Perdido Street Station Part 28

The man-o'-war pilots tugged at the nodules and subcutaneous synapses that controlled the creatures' movements, coursing deceptively fast over the roofs of the hovels and the dockside warehouses, trailing their steeds' venomous appendages into the channels between architecture. Behind them were trails of spasming bodies, eyes glazed and mouths frothing in dumb pain. Here and there, a few in the crowd-the old, the frail, the allergic and the unlucky-reacted to the stings with ma.s.sive biological violence. Their hearts stopped.

The militia's dark suits were interwoven with fibres from man-o'-war hide. The tendrils could not penetrate them.

Ranks of militia charged the open s.p.a.ces where the pickets were congregated. Men and vodyanoi wielded placards like badly designed clubs. Within the disorderly ma.s.s were brutal skirmishes, as militia agents swung spiked truncheons and whips coated with man-o'-war stings. Twenty feet from the front line of the confused and angry demonstrators, the first wave of uniformed militia dropped to their knees and raised their mirrored s.h.i.+elds. From behind them came the gibbering of a shunn, then quick arcs of billowing smoke as their fellows hurled gas grenades over into the demonstration. The militia moved inexorably into the clouds, breathing through their filter-masks.

A splinter group of officers peeled off from the main wedge formation and bore down on the river. They threw tube after hissing tube of billowing gas into the vodyanoi's watercraeft ditch. The croaks and screeches of burning lungs and skin filled the hole. The carefully maintained walls began to split and dribble as more and more strikers hurled themselves through into the river to escape the vicious fumes.

Three militiamen knelt at the very edge of the river. They were surrounded by a thicket of their colleagues, a protective skin. Quickly, the three at the centre pulled target-rifles from their backs. Each man had two, loaded and primed with powder, one of which they set beside them. Moving very fast, they sighted along the shafts into the miasma of grey smoke. An officer in the peculiar silver epaulettes of a captain-thaumaturge stood behind them, muttering quickly and inaudibly, his voice m.u.f.fled. He touched each marksman's temples, then jerked his hands away.

Behind their masks, the men's eyes watered and cleared, suddenly seeing registers of light and radiation that rendered the smoke virtually invisible.

Each man knew the bodyshape and movement patterns of his target perfectly. The sharpshooters tracked quickly through the fog of gas and saw their targets conferring with wet rags clamped to their mouths and noses. There was a rapid crackle, three shots in a quick tempo.

Two of the vodyanoi fell. The third looked round in panic, seeing nothing but the swirl of that vicious gas. He raced to the water walling him in, scooped a handful from it and began to croon to it, moving his hand in fast and esoteric pa.s.ses. One of the riverside marksmen dropped his rifle quickly and picked up his second weapon. The target was a shaman, he realized, and if given time he might invoke an undine. That would make things vastly more complicated. The officer raised the gun to his shoulder, aimed and fired in one brisk movement. The hammer with its clamped shard of flint slid down the serrated edge of the pan cover and snapped, sparking, into the pan.

The bullet burst through the gusts of gas, sending it coiling in intricate wreaths, and buried itself in the neck of the target. The third member of the vodyanoi strike committee fell squirming into the mire, the water dissipating in arcing spray. His blood pooled and thickened in the quag.

The watercraeft walls of the trench in the river were splintering and collapsing. They sagged and bowed, water breaching them in gouts and diluting the riverbed, eddying around the feet of the few remaining strikers, coiling like the gas above it, until with a s.h.i.+ver the Gross Tar reknit itself, healing the little rift that had paralysed it and confused its currents. Polluted water buried the blood, the political papers and the bodies.

As the militia put down the Kelltree strike, cables burst from the fifth airs.h.i.+p as from its kin.

The crowds in Dog Fenn were shouting, yelling news and descriptions of the fight. Escapees from the pickets stumbled through the ramshackle alleys. Gangs of youths ran back and forth in energetic confusion.

The costermongers on Silverback Street were yelling and pointing at the fat dirigible uncoiling its dangling rigging to the earth. Their shouts were effaced in the sudden boom and drone of klaxons in the sky as one by one the five airs.h.i.+ps sounded. A militia squad abseiled through the hot air into the streets of Dog Fenn.

