My room smells like an estuary. River coagulate and fishgut blood. You rattle for me stranger, like a summons you shake the bones you wear. I have not pulled open any sluices to let the moon illuminate my bedchamber, but light is for the living. These that look upon you are vampir eyes.

And welcome to you.

Three of you to wait for me in a grisly tableau: reclined upon my bed and in front of my window and by me now, closing my door, ushering me respectful into my home.

Look at you.

Look at you shimmering before me great salamander tails folded in layers on my floor, blunt streamlined skulls like viperfish, your teeth protruding like fistfuls of nails, eyes black and big as tarpits, wet skin stretched on muscled bone like sap on knotted wood. See you upright in my room.

And you, recumbent on my covers like a painter’s nude, grinning at me without intent on your piscine face, your neck wrapped all about with charms and bones, beckoning me politely, whose is the face you carry in your hand?

Whose head is that you have taken, to bring blood for me? What woman was she? A guard who found you? Missing in the carnage of the New Crobuzon war, drowned or cut apart, was it you who split her neck to take that misshapen trophy? It is a frayed-enough edge, a bloody and fibrous laceration.

The tan-haired woman stares at me from your fist.

Look at you!

You drop her dead flesh and rise like something I have never seen.

-Seigneur Brucolac, you tell me in a voice colder than mine.-We must talk.

I don’t mind. I will talk to you. I know who you are. I think I have expected you.

And as the hours unfold toward the morning oh what conspiracies oh what secrets we uncover.

You have come late, riverthing. Waterman. You have come late from the Cold Claw Sea, searching these salt currents for what was taken from you. Nothing you say to me with that spastically moving blood-flecked jaw is clear. Like the riverthing you are you flicker toward your meaning and disturb a silt of effluvial words that cloud your intent. But I have dealt with seers poets and Weavers and can track your insinuations.

You have hunted on currents. Cleaved parasitic to the undersides of our attackers and then fluttered free in the squalor of battle and you have plucked bodies from the dead and dying plenty.

And then, what am I to understand? Hiding away you have used them. You have kept some alive, fed them air and questioned them (questioned them after they have died, is that? have I that right?). Learning from them (terrified on the outskirts of death they have babbled everything to you, immobile in water, trapped under their homes).

Only days here and like the subtlest spies you have learnt most everything about this place.