Perdido Street Station (49 page)

"I don’t
know," said David hopelessly. "But he wasn’t
boasting...he sort of mentioned it in passing...I just...have no
idea. But I know that’s what he’s been working on, on and
off, for years and fucking
years..."

There was a long time
of silence, when the man on the bed looked thoughtfully into the far
corner of the room. His face ran a quick gamut of emotions. He looked
thoughtfully at David. "How do you know all this?" he said.

" ‘Zaac
trusts me," said David (and that place inside him winced again,
and he ignored it again). "At first this woman..."

"Name?"
interrupted the man.

David hesitated.

"Derkhan Blueday,"
he muttered eventually. "So Blueday, at first she’s really
chary of talking in front of me, but Isaac...he vouches for me. He
knows my politics, we’ve done demos together..." (again
that wince:
you have no politics, you fucking traitor
) "It’s
just that at a time like this..." he hesitated, unhappy. The man
waved peremptorily. He had no interest in David’s guilt, or his
rationalizations. "So Isaac tells her she can trust me and she
tells us everything."

There was a long time
of silence. The man on the bed waited. David shrugged.

"That’s all
I know," he whispered.

The man nodded and
stood.

"Right," he
said. "That’s all...extremely useful. We’ll probably
have to bring your friend Isaac in. Don’t worry," he added
with a reassuring smile. "We’ve no interest in disposing
of him, I promise. We may just need his help. You’re right,
obviously. There is a...circle to be squared, connections to be made,
and you’re not in a position to do it, and we might be. With
Isaac’s help.

"You’re
going to have to stay in touch," said the man. "You’ll
receive written instructions. Be sure to obey them. Obviously I don’t
have to stress that, do I? We’ll make sure der Grimnebulin
doesn’t know where our information comes from. We may not move
for a few days...don’t panic. That’s our affair. Just you
stay quiet, and try to keep der Grimnebulin doing what he’s
doing. All right?"

David nodded miserably.
He waited. The man looked at him sharply.

"That’s
all," he said. "You can go."

With a guilty, grateful
haste, David stood and hurried to the door. He felt as if he was
swimming in mire, his own shame engulfing him like a mucal sea. He
was longing to walk away from this room, and forget what he had said
and done, and not think of the coins and notes that would be sent to
him, and think only of how loyal he felt to Isaac, and tell himself
it was all for the best.

The other man opened
the door for him, released him, and David rushed gratefully away,
almost ran down along the passageway, eager to escape.

But hurry as he would
through the streets of Spit Hearth, guilt clung to him, tenacious as
quicksand.

One night the city lay
sleeping with reasonable peace.

Of course, the usual
interruptions oppressed it. Men and women fought each other and died.
Blood and spew fouled the old streets. Glass shattered. The militia
streaked overhead. Dirigibles sounded like monstrous whales. The
mutilated, eyeless body of a man who would later be identified as
Benjamin Flex washed ashore in Badside.

The city tossed
uneasily through its nightland, as it had for centuries. It was a
fractured sleep, but it was all the city had ever had.

But the next night,
when David performed his furtive task in the red-light zone,
something had changed. New Crobuzon night had always been a chaos of
jarring beats and sudden violent chords. But a new note was sounding.
A tense, whispering undertone that made the air sick.

For one night, the
tension in the air was a thin and tentative thing, that inveigled its
way into the minds of the citizens and sent shadows across their
sleeping faces. Then day, and no one remembered anything more than a
moment’s nocturnal unease.

And then as the shadows
dragged out and the temperature dropped, as the night returned from
under the world, something new and terrible settled on the city.

All around the city,
from Flag Hill in the north to Barrackham below the river, from the
desultory suburbs of Badside in the east to the rude industrial slums
of Chimer, people thrashed and moaned in their beds.

Children were the
first. They cried out and dug their nails into their hands, their
little faces crunching down into hard grimaces; they sweated heavily,
with a cloying stench; their heads oscillated horrendously to and
fro; and all without waking.