They slipped below the silhouetted rooftops into the rank air, then down, their huge boots hammering down the slippery concrete of the courtyard in which they landed. They looked more construct than human, bulked up by bizarre and twisted armour. The few workers and dossers in the cul-de-sac watched them with mouths gaping until one of the militia turned briefly and raised a huge blunderbuss rifle, sweeping it in a threatening arc. At that, the watchers dived to the ground or turned and fled.

The militia troops stormed down a dripping staircase into the underground slaughterhouse. They smashed through the unlocked door and fired into the swirling, b.l.o.o.d.y air. The butchers and slaughterers turned dumbfounded to the doorway. One dropped, gargling in agony as a bullet burst his lung. His gory tunic was drenched again, this time from the inside. The other workers fled, slipping on gristle as they ran.

The militia tore down the swinging, dripping carca.s.ses of goat and pigmeat and yanked at the suspended conveyor-belt of hooks until it ripped from the damp ceiling. They charged in waves towards the back of the dark chamber and stomped up the stairs and along the little landing. For all that it slowed them, the locked door to Benjamin Flex's bedroom might have been gauze.

Once inside the troops moved to either side of the wardrobe, leaving one man to unstrap a huge sledgehammer from his back. He swung it at the old wood, dissolving the wardrobe in three huge strokes, uncovering a hole in the wall that emitted the chugging of a steam engine and fitful oil-lamp light.

Two of the officers disappeared into the secret room. There was a m.u.f.fled shout and the sound of repeated hammering thuds. Benjamin Flex came flying through the crumbling hole, his body twisting, beads of blood hitting his grimy walls in radial patterns. He hit the floor head first and shrieked, tried to scrabble away, swearing incoherently. Another officer reached down and lifted him by the s.h.i.+rt with steam-enhanced strength, shoving him against a wall.

Ben gibbered and tried to spit, staring at the impa.s.sive blue-masked face, intricate smoked goggles and gasmask and spiked helmet like the face of some insectile daemon.

The voice that emerged from the hissing mouthparts was monotonous, but quite clear.

"Benjamin Flex, please give your verbal or written a.s.sent to accompany myself and other officers of the New Crobuzon militia to a place of our choosing for the purposes of interview and intelligence gathering." The militiaman slammed Ben against the wall, hard, eliciting an explosive burst of breath and an unintelligible bark. "a.s.sent so noticed in presence of myself and two witnesses," the officer responded. "Aye?"

Two of the militiamen behind the officer nodded in unison and responded: "Aye."

The officer cuffed Ben with a punis.h.i.+ng backhand blow that dazed him and burst his lip. His eyes wavered drunkenly and he dribbled blood. The hugely armoured man swung Ben up over his shoulder and stomped from the room.

The constables who had entered the little print-room waited for the rest of the squad to follow the officer back out into the corridor. Then, in perfect time, they each pulled a large iron canister from their belts and pushed the plungers that set in motion a violent chymical reaction. They threw the cylinders into the cramped room where the construct still cranked the printing press handle in an endless, mindless circuit.

The militiamen ran like ponderous bipedal rhinos down the corridor after their officer. The acid and powder in the pipebombs mixed and fizzed, flared violently, ignited the tightly packed gunpowder. There were two sudden detonations that sent the damp walls of the building shuddering.

The corridor jacked under the impact, as innumerable gobbets of flaming paper spewed from the doorway, with hot ink and ripped s.n.a.t.c.hes of pipe. Twists of metal and gla.s.s burst from the skylight in an industrial fountain. Like smouldering confetti, snippets of editorials and denunciations were sprinkled over the surrounding streets. WE SAY WE SAY, said one, and BETRAYAL BETRAYAL! another. Here and there the banner t.i.tle was visible, Runagate Rampant Runagate Rampant. Here it was torn and burning, only a fragment visible.

Run . . .

