Perdido Street Station (93 page)

He was lying in a shaft
of moonlight in some dusty little attic. Sounds filtered into the
space through the wooden floors and walls.

Derkhan and Yagharek
were raising themselves slowly and carefully onto their elbows,
shaking their heads. As Isaac watched, Derkhan reached up quickly and
gently felt the sides of her head. Her remaining ear—and his,
he quickly ascertained—was untouched.

The Weaver loomed in
the corner of the room. It stepped forward slightly, and behind it,
Isaac saw a militiaman. The officer seemed paralysed. He sat with his
back against the wall, shaking quietly, his smooth faceplate
skewwhiff and falling from his head. His rifle lay across his lap.
Isaac’s eyes widened when he saw it.

It was glass. A perfect
and useless model of a flintlock rifle rendered in glass.

...THIS WOULD BE
HOMESTEAD FOR THE FLEETING WINGED ONE...crooned the Weaver. It
sounded subdued again, as if its energy had ebbed from it during the
journey through the planes of the web...SEE MY LOOKING-GLASS MAN MY
PLAYMATE MY FRIENDLING...it whispered...HE AND ME SHALL WHILE TIME
AWAY THIS IS THE RESTING PLACE OF THE VAMPIR MOTH THIS IS WHERE IT
FOLDS ITS WINGS AND HIDES TO EAT AGAIN I WILL PLAY TIC-TAC-TOE AND
BOXES WITH MY GLASS-GUNNER...

It stepped back into
the corner of the room and set itself down suddenly with a jerk of
its legs. One of its knife-hands flashed like elyctricity, moving
with extraordinary speed, scoring a three-by-three grid onto the
boards before the comatose officer’s lap.

The Weaver etched a
cross into a corner square, then sat back and waited, whispering to
itself.

Isaac, Derkhan and
Yagharek shuffled into the centre of the room.

"I thought it was
going to get us away," mumbled Isaac. "It’s followed
the fucking moth...It’s here, somewhere..."

"We have to take
it," whispered Derkhan, her face set. "We’ve almost
got them all. Let’s finish it."

"With
what?"
hissed Isaac. "We’ve got our fucking helmets and that’s
it.
We’ve not got any weapons to face the likes of that
thing...we don’t even know where we damn-well are..."

"We have to get
the Weaver to help us," said Derkhan.

**

But their attempts were
quite fruitless. The gigantic spider ignored them utterly, wittering
quietly to itself and waiting intently, as if waiting for the frozen
militia officer to complete his move in tic-tac-toe. Isaac and the
others entreated with the Weaver, begged it to help them, but they
seemed suddenly invisible to it. They turned away in frustration.

"We have to go out
there," said Derkhan suddenly. Isaac met her eyes. Slowly, he
nodded. He strode across to the window and peered out.

"I can’t
tell where we are," he said eventually. "It’s just
streets." He moved his head exaggeratedly from side to side,
seeking some landmark. He re-entered the room eventually, shaking his
head. "You’re right, Dee," he said. "Maybe
we’ll...find something...maybe we can get out of here."

**

Yagharek moved without
sound, stalking from the little room into a dimly lit corridor. He
looked up and down its length, carefully.

The wall to his left
slanted steeply in with the roof. To his right, the narrow passage
was broken with two doors, before it curved away to the right and
disappeared in shadows.

Yagharek kept crouched
down. He beckoned slowly behind him, without looking, and Derkhan and
Isaac emerged slowly. They carried their guns loaded with the last of
their powder, damp and unreliable, aiming vaguely into the darkness.

They waited while
Yagharek crept slowly on, then followed him in faltering, pugnacious
steps.

Yagharek stopped by the
first door and flattened his feathered head against it. He waited a
moment, then pushed it open slowly, slowly. Derkhan and Isaac crept
over, peered into an unlit storeroom.

"Is there anything
in there we can use?" hissed Isaac, but the shelves were empty
of everything except dry and dusty bottles, ancient decaying brushes.

