Perdido Street Station Part 57

The heat was intense, but not fierce: it seemed instead like some absence, some enormous citywide lack. It was as if the sun was etiolated, as if its rays bleached out the shadows and cool undersides that gave the architecture its reality. The sun's heat stifled sounds and bled them of substance. Isaac sweated and cursed quietly beneath his putrid rags. He felt as if he stalked through some vaguely realized dream of heat.

With Andrej supported between them like a friend paralysed with cheap liquor, Isaac and Yagharek tramped through the streets, making for c.o.c.ks...o...b..Bridge.

They were interlopers here. This was not Dog Fenn or Badside or the Ketch Heath slums. There, they would have been invisible.

They crossed the bridge nervously. They were hemmed in by its lively stones, surrounded by the sneers and jibes of shopkeepers and customers.

Yagharek kept one surrept.i.tious hand clamped on a cl.u.s.ter of nerve and arterial tissue at the side of Andrej's neck, ready to pinch hard if the old man gave any sign of waking. Isaac muttered, a coa.r.s.e babble of swearing that sounded like drunken rambling. It was a disguise, in part. He was also steeling himself.

"Come on, f.u.c.ker," he grunted, tense and quiet, "come on, come on. f.u.c.ker. Sc.u.m. b.a.s.t.a.r.d." He did not know who he was swearing at.

Isaac and Yagharek crossed the bridge slowly, supporting their companion and their precious bag of equipment. The flow of people parted around them, let them pa.s.s with only jeers behind them. They could not let the opprobrium grow and become confrontation. If some bored toughs decided to kill time by hara.s.sing beggars, it would be catastrophic.

But they pa.s.sed over c.o.c.ks...o...b..Bridge, where they felt isolated and open, where the sun seemed to etch out their edges and mark them for attack, and slipped into Petty Coil. The city seemed to close its lips around them and they felt safer again.

There were other beggars here, walking in the train of local notables, earringed villains and fat money-lenders and pinch-lipped madams. Andrej stirred slightly and Yagharek closed his mind down again, laid hands on him efficiently.

Here there were backstreets. Isaac and Yagharek could peel away from the main roads and head down along overshadowed alleys. They pa.s.sed under washing that linked the facing terraces of tall, narrow streets. They were watched by men and women in underclothes who idly leaned over balconies, flirting with their neighbours. They pa.s.sed piles of rubbish and broken sewer coverings, and children leaned out from above and spat at them without rancour, or threw little pebbles and ran away.

As always, they sought the railway line. They found it at Sly Station, where the Salacus Fields trains branched away from the Sud Line. They sidled up to the raised path of arches that wove unsteadily above the cobbles of Spit Hearth. The air above the raucous crowds was reddening as the sun wound slowly towards gloaming. The arches were fouled with oil and soot, sprouting a microforest of mould and moss and tenacious climbing plants. They swarmed with lizards and insects, aspises sheltering from the heat.

Isaac and Yagharek ducked into a dirty cul-de-sac by the track's concrete and brick foundations. They rested. Life rustled in the urban thicket above them.

Andrej was light, but he was beginning to weigh them down, his ma.s.s seeming to increase with every second. They stretched their aching arms and shoulders, drew deep breaths. A few feet away, the crowds emerging from the station thronged past the entrance to their little hideaway.

When they had rested and rearranged their burdens, they braced themselves and set out again, into the backstreets once more, walking in the shadow of the Sud Line, towards the city's heart, the towers not yet visible over the surrounding miles of houses: the Spike and the turrets of Perdido Street Station.

Isaac began to talk. He told Yagharek what he thought would happen that night.

Derkhan made her way through the reclaimed filth of the Griss Twist dump towards the Construct Council.

Isaac had warned the great Constructed Intelligence that she would be coming. She knew she was expected. The idea made her uncomfortable.

As she approached the hollow that was the Council's lair, she thought she heard a susurration of lowered voices. She stiffened instantly, and drew her pistol. She checked that it was loaded, and that the firing pan was full.

Derkhan picked up her feet, stalking with care, avoiding any sound. At the end of a channel of rubbish, she saw the opening-out of the hollow. Someone walked briefly past her field of view. She stole carefully closer.

