Perdido Street Station (39 page)

"This was
something that came up when we were arranging the transfer deal,"
she said. "We checked his record of activity—much of it
against us, it has to be pointed out—and gauged him to be at
least as capable as ourselves of ensuring security. He’s no
fool."

"Do we know who’s
done this?" asked Rescue. Stem-Fulcher shrugged.

"Could be a rival,
Francine or Judix or someone. If so, they’ve bitten off a
godsdamned sight more than they can chew..."

"Right."
Rudgutter interrupted her with a peremptory tone. Stem-Fulcher and
Rescue turned to him and waited. He clenched his fists together, put
his elbows on the table and closed his eyes, concentrating so hard
that his face seemed ready to splinter.

"Right," he
repeated, and opened his eyes. "First thing we have to do is
verify that we are faced with the situation that we think we’re
faced with. That might seem obvious, but we have to be a
hundred
per cent
sure. Second thing is come out with some kind of
strategy for containing the situation quickly and quietly.

"Now, for the
second objective, we all know we can’t rely on human militia or
Remade—or xenians come to that. Same basic psychic type. We’re
all
food.
I’m sure we all remember our initial
attack-defence tests..." Rescue and Stem-Fulcher nodded quickly.
Rudgutter continued. "Right. Zombies might be a possibility, but
this is not Cromlech: we don’t have the facilities to create
them in the numbers or quality that we need. So. It seems to me that
the first objective can’t satisfactorily be dealt with if we’re
relying on our regular intelligence operations. We have to have
access to different information. So for two reasons, we have to
elicit assistance from agents better able to deal with the
situation—different psychic models from our own are vital. Now,
it seems to me there are two possible such agents, and that we have
little choice but to approach at least one of them."

He was silent, taking
in Stem-Fulcher and Rescue with his eyes, one by one. He waited for
dissent. There was none.

"Are we agreed?"
he asked quietly.

"We’re
talking about the ambassador, aren’t we?" said
Stem-Fulcher. "And what else...you don’t mean the Weaver?"
Her eyes furrowed in dismay.

"Well, hopefully
it won’t come to that," said Rudgutter reassuringly. "But
yes, those are the two...ah...agents I can think of. In that order."

"Agreed,"
said Stem-Fulcher quickly. "As long as it’s in that order.
The Weaver...Jabber! Let’s talk to the ambassador."

"Montjohn?"
Rudgutter turned to his deputy.

Rescue nodded slowly,
fingering his scarf.

"The ambassador,"
he said slowly. "And I hope that will be all we need."

"As do we all,
Deputy Mayor," said Rudgutter. "As do we all."

**

Between the eleventh
and fourteenth floors of the Mandragorae Wing of Perdido Street
Station, above one of the less popular commercial concourses that
specialized in old fabrics and foreign batiks, below a series of
long-deserted turrets, was the Diplomatic Zone.

Many of the embassies
in New Crobuzon were elsewhere, of course: baroque buildings in Nigh
Sump or East Gidd or Flag Hill. But several were there in the
station: enough to give those floors their name and let them keep it.

The Mandragorae Wing
was almost a self-contained keep. Its corridors described a huge
concrete rectangle around a central space, at the bottom of which was
an unkempt garden, overgrown with darkwood trees and exotic woodland
flowers. Children scampered along the paths and played in this
sheltered park while their parents shopped or travelled or worked.
The walls rose enormously around them, making the copse seem like
moss at the bottom of a well.

From the corridors on
the upper floors sprouted sets of interconnected rooms. Many had been
ministerial offices at one time. For a short while, each had been the
headquarters of some small company or other. Then they had been empty
for many years, until the mould and rot had been swept away and
ambassadors had moved in. That was a little more than two centuries
previously, when a communal understanding had swept the various
governments of Rohagi that from now on diplomacy would be greatly
preferable to war.

There had been
embassies in New Crobuzon far longer. But after the carnage in Suroch
put a bloody end to what were called the Pirate Wars or the Slow War
or the False War, the number of countries and city-states seeking
negotiated resolutions to disputes had multiplied enormously.
Emissaries had arrived from across the continent and beyond. The
deserted floors of the Mandragorae Wing had been overrun by the
newcomers, and by older consulates relocating to tap the new welter
of diplomatic business.