When Yagharek reached
the second door, he repeated the operation, waving at Isaac and
Derkhan to be still and listening intently through the thin wood.
This time he was still for much longer. The door was bolted several
times, and Yagharek fumbled with all the simple slide-locks. There
was a fat padlock, but it was resting open across one of the bolts,
as if it had been left for a moment. Yagharek pushed slowly at the
door. He poked his head through the resulting gap and stood like
that, perched half in, half out of the room for a disconcertingly
long time.

When he withdrew, he
turned.

"Isaac," he
said quietly. "You must come."

Isaac frowned and
stepped forward, his heart beating hard in his chest.

What is it?
he
thought.
What’s going on? (And even as he thought that a
voice in the deepest part of his mind told him what was waiting for
him, and he only half heard it, would not listen for fear that it was
wrong.)

He pushed past Yagharek
and walked hesitantly into the room.

It was a large,
rectangular attic space, lit by three oil-lamps and the thin wisps of
gaslight that found their way up from the street and through the
grubby, sealed window. The floor was littered with a tangle of metal
and discarded rubbish. The room stank.

Isaac was only
fleetingly conscious of any of this.

In a dim corner, turned
away from the door, kneeling up and chewing dutifully with her back
and head and gland attached to an extraordinary twisted sculpture,
was Lin.

**

Isaac cried out.

It was an animal wail,
and it grew and grew in strength until Yagharek hissed at him,
unheeded.

Lin turned with a start
at the sound. She trembled when she saw him.

He stumbled over to
her, weeping at the sight of her, at her russet skin and flexing
headscarab; and as he approached he cried out again, this time in
anguish, as he saw what had been done to her.

Her body was bruised
and covered with burns and scratches, welts that hinted at vicious
acts and brutalizations. She had been beaten across her back, through
her ragged shift. Her breasts were criss-crossed with thin scars. She
was bruised heavily around her belly and thighs.

But it was her head,
the twitching headbody, that almost made him fall.

Her wings had been
taken: he knew that, from the envelope, but to see them, to see the
tiny ragged stubs flit in agitation...Her carapace had been snapped
and bent backwards in places, uncovering the tender flesh beneath,
which was scabbed and broken. One of her compound eyes was crumpled
and sightless. The middle headleg on her right and the hind one on
her left had been torn from their sockets.

Isaac fell forward and
held her, closing her into him. She was so thin...so tiny and ragged
and broken, she was trembling as she touched him, her whole body
tense as if she could not believe he were real, as if he might be
taken away as some new torture.

Isaac clutched her and
cried. He held her carefully, feeling her thin bones beneath her
skin.

"I would have
come," he moaned in abject misery and joy. "I would’ve
come,
I thought you were
dead...
"

She pushed him back
just a little, until she had space for her hands to move.

Wanted you, love
you,
she signed chaotically,
help me save me take me away,
couldn’t he couldn’t let me die till had finished this...

For the first time,
Isaac looked up at the extraordinary sculpture that rose above and
behind her, onto which she was spreading khepri-spit. It was an
incredible multicoloured thing, a horrific kaleidoscopic figure of
composite nightmares, limbs and eyes and legs sprouting in weird
combinations. It was almost finished, with only a smooth framework
where what looked like a head must be, and an empty clutch of air
that suggested a shoulder.

Isaac gasped at it,
looked back at her.

Lemuel had been right.
There was, strategically, no reason at all for Motley to keep Lin
alive. He would not have done so for any other captive. But his
vanity, his mystical self-aggrandizement and philosophical dreamings
were stimulated by Lin’s extraordinary work. Lemuel could not
have known that.

Motley could not bear
for the sculpture to remain unfinished.

**

Derkhan and Yagharek
entered. When she saw Lin, Derkhan cried out as Isaac had done. She
ran across the room to where Isaac and Lin embraced and put her own
arms around the two of them, crying and smiling.

Yagharek paced uneasily
towards them.

Isaac was murmuring to
Lin, telling her over and over how sorry he was, that he thought she
was dead, that he would have come.

Kept me working,
beating and...and torturing, taunting me,
Lin signed, giddy and
exhausted with emotion.

Yagharek was about to
speak, but he snapped his head suddenly around.

The tramp of hurried
feet was audible in the corridor outside.

