Perdido Street Station (94 page)

She crawled slowly,
very slowly, towards him.

Behind her, she heard a
low, animal noise.

**

The slake-moth stood,
pugnacious and uneasy. It could taste minds all around, moving on all
sides, threatening and fearing it.

It was unsettled and
nervous, still traumatized by the slaughter of its siblings. One of
its spiny tentacles lashed the ground like a tail.

Before it, one mind was
captive. But the moth’s wings were spread out wide and yet it
had captured only
one
...? It was confused. It faced the main
mass of its enemies, it batted its wings at them hypnotically, trying
to pull them under and send their dreams bubbling to the surface.

They remained
resistant.

The slake-moth grew
panicked.

**

The security behind
Motley shifted in frustration. They tried to push past their boss,
but he had frozen at the threshold to the room. His enormous body
seemed fixed, his various legs planted hard on the ground. He gazed
at the slake-moth wings in an intense trance.

There were five Remade
behind him. They were poised. They were equipped specifically to
defend against slake-moths, in case of escapes. In addition to small
arms, three wielded flamethrowers; one a spray of femtocorrosive
acid; one an elyctro-thaumaturgic barb-gun. They could see their
quarry. But they could not get past their boss.

Motley’s men
tried to aim their weapons around him, but his towering bulk occluded
their line of fire. They shouted to each other and tried to devise
strategies, but they could not. They gazed into their mirrors,
watched the huge, predatory moth under Motley’s arms and limbs,
through gaps in his outline. They were cowed by the monstrous sight.

Isaac stretched his arm
back, reached for Derkhan.

"Come here, Lin,"
he hissed, "and
don’t look behind you."

It was like some
terrifying children’s game.

Yagharek and Derkhan
shifted quietly, moving towards each other behind the moth. It
chittered and looked up at their motion, but it remained more wary of
the mass of figures before it, and it did not turn round.

Lin slid fitfully along
the floor towards Isaac’s back, his clutching arms. A little
way from him, she hesitated. She saw Motley, transfixed as if amazed,
gazing past Isaac and over her, captivated by...something.

She did not know what
was happening, what was behind her.

She knew nothing about
the moths.

Isaac saw her hesitate,
and began to howl at her not to stop.

**

Lin was an artist. She
created with her touch and taste, making tactile objects. Visible
objects. Sculpture to be fondled and seen.

She was fascinated by
colour and light and shadow, by the interplay of shapes and lines,
negative and positive spaces.

She had been locked in
the attic for a long time.

In her position, some
would have sabotaged the vast sculpture of Motley. The commission had
become a sentence, after all. But Lin did not destroy it or skimp in
her work. She poured everything she could, all her pent-up creative
energy into that one monolithic and terrible piece. As Motley had
known she would.

It had been her only
escape. Her only means of expression. Starved of all the light and
colour and shapeliness of the world, she had focused in her fear and
pain and become obsessed. Creating a presence herself, the better to
beguile her.

And now something
extraordinary had entered her attic world.

She knew nothing of the
slake-moths. The command
don’t look behind you
was
familiar from fables, made sense only as a moralistic injuncture,
some heavy-handed lesson. Isaac must mean
be quick
or
don’t
doubt me,
something like that. His command made sense only as an
emotional exhortation.

Lin was an artist.
Savaged and tortured, confused by imprisonment and pain and
degradation, Lin grasped only that something extraordinary, some
utterly affecting sight had risen up behind her. And hungry for any
kind of wonder after the weeks of pain in the shadow of those drab,
colourless and shapeless walls, she paused, then quickly glanced
behind her.

**

Isaac and Derkhan
screamed in terrible disbelief; Yagharek called out with shock like
some livid crow.

With her one good eye,
Lin took in the extraordinary sweep of the slake-moth’s shape
with awe; and then she caught sight of the gusting colours on the
wings, and her mandibles clattered briefly and she was silent.
Enthralled.

She squatted on the
floor, her head twisted over her left shoulder, gazing stupidly at
the great beast, at the rush of colours. Motley and she stared at the
slake-moth’s wings, their minds overflowing.

