Perdido Street Station (60 page)

They had rested,
cleaned the nightsoil from their clothes as much as they could. Here,
finally, Isaac had tended the stub of Derkhan’s ear. It had
numbed, but was still painful. She bore it with heavy reserve. Isaac
and Lemuel had fingered their own scarred remnants uncomfortably.

As the night had crept
up faster, Isaac had readied himself to go. The argument had erupted
again. Isaac was resolute. He needed to see Lin alone.

He had to tell her that
she was in danger as soon as the militia connected her to him. He had
to tell her that her life as she had lived it was over, and that it
was his fault. He needed to ask her to come with him, to run with
him. He needed her forgiveness and her affection.

One night with her,
alone. That was all.

Lemuel would not
acquiesce. "It’s our fucking heads too, ‘Zaac,"
he had hissed. "Every militiaman in the city is after your hide.
Your helio’s probably pasted up in every tower and strut and
floor of the Spike. You don’t know how to get around. Me, I’ve
been wanted all my working life. If you go for your ladybird, I
come."

Isaac had had to give
in.

At half past ten, the
four companions had wrapped themselves in their ruined clothes,
obscuring their faces. After much coaxing, Isaac had finally been
able to goad the construct into communication. Reluctantly and
torturously slowly, it had scratched out its message.

Griss Twist Dump
number 2,
it had written.
Tomorrow night 10. Leave me below
arches now.

With the darkness, they
had realized, came the nightmares.

Even though they did
not sleep. The mental nausea, as the slake-moth dung polluted the
city’s sleep. Each of them grew tetchy and nervous.

Isaac had stashed his
carpet bag, containing the components of his crisis engine, under a
pile of wooden slats in the shack. Then they had descended, carrying
the construct for the last time. Isaac hid it in an alcove created
where the structure of the railway bridge had crumbled.

"Are you going to
be all right?" he asked it tentatively, still feeling absurd
talking to a machine. The construct did not answer him, and
eventually he had left it. "See you tomorrow," he said as
he left.

The criminal foursome
skulked and stalked their clandestine way through New Crobuzon’s
burgeoning night. Lemuel had taken his companions into the
alternative city of hidden byways and strange cartography. They had
evaded streets wherever there were alleys and alleys wherever there
were broken channels in the concrete. They had crept through deserted
yards and over flat roofs, waking the vagrants who grumbled and
huddled together in their wake.

Lemuel was confident.
He swung his primed and loaded pistol easily as he climbed and ran,
keeping them covered. Yagharek had adapted to his body without the
weight of wings. His hollow bones and tight muscles moved
efficiently. He swung lithely over the architectural landscape,
leaping obstacles in the slate. Derkhan was dogged. She would not let
herself fail to keep up.

Isaac was the only one
whose suffering showed. He wheezed and coughed and retched. He hauled
his excess flesh along the thieves’ trails, breaking slates
with his heavy slapping footfall, cradling his belly miserably. He
swore constantly, every time he exhaled.

They cut a trail deeper
into the night, as if it were a forest. With every step, the air grew
heavier. A sense of wrongness, of fraught unease, as if long nails
scraped the surface of the moon, raising the hackles of the soul.
From all around them came the cries of miserable, disturbed sleep.

They stopped in
Flyside, a few streets from the militia tower, and took water from a
pump to wash and drink. Then south through the morass of alleys
between Shadrach Street and Selchit Pass, bearing down on Aspic Hole.

And there in that
near-deserted and unearthly place, Isaac had bade his companions
wait. Between sobs of desperate breath, he begged them to wait, to
give him half an hour with her.

"You’ve got
to give me a little while to explain to her what’s going on..."
he pleaded.

They acquiesced, and
hunkered down in the darkness at the base of the building.

"Half an hour,
‘Zaac," said Lemuel clearly. "Then we’re coming
up. Understand?"

And so Isaac had begun
slowly to climb the stairs.

**

The tower was cool and
quite silent. On the seventh floor, Isaac heard sound for the first
time. It was the sleepy murmur and unceasing flutter of jackdaws. Up
again, through the breezes that passed through the ruined and unsafe
eighth floor, and on to the building’s crest.

