Perdido Street Station (44 page)

At one point in that
long, miserable evening, Lin had reflected that something had finally
happened to make Isaac acknowledge her. He had held her hands on
arrival. He had not even ostentatiously thrown up a duplicitous spare
bed when she had agreed to stay. It was not a triumph, though, not
the final great vindication of love that she would have chosen. The
reason for his change was simple.

David and he were
worried about more important things.

There was a slightly
sour part of her mind which, even now, did not believe his conversion
to be complete. She knew that David was an old friend, of similarly
libertarian principles, who would understand—if he were even
thinking about them—the difficulties of the situation, and who
could be relied on to be discreet. But she did not allow herself to
dwell on this, feeling mean-spirited and selfish to be thinking of
herself with Lublamai...ruined.

She could not feel
Lublamai’s affliction as deeply as his two friends, of course,
but the sight of that dribbling, mindless thing in the cot shocked
and frightened her. She was glad that something had happened to Mr.
Motley to give her a few hours or days with Isaac, who seemed broken
with guilt and misery.

Occasionally he would
flare into angry, useless action, shouting "Right!" and
clasping his hands decisively, but there was nothing to be decided,
no action he could take. Without some lead, some hint, the start of
some trail, there was nothing to be done.

That night, she and
Isaac had slept together upstairs, he clutching her miserably,
without a hint of arousal. David had gone home, promising to return
early in the morning. Yagharek had refused a mattress, had curled
into a peculiar, hunched, cross-legged crouch in the corner,
obviously designed to keep from crushing his supposed wings. Lin did
not know if he was maintaining his illusion for her sake, or if he
truly slept, still, in the pose he had used since childhood.

The next morning they
sat around the table, drinking coffee and tea, eating stolidly,
wondering what to do. When he checked the post, Isaac was quick to
discard the rubbish and return with Lemuel’s note: unstamped,
hand-delivered by some minion.

"What does he
say?" asked David quickly.

Isaac held the paper so
that David and Lin could read over his shoulder. Yagharek hung back.

Have tracked down source of Peculiar Caterpillar in my records. One
Josef Cuaduador. Acquisitions clerk for Parliament. Not wanting to
waste time, and remembering promise of
Fat Fee,
have already
been to speak to Mr. Cuaduador along with my Large Associate Mr. X.
Exerted some little pressure for cooperation. At first Mr. C. thought
I was militia. Reassured him otherwise, then ensured his
loquacity
with X’s friend
Flintlock.
Seems our Mr. C.
liberated
caterpillar from official shipment or some-such. Been regretting it
ever since. (I did not even pay him much for it.) No knowledge of
purpose or source of grub. No knowledge of fate of others from
original group—took only one.
One lead only:
(Useless?
Useful?) Recipient of packet named Dr. Barbell? Barrier? Berber?
Barlime? etc. in R&D.

Am keeping track of services rendered, Isaac. Itemized bill to
follow.

Lemuel Pigeon

"Fantastic!"
Isaac exploded, on finishing the letter. "A fucking
lead..."

David looked utterly
aghast.

"
Parliament?"
he said, a strangled gasp. "We’re fucking about with
Parliament?
Oh dear Jabber, do you have any
idea
of the
scale of shit we’re messed up in? What the fuck d’you
mean
‘Fantastic!’ you fucking
cretin,
Isaac? Oh, marvellous! We just have to ask Parliament for a list of
all those in the
top secret
Research and Development
department whose names begin with a B, then find them one by one and
ask if they know anything about flying things that scare their
victims comatose, specifically how to catch them. We’re
home
free"

No one spoke. A pall
settled slowly on the room.

**

At its south-westerly
corner, Brock Marsh met Petty Coil, a dense knot of chancers, crime
and architecture of decayed splendour wedged into a kink in the
river.

A little over a hundred
years previously, Petty Coil had been an urban hub for the major
families. The Mackie-Drendas and the Turgisadys; Dhrachshachet, the
vodyanoi financier and founder of the Drach Bank; Sirrah Jeremile
Carr, the merchant-farmer: all had their great houses in Petty Coil’s
wide streets.