Even to leave the lifts
or stairs on the floors of the Zone, a gamut of security checks had
to be run. The passages were cold and quiet, broken by a few doors
and insufficiently lit by desultory gas-jets. Rudgutter and Rescue
and Stem-Fulcher walked the deserted corridors of the twelfth floor.
They were accompanied by a short, wiry man with thick glasses who
scurried along behind them, never keeping up, lugging a large
suitcase.

"Eliza, Montjohn,"
said Mayor Rudgutter as they walked, "this is Brother Sanchem
Vansetty, one of our most able karcists." Rescue and
Stem-Fulcher nodded greetings. Vansetty ignored them.

Not every room in the
Diplomatic Zone was occupied. But some of the doors had brass plates
proclaiming them the sovereign territory of one country or
other—Tesh, or Khadoh, or Gharcheltist—behind which were
huge suites extending onto several floors: self-contained houses in
the tower. Some of the rooms were thousands of miles from their
capitals. Some of them were empty. By Tesh tradition, for example,
the ambassador lived as a vagrant in New Crobuzon, communicating by
mail for official business. Rudgutter would never meet him. Other
embassies were deserted due to lack of funds or interest.

But much of the
business conducted here was immensely important. The suites
containing the embassies of Myrshock and Vadaunk had been extended
some years ago, due to the expansion of paperwork and office space
that commercial relations necessitated. The extra rooms jutted like
ugly tumours from the interior walls of the eleventh floor, bulging
precariously over the garden.

The mayor and his
companions walked past a door marked
The Cray Commonwealth of
Salkrikaltor.
The corridor shook with the pound and whirr of
huge, hidden machinery. Those were the enormous steam-pumps that
worked for hours every day, sucking fresh brine fifteen miles from
Iron Bay for the cray ambassador and sluicing his used, dirty water
into the river.

The passageway was
confusing. It seemed to go on too long when looked at from one angle,
and to be all but stubby from another. Here and there short
tributaries branched from it, leading to other, smaller embassies or
store cupboards or boarded-up windows. At the end of the main
corridor, beyond the cray embassy, Rudgutter led the way down one of
these little passages. It extended a short way, twisting, its ceiling
lowering dramatically as some stairs above descended across its path,
and terminated in a small unmarked door.

Rudgutter looked behind
him, ensuring that his companions and he were not watched. Only a
short distance of passageway was visible, and they were quite alone.

Vansetty was pulling
chalk and pastels of various colours from his pockets. He pulled what
looked like a watch from his fob pocket and opened it. Its face was
divided into innumerable complicated sections. It had seven hands of
various lengths.

"Got to take
account of the variables, Mayor," Vansetty murmured, studying
the thing’s intricate working. He seemed to be talking more to
himself than to Rudgutter or anyone else. "Outlook for today’s
pretty grotty...High-pressure front moving in the aether. Could push
powerstorms anywhere from the abyss through null-space up. Fucking
poxy outlook on the borderlands as well. Hmmm..." Vansetty
scrawled some calculations on the back of a notebook. "Right,"
he snapped, and looked up at the three ministers.

He began to scribble
intricate, stylized markings on thick pieces of paper, tearing out
each one as it was finished and handing it to Stem-Fulcher,
Rudgutter, Rescue, and finally for himself.

"Whack those over
your hearts," he said cursorily, stuffing his into his shirt.
"Symbol facing out."

He opened his battered
suitcase and brought out a set of bulky ceramic diodes. He stood at
the centre of the group and handed one to each of his
companions—
"Left
hand and don’t drop
it..."—then wound copper wire around them tightly and
attached it to a handheld clockwork motor he pulled from his case. He
took readings from his peculiar gauge, adjusted dials and nodules on
the motor.

"Righto, everyone,
brace yourselves," he said, and flipped the switch that released
the clockwork engine.

Little arcs of energy
sputtered into multicoloured existence along the wires and between
the grubby diodes. The four of them were enclosed in a little
triangle of current. All their hair stood visibly on end. Rudgutter
swore under his breath.

"Got about half an
hour before that runs out," said Vansetty quickly. "Best be
quick, eh?"

