“Isaac,” said Derkhan fervently. “We’ve got them! We can use the Council as . . . as troops. We can take the moths out!”

Yagharek had come to stand a little way behind them, and he squatted down, on the peripheries of the conversation. Isaac glanced up at him, thinking hard.

“Damn,” he said very slowly. “Minds without dreams.”

“The others will not be so easy,” said the avatar. He was looking up, as was the Construct Council’s main body. For a tiny moment, those enormous searchlight eyes flicked on and sent powerful streams of light into the sky, contracting and searching. Dark shadows darted through the twisting torch-snares, half glimpsed and vague.

“There are two,” said the avatar. “They have been brought here by the dying call of this their sibling.”

“Fuck it!” shouted Isaac in alarm. “What shall we do?”

“They will not come,” replied the man. “They are quicker and stronger, less credulous than their backward brother. They can tell that all is not right. They can taste only you three, but they can sense the physical vibrations of all my bodies. The disparity unnerves them. They will not come.”

Slowly, Isaac, Derkhan and Yagharek relaxed.

They looked at each other, at the bone-thin avatar. Behind them, the slake-moth wailed in its death-agony. It was ignored.

“What,” said Derkhan, “are we going to do?”

After some minutes, the flickering, baleful shadows overhead disappeared. In the tiny desolate patch of the city, surrounded by the ghosts of industry, the pall of nightmare energy seemed to lift for a few hours.

Even exhausted and bereaved as they were, Isaac and Derkhan, even Yagharek, were buoyed by the Council’s triumph. Isaac stalked closer to the dying moth, investigated its tortured head, its indistinct, illogical features. Derkhan wanted to torch it, destroy it completely, but the avatar would not allow it. It wanted to keep the creature’s head, investigate it in the quiet minutes of its day, learn about the inside of the slake-moth mind.

The thing kept a tenacious claw-hold on life until past two in the morning, when it expired with a long moan and a trickle of foul citric saliva. There was a quivering release of pent-up alien misery, a ripple that dispersed quickly across the dump as the slake-moth’s empathic ganglions flexed in death.

There was a sublime stillness in the dump.

With a companionable motion, the avatar sat beside the two humans and the garuda. They began to talk. They tried to formulate plans. Even Yagharek spoke, with a quiet excitement. He was a hunter. He knew how to set traps.

“We can’t do anything until we know where the damn things are,” said Isaac. “Either we hunt them or we just have to sit and act as bait, hoping the bastard creatures come for us out of the millions of souls in the city.”

Derkhan and Yagharek nodded in agreement.

“I know where they are,” said the avatar.