Silas Fennec remained in The Pashakan for a long time after Bellis left. He read through some inky pamphlets and newspapers, watching the sky darken. The days were noticeably longer now, and he thought about summer in New Crobuzon.

He waited there a long time: this was where people determined enough to find him were directed. But he drank and read alone. One woman, dressed in rags, looked up at his back curiously as he left the room-that was all the notice that was paid him.

Fennec wound home through the circuitous routes and byways of Thee-And-Thine to the oily iron ship Drudgery. It was in a quiet part of town. Beside it loomed a big old factory ship-Armada’s asylum.

He waited at home in one of the nondescript concrete blocks built beside the Drudgery ’s funnel, directly in the asylum’s shadow. At eleven o’clock there was a knock at his door: his contact had arrived. For the first time in many days, they had something serious and important to talk about. Fennec walked slowly to answer the door, and his gait, his expressions, his demeanor shifted fractionally.

By the time he opened the door, he had become Simon Fench.

Waiting on his doorstep was a big, aging cactus-man, looking nervously about him.

"Hedrigall," said Fennec quietly, in what was not quite his own voice. "I’ve been waiting for you. We must talk."

In the jagged and obscure architecture of the moonship Uroc, the vampir were gathering.

The Brucolac had called a conclave of his ab-dead lieutenants, his cadre. As the light shifted from drab dusk to night, they settled as lightly and soundlessly on the moonship as leafs.

All the citizens of Dry Fall knew that their vampir were always watching. They wore no uniform; their identities were not known.

The bacillus that induced photophobic haemophagy-the vampir strain-was capricious, and weak, carried solely in spit and quick to denature and collapse. Only if a vampir’s victim did not die, and if the bite had been direct, mouth to skin so that some of the ab-dead’s spittle entered their prey’s bloodstream, was there a small chance that the survivor might be infected. And if they survived the fevers and the delirium, they would awaken one night, having died and been renewed, ab-dead, with a raging hunger, their bodies reconfigured, stronger and quicker by many times. Unaging, able to survive most injury. And unable to bear the sun.

Every one of the Dry Fall’s cadre had been carefully chosen by the Brucolac. The goretax was decanted before drinking, to avoid inadvertent infection. Those from whom the Brucolac drank directly were his most trusted servants, his closest supporters, to whom he gave the honor of a chance at ab-death.