Perdido Street Station (83 page)

**

Inside the dusty shack,
Derkhan waited silently with her gun on Andrej, until eventually they
heard the shuffling sounds of Isaac and Yagharek returning. When
Derkhan opened the door for them, Andrej began to wail and cry out
for help. He was astonishingly loud for such a frail man. Isaac, who
had been about to ask Derkhan what she had told Andrej, broke off
speaking and rushed over to quieten the man.

There was a
half-second, a tiny fraction of time, when Isaac opened his mouth,
and it seemed that he would say something to assuage the old man’s
fears, to assure him that he would be unharmed, that he was in safe
hands, that there was a reason for his bizarre incarceration.
Andrej’s shouts faltered for a moment as he stared at Isaac,
eager to be reassured.

But Isaac was tired,
and he could not think, and the lies that welled up made him feel as
if he would vomit. The patter died away silently, and instead Isaac
walked across to Andrej and overpowered the decrepit man with ease,
stifling his nasal wails with strips of cloth. Isaac bound Andrej
with coils of ancient rope and propped him as comfortably as possible
against a wall. The dying man hummed and exhaled in snotty terror.

Isaac tried to meet his
eye, to murmur some apology, to tell him how sorry he was, but Andrej
could not hear him for fear. Isaac turned away, aghast, and Derkhan
met his eye and grasped his hand quickly, thankful that someone
finally shared her burden.

**

There was much to be
done.

Isaac began his final
calculations and preparations.

Andrej squealed through
his gag and Isaac looked up at him despairingly.

In curt whispers and
brusque expostulations, Isaac explained to Derkhan and Yagharek what
he was doing.

He looked over the
battered engines in the shack, his analytical machines. He pored over
his notes, checking and rechecking his maths, cross-referring them
with the sheets of figures the Council had given him. He drew out the
core of his crisis engine, the enigmatic mechanism that he had
neglected to leave with the Construct Council. It was an opaque box,
a sealed motor of interwoven cables, elyctrostatic and thaumaturgic
circuits.

He cleaned it slowly,
examined its moving parts. Isaac readied himself and his equipment.
When Pengefinchess returned from some unstated errand, Isaac looked
up briefly. She spoke quietly, refusing to meet anyone’s eye.
She gathered herself slowly to leave, checked through her equipment,
oiling her bow to keep it safe under the water. She asked what had
become of Shadrach’s pistol, and clucked regretfully when Isaac
told her he did not know.

"A shame. It was a
powerful piece," she said abstractedly, looking out of the
window and away. "Charmed. A puissant weapon."

Isaac interrupted her.
He and Derkhan implored her to help once more before she left. She
turned and stared at Andrej, seemed to see him for the first time,
ignored Isaac’s pleading and demanded to know what in Hell he
was doing. Derkhan drew her away from Andrej’s snorts of fear
and Isaac’s grim industry, and explained.

Then Derkhan asked
Pengefinchess again if she would perform one last task to help them.
She could only beg.

Isaac half listened,
but he shut his ears quickly to the hissed imploring. He worked
instead on the task in hand, the complicated job of crisis
mathematics.

Andrej whimpered
unceasingly beside him.

Just before four
o’clock, as they prepared to go, Derkhan embraced Isaac and
Yagharek in turn. She hesitated only a moment before holding the
garuda close. He did not respond, but he did not pull away either.

"See you at the
rendezvous," she murmured.

"You know what you
have to do?" Isaac said. She nodded and pushed him towards the
door.

He hesitated now, at
the hardest thing. He looked over to where Andrej lay in a kind of
exhausted stupor of fear, his eyes glazed and his gag sticky with
mucus.

They had to bring him,
and he could not raise the alarm.

He had conferred with
Yagharek about this, in whispers easily hidden under the old man’s
terror. They had no drugs, and Isaac was no bio-thaumaturge, could
not insinuate his fingers briefly through Andrej’s skull and
turn his consciousness temporarily off.

Instead, they were
forced to use Yagharek’s more savage skills.

The garuda thought back
to the fleshpits, remembering the "milk fights": those that
ended with submission or unconsciousness rather than death. He
remembered the techniques he had perfected, adjusting them to his
human opponents.

