There was no washing on Cockscomb Bridge, but there were still lines drooped over the street studded with pegs like wizened fruit, and they shuddered as the shelling continued. At the sight of the flying men the line of Collectivists almost broke.
Parliament’s handlingers were dressed in suits and bowlers, their trousers a shade too short. A strange scare tactic. Were these the bodies of condemned New Quillers? Could they be volunteers, about whom there were rumours? Men and women whose loyalty to New Crobuzon’s government was so absolute they sacrificed themselves to be vessels for the handlingers? A holy rightist suicide. Probably these were just the executed dressed in costumes to cause foreboding.
Seeing them loom, thaumaturgicked and fire-spitting, stronger than cactacae, they seemed supra-Quillers, nightmares of reaction. The costumes raised memories of the Night of the Kinken Shards, when the New Quill Party had overrun the khepri ghetto in a storm of murder, shattering spit-sculptures in the Plaza of Statues, stamping the mindless males and butchering the women until they trod a ground of glass needles, ichor, blood. After that attack, so frenzied that respectable uptown opinion was horrified, the militia had come in to protect those few khepri not fled or murdered. But the Quillers did not have to flee: they were allowed to leave in an orderly and triumphant way.
Now Quillers or what looked like them were bearing down from the sky. The Collectivists stepped quickly into the lees of the bomb-shaken houses. They coughed in the dust of millennium-old bricks.
From the south, running the length of the bridge unnaturally fast to join them, came a thin and naked man. Clamped not to his neck or his head but to his face, fingers spread over his eyes and nose, was a dark left hand. A sinistral.
Civil wars made for unlikely allies. There were those few handlingers that for whatever reasons opposed their brothersisters-whether odd altruism or a politic calculation, the Collective’s negotiators never knew. It may have sickened the negotiators to do deals with these symbols of corruption and parasite cunning, but they would turn nothing down now. Especially as several of the handlinger turncoats were sinistrals.
The three militia handlingers were dextriers, warriors, but for all their power they veered when they saw it was a sinistral on the man’s face. They tried to get out of range, but the Collectivist hand-linger jumped up higher than a human should and snapped his fingers. One dark-suited man spasmed as the sinistral shut down the dextrier’s assimilation gland. It became nothing but a blind five-fingered beast clutching a brain-dead man who fell out of the sky, his bowler hat a coda behind him, into the slow and dirty river Tar.
A second snap from the sinistral’s fingers and the nude handlinger sent another of the flying men palsied and down, to spread out red on the cobbles. The Collectivists cheered. But the third loyalist handlinger had flown in fast under eaves unseen, and as the sinistral began to turn its host away from its burst victim, the dextrier opened its man’s mouth and spatseared.
Inky gusts of flame uncoiled and rolled over the nude man’s skin, darking him and sending his fat spitting, and the sinistral screamed in its host’s voice and psychically in its own, making receptives for a half mile wince. It dropped and burnt up, fire-ruined.
The militia motorguns opened and the air became a shredder. The Collectivists dropped behind stone as the dextrier flew unconcerned through the firing, its body jerking, protecting its hand-body with the contingent flesh it borrowed.
On the roofs at the north end of the bridge a thaumaturge rose, a Brock Marsh rebel come to defend the Collective. His body was aglow with corposant. It flared without sound in cobalt, and he barked and a gob of the colour sputtered, flew with butterfly flight to the frontmost militia gun, and it arced and took over the cannoneers who staggered and pulled their masks from faces gone bleached and blind.
The men and the gun brittled, cracks spread across them, and one by one gun and men shattered. The ground where they had been was dusted with shards of them, quite dry.
Another cheer, and the leader of Wynion Way came forward firing a musket, but the handlinger flew down, spinning as it did, heavy black boots flailing. It flew into a column of Collectivists with a kind of angry playfulness, smashing them and spitting fire in an incandescent spiral, leaving brutalised dead and dying and fire-stained walls.
“Fall back! Now!”
The Glasshouse Gunners emerged on the streeted bridge and started to retreat, firing rivebows into the militia, who were no longer waiting, were beginning to advance dragging carronade with them. Their motorguns started again. The handlinger and the Collectivist thaumaturge faced each other. The man raised his fists to send out a bolt; the handlinger sent him burning out of the air.
“Get the fuck back now!” The militia were coming. The Glasshouse Gunners turned and in a sudden rage stormed them. The ranks of huge thorned fighters were tremendous. The militia faltered.
The dextrier spat but too early. It burned through several clotheslines. A cactus-man sent a machete into the host, shouted triumph. It was a huge knife; it ground deep into the human meat, sent him down. The cactacae kicked and stamped the parasite and host with tree-trunk feet. The Gunners’ random line was enfiladed and, even armoured in crude-cast metal, the motorgun bullets tore at them.
The weary cactus fighters began to retreat, toward their approaching weapons. The last of the Gunners was a Remade human. He wore a mottlesome thing on his foot. His cactus comrades turned to him, and he spat fire across their faces. They had killed the host but not the handlinger. It had crept onto him.
A train came tearing over the city on the close-by rail-bridge, within a few yards of the Cockscomb. At the north shore the rails were blocked by a barricade, but south of Petty Coil Station, the Sud Line was the Collective’s. The train stopped beside the bridge, and from its windows Collectivists fired grenades, directed by a shantytown garuda on updrafts over the bomb fires. The missiles ruined more and more of the Cockscomb Bridge skyline, and broke apart the militia lines.
But it was not enough. The militia were taking Cockscomb Bridge, firing back at the train. In the east, the black spine of Parliament stabbed up, an inselberg of dark architecture, watching this and the other fights (an airship raid on the Kelltree Docks, shunn-cavalry riding their bipeds into Creekside, a Mamluk regiment of loyal Remade fighting in Echomire while the Collectivists screamed and called them traitors).
It’s time. A whisper from the Collective’s Riverskin commanders. Under the railway arches by Saltpetre Station, a command headquarters, Frengeler, ex-militia, trained in tactics and turned to the radicals, the outstanding military thinker of the Collective, was screaming: Decide if you want to fucking win or not. We’re out of time, do it. Blow the bridges.
There were few bridges left that crossed from Parliament territory directly into the Collective: each was a conduit they could not afford to cede to the militia. Below the surface of the Tar, the vodyanoi Collectivists guarding the sewer entrances sent out aquatic sappers.
None of them liked the job they had to do. None of them wanted to destroy these loved old things. They felt they must.
They found their way through the murked waters to where the arches of the bridge rose from mud, they groped, but with growing anxiety could not find their demolitions. They gripped at each other and barked their submerged tongue, but out of the dark water came enemy shapes. Betrayal, someone shouted, as militia vodyanoi came at them, shamans with roiling patches of clean water, undines that gripped the Collectivists and squeezed.