Perdido Street Station (74 page)

It crawled with a
horrible sluggish torpor towards the invigorating city night.

Yagharek had not
pinpointed its nest, and that was critical. His eyes batted
inconstantly between the insidious creature itself and the patch of
domed darkness from where he had first seen it rise.

And as he watched
intently through his mounted mirrors, he won his prize.

He kept his eyes on a
tangle of old architecture at the southwestern edge of the
Glasshouse. The buildings, amended and tinkered with after centuries
of cactus occupation, had once been a clot of smart houses. There was
almost nothing to distinguish them from their surroundings. They were
a little taller than the neighbouring edifices, and their tops had
been sliced off by the descending curve of the dome. But rather than
demolish them outright, the buildings had been selectively cut, their
upper floors taken off where they impeded the glass and the rest left
intact. The further out from the centre the houses were, the lower
the dome over them and the more of their raised floors had been
destroyed.

It was originally the
wedge of building at the fork where a street had split. The vertex of
the terrace was almost intact, with only the roof removed. Behind it
was a dwindling tail of brick storeys, shrinking under the mass of
the dome, and evaporating at the edge of the cactus town.

From the uppermost
window of this old structure emerged the unmistakable thrusting maw
of a slake-moth.

Again, Yagharek’s
heart moved, and it was a stern effort that restored its regular
beat. He experienced all his emotions at a remove, through a foggy
filter of the hunting trance. And this time he was diffusely aware of
excitement, as well as fear.

He knew where the
slake-moths roosted.

**

Now that he had
discovered what he had sought, Yagharek wanted to shin as fast as he
could down the innards of the dome, to remove himself from the
slake-moth’s world, to get out of the heights of the air and
hide on the ground under the looming eaves. But to move quickly, he
realized, was to risk the slake-moth’s attention. He had to
wait, swinging very slightly, sweating, silent and immobile, while
the monstrous creatures crawled out into the deeper darkness.

The second moth leapt
without the slightest sound into the air, gliding on spread wings for
a second and alighting on the metal bones of the Glasshouse. It slid
with a vile motion up towards its fellow.

Yagharek waited,
without moving.

It was several minutes
before the third moth appeared.

Its siblings had nearly
reached the top of the dome, after a long, stealthy climb. The
newcomer was too eager for that. It stood poised at the same window
from which the others had emerged, gripping the frame, balancing its
convoluted bulk on the edge of the wood. Then, with an audible snap
of air, it beat its way straight upwards, into the sky.

Yagharek could not be
sure where the next noise came from, but he thought the two crawling
slake-moths hissed at their flying sibling, in disapproval or
warning.

There was an answering
hum. In the stillness of the Glasshouse curfew, the clicking of
mechanized gears from the top of the temple was easily heard.

Yagharek was quite
still.

A light burst forth
from the top of the pyramid, a blazing white ray, so sharp and
defined it seemed almost solid. It beamed from the lens of the
strange machine.

Yagharek stared through
his mirrored glasses. In the faint ambience radiating backwards from
the glaring searchlight he could see a crew of cactacae elders
stationed behind it, each frantically adjusting some dial, some
valve, one grasping two enormous handles that jutted from the back of
the light-emitting engine. He swivelled and twisted the thing,
directing its luminous shaft.

The light glared
savagely onto a random patch of the dome’s glass, then was
wrested by its wielder into another position, swung randomly for a
moment, then pinioned the impatient slake-moth as it reached the
broken panes.

It turned its horned
eyesockets to the light. The monstrous creature hissed.

Yagharek heard shouts
from the cactus people on the ziggurat, a half-familiar tongue. It
was an alloy, a bastard hybrid, mostly words he had last heard in
Shankell, alongside New Crobuzon

Ragamoll and other
influences he did not recognize at all. As a gladiator in the desert
city, he had learnt some of the language of his mostly cactus
bookmakers. The formulations he heard now were bizarre, centuries out
of date and corrupted with alien dialects, but still almost
comprehensible to him.

