Perdido Street Station Part 24

Both those whose eyes faced forwards looked aghast and opened their mouth to scream.

"Oh, Jabber f.u.c.k no Jabber f.u.c.k no . . ." one managed, and then both were silent as the patterns on the creature's wings began to swarm like a pitiless dun kaleidoscope. . . ." one managed, and then both were silent as the patterns on the creature's wings began to swarm like a pitiless dun kaleidoscope.

"What the f.u.c.k . . . ?" began one of the Remade, and flickered his eyes briefly in front of him. His face collapsed in horror, but his moan died very fast as he caught sight of the creature's wings.

The final Remade yelled his comrades' names, and whimpered as he heard them drop their guns. He could see the faintest shape out of the corner of his eye. The creature before him could sense his terror. It stalked towards him, emitting little rea.s.suring murmurs in an emotive vector. A phrase circled imbecilically in the man's mind: There's one in There's one in front front of me there's one in of me there's one in front front of me . . . of me . . .

The Remade tried to move forward, his eyes fixed on his mirrors, but the creature before him moved easily into his field of vision. What had been in the corner of the man's eye became an inescapable, shifting field, and the man succ.u.mbed, dropping his eyes to those violently changing wings, and his jaw opened and shuddered tremulously. He dropped his gun-arm.

With a twitch of a skein of flesh, the free creature closed the door. It stood before the four men in thrall, and s...o...b..r drooled from its jaws. A snapped demand from its trapped kin interrupted its hunger and humbled it. It reached out and turned each of the men to face the four trapped moths.

There was a tiny moment when each man was no longer facing those wings, when his mind clutched at freedom for a moment, but then the awesome spectacle of four sets of those scudding patterns violently wrested control of his mind and he was lost.

Behind them now, the intruder pushed each man in turn towards one of the huge pinioned things, which reached out eagerly with the short limbs left free to them to grip their prey.

The creatures fed.

One of them fumbled for the keys at the belt of its meal, tore them from the man's clothes. When it had finished its meal, it reached up with careful movements and pushed the key delicately into the lock of the bolt restraining it.

It took four attempts-fingers clutching the unfamiliar key, twisting it from an awkward angle-but the creature freed itself. It turned to each of its fellows and repeated the slow process, until all the captives were liberated.

One by one they stumbled across the room to the ragged window-hole. They paused and braced their atrophied muscles against the brick, spread those astonishing wings wide and launched themselves out and away from the sickly dry aether that seemed to seep from the Ribs. The last to leave was the newcomer.

It dragged itself after its comrades: even exhausted and brutalized, they flew faster than it could manage. They were waiting in a circle hundreds of feet above, extending their awarenesses, adrift in the senses and impressions that welled up from all around.

When their humble liberator reached them, they moved apart a little to let it in. They flew together, sharing in what they felt, licking the air lasciviously.

They drifted as the first to fly had done, north towards Perdido Street Station. They rotated slowly, five like the five railway lines of the city, buoyed by the ma.s.sive profane urban presence below them, a fecund crawling place such as none of their kind had ever experienced before. They rocked above it, wings snapping, buffeted by wind, tingling with the sounds and energy of the growling city.

Everywhere they were, every part of the city, every dark bridge, every five-hundred-year-old mansion, every twisting bazaar, every grotesque concrete warehouse and tower and houseboat and squalid slum and manicured park, thronged with food.

It was a jungle without predators. A hunting ground.

CHAPTER T TWENTY-THREE.

Something was blocking the door into Isaac's warehouse. He swore mildly, pushing against the obstruction.

It was early afternoon of the day after his success, which he already conceived of as his "cheese moment." When he had reached Lin's rooms the previous evening, he had been delighted to find her in. She had been tired but as happy as him. They had gone to bed for three hours, then stumbled out to The Clock and c.o.c.kerel.

It had been an unnervingly perfect night. Everyone Isaac could have wanted to see had been abroad in Salacus Fields, and all had stopped at the C & C for lobster or whiskey or chocolate laced with quinner. There were new additions to the clique, including Maybet Sunder, who had been forgiven for winning the Shintacost Prize. In return she was gracious about the arch comments Derkhan had made in print and others in person.

Lin had relaxed in the company of her friends, although her melancholia seemed to ebb rather than dissipate. Isaac had had one of his hissed political arguments with Derkhan, who had slipped him the latest issue of Double-R Double-R. The gathered friends had argued and eaten and thrown food at each other until two in the morning, when Isaac and Lin had returned to bed and warm, entwined sleep.

