Perdido Street Station (68 page)

He was unsure of the
Council’s motivations, its reasons for remaining hidden. But it
was enough to know that this weapon could not be wielded by the
militia. And it was the best chance the city had. He could not deny
it that.

That was one thing.

But more powerful by
far, deep-ingrained in his gut, was something more base. A hatred. He
looked up at Derkhan and remembered why he was her friend. His mouth
twisted.

I would not trust
Rudgutter,
he thought coldly,
if the murdering bastard swore
by his children’s souls.

If the state found the
moths, Isaac realized, it would do everything in its power to
recapture them. Because they were so
damned valuable.
They
might be dragged out of the night skies, the danger might be
contained again, but they would be locked up once more in some
laboratory, hawked in another foul auction, returned to their
commercial purpose.

Once again, they would
be milked. And fed.

No matter how
ill-suited he was to tracking the slake-moths down and destroying
them, Isaac knew he would try. He would not be party to the
alternatives.

**

They talked on, until
the darkness began to leech from the eastern fringe of the sky.
Tentative suggestions began to coalesce. They were all conditionals.
But even hedged around with a hundred qualifications, the
half-schemes grew and took shape. Slowly, a sequence of actions
suggested itself. With a growing astonishment, Isaac and Derkhan
realized that they had a kind of plan.

As they talked, the
Council sent its mobile selves into the depths of the dump. They
rummaged unseen among the mounds of trash, to re-emerge carrying bent
wire, battered saucepans and colanders, even one or two broken
helmets, and great glinting piles of mirror, savage random jags.

"Can you find a
welder, or a metallo-thaumaturge?" asked the avatar. "You
must make defensive helmets." He described the mirrors that must
be mounted before the lines of sight.

"Yeah," said
Isaac. "We’ll return tomorrow night to make the helmets.
And then...then we have a day to...to ready ourselves. Before we go
in."

While the night was
still fully ascendant, the various constructs began to creep away.
They returned to their masters’ homes, early enough that their
night’s journeys were unnoticed.

The daylight had spread
and the occasional guttural sound of the trains increased. The
raucous and filthy early morning dialogue of the barge-families
began, shouted across the water on the other side of the rubbish. The
early shifts of workers began to trudge into the factories and abase
themselves before the vast chains, the steam engines and juddering
hammers of those profane cathedrals.

There were only the
five figures left in the clearing: Isaac and his companions; the
ghastly lich that spoke for the Construct Council; and the looming
Council itself, moving its segmented limbs sedately.

Isaac, Derkhan and
Yagharek rose to go. They were exhausted and in varying degrees of
pain, from knees and hands flayed by the barbed ground to Isaac’s
still-shuddering head. They were smeared with muck and grime. They
shed dust as thick as smoke. It was as if they burned.

They stashed the
mirrors and the material to make helmets in a place they would
remember in the dump. Isaac and Derkhan looked around in confusion at
the landscape so utterly changed by daylight, its threatening
demeanour become pathetic, the half-glimpsed looming forms revealed
as broken prams and torn mattresses. Yagharek picked his bound feet
up high, stumbling a little, and walked unerringly towards the
pathway from where they had come.

Isaac and Derkhan
joined him. They were utterly drained. Derkhan’s face was
white, and she dabbed in miserable pain at her missing ear. As they
were about to disappear behind the shifting walls of crushed rubbish,
the avatar called out.

When Isaac heard what
the avatar said, he began to frown, and did not stop while he turned
away and walked out of the Council’s presence with his
companions, nor did he stop all the while he wound his way through
the channels in the industrial midden and out into the slowly
illuminated estates of Griss Twist. The Construct Council’s
words stayed with him, and he thought them over, carefully.

"You cannot hold
on safely to everything you carry, der Grimnebulin," the avatar
had said. "In future, do not leave your precious things beside
the railway.

"Bring your crisis
engine to me," it had said, "for safekeeping."

"There is a
gentleman and a...a young boy to see you, Mr. Mayor," said
Davinia, through the speaking tube. "The gentleman told me to
tell you that Mr. Rescue sent him regarding the...plumbing in R&D."
Her voice faltered nervously over the obvious code.

