Perdido Street Station Part 23

"Listen, old son, I've clocked up a few extra hours." Isaac grinned back. "I'm having a half-day. Anyone asks, I'll see 'em tomorrow."

"Righto," said Lublamai, returning to his work with a wave. "Have a good one."

Isaac grunted goodbye.

He stopped in the middle of Paddler Way and sighed, purely for the pleasure of the air. The little street was not busy, but neither was it deserted. Isaac saluted one or two of his neighbours, then turned and strode off towards Petty Coil. It was a gorgeous day, and he had decided to walk to Salacus Fields.

The warm air seeped in through door and windows and cracks in the warehouse walls. Once, Lublamai stopped working to adjust his clothing. Sincerity was tussling playfully with a beetle. The construct had finished cleaning some time ago, and now stood gently ticking in the far corner, one of its optical lenses seemingly fixed on Lublamai.

A little while after Isaac left, Lublamai rose and, leaning out of the open window by his desk, he tied a red scarf to a bolt in the brick. He made a list of shopping that he needed, should Teafortwo come by. Then he returned to work.

By five o'clock the sun was still high, but it was curving towards earth. The light was thickening fast, becoming tawny.

Deep within the pendulous chrysalis the pupating lifeform could sense the lateness of the day. It shivered and flexed its nearly finished flesh. In its ichor and the byways of its body, a final set of chymical reactions began.

At half past six, an ungainly thud outside the window interrupted Lublamai, who looked out to see Teafortwo in the little alley outside, rubbing his head with his prehensile foot. The wyrman looked up at Lublamai and let out a yell of greeting.

"Guvnor Lublub! Doing me rounds, saw your red flapper . . ."

"Evening, Teafortwo," said Lublamai. "Fancy coming in?" He stood back from the window and let the wyrman in. Teafortwo flopped to the floor in a heavy, flapping motion. His russet skin was beautiful in the shards of late light that caught it. He grinned up at Lublamai with his cheerful, hideous face.

"What's the plan, boss?" shouted Teafortwo. Before Lublamai could answer, Teafortwo looked over at where Sincerity was eyeing him dubiously. He spread his wings, stuck out his tongue and leered at her. She scampered off in disgust.

Teafortwo laughed uproariously and burped.

Lublamai smiled indulgently. Before Teafortwo had a chance to get more sidetracked, he tugged him over to the desk where his shopping list waited. He gave Teafortwo a slab of chocolate to keep his attention on the job in hand.

As Teafortwo and Lublamai bickered over how many groceries the wyrman could carry in the air, something above them stirred.

In the rapidly darkening shadows of the cage in Isaac's raised laboratory, the coc.o.o.n was oscillating under a force that was not a wind. Movement within the tight, organic package was sending it in a quick, hypnotic motion. It spun, then faltered, bucked slightly. There was an infinitesimal ripping noise, much too low for Lublamai or Teafortwo to hear.

A moist, sculpted black claw split the fibres of the coc.o.o.n. It slid slowly upwards, ripping the stiff material as effortlessly as an a.s.sa.s.sin's knife. A welter of utterly alien senses spilt like invisible guts from the ragged hole. Disorienting gusts of feeling rolled briefly around the room, making Sincerity growl, and Lublamai and Teafortwo look up nervously for a moment.

Intricate hands emerged from the darkness and held the edges of the rent. They pushed silently, forcing the thing apart and open. There was the softest of thumps as a trembling body slid from the coc.o.o.n, as wet and slippery as a newborn.

For a minute it huddled on the wood, weak and bewildered, in the same hunched pose it had maintained within the chrysalis. Slowly, it pushed outwards, luxuriating in the sudden s.p.a.ce. When it encountered the wire mesh of the hutch it tore it effortlessly from the door and crawled into the larger s.p.a.ce of the room.

It discovered itself. It learnt its shape.

It learnt that it had needs.

Lublamai and Teafortwo looked up at the screech and discordant plucking of torn wire. The sound seemed to start above them and wash throughout the room. They looked at each other, then up again.

"Wa.s.sat, guvnor . . . ?" said Teafortwo.

Lublamai walked away from the desk. He glanced up at Isaac's balcony, turned slowly, took in the whole of the ground floor. There was silence. Lublamai stood still, frowning, gazing at the front door. Had the sound come from outside? he wondered.

