Perdido Street Station (55 page)

Isaac said nothing for
several moments. Then he nodded. The look of horrified astonishment
returned.

"I know betrayal,
Grimnebulin," whistled Yagharek. "I know it well. I
am...sorry for you."

Isaac turned away and
walked brusquely to his laboratory space, began shoving bits and
pieces of wire and ceramic and glass seemingly at random into a huge
carpet bag. He strapped it, bulky and clanking, to his back.

"When were you
betrayed, Yag?" he demanded.

"I was not. I
betrayed." Isaac stopped and turned to him. "I know what
David has done. And I am sorry."

Isaac stared in
bewilderment, in denial and misery.

The militia attacked.
It was only twenty minutes past seven.

**

The door flew open with
a massive sound. Three militia officers came hurtling through into
the room, their battering ram flying out of their hands.

The door was still
unlocked from when David had fled. The militia had not expected this,
and had tried to break down a door which did not resist them. They
fell, sprawling and idiotic.

There was a confused
moment. The three militia scrabbled to stand. Outside, the squad of
officers gaped stupidly into the building. On the ground floor,
Derkhan and Lemuel stared back at them. Isaac looked down at the
intruders.

Then everyone moved.

The militia outside in
the street recovered their wits and rushed the door. Lemuel flipped
David’s huge desk onto its side and hunkered down behind the
makeshift shield, priming his two long pistols. Derkhan ran towards
him, diving for cover. Yagharek hissed and stepped backwards from the
rail of the walkway, out of sight of the militia.

In one slick movement,
Isaac turned to his laboratory work-table and scooped up two huge
glass flasks of discoloured liquid, still spinning on his heels, and
hurled them over the rail at the invading officers like bombs.

The first three militia
through the door had regained their feet, only to be caught in the
shower of glass and chymical rain. One of the massive jars shattered
on the helmet of one officer, who hit the floor again, motionless and
bleeding. Vicious shards bounced off the others’ armour. The
two militia caught by the deluge were still for a moment, then began
to shriek suddenly as the chymicals seeped through their masks and
began to attack the soft tissues of their faces.

There was still no
gunfire.

Isaac turned again and
began to grab more jars, taking a moment to pick strategically, so
that the effects of the cascading chymicals were not entirely random.
Why don’t they shoot?
he thought giddily.

The wounded officers
had been pulled out into the street. In their place, a phalanx of
heavily armoured officers had entered, bearing iron shields with
reinforced glass windows through which they stared. Behind them,
Isaac saw two officers getting ready to attack with khepri
stingboxes.

They must want us
alive!
he realized. The stingbox could kill, easily, but it could
also not. If deaths were all that were desired, it would have been
far easier for Rudgutter to send conventional troops, with flintlocks
and crossbows, than such rare agents as humans trained in stingbox.

Isaac hurled a double
salvo of trow-iron dust and sanguimorph distillate at the defensive
huddle, but the guards were quick, and the jars were shattered with
twitching shields. The militia danced to avoid the dangerous gobbets.

Each of the two
officers behind the shield-bearers spun their jagged twin flails.

The stingboxes
themselves—metaclockwork engines of intricate and extraordinary
khepri design—were attached to the officers’ belts, each
the size of a small bag. Attached to each side was a long cord, thick
wires swathed in metal coils, then insulating rubber, extendible more
than twenty feet. About two feet from the end of each cord was a
polished wooden handle, one of which each officer held in each hand.
They used these to whirl the ends of the cords at terrible speed.
Something glimmered almost invisibly. At the tip of each tendril,
Isaac knew, was a vicious little metal prong, a weighted clutch of
barbs and spikes. These tips varied. Some were solid, the best-made
expanded like cruel flowers on impact. All were designed to fly heavy
and true, to puncture armour and flesh, to grip without mercy inside
torn flesh.

Derkhan had reached the
table and was huddling by Lemuel. Isaac turned to grab more
ammunition. In the moment of silence, Derkhan raised herself quickly
on one knee and peered over the tip of the table, taking aim with her
great pistol.

She pulled the trigger.
At the same instant, one of the officers let fly with his stingbox.

