Perdido Street Station (43 page)

Three militiamen knelt
at the very edge of the river. They were surrounded by a thicket of
their colleagues, a protective skin. Quickly, the three at the centre
pulled target-rifles from their backs. Each man had two, loaded and
primed with powder, one of which they set beside them. Moving very
fast, they sighted along the shafts into the miasma of grey smoke. An
officer in the peculiar silver epaulettes of a captain-thaumaturge
stood behind them, muttering quickly and inaudibly, his voice
muffled. He touched each marksman’s temples, then jerked his
hands away.

Behind their masks, the
men’s eyes watered and cleared, suddenly seeing registers of
light and radiation that rendered the smoke virtually invisible.

Each man knew the
bodyshape and movement patterns of his target perfectly. The
sharpshooters tracked quickly through the fog of gas and saw their
targets conferring with wet rags clamped to their mouths and noses.
There was a rapid crackle, three shots in a quick tempo.

Two of the vodyanoi
fell. The third looked round in panic, seeing nothing but the swirl
of that vicious gas. He raced to the water walling him in, scooped a
handful from it and began to croon to it, moving his hand in fast and
esoteric passes. One of the riverside marksmen dropped his rifle
quickly and picked up his second weapon. The target was a shaman, he
realized, and if given time he might invoke an undine. That would
make things vastly more complicated. The officer raised the gun to
his shoulder, aimed and fired in one brisk movement. The hammer with
its clamped shard of flint slid down the serrated edge of the pan
cover and snapped, sparking, into the pan.

The bullet burst
through the gusts of gas, sending it coiling in intricate wreaths,
and buried itself in the neck of the target. The third member of the
vodyanoi strike committee fell squirming into the mire, the water
dissipating in arcing spray. His blood pooled and thickened in the
quag.

The watercraeft walls
of the trench in the river were splintering and collapsing. They
sagged and bowed, water breaching them in gouts and diluting the
riverbed, eddying around the feet of the few remaining strikers,
coiling like the gas above it, until with a shiver the Gross Tar
reknit itself, healing the little rift that had paralysed it and
confused its currents. Polluted water buried the blood, the political
papers and the bodies.

As the militia put down
the Kelltree strike, cables burst from the fifth airship as from its
kin.

The crowds in Dog Fenn
were shouting, yelling news and descriptions of the fight. Escapees
from the pickets stumbled through the ramshackle alleys. Gangs of
youths ran back and forth in energetic confusion.

The costermongers on
Silverback Street were yelling and pointing at the fat dirigible
uncoiling its dangling rigging to the earth. Their shouts were
effaced in the sudden boom and drone of klaxons in the sky as one by
one the five airships sounded. A militia squad abseiled through the
hot air into the streets of Dog Fenn.

They slipped below the
silhouetted rooftops into the rank air, then down, their huge boots
hammering down the slippery concrete of the courtyard in which they
landed. They looked more construct than human, bulked up by bizarre
and twisted armour. The few workers and dossers in the cul-de-sac
watched them with mouths gaping until one of the militia turned
briefly and raised a huge blunderbuss rifle, sweeping it in a
threatening arc. At that, the watchers dived to the ground or turned
and fled.

The militia troops
stormed down a dripping staircase into the underground
slaughterhouse. They smashed through the unlocked door and fired into
the swirling, bloody air. The butchers and slaughterers turned
dumbfounded to the doorway. One dropped, gargling in agony as a
bullet burst his lung. His gory tunic was drenched again, this time
from the inside. The other workers fled, slipping on gristle as they
ran.

The militia tore down
the swinging, dripping carcasses of goat and pigmeat and yanked at
the suspended conveyor-belt of hooks until it ripped from the damp
ceiling. They charged in waves towards the back of the dark chamber
and stomped up the stairs and along the little landing. For all that
it slowed them, the locked door to Benjamin Flex’s bedroom
might have been gauze.