A movement was reflected in the mirror beside the door.

A dark thing rose from the floor at the top of the stairs.

Lublamai spoke, emitted some tremulous noise of disbelief, of fear, of confusion, but it dissipated soundlessly after the briefest moment. He stared with an open mouth at the reflection.

The thing unfolded. The sense was of a blossoming. An expansion after being enclosed, like a man or woman standing and spreading their arms wide after huddling foetally, but multiplied and made vast. As if the thing's indistinct limbs could bend a thousand times, so that it unhinged like a paper sculpture, standing and spreading arms or legs or tentacles or tails that opened and opened. The thing that had huddled like a dog stood and opened itself, and it was nearly the size of a man.

Teafortwo screeched something. Lublamai opened his mouth wider and tried to move. He could not see its shape. Only its dark, glistening skin and hands that clutched like a child's. Cold shadows. Eyes that were not eyes. Organic folds and jags and twists like rats' tails that shuddered and twitched as if newly dead. And those finger-long shards of colourless bone that shone white and parted and dripped and that were teeth teeth . . . . . .

As Teafortwo tried to bolt past Lublamai and Lublamai tried to open his mouth to scream, his eyes still fixed to the creature in the mirror, his feet skittering on the flagstones, the thing at the top of the stairs opened its wings.

Four rustling concertinas of dark matter flickered outwards on the creature's back, and outwards again and again, slotting into position, fanning and expanding in vast folds of thick mottled flesh, expanding to an impossible size: an explosion of organic patterns, a flag unfurling, clenched fists opening.

The thing made its body thin and spread those colossal wings, ma.s.sive flat folds of stiff skin that seemed to fill the hall. They were irregular, chaotic in shape, random fluid whorls; but mirrorperfect left and right, like spilt ink or paint patterns on folded paper.

And on those great flat planes were dark stains, rude patterns that seemed to flicker as Lublamai watched and Teafortwo fumbled with the door, wailing. The colours were midnight, sepulchral, black-blue, black-brown, black-red. And then the patterns did did flicker, the shadow-shapes moved like amoeba in a magnifying lens or oil on water, the patterns left and right still matching, moving in time, hypnotic and heavy, faster. Lublamai's face creased. His back itched maniacally with the thought that the thing was behind him. Lublamai spun to face it, gazed directly into the mutating colours, the dusky vivid show . . . flicker, the shadow-shapes moved like amoeba in a magnifying lens or oil on water, the patterns left and right still matching, moving in time, hypnotic and heavy, faster. Lublamai's face creased. His back itched maniacally with the thought that the thing was behind him. Lublamai spun to face it, gazed directly into the mutating colours, the dusky vivid show . . .

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

Teafortwo howled. He turned to see the thing that was now descending the stairs, those wings still unfurled. Then the patterns on the wings caught him and he stared, his mouth open.

The dark designs on those wings moved beguilingly.

Lublamai and Teafortwo stood still and silent, agog, slack-jawed and shivering, gazing at the magnificent wings.

The creature tasted the air.

It looked briefly at Teafortwo, and opened its mouth, but the pickings were meagre. It turned its head and faced Lublamai, keeping those wings spread and enthralling. It moaned with hunger in a soundless timbre that made Sincerity, already sick with fear, cry out. She huddled closer into the shadow of the motionless construct, propped against the wall in the corner of the room, weird shadows twitching in its lenses. The air hummed with the taste of Lublamai. The creature salivated and its wings flickered into a frenzy, and Lublamai's taste grew stronger and stronger until the thing's monstrous tongue emerged and it moved forward, flicking Teafortwo effortlessly out of its way.

The winged creature took Lublamai in its hungry embrace.

CHAPTER T TWENTY-TWO.

Sunset bled into the ca.n.a.ls and the converging rivers of New Crobuzon. They ran thick and gory with light. Shifts changed and working days ended. Retinues of exhausted smelters and foundry workers, clerks and bakers and c.o.ke-loaders, trudged from factory and office to the stations. The platforms were full of tired, boisterous argument, cigarillos and booze. Steam cranes in Kelltree worked into the night, hauling exotic cargoes from foreign ships. From the river and the great docks, striking vodyanoi stevedores yelled insults at the human crews on the jetties. The sky above the city was smeared with cloud. The air was warm, and smelt alternately lush and foul, as trees fruited and factory waste coagulated in thickening flows.

