A coldly furious man descended toward them. He was tall and young-looking and built like a dancer, with freckled skin the color of pale ash. His hair seemed to belong to someone else: it was dark and long and very tightly curled, and it hung in unruly locks from his scalp like an unkempt fleece. It jounced and coiled as he descended.

As he passed the scabmettlers he gave a peremptory little bow, which they returned with more ceremony. He stood still before the man in grey. The two men eyed each other with impenetrable expressions.

"Liveman Doul," said the newcomer eventually, in a whispering voice.

"Deadman Brucolac," was the reply. Uther Doul gazed at the Brucolac’s broad, handsome face.

"It seems your employers are going ahead with their idiot scheming," the Brucolac murmured, and then was silent. "I still can’t believe, Uther," he said finally, "that you approve of this lunacy."

Uther Doul did not move, did not take his eyes from the other man.

The Brucolac straightened his back and gave a sneer that might have indicated contempt, or a shared confidence, or many other things. "It won’t happen, you know," he said. "The city won’t allow it. That’s not what this city is for."

The Brucolac opened his mouth idly, and his great forked tongue flickered out, tasting the air and the ghosts of Uther Doul’s sweat.

There were things that made very little sense to Tanner Sack.

He did not understand how he could bear the cold of the seawater. With his bulky Remade tentacles, he had to descend with his chest uncovered, and the first touch of the water had shocked him. He had almost balked, then had smeared himself with thick grease; but he had acclimatized much faster than made sense. He was still aware of the chill, but it was an abstract knowledge. It did not cripple him.

He did not understand why the brine was healing his tentacles.

Since first they had been implanted at the caprice of a New Crobuzon magister-a punishment supposedly related to his crime according to some patronizing allegorical logic that had never made any sense to him-they had hung like stinking dead limbs. He had cut at them, experimentally, and the layers of nerves implanted in them had fired and he had nearly fainted with pain. But pain was all that had lived in them, so he had wrapped them around himself like rotting pythons and tried to ignore them.

But immersed in the saltwater, they had begun to move.

Their multitude of small infections had faded, and they were now cool to the touch. After three dives, to his grinding shock, the tentacles had started to move independently of the water.

He was healing.

After a few weeks of diving, new sensations passed through them, and their sucker pads flexed gently and attached themselves on surfaces nearby. Tanner was learning to move them by choice.

In the confused first days when the captives had first arrived, Tanner had wandered through the ridings and listened bewildered as merchants and foremen offered him work in a language he was learning very quickly to understand.