Then another man walked past the end of the gorge of crushed garbage, and she saw that he was dressed in work overalls, and that he was staggering slightly under the weight of a burden. Slung over his broad shoulder was a ma.s.sive coil of black-coated cable, entwining him vastly like some predatory constrictor.

She straightened up slightly. It was not the militia waiting for her. She walked on into the presence of the Construct Council.

She entered the hollow, glancing up nervously to ensure that there were no airships overhead. Then she turned to the scene before her, gasping at the scale of the gathering.

On all sides, engaged in all manner of opaque tasks, were nearly a hundred men and women. Mostly human, there were a handful of vodyanoi among them, and even two khepri. All were dressed in cheap and soiled clothes. And almost all were carrying or squatting before enormous coils of industrial cable.

It came in a variety of styles. Most was black, but there were brown and blue coatings as well, and red and grey. There were pairs of burly men staggering under loops nearly the thickness of a man's thigh. Others carried skeins of wire no more than four inches in diameter.

The thin hubbub of speech died away quickly as Derkhan entered, and all the eyes in the place turned to her. The rubble crater was crammed with bodies. Derkhan swallowed and looked over them carefully. She saw the avatar stumbling towards her on halting, brittle legs.

"Derkhan Blueday," he said quietly. "We are ready."

Derkhan huddled for a short time with the avatar, checking carefully over a scribbled map.

The b.l.o.o.d.y concavity of the avatar's open skull emitted an extraordinary reek. In the heat, his peculiar half-dead stench was utterly unbearable, and Derkhan held her breath as long as she could, gulping air when she had to through the sleeve of her filthy cloak.

While Derkhan and the Council conferred, the rest of the a.s.sembled kept a respectful distance.

"This is almost all of my bloodlife congregation," said the avatar. "I sent out mobile Is with urgent messages, and the faithful have gathered, as you see." He paused and clucked inhumanly. "We must proceed," he said. "It is seventeen minutes past five o'clock."

Derkhan looked up at the sky, which was deepening slowly, warning of dusk. She was sure that the clock the Council was checking, some timepiece buried deep in the bowels of the dump, was second-perfect. She nodded.

At a command from the avatar, the congregation began to stagger out of the dump, wobbling under their loads. Before they left, each turned to the place in the wall of the dump where the Construct Council was hidden. They paused a moment, then performed their devotional gesture with their hands, that vague suggestion of interlocking wheels, putting down their cable if necessary.

Derkhan watched them with foreboding.

"They'll never make it," she said. "They haven't the strength."

"Many have brought carts," responded the avatar. "They will leave in shifts."

"Carts . . . ?" said Derkhan. "From where?"

"Some own them," said the avatar. "Others have bought or rented them at my orders today. None were stolen. We cannot risk the attention and detection that might result."

Derkhan looked away. The control that the Council wielded over his human followers disturbed her.

As the last stragglers left the dump, Derkhan and the avatar walked over to the immobile head of the Construct Council. The Council lay on its side and became strata of rubbish, invisible.

A short, thick coil of cable lay waiting beside it. Its end was ragged, the thick rubber carbonized and split for the last foot or so. Tangles of wires splayed out of the end, unpicked from their neat skeins and plaits.

There was one vodyanoi still in the junk-basin. Derkhan saw him standing some feet away, watching the avatar nervously. She beckoned him to come closer. He waddled towards them, now on all fours, now bipedally, his big webbed toes splayed to remain steady on the treacherous ground. His overalls were the light, waxed material the vodyanoi sometimes used: they repelled liquid, so did not become saturated or heavy when the vodyanoi swam.

"Are you ready?" said Derkhan. The vodyanoi nodded quickly.

Derkhan studied him, but she knew little about his people. She could see nothing about him which gave any clue as to why he devoted himself to this strange, demanding sect, worshipping this weird intelligence, the Construct Council. It was obvious to her that the Council treated its worshippers like p.a.w.ns, that it drew no satisfaction or pleasure from their worship, only a degree of . . . usefulness.

She could not understand, not begin to understand, what release or service this heretical church offered its congregation.

"Help me lift this down to the river," she said, and picked up one end of the thick cable. She was unsteady under its weight, and the vodyanoi picked its way quickly over to her, helped brace her.

The avatar was still. He watched as Derkhan and the vodyanoi made their way away from him, towards the idle, looming cranes which burst up to the north-west, from behind the low rise of garbage that surrounded the Construct Council.

