Perdido Street Station (46 page)

There was a moment when
Derkhan felt sick at the woman’s callousness, but it came and
went quickly. Derkhan did not know if Umma Balsum could recall what
she heard and said when she was harmonized. And then even if she did,
Derkhan’s was only one tragedy in the hundreds and thousands
throughout the city. Umma Balsum made her money as a go-between, and
her mouth had told story after faltered story of loss and betrayal
and torture and misery.

There was a certain
obscure, lonely comfort for Derkhan in realizing that hers and Ben’s
was not a special, not an unusual suffering. Ben’s would not be
a special death.

"Look." Umma
Balsum was waving her piece of paper at Derkhan. "Two marks plus
five for connection is seven. I was there for eleven minutes, which
makes twenty-two stivers: that’s two and tuppence, brings it to
nine marks two. Plus a noble for Spike danger money, and you’re
looking at one noble nine and two."

Derkhan gave her two
nobles and left.

She walked quickly,
without thinking, tracing her way through the streets of Brock Marsh.
She re-entered the inhabited streets, where the people she passed
were more than shifty-looking figures skulking hurriedly from shadow
to shadow. Derkhan shouldered through stallholders and vendors of
cheap and dubious potions.

She realized that she
was making her way towards Isaac’s laboratory-house. He was a
close friend, and something of a political comrade. He had not known
Ben—had not even heard his name—but he would understand
the scale of what had happened. He might have some idea of what to
do...and if not, well, Derkhan would make do with a strong coffee and
some comforting.

His door was locked.
There was no answer from within. Derkhan almost wailed. She was about
to wander off into lonely misery when she remembered Isaac’s
enthusiastic descriptions of some vile pub that he frequented on the
river’s bank, The Dead Child or something. She turned down the
little alley beside the house and looked up and down the pathway by
the water, flagstones broken and erupting with tenacious grass.

The dirty lapping waves
tugged organic filth gently towards the east. Across the Canker, the
opposite bank was choked in snarls of bramble and thickets of
serpentine weeds. A little way to the north on Derkhan’s side,
some tumbledown establishment huddled by the trail. She walked
towards it tentatively, speeding up when she saw the stained and
peeling sign: The Dying Child.

Inside, the dark was
foetid and warm and unnervingly damp; but in the far corner, past the
slouching, collapsed human and vodyanoi and Remade wrecks, sat Isaac.

He was talking in an
animated whisper with another man who Derkhan vaguely remembered,
some scientist friend of Isaac’s. Isaac looked up as Derkhan
stood in the door, and after a double-take, he stared at her. She
almost ran towards him.

"Isaac, Jabber
and
fuck...
I’m so glad I found you..."

As she gabbled at him,
her hand nervously clenching the cloth of his jacket, she realized
with a mortifying lurch that he looked at her without welcome. Her
little speech faltered out.

"Derkhan...my
gods..." he said. "I...Derkhan, there’s a
crisis...Something’s happened, and I..." He looked uneasy.

Derkhan stared at him
miserably.

She sat suddenly,
collapsed onto the bench beside him. It was like a surrender. She
leant on the table, kneaded her eyes which were brimming suddenly and
irrevocably.

"I’ve just
seen a dear friend and comrade get ready to be
tortured to death
and half my
life’s
been crushed and exploded and stamped
on and I don’t know why and I’ve got to find a Doctor
fucking Barbile
somewhere in the city
to find out what’s
going on, and I come to you...for...because you’re supposed to
be my
friend
and what, you’re...
busy
...?"

Tears oozed from
beneath her fingertips and scored their way across her face. She
wiped her hands violently across her eyes and sniffed, glancing up
for a moment, and she saw that Isaac and the other man were staring
at her with an extraordinary, absurd intensity. Their eyes gaped.

Isaac’s hand
crept across the table and gripped her by the wrist.

"You’ve got
to find
who
?" he hissed.

"Well," said
Bentham Rudgutter carefully, "I couldn’t get anything out
of him. Yet."

"Not even the name
of his source?" asked Stem-Fulcher.