Teafortwo bolted from the warehouse on Paddler Way like cannonshot. He tore into the sky from the broken window trailing blood and tears, blubbering and sniffling like a baby, flying in a ragged spiral towards Pincod and Abrogate Green.

Minutes pa.s.sed before another, darker form followed him into the skies.

The intricate hatchling thing flexed itself through an upper window and launched into the gloaming. Its movements on the ground were tentative, every motion seemed to be experimental. In the air it soared. There was no hesitation, only a glorying in the motion.

The irregular wings clapped together and swept apart in huge, soundless gusts that scooped away great swathes of air. The creature spun, beating its wings languorously, its body careering across the sky with the chaotic graceless speed of a b.u.t.terfly. It sent eddies of wind and sweat and aphysical exudations in its wake.

The creature was still drying.

It exalted. It licked the cooling air.

The city festered like mould below it. A palimpsest of sense-impressions washed over the flying thing. Sounds and smells and lights that filtered into its obscure mind in a synaesthetic wash, an alien perception.

New Crobuzon steamed with the rich taste-scent of prey.

The thing had fed, was sated, but the glut of food confused it, gloriously, and it s...o...b..red and gnashed its huge teeth in a frenzy.

It dived. Its wings fluttered and trembled as it swooped towards the unlit alleys below it. It knew in its hunter's heart to avoid the great scabs of light clotted at irregular s.p.a.ces around the city, to seek out the darker places. It trailed its tongue in the air and found food, swept with chaotic aerobatics into the shadow of the bricks. It came down like a fallen angel in the gnarled cul-de-sac where a prost.i.tute and her client f.u.c.ked against a wall. Their desultory jerks faltered as they sensed the thing beside them.

Their screams were brief. They ceased quickly as the creature's wings spread.

The thing fell on them with eager greed.

Afterwards it flew again, drunk with the taste.

It hovered, seeking the centre of the city, turning, drawn slowly to the enormous sprawl of Perdido Street Station. It beat its way west over Spit Hearth and the red-light zone, over the contradictory tangle of commerce and squalor that was The Crow. Behind it, snagging the air like a trap, was the dark edifice of Parliament, and the militia towers of Strack Island and Brock Marsh. The creature traced an uneven course over the path of the skyrail that linked those lower towers to the Spike that loomed at the westernmost shoulder of Perdido Street Station.

The flying thing started as pods streaked along that rail. It hovered momentarily, fascinated at the rattling pa.s.sage of the trains that expanded outwards from the station, that monstrous architectural enormity.

Vibrations in a hundred registers and keys beckoned the thing, as forces and emotions and dreams spilt and were amplified in the brick chambers of the station and blasted outwards into the sky. A ma.s.sive, invisible flavour trail.

The few night-birds swerved violently away from the weird thing that beat its heavy way towards the city's dark heart. Wyrmen on errands saw its incomprehensible silhouette and wheeled off in other directions, shouting obscenities and oaths. Booms and drones vibrated as the dirigibles sounded to each other, sliding slowly between city and sky like fat pike. As they turned ponderously, the thing flapped past them, unseen except by an engineer who did not report his sighting, but made a religious sign and whispered to Solenton for protection.

Caught in the updraft, the wash of senses, from Perdido Street Station, the flying thing let itself be caught and swept up until it was way, way above the city. It turned slowly with a quiver from its wings, orienting itself to its new territory.

It noted the paths of the river. It felt the vents of different energies from the city's different zones. It sensed the city in a flickering pa.s.sage of different modes. Concentrations of food. Shelter.

The creature sought one more thing. Others of its kind.

It was social. When it was born for the second time it was with a hunger for company. Its tongue unrolled and it tasted the gritty air for anything that was like itself.

The thing shuddered.

Faintly, so faintly, it could sense something in the east. It could taste frustration. Its wings trembled in empathy.

It arced around and beat its way back in the direction from which it had come. It bore a little north this time, pa.s.sing over the parks and elegant old buildings of Gidd and Ludmead. The splintering enormities of the Ribs splayed extraordinarily to the south, and the flying thing felt a queasiness, an anxiety, at the awareness of those looming bones. The power that drooled upward from them was not at all to its liking. But its unease battled with its deeply encoded sympathy for its own kind, whose taste grew stronger, much stronger, in the shadow of the great skeleton.

