Perdido Street Station (57 page)

"You’ve read
Inspector Tormlin’s—‘Sally’s’—report.
According to Serachin, who is now recuperating in our care, der
Grimnebulin claims to have a working prototype of some kind of crisis
engine. We all understand the gravity of that. Well...our good
businessmen have found that out. And as you can imagine, they are
all—particularly Mr. Penton—
most desirous
of
putting a stop to this
absurd claim
as quickly as possible.
Any preposterous
fake engines
that Mr. der Grimnebulin might
have fabricated to fool the credulous should, we are advised, be
summarily destroyed." He sighed and looked up.

"They make some
mention of the generous funds they have provided the government and
the Fat Sun party over the years. We have been given our
orders,
ladies and gentlemen. They are not at all happy about the
slake-moths, and would like such dangerous animals contained
forthwith. But not surprisingly, they are having a
conniption
about the possibility of crisis energy. Now, we searched the
warehouse very thoroughly last night, and there is absolutely no sign
of any such apparatus. We have to consider the possibility that der
Grimnebulin is mistaken or lying. But in case he’s not, we must
also bear in mind that he may have taken his engine and his notes
with him last night. With," he sighed heavily, "the
Weaver."

Stem-Fulcher spoke
carefully. "Do we understand yet," she ventured, "what
happened?"

Rudgutter shrugged
brusquely.

"We presented the
evidence of the militia who saw the Weaver and heard what it said to
Kapnellior, I’ve been trying to contact the thing, and I’ve
had one curt, incomprehensible reply...It was scribbled in soot on my
mirror. All we can say for sure is that it thought it improved the
pattern of the worldweb to abduct der Grimnebulin and his friends
from under our noses. We don’t know where it’s gone or
why. Whether it’s left them alive. Anything really. Although
Kapnellior’s quite confident it’s still hunting the
moths."

"What about the
ears?" asked Stem-Fulcher.

"I have
no
idea!"
shouted Rudgutter. "It made the web prettier!
Obviously! So now we have twenty terrified, one-eared militia in the
infirmary!" He calmed a little. "I have been thinking. It’s
my belief that part of our problem is that we started with plans that
were too grand. We’ll keep trying to locate the Weaver, but in
the meantime we’re going to have to rely on less ambitious
methods of moth-hunting. We are going to put together a unit of all
our guards, militia, and scientists who have had any dealings with
the creatures. We’re putting together a specialist squad. And
we are going to do it in conjunction with Motley." Stem-Fulcher
and Rescue looked at him and nodded.

"It’s
necessary. We’re pooling our resources. He has trained men, as
do we. We have set procedures in motion. He will have his units, and
we will have ours, but they will operate in tandem. Motley and his
men have an unconditional amnesty on all criminal activity while we
conduct this operation.

"Rescue..."
said Rudgutter quietly. "We need your particular skills.
Quietly, of course. How many of your...kin do you think you can
mobilize within a day? Knowing the nature of the operation...It is
not without its dangers."

Montjohn Rescue
fingered his scarf again. He made a peculiar noise under his breath.
"Ten or so," he said.

"You’ll
receive training, of course. You’ve worn a mirror-guard before,
I think?" Rescue nodded. "Good. Because the sentience model
of your kind is...broadly similar to a human’s, is it not? Your
mind is as
tempting
to the moths as mine. Whatever your host?"

Rescue nodded again.

"We dream, Mr.
Mayor," he said in his flattened voice. "We can be prey."

"I understand
that. Your—and your kin’s—bravery will not go
unnoticed. We will provide whatever we can to ensure your safety."
Rescue nodded without visible emotion. He stood slowly.

"Time being of
such importance, I’ll make a start now on spreading the word."
He bowed. "You will have my squad by sundown tomorrow," he
said. He turned and left the room.

Stem-Fulcher turned to
Rudgutter with pursed lips.

"He’s not
too happy about this, is he?" she said. Rudgutter shrugged.

"He’s always
known that his role might involve danger. The slake-moths are as much
of a threat to his people as to ours."

Stem-Fulcher nodded.

"How long ago was
he taken? The original Rescue, I mean, the human one."

Rudgutter calculated
for a moment.

"Eleven years. He
was planning to supersede me. Have you set the squad in motion?"
he demanded. Stem-Fulcher sat back and drew lengthily on her clay
pipe. Aromatic smoke danced.

"We’re going
through two days’ intensive training today and tomorrow...you
know, aiming backwards with the mirror-guards, that sort of thing.
Motley is apparently doing the same. The rumours are that Motley’s
troop includes several Remade
specifically designed
for
slake-moth husbandry and capture...built-in mirrors, back-pointing
arms and the like. We have only one such officer." She shook her
head jealously. "We’re also having several of the
scientists who worked on the project work on detecting the moths.
They’re at pains to impress on us that this is unreliable, but
if they come through they may give us some kind of edge."

Rudgutter nodded. "Add
to that," he said, "our Weaver, still out there somewhere,
still hunting the moths busy tearing up his precious
worldweave...We’ve got a reasonable collection of troops."

"But they’re
not co-ordinated," said Stem-Fulcher. "That’s what
worries me. And morale in the city is slipping. Obviously very few
people know the truth, but everyone knows they can’t sleep at
night, for fear of their dreams. We’re plotting a map of the
nightmare hotspots, see if we can’t see some pattern, track the
moths in some way. There’s been a spate of violent crime over
the last week. Nothing big and planned: the sudden attacks, the
spur-of-the-moment murders, the brawls. Tempers," she said
slowly, "are fraying. People are paranoid and afraid."

After the silence had
settled for a moment, she spoke again.

"This afternoon
you should receive the fruits of some scientific labours," she
said. "I’ve asked our research team to make some helmet
that’ll stop the moth-shit seeping into your skull when you
sleep. You’ll look absurd in bed, but at least you’ll
rest." She stopped. Rudgutter was blinking rapidly. "How
are your eyes?" she asked.

Rudgutter shook his
head.

"Going," he
said sadly. "We just can’t solve the problem of rejection.
It’s about time for a fresh set."

**

Bleary-eyed citizens
made their way to work. They were surly and unco-operative.

At the Kelltree docks,
the broken strike was not mentioned. The bruises on the vodyanoi
stevedores were fading. They heaved spilt cargos from the dirty water
as always. They directed ships into tight spaces on the banks. They
muttered in secret about the disappearance of the stewards, the
strike-leaders.

Their human workmates
stared at the defeated xenians with a mixture of emotions.

The fat aerostats
patrolled the skies over the city with restless, clumsy menace.

Arguments broke out
with bizarre ease. Fights were common. The nocturnal misery reached
out and took victims from the waking world.

In the Bleckly Refinery
in Gross Coil, an exhausted crane operator hallucinated one of the
torments that had ripped up his sleep the previous night. He
shuddered just long enough to send the controls spasming. The massive
steam-powered machine disgorged its load of molten iron a second too
early. It spewed in a white-hot torrent over the lip of the waiting
container and spattered the crew like a siege engine. They screamed
and were consumed by the merciless cascade.

At the top of the great
deserted concrete obelisks of Spatters the city garuda lit huge fires
at night. They banged gongs and saucepans and shouted, screaming
obscene songs and raucous cries. Charlie the big man told them that
would keep the evil spirits from visiting their towers. The flying
monsters. The daemons that had come to town to suck the brains out of
the living.

The raucous cafe
gatherings in Salacus Fields were subdued.

The nightmares pushed
some artists into frenzies of creation. An exhibition was being
planned:
Dispatches from a Troubled City.
It was to be a
showcase of art and sculpture and soundwork inspired by the morass of
foul dreams in which the city wallowed.

There was a fear in the
air, a nervousness at invoking certain names. Lin and Isaac, the
disappeared. To speak them would be to admit that something might be
wrong, that they might not just be busy, that their enforced, silent
absence from regular haunts was sinister.

The nightmares were
splitting the membrane of sleep. They were spilling into the
everyday, haunting the sunlit realm, drying conversations in the
throat and stealing friends away.

**

Isaac awoke in the
throes of memory. He was recalling the extraordinary escape of the
previous night. His eyes flickered, but remained closed.

Isaac’s breath
caught.