Once inside the troops
moved to either side of the wardrobe, leaving one man to unstrap a
huge sledgehammer from his back. He swung it at the old wood,
dissolving the wardrobe in three huge strokes, uncovering a hole in
the wall that emitted the chugging of a steam engine and fitful
oil-lamp light.

Two of the officers
disappeared into the secret room. There was a muffled shout and the
sound of repeated hammering thuds. Benjamin Flex came flying through
the crumbling hole, his body twisting, beads of blood hitting his
grimy walls in radial patterns. He hit the floor head first and
shrieked, tried to scrabble away, swearing incoherently. Another
officer reached down and lifted him by the shirt with steam-enhanced
strength, shoving him against a wall.

Ben gibbered and tried
to spit, staring at the impassive blue-masked face, intricate smoked
goggles and gasmask and spiked helmet like the face of some insectile
daemon.

The voice that emerged
from the hissing mouthparts was monotonous, but quite clear.

"Benjamin Flex,
please give your verbal or written assent to accompany myself and
other officers of the New Crobuzon militia to a place of our choosing
for the purposes of interview and intelligence gathering." The
militiaman slammed Ben against the wall, hard, eliciting an explosive
burst of breath and an unintelligible bark. "Assent so noticed
in presence of myself and two witnesses," the officer responded.
"Aye?"

Two of the militiamen
behind the officer nodded in unison and responded: "Aye."

The officer cuffed Ben
with a punishing backhand blow that dazed him and burst his lip. His
eyes wavered drunkenly and he dribbled blood. The hugely armoured man
swung Ben up over his shoulder and stomped from the room.

The constables who had
entered the little print-room waited for the rest of the squad to
follow the officer back out into the corridor. Then, in perfect time,
they each pulled a large iron canister from their belts and pushed
the plungers that set in motion a violent chymical reaction. They
threw the cylinders into the cramped room where the construct still
cranked the printing press handle in an endless, mindless circuit.

The militiamen ran like
ponderous bipedal rhinos down the corridor after their officer. The
acid and powder in the pipebombs mixed and
fizzed,
flared
violently, ignited the tightly packed gunpowder. There were two
sudden detonations that sent the damp walls of the building
shuddering.

The corridor jacked
under the impact, as innumerable gobbets of flaming paper spewed from
the doorway, with hot ink and ripped snatches of pipe. Twists of
metal and glass burst from the skylight in an industrial fountain.
Like smouldering confetti, snippets of editorials and denunciations
were sprinkled over the surrounding streets. we say, said one, and
betrayal! another. Here and there the banner title was visible,
Runagate Rampant.
Here it was torn and burning, only a
fragment visible.

Run...

**

One by one the militia
attached themselves to the still-waiting ropes with a clip at their
belt. They fumbled with levers embedded in their integral backpacks,
setting in motion some powerful, hidden engine that dragged them off
the streets and into the air as the belt-pulley turned, its powerful
cogs interlocking and hauling the dark, bulky figures back up into
the belly of their airship. The officer holding Ben clutched him
tightly, but the pulley did not falter under the weight of the extra
man.

As a weak fire played
desultorily over what had been the slaughterhouse, something dropped
from the roof, where it had caught on a ragged gutter. It tumbled
through the air and crunched heavily on the stained ground. It was
the head of Ben’s construct, its upper right arm still
attached.

The thing’s arm
twitched violently, trying to twist a handle that was no longer
there. The head rolled, like a skull encased in pewter. Its metal
mouth twitched and for a few ghastly seconds, it affected a
disgusting parody of motion, crawling along the uneven ground by
flexing and unflexing its jaw.

Within half a minute
the last vestige of energy had leeched from it. Its glass eyes
vibrated and snapped to a stop. It was still.

A shadow passed over
the dead thing, as the airship, full now with all its troops, cruised
slowly over the face of Dog Fenn, over the last brutal, sordid
battles in the docklands, up past Parliament and over the enormity of
the city, towards Perdido Street Station and the interrogation rooms
of the Spike.