"No."
Rudgutter pursed his lips and shook his head slowly. "He just
shuts down. But I don’t think that’ll be too hard to find
out. After all, there aren’t a huge number of people it can be.
It’s got to be someone in R&D, it’s
probably
someone on the SM project...We may well know more when the
inquisitors have interrogated him."

"So..." said
Stem-Fulcher. "Here we are."

"Indeed."

Stem-Fulcher, Rudgutter
and Montjohn Rescue were standing, surrounded by an elite militia
guard unit, in a tunnel deep under Perdido Street Station. Gaslamps
made fitful impressions on the murk. The little points of grubby
light went on as far as they could see before them. A little way
behind them was the lift-cage they had just left.

At Rudgutter’s
signal, he, his companions and their escort began to walk down into
the darkness. The militia marched in formation.

"Right," said
Rudgutter. "You’ve both got the scissors?"
Stem-Fulcher and Rescue nodded. "Four years ago it was chess
sets," Rudgutter mused. "I remember when the Weaver changed
its tastes, it took about three deaths before we worked out what it
wanted." There was an uneasy pause. "Our research is quite
up to date," said Rudgutter with gallows humour. "I spoke
to Doctor Kapnellior before meeting you. He’s our resident
Weaver ‘expert’...something of a misnomer. Just means
that unlike the rest of us, he’s only extremely damn ignorant
about them, rather than totally. He reassures me that scissors are
still very much the object of desire."

After a moment, he
spoke again.

"I’ll do the
talking. I’ve dealt with it before." He was unsure himself
whether that was an advantage or a disadvantage.

The corridor had come
to an end, terminating in a thick door of iron-banded oak. The man at
the head of the militia unit slid a huge key into the lock and turned
it smoothly. He tugged the door open, bracing himself at its weight,
and trooped into the dark room beyond. He was well trained. His
discipline was like steel. He must, after all, have been extremely
frightened.

The rest of the
officers followed him, then Rescue and Stem-Fulcher, and finally
Bentham Rudgutter. He pulled the door closed behind them.

**

As they passed into the
room, all felt a moment of dislocation, a wispy unease that prickled
across their skin with a quasi-physical momentum. Long threads,
invisible filaments of spun aether and emotion, were draped in
intricate patterns around the room, and were rippling and sticking to
the intruders.

Rudgutter twitched.
From the corner of his eye he glimpsed threads that folded out of
existence when he looked them full on.

The room was as obscure
as if it were shrouded in cobwebs. On every wall, scissors were
attached in bizarre designs. Scissors chased each other like
predatory fish; they sported on the ceiling; they coiled around and
through each other in convoluted, unsettling geometric designs.

The militia and their
charges stood still against one wall of the room. No sources of light
were visible, but they could still see. The atmosphere in the room
seemed monochrome, or disturbed in some way, the light etiolated and
cowed.

They stood still for a
long time. There were no sounds.

Slowly and silently,
Bentham Rudgutter reached into the bag he carried and brought out the
large grey scissors he had had an aide buy in an ironmonger’s
on the lowest commercial concourse of Perdido Street Station.

He parted the scissors
without a noise, held them up in the cloying air.

Rudgutter brought the
razor edges together. The room reverberated with the unmistakable
sound of blade sliding along sharpened blade, and snapping shut with
an inexorable division.

The echoes trembled
like flies in a funnelweb. They slid into a dark dimension at the
room’s heart.

A gust of cold sent
gooseflesh dancing across the backs of those congregated.

The echoes of the
scissors came back.

As they returned and
crept up from below the threshold of hearing, they metamorphosed,
becoming words, a voice, melodious and melancholy, that first
whispered and then grew more bold, spinning itself into existence out
of the scissor-echoes. It was not quite describable, heartbreaking
and frightening, it tugged the listener close; and it sounded not in
the ears but deeper inside, in the blood and bone, in the
nerve-clusters.

...FLESHSCAPE INTO THE
FOLDING INTO THE FLESHSCAPE TO SPEAK A GREETING IN THIS THE SCISSORED
REALM I WILL RECEIVE AND BE RECEIVED...

In the fearful silence,
Rudgutter gesticulated at Stem-Fulcher and Rescue, until they
understood, and they raised their scissors as he had done, opened and
sharply shut them, slicing the air with an almost tactile sound. He
joined in, the three of them opening and closing their blades in
macabre applause.

