“Godspit, Isaac,” whispered Derkhan. “Go easy.”

Isaac was crushingly disappointed. He had been preparing a list of questions in his mind. He knew exactly how he had wanted to investigate the wings, which muscle-bone interaction currently intrigued him. He had been prepared to pay a good rate for the research, had prepared to get Ged to come down to ask questions about the Cymek Library. To be faced instead with a scared, sickly human reading from a script that would have disgraced the lowest playhouse depressed him.

His anger was tempered with pity as he stared at the miserable figure before him. The man behind the feathers nervously clutched and unclutched his left arm with his right. He had to open that preposterous beak to breath.

“ ‘Stail,” Isaac swore softly.

Derkhan had walked up to the bars.

“What did you do?” she asked.

The man looked around again before answering.

“Did thieving,” he said quickly. “Got caught trying to get an old painting of a garuda from some ancient cunt out in Chnum. Worth a fortune. Magister said since I was so impressed with garuda I could-” his breath caught for a moment “-I could be one.”

Isaac could see how the feathers of the face were shoved ruthlessly into the skin, doubtless bonded subcutaneously to make removal too agonizing to consider. He imagined the process of insertion, one by torturing one. When the Remade turned slightly to Derkhan, Isaac could see the ugly knot of hardened flesh on his back where those wings, torn from some buzzard or vulture, had been sealed together with the human muscles.

Nerve endings bonded randomly and uselessly, and the wings moved only with the spasms of a long drawn-out death. Isaac’s nose wrinkled at the stench. The wings were rotting slowly on the Remade’s back.

“Does it hurt?” Derkhan was asking.

“Not so very much any more, miss,” the Remade answered. “Anyway, I’m lucky to have this.” He indicated the tent and the bars. “Keeps me eating. That’s why I’d be obliged more’n I can say if you’d refrain from telling the boss that you clocked me.”

Did most who came here really accept this disgusting charade? wondered Isaac. Were people so gullible as to believe that something as grotesque as this could ever fly?

“We’ll say nothing,” said Derkhan. Isaac nodded curtly in agreement. He was full of pity and anger and disgust. He wanted to leave.

Behind them, the curtain swished and a group of young women entered, laughing and whispering lewd jokes. The Remade looked over Derkhan’s shoulder.

“Ah!” he said loudly. “Visitors from this strange city! Come, sit, hear stories of the harsh desert! Stay a while with a traveller from far, far away!”

He moved away from Derkhan and Isaac, gazing at them pleadingly as he did so. Delighted screams and astonishment burst from the new spectators.

“Fly for us!” yelled one.

“Alas,” heard Isaac and Derkhan as they left the tent, “the weather in your city is too inclement for my kind. I have caught chill and temporarily cannot fly. But tarry and I will tell you of the views from the cloudless Cymek skies…”

The cloth closed behind them. The speech was obscured.

Isaac watched as Derkhan scribbled in her notepad.

“What are you going to turn in?” he asked.

“ ‘Remade Forced by Magister’s Torture into Living as Zoo Exhibit.’ I won’t say which one,” she answered without looking up from her writing. Isaac nodded.

“Come on,” he murmured. “I’ll get that candyfloss.”

“I’m fucking depressed now,” said Isaac heavily. He bit at the sickly-sweet bundle he carried. Wisps of sugar fibres stuck to his stubble.

“Yes, but are you depressed because of what’d been done to that man, or because you didn’t get to meet a garuda?” asked Derkhan.

They had left the freakshow. They munched earnestly as they walked past the garish body of the fair. Isaac pondered. He was a little taken aback.

“Well, I suppose…probably because I didn’t meet a garuda…But,” he added defensively, “I wouldn’t be half so depressed if it’d just been a scam, someone in a costume, something like that. It’s the…fucking indignity of it that really sticks in the craw…”

Derkhan nodded thoughtfully.

“We could look around, you know,” she said. “There’s bound to be a garuda or two here somewhere. Some of the city-bred must be here.” She looked up, uselessly. With all the coloured lights, she could hardly even see the stars.

“Not now,” said Isaac. “I’m not in the mood. I’ve lost my momentum.” There was a long, companionable silence before he spoke again.

“Will you really write something about this place in Runagate Rampanfi”

Derkhan shrugged, looked around briefly to make sure no one was listening.

“It’s a difficult job, dealing with the Remade,” she said. “There’s so much contempt, prejudice against them. Divide, rule. Trying to link up, so people don’t…judge them as monsters…it’s really hard. And it’s not like people don’t know they’ve got fucking horrendous lives, for the most part…it’s that there’s a lot of people who kind of vaguely think they deserve it, even if they pity them, or think it’s Gods-given, or rubbish like that. Oh, Godspit,” she said suddenly, and shook her head.

“What?”

“I was in court the other day, saw a Magister sentence a woman to Remaking. Such a sordid, pathetic, miserable crime…” She winced in remembrance. “Some woman living at the top of one of the Ketch Heath monoliths killed her baby…smothered it or shook it or Jabber knows what…because it wouldn’t stop crying. She’s sitting there in court, her eyes are just…damn well empty…she can’t believe what’s happened, she keeps moaning her baby’s name, and the Magister sentences her. Prison, of course, ten years I think, but it was the Remaking that I remember.

“Her baby’s arms are going to be grafted to her face. ‘So she doesn’t forget what she did,’ he says.” Derkhan’s voice curdled as she mimicked the Magister.

They walked in silence for a while, dutifully munching candyfloss.

“I’m an art critic, Isaac,” Derkhan said eventually. “Remaking’s art, you know. Sick art. The imagination it takes! I’ve seen Remade crawling under the weight of huge spiral iron shells they retreat into at night. Snail-women. I’ve seen them with big squid tentacles where their arms were, standing in river mud, plunging their suckers underwater to pull out fish. And as for the ones made for the gladiatorial shows…! Not that they admit that’s what they’re for…

“Remaking’s creativity gone bad. Gone rotten. Gone rancid. I remember you once asked me if it was hard to balance writing about art and writing for RR? She turned to look at him as they paced through the fair. “It’s the same thing, Isaac. Art’s something you choose to make…it’s a bringing together of…of everything around you into something that makes you more human, more khepri, whatever. More of a person. Even with Remaking a germ of that survives. That’s why the same people who despise the Remade are in awe of Jack Half-a-Prayer, whether or not he exists.

“I don’t want to live in a city where Remaking is the highest art.”

Isaac felt in his pocket for Runagate Rampant. It was dangerous even to hold a copy. He patted it, mentally thumbing his nose to the north-east, at Parliament, at Mayor Bentham Rudgutter and the parties squabbling over how to slice up the cake amongst themselves. The Fat Sun and Three Quills parties; Diverse Tendency, whom Lin called “comprador scum”; the liars and seducers of the Finally We Can See party; the whole pompous bickering brood like all-powerful six-year-olds in a sandpit.

At the end of the path paved with bon-bon wrappers, posters, tickets and crushed food, discarded dolls and burst balloons, stood Lin, lounging by the entrance to the fair. Isaac smiled with unfeigned pleasure at seeing her. As they neared her she stood straighter and waved at them. She sauntered in their direction.