One by one the militia attached themselves to the still-waiting ropes with a clip at their belt. They fumbled with levers embedded in their integral backpacks, setting in motion some powerful, hidden engine that dragged them off the streets and into the air as the belt-pulley turned, its powerful cogs interlocking and hauling the dark, bulky figures back up into the belly of their airs.h.i.+p. The officer holding Ben clutched him tightly, but the pulley did not falter under the weight of the extra man.

As a weak fire played desultorily over what had been the slaughterhouse, something dropped from the roof, where it had caught on a ragged gutter. It tumbled through the air and crunched heavily on the stained ground. It was the head of Ben's construct, its upper right arm still attached.

The thing's arm twitched violently, trying to twist a handle that was no longer there. The head rolled, like a skull encased in pewter. Its metal mouth twitched and for a few ghastly seconds, it affected a disgusting parody of motion, crawling along the uneven ground by flexing and unflexing its jaw.

Within half a minute the last vestige of energy had leeched from it. Its gla.s.s eyes vibrated and snapped to a stop. It was still.

A shadow pa.s.sed over the dead thing, as the airs.h.i.+p, full now with all its troops, cruised slowly over the face of Dog Fenn, over the last brutal, sordid battles in the docklands, up past Parliament and over the enormity of the city, towards Perdido Street Station and the interrogation rooms of the Spike.

At first, I felt sick to be around them, all these men, their rus.h.i.+ng, heavy, stinking breaths, their anxiety pouring through their skin like vinegar. I wanted the cold again, the darkness below the railways, where ruder forms of life struggle and fight and die and are eaten. There is a comfort in that brute simplicity.

But this is not my land and that is not my choice to make. I have struggled to contain myself. I have struggled with the alien jurisprudence of this city, all sharp divides and fences, lines that separate this from that and yours from mine. I have modelled myself on this. I have sought comfort and protection in owning myself, in being my own, my isolate, my private property for this the first time. But I have learnt with sudden violence that I am the victim of colossal fraud.

I have been duped. When the crisis breaks, I cannot be my own here any more than in the Cymek's constant summer (where "my sand" or "your water" are absurdities that would kill their utterer). The splendid isolation I have sought has crumbled. I need Grimnebulin, Grimnebulin needs his friend, his friend needs succour from us all. It is simple mathematics to cancel common terms and discover that I need succour, too. I must offer it to others, to save myself.

I am stumbling. I must not fall.

I was once a creature of the air, and it remembers me. When I climb to the city heights and lean out into the wind, it tickles me with currents and vectors from my past. I can smell and see the pa.s.sage of predators and prey in the eddying wash of this atmosphere.

I am like a diver who has lost his suit, who can still gaze through the gla.s.s bottom of a boat and watch the creatures of the upper and deeper darkness, can trace their pa.s.sage and feel the tug of the tides, even though distorted and distant, veiled and half hidden.

I know that something is wrong in the sky.

I can see it in the disturbed flocks of birds, that shy suddenly away from random patches of air. I can see it in the panicked pa.s.sage of wyrmen that seem to glance behind them as they fly.

The air stills with summer, is heavy with heat and now with these newcomers, these intruders I cannot see. The air is laden with menace. My curiosity rises. My hunting instincts stir.

But I am earthbound.

PART FOUR.

A Plague of Nightmares

CHAPTER T TWENTY-SEVEN.

Something uncomfortable and insistent prodded Benjamin Flex awake. His head rocked nauseously, his stomach plunged.

He was sitting strapped to a chair in a small, antiseptic white room. On one wall was a window of frosted gla.s.s, admitting light but no sights, no clue at all as to what lay outside. A white-coated man stood over him, poking him with a long shard of metal attached by wires to a humming engine.

Benjamin looked up into the man's face and saw his own. The man wore a mask of perfectly smooth, rounded mirror, a convex lens that sent Benjamin's distorted face back at him. Even bowled and ridiculous, the bruises and blood that discoloured Benjamin's skin shocked him.

The door was open slightly and a man was standing half in, half out of the room. He held the door and faced back the way he had come, speaking to someone in the corridor or main room beyond.