At the sound of that
snapping susurration, the unearthly voice resonated into the room
again. It moaned with an obscene pleasure. Each time it spoke, it was
as if what faded into audibility was only a snatch of an unceasing
monologue.

...AGAIN AGAIN AND
AGAIN DO NOT WITHHOLD THIS BLADED SUMMONS THIS EDGED HYMN I ACCEPT I
AGREE YOU SLICE SO NICE AND NICELY YOU LITTLE ENDOSKELETAL FIGURINES
YOU SNIP AND SHAVE AND SLIVER THE CORDS OF THE WOVEN WEB AND SHAPE IT
WITH AN UNCOUTH GRACE

From out of shadows
cast by some unseen shapes, shadows that seemed stretched-out and
taut, tethered from corner to corner of the square room, something
stalked into view.

Into existence. It
bulked suddenly where there had been nothing. It stepped out from
behind some fold in space.

It picked its way
forward, delicate on pointed feet, vast body bobbing, lifting
multiple legs high. It looked down at Rudgutter and his fellows from
a head that loomed colossally above them.

A spider.

**

Rudgutter had trained
himself rigorously. He was an unimaginative man, a cold man who ruled
himself with industrial discipline. He could no longer feel terror.

But, gazing at the
Weaver, he came close.

It was worse, more
frightening by far than the ambassador. The Hellkin were appalling
and awesome, monstrous powers for which Rudgutter had the most
profound respect. And yet, and yet...he understood them. They were
tortured and torturing, calculating and capricious. Shrewd.
Comprehensible. They were political.

The Weaver was utterly
alien. There could be no bargaining and no games. It had been tried.

Rudgutter conquered
himself, angry, judging himself harshly, studying the thing before
him in an attempt to itemize and metabolize the sight.

The Weaver’s bulk
was mostly its huge teardrop abdomen that welled up and hung
downwards behind it from its neck-waist, a tight, bulbous fruit seven
feet long and five wide. It was absolutely taut and smooth, its
chitin a shimmering black iridescence.

The creature’s
head was the size of a man’s chest. It was suspended from the
front of the abdomen a third of the way from the top. The fat curve
of its body loomed above it like skulking black-clad shoulders.

The head swivelled
slowly to take in its visitors.

The top as smooth and
spare as a human skull in black: multiple eyes a single, deep
blood-red. Two main orbs as large as new-borns’ heads sat in
sunken sockets at either side; between them a much smaller third;
above it two more; above them three more still. An intricate, precise
constellation of glints on dark crimson. An unblinking array.

The Weaver’s
complicated mouthparts unhinged, its inner jaw flexing, something
between a mandible and a black ivory trap. Its wet gullet flexed and
vibrated deep within.

Its legs, thin and bony
as human ankles, sprouted from the thin band of segmented flesh that
linked its headpiece and abdomen. The Weaver walked on its hindmost
four legs. They shot up and out at a forty-five-degree angle, hinging
in knees a foot or more above the Weaver’s hunkered head,
higher than the top of its abdomen. The legs rebounded from the
joints almost straight down ten feet, culminating in a point as
featureless and sharp as a stiletto.

Like a tarantula, the
Weaver picked one leg up at a time, lifting it very high and placing
it down with the delicacy of a surgeon or an artist. A slow, sinister
and inhuman movement.

From the same intricate
fold as that great quadrupedal frame emerged two sets of shorter
legs. One pair, six feet long, rested pointing upwards at the elbows.
Each thin, hard shaft of chitin ended in an eighteen-inch talon, a
cruel, polished shard of russet shell edged like a scalpel. At the
base of each weapon sprouted a curl of arachnid-bone, a sharpened
hook to snag and slice and hold prey.

Those organic kukris
jutted up like wide horns, like lances. An ostentatious display of
murderous potential.

And in front of them,
the final, shorter pair of limbs hung down. At their tips, held
midway between the Weaver’s head and the ground, a pair of thin
and tiny hands. Five-fingered and slender, only smooth fingertips
without nails and skin the alien, nacreous black of pure pitch
distinguished them from the hands of human children.