"...there!"
he heard, and something about light. Then as the slake-moth dropped
away again from the glass to extricate itself from the torch, he
heard, very clearly, "It’s coming!"

The slake-moth had
easily fallen away and out of the reach of the enormous torch. Its
beam oscillated wildly like a madman’s lighthouse as the
cactacae fought to point it in the right direction. Desperately they
swung it over the streets, up at the roof of the dome.

The other two moths
remained unseen, flattening themselves against the glass.

There was a shouted
discussion from below.

"...ready...sky..."
he made out, then some word that sounded like the Shankell words for
"sun" and "spear" run together. Someone shouted
out to take care, and said something about the sunspear and the home:
too far,
they shouted,
too far.

There was a barked
order from the cactus directly behind the vast torch, and his team
adjusted their motions obscurely. The leader demanded "limits,"
of what Yagharek could not understand.

As the light lurched
wildly, it found its target again, momentarily. For a moment, the
tangled presence of the slake-moth sent a ghastly shadow across the
inside of the dome.

"Ready?"
shouted the leader, and there was a confirming chorus.

He continued to swivel
the lamp, desperately trying to pin the flying moth with its hard
light. It swooped and curved, arcing over the tops of the buildings
and careering in spirals, a dimly glimpsed display of virtuoso
aerobatics, a shadowy circus.

And then, for a moment,
the creature was caught spreadeagled in the sky, the light caught it
full on and time seemed to stop at the sight of the thing’s
awesome, unfathomable and terrible beauty.

At the sight, the
cactacae aiming the light tugged some hidden handle, and a gob of
incandescence spat out of the lens and blazed along the path of the
searchlight. Yagharek’s eyes widened. The clot of concentrated
light and heat spasmed out of existence a few feet before it hit the
glass of the dome.

The momentary white-out
seemed to still all sound in the dome.

Yagharek blinked to
clear the afterimage of that savage projectile from his eyes.

The cactacae below
began to talk again.

"...get it?"
asked one. There was a confusion of unclear answers.

They peered, along with
Yagharek, unseen above them, into the air where the slake-moth had
flown. They scoured the ground with their eyes, turning the powerful
beam towards the pavement.

Throughout the streets
below, Yagharek saw the armed patrols standing still, watching the
searching light, standing implacable as it swept over them.

"Nothing,"
shouted one to the elders on high, and his report was repeated from
all sectors, shouted into the claustrophobic night.

Behind the thick
curtains and the wooden shutters of Glasshouse’s windows,
threads of light spilt into the air as torches and gaslights were
lit. But even woken by the crisis, the cactacae would not peer out
into the darkness, would not take the risk on what they might see.
The guards were left alone.

And then, with a sough
of wind as lascivious as a sexual breath, the cactus people on the
temple summit learnt that they had
not
hit the slake-moth: it
had ducked in a sharp zigzagging manoeuvre out of the range of their
sunspear, it had flown low enough over the rooftops to touch them, to
claw its way towards the tower, to pull itself slowly up and to rise
magisterially into view, wings outstretched to their full compass,
patterns flickering across them as fierce and complex as dark fire.

There was a tiny moment
when one of the elders shrieked. There was a split second when the
leader tried to tug the sunspear into position to blast the
slake-moth into burning fragments. But they could not but see the
wings unfolded before them, and their cries, their plans, evaporated
as their minds overflowed.

Yagharek watched in his
mirrored eyepieces, not wanting to see.

The two moths still
clinging to the ceiling of the dome dropped suddenly away. They
plummeted towards the earth, to lurch away from gravity with a
stunning curving glide. They swept up the steep sides of the red
pyramid, rising like devils from inside the earth, manifesting beside
the transfixed cactacae horde.

One reached out with
grasping creepers and whipped it around the thick leg of one of the
cactus people. Thin arms and avaricious talons bit into cactus flesh
without response, as the three slake-moths selected their victims,
each grabbing hold of one of the entranced elders.

