Nathan and Dashini appeared in the Circus, right where Nathan had once fished for limb-babies – how long ago was it? Months? Years? Did time even pass in the Manse? Their apparition sent slum children wading back to the shores, and ripples of the Living Mud washed the Strand.
Nathan didn’t pause to appreciate the scene around him, no matter how different it might seem to him as he was now in contrast to that nervous, reticent child he had been. That kind of thought he left to the poor, sad, silent slum-dwellers that surrounded him. He, instead, pushed out for the middle while Dashini ran for the edge, holding her dress up. When he reached the deepest part, he submerged himself entirely, both hands enclosing God’s eye. When the Mud was over his hair and in his ears, he Itched and Scratched and Sparked with everything he could feel.
He knew what would happen because he knew what he wanted. That was the secret. He only had to know what he wanted, to bring it to mind. No more worms, no more limb-babies, no more alifonjers. Too long had his dreams and his pain dictated things. Now he would control it. Dashini had shown him by her example. The eye was showing him. Power. It can be seized. It can be directed.
Up from the Mud came swarms of flukes, Nathan-sized, Nathan-shaped, faceless but whole, hundreds of them emerging in waves centred on Nathan. As they formed, the Mud was consumed, Nathan revealed at the centre. His grip on the eye was so tight that he might have crushed it, and here was an army, building, seething around him, staring eyelessly.
‘That’s it!’ Dashini cried.
More and more came, thousands of Nathan-flukes, and though he could feel himself getting thinner, he didn’t care. This was not some pool of worms, or pit of anger, sadness. This was an army. First, he would use it to drive the people out of the slums up into the Merchant City, where they would be safe, and then, when that was done, he would send his army down into the Living Mud beneath the Circus. It was clear to him now: the Circus was the place most affected by the proximity of God, the place where the eggshell that was Mordew was the thinnest, where the fishing had always been best, where God’s power had the most potency. If he could crack it here, then that crack would propagate throughout the city.
Dashini saw his plan, part of it at least. She raised high the Nathan Knife and began to sing. Across Mordew, to the slum boys and the hawkers, the fences and the witch-women, the hair-sellers and rag-seekers, the fishermen’s widows and their orphans, the eye-blackers and the Athanasians, the gin-house proprietresses, the broom-handlers, and all the hungry, filthy, Mud-stained wretches withering in the shadow of the Sea Wall, to these she appeared in their bonfires and their candlelights, urging them in song to rise up out of their squalor and take what they were due from the Merchant City.
Nathan stood up from the Mud, opened his fist and the eye was like an egg, white and firm. There were thousands of flukes now, and they were moving towards him as if drawn by a magnet. They reached for him, grabbed at him, not in violence but in worship, and these he filled with the Spark so that they shone blue. He sent them out into the slums to usher the people out, to help them where they needed help, and to remove any obstacles. God’s eye allowed it to become real, against the will of the Interdicting Finger, against the will of the Master.
Dashini’s song turned to a scream of joy as the people moved. She fed the slums with the black fire, driving out water, driving out rain, and she made every firebird feather burst like a bomb. Pillars of steam and smoke she forced up into the sky. The people and the flukes and all those things that could crawl out from the Living Mud fled the flames and went urgently up to the Merchant City, shrieking and crying.