As the night wore on
the adults also suffered. In the depths of some other, innocuous
dream, old fears and paranoias suddenly crashed through mental
firewalls like invading armies. Successions of ghastly images
assaulted the afflicted, animated visions of deep fears, and absurdly
terrifying banalities—ghosties and goblins they need never
face—they would have laughed at when awake.

Those arbitrarily
spared the ordeal were woken suddenly in the depths of the night by
the moans and screams from their sleeping lovers, or their heavy
despairing sobs. Sometimes the dreams might be dreams of sex or
happiness, but heightened and feverish and become terrifying in their
intensity. In this twisted night-trap, bad was bad and good was bad.

The city rocked and
shivered. Dreams were become a pestilence, a bacillus that seemed to
leap from sleeper to sleeper. They even inveigled their way into the
minds of the waking. Nightwatch-men and militia agents; late-night
dancers and frantic students; insomniacs: they found themselves
losing their trains of thought, drifting into fantasies and
ruminations of weird, hallucinatory intensity.

All over the city the
night was fissured by cries of nocturnal misery.

New Crobuzon was
gripped in an epidemic, an outbreak, a plague of nightmares.

**

The summer was clotting
over New Crobuzon. Stifling it. The night air was as hot and thick as
an exhaled breath. Way above the city, transfixed between the clouds
and the sprawl, the great winged things drooled.

They spread out and
flapped their vast irregular wings, sending fat gusts of air rolling
with each sweeping motion. Their intricate appendages—tentacular
and insectile, anthropoid, chitinous, numerous—trembled as they
passed in febrile excitement.

They unhinged their
disturbing mouths and long feathered tongues unrolled towards the
rooftops. The very air was thick with dreams, and the flying things
lapped eagerly at the succulent juices. When the fronds that tipped
their tongues were heavy with the invisible nectar, their mouths
gaped and they rolled up their tongues with an eager smacking. They
gnashed their huge teeth.

They soared. As they
flew they shat, exuding all the sewage from their previous meals. The
invisible spoor spread out in the sky, psychic effluent that slid,
lumpy and cloying, through the interstices of the mundane plane. It
oozed its way through aether to fill the city, saturating the minds
of the inhabitants, disturbing their rest, bringing forth monsters.
The sleeping and the wakeful felt their minds churn.

The five went hunting.

**

Amid the vast swirling
broth of the city’s nightmares, each of the dark things could
discern individual snaking trails of flavour.

Usually, they were
opportunistic hunters. They would wait until they scented some strong
mental tumult, some mind particularly delicious in its own
exudations. Then the intricate dark flyers would turn and dive, bear
down on the prey. They used their slim hands to unlock top-floor
windows, and paced across moonlit attics towards shivering sleepers
to drink their fill. They clutched with a multitude of appendages at
lonely figures walking the riverside, figures who screeched and
screeched as they were taken into a night already full of plaintive
cries.

But when they had
discarded the flesh-husks of their meals to twitch and loll
slack-mouthed on boards and shadowed cobbles, when their stabs of
hunger had been assuaged and meals could be taken more slowly, for
pleasure, the winged creatures became curious. They tasted the faint
drippings of minds they had tasted before, and, like inquisitive,
coldly intelligent hunting beasts, they pursued them.

Here was the tenuous
mental thread of one of the guards, who had stood outside their cage
in Bonetown and fantasized about his friend’s wife. His
flavoursome imaginings wafted up to wrap around a twitching tongue.
The creature that tasted that wheeled around in the sky, in the
chaotic arc of a butterfly or a moth, and dived towards Echomire,
following his prey’s scent.

Another of the great
airborne shapes pulled up suddenly in a vast figure of eight, rolling
over its own tracks, seeking out the familiar flavour that had
flitted across its tastebuds. It was a nervous aroma that had
permeated the cocoons of the pupating monsters. The great beast
hovered over the city, saliva dissipating in various dimensions below
it. The emissions were obscured, frustratingly tenuous, but the
creature’s sense of taste was fine, and it bore down towards
Mafaton, licking its way along the enticing trail of the scientist
who had watched it grow, Magesta Barbile.

