Perdido Street Station Part 56

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 pa.s.s, 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 fas.h.i.+on 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 pa.s.sed 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: G.o.ds 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 spa.r.s.e 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 ma.s.sive arched windows full of cold light, past wheezing, dying bodies. To the hara.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed through and entered a h.e.l.l 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, Lungrot, she had read. she had read. 2 dose laudanum/3 hours for pain. 2 dose laudanum/3 hours for pain. Then in another hand: Then in another hand: Laudanum unavailable Laudanum unavailable.

In the next bed, the unavailable drug was sporr-water. In the next, calciach sudifile, which, if Derkhan read the chart correctly, would have cured the patient of their disintegrating bowel over eight treatments. It went on, stretched 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 hazily aware of the criteria with which she gazed-of sound mind, and not so ill they will not last the day-and she had felt sick to her soul. 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, had continued with her terrible cool a.s.sessment. Derkhan had walked the length of the room, stopping eventually beside the bed of a tired 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 strained and untenable ethics to the choice-Who here is a militia informer? she wanted to shout. she wanted to shout. Who here has raped? Who has murdered a child? Who has tortured? Who here has raped? Who has murdered 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. 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 walk? 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 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 a.s.sert. she felt herself a.s.sert. We take him but all these others we save! 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. Derkhan had thought, sick with self-loathing. It wasn't just me! She chose to do it too! 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! He must know what's going on! she had thought. she had thought. He's tired of living like this, he's making it easy on me. 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. 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.

Inside the dusty shack, Derkhan waited silently with her gun on Andrej, until eventually they heard the shuffling sounds of Isaac and Yagharek returning. When Derkhan opened the door for them, Andrej began to wail and cry out for help. He was astonis.h.i.+ngly loud for such a frail man. Isaac, who had been about to ask Derkhan what she had told Andrej, broke off speaking and rushed over to quieten the man.

There was a half-second, a tiny fraction of time, when Isaac opened his mouth, and it seemed that he would say something to a.s.suage the old man's fears, to a.s.sure him that he would be unharmed, that he was in safe hands, that there was a reason for his bizarre incarceration. Andrej's shouts faltered for a moment as he stared at Isaac, eager to be rea.s.sured.

But Isaac was tired, and he could not think, and the lies that welled up made him feel as if he would vomit. The patter died away silently, and instead Isaac walked across to Andrej and overpowered the decrepit man with ease, stifling his nasal wails with strips of cloth. Isaac bound Andrej with coils of ancient rope and propped him as comfortably as possible against a wall. The dying man hummed and exhaled in snotty terror.

Isaac tried to meet his eye, to murmur some apology, to tell him how sorry he was, but Andrej could not hear him for fear. Isaac turned away, aghast, and Derkhan met his eye and grasped his hand quickly, thankful that someone finally shared her burden.

There was much to be done.

Isaac began his final calculations and preparations.

Andrej squealed through his gag and Isaac looked up at him despairingly.

In curt whispers and brusque expostulations, Isaac explained to Derkhan and Yagharek what he was doing.

He looked over the battered engines in the shack, his a.n.a.lytical machines. He pored over his notes, checking and rechecking his maths, cross-referring them with the sheets of figures the Council had given him. He drew out the core of his crisis engine, the enigmatic mechanism that he had neglected to leave with the Construct Council. It was an opaque box, a sealed motor of interwoven cables, elyctrostatic and thaumaturgic circuits.

He cleaned it slowly, examined its moving parts.

Isaac readied himself and his equipment.

When Pengefinchess returned from some unstated errand, Isaac looked up briefly. She spoke quietly, refusing to meet anyone's eye. She gathered herself slowly to leave, checked through her equipment, oiling her bow to keep it safe under the water. She asked what had become of Shadrach's pistol, and clucked regretfully when Isaac told her he did not know.

"A shame. It was a powerful piece," she said abstractedly, looking out of the window and away. "Charmed. A puissant weapon."

Isaac interrupted her. He and Derkhan implored her to help once more before she left. She turned and stared at Andrej, seemed to see him for the first time, ignored Isaac's pleading and demanded to know what in h.e.l.l he was doing. Derkhan drew her away from Andrej's snorts of fear and Isaac's grim industry, and explained.