"He’s an old
man!" hissed Isaac. "And he’s dying, he’s
frail...Be gentle..."

Yagharek sidled along
the wall to where Andrej lay staring at him with tired, nauseous
foreboding.

There was a quick feral
movement, and Yagharek was leaning behind Andrej, on one knee, the
old man’s head pinioned with his left arm. Andrej stared out at
Isaac, his eyes bulging, unable to scream through his gag.
Isaac—horrified, guilty and debased—could not help but
meet his eye. He watched Andrej, knew that the old man thought he was
about to die.

Yagharek’s right
elbow swung down in a sharp arc and smacked with brutal precision
into the back of the dying man’s head, where his skull gave way
into the neck. Andrej gave a short, constricted bark of pain, that
sounded very like vomiting. His eyes flickered out of focus, then
closed. Yagharek did not let Andrej’s head fall away: he kept
his arms tense, pulling his bony elbow hard into soft flesh, counting
seconds.

Eventually he let
Andrej slump.

"He will wake,"
he said. "Perhaps in twenty minutes, perhaps in two hours. I
must watch him. I can send him to sleep again. But we must be
careful—too much and we will starve his brain of blood."

They wrapped Andrej’s
motionless body with random rags. They hauled him up between them,
each with one arm over a shoulder. He was wasted, his insides
devoured over years. He weighed shockingly little.

They moved together,
supporting the enormous sack of equipment between them with their
free arms, carrying it as carefully as if it were a religious relic,
the body of some saint.

They were still swathed
in their absurd, wearisome disguises, bent and shuffling like
beggars. Under his hood, Isaac’s dark skin was still dappled
with tiny scabs from his savage shaving. Yagharek wrapped his head,
like his feet, in rotten cloth, leaving one tiny slit through which
to see. He looked like a faceless leper hiding his decaying skin.

The three of them
looked like some appalling caravan of vagrants, a travelling
convocation of the dispossessed.

At the door, they
turned their heads once, quickly. They both raised their hands in
farewell to Derkhan. Isaac looked over to where Pengefinchess watched
them placidly. Hesitantly, he raised his hand to her, raised his
eyebrows in a query—
Will I see you again?
he might have
been asking, or
Will you help us?
Pengefinchess raised her
great splayed hand in noncommittal response and looked away.

Isaac turned away, set
his lips.

He and Yagharek began
the dangerous journey across the city.

They did not risk
crossing the rail bridge. They were afraid in case an irate train
driver did more than blast them with a steam-whistle as he tore past.
He might stare at them and clock their faces, or report to his
superiors at Sly or Spit Bazaar Stations, or at Perdido Street
Station itself, that three stupid dossers had blundered their way
onto the rails and were heading for disaster.

Interception was too
dangerous. So instead, Isaac and Yagharek clambered down the
crumbling stone slope by the railway line, hanging on to Andrej’s
body as it tumbled and sprawled towards the quiet pavements.

The heat was intense,
but not fierce: it seemed instead like some absence, some enormous
citywide lack. It was as if the sun was etiolated, as if its rays
bleached out the shadows and cool undersides that gave the
architecture its reality. The sun’s heat stifled sounds and
bled them of substance. Isaac sweated and cursed quietly beneath his
putrid rags. He felt as if he stalked through some vaguely realized
dream of heat.

With Andrej supported
between them like a friend paralysed with cheap liquor, Isaac and
Yagharek tramped through the streets, making for Cockscomb Bridge.

They were interlopers
here. This was not Dog Fenn or Badside or the Ketch Heath slums.
There, they would have been invisible.

They crossed the bridge
nervously. They were hemmed in by its lively stones, surrounded by
the sneers and jibes of shopkeepers and customers.

Yagharek kept one
surreptitious hand clamped on a cluster of nerve and arterial tissue
at the side of Andrej’s neck, ready to pinch hard if the old
man gave any sign of waking. Isaac muttered, a coarse babble of
swearing that sounded like drunken rambling. It was a disguise, in
part. He was also steeling himself.

