Perdido Street Station (91 page)

Isaac heard Derkhan
shout a foul oath. Yagharek had leapt across the roof to her and
flailed expertly with his whip, sending her attacker spinning. Isaac
turned and fired at the falling figure, heard him grunt with pain as
the bullet tore open the muscle of his shoulder.

The airships were
almost overhead now. Derkhan was sitting back from the brink a
little, blinking rapidly, her eyes fouled with clods of brickdust
from where a bullet had shattered the wall beside her.

There were about five
militia left on the roofs, and they were still coming, slow and
stealthy.

A final insectile
shadow swooped towards the roof from the south-east of the city. It
looped in a long S-curve under the Spit Hearth skyrail and shot up
again, riding the updrafts in the hot night, coming in towards the
station.

"They’re all
here," whispered Isaac.

As he refilled his gun,
spilling powder inexpertly about him, he looked up. His eyes widened:
the first moth approached. It was a hundred feet above him and then
sixty, then suddenly twenty and ten. He stared at it in awe. It
seemed to move with no pace at all as time stretched out thin and
very slow. Isaac saw the clutching half-simian paws and jagged tail,
the enormous mouth and chattering teeth, eyesockets with their clumsy
antennae stubs like fumbling maggots, a hundred extrusions of flesh
that whiplashed and unfolded and pointed and snapped shut in a
hundred mysterious motions...and the wings, those prodigious,
untrustworthy, constantly altering wings, tides of weird colour
drenching them and retreating like sudden squalls.

He watched the moth
directly, ignoring the mirrors before his eyes. It had no time for
him. It ignored him.

He was frozen for a
long moment, in a terror of memories.

The slake-moth swept
past him and a great backwash of air sent his hair and coat flailing.

The clutching
multilimbed creature reached out, unrolled its enormous tongue, spat
and chittered in obscene hunger. It landed on Andrej like some
nightmare spirit, clutched him and sought desperately to drink.

As its tongue slid
rapidly in and out of Andrej’s orifices, coating him in that
thick citric saliva, another moth careened in on a trough of air,
crashing into the first moth and fighting it for position on Andrej’s
body.

The old man was
twitching as his muscles fought to make sense of the slew of absurd
stimuli engulfing them. The torrent of Weaver/Council brainwaves
blasted up and out of his skull.

The engine lying on the
roofspace rattled. It grew dangerously hot as its pistons fought to
retain control of the enormous wash of crisis energy. Rain spat and
evaporated as it hit it.

As the third moth came
in to land, the struggle to feed at the mouth of the font, at the
pseudo-mind pouring from Andrej’s skull, continued. In an
irritated convulsive motion, the first moth slapped the second a few
feet away, where it licked eagerly at the back of Andrej’s
head.

The first moth plunged
its tongue into Andrej’s slavering mouth, then removed it with
a sickening
plop
and sought another outflow. It found the
little trumpet on Andrej’s helmet, from which the whole
bursting wash of ever-increasing output poured. The moth slid its
tongue into the opening and around dimensional corners into and out
of the aether, rolling the sinuous organ around the multifarious
planes of the flow.

It squealed in delight.

Its skull vibrated in
its flesh. Gouts of the intense artificial mind-waves spurted down
its throat and dripped invisibly from its mouth, a burning jet of
intense, sweet thought-calories that poured and poured into the
moth’s belly, more powerful, more concentrated than its
day-to-day feed by a vast and increasing factor, an uncontrollable
torrent of energy that raged through the slake-moth’s gullet
and filled its stomach in seconds.

The moth could not
break free. It locked in, gorged and fixated. It could sense danger,
but it could not care, could not think of anything apart from the
entrancing, inebriating flow of food that held it, that focused it.
It was fixed with the mindless intent of a night insect battering
itself against cracked glass to find a way in to a deadly flame.

The slake-moth
immolated itself, immersed itself in the torrential blasts of power.

Its stomach swelled and
chitin creaked. The massive wash of mental emanations overwhelmed it.
The huge and skulking creature jerked once; its belly and skull burst
with wet, explosive sounds.

