Isaac and Yagharek ducked into a dirty cul-de-sac by the track’s concrete and brick foundations. They rested. Life rustled in the urban thicket above them.

Andrej was light, but he was beginning to weigh them down, his mass seeming to increase with every second. They stretched their aching arms and shoulders, drew deep breaths. A few feet away, the crowds emerging from the station thronged past the entrance to their little hideaway.

When they had rested and rearranged their burdens, they braced themselves and set out again, into the backstreets once more, walking in the shadow of the Sud Line, towards the city’s heart, the towers not yet visible over the surrounding miles of houses: the Spike and the turrets of Perdido Street Station.

Isaac began to talk. He told Yagharek what he thought would happen that night.

Derkhan made her way through the reclaimed filth of the Griss Twist dump towards the Construct Council.

Isaac had warned the great Constructed Intelligence that she would be coming. She knew she was expected. The idea made her uncomfortable.

As she approached the hollow that was the Council’s lair, she thought she heard a susurration of lowered voices. She stiffened instantly, and drew her pistol. She checked that it was loaded, and that the firing pan was full.

Derkhan picked up her feet, stalking with care, avoiding any sound. At the end of a channel of rubbish, she saw the opening-out of the hollow. Someone walked briefly past her field of view. She stole carefully closer.

Then another man walked past the end of the gorge of crushed garbage, and she saw that he was dressed in work overalls, and that he was staggering slightly under the weight of a burden. Slung over his broad shoulder was a massive coil of black-coated cable, entwining him vastly like some predatory constrictor.

She straightened up slightly. It was not the militia waiting for her. She walked on into the presence of the Construct Council.

She entered the hollow, glancing up nervously to ensure that there were no airships overhead. Then she turned to the scene before her, gasping at the scale of the gathering.

On all sides, engaged in all manner of opaque tasks, were nearly a hundred men and women. Mostly human, there were a handful of vodyanoi among them, and even two khepri. All were dressed in cheap and soiled clothes. And almost all were carrying or squatting before enormous coils of industrial cable.

It came in a variety of styles. Most was black, but there were brown and blue coatings as well, and red and grey. There were pairs of burly men staggering under loops nearly the thickness of a man’s thigh. Others carried skeins of wire no more than four inches in diameter.

The thin hubbub of speech died away quickly as Derkhan entered, and all the eyes in the place turned to her. The rubble crater was crammed with bodies. Derkhan swallowed and looked over them carefully. She saw the avatar stumbling towards her on halting, brittle legs.

“Derkhan Blueday,” he said quietly. “We are ready.”

Derkhan huddled for a short time with the avatar, checking carefully over a scribbled map.

The bloody concavity of the avatar’s open skull emitted an extraordinary reek. In the heat, his peculiar half-dead stench was utterly unbearable, and Derkhan held her breath as long as she could, gulping air when she had to through the sleeve of her filthy cloak.

While Derkhan and the Council conferred, the rest of the assembled kept a respectful distance.

“This is almost all of my bloodlife congregation,” said the avatar. “I sent out mobile Is with urgent messages, and the faithful have gathered, as you see.” He paused and clucked inhumanly. “We must proceed,” he said. “It is seventeen minutes past five o’clock.”

Derkhan looked up at the sky, which was deepening slowly, warning of dusk. She was sure that the clock the Council was checking, some timepiece buried deep in the bowels of the dump, was second-perfect. She nodded.

At a command from the avatar, the congregation began to stagger out of the dump, wobbling under their loads. Before they left, each turned to the place in the wall of the dump where the Construct Council was hidden. They paused a moment, then performed their devotional gesture with their hands, that vague suggestion of interlocking wheels, putting down their cable if necessary.

Derkhan watched them with foreboding.

“They’ll never make it,” she said. “They haven’t the strength.”

“Many have brought carts,” responded the avatar. “They will leave in shifts.”

“Carts…?” said Derkhan. “From where?”

“Some own them,” said the avatar. “Others have bought or rented them at my orders today. None were stolen. We cannot risk the attention and detection that might result.”

Derkhan looked away. The control that the Council wielded over his human followers disturbed her.

As the last stragglers left the dump, Derkhan and the avatar walked over to the immobile head of the Construct Council. The Council lay on its side and became strata of rubbish, invisible.

A short, thick coil of cable lay waiting beside it. Its end was ragged, the thick rubber carbonized and split for the last foot or so. Tangles of wires splayed out of the end, unpicked from their neat skeins and plaits.

There was one vodyanoi still in the junk-basin. Derkhan saw him standing some feet away, watching the avatar nervously. She beckoned him to come closer. He waddled towards them, now on all fours, now bipedally, his big webbed toes splayed to remain steady on the treacherous ground. His overalls were the light, waxed material the vodyanoi sometimes used: they repelled liquid, so did not become saturated or heavy when the vodyanoi swam. “Are you ready?” said Derkhan. The vodyanoi nodded quickly. Derkhan studied him, but she knew little about his people. She could see nothing about him which gave any clue as to why he devoted himself to this strange, demanding sect, worshipping this weird intelligence, the Construct Council. It was obvious to her that the Council treated its worshippers like pawns, that it drew no satisfaction or pleasure from their worship, only a degree of…usefulness.

She could not understand, not begin to understand, what release or service this heretical church offered its congregation.

“Help me lift this down to the river,” she said, and picked up one end of the thick cable. She was unsteady under its weight, and the vodyanoi picked its way quickly over to her, helped brace her.

The avatar was still. He watched as Derkhan and the vodyanoi made their way away from him, towards the idle, looming cranes which burst up to the north-west, from behind the low rise of garbage that surrounded the Construct Council.

The cable was massive. Derkhan had to stop several times and put the end down, then brace herself to continue. The vodyanoi moved stolidly beside her, stopping with her and waiting for her to carry on. Behind them, the squat pillar of coiled cable shrank slowly as it unwound.

Derkhan chose their passage, moving through the piles of murk towards the river like a prospector.

“D’you know what all this is about?” she asked the vodyanoi quickly, without looking up. He glanced at her sharply, then back up at the thin silhouette of the avatar, still visible against a background of rubbish. He shook his jowly head.

“No,” he said quickly. “Just heard that…that God-machine demanded our presence, ready for an evening’s work. Heard Its bidding when I got here.” He sounded quite normal. His tone was curt, but conversational. Not zealous. He sounded like a worker complaining philosophically about management’s demands for unpaid overtime.