Derkhan was a decent
shot. Her ball flew into the viewing window of one of the militia
shields, which she had judged its weak point. But she had
underestimated the militia’s defences. The porthole cracked
violently and spectacularly, whitened completely with shards of
glassdust and a crack-lattice, but its structure was interlaced with
copper wire, and it held. The militiaman staggered, then stood solid.

The officer with the
stingbox moved like an expert.

He swung up his arms at
the same moment in sweeping curves, flicking the little switches in
the wooden handles that allowed the cords to slide through them,
releasing them. The momentum of the twirling blades took them flying
through the air in a flash of metallic grey.

Cord unravelled almost
without friction from inside the stingbox, through the air and the
wooden handles, slowing the blades hardly at all. Their curving
flight was absolutely true. The jagged weights flew in a long,
elliptical motion through the air, the curve shallowing rapidly as
the cables attaching them to the stingbox extended.

The buds of sharpened
steel smacked simultaneously into each side of Derkhan’s chest.
She screamed and staggered, her teeth gritting as the pistol fell
from her spasming fingers.

Instantly, the officer
pressed the catch on his stingbox to release the pent-up clockwork
within.

There was a sputtering
whirr. The hidden coils of the motor began to unwind, twirling like a
dynamo and generating waves of weird current. Derkhan danced and
spasmed, agonized yells spurting out from behind her teeth. Little
bursts of blue light exploded like whiplashes from her hair and
fingers.

The officer watched her
intently, twiddling the dials on his stingbox that controlled the
intensity and form of the power. There was a violent, cracking jolt
and Derkhan flew backwards against the wall, collapsing to the floor.

The second officer sent
his sharp bulbs over the edge of the table, hoping to catch Lemuel,
but he was flattened hard against the wood and they flew harmlessly
around him. The officer pressed a stud and the cords rapidly
retracted back into a ready position.

Lemuel stared at the
stricken Derkhan and hefted his pistols. Isaac bellowed in rage. He
hurled another vast pot of unstable thaumaturgic compound at the
militia. It fell short, but burst with such violence that it splashed
onto and over the shields, mixing with the distillate and sending two
officers screaming to the floor as their skin became parchment and
their blood ink.

An amplified voice
burst through the door. It was Mayor Rudgutter’s.

"Stop these
attacks. Be sensible. You aren’t going to get out. Stop
attacking us and we will show mercy."

**

Rudgutter stood in the
midst of his honour guard with Eliza Stem-Fulcher. It was highly
unusual for him to accompany a militia raid, but this was no ordinary
raid. He was stationed across the road and a little way along from
Isaac’s workshop.

It was not yet
completely dark. Alarmed and curious faces peered from windows up and
down the street. Rudgutter ignored them. He took the funnel of iron
away from his mouth and turned to Eliza Stem-Fulcher. His face was
creased in irritation.

"This is an
absolute bloody shambles," he said. She nodded. "Well,
however inefficient they are, the militia can’t lose. A few
officers might be killed, regrettably, but there’s no way der
Grimnebulin and his cohorts are getting out of there." The faces
peeking nervously from behind windows all around suddenly annoyed
him.

He raised the
loudhailer sharply and yelled into it: "Get back into your
houses immediately!"

There was a gratifying
flurry of curtains. Rudgutter stood back and watched as the warehouse
shuddered.

**

Lemuel dispatched the
other stingbox-wielder with one elegant and careful shot. Isaac
hurled his table down the stairs taking two officers with it when
they had tried to rush him, and now he continued with his chymical
sniping. Yagharek was helping him, at his direction, showering the
attackers with noxious mixtures.

But this was all, could
not but be, doomed valiance. There were too many militia. It helped
that they were not prepared to kill, because Isaac and Lemuel and
Yagharek had no such constraints. Isaac estimated that four militia
had fallen: one to a bullet; one to a crushed skull; and two to
random chymico-thaumaturgic reactions. But it could not last. The
militia advanced on Lemuel behind their shields.

Isaac saw the militia
look up and confer for a minute. Then one of them raised a flintlock
rifle carefully, aiming it at Yagharek.

"Down, Yag!"
he yelled. "They’ll kill
you!"

Yagharek dropped to the
floor, out of sight of the assassin.

There was no sudden
manifestation, no creeping flesh or vast stalking figure. All that
happened was that the Weaver’s voice sounded in Rudgutter’s
ear.