"Come on, fucker,"
he grunted, tense and quiet, "come on, come on. Fucker. Scum.
Bastard." He did not know who he was swearing at.

Isaac and Yagharek
crossed the bridge slowly, supporting their companion and their
precious bag of equipment. The flow of people parted around them, let
them pass with only jeers behind them. They could not let the
opprobrium grow and become confrontation.

If some bored toughs
decided to kill time by harassing beggars, it would be catastrophic.

But they passed over
Cockscomb Bridge, where they felt isolated and open, where the sun
seemed to etch out their edges and mark them for attack, and slipped
into Petty Coil. The city seemed to close its lips around them and
they felt safer again.

There were other
beggars here, walking in the train of local notables, earringed
villains and fat money-lenders and pinch-lipped madams. Andrej
stirred slightly and Yagharek closed his mind down again, laid hands
on him efficiently.

Here there were
backstreets. Isaac and Yagharek could peel away from the main roads
and head down along overshadowed alleys. They passed under washing
that linked the facing terraces of tall, narrow streets. They were
watched by men and women in underclothes who idly leaned over
balconies, flirting with their neighbours. They passed piles of
rubbish and broken sewer coverings, and children leaned out from
above and spat at them without rancour, or threw little pebbles and
ran away.

As always, they sought
the railway line. They found it at Sly Station, where the Salacus
Fields trains branched away from the Sud Line. They sidled up to the
raised path of arches that wove unsteadily above the cobbles of Spit
Hearth. The air above the raucous crowds was reddening as the sun
wound slowly towards gloaming. The arches were fouled with oil and
soot, sprouting a microforest of mould and moss and tenacious
climbing plants. They swarmed with lizards and insects, aspises
sheltering from the heat.

Isaac and Yagharek
ducked into a dirty cul-de-sac by the track’s concrete and
brick foundations. They rested. Life rustled in the urban thicket
above them.

Andrej was light, but
he was beginning to weigh them down, his mass seeming to increase
with every second. They stretched their aching arms and shoulders,
drew deep breaths. A few feet away, the crowds emerging from the
station thronged past the entrance to their little hideaway.

When they had rested
and rearranged their burdens, they braced themselves and set out
again, into the backstreets once more, walking in the shadow of the
Sud Line, towards the city’s heart, the towers not yet visible
over the surrounding miles of houses: the Spike and the turrets of
Perdido Street Station.

Isaac began to talk. He
told Yagharek what he thought would happen that night.

**

Derkhan made her way
through the reclaimed filth of the Griss Twist dump towards the
Construct Council.

Isaac had warned the
great Constructed Intelligence that she would be coming. She knew she
was expected. The idea made her uncomfortable.

As she approached the
hollow that was the Council’s lair, she thought she heard a
susurration of lowered voices. She stiffened instantly, and drew her
pistol. She checked that it was loaded, and that the firing pan was
full.

Derkhan picked up her
feet, stalking with care, avoiding any sound. At the end of a channel
of rubbish, she saw the opening-out of the hollow. Someone walked
briefly past her field of view. She stole carefully closer.

Then another man walked
past the end of the gorge of crushed garbage, and she saw that he was
dressed in work overalls, and that he was staggering slightly under
the weight of a burden. Slung over his broad shoulder was a massive
coil of black-coated cable, entwining him vastly like some predatory
constrictor.

She straightened up
slightly. It was not the militia waiting for her. She walked on into
the presence of the Construct Council.

**

She entered the hollow,
glancing up nervously to ensure that there were no airships overhead.
Then she turned to the scene before her, gasping at the scale of the
gathering.

On all sides, engaged
in all manner of opaque tasks, were nearly a hundred men and women.
Mostly human, there were a handful of vodyanoi among them, and even
two khepri. All were dressed in cheap and soiled clothes. And almost
all were carrying or squatting before enormous coils of industrial
cable.

It came in a variety of
styles. Most was black, but there were brown and blue coatings as
well, and red and grey. There were pairs of burly men staggering
under loops nearly the thickness of a man’s thigh. Others
carried skeins of wire no more than four inches in diameter.