**

At first, I felt
sick to be around them, all these men, their rushing, heavy, stinking
breaths, their anxiety pouring through their skin like vinegar. I
wanted the cold again, the darkness below the railways, where ruder
forms of life struggle and fight and die and are eaten. There is a
comfort in that brute simplicity.

But this is not my
land and that is not my choice to make. I have struggled to contain
myself. I have struggled with the alien jurisprudence of this city,
all sharp divides and fences, lines that separate this from that and
yours from mine. I have modelled myself on this. I have sought
comfort and protection in owning myself, in being my own, my isolate,
my private property for this the first time. But I have learnt with
sudden violence that I am the victim of colossal fraud.

I have been duped.
When the crisis breaks, I cannot be my own here any more than in the
Cymek’s constant summer (where "my sand" or "your
water" are absurdities that would kill their utterer). The
splendid isolation I have sought has crumbled. I need Grimnebulin,
Grimnebulin needs his friend, his friend needs succour from us all.
It is simple mathematics to cancel common terms and discover that I
need succour, too. I must offer it to others, to save myself.

I am stumbling. I
must not fall.

**

I was once a
creature of the air, and it remembers me. When I climb to the city
heights and lean out into the wind, it tickles me with currents and
vectors from my past. I can smell and see the passage of predators
and prey in the eddying wash of this atmosphere.

I am like a diver
who has lost his suit, who can still gaze through the glass bottom of
a boat and watch the creatures of the upper and deeper darkness, can
trace their passage and feel the tug of the tides, even though
distorted and distant, veiled and half hidden.

I know that
something is wrong in the sky.

I can see it in the
disturbed flocks of birds, that shy suddenly away from random patches
of air. I can see it in the panicked passage of wyrmen that seem to
glance behind them as they fly.

The air stills with
summer, is heavy with heat and now with these newcomers, these
intruders I cannot see. The air is laden with menace. My curiosity
rises. My hunting instincts stir.

But I am earthbound.

Something uncomfortable
and insistent prodded Benjamin Flex awake. His head rocked
nauseously, his stomach plunged.

He was sitting strapped
to a chair in a small, antiseptic white room. On one wall was a
window of frosted glass, admitting light but no sights, no clue at
all as to what lay outside. A white-coated man stood over him, poking
him with a long shard of metal attached by wires to a humming engine.

Benjamin looked up into
the man’s face and saw his own. The man wore a mask of
perfectly smooth, rounded mirror, a convex lens that sent Benjamin’s
distorted face back at him. Even bowled and ridiculous, the bruises
and blood that discoloured Benjamin’s skin shocked him.

The door was open
slightly and a man was standing half in, half out of the room. He
held the door and faced back the way he had come, speaking to someone
in the corridor or main room beyond.

"...glad you like
it," Benjamin heard. "...off to the playhouse with
Cassandra tonight, so you never know...no, these eyes are still
killing me..." The man laughed briefly in response to some
unheard pleasantry. He waved. Then he turned and entered the little
room.

He turned towards the
chair, and Benjamin saw a figure that he recognized from rallies,
from speeches, from massive heliotypes plastered around the city. It
was Mayor Rudgutter.

The three figures in
the room were still, regarding each other.

"Mr. Flex,"
said Rudgutter eventually. "We must talk."

**

"Got word from
Pigeon." Isaac waved the letter as he returned to the table he
and David had set up in Lublamai’s corner of the ground floor.
It was where they had spent the hours of the previous day uselessly
scrabbling for plans.

Lublamai lay and
drooled and shat in a cot a little way away.

Lin sat with them at
the table, listlessly eating slices of banana. She had arrived the
previous day, and Isaac, stumbling and semi-coherent, had told her
what had happened. Both he and David had seemed in shock. It had been
some minutes before she had noticed Yagharek, skulking against a wall
in the shadows. She had not known whether to greet him, and had waved
a brief introduction that he had not acknowledged. When the four of
them ate a miserable supper, he had drifted over to join them, his
enormous cloak draped over what she knew to be fake wings. Not that
she would tell him she knew him to be engaged in a masquerade.