“The moon made horns, the sky was gnarly. The cults were skittish.”

“Bellis gasped.Everywhere lights where suspended. Globes of cold illumination like frost moons, with no trace of the sepia of the New Crobuzon's gaslamps. The city glowed in the darkening water like a net full of ghostly lights.The outer edges of the city were low buildings in porous stone and coral.”

“Was it that these particular occult streets had been made, then hidden? Their names leaked as traps in an elaborate double-bluff, so that no one could go except those who knew that suchtraps were actually destinations? Or were there really no streets there when the traps were set? Perhaps these cul-de-scas were residues, yawned into illicit existence when the atlases were drawn up by liars.”

“A sense of wrongness, of fraught unease, as if long nails scraped the surface of the moon, raising the hackles of the soul.”

“Perhaps the window is not a sun but an asterisk, interrupting the grammar of the sky, with me sitting below it like a footnote.”

“It had acquired a name, Spatters, that reflected the desultory randomness of its outlines: the whole stinking shanty-town seemed to have dribbled like shit from the sky.”

“...and Lublamai no longer thought of screaming but only of watching as those dark markings rolled and boiled in perfect symetry across the wings like clouds in a night sky above, in water below.”