Perdido Street Station (66 page)

As it fumbled, it
spitseared in fear, without aim or direction, emblazoning the night
with igniting gas in a massive burst. The edge of the cloud almost
caught the Rescue-handlinger as it fought to obey its sinistral’s
panicked mental cries. It spun for yards to avoid the swelling globe
of scalding air and bolted into the body of the wounded moth.

The creature quivered
with pain and fear. The Weaver had been pulled from its tortured
body, but it was dropping miserably towards its nest, its wounds
dripping and its joints crushed and in agony. For once, it had no
interest in food. It rippled in pain as the Rescue-handlinger and its
dog-sinistral thumped it.

In a petulant spasm,
two huge biotic jags scissored out like secateurs from the slake-moth
and sliced both Montjohn Rescue’s and the dog’s heads off
with one quick, grisly sound.

The heads fell away
into the darkness.

The handlingers
remained alive and conscious, but with the brainstems of their hosts
gone they could not control their dying bodies. The human and canine
carcasses jerked and danced in a posthumous fit. Blood gushed and
pumped energetically over the tumbling bodies, over the frantic
handlingers, which keened and clenched their fingers.

They were awake all the
way down, till they landed on the punishing concrete of a backyard in
Petty Coil in a bizarre splash of mangled flesh and bone fragments.
They and their decapitated host-bodies were instantly shattered.
Their bone was powdered, their flesh tenderized beyond repair.

The blindfolded
vodyanoi had almost undone the leather connections that locked him to
the woman-handlinger, whose mind the slake-moth held. But as the
vodyanoi-dextrier was about to undo the last fastening and peel away
into the sky, the slake-moth moved in to feed.

It wrapped its
insectile arms around its prey, clasping it tight. It pulled the
woman to it, as it pushed its questing tongue into her mouth and
began to drink the handlinger’s dreams. The slake-moth sucked
eagerly.

It was a rich brew. The
residue of the human host’s thoughts eddied like silt or coffee
grounds through the handlinger’s mind. The slake-moth reached
around the woman’s body and hugged her to it, puncturing the
flabby vodyanoi flesh attached to her back with its bone-hard limbs.
The dextrier screamed in fear and sudden pain, and the moth could
taste the terror in the air. It was confused for a moment, unsure of
this other mind that sprouted so close to its meal. But it recovered,
gripped tighter, determined to sup again when it had licked this
first treat dry.

The vodyanoi-body was
trapped as its sinistral passenger was drained. It struggled and
cried out, but it could not escape.

**

A little way away in
the air, behind its feeding sibling, the slake-moth which had snared
the Weaver whipped its stinging tentacular tail through various
dimensions. The vast spider flickered in and out of the sky with a
frantic speed. Whenever it appeared the Weaver began to fall: gravity
entangled it remorselessly. It would blink out to some other aspect,
dragging the jagged harpoon-tip of the tentacle with it, embedded in
its flesh. In that other aspect it would scamper and shake to throw
off its attacker, before reappearing in the mundane plane, using its
weight and leverage, then disappearing again.

The slake-moth was
tenacious, somersaulting around its prey, refusing to let it escape.

The handlinger clerk
kept up a frenzied, fearful monologue. It sought its fellow
sinistral, in the body of the younger, muscled man.

dead all dead our
fellows,
it screamed. Some of what it had seen, some of its
emotion, flowed back down the channel into the head of its dextrier.
The old woman’s body yawed uneasily.

The other sinistral
tried to remain calm. It moved its head from side to side, trying to
exude authority,
stop,
it commanded peremptorily. It gazed
through its mirrors at the three moths behind it: the wounded,
limping through the air, down towards its hidden nest; the hungry,
lunching from the minds of the trapped handlingers; and the fighting,
still thrashing like a shark, trying to tear the head from the
Weaver.

The sinistral pushed
its dextrier a little closer,
take them now,
it thought, and
sent to its fellow,
spitsear hard, take two. chase the wounded.
Then it flicked its head from side to side suddenly, and an anguished
thought escaped it.
where’s the other?
it cried.