But industry had
exploded in New Crobuzon, much of it bankrolled by those very
families. Factories and docks budded and proliferated. Griss Twist,
just across the river, enjoyed a short-lived boom of small
machinofacture, with all the noise and stink that that entailed. It
became the site of massive riverside tips. A new landscape of ruin
and refuse and industrial filth was created, in a speeded-up parody
of geological process. Carts dumped load after load of broken
machines, rotting paper, slag, organic offal and chymical detritus
into the fenced-off rubbish tips of Griss Twist. The rejected matter
settled and shifted and fell into place, affecting some shape,
mimicking nature. Knolls, valleys, quarries and pools bubbling with
foetid gas. Within a few years the local factories had gone but the
dumps remained, and the winds that blew in from the sea could send a
pestilential stench over the Tar into Petty Coil.

The rich deserted their
homes. Petty Coil degenerated in a lively fashion. It became noisier.
Paint and plaster bubbled, desquamating grotesquely, as the massive
houses became homes for more and more of New Crobuzon’s
swelling population. Windows broke, were fixed roughly, broke again.
As small food-shops and bakers and carpenters moved in, Petty Coil
fell willing prey to the city’s ineluctable capacity for
spontaneous architecture. Walls and floors and ceilings were called
into question, amended. New and inventive uses were found for
deserted constructions.

Derkhan Blueday made
her way hurriedly towards this mess of abused, misused grandeur. She
carried a bag close. Her face was set and miserable.

She came up over
Cockscomb Bridge, one of the city’s most ancient edifices. It
was narrow and roughly cobbled, with houses built into the very
stones. The river was invisible from the centre of the bridge. On
either side, Derkhan could see nothing but the squat, rough-edged
skyline of houses nearly a thousand years old, their intricate marble
façades crumbled long ago. Lines of washing stretched across
the width of the bridge. Raucous shouted conversations and arguments
bounced back and forth.

In Petty Coil itself,
Derkhan walked quickly under the raised Sud Line and bore north. The
river she had passed over bent sharply back on itself, veering
towards her in an enormous S, before righting its course and heading
east and down to meet the Canker.

Petty Coil was blurring
with Brock Marsh. The houses were smaller, the streets narrower and
more intricately twisted. Mildewing old houses tottered overhead,
their steeply slanting roofs like capes slung over narrow shoulders,
making them furtive. In their cavernous front rooms and central
courtyards, where trees and bushes died as filth encroached, rude
signs were plastered advertising scarabomancy and automatic reading
and enchantment therapy. Here, the poorest or most unruly of Brock
Marsh’s delinquent chymists and thaumaturges fought for space
with charlatans and liars.

Derkhan checked the
directions she had been given, and found her way to St. Sorrel’s
Mews. It was a tight little passage ending in a collapsed wall. To
her right, Derkhan saw the tall, rust-coloured building described in
the note. She entered through the doorless threshold and picked her
way over building debris, through a short unlit passage that
virtually dripped with damp. At the end of the corridor, she saw the
bead curtain she had been told to look for, strings of broken glass
on wire, swaying gently.

She steeled herself,
drawing the vicious shards back gently, drawing no blood. Derkhan
entered the little parlour beyond.

Both of the room’s
windows had been covered: thick material was glued to them in great
fibrous clumps that clotted the air with heavy shadow. The
furnishings were minimal. The same shade of brown as the darkened
atmosphere, they seemed half invisible. Behind a low table, sipping
tea in an absurdly dainty manner, a plump, hairy woman basked in a
sumptuous decaying armchair.

She eyed Derkhan.

"What can I do for
you?" she asked evenly, in a tone of resigned irritation.

"You’re the
communicatrix?" said Derkhan.

"Umma Balsum."
The woman inclined her head. "Got some business for me?"

Derkhan made her way
across the room and hovered nervously by a bursting sofa until Umma
Balsum indicated that she should sit. Derkhan did so abruptly, and
fumbled in her bag.

"I need...uh...to
talk to
Benjamin Flex."
Her voice was taut. She spoke in
little bursts, gearing up to each announcement, then spitting it out.
She pulled out a little pouch of the detritus she had found at the
site of the abattoir.

