Perdido Street Station (65 page)

"Yag, dammit!"
shouted Isaac. "Run!" But he spoke too late. The newcomer
was a similarly enormous industrial construct, and the wire-mesh that
looped down and ensnared Yagharek was much too hard to break.

Out of the fray, the
bloody man, that flesh-extension of the Construct Council, raised his
voice.

"You are not being
attacked," he said. "You will not be harmed. We start here.
We lay bait. Please do not be alarmed."

"Are you out of
your godsdamned
mind?"
shouted Isaac. "What the fuck
d’you
mean?.
What are you
doing?"

The constructs in the
heart of the rubbish-maze were moving back to the edges of the empty
space, the Construct Council’s throne room. The cable that had
ensnared Derkhan tugged her across the shattered ground. She fought
it, shouting and gritting her teeth, but she had to rise and stumble
with it to stop the laceration of her flesh. The construct holding
Yagharek lifted him effortlessly and stalked away from Isaac.
Yagharek thrashed violently, his hood falling from his face, his
fierce avian eyes sending cold looks of utter rage in all directions.
But he was powerless before that ineluctable artificial force.

Isaac’s captor
pulled him into the centre of the widening space. The avatar danced
around him.

"Try to relax,"
he said. "This will not hurt."

"
What?"
roared Isaac. From the opposite side of the little amphitheatre, a
little construct made its jerky, childish way across the rubble. It
carried a weird-looking piece of apparatus, a rude helmet with what
looked like a funnel expanding up out of it, the whole connected to
some portable engine. It leapt up to Isaac’s shoulders,
gripping painfully with its toes, and shoved the helmet on his head.

Isaac struggled, and
shouted, but pinioned as he was by those mighty arms he could not
possibly break free. It was not long before the helmet was fastened
to him tightly, yanking his hair and bruising his scalp.

"I am the
machine," said the naked dead man, dancing nimbly from rock to
engine debris to broken glass. "What is discarded here is my
flesh. I fix it more quickly than your body mends bruises or broken
bones. Everything is left here for dead. What is not here now will be
brought here soon, or my worshippers will bring for me, or I can
build. The equipment on your head is a piece like those used by
channellers and seers, communicators and psycho-nauts of all kinds.
It is a transformer. It can channel and redirect and amplify psychic
discharge. At the moment, it is set to augment and radiate.

"I have adjusted
it. It is much stronger than those at use in the city.

"You remember the
Weaver warned you that the slake-moth you raised is hunting you? It
is a crippled one, a stunted outcast. It cannot track you without
help."

The man looked at
Isaac. Derkhan was shouting something in the background, but Isaac
was not listening, could not take his eyes from the looming eyes of
the avatar.

"You will see what
we can do," said the man. "We are going to help it."

Isaac did not hear his
own howl of outrage and fear. A construct reached forward and turned
on the engine. The helmet vibrated and hummed so hard and loud that
Isaac’s ears hurt.

Waves of Isaac’s
mental print went pulsing out into the city night. They passed
through the malign fur of bad dreams that clogged up the city’s
pores, and beamed out into the atmosphere.

Blood trickled from
Isaac’s nose. His head began to ache.

**

A thousand feet above
the city, the handlingers congregated in Ludmead. The sinistrals
tentatively investigated the psychic wake of the slake-moths.

on fast attack
before suspicion,
urged one pugnaciously.

urge caution,
intimated another,
track with care and follow, find nest.

They quarrelled quickly
and silently. They were motionless as they hung in the air, the
quintumvirate of dextriers, each bearing a sinistral noble. The
dextriers were respectfully silent as the sinistrals debated tactics.

on slow,
they
agreed. With the exception of the dog, each sinistral and dextrier
raised its host’s arm, held its flintlock carefully at the
ready. They swept slowly forward through the air, a fantastic search
party, combing the rippling psychosphere for the driblets of
slake-moth consciousness.

They followed the trail
of spattered dream-residue in a twisting spiral over New Crobuzon,
moving slowly in a curving passage towards the sky over Spit Hearth,
and on to Sheck and the south of the Tar, in Riverskin.