He stood before Lin’s
familiar door.
She may not be there,
he reasoned.
She’s
probably still with that guy, her patron, doing her work. In which
case I’ll just have to...leave a message for her.

He knocked at the door,
which fell open. His breath stalled in his throat. He rushed into the
room.

The air stank of
putrefying blood. Isaac scanned the little attic space. He caught
sight of what awaited him.

Lucky Gazid gazed up at
him sightlessly, propped on one of Lin’s chairs, sitting at the
table as if at a meal. His shape was outlined in what little light
crept up from the square below. Gazid’s arms were flat on the
table. His hands were tense and hard as bone. His mouth was open and
stuffed with something that Isaac could not clearly see. Gazid’s
front was utterly drenched with blood. Blood had slicked on the
table, seeping deep into the grain of the wood. Gazid’s throat
had been cut. In the summer heat it thronged with hungry little night
insects.

There was a second when
Isaac thought that it might be a nightmare, one of the sick dreams
that afflicted the city, spewing out of his unconscious on a slick of
slake-moth dung and spattering into the aether.

But Gazid did not
disappear. Gazid was real, and really dead.

Isaac looked at him. He
blenched at Gazid’s screaming face. He looked again at the
clawed hands. Gazid had been held down at the table, cut and held
down until he died. Then something had been shoved into his gaping
mouth.

Isaac picked his way
towards the corpse. He set his face and reached up, pulled from
Gazid’s dry mouth a large envelope.

When he unrolled it, he
saw that the name carefully written on the front was his own. He
reached inside with a nauseous foreboding.

There was a moment, a
tiny moment, when he did not recognize what he pulled out. Flimsy and
almost weightless, it felt as he drew it out like crumbling
parchment, like dead leaves. Then he held it in the faint grey light
of the moonlit room and he saw it was a pair of khepri wings.

**

Isaac let out a sound,
an exhalation of shocked misery. His eyes widened in horror.

"Oh no," he
said, hyperventilating. "Oh no oh no no no..." The wings
had been bent and rolled, and their delicate substance was shattered.
They desquamated in great clots of translucent matter. Isaac’s
fingers trembled as he tried to smooth them down. His fingertips
brushed their battered surface. He was humming a single note, a
tremulous keening. He fumbled with the envelope, brought out a single
sheet of folded paper.

It was typewritten,
with a chessboard or patchwork standard printed at its top. As he
read it, Isaac began to cry out wordlessly.

Copy 1: Aspic Hole. (Others to be delivered to Brock Marsh, Salacus
Fields)

Mr. Dan der Grimnebulin,

Khepri cannot make sounds, but I judge by the chymicals she was
exuding and the trembling of those bugger legs that Lin found the
removal of these useless wings a deeply unpleasant experience. I
don’t doubt that her lower body would also have been righting
us had we not strapped the bug-bitch in a chair.

Lucky Gazid can give you this message, as it is he I have to thank
for your interference.

I gather that you have been trying to squeeze in on the dreamshit
market. At first I thought you might have wanted all that ‘shit
you bought from Gazid for yourself, but the idiot man’s
wittering eventually turned to your caterpillar in Brock Marsh, and I
realized the magnitude of your scheme.

You would never get top grade ‘shit from a moth weaned on
human-consumption dreamshit, of course, but you could have charged
less for your inferior product. It is in my interest to keep all my
customers connoisseurs. I will tolerate no competition.

As I have subsequently learnt, and as one might have expected from an
amateur, you couldn’t control your damn producer. Your shit-fed
runt escaped through your incompetence, and liberated its siblings.
You stupid man.

Here are my demands, (i) That you give yourself up to
me
immediately, (ii) That you return the remains of the dreamshit you
stole from me through Gazid, or pay me compensation (sum to be
arranged), (iii) That you pursue the task of recapturing my
producers, along with your pathetic specimen, to be handed over to me
immediately. After such time as this, we will discuss your continued
life.

While we wait to hear your response, I will continue my discussions
with Lin. I have been enjoying her company greatly over these last
weeks, and relish the chance to deal with her more closely. We have a
little wager.
She
bets that you will respond to this epistle
while she still retains some of her headlegs.
I
remain
unconvinced. The current rate is one headleg every two days we do not
hear from you after today. Who will be proved right?