Rudgutter reached out
with his right hand and opened the door. The four of them shuffled
forward, maintaining their positions relative to each other, keeping
the triangle in place around them. Stem-Fulcher pushed the door
closed again behind them.

They were in an
absolutely dark room. They could see only by the faint ambient glow
of the lines of power, until Vansetty hung the clockwork motor around
his neck on a strap and lit a candle. In its inadequate light they
saw that the room was perhaps twelve feet by ten, dusty and
absolutely empty apart from an old desk and chair by the far wall, a
gently humming boiler by the door. There were no windows, no shelves,
nothing else at all. The air was very close.

From his bag Vansetty
extracted an unusual hand-held machine. Its twists of wire and metal,
its knots of multicoloured glass were intricate and lovingly crafted.
Its use was quite opaque. Vansetty leaned briefly out of the circle
and plugged an input valve into the boiler beside the door. He pulled
a lever on the top of the little machine, which began to hum and
blink with lights.

" ‘Course,
in your old days, before I came into the profession, you had to use a
live offering," he explained as he unwound a tight coil of wire
from the underside of the machine. "But we’re not savages,
are we? Science is a wonderful thing. This little darling—"
he patted the machine proudly "—is an amplifier. Increases
the output from that engine by a factor of two hundred, two hundred
and ten, and transforms it into an aetherial energy form. Bleed that
through the wires so..." Vansetty slung the uncoiled wire into
the far corner of the tiny room, behind the desk. "And there you
go! The victimless sacrifice!"

He grinned with
triumph, then turned his attention to the dials and knobs of the
little engine, and began to twist and prod them with intense
attention. "No more learning stupid languages, neither," he
muttered quietly. "Invocation’s automatic now and all.
We’re not actually
going
anywhere, you understand?"
He spoke louder, suddenly. "We ain’t abyssonauts, and we
ain’t playing with
nearly
enough power to do an actual
transplantropic leap. All we’re doing is peering through a
little window, letting the Hellkin come to us. But the dimensionality
of this room is going to be just a damn touch unstable for a while,
so stick within the protection and don’t muck about. Got it?"

**

Vansetty’s
fingers skittered over the box. For two or three minutes, nothing
happened. There was nothing but the heat and pounding from the
boiler, the drumming and whining of the little machine in Vansetty’s
hands. Beneath it all, Rudgutter’s foot tapped impatiently.

And then the little
room began to grow perceptibly warmer.

There was a deep,
subsonic tremor. An insinuation of russet light and oily smoke. Sound
became muted and then suddenly sharp.

There was a
disorientating moment of tugging, and a red marbling of light
flickered onto every surface, moving constantly as if through bloody
water.

Something fluttered.
Rudgutter looked up, his eyes smarting in air that seemed suddenly
clotted and very dry.

A heavy man in an
immaculate dark suit had appeared behind the desk.

He leaned forward
slowly, his elbows resting on the papers that suddenly littered the
desk. He waited.

Vansetty peered over
Rescue’s shoulder and jerked his thumb at the apparition.

"His Infernal
Excellency," he declared, "the ambassador of Hell."

**

"Mayor Rudgutter,"
the daemon said, in a pleasant, low voice. "How nice to see you
again. I was just doing some paperwork." The humans looked up
with a flicker of unease.

The ambassador had an
echo: half a second after he spoke his words were repeated in the
appalling shriek of one undergoing torture. The screamed words were
not loud. They were audible just beyond the walls of the room, as if
they had soared up through miles of unearthly heat from some trench
in Hell’s floor.

"What can I do for
you?" he continued (
What can I do for you?
came the
soulless howl of misery). "Still trying to find out if you’ll
be joining us when you pass on?" The ambassador smiled slightly.

Rudgutter smiled back
and shook his head.

"You know my views
on that, ambassador," he replied levelly. "I’ll not
be drawn, I’m afraid. You can’t provoke me into
existential fear, you know." He gave a polite little laugh, to
which the ambassador responded in kind. As did his horrendous echo.
"My soul, if such exists, is my own. It is not yours to punish
or covet. The universe is a much more capricious place than that...I
asked you before, what do you suppose happens to daemons when
you
die? As we both know you can."