Perdido Street Station (37 page)

It flitted from roof to
roof, its tongue dangling obscenely as it traced them. Sometimes the
downdraft from its wings would make a passer-by look up, as hats and
paper bowled down the deserted streets. If they saw the dark shape
that loomed momentarily over them and then was gone, they shivered
and hurried on, or furrowed their brows and denied what they had
seen.

The winged thing let
its tongue dangle as it slowly beat the air. It used it as a
bloodhound would its nose. It passed over the undulating roofscape
that seemed buckled by the Ribs. It licked its way along a faint
trail.

Then it crossed the
aura of a large, bituminous building in a deserted street, and its
long tongue spasmed like a whip. It sped up, arced up and back down
in an elegant loop towards the tarred roof. There at the far corner,
below that ceiling through which the sensations of its kind leaked
like brine through a sponge...

It scrambled over the
slates flexing its peculiar limbs. Solicitous feelings were oozing
from it, and there was a befuddled moment of confusion as its captive
kin reacted to its presence. Then their nebulous misery became
impassioned: pleas and joy and demands for freedom, and among that,
cold and exact instructions on what to do.

The creature found its
way to the edge of the roof and descended in a motion halfway between
flying and climbing, until it clung to the outer edge of a sealed
window forty feet above the pavement. The glass was painted opaque.
It vibrated minutely in eldritch dimensions, buffeted by the
emanations from within.

The thing on the
window-sill scrabbled with its fingers for a moment, then tore away
the frame with a quick motion, leaving an ugly wound where the window
had been. It dropped the already breaking glass with a catastrophic
noise and stepped into the dark attic.

The room was very large
and bare. A great glutinous wash of welcome and warning came from
across the rubbish-strewn floor.

Opposite the newcomer
were four of its kind. It was dwarfed by them, the magnificent
economy of their limbs made its own look stunted, runtlike. They were
shackled to the wall with enormous bands of metal around their
midriffs and several of their limbs. Each had its wings fully
extended, flat against the wall: each set was as unique and random as
the newcomer’s. Below each of their hindquarters was a bucket.

A moment of tugging
made it clear to the new arrival that those bands could not be
shifted. One of those pinned to the wall hissed at the frustrated
creature, imperiously bade it pay attention. It communicated in a
psychic twittering.

The free, newly lowly
thing backed away as instructed, and waited.

In the simple sonar
plane, shouts and yells were sounding from the street below where the
window had smashed. There was a confused rumbling from within the
building below. From the corridor beyond the door came the sound of
running. Chaotic snatches of conversation found their way through the
wood.

"
...inside..."

"...get in?"

"...mirrors,
don’t..."

The creature backed
away further from its tethered kin and moved into the shadows at the
far side of the room, beyond the door. It folded its wings and
waited.

Bolts on the other side
of the door were thrown. There was a moment of hesitation, then the
door flew open and four armed men burst in in quick succession. They
all faced away from the trapped creatures. Two carried heavy
flintlocks, primed and held ready. Two were Remade. In their left
hands they held pistols, but from their right shoulders jutted huge
metal barrels, splayed at the end like blunderbusses. These were
fixed into position pointing directly behind each Remade. They hefted
these carefully, and stared into mirrors suspended from a metal
helmet before their eyes.

The two with
conventional rifles also wore the mirror-helmets, but they were
staring past the mirrors into the darkness straight ahead of them.

"Four moths, and
all clear!" shouted one of the Remade with the strange
backpointing rifle-arm, still gazing into his mirror.

"There’s
nothing here..." answered one of the men looking forward into
the darkness by the ruined window-hole, and as he spoke the intruding
thing stepped out of the shadows and spread its incredible wings.

Both those whose eyes
faced forwards looked aghast and opened their mouth to scream.

"Oh,
Jabber
fuck no...
" one managed, and then both were silent as the
patterns on the creature’s wings began to swarm like a pitiless
dun kaleidoscope.

"What the
fuck...?" began one of the Remade, and flickered his eyes
briefly in front of him. His face collapsed in horror, but his moan
died very fast as he caught sight of the creature’s wings.