I will rip them from her while she twitches and spits, do you
understand? And within two weeks I will tear her carapace from her
headbody and feed her living head to the rats. I will
personally
hold her down while they lunch.

I very much look forward to hearing from you soon.

Yours sincerely,

Motley.

When Derkhan, Yagharek
and Lemuel reached the ninth floor, they could hear Isaac’s
voice. He was talking slowly, in low tones. They could not make out
what he was saying, but it sounded like a monologue. He was not
pausing to hear or see any responses.

Derkhan knocked on the
door, and when there was no answer, she pushed it tentatively open
and peered inside.

She saw Isaac and
another man. It was only a few seconds before she recognized Gazid,
and saw that he had been butchered. She gasped and moved slowly
inside, letting Yagharek and Lemuel slip in behind her.

They stood and stared
at Isaac. He was sitting on the bed, holding a pair of insectile
wings and a piece of paper. He looked up at them and his murmuring
subsided. He was crying without a sound. He opened his mouth and
Derkhan moved over to him, grasped his hands. He sobbed and hid his
eyes, his face twisted with rage. Without a sound she took the letter
and read it.

Her mouth quivered in
horror. She emitted a mute little cry for her friend. She passed the
letter to Yagharek, shaking, controlling herself.

The garuda took it and
perused it carefully. His reaction was invisible. He turned to
Lemuel, who was examining Lucky Gazid’s corpse.

"This one’s
been dead a while," he said, and accepted the letter.

His eyes widened as he
read.

"
Motley?"
he breathed. "Lin’s been dealing with
Motley?"

"
Who is he?"
shouted Isaac.
"Where is the fucking piece of scum...?"

Lemuel looked up at
Isaac, his face open and aghast. Pity glimmered in his eyes as he saw
Isaac’s tear-stained, snotty rage.

"Oh Jabber...Mr.
Motley is the kingpin, Isaac," he said simply. He is the
man.
He runs the eastern city. He
runs
it. He’s the outlaw
boss."

"I’ll
fucking
kill the fucker,
I’ll
kill him, I’ll
kill him...
" Isaac raged.

Lemuel watched him
uneasily.
You won’t, ‘Zaac,
he thought.
You
really won’t.

"Lin...wouldn’t
tell me who she’d been working for," said Isaac, his voice
calming slowly.

"I’m not
surprised," said Lemuel. "Most people haven’t heard
of him. Rumours, maybe...Nothing more."

Isaac stood suddenly.
He dragged his sleeve across his face, sniffed hard and cleared his
nose.

"Right, we have to
get her," he said. "We have to find her. Let’s think.
Think.
This...Motley thinks I’ve been ripping him off,
which I haven’t. Now, how can I get him to back down...?"

" ‘Zaac,
‘Zaac..." Lemuel was frozen. He swallowed and looked away,
then walked slowly towards Isaac, holding his hands up wide, begging
him to calm down. Derkhan looked at him, and there it was again, that
pity: hard and brusque, but undoubtedly there. Lemuel was shaking his
head slowly. His eyes were hard, but his mouth worked silently as he
groped for words.

" ‘Zaac,
I’ve dealt with Motley. I’ve never met the guy, but I
know him. I know his work. I know how to deal with him, I know what
to expect. I’ve seen this before, this exact kind of
scenario...Isaac..." He swallowed and continued.
"Lin’s
dead."

**

"No, she is not,"
shouted Isaac, clenching his hands and flailing them around his head.

But Lemuel caught hold
of his wrists, not hard or pugnaciously, but intensely, making him
listen and understand. Isaac was still for a moment, his face wary
and wrathful.

"She’s dead,
Isaac," said Lemuel softly. "I’m sorry, mate. I
really am. I’m sorry, but she’s
gone."
He
moved back. Isaac stood, stricken, shaking his head. His mouth opened
as if he was trying to cry out. Lemuel was shaking his head slowly.
He looked away from Isaac and spoke slowly and quietly, as if to
himself.