Hollowfold

A heap of what looks like rotten cloth in a disused drying house. It breathes. Bladders rise out of it to the roof beams and sink again, sheets spread across the floor and up the walls, and a man who has walked into the room finds that the folds have closed every way out.

Sarrum's cloth passes through a great many hands before the grading hall seals it, and through a great many buildings, and when the trade moved some of the buildings were left. The drying houses and bleach yards stand empty in the outer Cinders, and their owners are dead, or in debt, or in London. Salvagers go in for copper and timber. The associations tell them to leave the cloth alone, and the young ones do not listen.

It is one creature made of skins: sheets and folds and hollow bladders, dirty ivory and pale lavender where it is young, bruised burgundy and grey where it is old, thin enough in places to see veins and fibres branching inside. It has no head, no eyes and no limbs. It moves by spreading a sheet, holding with it, and drawing the rest along, and when it is roused its bladders swell up toward the roof and fall like collapsing sails. It takes what it can close round, and it closes slowly, and from every side at once.

The halls say a property's contents are the owner's affair. The owner cannot be found. The Weavers hold that nothing in a drying house should be touched until the title is settled, which suits nobody but the Hollowfold. The mission women say the cloth was soaked in what the works made, and the works made this.

As witnesses describe it

Filling a derelict Sarrum textile mill, monumental ivory and lavender translucent membranes inflated into great veined bladders reaching the roof beams, sheets draped over rusted looms and machinery, branching veins visible in warm filtered light. Another, violet-grey and burgundy, spreads its folds and arching cavities across a rain-soaked abandoned industrial courtyard.