The final Remade yelled
his comrades’ names, and whimpered as he heard them drop their
guns. He could see the faintest shape out of the corner of his eye.
The creature before him could sense his terror. It stalked towards
him, emitting little reassuring murmurs in an emotive vector. A
phrase circled imbecilically in the man’s mind:
There’s
one in
front
of me there’s one in
front
of me...

The Remade tried to
move forward, his eyes fixed on his mirrors, but the creature before
him moved easily into his field of vision. What had been in the
corner of the man’s eye became an inescapable, shifting field,
and the man succumbed, dropping his eyes to those violently changing
wings, and his jaw opened and shuddered tremulously. He dropped his
gun-arm.

With a twitch of a
skein of flesh, the free creature closed the door. It stood before
the four men in thrall, and slobber drooled from its jaws. A snapped
demand from its trapped kin interrupted its hunger and humbled it. It
reached out and turned each of the men to face the four trapped
moths.

There was a tiny moment
when each man was no longer facing those wings, when his mind
clutched at freedom for a moment, but then the awesome spectacle of
four sets of those scudding patterns violently wrested control of his
mind and he was lost.

Behind them now, the
intruder pushed each man in turn towards one of the huge pinioned
things, which reached out eagerly with the short limbs left free to
them to grip their prey.

The creatures fed.

**

One of them fumbled for
the keys at the belt of its meal, tore them from the man’s
clothes. When it had finished its meal, it reached up with careful
movements and pushed the key delicately into the lock of the bolt
restraining it.

It took four
attempts—fingers clutching the unfamiliar key, twisting it from
an awkward angle—but the creature freed itself. It turned to
each of its fellows and repeated the slow process, until all the
captives were liberated.

One by one they
stumbled across the room to the ragged window-hole. They paused and
braced their atrophied muscles against the brick, spread those
astonishing wings wide and launched themselves out and away from the
sickly dry aether that seemed to seep from the Ribs. The last to
leave was the newcomer.

It dragged itself after
its comrades: even exhausted and brutalized, they flew faster than it
could manage. They were waiting in a circle hundreds of feet above,
extending their awarenesses, adrift in the senses and impressions
that welled up from all around.

When their humble
liberator reached them, they moved apart a little to let it in. They
flew together, sharing in what they felt, licking the air
lasciviously.

They drifted as the
first to fly had done, north towards Perdido Street Station. They
rotated slowly, five like the five railway lines of the city, buoyed
by the massive profane urban presence below them, a fecund crawling
place such as none of their kind had ever experienced before. They
rocked above it, wings snapping, buffeted by wind, tingling with the
sounds and energy of the growling city.

Everywhere they were,
every part of the city, every dark bridge, every
five-hundred-year-old mansion, every twisting bazaar, every grotesque
concrete warehouse and tower and houseboat and squalid slum and
manicured park, thronged with food.

It was a jungle without
predators. A hunting ground.

Something was blocking
the door into Isaac’s warehouse. He swore mildly, pushing
against the obstruction.

It was early afternoon
of the day after his success, which he already conceived of as his
"cheese moment." When he had reached Lin’s rooms the
previous evening, he had been delighted to find her in. She had been
tired but as happy as him. They had gone to bed for three hours, then
stumbled out to The Clock and Cockerel.

It had been an
unnervingly perfect night. Everyone Isaac could have wanted to see
had been abroad in Salacus Fields, and all had stopped at the C &
C for lobster or whiskey or chocolate laced with quinner. There were
new additions to the clique, including Maybet Sunder, who had been
forgiven for winning the Shintacost Prize. In return she was gracious
about the arch comments Derkhan had made in print and others in
person.

Lin had relaxed in the
company of her friends, although her melancholia seemed to ebb rather
than dissipate. Isaac had had one of his hissed political arguments
with Derkhan, who had slipped him the latest issue of
Double-R.
The gathered friends had argued and eaten and thrown food at each
other until two in the morning, when Isaac and Lin had returned to
bed and warm, entwined sleep.