The cable was ma.s.sive. Derkhan had to stop several times and put the end down, then brace herself to continue. The vodyanoi moved stolidly beside her, stopping with her and waiting for her to carry on. Behind them, the squat pillar of coiled cable shrank slowly as it unwound.

Derkhan chose their pa.s.sage, moving through the piles of murk towards the river like a prospector.

"D'you know what all this is about?" she asked the vodyanoi quickly, without looking up. He glanced at her sharply, then back up at the thin silhouette of the avatar, still visible against a background of rubbish. He shook his jowly head.

"No," he said quickly. "Just heard that . . . that G.o.d-machine demanded our presence, ready for an evening's work. Heard Its bidding when I got here." He sounded quite normal. His tone was curt, but conversational. Not zealous. He sounded like a worker complaining philosophically about management's demands for unpaid overtime.

But when Derkhan, wheezing with effort, began to ask more-"How often do you meet?" "What other things does It bid you do?"-he looked at her with fear and suspicion, and his answers became monosyllabic, then nods, then quickly nothing at all.

Derkhan became silent again. She concentrated on hauling the great wire.

The dumps sprawled untidily to the very edge of the river. The river banks around Griss Twist were sheer walls of slimy brick that rose up from the dark water. When the river was swollen, perhaps only three feet of the decaying clay prevented a flood. At other times, there were as many as eight feet between the top of the riverwall and the choppy surface of the Tar.

Jutting directly from the splintered brick was a six-foot fence of iron links and wooden slats and concrete, built years ago to contain the dumps in their infancy. But now the weight of acc.u.mulated filth made the old wirelinks bow alarmingly over the water. With the decades, sections of the flimsy wall had burst and split from its concrete moorings, spewing rubbish into the river below. The fence had gone unrepaired, and in those places now it was only the solidity of the crushed rubbish itself which held the dump in place.

Blocks of compressed garbage regularly cascaded into the water in greasy landslides of slag.

The huge cranes which took cargo from the trash-barges had originally been separated from the garbage they unloaded by a few yards of no-man's-land-flat scrub and baked earth-but that had rapidly disappeared as the rubbish encroached. Now the dump workers and crane operators had to hike across the scoriatic landscape to cranes that sprouted directly from the vulgar geology of the dump.

It was as if the trash was fertile, and that it bore great structures.

Derkhan and the vodyanoi turned corners in the muck until they could no longer see the Council's hide. They left a trail of cable that became invisible the moment it touched the ground, transformed into one meaningless piece of litter in a whole vista of mechanical refuse.

The hillocks of garbage subsided as they approached the Tar. Ahead of them, the rusted fence rose four feet or so from the surface layer of detritus. Derkhan changed course fractionally, headed for a wide break in the wire, where the dump was open to the river.

Across the squalid water Derkhan could see New Crobuzon. For a moment, the lumpy spires of Perdido Street Station were just visible, perfectly framed in the fence's hole, bulging distantly over the city. She could see the rail-lines pick their way between towers that stabbed randomly from the bedrock. Militia struts jutted ugly into the skyline.

Opposite her, Spit Hearth welled up fatly to the river's edge. There was no unbroken promenade by the side of the Tar, only sections of streets that traced it for a short time, then private gardens, sheer warehouse walls and wasteground. There was no one to watch Derkhan's preparations unfold.

A few feet from the edge, Derkhan dropped the end of the cable and moved cautiously towards the break in the fence. She felt with her feet, making sure the ground would not fall forward and pitch her into the filthy river seven or more feet below. She leaned out as far as she dared, and scanned the gently moving surface.

The sun was slowly approaching the rooftops to the west, and the dirty black of the river was varnished with reddening light.

"Penge!" Derkhan hissed. "You there?"

After a moment, there was a small splashing sound. One of the indistinct pieces of flotsam that littered the river bobbed suddenly closer. It moved against the current.

Slowly, Pengefinchess raised her head from the river. Derkhan smiled. She felt an odd, desperate relief.

"All right then," said Pengefinchess. "Time for my last job."

Derkhan nodded with absurd grat.i.tude.

"She's here to help," Derkhan said to the other vodyanoi, who stared at Pengefinchess in alarmed suspicion. "This cable's too big and heavy for you to manage yourself. If you get in, then I'll feed it down to you both."

