It staggered forward, always seeming to teeter on the edge of collapse. It opened its arms to Isaac like a loving parent, swept him quickly and effortlessly up. Isaac grimaced in fear as he was taken into its weird, cool embrace. Don’t cut me, he thought fervently, don’t slice me up!

The militia peered furtive and aghast over the roof at the sight.

The enormous, towering spider stalked edgily this way and that, Isaac tucked lolling like some absurd, vast baby under its arm.

It moved with sure, fleeting motions across the sodden tar and clay. It could not be followed. It moved in and out of conventional space with motions too fast to see.

It stood before Yagharek. The garuda swung the sack of mechanical components that he had hastily gathered over onto his back. Yagharek delivered himself thankfully to the dancing mad god, throwing up his arms and clutching at the smooth waist between the Weaver’s head and abdomen…GRAB TIGHT LITTLE ONE WE MUST FIND A WAY AWAY…sang the Weaver.

The weird metallic troops were approaching the little elevation of flat land, their mechanical anatomy hissing with efficient energy. They swept past the lower militia, terrified junior officers who gazed up in astonishment at the human faces peering intently from the back of the iron warriors’ heads.

Derkhan looked round at the encroaching figures, then swallowed and walked quickly over to the Weaver, which stood with humanoid arms wide. Isaac and Yagharek were perched on its weapon arms, their legs scrabbling for purchase across its broad back.

“Don’t hurt me again,” whispered Derkhan, her hand flickering over the scabbed wound on the side of her face. She holstered her guns and raced across into the Weaver’s terrifying, cradling arms.

The second dirigible arrived at the roof of Perdido Street Station and threw out ropes for its troops to descend. Motley’s Remade squadron had reached the top of the rise of architecture and was vaulting over without pause. The militia gazed up at them, cowed. They did not understand what they were seeing.

The Remade breached the low rise of bricks without hesitation, only faltering when they saw the Weaver’s huge and skulking form scampering to and fro across the bricks, three figures jouncing like dolls on its back.

Motley’s troops stepped back towards the edge slowly, rain varnishing their impassive steel faces. Their heavy feet crushed the remnants of the engines that still lay split across the roof.

As they watched, the Weaver reached down and grasped hold of a quailing militiaman, who wailed in terror as he was dragged up by his head. The man flailed, but the Weaver pushed his arms away and cuddled him like a baby.

…OFF AND ON TO GO HUNTING WE WILL TAKE OUR LEAVE…whispered the Weaver to all present. It walked sideways off the edge of the roof, seemingly unencumbered, and disappeared.

For two or three seconds, only the rain sounded fitful and depressing on the roof. Then Half-a-Prayer let off a last volley of shots from above, sending the assembled men and Remade scattering. When they emerged carefully, there were no more attacks. Jack Half-a-Prayer had gone.

The Weaver and its companions had left no trail, and no trace.

The slake-moth tore through currents of air. It was frantic and afraid.

It sounded every so often, letting out a cry in a variety of sonic registers, but it was unanswered. It was miserable and confused.

And yet beneath it all, its infernal hunger was growing again. It was not free of its appetite.

Below it the Canker flowed through the city, its barges and pleasure boats little grubs of dirty light on the blackness. The slake-moth slowed and spiralled.

A line of filthy smoke was drawn slowly across the face of New Crobuzon, marking it like a stub of pencil, as a late train went east on the Dexter Line, through Gidd and Barguest Bridge, on over the water towards Lud Fallow and Sedim Junction.

The moth swept on over Ludmead, ducking low above the roofs of the university faculty, alighting briefly on the roof of the Magpie Cathedral in Saltbur, flitting away in a pang of hunger and lonely fear. It could not rest. It could not channel its rapacity to feed.

As it flew, the slake-moth recognized the configuration of light and darkness below it. It felt a sudden pull.

Behind the railway lines, rising from the shabby and decrepit architecture of Bonetown, the Ribs rose out into the night air in a colossal sweep and curve of ivory. They made memories eddy in the slake-moth’s head. It recalled the dubious influence of those old bones that had made Bonetown a fearful place, somewhere to be escaped, where air currents were unpredictable and noxious tides could pollute the aether. Distant images of days clamped still, being milked lasciviously, its glands sucked clean, a hazy sense of a suckling grub at its teat, but nothing being there…memories caught it up.

The moth was utterly cowed. It sought relief. It hankered for a nest, somewhere to lie still, recuperate. Somewhere familiar, where it could tend itself and be tended. In its misery, it remembered its captivity in a selective, twisted light. It had been fed and cleaned by careful tenders there in Bonetown. It had been a sanctuary.

Frightened and hungry and eager for relief, it conquered its fear of the Bonetown Ribs.

It set off southwards, licking its way through half-forgotten routes in the air, skirting the blistered bones, seeking out a dark building in a little alley, a bitumened terrace of unclear purpose, from where it had crawled weeks ago.

The slake-moth wheeled nervously over the dangerous city and headed for home.

Isaac felt as if he had been asleep for several days, and he stretched luxuriously, feeling his body slide uncomfortably forward and back.

He heard an appalling scream.

Isaac froze as memories came back to him in torrents, let him know how he had come to be there, held tight in the Weaver’s arms (he jerked and spasmed as he recalled it all).

The Weaver was stepping lightly over the worldweb, scuttling across metareal filaments connecting every moment to every other.

Isaac remembered the vertiginous pitch of his soul when he had seen the worldweb. He remembered a nausea that had wracked his existential being at the sight of that impossible vista. He struggled not to open his eyes.

He could hear the jabbering of Yagharek and Derkhan’s whispered curses. They came to him not as sounds but as intimations, floating fragments of silk that slipped into his skull and became clear to him. There was another voice, a jagged cacophony of bright fabric shrieking in terror.

He wondered who that might be.

The Weaver moved quickly across pitching threads alongside the damage and potentiality of damage that the slake-moth had wreaked, and might again. The Weaver disappeared into a hole, a dim funnel of connections that wound through the material of that complex dimension and emerged again into the city.

Isaac felt air against his cheek, wood below him. He woke and opened his eyes.

His head hurt. He looked up. His neck wobbled as he adjusted to the weight of his helmet, still perched tight on his head, its mirrors miraculously unbroken.

He was lying in a shaft of moonlight in some dusty little attic. Sounds filtered into the space through the wooden floors and walls.

Derkhan and Yagharek were raising themselves slowly and carefully onto their elbows, shaking their heads. As Isaac watched, Derkhan reached up quickly and gently felt the sides of her head. Her remaining ear-and his, he quickly ascertained-was untouched.