". . . glad you like it," Benjamin heard. ". . . off to the playhouse with Ca.s.sandra tonight, so you never know . . . no, these eyes are still killing me . . ." The man laughed briefly in response to some unheard pleasantry. He waved. Then he turned and entered the little room.

He turned towards the chair, and Benjamin saw a figure that he recognized from rallies, from speeches, from ma.s.sive heliotypes plastered around the city. It was Mayor Rudgutter.

The three figures in the room were still, regarding each other.

"Mr. Flex," said Rudgutter eventually. "We must talk."

"Got word from Pigeon." Isaac waved the letter as he returned to the table he and David had set up in Lublamai's corner of the ground floor. It was where they had spent the hours of the previous day uselessly scrabbling for plans.

Lublamai lay and drooled and shat in a cot a little way away.

Lin sat with them at the table, listlessly eating slices of banana. She had arrived the previous day, and Isaac, stumbling and semicoherent, had told her what had happened. Both he and David had seemed in shock. It had been some minutes before she had noticed Yagharek, skulking against a wall in the shadows. She had not known whether to greet him, and had waved a brief introduction that he had not acknowledged. When the four of them ate a miserable supper, he had drifted over to join them, his enormous cloak draped over what she knew to be fake wings. Not that she would tell him she knew him to be engaged in a masquerade.

At one point in that long, miserable evening, Lin had reflected that something had finally happened to make Isaac acknowledge her. He had held her hands on arrival. He had not even ostentatiously thrown up a duplicitous spare bed when she had agreed to stay. It was not a triumph, though, not the final great vindication of love that she would have chosen. The reason for his change was simple.

David and he were worried about more important things.

There was a slightly sour part of her mind which, even now, did not believe his conversion to be complete. She knew that David was an old friend, of similarly libertarian principles, who would understand-if he were even thinking about them-the difficulties of the situation, and who could be relied on to be discreet. But she did not allow herself to dwell on this, feeling mean-spirited and selfish to be thinking of herself with Lublamai . . . ruined.

She could not feel Lublamai's affliction as deeply as his two friends, of course, but the sight of that dribbling, mindless thing in the cot shocked and frightened her. She was glad that something had happened to Mr. Motley to give her a few hours or days with Isaac, who seemed broken with guilt and misery.

Occasionally he would flare into angry, useless action, shouting "Right!" and clasping his hands decisively, but there was nothing to be decided, no action he could take. Without some lead, some hint, the start of some trail, there was nothing to be done.

That night, she and Isaac had slept together upstairs, he clutching her miserably, without a hint of arousal. David had gone home, promising to return early in the morning. Yagharek had refused a mattress, had curled into a peculiar, hunched, cross-legged crouch in the corner, obviously designed to keep from crus.h.i.+ng his supposed wings. Lin did not know if he was maintaining his illusion for her sake, or if he truly slept, still, in the pose he had used since childhood.

The next morning they sat around the table, drinking coffee and tea, eating stolidly, wondering what to do. When he checked the post, Isaac was quick to discard the rubbish and return with Lemuel's note: unstamped, hand-delivered by some minion.

"What does he say?" asked David quickly.

Isaac held the paper so that David and Lin could read over his shoulder. Yagharek hung back.

Have tracked down source of Peculiar Caterpillar in my records. One Josef Cuaduador. Acquisitions clerk for Parliament. Not wanting to waste time, and remembering promise of Have tracked down source of Peculiar Caterpillar in my records. One Josef Cuaduador. Acquisitions clerk for Parliament. Not wanting to waste time, and remembering promise of Fat Fee Fat Fee, have already been to speak to Mr. Cuaduador along with my Large a.s.sociate Mr. X. Exerted some little pressure for cooperation. At first Mr. C. thought I was militia. Rea.s.sured him otherwise, then ensured his loquacity loquacity with X's friend with X's friend Flintlock Flintlock. Seems our Mr. C. liberated liberated caterpillar from official s.h.i.+pment or somesuch. Been regretting it ever since. (I did not even pay him much for it.) No knowledge of purpose or source of grub. No knowledge of fate of others from original group-took only one. caterpillar from official s.h.i.+pment or somesuch. Been regretting it ever since. (I did not even pay him much for it.) No knowledge of purpose or source of grub. No knowledge of fate of others from original group-took only one. One lead only: One lead only: (Useless? Useful?) Recipient of packet named Dr. Barbell? Barrier? Berber? Barlime? etc. in R&D. (Useless? Useful?) Recipient of packet named Dr. Barbell? Barrier? Berber? Barlime? etc. in R&D.

