Perdido Street Station (80 page)

From behind the
mouldering concrete of the wall, Isaac heard Lemuel’s screams
as the cactacae reached him.

"He’s
nothing to do with it!" he shouted out in a rage of grief.
Pengefinchess, her face set, dropped out of sight into the sewer that
toiled below. "He’s nothing to do with it at all!"
screamed Isaac, desperate for Lemuel’s wails to stop. Derkhan
followed the vodyanoi, her face white, her ruined ear-hole bleeding.
"Let him go you fucks, you shits, you stupid cactus bastards!"
Isaac shrieked over Lemuel’s cacophony. Yagharek descended to
his shoulders and gripped Isaac’s ankle fiercely, gesticulating
at him to come, his inhuman beak clattering as he snapped in
agitation. "He was
helping you...
" shouted Isaac
with exhausted horror.

As Yagharek
disappeared, Isaac gripped the edge of the manhole and lowered
himself in. He squeezed his tight fat bulk past the metal lips and
scrabbled with the lid, preparing to replace it as he dropped out of
sight.

Lemuel continued to
shout, in pain and fear, from over the wall. The brutal sounds of the
terrified, triumphant cactacae punishing the intruder went on and on.

It’ll stop,
thought Isaac desperately as he descended.
They’re
frightened and confused, they don’t know what’s going on.
They’ll put a chakri or a knife or a bullet in his head any
moment, finish this, put an end to this. They’ve no reason to
keep him alive,
he thought,
they’ll kill him because
they think he’s with the moths, they’ll do their bit to
cleanse the dome, they’ll finish this, they’re panicking,
they’re not torturers,
he thought,
they just want to
stop the horror...They’ll end this any second,
he thought
in misery.
This will stop now.

Yet the sound of
Lemuel’s screams continued as he disappeared into the stinking
darkness, and as he pulled the metal seal over his head. And even
then they filtered tinny and absurd through the lid, even as Isaac
fell into the stream of warm, faecal water, and staggered along the
tunnels following the other survivors. He thought he could hear them
even as he crawled through the dripping, trickling, reverberating
water-sounds, underneath the liquid rush, along ancient channels like
rutted veins, away from the Glasshouse, in a confused, random flight
towards the relative safety of the mammoth night-city.

It was a long time
before they were silent.

**

The night is
unthinkable. We can only run. We make animal sounds as we rush to
escape what we have seen. Dread and revulsion and alien emotions
cling to us and cloy our movements. We cannot clean them off.

**

We scrabble our
wounded way up and out from the undercity and reach the railside
hovel. We shiver even in the awful heat, nodding mutely to the
clattering trains that shake our walls. We stare warily at each
other.

Except Isaac, who
looks at nothing.

Do I sleep? Does
anyone sleep? There are moments when the numbness overwhelms me and
clogs up my head so that I cannot see or think. Perhaps these fugues,
these broken zombie moments, are sleep. Sleep for the new city.
Perhaps that is all we can hope for any more.

No one speaks, for a
long, long time.

**

Pengefinchess the
vodyanoi is the first to speak.

She begins quietly,
murmuring things hardly recognizable as words. But she is addressing
us. She sits, her back against the wall, her fat thighs splayed. The
idiot undine winds around her body, washing her clothes, keeping her
wet.

She tells us about
Shadrach and Tansell. The three had met in some ill-defined episode
she glosses over, some mercenary escapade in Tesh, City of the
Crawling Liquid. They had run together for seven years.

The window of our
shack is fringed with ragged stubs of glass. At dawn, they snag
ineffectually at the sunlight. Under a sharp rafter of the
insect-fouled light, Pengefinchess talks in a gentle monotone of her
times with her dead companions: poaching in the Wormseye Scrub;
thievery in Neovadan; tombrobbing in the Ragamoll forest and steppe.

They had never been
three equally united, she says, without spite or rancour. Always she,
then Tansell and Shadrach together, who found in each other
something, some calm passionate connection she could not and did not
want to touch.