It took a few seconds for him to decide the risks posed by the newcomer were less important than the job in hand. He glowered at Derkhan in nervous fear, and nodded. He padded quickly to the break in the link-fence, paused for a fraction of a second, then hopped elegantly up and plunged into the water. His dive was so controlled that there was only a tiny splash.

Pengefinchess eyed him suspiciously as he kicked closer to her.

Derkhan looked quickly around, saw a cylindrical metal pipe thicker than her thigh. It was long and incredibly heavy, but working urgently, ignoring her tortured muscles, Derkhan hauled it inch by inch across the gap in the fence, wedging it across the tear. She held her arms out, wincing at the acid burn of her muscles. She stumbled back to the cable and tugged it to the edge of the water.

She began to feed it down over the top of the pipe towards the waiting vodyanoi, hauling it as hard as she could. She pulled more and more free from the coils hidden in the heart of the dump and sent the slack towards the water. Finally, Derkhan had lowered it enough for Pengefinchess to kick up, launch herself almost out of the water and grab hold of the dangling end. Her weight pulled several feet of cable down into the water. The edge of the dump listed alarmingly towards the river, but the cable slid across the smooth surface of the pipe, pulling it tight against the fence on either side and rolling smoothly across its top.

Pengefinchess reached up again and hauled, submerging and powering towards the bottom of the river. Kept free of the ensnaring hooks and edges of the inorganic topsoil, the cable came in great gouts, skimming roughly across the surface of the rubbish and plummeting into the water.

Derkhan watched its halting progress, sudden bursts of motion as the vodyanoi hidden at the bottom of the river jack-knifed their legs and swam hard. She smiled, a small and brief moment of triumph, and leaned exhausted against a broken concrete pillar.

There was nothing on the surface of the water to give any hint of the operation below. The great cable slipped in spurts into the water by the riverwall. It plunged absolutely precipitately into the darkness, hitting the surface at ninety degrees. The vodyanoi, Derkhan realized, must be tugging ma.s.ses of slack into the water first, rather than pulling the end of the wire directly across the river and having it stretch out across the top of the water.

Eventually the cable was still. Derkhan watched quietly, waiting for some sign of the operation under way.

Minutes pa.s.sed. Something emerged in the absolute centre of the river.

It was a vodyanoi, raising an arm in triumph or salute or signal. Derkhan waved back, squinted to see who it was, to work out if she was being given a message.

The river was very wide, and the figure was unclear. Then Derkhan saw that the arm carried a composite bow, and she realized that it was Pengefinchess. She saw then that the wave was one of curt farewell, and she responded more fulsomely, her brows furrowing.

It made very little sense, Derkhan realized, to have begged Pengefinchess to help at this last stage of the hunt. Undoubtedly it had made things easier, but they could have managed without her, with the help of more of the Council's vodyanoi followers. And it made little sense to feel affected by her leaving, even if remotely; to wish Pengefinchess luck; to wave with feeling and feel a faint lack. The vodyanoi mercenary was taking her leave, was disappearing for more lucrative and safer contracts. Derkhan owed her nothing, least of all thanks or affection.

But circ.u.mstances had made them comrades, and Derkhan was sorry to see her go. She had been part, a small part, of this chaotic nightmare struggle, and Derkhan marked her pa.s.sing.

The arm and bow disappeared. Pengefinchess submerged again.

Derkhan turned her back on the river and headed back into the Council's labyrinth.

She followed the trail of decaying cable through the twists of the junkyard scenery, into the Council's presence. The avatar stood waiting by the diminished coil of rubber-swathed wire.

"Is the crossing successful?" he asked as soon as he saw her. He stumbled forwards, the cable that burst from his brainpan rattling behind him. Derkhan nodded.

"We've got to get things ready here," she said. "Where's the output?"

The avatar turned and indicated for her to follow him. He stopped for a moment and picked up the other end of the cable. He staggered under its weight, but he did not complain or ask for help, and Derkhan did not volunteer.

With the thick insulated wire under his arm, the avatar approached the constellation of rubbish that Derkhan recognized as the Construct Council's head (with a slight unsettling jolt, as at a child's book of optical tricks, as if an ink drawing of a young woman's face had suddenly become a crone's). It still lolled sideways, without any sign of life.