"Let them in,"
said Rudgutter instantly, recognizing the handlinger passwords.

He was fidgeting in his
seat, moving from side to side in agitation. The heavy doors to the
Lemquist Room swung ponderously open, and a well-built, harrowed
young man stumbled in, leading a terrified-looking child by the hand.
The child was dressed in a collection of rags, as if he had just
stepped off the street. One of his arms was covered with a large
swelling, coated in filthy bandages. The man’s clothes were of
decent quality, but a bizarre fashion. He sported a pair of
voluminous trousers, almost like those worn by khepri. It made him
look peculiarly feminine, despite his build.

Rudgutter looked at him
with an exhausted, angry glance.

"Sit," he
said. He waved a sheaf of papers at the odd pair. He spoke rapidly.
"One unidentified headless corpse, strapped to a headless
dog,
both complete with dead handlingers. One pair of handlinger hosts,
strapped back to back, both drained of intellect. A—" he
glanced down at the militia report "—a vodyanoi, covered
in deep wounds, and a young human woman. We managed to extract the
handlingers—killing the hosts, actual biological death, not
this ridiculous half-thing—and we offered them some new hosts,
put them in a cage with a pair of dogs, but they didn’t move.
It’s as we suspected. Drain the host, you drain the handlinger
with it."

He sat back and watched
the two traumatized-looking figures before him.

"So..." he
said slowly, after a little silence.
"I
am Bentham
Rudgutter. Suppose you tell me who you are, and where is Mont-John
Rescue, and what happened."

In a meeting room near
the top of the Spike, Eliza Stem-Fulcher looked across the table at
the cactacae opposite her. His head towered over hers, rising
neckless from his shoulders. His arms lay motionless across the
table, enormous weighty slabs like the boughs of a tree. His skin was
pocked and marked with a hundred thousand scratches and tears that
had scarred, in the cactacae fashion, into thick knots of vegetable
matter.

The cactus pruned his
thorns strategically. The insides of his arms and legs, his palms,
wherever flesh might rub or press against flesh, he had plucked the
little spines. A tenacious red flower remained on the side of his
neck from the spring. Nodules of growth burst from his shoulders and
his chest.

He waited silently for
Stem-Fulcher to speak.

"It is our
understanding," she said carefully, "that your ground-based
patrols were ineffectual last night. As were ours, I might add. We
have yet to verify this, but it appears that there may have been some
contact between the slake-moths and a small...aerial unit of ours."
She flicked through her papers briefly. "It seems increasingly
clear," she ventured, "that simply scouring the city will
not yield results.

"Now, for many
reasons that we have discussed, not least our somewhat different
working methods, we don’t believe it would be particularly
fruitful to combine our patrols. However, it most certainly
does
make sense to co-ordinate our efforts. That is why we have extended a
legal amnesty for your organization during this collaborative
mission. In similar vein, we are prepared to offer a
temporary
waver of the strict rule against non-governmental aerostats."

She cleared her throat.
We’re getting desperate,
she thought.
But then, so, I
wager, are you.

"We are prepared
to loan two airships, to be used after discussion with us on suitable
routes and times. This is in an effort to divide up our efforts to
hunt, as it were, in the skies. Our conditions remain as previously
stated: all plans to be discussed and agreed in advance. In addition,
all research into hunting methodology to be pooled.

"So..." she
sat back and dropped a contract across the desk. "Do you have
authority with Motley to take this kind of decision? And if so...what
do you say?"

**

When Isaac, Derkhan and
Yagharek pushed open the door of the little shack by the railway and
fell into its warm shadows, exhausted, they were only a little
surprised to see Lemuel Pigeon waiting for them.

Isaac was surly and
foul. Pigeon was unapologetic.

"I told you,
Isaac," he said. "Don’t get confused. Going gets hot,
I’m gone. But here you are and I’m glad to see it, and
our deal still stands. Assuming you still insist on hunting those
fuckers, I’m going to own you, and until then you get my help."