The twisted one, the
malnourished runt that had liberated its fellows, found a taste-trail
that it, too, remembered. Its mind was not so developed, its
tastebuds less exact: it could not follow the flickering scent
through the air. But, uncomfortably, it tried. The full taste of the
mind was so familiar...it had surrounded the twisted creature during
its flourishing into consciousness, during its pupation and
self-creation in the silk shell...It lost and found the scent, lost
it again, floundered.

The smallest and
weakest of the night-hunters, stronger by far than any man, hungry
and predatory, licked its way through the sky, trying to regain the
trail of Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin.

**

Isaac, Derkhan and
Lemuel Pigeon fidgeted on the streetcorner, in the smoky glare of the
gaslight.

"Where the fuck’s
your mate?" hissed Isaac.

"He’s late.
Probably can’t find it. I told you, he’s stupid,"
said Lemuel calmly. He took out a flick-knife and began to clean his
nails.

"Why do we need
him?"

"Don’t come
the fucking innocent, Isaac. You’re good at waving enough brass
at me to get me to do all sorts of jobs that go against my better
judgement, but there are limits. I’m not getting involved in
anything which irritates the damn government without protection. And
Mr. X is that, in spades."

Isaac swore silently,
but he knew Lemuel was right.

He had been very uneasy
at the notion of involving Lemuel in this adventure, but events had
rapidly conspired to give him no choice. David had clearly been
reluctant to help him find Magesta Barbile. He seemed paralysed, a
mass of helpless nerves. Isaac was losing patience with him. He
needed support, and he wanted David to get off his arse and
do
something. But now was not the time to confront him.

Derkhan had
inadvertently provided the name that seemed key to the interlocking
mysteries of the presence in the skies and the militia’s
enigmatic interrogation of Ben Flex. Isaac sent word, got the name
and what information they had—Mafaton, scientist, R&D—to
Lemuel Pigeon. He included money, several guineas (and realized as he
did so that the gold Yagharek had given him was slowly dwindling),
and begged for information, and help.

That was why he
contained his anger at Mr. X’s late show. For all that he
pantomimed impatience, that kind of protection was precisely what he
had approached Lemuel for.

Lemuel himself had not
taken much persuasion to accompany Isaac and Derkhan to the address
in Mafaton. He affected an insouciant disregard for particulars, a
mercenary desire simply to be paid for his efforts. Isaac did not
believe him. He thought that Lemuel was growing interested in the
intrigue.

Yagharek was adamant he
would not come. Isaac had tried to persuade him, quickly and
fervently, but Yagharek had not even replied.
What the fuck are
you doing here then?
Isaac felt like asking, but he swallowed his
irritation and let the garuda be. Perhaps it would take a little time
before he would behave as if he were part of any collective at all.
Isaac would wait.

Lin had left just
before Derkhan’s arrival. She had been reluctant to leave Isaac
in his despondency, but she had also seemed somewhat distracted. She
had stayed only one night, and when she had gone she had promised
Isaac she would return as soon as she could. But then the next
morning Isaac had received a letter in her cursive hand, couriered
across the city with an expensive guaranteed delivery.

Dear Heart,

I am afraid you might feel angry and betrayed at this, but please be
forbearing. Waiting for me here was another letter from my employer,
my commissioner, my patron, if you will. Hot on the heels of his
missive telling me I would not be needed for the foreseeable future,
came another message saying I was to return.

I know the timing of this could not be worse. I ask only that you
believe that I would disobey if I could, but that I
cannot.
I
cannot,
Isaac. I will try to finish my job with him as quickly
as possible—within a week or two, I hope—and return to
you.

Wait for me.

With my love, Lin

So, waiting on the
corner of Addley Pass, camouflaged by the chiaroscuro of full moon
through the clouds and the shadows of the trees in Billy Green, were
only Isaac, Derkhan and Lemuel.

All three were shifting
uneasily, looking up at passing shades, starting at imagined noises.
From the streets around them there came intermittent sounds of
horrendously disturbed sleep. At each savage moan or ululation, the
three would catch each other’s eyes.