The thing descended tentatively. It approached circuitously, from the north and the east. It flew low and tight, below the skyrail that extended northwards from the militia tower of Mog Hill to that in Chnum. It shadowed an eastbound train on the Dexter Line, gliding in its filthy thermals. Then it swung in a long arc around the Mog Hill tower and over the northern fringe of Echomire's industrial zone. The thing swept in towards Bonetown's raised railway, cringing at the influence of the Ribs, but dragged on towards the taste of its fellows.

It flitted from roof to roof, its tongue dangling obscenely as it traced them. Sometimes the downdraft from its wings would make a pa.s.ser-by look up, as hats and paper bowled down the deserted streets. If they saw the dark shape that loomed momentarily over them and then was gone, they shivered and hurried on, or furrowed their brows and denied what they had seen.

The winged thing let its tongue dangle as it slowly beat the air. It used it as a bloodhound would its nose. It pa.s.sed over the undulating roofscape that seemed buckled by the Ribs. It licked its way along a faint trail.

Then it crossed the aura of a large, bituminous building in a deserted street, and its long tongue spasmed like a whip. It sped up, arced up and back down in an elegant loop towards the tarred roof. There at the far corner, below that ceiling through which the sensations of its kind leaked like brine through a sponge . . .

It scrambled over the slates flexing its peculiar limbs. Solicitous feelings were oozing from it, and there was a befuddled moment of confusion as its captive kin reacted to its presence. Then their nebulous misery became impa.s.sioned: pleas and joy and demands for freedom, and among that, cold and exact instructions on what to do.

The creature found its way to the edge of the roof and descended in a motion halfway between flying and climbing, until it clung to the outer edge of a sealed window forty feet above the pavement. The gla.s.s was painted opaque. It vibrated minutely in eldritch dimensions, buffeted by the emanations from within.

The thing on the window-sill scrabbled with its fingers for a moment, then tore away the frame with a quick motion, leaving an ugly wound where the window had been. It dropped the already breaking gla.s.s with a catastrophic noise and stepped into the dark attic.

The room was very large and bare. A great glutinous wash of welcome and warning came from across the rubbish-strewn floor.

Opposite the newcomer were four of its kind. It was dwarfed by them, the magnificent economy of their limbs made its own look stunted, runtlike. They were shackled to the wall with enormous bands of metal around their midriffs and several of their limbs. Each had its wings fully extended, flat against the wall: each set was as unique and random as the newcomer's. Below each of their hindquarters was a bucket.

A moment of tugging made it clear to the new arrival that those bands could not be shifted. One of those pinned to the wall hissed at the frustrated creature, imperiously bade it pay attention. It communicated in a psychic twittering.

The free, newly lowly thing backed away as instructed, and waited.

In the simple sonar plane, shouts and yells were sounding from the street below where the window had smashed. There was a confused rumbling from within the building below. From the corridor beyond the door came the sound of running. Chaotic s.n.a.t.c.hes of conversation found their way through the wood.

". . . inside . . ."

". . . get in?"

". . . mirrors, don't . . ."

The creature backed away further from its tethered kin and moved into the shadows at the far side of the room, beyond the door. It folded its wings and waited.

Bolts on the other side of the door were thrown. There was a moment of hesitation, then the door flew open and four armed men burst in in quick succession. They all faced away from the trapped creatures. Two carried heavy flintlocks, primed and held ready. Two were Remade. In their left hands they held pistols, but from their right shoulders jutted huge metal barrels, splayed at the end like blunderbusses. These were fixed into position pointing directly behind each Remade. They hefted these carefully, and stared into mirrors suspended from a metal helmet before their eyes.

The two with conventional rifles also wore the mirror-helmets, but they were staring past the mirrors into the darkness straight ahead of them.

"Four moths, and all clear!" shouted one of the Remade with the strange backpointing rifle-arm, still gazing into his mirror.

"There's nothing here . . ." answered one of the men looking forward into the darkness by the ruined window-hole, and as he spoke the intruding thing stepped out of the shadows and spread its incredible wings.