Over breakfast he had told her about his triumph with the crisis engine. She had not really understood the scale of the achievement, but that was understandable. She had realized that he was excited as almost never before, and had done her best to enthuse sufficiently. For Isaac's part, it had made the difference he had suspected it would, simply communicating the bare bones of the project in the most unscientific way. He felt more grounded, less as if he were living some preposterous dream. He had learnt of potential problems during his explanation, and had come away eager to rectify them.

Isaac and Lin had parted with deep affection, and with a mutual promise not to let so long go by without each other again.

And now Isaac could not get into his workshop.

"Lub! David! What the a.r.s.e you up to?" he yelled, and shoved at the door again.

As he pushed, the door opened a tiny way and he could see a sliver of the sunlit interior. He could see the edge of whatever was blocking the door.

It was a hand.

Isaac's heart skittered.

"Oh Jabber!" he heard himself shout as he leant with all his weight on the door. It opened before his ma.s.s.

Lublamai was sprawled p.r.o.ne across the doorway. As Isaac knelt by his friend's head, he heard Sincerity sniffling some way away, between the treads of the construct. She was cowed.

Isaac turned Lublamai over and let out a juddering sigh of relief when he felt that his friend was warm, heard him breathing.

"Wake up, Lub!" he yelled.

Lublamai's eyes were already open. Isaac started back from that impa.s.sive gaze.

"Lub . . . ?" he whispered.

Drool had collected below Lublamai's face, had blazed trails across his dusty skin. He lay completely limp, utterly motionless. Isaac felt his friend's neck. The pulse was quite steady. Lublamai was taking in deep breaths, pausing a moment, then releasing. He sounded as if he were sleeping.

But Isaac flinched in horror before that imbecilic vacant glare. He waved his hand before Lublamai's eyes, eliciting no response. Isaac slapped Lublamai's face, softly, then hard twice. Isaac realized that he was shouting Lublamai's name.

Lublamai's head rocked back and forth like a sack full of stones.

Isaac closed his hand and felt something clammy. Lublamai's hand was thinly coated in a clear, sticky liquid. He sniffed his hand and recoiled from the faint scent of lemons and rot. It made him feel momentarily light-headed.

Isaac fingered Lublamai's face and saw that the skin around his mouth and nose was slippery and tacky with the slop, that what he had thought Lublamai's saliva was mostly that thin slime.

No yells, no slaps, no pleas would make Lublamai wake.

When Isaac finally looked up and around the room, he saw the window by Lublamai's desk was open, the gla.s.s broken and the wooden shutters splintered. He stood and ran over to the knocking window frame, but there was nothing to see inside or out.

Even as Isaac ran from corner to corner under his own raised laboratory, darting between Lublamai's corner and David's, whispering idiotic rea.s.surances to the terrified Sincerity, looking for signs of intruders, he realized that a terrible idea had occurred to him some time ago, and had been squatting balefully in the back of his mind. He faltered to a stop. Slowly, he raised his eyes and looked up in cold horror at the underside of the walkway boards.

Fearful calm settled on him like snow. He felt his feet lift, trudging inexorably towards the wooden stairs. He turned his head as he walked, saw Sincerity sniffing gradually closer to Lublamai, her courage slowly returning now that she was not alone.

Everything Isaac saw seemed slowed. He walked as if through freezing water.

Stair by stair he ascended. He felt no surprise and only a very dull foreboding as he saw pools of weird spittle on each stair, saw the fresh sc.r.a.pings left by some sharp-clawed newcomer. He heard his own heart pulsing with what seemed tranquillity, and he wondered if he was numb to shock.

But when he reached the top and turned to see the hutch thrown on its side, its thick wire mesh burst from within, little fingers of metal exploding away from the central hole, and when he saw the chrysalis split and empty and saw the trail of dark juices dribbling from within its husk, Isaac heard himself cry out aghast and felt his body shudder into immobility as an icy tide of gooseflesh swept him up. Horror billowed up within him and around him like ink in water.

"Oh dear G.o.ds . . ." he whispered through dry and quivering lips. "Oh Jabber . . . what have I done?"

The New Crobuzon militia did not like to be seen. They emerged in their dark uniforms at night, to perform duties such as fishing the dead from the river. Their airships and pods meandered and buzzed over the city with opaque ends. Their towers were sealed.

