Gravity pulled her to the west as the train turned. It broke off from the Kelltree Line and veered away to the east, gearing up to leap the river.

The masts of tall ships in Kelltree swung into view as the train turned. They teetered and swayed gently in the water. Derkhan glimpsed the furled sails, the massive paddles and yawning smokestacks, the excited, tightly reined seawyrms of trading ships from Myrshock and Shankell and Gnurr Kett. The water boiled with submersibles carved from great nautili shells. Derkhan turned her head to stare as the train arced.

She could see the Gross Tar over the roofs to the south, wide and relentless and bristling with vessels. Antique ordinances stopped the large ships, the foreign ships, half a mile downriver of the confluence of Canker and Tar. They collected beyond Strack Island, in the docklands. For a mile and a half or more, the north bank of the Gross Tar thronged with cranes loading and unloading constantly, bobbing like massive feeding birds. Swarms of barges and tugs took the transferred cargos upriver to Smog Bend and Gross Coil and the mean slum-industries of Creekside; they hauled crates along New Crobuzon’s canals, linking minor franchises and failing workshops, finding their way through the maze like laboratory rats.

The clay of Kelltree and Echomire was gouged by fat square docks and reservoirs, huge culs-de-sac of water that jutted into the city, linked by deep channels to the river, thronging with ships.

There had once been an attempt to replicate the Kelltree docks in Badside. Derkhan had seen what remained. Three massive stinking troughs of malarial slime, their surfaces broken with half-sunk wrecks and twisted girders.

The rattle and boom of the tracks beneath the iron wheels changed suddenly as the steaming engine hauled its charges onto the great girders of Barley Bridge. It veered a little from side to side, slowing on the unkempt tracks as it rose as if with distaste over Dog Fenn.

A few grey blocks rose from the streets like weeds in a cesspool, their concrete seeping and rotten. Many were unfinished, with splayed iron supports fanning out from the ghosts of roofs, rusting, bleeding with the rain and the damp, staining the skin of the buildings. Wyrmen swirled like carrion crows over these monoliths, squatting on the upper floors and fouling their neighbours’ roofs with dung. The outlines of Dog Fenn’s slum landscape bloated and burst and changed every time Derkhan saw them. Tunnels were dug into the undercity that stretched in a network of ruins and sewers and catacombs below New Crobuzon. Ladders left against a wall one day were hammered into place the next, reinforced after that, and within a week had become the stairwells to a new storey, thrown precariously between two drooping roofs. Wherever she looked, Derkhan could see people lying or running or fighting on the roofscape.

She stood wearily as the smell of the Fenn seeped into the slowing carriage.

As usual, there was no one to take her ticket at the station exit. Had it not been for the profound consequences of discovery, however small the possibility, Derkhan would never have bothered buying one. She flung it down on the counter and descended.

The doors of Dog Fenn Station were always open. They had rusted into position, and ivy had anchored them against the walls. Derkhan stepped out into the squalls and stench of Silverback Street. Barrows were thrown against walls slick with fungus and rotting paste. All manner of wares-some of surprisingly high quality-were available here. Derkhan turned and walked deeper into the slum. She was surrounded with a constant hubbub of shouts, advertising that sounded more like riotous assembly. For the most part, it was food that was announced.

“Onions! Who’ll buy my fine onions?”

“Whelks! Stick to whelks!”

“Broth to warm yer!”

Other goods and services were plainly available on every streetcorner.

Whores congregated in wretched, raucous gangs. Filthy petticoats and tawdry flounces of stolen silk, faces smeared white and scarlet over bruises and broken veins. They laughed with mouths full of broken teeth and sniffed tiny stains of shazbah cut with soot and rat-poison. Some were children who played with little paper dolls and wooden quoits when no one watched them, pouted lasciviously and tongued the air whenever a man walked by.

The Dog Fenn streetwalkers were the lowest of a despised breed. For decadent, inventive, obsessive, fetishized corruption and perversion of the flesh, the connoisseur looked elsewhere, in the red-light zone between The Crow and Spit Hearth. In Dog Fenn, the quickest, simplest, cheapest relief was available. The clients here were as poor and dirty and diseased as the tarts.

At the entrances to clubs already ejecting comatose drunks, industrial Remade worked as bouncers. They teetered aggressively on hooves and treads and massive feet, flexing metal claws. Their faces were brutalized, defensive. Their eyes would lock at the taunts from a passer-by. They took gobs of spit in the face, unwilling to risk their jobs. Their fear was understandable: to Derkhan’s left a cavernous space opened in an arch below the railway. From the darkness came the reek of shit and oil, the mechanical clank and human groans of Remade dying in a starving, drunken, stinking huddle.

A few ancient, tottering constructs staggered through the streets, clumsily ducking the rocks and mud thrown by ragged street-children. Graffiti covered every wall. Rude poems and obscene drawings jostled with slogans from Runagate Rampant and anxious prayers:

Half-a-Prayer’s coming!

Against the Lottery!

Tar and Canker spread like legs | City wonders where her Lover went | Cos now she’s being Ravished blind | lay the Prick that is the Government!

The walls of churches were not spared. The Veruline monks stood in a nervous group and wiped at the scrawled pornography that had appeared on their chapel.

There were xenians in the crowds. Some were being harassed, notably the few khepri. Others laughed and joked and swore with their neighbours. On one corner a cactus was arguing fiercely with a vodyanoi, and the mainly human crowd was catcalling equally for both sides.

Children hissed and called for stivers from Derkhan as she walked past. She ignored them, did not pull her bag closer to herself and identify herself as a victim. She stomped aggressively into the heart of Dog Fenn.

The walls around her suddenly sealed over her head as she passed under rickety bridges and ersatz rooms thrown up as if by aggregated filth. The air in their shadow dripped and creaked ominously. A whoop sounded from behind her, and Derkhan felt a rush of air on her neck as a wyrman dived acrobatically through the short tunnel and took off again into the sky, cackling madly. She stumbled as he passed and fell against a wall, adding her voice to the chorus of abuse that travelled in the wyrman’s wake.

The architecture she passed seemed governed by rules quite distinct from those in the rest of the city. There was no functional sense here. Dog Fenn seemed born of struggles in which the inhabitants were unimportant. The nodes and cells of brick and wood and palsied concrete had gone rogue, spreading like malignant tumours.

Derkhan turned into a mildewed brick cul-de-sac and looked around her. A Remade horse stood by the far end, its hind legs enormous piston-driven hammers. Behind it, a covered cart was backed nearly to the wall. Any one of the dead-eyed figures loitering around could be militia informers. It was a risk she would have to take.

She walked around to the back of the cart. Six pigs had been loaded out of the cart into a makeshift pen open on the side nearest the wall. Two men were chasing the pigs comically around the little space. The pigs squealed and screeched like babies as they ran. The pen led onto a semicircular opening about four feet high set into the wall at ground level. Derkhan peered through this space into a foetid hole ten feet below, barely lit with gas-jets that flickered unreliably. The burrow boomed and hissed and gleamed red in the gaslight. Figures came and went below her, bent double under dripping burdens like souls in some lurid hell.