“What’s over there?”

“That’s where I keep the exotica,” said Isaac. “Aspises, lasifly…”

“You’ve got a lasifly?” exclaimed Lublamai. Isaac nodded and grinned.

“Don’t have the heart to do any experiments with the beautiful thing,” he said.

“Can I see it?”

“ ‘Course, Lub. It’s over there behind the cage with the batkin in it.”

As Lublamai trooped over between the tightly packed cases, David looked briskly about him.

“So where’s your ornithological problem, then?” he asked and rubbed his hands.

“On the desk.” Isaac indicated the miserable, trussed pigeon. “How do I make that thing stop wriggling. I wanted it to at first, to see the musculature, but now I want to move the wings myself.”

David stared levelly at him as if at a halfwit.

“Kill it.”

Isaac shrugged hugely.

“I tried. It wouldn’t die.”

“Oh for fuck’s sake…” David laughed exasperatedly, and strode over to the desk. He wrung the pigeon’s neck.

Isaac winced ostentatiously and held up his massive hands.

“They’re just not subtle enough for that sort of work. My hands are too clumsy, my sensibilities too damned delicate,” he declared airily.

“Right,” agreed David sceptically. “What are you working on?”

Isaac was instantly enthusiastic.

“Well…” He strode over to the desk. “I’ve had fuck-all luck with the garuda in the city. I heard rumours about a couple living in St. Jabber’s Mound and Syriac, and I sent word that I was willing to pay good moolah for a couple of hours’ time and some heliotypes. I’ve had absolutely nil response. I’ve whacked a couple of posters up in the university as well, asking for any garuda student ready and willing to drop by here, but my sources tell me there’s been no intake this year.”

“ ‘Garuda aren’t…adept at abstract thought.’ ” David imitated the sneering tone of the speaker from the sinister Three Quills party, which had held a disastrous rally in Brock Marsh the previous year. Isaac and David and Derkhan had gone along to disrupt proceedings, hurling abuse and rotten oranges at the man on stage to the delight of the xenian demonstration outside. Isaac barked in recollection.

“Absolutely. So anyway, short of going to Spatters, at the moment I can’t work with actual garuda, so I’m looking at the various flight mechanisms you…uh…see around you. Amazing variation, actually.”

Isaac sheafed through piles of notes, holding up diagrams of finches’ and bluebottles’ wings. He untied the dead pigeon and delicately traced the movement of its wings through a rolling arc. He pointed wordlessly at the wall around his desk. It was covered with carefully rendered diagrams of wings. Close-up sections of the rotating joint at the shoulder, pared-down representations of forces, beautifully shaded studies of feather patterns. Here too were heliotypes of dirigibles, with arrows and question marks scrawled on them in dark ink. There were suggestive sketches of the mindless men-o’-war, and hugely enlarged pictures of wasps’ wings. Each was carefully labelled. David moved his eyes slowly over the hours and hours of work, the comparative studies of the engines of flight.

“I don’t think my client’s too fussy about what his wings-or whatever-look like, as long as he can get airbound as and when.” David and Lublamai knew about Yagharek. Isaac had asked them for secrecy. He trusted them. He had told them in case Yagharek visited when they were in the warehouse, although so far the garuda had managed to avoid them on his fleeting visits.

“Have you thought about just, y’know, sticking some wings back on?” said David. “Remaking him?”

“Well, absolutely, that’s my main line of enquiry, but there’re two problems. One is what wings? I’ll have to build them. Second is, do you know any Remakers prepared to do that on the quiet? The best bio-thaumaturge I know is the despised Vermishank. I’ll go to him if I fucking have to, but I’ll be sorely desperate before I do that…So at the moment I’m doing preliminary stuff, trying to work out the size and shape and power-source of something that would hold him up at all. If I go that way, eventually.”

“What else have you got in mind? Physico-thaumaturgy?”

“Well, you know, UFT, my old favourite…” Isaac grinned and shrugged self-deprecatingly. “I have a feeling his back’s too messed up for easy Remaking, even if I could get the wings sorted out. I’m wondering about combining two different energy fields…Shit, David, I don’t know. I’ve got the beginnings of an idea…” He pointed vaguely at a roughly labelled drawing of a triangle.

“Isaac?” Lublamai’s yell sailed over the relentless squawks and screeches. Isaac and David looked over at him. He had wandered on past the lasifly and the pair of gild-parakeets. He was pointing at a smaller set of boxes and cases and vats. “What’s all this?”

“Oh, that’s my nursery,” shouted Isaac with a grin. He strode towards Lublamai, pulling David with him. “I thought it might be interesting to see how you progress from something that can’t fly to something that can, so I managed to get hold of a bunch of neonates and unborns and baby things.”

He stopped by the collection. Lublamai was peering into a small hutch at a clutch of vivid cobalt eggs.

“Don’t know what they are,” said Isaac. “Hope it’s something pretty.”

The hutch was on the top of a pile of similar open-fronted boxes, in each of which a clumsy little hand-made nest contained between one and four eggs. Some were astonishing colours, some a drab beige. A little pipe coiled away behind the hutches and disappeared over the railings into the boiler below. Isaac nudged it with his foot.

“I think they prefer it warm…” he muttered. “Don’t really know…”

Lublamai was bending down to peer into a glass-fronted tank.

“Wow…” he breathed. “I feel like I’m ten again! Trade you these for six marbles.”

The tank’s floor writhed with little green caterpillars. They munched voraciously and systematically on the leaves stuffed rudely around them. The stems were crawling with little bodies.

“Yeah, that’s quite interesting. Any day now they should go into their cocoons, and then I think I’m going to ruthlessly cut them open at various stages to see how they transmogrify themselves.”

“Life as a lab assistant is cruel, isn’t it?” murmured Lublamai into the tank. “What other disgusting grubs do you have?”

“Bunch of maggots. Easy to feed. That’s probably the smell that’s got Sincerity upset.” Isaac laughed. “Some other grubs that promise to turn into butterflies and moths, horribly aggressive water-things that I am told turn into damask-flies and what have you…” Isaac pointed at a tank full of dirty water, behind the others.

“And,” he said, swaggering over to a little mesh cage some feet away, “something rather special…” He jabbed his thumb at the container.

David and Lublamai crowded round. They gazed with open mouths.

“Oh, now that is splendid…” whispered David, after a while.

“What is it?” hissed Lublamai.

Isaac peered over their heads at his star caterpillar.

“Frankly, my friends, I have not an arsing clue. All I know is that it’s huge, pretty, and not very happy.”

The grub waved its thick head blindly. It shifted its massive body sluggishly around the wire prison. It was at least four inches long and one inch thick, with bright colours slapped randomly around its chubby cylindrical body. Spiky hairs sprouted from its rump. It shared its cage with browning lettuce leaves, little snips of meat, slices of fruit, paper strips.

“See,” said Isaac, “I’ve tried to feed the thing everything. I’ve put in as many herbs and plants as exist, and it doesn’t want any of them. So I tried it on fish and fruit and cake, bread, meat, paper, glue, cotton, silk…it just roots aimlessly around being hungry, staring at me accusingly.”