Am keeping track of services rendered, Isaac. Itemized bill to follow.

Lemuel Pigeon.

"Fantastic!" Isaac exploded, on finis.h.i.+ng the letter. "A f.u.c.king lead lead . . ." . . ."

David looked utterly aghast.

"Parliament?" he said, a strangled gasp. "We're f.u.c.king about with he said, a strangled gasp. "We're f.u.c.king about with Parliament Parliament? Oh dear Jabber, do you have any idea idea of the scale of s.h.i.+t we're messed up in? What the f.u.c.k d'you of the scale of s.h.i.+t we're messed up in? What the f.u.c.k d'you mean mean 'Fantastic!' you f.u.c.king 'Fantastic!' you f.u.c.king cretin cretin, Isaac? Oh, marvellous! We just have to ask Parliament for a list of all those in the top secret top secret Research and Development department whose names begin with Research and Development department whose names begin with B B, then find them one by one and ask if they know anything about flying things that scare their victims comatose, specifically how to catch them. We're home free home free."

No one spoke. A pall settled slowly on the room.

At its south-westerly corner, Brock Marsh met Petty Coil, a dense knot of chancers, crime and architecture of decayed splendour wedged into a kink in the river.

A little over a hundred years previously, Petty Coil had been an urban hub for the major families. The Mackie-Drendas and the Turgisadys; Dhrachshachet, the vodyanoi financier and founder of the Drach Bank; Sirrah Jeremile Carr, the merchant-farmer: all had their great houses in Petty Coil's wide streets.

But industry had exploded in New Crobuzon, much of it bankrolled by those very families. Factories and docks budded and proliferated. Griss Twist, just across the river, enjoyed a short-lived boom of small machinofacture, with all the noise and stink that that entailed. It became the site of ma.s.sive riverside tips. A new landscape of ruin and refuse and industrial filth was created, in a speeded-up parody of geological process. Carts dumped load after load of broken machines, rotting paper, slag, organic offal and chymical detritus into the fenced-off rubbish tips of Griss Twist. The rejected matter settled and s.h.i.+fted and fell into place, affecting some shape, mimicking nature. Knolls, valleys, quarries and pools bubbling with foetid gas. Within a few years the local factories had gone but the dumps remained, and the winds that blew in from the sea could send a pestilential stench over the Tar into Petty Coil.

The rich deserted their homes. Petty Coil degenerated in a lively fas.h.i.+on. It became noisier. Paint and plaster bubbled, desquamating grotesquely, as the ma.s.sive houses became homes for more and more of New Crobuzon's swelling population. Windows broke, were fixed roughly, broke again. As small food-shops and bakers and carpenters moved in, Petty Coil fell willing prey to the city's ineluctable capacity for spontaneous architecture. Walls and floors and ceilings were called into question, amended. New and inventive uses were found for deserted constructions.

Derkhan Blueday made her way hurriedly towards this mess of abused, misused grandeur. She carried a bag close. Her face was set and miserable.

She came up over c.o.c.ks...o...b..Bridge, one of the city's most ancient edifices. It was narrow and roughly cobbled, with houses built into the very stones. The river was invisible from the centre of the bridge. On either side, Derkhan could see nothing but the squat, rough-edged skyline of houses nearly a thousand years old, their intricate marble facades crumbled long ago. Lines of was.h.i.+ng stretched across the width of the bridge. Raucous shouted conversations and arguments bounced back and forth.

In Petty Coil itself, Derkhan walked quickly under the raised Sud Line and bore north. The river she had pa.s.sed over bent sharply back on itself, veering towards her in an enormous S, before righting its course and heading east and down to meet the Canker.