On the ground below the
lights were moiling in confusion. The armed patrols were running in
circles, shouting to each other, aiming their weapons skyward and
lowering them again, cursing. They could see almost nothing. All they
knew was that some vague, fluttering things were whirling like leaves
around the top of the temple, and that the elders had stopped firing
the sunspear.

A group of hard, brave
warriors ran in to the entrance of the temple, racing up its wide
staircases towards their leaders. They were too slow. They were
helpless. The moths moved away from the building, slipping smoothly
through the sky, their wings still stretched out, somehow flying
while the wings presented an unmoving, mesmerizing vista. Each moth
dipped slightly in the air as its prey was dragged from the edge of
the brick. The three cactus elders dangled in snares, cat’s-cradles
of eerie slake-moth limbs, gazing up in stupor at the tumbling storm
of night-colours on their captors’ wings.

Several seconds before
the squad of cactacae burst up from the trapdoor onto the roof, the
moths disappeared. One by one, according to some flawless unspoken
order, they shot straight up and burst out of the crack in the dome.
They slipped out by some breakneck charm, passing without a moment’s
pause through a gap not quite large enough for their wings.

They took their
comatose prey with them, tugging the deadweight bodies into the
night-city with a repulsive grace.

The cactus elders left
beside the wilting sunspear shook themselves in confusion and
exclaimed in amazement and discomfort as their minds returned to
them. Their shouts became horrified when they saw that their
companions had been taken. They wailed in rage and swung the sunspear
up, aiming pointlessly at the empty skies. The younger warriors
appeared, their rivebows and machetes poised. They looked around in
confusion at the miserable scene and lowered their weapons.

Only then, finally,
with the victims shouting blood-oaths and caterwauling in anger, with
the night full of confused sounds, with the slake-moths flying out
across the dark metropolis, did Yagharek emerge from the martial
trance and continue climbing down the girders inside the Glasshouse
dome. The monkey-constructs saw him move, and followed him towards
the streets.

**

He moved sideways along
cross-beams, ensuring that he came to ground behind the backs of the
houses, in the little scrap of wasteland that surrounded the foetid
stub of the canal.

Yagharek dropped the
last few feet and landed silently, rolling on the broken bricks. He
crouched and listened.

There were three little
crunches as the mechanical apes landed around him and waited for
orders or suggestions.

Yagharek peered into
the filthy water beside him. The bricks were slippery with years of
organic muck and slime. At one end, thirty feet or so within the
dome’s walls, it came to an abrupt brick end. This must have
been the start of a little tributary onto the main canal system.
Where it met the dome’s wall, the canal was cut off with a
rudely made blockage of concrete and iron. It had been hammered into
place in the water, its edges sealed as tight as they could. There
were still enough tiny impurities and channels in the sodden
brickwork to ensure that the trench was kept full of water from
outside. It seeped in through the decaying stone and eddied to a
stop, thick with rubbish and dead things, a cloying broth of
water-rotting filth.

Yagharek could smell
it. He crept a little further away, towards the squat stumps of a
wall that rose out of the shattered architecture. Outside, he
realized, in the streets of the Glasshouse, the frantic shouts
continued. The air was full of idiot demands for action.

He was about to settle
down, to wait for Shadrach and the others, when Yagharek saw mounds
of the broken bricks rising all around him. They tumbled to the
ground with a little thudding downpour. Isaac and Shadrach,
Pengefinchess and Derkhan and Lemuel and Tansell rose out of the
brickdust. Yagharek saw that a pile of scrap-wire and glass behind
them was two more monkey-constructs, moving forward now to join their
fellows.

For a moment, no one
spoke. Then Isaac stumbled forward, trailing ashes and grime. The
sewer muck that coated his clothes and bag was now coated with the
grit from the collapsed buildings. His helmet—another like
Shadrach’s, complex and mechanical looking—lolled
battered and absurd on his head.