Isaac howled and
stumbled backwards, reaching out desperately.

The slake-moth reached
out with a slithering clutch of tentacles and pulled Lin towards it.
Its vast and dripping mouth slid open like a doorway into some
stygian place. Rank citric spittle drooled across Lin’s face.

As Isaac grabbed
backwards for her hand, staring intently into his mirrors, the
slake-moth’s tongue lurched out of its stinking throat and
lapped at her headscarab briefly. Isaac shouted again and again, but
he could not stop it.

The long tongue,
slippery with saliva, inveigled its way past Lin’s slack
mouthparts and plunged into her head.

**

At the sound of Isaac’s
appalled yells, two of the Remade trapped behind Motley’s
enormous bulk reached over and fired erratically with their
flintlocks. One missed completely, the other clipped the slake-moth’s
thorax, eliciting a brief dollop of liquid and an irritated hiss, but
no more. It was not the right weapon.

The two who had fired
shouted at their fellows, and the small squadron began to shove at
Motley’s bulk, in careful, timed thrusts.

Isaac was clutching for
Lin’s hand.

The slake-moth’s
throat swelled and shrank, its gristly throat swallowing in great
swigs.

Yagharek reached down
and grabbed the oil-lamp that stood by the foot of the sculpture. He
hefted it briefly in his left hand, raised his whip in his right.

"Grab her, Isaac,"
he called.

As the slake-moth
clutched her thin body to its thorax, Isaac felt his fingers close
around Lin’s wrist. He clenched hard, tried to pull her free.
He wept and swore.

Yagharek hurled the lit
oil-lamp against the back of the slake-moth’s head. The glass
broke open and a little spray of incandescent oil spattered over the
smooth skin. A burst of blue flame crawled across the dome of the
skull.

The slake-moth
squealed. A flurry of limbs whipped up to batter out the little fire
as the slake-moth jerked its head back momentarily in pain.
Instantly, Yagharek snapped his whip with a savage stroke. It smacked
loud and dramatic against the dark skin. Coils of the thick leather
wound almost instantly around the slake-moth’s neck.

Yagharek pulled hard
and fast, with all his wiry strength. He drew the whip absolutely
tight and braced himself.

The small fire kept
stinging, burning tenaciously. The whip cut off the slake-moth’s
throat. It could not swallow or breathe.

Its head lurched on its
long neck. It emitted strangulated little cries. Its tongue swelled
and it lashed it out of Lin’s mouth. The spurts of
consciousness it had tried to drink clogged up in its throat. The
moth clawed at the whip, frantic and terrified. It flailed and shook
and spun.

Isaac hung on to Lin’s
shrunken wrist, tugging at her as the moth twirled in a hideous
dance. Its twitching limbs flew away from her, clutching vainly at
the thong that choked it. Isaac pulled her clear, dropped to the
floor and scrabbled away from the rampaging creature.

As it turned in its
panic, its wings folded and it turned away from the door. Instantly,
its hold on Motley was broken. Motley’s composite body stumbled
forward and collapsed on the floor as his mind crawled back together.
His men pushed over him, picking their way past a tangle of his legs
into the room.

In a hideous drumming
of feet the slake-moth spun. The whip was wrenched from Yagharek’s
hands, tearing his skin. He staggered back, towards Derkhan, out of
range of the slake-moth’s razored, spinning limbs.

Motley was standing. He
stamped quickly away from the beast, passing back into the corridor.

"
Kill the damn
thing!"
he shrieked.

The moth danced in a
frenzy into the centre of the room. The five Remade stood in a little
clutch around the door. They aimed through their mirrors.

Three jets of burning
gas burst from the flamethrowers, scorching the vast creature’s
skin. It tried to shriek as its wings and chitin roared and split and
crisped, but the whip prevented it. A great gob of acid sprayed the
twisting moth square in the face. It denatured the proteins and
compounds of its hide in seconds, melting the moth’s
exoskeleton.

The acid and the flame
ate swiftly through the whip. Its remnants flew away from the
spinning moth, which could finally breathe, and scream.