...I HAVE BOUNDED
UNSEEN UP TANGLING WIRES OF SKYNESS AND SLIPPED MY LEGS SPLAYED
WILLY-NILLY ON THE PSYCHIC DUNG OF THE WEB-REAVERS THEY ARE LOW
CREATURES AND INELEGANT AND DRAB WHISPER WHAT HAPPENS MR. MAYOR THIS
PLACE TREMBLES...

Rudgutter started.
That’s all I need,
he thought. He replied with a firm
voice.

"Weaver," he
said. Stem-Fulcher turned to him with a sharp, curious gaze. "How
nice to have you with us."

It’s too
damned unpredictable,
Rudgutter thought furiously. Not
now,
not bloody now! Go and chase the moths, go hunting...what are you
doing
here?
The Weaver was infuriating and dangerous, and
Rudgutter had taken a calculated risk in engaging its aid. A loose
cannon was still a lethal weapon.

Rudgutter had thought
that the great spider and he had something of an
arrangement.
As much, at least, as it was possible to maintain with a Weaver.
Kapnellior had helped him. Textorology was a tentative field, but it
had borne some fruit. There were proven methods of communication, and
Rudgutter had been using them to interact with the Weaver. Messages
carved into the blades of scissors and melted. Apparently random
sculptures, lit from below, whose shadows wrote messages across the
ceiling. The Weaver’s responses were prompt and delivered even
more bizarrely.

Rudgutter had politely
bade the Weaver busy itself chasing the moths. Rudgutter could not
order, of course, could only suggest. But the Weaver had responded
positively, and Rudgutter realized that stupidly, absurdly, he had
begun to think of it as his agent.

No more of that.

Rudgutter cleared his
throat. "Might I ask why you have joined us, Weaver?"

The voice came again,
resonating in his ear, bouncing on the bones inside his head.

...INSIDE AND OUTSIDE
THE FIBRES ARE SPLIT AND BURST AND A TRAIL IS TORN ACROSS THE WARP OF
THE WORLDWEB WHERE COLOURS ARE BLED AND WAN I HAVE SLID ACROSS THE
SKY BELOW THE SURFACE AND DANCED ALONG THE RENT WITH TEARS OF MISERY
AT THE UGLY RUIN WHICH STEMS AND SPREADS AND BEGINS IN THIS PLACE...

Rudgutter nodded slowly
as the sense of the words emerged. "It started from here,"
he agreed. "This is the centre. This is the source.
Unfortunately..." He spoke very carefully. "Unfortunately,
this is a somewhat inopportune moment. Might I prevail on you to
investigate this—which is indeed the birthplace of the
problem—in a little while?"

Stem-Fulcher was
watching him. Her face was fraught. She listened intently to his
responses.

For a strange moment,
all the sounds around them ceased. The shots and yells from the
warehouse momentarily died. There were no creaks or clanks from the
militia’s arms. Stem-Fulcher’s mouth was open, as she
hovered ready to speak, but she said nothing. The Weaver was silent.

Then there was a
whispering sound inside Rudgutter’s skull. He gasped in
consternation, then opened his mouth in outright dismay. He did not
know how he knew, but he was listening to the uncanny sound of the
Weaver picking its way across various dimensions towards the
warehouse.

**

The officers bore down
on Lemuel with a remorseless precision. They tramped across
Vermishank’s corpse. They held their shields triumphantly
before them.

Above, Isaac and
Yagharek had run out of chymicals. Isaac was bellowing, hurling
chairs and slats of wood and rubbish at the militia. They deflected
them with ease.

Derkhan was as
motionless as Lublamai, who lay still on a cot in the corner of
Isaac’s living space.

Lemuel let out a
desperate yell of rage and swung his powder-horn at his attackers,
spraying them with acrid gunpowder. He fumbled for his tinderbox, but
they were on him, truncheons swinging. The officer with the stingbox
approached, twirling his blades.

The air in the centre
of the warehouse vibrated uncannily.

Two militiamen were
approaching this unstable patch, and they paused in puzzlement. Isaac
and Yagharek each carried one end of an enormous bench, ready to hurl
it at the officers below. Each caught sight of the phenomenon. They
stopped moving and watched.