But when Derkhan, wheezing with effort, began to ask more-“How often do you meet?”

“What other things does It bid you do?”-he looked at her with fear and suspicion, and his answers became monosyllabic, then nods, then quickly nothing at all.

Derkhan became silent again. She concentrated on hauling the great wire.

The dumps sprawled untidily to the very edge of the river. The river banks around Griss Twist were sheer walls of slimy brick that rose up from the dark water. When the river was swollen, perhaps only three feet of the decaying clay prevented a flood. At other times, there were as many as eight feet between the top of the river-wall and the choppy surface of the Tar.

Jutting directly from the splintered brick was a six-foot fence of iron links and wooden slats and concrete, built years ago to contain the dumps in their infancy. But now the weight of accumulated filth made the old wirelinks bow alarmingly over the water. With the decades, sections of the flimsy wall had burst and split from its concrete moorings, spewing rubbish into the river below. The fence had gone unrepaired, and in those places now it was only the solidity of the crushed rubbish itself which held the dump in place.

Blocks of compressed garbage regularly cascaded into the water in greasy landslides of slag.

The huge cranes which took cargo from the trash-barges had originally been separated from the garbage they unloaded by a few yards of no-man’s-land-flat scrub and baked earth-but that had rapidly disappeared as the rubbish encroached. Now the dump workers and crane operators had to hike across the scoriatic landscape to cranes that sprouted directly from the vulgar geology of the dump.

It was as if the trash was fertile, and that it bore great structures.

Derkhan and the vodyanoi turned corners in the muck until they could no longer see the Council’s hide. They left a trail of cable that became invisible the moment it touched the ground, transformed into one meaningless piece of litter in a whole vista of mechanical refuse.

The hillocks of garbage subsided as they approached the Tar. Ahead of them, the rusted fence rose four feet or so from the surface layer of detritus. Derkhan changed course fractionally, headed for a wide break in the wire, where the dump was open to the river.

Across the squalid water Derkhan could see New Crobuzon. For a moment, the lumpy spires of Perdido Street Station were just visible, perfectly framed in the fence’s hole, bulging distantly over the city. She could see the rail-lines pick their way between towers that stabbed randomly from the bedrock. Militia struts jutted ugly into the skyline.

Opposite her, Spit Hearth welled up fatly to the river’s edge. There was no unbroken promenade by the side of the Tar, only sections of streets that traced it for a short time, then private gardens, sheer warehouse walls and wasteground. There was no one to watch Derkhan’s preparations unfold.

A few feet from the edge, Derkhan dropped the end of the cable and moved cautiously towards the break in the fence. She felt with her feet, making sure the ground would not fall forward and pitch her into the filthy river seven or more feet below. She leaned out as far as she dared, and scanned the gently moving surface.

The sun was slowly approaching the rooftops to the west, and the dirty black of the river was varnished with reddening light.

“Penge!” Derkhan hissed. “You there?”

After a moment, there was a small splashing sound. One of the indistinct pieces of flotsam that littered the river bobbed suddenly closer. It moved against the current.

Slowly, Pengefinchess raised her head from the river. Derkhan smiled. She felt an odd, desperate relief.

“All right then,” said Pengefinchess. “Time for my last job.” Derkhan nodded with absurd gratitude. “She’s here to help,” Derkhan said to the other vodyanoi, who stared at Pengefinchess in alarmed suspicion. “This cable’s too big and heavy for you to manage yourself. If you get in, then I’ll feed it down to you both.”

It took a few seconds for him to decide the risks posed by the newcomer were less important than the job in hand. He glowered at Derkhan in nervous fear, and nodded. He padded quickly to the break in the link-fence, paused for a fraction of a second, then hopped elegantly up and plunged into the water. His dive was so controlled that there was only a tiny splash.

Pengefinchess eyed him suspiciously as he kicked closer to her. Derkhan looked quickly around, saw a cylindrical metal pipe thicker than her thigh. It was long and incredibly heavy, but working urgently, ignoring her tortured muscles, Derkhan hauled it inch by inch across the gap in the fence, wedging it across the tear. She held her arms out, wincing at the acid burn of her muscles. She stumbled back to the cable and tugged it to the edge of the water.

She began to feed it down over the top of the pipe towards the waiting vodyanoi, hauling it as hard as she could. She pulled more and more free from the coils hidden in the heart of the dump and sent the slack towards the water. Finally, Derkhan had lowered it enough for Pengefinchess to kick up, launch herself almost out of the water and grab hold of the dangling end. Her weight pulled several feet of cable down into the water. The edge of the dump listed alarmingly towards the river, but the cable slid across the smooth surface of the pipe, pulling it tight against the fence on either side and rolling smoothly across its top.

Pengefinchess reached up again and hauled, submerging and powering towards the bottom of the river. Kept free of the ensnaring hooks and edges of the inorganic topsoil, the cable came in great gouts, skimming roughly across the surface of the rubbish and plummeting into the water.

Derkhan watched its halting progress, sudden bursts of motion as the vodyanoi hidden at the bottom of the river jack-knifed their legs and swam hard. She smiled, a small and brief moment of triumph, and leaned exhausted against a broken concrete pillar.

There was nothing on the surface of the water to give any hint of the operation below. The great cable slipped in spurts into the water by the riverwall. It plunged absolutely precipitately into the darkness, hitting the surface at ninety degrees. The vodyanoi, Derkhan realized, must be tugging masses of slack into the water first, rather than pulling the end of the wire directly across the river and having it stretch out across the top of the water.

Eventually the cable was still. Derkhan watched quietly, waiting for some sign of the operation under way.

Minutes passed. Something emerged in the absolute centre of the river.

It was a vodyanoi, raising an arm in triumph or salute or signal. Derkhan waved back, squinted to see who it was, to work out if she was being given a message.

The river was very wide, and the figure was unclear. Then Derkhan saw that the arm carried a composite bow, and she realized that it was Pengefinchess. She saw then that the wave was one of curt farewell, and she responded more fulsomely, her brows furrowing.

It made very little sense, Derkhan realized, to have begged Pengefinchess to help at this last stage of the hunt. Undoubtedly it had made things easier, but they could have managed without her, with the help of more of the Council’s vodyanoi followers. And it made little sense to feel affected by her leaving, even if remotely; to wish Pengefinchess luck; to wave with feeling and feel a faint lack. The vodyanoi mercenary was taking her leave, was disappearing for more lucrative and safer contracts. Derkhan owed her nothing, least of all thanks or affection.

But circumstances had made them comrades, and Derkhan was sorry to see her go. She had been part, a small part, of this chaotic nightmare struggle, and Derkhan marked her passing.