Perdido Street Station (82 page)

Isaac’s face was
hard. He spoke in a monotone. He looked at the avatar carefully.

"There’s
only four of us, and one of those we can’t rely on," he
went on. "Can you contact your...congregation?" The avatar
nodded slowly, waiting for an explanation. "See, we need people
to connect those cables across the city." Isaac tugged the list
out of the avatar’s hands and began to sketch on the back: a
jagged sideways Y for the two rivers, little crosses for Griss Twist,
The Crow, and scribbles delineating Brock Marsh and Spit Hearth in
between. He linked the first two crosses with a quick slash of
pencil. He looked up at the avatar. "You’re going to have
to organize your congregation.
Fast.
We need them in place
with the cable
by six o’clock."

"Why do you not
perform the operation here?" asked the avatar. Isaac shook his
head vaguely.

"It wouldn’t
work. This is a backwater. We have to channel the power through the
city’s focal point, where all the lines converge.

"We have to go to
Perdido Street Station."

Carrying a bloated sack
of discarded technology between them, Isaac and Yagharek crept back
through the quiet streets of Griss Twist, up the broken brick
stairwell of the Sud Line. Like shambling city vagrants in clothes
ill-suited to the sweltering air, they trudged a path through the
skyline of New Crobuzon, back to their collapsing hideout by the
railway line. They waited for a squealing onrush of train to pass,
blowing energetically from its flared chimney, then picked their way
through fences of wavering air poured upwards from the scalding iron
tracks.

It was midday, and the
air wrapped them like a heated poultice.

Isaac put down his end
of the sack and tugged at the rickety door. It was pushed open from
inside by Derkhan. She slipped through to stand in front of him, half
closing the door behind her. Isaac glanced up and could see someone
standing ill-at-ease in a dark corner.

"Found someone,
‘Zaac," whispered Derkhan. Her voice was taut. Her eyes
were bloodshot and nearly tearful in her dirty face. She pointed
briefly back into the room. "We’ve been waiting."

**

Isaac had to meet the
Council; Yagharek would inspire awe and confusion but no confidence
in those he approached; Pengefinchess would not go; so hours ago, it
was Derkhan who had been forced out into the city on the grisly and
monstrous errand. It had turned her into some bad spirit.

At first, when she left
the hut and walked into the city, made her way quickly through the
tarry darkness that filled the streets, she had cried in a drab
fashion to ease the pressure of her tortured head. She had kept her
shoulders skulking high, knowing that of the few figures she saw
quickly pacing their way somewhere, a high proportion were likely to
be militia. The heavy nightmare tension of the air drained her.

But then as the sun
rose and the night sank slowly into the gutters, her way had become
easier. She had moved more quickly, as if the very material of the
darkness had resisted her.

Her task was no less
horrendous, but urgency bleached her horror until it was an anaemic
thing. She knew that she could not wait.

She had some way to go.
She was making for the charity hospital of Syriac Well, through four
or more miles of intricately twisting slum and collapsing
architecture. She did not dare take a cab, in case it was driven by a
militia spy, an agent out to catch perpetrators like her. So she
paced as quickly as she dared in the shadow of the Sud Line. It
raised itself higher and higher above the roofs as it passed further
and further from the city’s heart. Yawning arches of dripping
brick soared over the squat streets of Syriac.

At Syriac Rising
Station, Derkhan had broken away from the tracks of the rails and
borne off into the snarl of streets south of the undulating Gross
Tar.

It had been easy to
follow the noise of costermongers and stallholders to the squalor of
Tincture Prom, the wide and dirty street that linked Syriac, Pelorus
Fields and Syriac Well. It followed the course of the Gross Tar like
an imprecise echo, changing its name as it went, becoming Wynion Way,
then Silverback Street.

Derkhan had skirted its
raucous arguments, its two-wheel cabs and resilient, decaying
buildings from the side streets. She had tracked its length like a
hunter, bearing north-east. Until finally, where the road kinked and
bore north at a sharper angle, she had gathered her courage to scurry
across it, scowling like a furious beggar, and plunged into the heart
of Syriac Well, to the Veruline Hospital.