**

Instantly it snapped
back, dying quickly in two sprays of ichor and ragged skin, entrails
and brainstuff bursting in curves from its massive injuries, oozing
with undigested, indigestible mind-liquor. It slumped dead across
Andrej’s insensible form, twitching with spastic motion,
dripping and broken.

**

Isaac bellowed with
delight, a massive shout of astonished triumph. Andrej was briefly
forgotten.

Derkhan and Yagharek
turned quickly and stared at the dead moth.

"
Yes!"
shouted Derkhan exultantly, and Yagharek emitted the wordless
ululating cry of a successful hunter. Below them, the militia paused.
They could not see what had happened, and they were unnerved by the
sudden shouts of triumph.

The second moth was
scrambling over the body of its fallen sibling, licking and sucking.
The crisis engine still sounded; Andrej still crawled in agony in the
rain, unaware of what was happening. The slake-moth scrabbled for the
continuing flow of bait.

The third moth arrived,
sending rainwater spraying in the downdrafts from its ferociously
beating wings. It paused for a fraction of a second, tasting the dead
moth in the air, but the stench of those astonishing Weaver/Council
waves were irresistible. It crawled through the sticky slick of the
fallen moth’s bowels.

The other moth was
quicker. It found the outflow pipe of the helmet and thrust its mouth
into the funnel, its tongue anchoring it like some vampiric umbilical
cord.

It gulped and sucked,
hungry and exhilarated, drunk, burnt up with its desires.

It was captivated. It
could not resist when the power of the food began to burn a hole in
its stomach wall. It whined and puked, metadimensional globules of
brainpattern travelling back up its gullet and meeting the torrent
that it still sucked like nectar, converging in its throat and
suffocating it, until the soft skin of its throat distended and
split.

It began to bleed and
die from the ragged tracheotomy, still drinking from the helmet and
hastening its own death. The swell of energy was too much: it
destroyed the moth as quickly and completely as its own unadulterated
milk would a human. The slake-moth’s mind burst flatly like a
great blood-blister.

It fell back, its
tongue retracting sluggishly like old elastic.

Isaac roared again as
the third moth kicked away the twitching corpse of its sisterbrother
and fed.

**

The militia were
breaching the last rise of rooftop before the plateau. Yagharek moved
in a lethal dance, suddenly murderous. His whip slashed; officers
stumbled and fell away, ducked out of sight, moved warily behind the
chimneys.

Derkhan fired again,
into the face of a militiaman who rose before her, but the main wad
of powder in the shaft of her pistol did not properly ignite. She
cursed and held the gun away from her at arm’s length, trying
to keep it trained on the officer. He moved forward and the powder
finally exploded, sending a ball over his head. He ducked and slipped
to one foot on the frictionless roofspace.

Isaac pointed his gun
and fired as the man fought to stand, sending a bullet into the back
of his skull. The man jerked and his head battered against the
ground. Isaac reached for his powder horn, then slid back. There was
no time to reload, he realized. The last clutch of officers was
vaulting towards him. They had been waiting for him to fire.

"Get back, Dee!"
he yelled, and moved away from the edge.

Yagharek knocked one
man down with a whipstrike at his legs, but he had to withdraw as the
officers approached. Derkhan, Yagharek and Isaac moved back from the
brink and looked desperately around for weapons.

Isaac stumbled on the
segmented limb of a fallen moth. Behind him, the third moth was
emitting little cries of greed as it drank. They fused into a single
wail, an extended animal sound of delight or misery.

Isaac turned at the
sound of the bleating and was caught in a moist detonation of flesh.
Shredded innards slopped noisily over the roof, rendering it
treacherous.

The third moth had
succumbed.

Isaac stared at the
dark, lolling shape, hard and variegated, as big as a bear. It was
spreadeagled in a radial burst of limbs and bodyparts, dripping from
its emptied-out thorax. The Weaver bent forward like a child and
prodded the splayed exoskeleton with a tentative finger.

Andrej still moved,
though his scissoring kicks were fitful. The moths had not drunk him,
but the massive wash of artificial thoughts that bubbled up from the
helmet. His mind still worked, bewildered and fearful and locked in
the terrible feedback loop of the crisis engine. He was slowing down,
his body collapsing under the extraordinary strain. His mouth worked
in exaggerated yawns to clear itself of the thick, rotten-smelling
saliva.