The other, the last
slake-moth that had escaped the sheets of fire from the old woman’s
tongue and dropped out of sight in an elegant dive, had described a
long, curling loop over the rooftops. It had swept out and up and
back, flying slowly and quietly, turning its wings a drab camouflaged
dun, hiding out against the clouds, to pounce now, appearing in a
sudden burst of dark colours, a shimmering slick of hypnagogic
patterns.

It appeared on the
other side of the handlingers, before the sinistrals’ eyes. The
sinistral in the young human male snapped to with a paroxysm of
shock, seeing the predatory beast bask, its wings held tight. The
sinistral felt its mind begin to go slack before the midnight shades
sinuously mutating on the slake-moth’s wings.

It felt a moment of
terror, then nothing but a violent and incomprehensible wash of
dreams...

**

...then terror
again,
and it shuddered, the fear mixing with desperate joy as it realized
it was thinking once more.

Faced with two sets of
enemies, the slake-moth had hesitated a moment, then twisted slightly
in the air. It had altered the angle of its hovering, so that the
ensnaring face of its wings was turned full on to the clerk and the
old woman who bore him. They, after all, were the handlingers that
had tried to burn it.

The freed sinistral saw
the massive body of the slake-moth before it, angled away, its wings
hidden. To its left it saw the old woman turn her head nervously,
unsure of what was happening, saw the clerk’s eyes unfocus.

now burn it now now!
the sinistral tried to shriek to the old woman, across the gulf of
air. Her dextrier puckered up her mouth to spitsear when the enormous
moth crossed the air between them too fast even to see and clasped
the handlingers to it, slobbering like a famished man.

There was a burst of
mental screaming. The old woman began to spit her fire, which bolted
out harmlessly away from the slake-moth which gripped her,
evaporating in the curdling air.

Even as the wave of
horror gusted through it, the last sinistral, in the body of the man
astride the homeless child, saw a terrifying thing in its mirror
helm. The Weaver’s claws flashed visible for a moment, and the
tail-harpoon of the slake-moth attacking it snapped away, its jag
severed, its torn tail spewing blood. The moth screamed silently and,
free of the Weaver, which did not reappear, hurtled through the warm
night air towards the handlinger pair.

And before its eyes,
the sinistral saw the moth in front of it look up from its repast,
twist its head over its shoulder and wave its antennae towards him,
in a slow, ominous motion.

There were moths before
it and behind it. The dextrier in the tough little street kid’s
body shivered and waited for directions.

dive!
screamed
the sinistral in sudden, mad fear,
dive and away! mission abort!
alone and doomed, escape, spitsear and fly!

A great wash of panic
gushed into the dextrier’s mind. The child’s face twisted
in terror and it began to spew fire. It plunged towards New
Crobuzon’s sweating stones, its dank and rotting wood, like a
soul towards Hell.

dive dive dive!
screamed the sinistral, as the moths licked its terror trail with
their vile tongues.

The night shadows of
the city reached up like fingers and drew the handlingers in, back to
the sunless city of mundane betrayal and danger, away from the mad,
impenetrable, unspeakable menace in the clouds.

Isaac damned the
Construct Council to Hell, demanded to be released. Blood streamed
from his nose and clotted in his beard. Some way from him, Yagharek
and Derkhan struggled in the arms of their construct captors. They
battled with a miserable lassitude. They knew they were trapped.

Through the migraine
haze, Isaac saw the great Construct Council raise its bony metal arm
to the skies. At the same moment, the gaunt and bloody human avatar
pointed up with the same arm, in an unsettling visual echo.

"It is coming,"
the Council said in the man’s dead voice.

Isaac howled in rage
and twisted his head skyward, bucking and whipping from side to side
in a fruitless effort to dislodge the helmet.

Below the skittering
clouds he saw a huge spreadeagled shape approaching haphazardly
through the sky. It lurched in an eager, chaotic movement. Derkhan
and Yagharek saw it, and faltered into immobility.

The perplexing organic
shape moved closer with a terrifying speed. Isaac closed his eyes,
then opened them again. He had to see the thing.

It drew closer,
dropping suddenly, cruising low and slow over the river. Its manifold
limbs opened and shut. Its body juddered in complex unity.

