Shadrach leaned over carefully and peered into the darkening glass. Yagharek pointed down, across the thronging village at a crumbling ghost-building by the vile canal end. The water, its towpaths and a little finger of torn land on which the broken house stood were all enclosed by an accidental fence of rubble, brambles and long-rusted barbed wire. The rejected sliver of space backed directly onto the dome, which swept up steeply over it like a flat cloud.

“You must find your way there.” Shadrach began to make some sound, murmuring about the impossibility, but Yagharek cut him off. “It is difficult. It will be difficult. But you cannot climb down from here on the inside, and if you can then Isaac certainly cannot. We need him inside. You must take him in. As fast as you can. I will come down to you, I will find you, when I have found the slake-moths. Wait for me.”

As he spoke, Yagharek strapped the makeshift helmet on his head and investigated the field of view it gave behind him.

He caught Shadrach’s eye in one of the big slivers of mirror.

“You must go. Be quick. Be patient. I will come to you and find you before the night is out. The moths must leave by this break, and so I will wait and watch for them.”

Shadrach’s face set. Yagharek was right. It was unthinkable that Isaac would be able to climb down the steep and dangerous iron rafters.

He nodded at Yagharek curtly, signalling goodbye into the garuda’s mirrors, then turned and scrambled back to the main ladder, descended at expert speed out of sight.

Yagharek turned and looked into the last of the sun. He breathed deeply and flickered his eyes from left to right, checking his vision in each jagged mirror. He calmed himself completely. He breathed in the slow rhythm of the yajhu-saak, the hunter’s reverie, the martial trance of the Cymek garuda. He composed himself.

After some minutes there came the skittering clatter of metal and wire on glass, and one by one three monkey-constructs came into view, approaching him from different directions. They gathered around him and waited, their glass lenses glinting rose in the evening, their thin pistons hissing as they moved.

Yagharek turned and regarded them through the mirrors. Then, gripping the rope carefully, he began to lower himself through the hole in the glass. He gesticulated at the constructs to follow him as he slipped past the gash. The heat of the dome washed up around him and closed over his head as he descended into the glass-bounded village, towards houses immersed in red light as the clear globe magnified and dispersed the setting sun’s rays, into the slake-moths’ lair.

Chapter 43

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE