Perdido Street Station (47 page)

The Weaver bent its
elbows up a little and held these hands together, clasping and
rubbing them together slowly and incessantly. It was a furtive,
disturbingly human motion, like that of an untrustworthy, simpering
priest.

The spearpoint feet
crept closer. The red-black claws swivelled a little and glinted in
the non-light. The hands stroked each other.

The Weaver’s body
rocked back and alarmingly forward again.

...WHAT OFFERING WHAT
BOON THE HINGED SPLITTERS YOU BRING ME...it said, and suddenly held
out its right hand. The militia officers tensed at the quick
movement.

Without hesitation
Rudgutter stepped forward and placed his scissors into its palm,
taking a little care not to touch its skin. Stem-Fulcher and Rescue
did the same. The Weaver stepped back with unsettling speed. It
looked at the scissors it held, threaded its fingers through the
handles and worked each pair rapidly open and shut. Then it moved to
the back wall and, moving quickly, it pressed each pair of scissors
into a position on the cold stone.

Somehow, the lifeless
metal stayed where it was put, clinging to the damp-patterned stone.
The Weaver adjusted its design minutely.

"We’re here
to ask you about something, Weaver." Rudgutter’s voice was
steady.

The Weaver turned
ponderously back to face him.

...THE WEFT OF THREADS
SURROUND ABOUND ABOUT YOUR TOTTERING TITTERING CARCASSES YOU TUG AND
SHRUG UNRAVEL AND REKNIT YOU TRIUMVIRATE OF POWER ENCASED IN THE
BLUE-CLAD BRISTLING WITH SPARKING FLINT BLACK POWDER IRON YOU
STILL-POINT THREE HAVE CAUGHT HANGNAIL-SOULS ON THE FABRIC SNAGS THE
FIVE WINGED RIPPERS RENDING UNWIND SYNAPSE AFTER GANGLIOL SPIRIT SUCK
ON MINDFIBRES...

Rudgutter looked
sharply over at Rescue and Stem-Fulcher. All three of them were
straining to follow the dream-poetics that was the Weaver tongue. One
thing had come across clear.

"Five?"
whispered Rescue, looking over at Rudgutter and Stem-Fulcher. "Motley
bought only
four
moths..."

...FIVE DIGITS OF A
HAND TO INTERFERE TO STRIP WORLD-FABRIC FROM THE BOBBINS OF THE
CITY-KIND FIVE AIR-TEARING INSECTS FOUR FINELY FORMED NOBLE BERINGED
WITH SHIMMERING DECORATION ONE SQUAT THUMB THE RUNT THE RUINED
EMPOWERING ITS IMPERIOUS SIBLING FINGERS FIVE A HAND...

The militia guard
tensed as the Weaver stalked its slow ballet over to Rescue. It
spread out the fingers of one hand, held it up in front of Rescue’s
face, pushed it closer and closer to him. The air around the humans
thickened at the Weaver’s approach. Rudgutter fought down an
impulse to wipe his face, to clean it of that unseen clinging silk.
Rescue set his jaw. The militia murmured with dithering impotence.
Their uselessness was brought home.

Rudgutter watched the
little drama uneasily. The last but one time he had spoken to the
Weaver, it had illustrated a point it was making, a figure of speech
of some kind, by reaching out to the militia captain flanking
Rudgutter, lifting him into the air and filleting him slowly, drawing
one of its talons through his armour up the side of his abdomen and
around under the chin, drawing out bone after steaming bone. The man
had screamed and flopped and screamed as the Weaver eviscerated him,
its mournful voice resonating in Rudgutter’s head as it
explained itself in its oneiric riddles.

Rudgutter knew that the
Weaver would do anything that it considered improved the worldweave.
It might pretend to be dead or reshape the stone of the floor into a
statue of a lion. It might pluck out Eliza’s eyes. Whatever it
took to shape the pattern in the fabric of the aether that only it
could see, whatever it took to Weave the tapestry into shape.

The memory of
Kapnellior discussing Textorology—the science of
Weavers—flitted in and out of Rudgutter’s mind. Weavers
were fabulously rare, and only intermittent inhabitants of
conventional reality. Only two Weaver corpses had been procured by
New Crobuzon’s scientists since the city’s birth.
Kapnellior’s was hardly an exact science.

No one knew why this
Weaver chose to stay. It had announced in its elliptical way to Mayor
Dagman Beyn, more than two hundred years ago, that it would live
below the city. Over the decades, one or two administrations had left
it alone. Most had been unable to resist the pull of its power. Its
occasional interactions—sometimes banal, sometimes fatal—with
mayors and scientists were the main source of information for
Kapnellior’s studies.

Kapnellior himself was
an Evolutionist. He held to the view that the Weavers were a species
of conventional spider that had been subjected by some Torquic or
thaumaturgic fluke—thirty, forty thousand years ago, probably
in Sagrimai—to a sudden, short-lived evolutionary acceleration
of explosive velocity. Within a few generations, he had explained to
Rudgutter, the Weavers evolved from virtually mindless predators into
aestheticians of astonishing intellectual and materio-thaumaturgic
power, superintelligent alien minds who no longer used their webs to
catch prey, but were attuned to them as objects of beauty
disentanglable from the fabric of reality itself. Their spinnerets
had become specialized extradimensional glands that Wove patterns in
with the world. The world which was, for them, a web.

Old stories told how
Weavers would kill each other over aesthetic disagreements, such as
whether it was prettier to destroy an army of a thousand men or to
leave it be, or whether a particular dandelion should or should not
be plucked. For a Weaver, to think was to think aesthetically. To
act—to Weave—was to bring about more pleasing patterns.
They did not eat physical food: they seemed to subsist on the
appreciation of beauty.

A beauty unrecognized
by humans or other denizens of the mundane plane.

Rudgutter was praying
fervently that the Weaver did not decide that slaughtering Rescue
would make a pretty pattern in the aether.

After tense seconds,
the Weaver retreated, still holding up its hand with splayed fingers.
Rudgutter exhaled with relief, heard his colleagues and the militia
guard do the same.

...FIVE...whispered the
Weaver.

"Five,"
agreed Rudgutter evenly. Rescue paused and nodded slowly.

"Five," he
whispered.

"Weaver,"
said Rudgutter. "You’re right, of course. We wanted to ask
about the
five
creatures loose in the city. We’re...concerned
about them...as, it sounds, are you. We want to ask if you will help
us clear them out of the city. Root them out. Flush them out. Kill
them. Before they damage the Weave."

There was a moment of
silence, and then the Weaver danced suddenly and quickly from side to
side. There was a soft, very fast drumming as its sharp feet pattered
on the floor. It jigged bizarrely.

...WITHOUT YOU ASK THE
WEAVE IS TIGHT RUCKED COLOURS BLEED TEXTURES WEARING THREADS FRAY
WHILE I KEEN FUNERAL SONGS FOR SOFT POINTS WHERE WEBSHAPES FLOW I
WISH I WILL I CAN COILS OF MONSTERS SHADE SLATESCAPES WINGS MOIL SUCK
WORLDWEAVE COLOURLESS DRAB IT IS NOT TO BE I READ RESONANCE PRANCE
FROM POINT TO POINT ON THE WEB TO EAT SPLENDOUR REAR AND LICK CLEAN
RED KNIFENAILS I WILL SNIP FABRICS AND RETIE THEM I AM I AM A SUBTLE
USER OF COLOUR I WILL BLEACH YOUR SKIES WITH YOU I WILL SWEEP THEM
CLEAN AND KNOT THEM TIGHT...

It took several moments
for Rudgutter to realize that the Weaver had agreed to help them.

Cautiously, he grinned.
Before Rudgutter could speak again, the Weaver pointed straight up
with its front four arms....I’M TO FIND WHERE PATTERNS GO AMOK
WHERE COLOURS RUN WHERE VAMPIR INSECTS SUCK BOBBIN-CITIZENS DRY AND I
AND I WILL BE BY BY-AND-BY...

The Weaver stepped
sideways and was gone. It had peeled away from physical space. It was
running acrobatically along the span of the worldweb.

The wisps of aetherwebs
that crawled invisible across the room and human skin began, slowly,
to fade.

Rudgutter turned his
head slowly from side to side. The militia were straightening their
backs, releasing sighs, relaxing from the combat positions they had
unconsciously held. Eliza Stem-Fulcher caught Rudgutter’s eye.

"So," she
said. "It’s hired, right?"

The wyrmen were cowed.
They told stories of monsters in the sky.

They sat at night
around their rubbish-fires in the city’s great dumps and cuffed
their children to quiet them. They took turns telling of sudden
squalls of disturbed air and glimpses of terrible things. They had
seen convoluted shadows in the sky. They had felt drips of acrid
liquid spatter them from above.

Wyrmen were being
taken.

At first they were just
stories. Even through their fear, the wyrmen half-relished the yarns.
But then they started to know the protagonists. Their names were
ululated through the city at night, when their dribbling, idiot
bodies were found. Arfamo and Sideways; Minty; and most
frighteningly, Buggerme, the boss-boy of the eastern city. He never
lost a fight. Never backed down. His daughter found him, head
lolling, oozing mucus from mouth and nose, eyes fat and pale and as
alert as poached eggs, in the scrubland by a rusting gas tower in
Abrogate Green.

Two khepri matrons were
found sat slack and vacant in the Plaza of Statues. A vodyanoi lolled
at the edge of the river in Murkside, his capacious mouth pouting in
a moronic leer. The number of humans found with their minds gone rose
steadily into double figures. The increase did not slow.

The elders of the
Riverskin Glasshouse would not say if any cactus had been afflicted.

The
Quarrel
ran
a story on its second page, entitled "Mystery Epidemic of
Imbecility."

It was not only the
wyrmen who were seeing things that should not have been there. First
two or three, then more and slowly more hysterical witnesses claimed
to have been in the company of one of those whose mind was taken.
They were confused, they had been in some trance, they said, but they
gabbled descriptions of monsters, insect devils without eyes, dark
hunched bodies unfolding in a nightmare conjunction of limbs.
Protruding teeth and hypnotic wings.

**

The Crow spread out
around Perdido Street Station in an intricate confusion of
thoroughfares and half-hidden alleys. The main arteries—LeTissof
Street, Concubek Pass, Boulevard Dos Gherou—burst out in all
directions around the station and BilSantum Plaza. They were wide and
packed, a confusion of carts and cabs and pedestrian crowds.

Every week new and
elegant shops opened amid the throng. Huge stores that took up three
floors of what had been noble houses; smaller, no less thriving
establishments with windows full of the very latest in gaslight
produce, lamps of intricately twisting brass and extension-valve
fittings; food; luxury snuff-boxes; tailored clothes.

In the smaller branches
that spread from these massive streets like capillaries, the offices
of lawyers and doctors, actuaries, apothecaries and benevolent
societies jostled with exclusive clubs. Patrician men in immaculate
suits patrolled these roads.

Tucked into more or
less obscure corners of The Crow, pockets of penury and diseased
architecture were judiciously ignored.

Spit Hearth, to the
south-east, was bisected from above by the skyrail connecting the
militia tower at the point of Brock Marsh to Perdido Street Station.
It was part of the same boisterous zone as Sheck, a wedge of smaller
shops and houses made of stone and patched with brick. Spit Hearth
had a twilight industry: Remaking. Where the borough met the river,
subterranean punishment factories emitted wails of pain, sometimes,
and hastily smothered screams. But for the sake of its public face,
Spit Hearth was able to ignore that hidden economy with only a slight
show of distaste.

It was a busy place.
Pilgrims made their way through it to the Palgolak temple at the
northern edge of Brock Marsh. For centuries, Spit Hearth had been a
haven for dissenting churches and religious societies. Its walls were
held together with the paste from a thousand mouldering posters
advertising theological debates and discussions. The monks and nuns
of peculiar contemplative sects walked the streets hurriedly,
avoiding eye contact. Dervishes and hieronomers argued on corners.

Wedged gaudily between
Spit Hearth and The Crow was the city’s worst-kept secret. A
grubby, guilty stain. It was a little region, in the city’s
terms. A few streets where the ancient houses were narrow and close,
could easily be joined by walkways and ladders. Where the constricted
slivers of pavement between tall and strangely adorned buildings
could be a protective maze.

The brothel quarter.
The red-light zone.

**

It was late in the
evening as David Serachin walked through the northern reaches of Spit
Hearth. He might have been walking home to Skulkford, due west under
the Sud Line and the skyrails, through Sheck, past the massive
militia tower to Skulkford Green. It was a long but not implausible
walk.

But when David passed
under the arches of Spit Bazaar Station, he took advantage of the
darkness to turn and gaze back the way he had come. The people behind
him were only passers-by. He was not followed. He hesitated a moment,
then emerged from beneath the railway lines, as a train whistled
above and sent booms reverberating around the brick caverns.

David turned north,
following the path of the railway line, into the outer reaches of the
whoretown.

He dug his hands deep
into his pockets and thrust his head down. This was his shame. He
simmered in self-disgust.

At the outer reaches of
the red-light zone the wares catered for orthodox tastes. There were
some dollymops, streetwalkers poaching custom, but the freelancers
that thronged elsewhere in New Crobuzon were the outsiders here. This
was the borough for more languorous indulgence, under the roofs of
the establishment houses. Peppered with little general stores which
even here catered for everyday needs, the still-elegant buildings of
this quarter were illuminated by gaslamps flaring behind the
traditional red filters. In the doorways of some, young women in
clinging bodices called softly to the foot-traffic. The streets here
were less full than in the outside city, but they were hardly empty.
The men here were mostly well dressed. This merchandise was not for
the poor.