Even from that distance
and even through his fear, Isaac could see that the slake-moth that
approached him was a sorry specimen, compared to the terrible
predatory perfection of the one that had taken Barbile. The twists
and convolutions, the half-random whorls and skeins of intricate
flesh that had made up that rapacious totality had been functions of
some unthinkable, inhuman symmetry, cells multiplying like obscure
and imaginary numbers. This, though, this eager flapping shape with
gnarled extremities, body segments misshapen and incomplete, its
weaponry stubby and mangled in the cocoon...this was a freak,
malformed.

This was the slake-moth
that Isaac had fed on bastardized food. The moth that had tasted the
dripping juices from Isaac’s own head, as he lay trembling in a
dreamshit fix. It was still hunting that taste, it seemed, that first
delicious intimation of a purer sustenance.

This unnatural birth
was the start, Isaac realized, of all the troubles.

"Oh sweet Jabber,"
whispered Isaac in a trembling voice, "Devil’s Tail...Gods
help me..."

**

In a curling upsurge of
industrial dust, the slake-moth landed. It folded its wings.

It crouched, its back
curved and tight, a pose of simian pugnacity. It held its cruel
arms—flawed, but still vicious and powerful—with the
killing poise of a hunter. It swept its long, thin head slowly from
side to side, its eyesocket antennae fumbling in the air.

All around it,
constructs shifted minutely. The slake-moth ignored them all. Its
brutal, coarse mouth opened and emitted that salacious tongue,
flickered it like a huge ribbon across the gathering.

Derkhan moaned and the
moth shuddered.

Isaac tried to yell to
her to be quiet, not to let it feel her, but he could not speak.

The waves of Isaac’s
mind oscillated like a heartbeat, rocking the psychosphere of the
dump. The moth could taste it, knew it for the same mind-liquor it
had sought before. The other little titbits it could sense were
nothing beside it, little morsels by a feast.

The slake-moth quivered
with anticipation, and turned its back on Yagharek and Derkhan. It
faced Isaac. It stood slowly on four of its limbs, opened its mouth
with a tiny, childish hiss, and spread its mesmeric wings.

**

For a moment, Isaac
tried to close his eyes. A little adrenalized part of his brain threw
up strategies for escape.

But he was so tired, so
befuddled, so miserable and in so much pain, he left it too late.
Blearily, unclearly at first, he saw the slake-moth’s wings.

The rippling tide of
colours unfolded like anemones, a gentle, uncanny unfurling of
enthralling shades. On both sides of the moth’s body, the
perfectly mirrored midnight tinctures slipped like thieves down
Isaac’s optic nerve and smeared themselves across his mind.

Isaac saw the
slake-moth stalk slowly towards him across the wasteground, saw the
perfectly symmetrical, curling wings flutter gently and bathe him in
their narcotic display.

And then his mind
slipped like a faltering flywheel, and he knew nothing except a slew
of dreams. A froth of memories and impressions and regrets
effervesced up from within him.

This was not like the
dreamshit. There was no core of him to watch and cling to sentience.
These were not invading dreams. They were his own and there was no
he
to watch them boil, he was the wash of images itself, he was the
recall and the symbol. Isaac
was
the memory of parent-love,
the deep sex fantasies and memories, the bizarre neurotic inventions,
the monsters, the adventures, the slips in logic the aggrandizing
self-memory the mutating mass of the undermind triumphant over
ratiocination and cognition and the reflection that spawned it the
terrible and awesome interlocking charges of subconsciousness the
dreaming

the dreaming

it

it
stopped

stopped
suddenly
and Isaac bellowed at the sudden breathtaking tug of reality.

He blinked fervently as
his mind slatted suddenly down into layers, the subconscious falling
back to where it belonged. He swallowed hard. His head felt as if it
was imploding, reorganizing itself out of a chaos of unpicked shreds.

He heard Derkhan’s
voice coming to the end of some announcement.

"...incredible!"
she shouted. "Isaac? Isaac, can you hear me? Are you all right?"

Isaac closed his eyes
for a moment, then opened them slowly. The night swam back into
focus.