It shrieked in agony as
fresh gouts of fire and acid caught it. It hurled itself blindly in
the direction of its attackers.

Bolts of dark energy
from the fifth man’s gun burst into it, dissipating across its
surface area, numbing and scorching it without heat. It screeched
again, but hurtled on, a sightless storm of flame, spitting acid and
flailing ragged bone.

The five Remade moved
back as it stumbled madly for them, following Motley into the
corridor. The intense moving pyre slammed into the walls, igniting
them, fumbling for the doorway.

From the little
hallway, the sounds of fire, spewing acid and quarrels of
elyctro-thaumaturgy continued.

**

For long seconds,
Derkhan and Yagharek and Isaac stared up dumbfounded at the doorway.
The moth still shrieked just out of sight, the corridor beyond was
radiant with flickering light and heat.

Then Isaac blinked and
stared down at Lin, who slumped in his embrace.

He hissed at her, shook
her.

"Lin," he
whispered. "Lin...We’re leaving."

Yagharek strode quickly
over to the window and peered out over the street five floors below.
Next to the window, a little jutting column of brick extended out
from the wall, becoming a chimney. A drainpipe snaked up beside it.
He stood quickly on the window-sill and reached up for the guttering,
tugged it quickly. It was solid.

"Isaac, bring her
here," said Derkhan urgently. Isaac lifted Lin up, biting his
lip at how light she was. He walked quickly with her to the window.
As he watched her, his face suddenly broke into an incredulous, an
ecstatic smile. He began to weep.

From the passage
outside, the slake-moth keened weakly.

"Dee, look!"
he hissed. Lin’s hands were fluttering erratically in front of
her as he cradled her. "She’s
signing.
She’s
going to be all right!"

Derkhan peered over,
reading her words. Isaac watched, shook his head.

"She’s not
conscious, it’s just random words, but, Dee, it’s
words...
We were in
time...
"

Derkhan smiled in
delight. She kissed Isaac hard on the cheek, stroked Lin’s
broken headscarab gently.

"Get her out of
here," she said quietly. Isaac peered out of the window, where
Yagharek had wedged himself into a corner of architecture, on a
little extrusion of brick a few feet away.

"Give her to me,
and follow," said Yagharek, jerking his head up above him. At
the eastern end the long sloped roof of Motley’s terrace joined
with the next street, which jutted perpendicularly south in a
descending row of houses. The roofscape of Bonetown stretched out
above and all around them; a raised landscape; linked islands of
slate over the dangerous streets, extending for miles in the
darkness, sweeping away from the Ribs to Mog Hill and beyond.

**

Even then, devoured
alive by tides of fire and acid, stunned with bolts of obscure
energy, the last slake-moth might have survived.

It was a creature of
astonishing endurance. It could heal itself at frightening speeds.

If it had been in the
open air, it could have leapt up and spread those terribly wounded
wings and disappeared from the earth. It might have forced itself up,
ignoring the pain, ignoring the scorched flakes of skin and chitin
that would flutter around it filthily. It could have rolled into the
wet clouds to douse the flames, wash itself free of acid.

If its family had
survived, if it had been confident that it could return to its
siblings, that they would hunt together again, it might not have
panicked. If it had not witnessed a carnage of its kind, an
impossible blast of poisonous vapour that enticed its brothersisters
in and burst them, the moth would not have been insane with fear and
anger, and it might not have become frenzied and lashed out, trapping
itself further.

But it was alone.
Trapped under brick, in a claustrophobic warren that constricted it,
flattened its wings, left it nowhere to go. Assailed on all sides by
murderous, endless pain. The fire came and came again too fast for it
to heal.

It staggered the length
of the corridor in Motley’s headquarters, a white-hot ball,
reaching out to the last with ragged claws and spines, trying to
hunt. It fell just before the top of the stairs.

Motley and the Remade
looked on in awe from halfway down, praying that it lay still, that
it did not crawl over the lip of the stairway and tumble flaming onto
them.

It did not. It was
still while it died.