As they curled round to
the west, they sensed the wafts of psyche emanating from Griss Twist.
For a moment, the handlingers were confused. They hovered and
investigated the rippling sensation, but it was quickly clear that
they were human radiations.

some thaumaturge,
intimated one.

not our concern,
its fellows agreed. The sinistrals bade their dextrier mounts
continue with their airborne tracking. The little figures hovered
like dust-motes above the skyrails of the militia. The sinistrals
moved their heads uneasily from side to side, scanning the empty sky.

There was a sudden
burgeoning swell of foreign exudations. The surface tension of the
psychosphere ballooned with pressure, and that hideous sense of alien
greed oozed through its pores. The psychic plane was thick with the
glutinous effluvia of incomprehensible minds.

The sinistrals squirmed
in a glut of fear and confusion. It was so much, so strong, so quick!
They bucked on the backs of their mounts. The links they had opened
with the dextriers were suddenly full of psychic backwash. Each of
the dextriers felt a flood of terror as the sinistrals’
emotions overflowed.

The flight of the five
pairs became erratic. They spasmed through the sky, broke formation.

thing coming,
yelled one, and there was an answering welter of confused and fearful
messages.

The dextriers fought to
regain control of their flight.

In a simultaneous burst
of wings, five dark, cryptic shapes launched themselves from some
shadowed niche in the tight-packed confusion of Riverskin’s
roofs. The snapping wafts of enormous wings sounded through several
dimensions, up through the tepid air to where the handlinger pairs
zigzagged in confusion.

The dog-sinistral
caught a glimpse of great shadowy wings ploughing the air beneath it.
It let out a mental keen of fright, and felt the Rescue-dextrier
pitch nauseously beneath it. The sinistral fought to regain control
of itself.

sinistrals together,
it shouted, and then demanded of the dextrier that it go up, up.

The dextriers banked
together, slid through the air to fall in beside each other. They
drew strength from each other, reining in with hard discipline. Quite
suddenly, they were a line like a military division, five blindfolded
dextriers facing slightly down, their mouths puckered ready to
spitsear. Their sinistrals scanned the skies avidly in their mirror
helms. Their faces were pointing up to the stars. Their mirrors were
angled down: they had a vision of the city’s dark vista, a
crazily yawing aggregation of tiles and alleyways and domed glass.

They watched as the
slake-moths drew closer at breathtaking speed.

how smell us?
queried one sinistral nervously. They were blocking their mindpores
as best they could. They were not expecting to be ambushed. How had
they lost the initiative?

But as the slake-moths
lurched up towards them, the sinistrals saw that they were
not
discovered.

The largest moth, at
the front of the chaotic wedge of wings, was shrouded with a
flickering encumbrance. They saw that the slake-moth’s fearful
weaponry, its jagged tentacles and bone-serrated limbs, were flashing
and cutting. Its massive teeth were gnashing at the air.

It seemed as if it
fought a wraith. Its enemy wavered in and out of conventional space,
its form as evanescent as smoke, solidifying and disappearing like a
shadow. It was like some vast arachnid nightmare that pranced through
close-woven realities and slashed at the slake-moth with cruel chitin
lancets.

Weaver!
gushed
one of the sinistrals, and they bade their dextriers creep back
slowly from the acrobatic melee.

The other moths spun
around their sibling, trying to aid it. They took it in turns to
sweep in, according to some impenetrable code. As the Weaver
manifested they would attack it, cutting through its armour,
releasing gouts of ichor before it was gone. Despite its wounds, the
Weaver was ripping great clots of tissue and some crude tarry blood
from the frantic slake-moth.

The moth and the spider
attacked each other in an extraordinary blur of violent motion, each
thrust and parry too fast to see.

As they rose, the moths
broke the dream-cover over the city. They reached the level of the
sky where those waves of mentality had confused the handlingers.

It was obvious that the
moths could feel them too. Their tight-knit formation broke in
momentary confusion. The smallest of the moths, with a twisted body
and stunted wings, peeled away from the mass and unrolled a monstrous
tongue.