It was an old and
sprawling pile, turreted and finessed with various brick and cement
flounces: gods and daemons eyed each other across the tops of
windows, and drakows rampant sprouted at odd angles from the
multilevel roof. Three centuries previously, it had been a grandiose
rest-home for the insane rich, in what was then a sparse suburb of
the city. The slums had spread like gangrene and swallowed up Syriac
Well: the asylum had been gutted, turned into a warehouse for cheap
wool; then emptied out by bankruptcy; squatted by a thieves’
chapter, then a failed thaumaturges’ union; and finally bought
by the Veruline Order and turned once more into a hospital.

Once more a place of
healing, they said.

Without funds or drugs,
with doctors and apothecaries volunteering odd hours when their
consciences goaded them, with a staff of pious but untrained monks
and nuns, the Veruline Hospital was where the poor went to die.

Derkhan had made her
way past the doorman, ignoring his queries as if she were deaf. He
raised his voice at her, but he did not follow. She had ascended the
stairs to the first floor, towards the three working wards.

And there...there she
had hunted.

She remembered stalking
up and down past clean, worn beds, below massive arched windows full
of cold light, past wheezing, dying bodies. To the harassed monk who
scurried up to her and asked her business, she had blubbered about
her dying father who had gone missing—stomped off into the
night to die—who she had heard might be here with these angels
of mercy, and the monk was mollified and a little puffed at his
goodliness and he told Derkhan that she might stay and search. And
Derkhan asked where the very ill were, tearful again, because her
father, she explained, was close to death.

The monk had pointed
her wordlessly through the double-doors at the end of the huge room.

And Derkhan had passed
through and entered a hell where death was stretched out, where all
that was available to ward off the pain and degradation was sheets
without bed-bugs. The young nun who stalked the ward with eyes wide
in endless appalled shock would pause occasionally and refer to the
sheet clipped to the end of every bed, verifying that yes the patient
was dying and that no they were still not dead.

Derkhan looked down and
flipped a chart open. She found the diagnosis and the prescription.
Lungrot,
she had read.
2 dose laudanum/3 hours for pain.
In in another hand:
Laudanum unavailable.

In the next bed, the
unavailable drug was sporr-water. In the next, calciach sudifile,
which Derkhan read the chart correctly, would have cured the patient
of their disintegrating bowel over eight treatments. It went onward
the length of the room, a pointless, informational list of what would
have ended the pain, one way or another.

Derkhan began to do
what she had come for.

She examined the
patients with a ghoulish eye, a hunter of the nearly dead. She had
been highly aware of the criteria with which she gazed—
of
sound mind, and so ill they will not last the day—
and she
had felt sick to her stomach. The nun had seen her, had approached
with a curious lack of urgency, demanding to know what or whom she
sought.

Derkhan had ignored her
and continued with her terrible cool assessment. Derkhan had walked
the length of the room, stopping eventually beside the bed of an old
man whose notes gave him a week to live. He slept with his mouth
open, dribbling slightly and grimacing in his sleep.

There had been a
ghastly moment of reflection when she had found herself applying
untenable ethics to the choice—
Who here is a militia
informer?
she wanted to shout.
Who here has raped? Who has
abused a child? Who has tortured?
She had closed down the
thoughts. That could not be allowed, she had realized. That might
drive her mad. This had to be exigency. This could not be a choice.

Derkhan had turned to
the nun who followed her emitting a constant stream of blather it was
no effort to ignore.

Derkhan remembered her
own words as if they had never been real.

This man is dying, she
had said. The nun’s noise had quieted, and she had nodded. Can
he move? Derkhan had asked.

Slowly, the nun said.

Is he mad? Derkhan had
asked. He was not.

I’m taking him,
she had said. I need him.