Then Derkhan asked Pengefinchess again if she would perform one last task to help them. She could only beg.

Isaac half listened, but he shut his ears quickly to the hissed imploring. He worked instead on the task in hand, the complicated job of crisis mathematics.

Andrej whimpered unceasingly beside him.

CHAPTER F FORTY-EIGHT.

Just before four o'clock, as they prepared to go, Derkhan embraced Isaac and Yagharek in turn. She hesitated only a moment before holding the garuda close. He did not respond, but he did not pull away either.

"See you at the rendezvous," she murmured.

"You know what you have to do?" Isaac said. She nodded and pushed him towards the door.

He hesitated now, at the hardest thing. He looked over to where Andrej lay in a kind of exhausted stupor of fear, his eyes glazed and his gag sticky with mucus.

They had to bring him, and he could not raise the alarm.

He had conferred with Yagharek about this, in whispers easily hidden under the old man's terror. They had no drugs, and Isaac was no bio-thaumaturge, could not insinuate his fingers briefly through Andrej's skull and turn his consciousness temporarily off.

Instead, they were forced to use Yagharek's more savage skills.

The garuda thought back to the fleshpits, remembering the "milk fights": those that ended with submission or unconsciousness rather than death. He remembered the techniques he had perfected, adjusting them to his human opponents.

"He's an old man!" hissed Isaac. "And he's dying, he's frail . . . Be gentle . . ."

Yagharek sidled along the wall to where Andrej lay staring at him with tired, nauseous foreboding.

There was a quick feral movement, and Yagharek was leaning behind Andrej, on one knee, the old man's head pinioned with his left arm. Andrej stared out at Isaac, his eyes bulging, unable to scream through his gag. Isaac-horrified, guilty and debased-could not help but meet his eye. He watched Andrej, knew that the old man thought he was about to die.

Yagharek's right elbow swung down in a sharp arc and smacked with brutal precision into the back of the dying man's head, where his skull gave way into the neck. Andrej gave a short, constricted bark of pain, that sounded very like vomiting. His eyes flickered out of focus, then closed. Yagharek did not let Andrej's head fall away: he kept his arms tense, pulling his bony elbow hard into soft flesh, counting seconds.

Eventually he let Andrej slump.

"He will wake," he said. "Perhaps in twenty minutes, perhaps in two hours. I must watch him. I can send him to sleep again. But we must be careful-too much and we will starve his brain of blood."

They wrapped Andrej's motionless body with random rags. They hauled him up between them, each with one arm over a shoulder. He was wasted, his insides devoured over years. He weighed shockingly little.

They moved together, supporting the enormous sack of equipment between them with their free arms, carrying it as carefully as if it were a religious relic, the body of some saint.

They were still swathed in their absurd, wearisome disguises, bent and shuffling like beggars. Under his hood, Isaac's dark skin was still dappled with tiny scabs from his savage shaving. Yagharek wrapped his head, like his feet, in rotten cloth, leaving one tiny slit through which to see. He looked like a faceless leper hiding his decaying skin.

The three of them looked like some appalling caravan of vagrants, a travelling convocation of the dispossessed.

At the door, they turned their heads once, quickly. They both raised their hands in farewell to Derkhan. Isaac looked over to where Pengefinchess watched them placidly. Hesitantly, he raised his hand to her, raised his eyebrows in a query-Will I see you again? he might have been asking, or he might have been asking, or Will you help us? Will you help us? Pengefinchess raised her great splayed hand in noncommittal response and looked away. Pengefinchess raised her great splayed hand in noncommittal response and looked away.

Isaac turned away, set his lips.

He and Yagharek began the dangerous journey across the city.

They did not risk crossing the rail bridge. They were afraid in case an irate train driver did more than blast them with a steam-whistle as he tore past. He might stare at them and clock their faces, or report to his superiors at Sly or Spit Bazaar Stations, or at Perdido Street Station itself, that three stupid dossers had blundered their way onto the rails and were heading for disaster.

Interception was too dangerous. So instead, Isaac and Yagharek clambered down the crumbling stone slope by the railway line, hanging on to Andrej's body as it tumbled and sprawled towards the quiet pavements.