Tentatively, he
remembered. Impossible images assailed him. Silk strands a lifetime
thick. Living things crawling insidiously across interlocking wires.
Behind a beautiful palimpsest of coloured gossamer, a vast, timeless,
infinite mass of absence...

In terror, he opened
his eyes.

The web was gone.

Isaac looked around him
slowly. He was in a brick cavern, cool and wet, dripping in the dark.

"You awake,
Isaac?" said Derkhan’s voice.

Isaac struggled up onto
his elbows. He groaned. His body hurt him in a variety of ways. He
felt battered and torn. Derkhan sat a little way away from him on a
ledge of brick. She smiled absolutely mirthlessly at him. It was a
terrifying rictus.

"Derkhan?" he
murmured. His eyes widened slowly. "What are you wearing?"

In the half-light
emitted by a smoke-seeping oil-lamp, Isaac could see that Derkhan was
dressed in a puffy dressing gown of bright pink material. It was
decorated with garish needlework flowers. Derkhan shook her head.

"I don’t
damn well know, Isaac," she said bitterly. "All I know is I
was knocked out by the officer with the stingbox and then I woke up
here in the sewers, dressed in this. And that’s not all..."
Her voice trembled for a brief moment. She pulled her hair back from
the side of her head. He hissed at the raw, seeping clot of blood
that caked the side of her face. "My...damned
ears
gone."
She let her hair fall back into place with an unsteady hand.
"Lemuel’s been saying it was a...a
Weaver
that
brought us here. You haven’t seen your own outfit yet, anyway."

Isaac rubbed his head
and sat up completely. He struggled to clear his mind of fog.

"
What?"
he said.
"Where
are we? The sewers...? Where’s
Lemuel? Yagharek? And..."
Lublamai,
he heard inside his
mind, but he remembered Vermishank’s words. He remembered with
cold horror that Lublamai was irrevocably lost.

His voice dissipated.

He heard himself, and
realized that he was rambling hysterically. He stopped and breathed
deeply, forced himself to calm down.

He looked around him,
took in the situation.

He and Derkhan sat in a
two-foot-wide alcove embedded into the wall of a windowless little
brick chamber. It was about ten feet square—its far side only
just visible in the faint light—with a ceiling no more than
five feet above him. In each of the room’s four walls was a
cylindrical tunnel, about four feet round.

The bottom of the room
was completely submerged in filthy water. It was impossible to tell
how deep below it the floor was. The liquid looked to be emerging
from at least two of the tunnels, and slowly ebbing out of the
others.

The walls were slick
with organic slime and mould. The air stank richly of rot and shit.

Isaac looked down at
himself and his face creased in confusion. He was dressed in an
immaculate suit and tie, a dark, well-tailored piece that any
Parliamentarian would be proud of. Isaac had never seen it before.
Beside him, roughened and dirty, was his carpet bag.

He remembered,
suddenly, the explosive pain and blood he had suffered the previous
night. He gasped and reached up with trepidation. As his fingers
fumbled, he exhaled explosively. His left ear was gone.

He gingerly prodded for
ruined tissue, expecting to meet wet, ripped flesh or crusting scabs.
Instead, unlike Derkhan, he found a well-healed scar, covered in
skin. There was no pain at all. It was as if he had lost his ear
years before. He frowned and clicked his fingers experimentally
beside his wound. He could still hear, though doubtless his ability
to pinpoint sounds would be reduced.

Derkhan shook slightly
as she watched him.

"This Weaver saw
fit to heal your ear, along with Lemuel’s. Not mine..."
Her voice was subdued and miserable. "Although," she added,
"it did stop the bleeding on the wounds from that...damned
stingbox." She watched him for a moment. "So Lemuel wasn’t
mad, or lying, or dreaming," she said quietly. "You’re
telling me that a
Weaver
appeared and rescued us?"

Isaac nodded slowly.

"I don’t
know why...I have no
idea
why...but it’s true." He
thought back. "I heard Rudgutter outside, yelling something at
it. It sounded like he wasn’t completely surprised it was
there...he was trying to
bribe
it, I think. Maybe the damn
fool’s been trying to do deals with it...Where are the others?"