The nun had begun to
vent outrage and astonishment and Derkhan’s own carefully
battened down emotions had broken free momentarily and tears had
flooded her face with appalling speed, and she had felt as if she
would howl in misery so she closed her eyes and hissed in wordless
animal grief until the nun was silent. Derkhan had looked at her
again and shut down her own tears.

Derkhan had pulled her
gun from inside her cloak and held it at the nun’s belly. The
nun looked down and mewed in surprise and fear. While the nun still
gazed at the weapon in disbelief, with her left hand Derkhan had
pulled out the pouch of money, the remnants of Isaac’s and
Yagharek’s money. She had held it out until the nun saw it, and
realized what was expected and held out her hand. Then Derkhan poured
the notes and gold-dust and battered coins into it.

Take this, she had
said, her voice trembling and careful. She pointed randomly about the
ward at the moaning, tossing figures in the beds. Buy laudanum for
him and calciach for her, Derkhan had said, cure him and send that
one quietly to sleep; make one or two or three or four of them live,
and make death easier for one or two or three or four or five or I
don’t know, I don’t know. Take it, make things better for
how many you can, but this one I
must take.
Wake him up and
tell him he has to come with me. Tell him I can help him.

Derkhan’s pistol
wavered, but she kept it trained vaguely on the other woman. She
closed the nun’s fingers around the money and watched her eyes
crease and widen in astonishment and incomprehension.

Deep inside her, in the
place that still felt, that she could not quite close down, Derkhan
had been aware of a plaintive defence, an argument of
justification—
See?
she felt herself assert.
We take
him but all these others we save!

But there was no moral
accounting that lessened the horror of what she was doing. She could
only ignore that anxious discourse. She stared deep and fervent into
the nun’s eyes. Derkhan closed her hand tight around the nun’s
fingers.

Help them, she had
hissed. This can help them. You can help them all except him or you
can help none of them. Help them.

And after a long, long
time of silence, of staring at Derkhan with troubled eyes, of looking
at the grubby currency and at the gun and then at the dying patients
on all sides, the nun put the money into her white overall with a
shaking hand. And as she moved away to waken the patient, Derkhan
watched her with a terrible, mean triumph.

See?
Derkhan had
thought, sick with self-loathing.
It wasn’t just me! She
chose to do it too!

**

His name was Andrej
Shelbornek. He was sixty-five. His innards were being eaten by some
virulent germ. He was quiet and very tired of worrying, and after two
or three initial questions, he followed Derkhan without complaint.

She told him a little
about the treatments they had in mind, the experimental techniques
they wished to try on his brutalized body. He said nothing about
this, about her filthy appearance, or anything else.
He must know
what’s going on!
she had thought.
He’s tired of
living like this, he’s making it easy on me.
This was
rationalization of the lowest kind, and she would not entertain it.

It was swiftly clear
that he could not walk the miles to Griss Fell. Derkhan had
hesitated. She pulled a few torn notes from her pocket. She had no
choice but to hail a cab. She was nervous. She had lowered her voice
into an unrecognizable snarl as she gave directions, with her cloak
hiding her face.

The two-wheeled cab was
pulled by an ox, Remade into a biped to fit with ease into New
Crobuzon’s twisted alleyways and narrow thoroughfares, to turn
tight corners and retreat without stalling. It lolloped on its two
back-curved legs in constant surprise at itself, with a stride that
was uncomfortable and bizarre. Derkhan sat back and closed her eyes.
When she looked up again, Andrej was asleep.

He did not speak, or
frown or seem perturbed, until she had bade him climb the steep slope
of earth and concrete shards beside the Sud Line. Then his face had
creased and he had looked at her in confusion.

Derkhan had said
something blithely about a secret experimental laboratory, a site
above the city, with access to the trains. He had looked concerned,
had shaken his head and looked around to escape. In the dark below
the railway bridge, Derkhan had pulled out her flintlock. Although
dying, he was still afraid of death, and she had forced him up the
slope at gunpoint. He had begun to cry halfway up. Derkhan had
watched him and nudged him with the pistol, had felt all her emotions
from very far away. She kept distant from her own horror.