Derkhan glowered, but
she did not indulge anger. She was tense with excitement. She glanced
at Isaac quickly and frowned.

"Can you get us
into the Glasshouse?" she said.

She told him, briefly,
about the immunity of the Construct Council from slake-moth attack.
He listened in fascination as she described how the Council had
swivelled the crane behind the moth’s back, released it and
pinioned the thing mercilessly under tons of rubbish. She told him
how the Construct Council was sure the moths were in Riverskin,
hiding in the Glasshouse.

Derkhan told him the
tentative plans.

"Today we have to
find some way to make the helmets," she said. "Then
tomorrow...we go in."

Pigeon’s eyes
narrowed. He began to scribble designs in the dust.

"This is the
Glasshouse," he said. "There are five basic routes in. One
involves bribery, and two almost certainly involve killing. Killing
cactacae’s never a good idea, and bribery’s risky. They
talk and talk about how they’re independent, but the Glasshouse
survives on Rudgutter’s sufferance." Isaac nodded and
glanced at Yagharek. "That means there’s loads of
informers. Secrecy’s safer."

Derkhan and Isaac
leaned over him, watched his hieroglyphs take shape. "So let’s
concentrate on the other two, see how they pan out."

After an hour of talk
Isaac could not stay awake any longer. His head slumped as he
listened. He began to drool on his collar. His tiredness spread out
and infected Derkhan and Lemuel. They slept, briefly.

Like Isaac, they rolled
unhappily in the muggy air, sweating in the close air of the shack.
Isaac’s sleep was more disturbed than theirs, and he whimpered
several times in the heat. A little before noon, Lemuel pulled
himself up and roused the others. Isaac awoke moaning Lin’s
name. He was fuddled with exhaustion and bad sleep and misery, and he
forgot to be angry with Lemuel. He hardly recognized that Lemuel was
there.

"I’m going
to get some company," said Lemuel. "Isaac, you better get
ready to prepare those helmets that Dee tells me about. We’re
going to need at least seven, I reckon."

"Seven?"
mumbled Isaac. "Who’re you getting? Where you off to?"

"As I’ve
told you, I feel safer with a little protection," said Lemuel,
and smiled coldly. "I put the word out that there was a little
protection work going, and I gather there’ve been a few
responses. I’m off to assess ‘em. And I will guarantee to
bring a metalhexer for you before the evening sets in. One of the
applicants, or failing that there’s a guy who owes me a favour
in Abrogate Green. I’ll see you both at...um...seven o’clock,
outside the dump."

He left. Derkhan moved
closer to Isaac in his exhausted misery and put her arm around him.
He sniffled like a child in her arms, the dream of Lin still clinging
to him.

A homegrown nightmare.
A genuine misery from deep in his mind.

**

The militia crews were
busy fitting enormous mirrors of polished metal to the backs of the
airship harnesses.

It was impossible to
refit the engine rooms or change the layout of the cabs, but they
covered the front windows with thick black curtains. The pilot would
spin the wheel blind, instructed by the yells from the officers
halfway along the gantry, staring out of the rear windows above the
enormous propellers, into the angled mirrors that offered a confusing
but complete view of the sky before the dirigible.

Motley’s
hand-picked crew were escorted to the top of the Spike by Eliza
Stem-Fulcher herself.

"I gather,"
she said to one of Motley’s captains, a taciturn Remade human
whose left arm had been replaced with an unruly python that he fought
to quieten, "that you know how to pilot an aerostat." He
nodded. She did not remark on the obvious illegality of that skill.
"You’ll be piloting the
Beyn’s Honour,
your
colleagues the
Avanc.
The militia have been warned. Keep an
eye out for other air traffic. We thought you might want to get
started this afternoon. The quarries tend to be inactive before the
night, but we thought it might be an idea for you to get used to the
controls."

The captain did not
respond. All around him, his crew were checking their equipment,
checking the angles of their helmets’ mirrors. They were stern
and cold. They seemed less fearful than the militia officers
Stem-Fulcher had left in the training room below, practising aiming
through mirrors, firing behind their own backs. Motley’s men,
after all, had dealt with the slake-moths more recently.