He was fidgeting in his seat, moving from side to side in agitation. The heavy doors to the Lemquist Room swung ponderously open, and a well-built, harrowed young man stumbled in, leading a terrified-looking child by the hand. The child was dressed in a collection of rags, as if he had just stepped off the street. One of his arms was covered with a large swelling, coated in filthy bandages. The man’s clothes were of decent quality, but a bizarre fashion. He sported a pair of voluminous trousers, almost like those worn by khepri. It made him look peculiarly feminine, despite his build.

Rudgutter looked at him with an exhausted, angry glance.

“Sit,” he said. He waved a sheaf of papers at the odd pair. He spoke rapidly. “One unidentified headless corpse, strapped to a headless dog, both complete with dead handlingers. One pair of handlinger hosts, strapped back to back, both drained of intellect. A—” he glanced down at the militia report “—a vodyanoi, covered in deep wounds, and a young human woman. We managed to extract the handlingers—killing the hosts, actual biological death, not this ridiculous half-thing—and we offered them some new hosts, put them in a cage with a pair of dogs, but they didn’t move. It’s as we suspected. Drain the host, you drain the handlinger with it.”

He sat back and watched the two traumatized-looking figures before him.

“So . . .” he said slowly, after a little silence. “I am Bentham Rudgutter. Suppose you tell me who you are, and where is MontJohn Rescue, and what happened.”

In a meeting room near the top of the Spike, Eliza Stem-Fulcher looked across the table at the cactacae opposite her. His head towered over hers, rising neckless from his shoulders. His arms lay motionless across the table, enormous weighty slabs like the boughs of a tree. His skin was pocked and marked with a hundred thousand scratches and tears that had scarred, in the cactacae fashion, into thick knots of vegetable matter.

The cactus pruned his thorns strategically. The insides of his arms and legs, his palms, wherever flesh might rub or press against flesh, he had plucked the little spines. A tenacious red flower remained on the side of his neck from the spring. Nodules of growth burst from his shoulders and his chest.

He waited silently for Stem-Fulcher to speak.

“It is our understanding,” she said carefully, “that your ground-based patrols were ineffectual last night. As were ours, I might add. We have yet to verify this, but it appears that there may have been some contact between the slake-moths and a small . . . aerial unit of ours.” She flicked through her papers briefly. “It seems increasingly clear,” she ventured, “that simply scouring the city will not yield results.