Tansell was mad with
grief at the end, she says, unthinking, exploding, a mindless
eruption of thaumaturgic misery. But had he been clear in his brain,
she says, he would have done no different.

So she is on her own
again.

**

Her testimony ends.
It demands response, like some ritual liturgy.

She ignores Isaac,
cosseted in agony. She looks to Derkhan and to me.

We fail her.

Derkhan shakes her
head, wordless and sad.

I try. I open my
beak and the story of my crime and my punishment and my exile wells
up in my throat. It almost emerges, it almost bursts through the
crack.

But I batten it
down. It is not connected. It is not for tonight.

Pengefinchess’s
history is one of selfishness and plunder, yet it is made by the
telling into a valedictory for dead comrades. My history of
selfishness and exile resists transmutation. It cannot but be a base
story of base things. I am silent.

**

But then, as we
prepare to give up on words and let what happen will, Isaac raises
his sluggish head and speaks.

First he demands
food and water that we do not have. Slowly his eyes narrow and he
begins to talk like a sentient creature. In a remote misery, he
describes the deaths he has seen.

He tells us about
the Weaver, the dancing mad god, and its fight with the moths, the
eggs that burnt, the weird sing-song declamations of our unlikely and
untrustworthy champion. In cold and clear words Isaac tells us what
he thinks the Construct Council is become, and what it wants and what
it might be (and Pengefinchess gulps deep in her throat in her
astonishment, her protuberant eyes bulging more as she learns what
has happened to the constructs in the city’s dump).

And the more he
talks the more he talks. He talks of plans. His voice hardens.
Something has come to an end in him, some waiting, some soft patience
that died with Lin and now is buried, and I feel myself become stone
as I hear him. He inspires me to rigour and purpose.

He talks of
betrayals and counter-betrayals, of mathematics and lies and
thaumaturgy, dreams and winged things. He expounds theories. He talks
to me of flight, something I had half forgotten I might ever have,
which I want again, as he mentions it, I want with all of me.

As the sun crawls
like a sweating man to the apex of the sky, we remnants, we dregs,
examine our weapons and our collected debris, our notes and our
stories.

With reserves we did
not know we could summon, with an astonishment I feel as if through a
veil, we make plans. I coil my whip around my hand tight and sharpen
my blade. Derkhan cleans her guns, and murmurs to Isaac.
Pengefinchess sits back and shakes her head. She will go, she warns
us. There is nothing that might incite her to stay. She will sleep a
little, then bid us farewell, she says.

Isaac shrugs. He
pulls compact valved engines from where he has stashed them in the
piled-up rubbish of the shed. He pulls sheafs and sheafs of notes,
sweat-stained, smeared, barely legible, from inside his shirt.

We begin to work,
Isaac more fervently than any of us, scribbling frantically.

He looks up after
hours of muttered oaths and hissing breakthroughs. We cannot do this,
he says. We would need a focus.

And then another
hour or two hours pass and he looks up again.

We have to do this,
he says, and still, we need a focus.

He tells us what we
must do.

**

There is silence,
and then we debate. Quickly. Anxiously. We raise candidates and
discard them. Our criteria are confused—do we choose the doomed
or the loathed? The decrepit or the vile? Do we judge?

Our morality becomes
rushed and furtive.

But the day is more
than half gone, and we must choose.

Her face set hard
but breaking with misery, Derkhan readies herself. She is charged
with the vile task.

She takes what money
we have, including the last nuggets of my gold. She cleans some of
the undercity’s filth from her, changing her accidental
disguise, becoming only a low vagabond, then sets out to hunt for
what we need.

Outside it begins to
darken, and still Isaac works. Tiny confined figures and equations
fill every space, every tiny part of white space, on his few sheets
of paper.

The thick sun
illumines the smears of cloud from below. The sky grows drab with
dusk.

None of us fear the
night’s crop of dreams.

The streetlights
flickered off all over the city, and the sun came up over the Canker.
It picked out the shape of a tiny barge, little more than a raft,
which bobbed on the cool swell.

