Fuck them, he would think suddenly, staring at the crisis engine’s parts. I don’t owe their laws respect . . . Free the prisoners. That was what Runagate Rampant always said.

But the Cymek garuda did not live like the citizens of New Crobuzon. There were no magisters, Isaac remembered, no courts or punishment factories, no quarries and dumps to pack with Remade, no militia or politicians. Punishment was not doled out by backhanding bosses.

Or so he had been told. So he remembered. The band voted, Kar’uchai had said.

Was that true? Did that change things?

In New Crobuzon punishment was for someone. Some interest was served. Was that different in the Cymek? Did that make the crime more heinous?

Was a garuda rapist worse than a human one?

Who am I to judge? Isaac thought in sudden anger, and stormed towards his engine, picked up his calculations, ready to continue, but then, Who am I to judge? he thought, in sudden hollow uncertainty, the ground taken from under him, and he put his papers down slowly.

He kept glancing at Lin’s thighs. Her bruises had almost gone, but his memory of them was as savage a stain as they had been.

They had mottled her in suggestive patterns around her lower belly and inner thighs.

Lin shifted and woke and held him and shied away in fear and Isaac’s teeth set at the thought of what might have been done to her. He thought of Kar’uchai.

This is all wrong, he thought. That’s just exactly what she told you not to do. This isn’t about rape, she said . . .

But it was too hard. Isaac could not do it. If he thought of Yagharek he thought of Kar’ uchai, and if he thought of her he thought of Lin.

This is all arse-side up, he thought.

If he took Kar’uchai at her word, he could not judge the punishment. He could not decide whether he respected garuda justice or not: he had no grounds at all, he knew nothing of the circumstances. So it was natural, surely, it was inevitable and healthy, that he should fall back on what he knew: his scepticism; the fact that Yagharek was his friend. Would he leave his friend flightless because he gave alien laws the benefit of the doubt?

He remembered Yagharek scaling the Glasshouse, fighting beside him against the militia.

He remembered Yagharek’s whip savaging the slake-moth, ensnaring it, freeing Lin.

But when he thought of Kar’uchai, and what had been done to her, he could not but think of that as rape. And he thought of Lin, and everything that might have been done to her, until he felt as if he would puke with anger.

He tried to extricate himself.