The militia, New Crobuzon's military defence and its internal correction agents, only appeared in their uniforms, the infamous full-face masks and dark armour, the shields and flintlocks, when they were acting as guards at some sensitive locus, or at times of great emergency. They wore their colours openly during the Pirate Wars and the Sacramundi Riots, when enemies attacked the city's order from without or within.

For their day-to-day duties they relied on their reputation and on their vast network of informers-rewards for information were generous-and plain-clothed officers. When the militia struck, it was the man drinking ca.s.sis in the cafe, the old woman weighed down with bags, the clerk in stiff collar and polished shoes who suddenly reached over their heads and pulled hoods from invisible folds in the cloth, who slipped enormous flintlocks from hidden holsters and poured into criminal dens. When a cutpurse ran from a shouting victim, it might be a portly man with a bushy moustache (palpably false, everyone would reflect afterwards, why had they not noticed that before?) who would grab the offender in a punishing necklock and disappear with him or her into the crowd, or a militia tower.

And afterwards, no witness could say for sure what those agents had looked like in their civilian guise. And no one would ever see the clerk or the portly man or any of them again, in that part of the city.

It was policing by decentralized fear.

It had been four in the morning when the prost.i.tute and her client had been found in Brock Marsh. The two men walking the dark alleys with their hands in their pockets and their heads jaunty had paused, seeing the crumpled shape in the dim gaslight. Their demeanour had changed. They had looked about them, then trotted into the cul-de-sac.

They found the stupefied pair lying across each other, their eyes glazed and vacant, their breath ragged and smelling of cloying citrus. The man's trousers and pants were dropped around his ankles, exposing his shrivelled p.e.n.i.s. The woman's clothes-her skirt complete with the surrept.i.tious slit many prost.i.tutes used to finish their work quickly-were intact. When the newcomers had failed to wake them, one man had remained with the mute bodies and the other had run off into the darkness. Both men had pulled dark hoods over their heads.

Some while later a black carriage had pulled up, drawn by two enormous horses, Remade with horns and fangs that glinted with slaver. A small corps of uniformed militia had leapt to the ground and, without words, had pulled the comatose victims into the darkness of the cab, which had sped off towards the Spike that towered over the centre of the city.

The two men remained behind. They waited until the carriage had disappeared over the cobbles of the labyrinthine quarter. Then they looked about them carefully, taking stock of the spa.r.s.e harvest of lights that glinted from the backs of buildings and outhouses, from behind crumbling walls and through the thin fingers of fruit trees in gardens. Satisfied that they were un.o.bserved, they slipped off their hoods and thrust their hands back into their pockets. They melted suddenly into a different character, laughing quietly with each other and chatting urbanely as, innocuous again, they resumed their graveyard-shift patrol.

In the catacombs under the Spike, the limp pair of foundlings were prodded and slapped, shouted at and cajoled. By early morning they had been examined by a militia scientist, who scribbled a preliminary report.

Heads were scratched in perplexity.

The scientist's report, along with condensed information on all other unusual or serious crimes, was sent up the length of the Spike, stopping at the highest floor but one. The reports were couriered briskly the length of a twisting, windowless corridor, towards the offices of the home secretary. They arrived on time, by half past nine.

At twelve minutes past ten, a speaking tube began to bang peremptorily in the cavernous pod-station that took up the whole floor at the very top of the Spike. The young sergeant on duty was on the other side of the room, fixing a cracked light on the front of a pod that hung, like tens of others, from an intricate cat's cradle of skyrails which looped and criss-crossed each other below the high ceiling. The tangled rails allowed the pods to be moved around each other, positioned on one or other of the seven radial skyrails that exploded out through the enormous open holes s.p.a.ced evenly around the outside wall. The tracks took off above the colossal face of New Crobuzon.

From where he stood, the sergeant could see the skyrail enter the militia tower in Sheck a mile to the south-west, and emerge beyond it. He saw a pod leave the tower, way over the shambolic housing, virtually at his own eye-level, and shoot off away from him towards the Tar, which trickled sinuous and untrustworthy to the south.

He looked up as the banging continued, and, realizing which tube demanded attention, he swore and rushed across the room. His furs flapped. Even in summer, it was cold so high above the city, in an open room that functioned as a giant wind tunnel. He pulled the plug from the speaking tube and barked into the bra.s.s.

"Yes, Home Secretary?"

The voice that emerged was small and distorted by its journey through the twisting metal.