Directly above him, the
final moth had spiralled into the fountain of energy from his helmet.
Its wings were still, angled to control its fall, as it dropped like
some murderous weapon out of the sky towards the tangled carnage. It
bore down on the source of the feast, a clutch of arms and hands and
hooks extended in frantic predation.

The militia lieutenant
rose a foot or so over the grooved guttering at the edge of the
plateau. He faltered and shouted something at his men—"...ing
Weaver!"—then fired wildly at Isaac. Isaac leapt sideways,
grunted in quick triumph when he realized that he was uninjured. He
grabbed a spanner from the pile of tools by his foot and hurled it at
the mirrored helmet.

Something rocked
unsteadily in the air around Isaac. His gut tensed and fluttered. He
looked around wildly.

Derkhan was moving
backwards from the edge of the roof, her face creased with
inarticulate horror. She was staring around her in inchoate fear.
Yagharek was holding his left hand to his head, the long knife
dangling uncertainly from his fingers. His right hand, his whip, was
motionless.

The Weaver looked up
and muttered.

There was a small round
hole in Andrej’s chest where the officer’s bullet had
caught him. Blood was welling out of it in lazy pulses, dribbling
across his belly and saturating his filthy clothes. His face was
white, his eyes closed.

Isaac shouted and
rushed to him, held the old man’s hand.

The pattern of Andrej’s
brainwaves faltered. The engines combining the Weaver’s and the
Council’s exudations skittered uncertainly as their template,
their reference, suddenly ebbed.

Andrej was tenacious.
He was an old man whose body was collapsing under the oppressive
weight of a rotting, wasting disease, whose mind was stiff with
coagulated dream-emissions. But even with a bullet lodged under his
heart and his lung haemorrhaging, it took him nearly ten seconds to
die.

Isaac held Andrej as he
breathed bloodily. The bulky helmet lolled absurdly on his head.
Isaac clenched his teeth as the old man died. At the very end, in
what might have been a twitch of dying nerves, Andrej tensed and
clutched Isaac, hugging him back in what Isaac desperately wanted to
be forgiveness.

I had to I’m
sorry I’m sorry,
he thought giddily.

**

Behind Isaac the Weaver
still drew patterns in the spilt juices of the slake-moths. Yagharek
and Derkhan were calling to Isaac, screaming at him, as the militia
came over the edge of the roof.

One of the dirigibles
had lowered itself now until it hung sixty or seventy feet over the
flattened roofscape below. It loomed like a bloated shark. A tangle
of ropes was spilling untidily through the darkness towards the great
expanse of clay.

Andrej’s brain
went out like a broken lamp.

A confused tangle of
information weltered through the analytical engines.

Without Andrej’s
mind as referent, the combination of the Weaver’s and the
Construct Council’s waves became suddenly random, their
proportions skewing and rolling unsteadily. They no longer modelled
anything: they were just an untidy slosh of oscillating particles and
waves.

The crisis was gone.
The thickening mixture of mindwaves was no more than the sum of its
parts, and it had stopped trying to be. The paradox, the tension,
disappeared. The vast field of crisis energy evaporated.

The burning gears and
motors of the crisis engine stuttered to an abrupt stop.

With a crushing
implosive collapse, the enormous wash of mental energy was snuffed
instantly out.

Isaac, Derkhan,
Yagharek and the militia for thirty feet around let out cries of
pain. They felt as if they had walked from bright sunlight into a
darkness so sudden and total it hurt them. They ached drably behind
their eyes.

Isaac let Andrej’s
body fall slowly to the wet ground.

**

In the wet heat a
little way above the station, the last slake-moth eddied in
confusion. It beat its wings in complex four-way patterns, sent coils
of air in all directions. It hovered.

The rich trough of
food, that unthinkable gush, was gone. The frenzy that had overtaken
the moth, the terrible, uncompromising hunger, had gone.

It licked out and its
antennae trembled. There were a handful of minds below it, but before
it could attack the moth sensed the chaotic bubbling consciousness of
the Weaver, and it remembered its agonizing battles and it screeched
in fear and rage, stretching its neck back and baring its monstrous
teeth.