The enormous tongue
quivered and flickered back into the dripping maw.

With a lunatic erratic
flight the smallest moth swivelled in the air, circling the savagery
of the Weaver and its prey, hesitated in midair, then plummeted down
and east, towards Griss Twist.

The desertion of the
litter runt confused the slake-moths. They separated in the sky,
twirling their heads around them, their antennae flickering wildly.

The spellbound
sinistrals moved back in alarm.

now!
said one.
confused and busy, we attack with Weaver!

They dithered
helplessly.

ready for spitsear,
the dog-handlinger told Rescue-handlinger.

As the moths peeled
away from each other, flying further and further around the tussling
pair in the centre, they spun in the air. The sinistrals screamed at
each other.

attack!
screamed
one, the sinistral parasitic on the thin clerk, a frenzy of fear
audible in its voice,
attack!

The old human woman
bolted suddenly forward through the air, as the fearful sinistral
goaded its dextrier on to a sudden burst of speed. Just as one of the
moths turned and froze, facing the oncoming pair of handlingers and
their hosts.

At that moment the
other two moths swept in together, one plunging a massive bone lance
into the Weaver’s distended abdomen. As the great spider reared
back, the other moth lassooed its neck with a coil of segmented
tentacle. The Weaver disappeared out of the night into another plane,
but the tentacle snared it, dragged it half back out of a fold in
space, tightened around its neck.

The Weaver jacked and
fought to free itself, but the sinistrals hardly saw it. The third
moth was careering towards them.

The dextriers saw
nothing, but they felt the terrified psychic wailing of the
sinistrals who wobbled to try to keep the approaching moth visible in
their mirrors.

spitsear!
commanded the clerk-handlinger to his dextrier.
now!

The host body, the old
woman, opened her mouth and jutted out a rolled-up tongue. She
inhaled sharply and spat as hard as she could. A great gush of
pyrotic gas rolled out of her tongue and combusted spectacularly
across the night sky. A massive rolling cloud of flame unfurled
itself at the slake-moth.

The aim was true, but
the sinistral had mistimed in its fear. The dextrier spitseared too
early. The fire unfolded in an oily wash, dissipating before it
touched the moth’s flesh. When the burst had evaporated, the
moth was gone.

In a panic, the
sinistrals began to command their dextriers to swivel in the air, to
find the creature,
wait wait!
screamed the dog-handlinger, but
its warning was quite unheeded. The handlingers were bobbing in the
sky as randomly as rubbish in the sea, facing all directions, gazing
frantically into their mirrors.

there,
screeched
the young-woman sinistral, catching sight of the moth as it pitched
remorselessly as an anchor towards the city. The other handlingers
turned in the sky to see through their mirrors, and with a chorus of
screams found themselves face to face with another moth.

It had flown over them
while they sought its sibling, so that when they turned it was before
their eyes, clearly visible with its wings outstretched, just beyond
their mirrors.

The young man-sinistral
managed to close its host’s eyes and command its dextrier to
turn, spitsearing. The panicking dextrier, in the host of the young
child, tried to obey, and sent flaming gobbets of gas spinning in a
tight spiral, spattering the pair of handlingers beside it in the
air.

The Remade-dextrier and
its khepri-sinistral screamed sonically and psychically as they and
their hosts ignited. They plummeted from the sky, immolating in
agony, screaming until they died halfway down, their blood boiling
and their bones cracking from the intense heat before they hit the
waters of the Tar. They disappeared under the dirty water with a
burst of steam.

The woman-sinistral was
hovering in thrall, its borrowed eyes glazed by the storm of patterns
on the slake-moth’s wings. The sudden hypnotized efflorescence
of the sinistral’s dreams slid through the channel to its
dextrier steed. The vodyanoi-handlinger winced at the bizarre
cacophony of a mind unfolding. It realized what had happened. It
moaned in terror with its host’s mouth, and fumbled with the
straps attaching the sinistral and host to its back. The dextrier
shut its vodyanoi eyes tight, even under the blindfold.