"Get my pod ready immediately. I'm going to Strack Island."

The doors to the Lemquist Room, the mayor's office in Parliament, were huge and bound in bands of ancient iron. There were two militia stationed outside the Lemquist Room at all times, but one of the usual perks of a posting in the corridors of power was denied them: no gossip, no secrets, no sounds of any kind filtered to their ears through the enormous doors.

Behind the metal-girdled entrance, the room itself was immensely tall, panelled in darkwood of such exquisite quality it was almost black. Portraits of previous mayors circled the room, from the ceiling thirty feet above, spiralling slowly down to within six feet of the floor. There was an enormous window that looked out directly at Perdido Street Station and the Spike, and a variety of speaking tubes, calculating engines and telescopic periscopes stashed in niches around the room, in obscure and oddly threatening poses.

Bentham Rudgutter sat behind his desk with an air of utter command. None who had seen him in this room had been able to deny the extraordinary surety of absolute power he exuded. He was the centre of gravity here. He knew it at a deep level, and so did his guests. His great height and muscular corpulence doubtless added to the sense, but there was far more to his presence.

Opposite him sat MontJohn Rescue, his vizier, wrapped as always in a thick scarf and leaning over to point out something on a paper the two men were studying.

"Two days," said Rescue in a strange, unmodulated voice, quite different from the one he used for oratory.

"And what?" said Rudgutter, stroking his immaculate goatee.

"The strike goes up. Currently, you know, it's delaying loading and unloading by between fifty and seventy per cent. But we've got intelligence that in two days the vodyanoi strikers plan to paralyse the river. They're going to work overnight, starting at the bottom, working their way up. A little to the east of Barley Bridge. Ma.s.sive exercise in watercraeft. They're going to dig a trench of air across the water, the whole depth of the river. They'll have to sh.o.r.e it up continuously, recraefting the walls constantly so they don't collapse, but they've got enough members to do that in shifts. There's no ship that can jump that gap, Mayor. They'll totally cut off New Crobuzon from river trade, in both directions."

Rudgutter mused and pursed his lips.

"We can't allow that," he said reasonably. "What about the human dockers?"

"My second point, Mayor," continued Rescue. "Worrying. The initial hostility seems to be waning. There's a growing minority who seem to be ready to throw in their lot with the vodyanoi."

"Oh, no no no no," said Rudgutter, shaking his head like a teacher correcting a normally reliable student.

"Quite. Obviously our agents are stronger in the human camp than the xenian, and the mainstream are still antagonistic or undecided about the strike, but there seems to be a caucus, a conspiracy, if you will . . . secret meetings with strikers and the like."

Rudgutter spread his enormous fingers and looked closely at the grain of the desk between them.

"Any of your people there?" he asked quietly. Rescue fingered his scarf.

"One with the humans," he answered. "It is difficult to remain hidden on the vodyanoi, who usually wear no clothes in the water." Rudgutter nodded.

The two men were silent, pondering.

"We've tried working from the inside," said Rudgutter eventually. "This is far the most serious strike to threaten the city for . . . over a century. Much as I'm loath to, it seems we may have to make an example . . ." Rescue nodded solemnly.

One of the speaking tubes on the mayor's desk thumped. He raised his eyebrows as he unplugged it.

"Davinia?" he answered. His voice was a masterpiece of insinuation. In one word he told his secretary that he was surprised to have her interrupt him against his instructions, but that his trust in her was great, and he was quite sure she had an excellent reason for disobeying, which she had better tell him immediately.

The hollow, echoing voice from the tube barked out tiny little sounds.

"Well!" exclaimed the mayor mildly. "Of course, of course." He replugged the tube and eyed Rescue. "What timing," he said. "It's the home secretary."

The enormous doors opened briefly and slightly, and the home secretary entered, nodding in greeting.

"Eliza," said Rudgutter. "Please join us." He gesticulated at a chair by Rescue's.

Eliza Stem-Fulcher strode over to the desk. It was impossible to tell her age. Her face was virtually unlined, its strong features suggesting that she was probably somewhere in her thirties. Her hair, though, was white, with only the faintest peppering of dark strands to suggest that it had once been another colour. She wore a dark civilian trouser suit, cleverly chosen in cut and colour to be strongly suggestive of a militia uniform. She drew gently on a long-stemmed white clay pipe, the bowl at least a foot and a half from her mouth. Her tobacco was spiced.