That, Isaac realized, was the source of that unspeakable stench. He turned his head and put his hand over his mouth as he saw that near him lay a decomposing cactacae child, its rotting flesh falling from fibrous hardwood bones. A little way away was the stinking carcass of a human, and beyond that Isaac saw another, fresher human corpse, and a bloated vodyanoi. Most of the bodies were cactus.

Some, he saw with misery and without surprise, were still breathing. They lay discarded: husks; empty bottles. They would drool and piss and shit their last imbecilic days or hours out in this stifling hole, until they died of hunger and thirst and rotted as mindlessly as they had lived at the end.

They could not be in paradise or Hell, thought Isaac despondently. Their spirits could not roam in spectral form. They had been metabolized. They had been drunk and shat out, converted by vile oneirochymical processes and become fuel for a slake-moth flight.

Isaac saw that in one of its crooked hands, the moth was dragging the body of a cactus elder, sash still dangling portentous and absurd about its shoulders. The moth was sluggish. It raised its arm indolently and let the mindless cactus man fall heavily across the mortar floor.

Then the slake-moth moved a little and reached underneath it with its hind legs. It shuffled forward a little, its heavy, uncanny body slipping across the dusty floor. From below its abdomen, the slake-moth pulled out a great, soft globe. It was about three feet across, and as Isaac squinted into his mirror to see it more clearly, he thought he recognized the thick, mucal texture and drab chocolate colour of dreamshit.

His eyes widened.

The slake-moth measured the thing with its back legs, spreading them to encompass the fat globule of slake-moth milk. That’s got to be worth fucking thousands . . . Isaac thought. No, cut it to make it palatable, there’s probably millions of guineas there! No wonder everyone’s trying to get these damn things back . . .

Then, as Isaac watched, a piece of the slake-moth’s abdomen unfolded. A long organic syringe emerged, a tapering segmented extrusion that bent backwards from the slake-moth’s tail on some chitinous hinge. It was nearly as long as Isaac’s arm. As he watched, his mouth slack with revulsion and horror, the slake-moth prodded it against the ball of raw dreamshit, paused a moment, then plunged it deep into the centre of the sticky mass.

Under the armour that had unfolded, where the soft part of the underbelly was visible, from where the long probe had emerged, Isaac saw the abdomen of the slake-moth convulse peristaltically, squirting some unseen thing the length of the bony shaft into the depths of the dreamshit.

Isaac knew what he was seeing. The dreamshit was a food source, to give starving hatchlings reserves of energy. The protruding jag of flesh was an ovipositor.

The slake-moth was laying its eggs.