It was one of many that
littered the twin rivers of New Crobuzon. Left to rot into the water,
the carcasses of old boats floated randomly with the current, tugging
half-heartedly at forgotten moorings. There were many of these
vessels in the heart of New Crobuzon, and the mudlarks dared each
other to swim out to them, or to clamber along the old ropes that
tethered them pointlessly. Some they avoided, whispering that they
were the homes of monsters, the lairs of the drowned who would not
accept that they were dead, even as they rotted.

This one was half
covered with ancient stiffened fabric that stank of oil and rot and
grease. The boat’s old wood skin seeped with the river water.

Hidden in the shadow of
the tarpaulin, Isaac lay looking at the quickly moving clouds. He was
naked and quite still.

He had lain there for
some time. Yagharek had come with him to the river’s edge. They
had crept for more than an hour through the uneasily shifting city,
through the familiar streets of Brock Marsh and up through Gidd, on
under rail-lines and past militia towers, eventually reaching the
southern fringes of Canker Wedge. Less than two miles from the centre
of the city, but a different world. Low, quiet streets and modest
housing, small apologetic parks, frumpy churches and halls, offices
with false fronts and façades in a cacophony of muted styles.

Here there were
avenues. They were nothing like the wide banyan-fringed thoroughfares
of Aspic, or the Rue Conifer in Ketch Heath, magnificently lined with
ancient pine trees. Still, in the outskirts of Canker Wedge were
stunted oaks and darkwoods that hid the architecture’s
failings. Isaac and Yagharek, his feet wrapped in bandages again, his
head hidden in a newly stolen cloak, had been thankful for the cover
of leafy darkness as they made for the river.

There were no great
conglomerations of heavy industry along the Canker. The factories and
workshops and warehouses and docks studded the sides of the slower
Tar, and the Gross Tar which the conjoined rivers became. It was not
until the last mile of its distinct existence, where it passed Brock
Marsh and a thousand laboratory outflows, that the Canker became
fouled and dubious.

In the north of the
city, in Gidd and Rim, and here in Canker Wedge, residents might row
the waters for pleasure, an unthinkable pastime further south. So it
was that Isaac had made his way here, where the river traffic was
quiet, to obey the Weaver’s instructions.

They had found a little
alley between the backs of two rows of houses, a thin sliver of space
that sloped down towards the eddying water. It had not been hard to
find a deserted boat, though there were not a fraction as many as
there were by the industrial riversides of the city.

Leaving Yagharek
watching from beneath his ragged hood like some motionless tramp,
Isaac had picked his way down to the edge of the river. There was a
fringe of grass and a band of thick mud between him and the water,
and he shucked his clothes as he went, collecting them under his arm.
By the time he reached the Canker he was nude under the waning
darkness.

Without hesitating,
steeling himself, he had walked on into the water.

It had been a short,
cold swim to the boat. He had enjoyed it, luxuriating in the feeling,
the black river washing him clean of sewer-filth and days of grime.
He had trailed his clothes behind him, willing the water to suffuse
their fibres and clean them, too.

He had hauled himself
over the side of the boat, his skin prickling as he dried. Yagharek
was barely visible, motionless, watching. Isaac arranged his clothes
around him and pulled the tarpaulin a little way over him, so that he
lay covered by shadows.

He watched the light
arrive in the east and shivered as breezes raised paths of goosefiesh
on him.

"Here I am,"
he murmured. "Naked as a dead man on the river’s dawn. As
requested."

He did not know if the
Weaver’s dreamlike pronouncement, that it had hummed that
ghastly night in the Glasshouse, had been any kind of invitation. But
he thought that by responding to it he might make it one, changing
the patterns of the worldweb, weaving it into a conjuncture that
might, he hoped, please the Weaver.

He had to see the
magnificent spider. He needed the Weaver’s help.

**

Halfway through the
previous night, Isaac and his comrades had become aware that the
night’s tension, the unsettled sick feeling in the air, the
nightmares, had returned. The Weaver’s attack had failed, as it
had predicted. The moths were still alive.