“Thing is,” said Isaac thoughtfully, “it can’t just be the strength of the signal that attracts them, or it would only ever be the seers and communicatrixes and so on that got taken. I think they like particular flavours. That’s why the runt came for me. Not because there was a big waving trail above the city, any old trail, but because it recognized and wanted that particular mind. And . . . well, now, maybe the others are going to recognize it as well. Maybe I was wrong that only the one would ever recognize my mind. They must’ve sniffed it last night.” He looked at the avatar thoughtfully. “They’re going to remember it as the trail their brother or sister was after when it got killed. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing . . .”

“Der Grimnebulin,” said the dead man after a moment, “you must bring at least one of my little selves back with you. They must download what they have seen into me, the Council. I can learn so much of the Glasshouse from this. It can only help us. Whatever happens, one must get free.”

There were several moments of silence. The Council waited. Isaac thought for something to say, and then could not. He looked up into the avatar’s eyes.

“I’ll be back tomorrow. Have your monkey-selves ready then. And then I will . . . I will . . . see you again,” he said.

The city basked in extraordinary night-heat. The summer reached a critical moment. In the striae of dirty air above the city’s core, the slake-moths danced.

They flitted giddily over the minarets and crags of Perdido Street Station. They twitched their wings infinitesimally, edging expertly up the thermals. Skeins of inconstant emotion spun out from their cavorting.

With silent pleadings and caresses they courted each other. Wounds, already half healed, were now forgotten, in trembling, febrile excitement.

The summer here, in this once verdant plain on the edge of the Gentleman’s Sea, came a month and a half earlier than for the slake-moths’ siblings across the water. The temperature had slowly spiralled, reaching twenty-year highs.

Thermotaxic reactions were triggered in the slake-moths’ loins. Hormones swam in their ichor tides. Unique configurations of flesh and chymicals spurred their ovaries and gonads into untimely productivity. They became suddenly fertile, and aggressively aroused.

Aspises and bats and birds fled the air in terror, pungent as it was with psychotic desires.

The slake-moths flirted with ghastly and lascivious aerial ballet. They touched tentacles and limbs, unfolded new parts they had never seen before. The three less damaged moths tugged their sibling, the victim of the Weaver, on wafts of smoke and air. Gradually, the most wounded moth stopped licking its multitude of wounds with its trembling tongue, and began to touch its fellows. Their erotic charge was utterly infectious.