Over breakfast he had
told her about his triumph with the crisis engine. She had not really
understood the scale of the achievement, but that was understandable.
She had realized that he was excited as almost never before, and had
done her best to enthuse sufficiently. For Isaac’s part, it had
made the difference he had suspected it would, simply communicating
the bare bones of the project in the most unscientific way. He felt
more grounded, less as if he were living some preposterous dream. He
had learnt of potential problems during his explanation, and had come
away eager to rectify them.

Isaac and Lin had
parted with deep affection, and with a mutual promise not to let so
long go by without each other again.

And now Isaac could not
get into his workshop.

"Lub! David! What
the arse you up to?" he yelled, and shoved at the door again.

As he pushed, the door
opened a tiny way and he could see a sliver of the sunlit interior.
He could see the edge of whatever was blocking the door.

It was a hand.

Isaac’s heart
skittered.

"Oh Jabber!"
he heard himself shout as he leant with all his weight on the door.
It opened before his mass.

Lublamai was sprawled
prone across the doorway. As Isaac knelt by his friend’s head,
he heard Sincerity sniffling some way away, between the treads of the
construct. She was cowed.

Isaac turned Lublamai
over and let out a juddering sigh of relief when he felt that his
friend was warm, heard him breathing.

"Wake up, Lub!"
he yelled.

Lublamai’s eyes
were already open. Isaac started back from that impassive gaze.

"Lub...?" he
whispered.

Drool had collected
below Lublamai’s face, had blazed trails across his dusty skin.
He lay completely limp, utterly motionless. Isaac felt his friend’s
neck. The pulse was quite steady. Lublamai was taking in deep
breaths, pausing a moment, then releasing. He sounded as if he were
sleeping.

But Isaac flinched in
horror before that imbecilic vacant glare. He waved his hand before
Lublamai’s eyes, eliciting no response. Isaac slapped
Lublamai’s face, softly, then hard twice. Isaac realized that
he was shouting Lublamai’s name.

Lublamai’s head
rocked back and forth like a sack full of stones.

Isaac closed his hand
and felt something clammy. Lublamai’s hand was thinly coated in
a clear, sticky liquid. He sniffed his hand and recoiled from the
faint scent of lemons and rot. It made him feel momentarily
light-headed.

Isaac fingered
Lublamai’s face and saw that the skin around his mouth and nose
was slippery and tacky with the slop, that what he had thought
Lublamai’s saliva was mostly that thin slime.

No yells, no slaps, no
pleas would make Lublamai wake.

When Isaac finally
looked up and around the room, he saw the window by Lublamai’s
desk was open, the glass broken and the wooden shutters splintered.
He stood and ran over to the knocking window frame, but there was
nothing to see inside or out.

Even as Isaac ran from
corner to corner under his own raised laboratory, darting between
Lublamai’s corner and David’s, whispering idiotic
reassurances to the terrified Sincerity, looking for signs of
intruders, he realized that a terrible idea had occurred to him some
time ago, and had been squatting balefully in the back of his mind.
He faltered to a stop. Slowly, he raised his eyes and looked up in
cold horror at the underside of the walkway boards.

Fearful calm settled on
him like snow. He felt his feet lift, trudging inexorably towards the
wooden stairs. He turned his head as he walked, saw Sincerity
sniffing gradually closer to Lublamai, her courage slowly returning
now that she was not alone.

Everything Isaac saw
seemed slowed. He walked as if through freezing water.

Stair by stair he
ascended. He felt no surprise and only a very dull foreboding as he
saw pools of weird spittle on each stair, saw the fresh scrapings
left by some sharp-clawed newcomer. He heard his own heart pulsing
with what seemed tranquillity, and he wondered if he was numb to
shock.

But when he reached the
top and turned to see the hutch thrown on its side, its thick wire
mesh burst from within, little fingers of metal exploding away from
the central hole, and when he saw the chrysalis split and empty and
saw the trail of dark juices dribbling from within its husk, Isaac
heard himself cry out aghast and felt his body shudder into
immobility as an icy tide of goose-flesh swept him up. Horror
billowed up within him and around him like ink in water.