**

She had gone to Dog
Fenn the previous evening, as news of the militia’s crushing of
the dock strike washed over New Crobuzon. It swept along with rumours
in its wake. One of the rumours concerned a subsidiary attack on a
seditious newspaper in Dog Fenn.

It had been late when
Derkhan had arrived, disguised as always, in the dank streets in the
south-east of the city. It had rained; warm, fat drops bursting like
rotting things on the rubble in the cul-de-sac. The entrance was
blocked, so Derkhan had entered through the low portal through which
meat and animals were slung. She had clung to the noisome stones,
dangling over the lip into the butchers’ den, stained with shit
and gore from a thousand terrified animals, and dropped the few feet
into the bloody darkness of the deserted charnel-house.

She had crawled over
the ruined conveyor-belt, snagged herself on the meathooks that
littered the floor. The sanguinary slick in which she stumbled was
cold and sticky.

Derkhan had fought her
way past the stones that had burst from walls, over the ruined
stairs, up towards Ben’s room, the centre of the destruction.
Her way was paved with ripped and ruined shards of printing
machinery, and smoke-charred pieces of cloth and paper.

The room itself was
little more than a hole full of rubbish. Chunks of masonry had
crushed the bed. The wall between Ben’s bedroom and the hidden
printing press was almost completely destroyed. Languorous summer
drizzle had been falling through the burst skylight onto the
shattered skeleton of the press.

Derkhan’s face
had hardened. She had searched with a fervent intensity. She had
unearthed small pieces of evidence, small proofs that this was once
where a man had lived. She brought them out now, put them on the
table before Umma Balsum.

She had found his
razor, with a little stubble and bloodrust still staining its blade.
The torn remnants of a pair of trousers. A piece of paper discoloured
with his blood from where she had rubbed and rubbed it against a red
stain on the wall. The last two issues of
Runagate Rampant
that she had found under the ruins of his bed.

Umma Balsum watched the
pathetic collection emerge.

"Where is he?"
she asked.

"I...I think he’s
in the Spike," said Derkhan.

"Well, that’s
going to cost you an extra noble straight off," said Umma Balsum
tartly. "Don’t like tangling with the law. Talk me through
this stuff."

Derkhan showed her each
of the pieces she had brought. Umma Balsum nodded at each briefly,
but seemed particularly interested in the issues of
RR.

"He wrote for
this, did he?" she asked keenly, fingering the papers.

"Yes."
Derkhan did not volunteer the information that he edited it. She was
nervous of breaking the taboo against naming names, even though she
had been assured that the communicatrix was trustworthy. Umma
Balsum’s livelihood depended for the most part on contacting
people in the militia’s possession. Selling out her clients
would be a financial miscalculation. "This—" Derkhan
turned to the central column, with the headline
What We Think"—
he
wrote this."

"Ahhh..."
said Umma Balsum. "Shame you don’t have it in his original
scripture. But this ain’t bad. Got anything else peculiar on
him?"

"He has a tattoo.
Above his left bicep. Like this." Derkhan brought out the sketch
she had made of the ornate anchor decoration.

"Sailor?"

Derkhan smiled
mirthlessly.

"Got discharged
and banged up without setting foot on a ship. Got drunk when he
joined up and insulted his captain before the tattoo was even dry."
She remembered him telling the story.

"Righto,"
said Umma Balsum. "Two marks for the attempt. Five marks
connection fee if I get him, then two stivers a minute while we’re
linked. And a noble on account of he’s in the Spike.
Acceptable?" Derkhan nodded. It was expensive, but this kind of
thaumaturgy was not just a question of learning a few passes. With
enough training, anyone could effect the odd fumbling hex, but this
kind of psychic channelling took a prodigious birth-talent and years
of arduous study. Appearances and surroundings notwithstanding, Umma
Balsum was no less a thaumaturgic expert than a senior Remaker or
chimerist. Derkhan fumbled for her purse. "Pay after. We’ll
see if we get through first." Umma Balsum rolled up her left
sleeve. Her flesh dimpled and wobbled loosely. "Draw me that
tattoo. Make it as like the original as you can." She nodded,
indicating Derkhan to a stool in the corner of the room on which
rested a palette with a collection of brushes and coloured inks.