Isaac stood, supporting
Lin as he came, keeping her enfolded in his embrace. Derkhan moved
away from the two of them. She drew her pistols and turned to face
the door. Yagharek flattened himself against the wall in the shadow
of the sculpture, his whip coiled and ready.

The door burst open and
hammered against the wall, sprang back.

Motley stood before
them.

He was silhouetted.
Isaac saw a twisted outline against the black-painted walls of the
corridor. A garden of multifarious limbs, a walking patchwork of
organic forms. Isaac’s mouth dropped open in amazement. He
realized as he watched the shuffling goat- and bird- and dog-footed
creature, as he saw the clutching tentacles and knots of tissue, the
composite bones and inverted skin, that Lin’s piece was taken,
without fancy, from
life.

At the sight of him,
Lin went limp with fear and the memory of pain. Isaac felt rage begin
to engulf him.

Motley stepped back
slightly and turned to face the way he had come.

"
Security!"
shouted Motley from some unclear mouth.
"Get here now!"
He stepped back into the room.

"Grimnebulin,"
he said. His voice was quick and tense. "You came. Didn’t
you get my message? Bit
remiss,
aren’t you?" Motley
stepped into the room and the faint light.

Derkhan fired twice.
Her bullets tore through Motley’s armoured skin and patches of
fur. He staggered back on multiple legs with a bellow of pain. His
cry became a vicious laugh.

"Far too many
internal organs to hurt me, you useless slut," he shouted.
Derkhan spat with fury and edged closer to the wall.

Isaac stared at Motley,
saw teeth gnashing in a multitude of mouths. The floor shook as
people pounded along the corridor outside, racing towards the room.

Men appeared in the
doorway behind Motley, waved weapons, waited uncertainly. For a
moment Isaac’s stomach pitched: the men had no faces, only
smooth skin stretched tight over their skulls.
What kind of
fucking Remades are these?
he thought giddily. Then he caught
sight of the mirrors extending backwards from the helmets.

His eyes widened as he
realized that these were shaven-headed Remade with their heads turned
one hundred and eighty degrees, specially and perfectly adapted to
dealing with the slake-moths. They waited now for their boss’s
orders, their muscular bodies facing Isaac, their heads turned
permanently away.

One of Motley’s
limbs—an ugly, segmented and suckered thing—shot out to
indicate Lin.

"Finish your
godsdamned
job,
you bugger bitch, or you know what you’ll
get!" he shouted, and hobbled towards Lin and Isaac.

With an utterly bestial
roar, Isaac pushed Lin to one side. A spray of chymical anguish burst
from her. Her hands twisted as she begged him to stay with her, but
he was launching himself at Motley in an agony of guilt and fury.

Motley shouted
wordlessly, meeting Isaac’s challenge.

**

There was a sudden loud
concussion. An explosion of glass scintillas sprayed across the room,
leaving blood and curses.

Isaac froze in the
centre of the room. Motley was frozen before him. The ranks of
security were fumbling with their weapons, shouting orders at each
other. Isaac looked up, into the mirrors before his eyes.

The last slake-moth
stood behind him. It was framed in the ragged stubs of the window.
Glass still dripped around it like viscous liquid.

Isaac gasped.

It was a huge, a
terrifying presence. It stood, half crouched, a little way forward
from the wall and the window-hole, various savage limbs clutching the
floor. It was massive as a gorilla, a body of terrible solidity and
intricate violence.

Its unthinkable wings
were wide open. Patterns burst across them like negative fireworks.

Motley had been facing
the great beast: his mind was captured. He gazed at the wings with an
array of unblinking eyes. Behind him his troops were shouting in
agitation, levelling weapons.

Yagharek and Derkhan
had been standing with their backs to the wall. Isaac saw them in his
mirrors behind the thing. The patterned sides of its wings were
hidden from them: they were still with shock, but not in thrall.

Between the slake-moth
and Isaac, sprawled on the boards where she had fallen in the ragged
cascade of glass, was Lin.

"Lin!"
shouted Isaac desperately.
"Don’t turn round! Don’t
look behind you! Come to me!"

Lin froze at his
panicked tone. She saw him reach backwards in an appallingly clumsy
gesture, step hesitatingly towards her without turning round.