“I am a chief of my people, come to see New Crobuzon of which we have heard.”

The voice was pained and exhausted, high-pitched and raw, but it made nothing like the alien sounds that burst from Yagharek’s throat. The speaker stepped out of obscurity. Isaac opened his eyes and mouth wide to bellow in triumph and wonder, but his shout mutated as it began and died in an aghast whisper.

The figure before Isaac and Derkhan shivered and scratched its stomach. Its flesh hung heavy off it like a pudgy schoolboy’s. Its skin was pale and pockmarked with disease and cold. Isaac’s eyes wove all over its body in dismay. Bizarre nodes of tissue burst from its bunched toes: claws drawn by children. Its head was swathed in feathers, but feathers of all sizes and shapes, jammed at random from its crown to its neck in a thick, uneven, insulating layer. The eyes that peered myopically at Isaac and Derkhan were human eyes, fighting to open lids encrusted in rheum and pus. The beak was large and stained, like old pewter.

Behind the wretched creature stretched a pair of dirty, foul-smelling wings. They were no more than six feet from tip to tip. As Isaac watched, they half-opened, jerked and twitched spastically. Tiny pieces of organic muck spilt from them as they shuddered.

The creature’s beak opened and, underneath it, Isaac caught a glimpse of lips forming the words, nostrils above. The beak was nothing but a roughly made fixture shoved and sealed into place like a gas-mask over the nose and mouth, he realized.

“Let me tell you of the times I have soared into the air with my prey . . .” began the pathetic figure, but Isaac stepped forward and held up a hand to cut it off.

“Please gods, enough!” he shouted. “Spare us this . . . embarrassment . . .”

The false garuda staggered backwards, blinking in fear.

There was silence for a long time.

“What’s the matter, guvnor?” whispered the thing behind bars eventually. “What’d I do wrong?”

“I came here to see a fucking garuda,” rumbled Isaac. “What d’you take me for? You’re Remade, mate . . . as any fool can see.”

The big dead beak clicked together as the man licked his lips. His eyes darted left and right nervously.

“Jabber’s sake, squire,” he whispered pleadingly. “Don’t go complaining. This is all I got. You’re obviously a gentleman of education . . . I’m as close as most get to garuda . . . all they want’s to hear a bit about hunting in the desert, see the bird-man, and that way I earn.”

“Godspit, Isaac,” whispered Derkhan. “Go easy.”