“Isaac, did you see it?” hissed Derkhan.

He shook his head, his eyes wide in astonishment. Slowly, he pulled himself to his feet.

“What happened?” he managed to spit. His voice sounded shockingly alien to him.

“You were under nearly a minute,” Derkhan said urgently. “It got you…I was screaming at you, but you were gone…and then…and then the constructs stepped forward.” She looked, wondering. “They were walking towards it, and it could sense them…and it seemed confused and…and flustered. It moved back a little and stretched its wings back further, so that it was beaming colours at the constructs as well as you, but they kept coming.”

Derkhan stumbled forward towards him. Blood was dripping viscously down the side of her face, from where her wound had reopened. She described a wide circle around the half-crushed slake-moth, which bleated as faintly and beseechingly as a lamb when she passed it. She watched it fearfully, but it was powerless against her, pinioned and ruined. Its wings were hidden, broken by the crush of debris.

Derkhan sank to the floor by Isaac, reached out and grabbed his shoulders with violently shaking hands. She cast her eyes nervously back to the trapped slake-moth, then held Isaac’s gaze.

“It couldn’t get them! They kept coming and it was…it was backing away…It kept its wings spread so that you couldn’t get away, but it was fearful…confused. And while it was moving back, the crane was moving. It couldn’t sense it, even though the ground was rumbling. And then, the constructs stopped still, and the moth was waiting…and the crate came down on it.”

She turned and looked at the mess of organic slime and spilt rubbish fouling the ground. The slake-moth keened piteously.

Behind her, the Construct Council’s avatar stalked across the jagged rubbish floor. He stamped within three feet of the slake-moth, which flicked out its tongue and tried to wrap it around his ankle. But it was too weak and slow, and he did not even have to break his stride to avoid it.

“It cannot sense my mind. I am invisible to it,” the man said. “And when it hears me, notices my gross physicality approaching it, my psyche remain opaque. And immune to its seduction. Its wings are patterned with complex shapes, making themselves more complex in a quick and relentless slide…and that is all.

“I do not dream, der Grimnebulin. I am a calculating machine that has calculated how to think. I do not dream. I have no neuroses, no hidden depths. My consciousness is a growing function of my processing power, not the baroque thing that sprouts from your mind, with its hidden rooms in attics and cellars.

“There is nothing in me on which the moth can feed. It goes hungry. I can surprise it.” The man turned to look at the moaning ruins of the moth. “I can kill it.”

Derkhan stared at Isaac.

“A thinking machine…” she breathed. Isaac nodded slowly.

“Why did you subject me to that?” he said shakily, seeing the blood which still seeped from his nose spatter across the dry ground.

“It was my calculation,” he said simply. “I computed it as most likely to convince you of my worth, and having the advantage of destroying one of the moths at the same time. Albeit the least threatening.”

Isaac shook his head in exhausted disgust.

“See…” he spat. “That’s the damn trouble with excessive logic…No allowances for variables like headaches…”

“Isaac,” said Derkhan fervently. “We’ve got them! We can use the Council as…as troops. We can take the moths out!”

Yagharek had come to stand a little way behind them, and he squatted down, on the peripheries of the conversation. Isaac glanced up at him, thinking hard.

“Damn,” he said very slowly. “Minds without dreams.”

“The others will not be so easy,” said the avatar. He was looking up, as was the Construct Council’s main body. For a tiny moment, those enormous searchlight eyes flicked on and sent powerful streams of light into the sky, contracting and searching. Dark shadows darted through the twisting torch-snares, half glimpsed and vague.

“There are two,” said the avatar. “They have been brought here by the dying call of this their sibling.”

“Fuck it!” shouted Isaac in alarm. “What shall we do?”

“They will not come,” replied the man. “They are quicker and stronger, less credulous than their backward brother. They can tell that all is not right. They can taste only you three, but they can sense the physical vibrations of all my bodies. The disparity unnerves them. They will not come.”

Slowly, Isaac, Derkhan and Yagharek relaxed.

They looked at each other, at the bone-thin avatar. Behind them, the slake-moth wailed in its death-agony. It was ignored.

“What,” said Derkhan, “are we going to do?”

After some minutes, the flickering, baleful shadows overhead disappeared. In the tiny desolate patch of the city, surrounded by the ghosts of industry, the pall of nightmare energy seemed to lift for a few hours.

Even exhausted and bereaved as they were, Isaac and Derkhan, even Yagharek, were buoyed by the Council’s triumph. Isaac stalked closer to the dying moth, investigated its tortured head, its indistinct, illogical features. Derkhan wanted to torch it, destroy it completely, but the avatar would not allow it. It wanted to keep the creature’s head, investigate it in the quiet minutes of its day, learn about the inside of the slake-moth mind.

The thing kept a tenacious claw-hold on life until past two in the morning, when it expired with a long moan and a trickle of foul citric saliva. There was a quivering release of pent-up alien misery, a ripple that dispersed quickly across the dump as the slake-moth’s empathic ganglions flexed in death.

There was a sublime stillness in the dump.

With a companionable motion, the avatar sat beside the two humans and the garuda. They began to talk. They tried to formulate plans. Even Yagharek spoke, with a quiet excitement. He was a hunter. He knew how to set traps.

“We can’t do anything until we know where the damn things are,” said Isaac. “Either we hunt them or we just have to sit and act as bait, hoping the bastard creatures come for us out of the millions of souls in the city.”

Derkhan and Yagharek nodded in agreement.

“I know where they are,” said the avatar.

The others stared at him in astonishment.

“I know where they hide,” he said. “I know where they nest.”

“How?” hissed Isaac. “Where?” He grasped the avatar’s arm in his excitement, then shocked, withdrew his grasp. He was leaning in close to the avatar’s face, and something of the horror of that visage struck him. He could see the rim of shorn skull just inside the man’s curling skin, drab white, streaked with bloody residue. He could see the gory cable plunge into the intricate fold at the bottom of the hollow in the man’s head, from where his brain had been torn.

The avatar’s skin was dry and stiff and cold, like hanging meat.

Those eyes, with their unchanging expression of concentration and thinly hidden anguish, regarded him.

“All of me have tracked the attacks. I have cross-referenced dates and places. I have found correlations, systematized them. I have factored in the evidence of the cameras and the computing engines whose information I steal, the unexplainable shapes in the night sky, the shadows that do not correspond to any city-race.

“There are complex patterns. I have formalized them. I have discarded possibilities and applied high-level mathematical programmes to the remaining potentialities. With unknown variables, absolute certainty is impossible. But according to the data available, the chance is seventy-eight per cent that the nest is where I say.