As it fumbled, it spitseared in fear, without aim or direction, emblazoning the night with igniting gas in a massive burst. The edge of the cloud almost caught the Rescue-handlinger as it fought to obey its sinistral’s panicked mental cries. It spun for yards to avoid the swelling globe of scalding air and bolted into the body of the wounded moth.

The creature quivered with pain and fear. The Weaver had been pulled from its tortured body, but it was dropping miserably towards its nest, its wounds dripping and its joints crushed and in agony. For once, it had no interest in food. It rippled in pain as the Rescue-handlinger and its dog-sinistral thumped it.

In a petulant spasm, two huge biotic jags scissored out like secateurs from the slake-moth and sliced both Montjohn Rescue’s and the dog’s heads off with one quick, grisly sound.

The heads fell away into the darkness.

The handlingers remained alive and conscious, but with the brainstems of their hosts gone they could not control their dying bodies. The human and canine carcasses jerked and danced in a posthumous fit. Blood gushed and pumped energetically over the tumbling bodies, over the frantic handlingers, which keened and clenched their fingers.

They were awake all the way down, till they landed on the punishing concrete of a backyard in Petty Coil in a bizarre splash of mangled flesh and bone fragments. They and their decapitated host-bodies were instantly shattered. Their bone was powdered, their flesh tenderized beyond repair.

The blindfolded vodyanoi had almost undone the leather connections that locked him to the woman-handlinger, whose mind the slake-moth held. But as the vodyanoi-dextrier was about to undo the last fastening and peel away into the sky, the slake-moth moved in to feed.

It wrapped its insectile arms around its prey, clasping it tight. It pulled the woman to it, as it pushed its questing tongue into her mouth and began to drink the handlinger’s dreams. The slake-moth sucked eagerly.

It was a rich brew. The residue of the human host’s thoughts eddied like silt or coffee grounds through the handlinger’s mind. The slake-moth reached around the woman’s body and hugged her to it, puncturing the flabby vodyanoi flesh attached to her back with its bone-hard limbs. The dextrier screamed in fear and sudden pain, and the moth could taste the terror in the air. It was confused for a moment, unsure of this other mind that sprouted so close to its meal. But it recovered, gripped tighter, determined to sup again when it had licked this first treat dry.

The vodyanoi-body was trapped as its sinistral passenger was drained. It struggled and cried out, but it could not escape.

A little way away in the air, behind its feeding sibling, the slake-moth which had snared the Weaver whipped its stinging tentacular tail through various dimensions. The vast spider flickered in and out of the sky with a frantic speed. Whenever it appeared the Weaver began to fall: gravity entangled it remorselessly. It would blink out to some other aspect, dragging the jagged harpoon-tip of the tentacle with it, embedded in its flesh. In that other aspect it would scamper and shake to throw off its attacker, before reappearing in the mundane plane, using its weight and leverage, then disappearing again.

The slake-moth was tenacious, somersaulting around its prey, refusing to let it escape.

The handlinger clerk kept up a frenzied, fearful monologue. It sought its fellow sinistral, in the body of the younger, muscled man.

dead all dead our fellows, it screamed. Some of what it had seen, some of its emotion, flowed back down the channel into the head of its dextrier. The old woman’s body yawed uneasily.

The other sinistral tried to remain calm. It moved its head from side to side, trying to exude authority, stop, it commanded peremptorily. It gazed through its mirrors at the three moths behind it: the wounded, limping through the air, down towards its hidden nest; the hungry, lunching from the minds of the trapped handlingers; and the fighting, still thrashing like a shark, trying to tear the head from the Weaver.

The sinistral pushed its dextrier a little closer, take them now, it thought, and sent to its fellow, spitsear hard, take two. chase the wounded. Then it flicked its head from side to side suddenly, and an anguished thought escaped it. where’s the other? it cried.

The other, the last slake-moth that had escaped the sheets of fire from the old woman’s tongue and dropped out of sight in an elegant dive, had described a long, curling loop over the rooftops. It had swept out and up and back, flying slowly and quietly, turning its wings a drab camouflaged dun, hiding out against the clouds, to pounce now, appearing in a sudden burst of dark colours, a shimmering slick of hypnagogic patterns.

It appeared on the other side of the handlingers, before the sinistrals’ eyes. The sinistral in the young human male snapped to with a paroxysm of shock, seeing the predatory beast bask, its wings held tight. The sinistral felt its mind begin to go slack before the midnight shades sinuously mutating on the slake-moth’s wings.

It felt a moment of terror, then nothing but a violent and incomprehensible wash of dreams…

…then terror again, and it shuddered, the fear mixing with desperate joy as it realized it was thinking once more.

Faced with two sets of enemies, the slake-moth had hesitated a moment, then twisted slightly in the air. It had altered the angle of its hovering, so that the ensnaring face of its wings was turned full on to the clerk and the old woman who bore him. They, after all, were the handlingers that had tried to burn it.

The freed sinistral saw the massive body of the slake-moth before it, angled away, its wings hidden. To its left it saw the old woman turn her head nervously, unsure of what was happening, saw the clerk’s eyes unfocus.

now burn it now now! the sinistral tried to shriek to the old woman, across the gulf of air. Her dextrier puckered up her mouth to spitsear when the enormous moth crossed the air between them too fast even to see and clasped the handlingers to it, slobbering like a famished man.

There was a burst of mental screaming. The old woman began to spit her fire, which bolted out harmlessly away from the slake-moth which gripped her, evaporating in the curdling air.

Even as the wave of horror gusted through it, the last sinistral, in the body of the man astride the homeless child, saw a terrifying thing in its mirror helm. The Weaver’s claws flashed visible for a moment, and the tail-harpoon of the slake-moth attacking it snapped away, its jag severed, its torn tail spewing blood. The moth screamed silently and, free of the Weaver, which did not reappear, hurtled through the warm night air towards the handlinger pair.

And before its eyes, the sinistral saw the moth in front of it look up from its repast, twist its head over its shoulder and wave its antennae towards him, in a slow, ominous motion.

There were moths before it and behind it. The dextrier in the tough little street kid’s body shivered and waited for directions.

dive! screamed the sinistral in sudden, mad fear, dive and away! mission abort! alone and doomed, escape, spitsear and fly!

A great wash of panic gushed into the dextrier’s mind. The child’s face twisted in terror and it began to spew fire. It plunged towards New Crobuzon’s sweating stones, its dank and rotting wood, like a soul towards Hell.

dive dive dive! screamed the sinistral, as the moths licked its terror trail with their vile tongues.