Perdido Street Station (76 page)

"Ready,"
Shadrach said.

Tansell began to hum
and whisper, spitting out weird sounds. He was almost invisible. As
Isaac watched him, he could see nothing more than a figure shrouded
in obscurity, trembling with effort. The murmuring increased.

A shock snapped through
him. Isaac spasmed a little and felt Shadrach hold him where he was.
Isaac’s skin crawled and he felt a stinging current trickle in
through his pores, where the wire touched his skin.

The sensation continued
for a minute, and then dissipated as the engine wound down.

"All right,"
croaked Tansell. "Let’s see if it’s worked."

Shadrach stepped out of
the hollow into the street.

The shadows came with
him.

Enveloping him was an
indistinct aura of darkness, the same one that had covered him as he
stood in the deep shade. Isaac stared at him, saw the patch of deep
black in Shadrach’s eyes and below his chin. Shadrach stepped
slowly forward, and into the light shed by torches in the junction a
little way off.

The shadows on his face
and body did not alter. They remained fixed in the conjuncture they
had assumed as he crouched in the coal darkness, exactly as if he
stood still hidden from the flickering glow, beside the wall. The
shadows that clung to him extended perhaps an inch from his skin,
discolouring the air that surrounded him like a caliginous halo.

There was something
else, an untimely stillness that crept with him even as Shadrach
moved. It was as if the frozen furtiveness of his concealment in the
bricks suffused the shadows that coated him. He stalked forward, yet
the sense of it was that he was still. He confused the eye. You could
follow his progress if you knew he was there and were determined to
watch, but it was easier not to notice him.

Shadrach motioned Isaac
and Yagharek to join him.

Am I like him?
thought Isaac as he crept out into the lighter darkness.
Do I slip
around the corners of your eye? Am I half invisible, bringing my
shadow-cover with me?

He looked over at
Derkhan, and saw by her wide-mouthed stare that he was. To his left,
Yagharek too was an indistinct figure.

"First sign of
sun-up, go," whispered Shadrach to his companions. Tansell and
Pengefinchess nodded. They had disengaged, and shook their heads in
exhaustion. Tansell raised his hand in a gesture of good luck.

Shadrach beckoned Isaac
and Yagharek, and stepped out of the darkened alley into the
sputtering firelight in front of the houses. After them came the
monkeys, moving slowly, as silently as they could. They stood beside
the two humans and the garuda, and the red light glinted violently
from their battered metal shells. The same light slipped off the
three hexed intruders like thin oil off a blade. It could find no
purchase. The three unclear figures stood before the five quietly
clattering constructs, and moved across the deserted street towards
the house.

**

The cactacae did not
lock their doors. It was easy enough to gain entrance to the house.
Shadrach began to creep up the stairs.

As Isaac followed him,
he sniffed at the exotic, unfamiliar smell of cactacae sap and
strange food. Pots of sandy soil were placed all around the entrance
hall, sporting a variety of desert plants, mostly unhealthy and
dwindling in the interior of the house.

Shadrach turned and
took in Isaac and Yagharek with a look.

Very slowly, he put his
finger to his lips. Then he continued to climb.

As they approached the
first floor, they heard a quiet argument in deep cactus voices.
Yagharek translated what he understood in a tiny whisper, something
about being afraid, an exhortation to trust the elders. The corridor
was bare and unadorned. Shadrach paused and Isaac peered over his
shoulder, saw that the door to the cactus-people’s room was
wide open.

Inside he saw a large
room with a very high ceiling, wrought, he realized as he saw the
fringe of planking that skirted the walls seven feet up, by tearing
out the floor of the rooms above. A gaslight was turned on low. A
little way from the door, Isaac saw several sleeping cactacae,
standing with their legs locked, immobile and impressive. Two figures
next to each other were still awake, leaning in slightly, whispering.

Very slowly, Shadrach
stalked like a predatory creature up the last of the stairs and past
the door. He paused just before he reached it, and looked back and
pointed at one of the monkey-constructs, then beside himself. He
repeated the gesture. Isaac understood. He pulled himself close to
the aural inputs of the construct and whispered instructions to it.

It scampered up the
stairs with a quiet clatter that made Isaac wince, but the cactacae
did not notice it. The construct squatted quietly down beside
Shadrach, blocked from sight inside the room by his dark-drenched
form. Isaac sent another construct to follow it, then signalled
Shadrach to move.

At a slow, steady
crawl, the big man crept in front of the doorway, shielding the
constructs with his body. Their forms still caught the light, would
glint as they passed the threshold. Shadrach moved without pause past
the line of sight of the cactacae talking within, with the constructs
creeping beside him hidden from the light, then on past the edge of
the doorway into the darkness of the corridor beyond.

And then it was Isaac’s
turn.

He indicated two more
constructs hide behind his bulk, then began to crawl along the wooden
floor. His belly hung down as he shuffled along with the constructs.

It was a frightening
feeling, to move out from behind the wall and emerge in full view of
the cactacae couple talking quietly as they stood ready to sleep.
Isaac was huddled against the banisters on the hallway, as far from
the door as he could go, but there were still several intolerable
seconds when he crept through the dim cone of light towards the
safety of the dark corridor beyond.

He had time to stare at
the big cactus people standing in the hard dirt on the floor,
whispering. Their eyes passed over him as he crept before their door,
and he held his breath, but his thaumaturgic shadows augmented the
darkness of the house, and he went unseen.

Then Yagharek, his
scrawny form doing its best to hide the last of the constructs, crept
past the light.

They regrouped before
the next stairs.

"This section is
easier," whispered Shadrach. "There’s no one on the
floor above, it’s just the ceiling of this one. And then above
that...that’s where our slake-moths hide."

**

Before they reached the
fourth floor, Isaac tugged at Shadrach and pulled him to a stop.
Watched by Shadrach and Yagharek, Isaac whispered again to one of the
monkey-constructs. He held Shadrach still as the thing crept with
mechanical stealth over the lip of the stairs, and disappeared into
the dark room beyond.

Isaac held his breath.
After a minute, the construct emerged and waved its arm jerkily,
indicated them to come up.

They rose slowly into a
long-deserted attic room. A window looked out onto the junction of
the streets, a window without glass, whose dusty frame was scuffed
with a variety of bizarre markings. It was through this little
rectangle that light came in, a wan and changing exudation of the
torches below.

Yagharek pointed at the
window slowly.

"From there,"
he said. "It came from there."

The floor was littered
with ancient rubbish, and thick in dust. The walls were scratched
with unsettling random designs.

The room was traversed
by a discomfiting river of air. It was a faint current, almost
undetectable. In the motionless heat of the dome, it was unsettling
and remarkable. Isaac looked around, trying to trace its source.

He saw it. Even
sweating in the night-heat, he shivered slightly.

Directly opposite the
window, the plaster of the wall lay in shredded layers across the
floor. It had fallen from a hole, a hole that looked newly created,
an irregular cavity in the bricks that raised to the height of
Isaac’s thighs.

It was a glaring,
looming wound in the wall. The breeze connected it and the window, as
if some unthinkable creature breathed out in the bowels of the house.

"It’s in
there," said Shadrach. "That must be where they’re
hiding. That must be the nest."

**

Inside the hole was a
complex and broken tunnel, carved into the substance of the house.
Isaac and Shadrach squinted into its darkness.

"It doesn’t
look wide enough for one of those bastards," said Isaac. "I
don’t think they work quite according to...uh...regular space."

The tunnel was four
feet or so wide, rough-hewn and deep. Its interior was quickly
invisible. Isaac kneeled before it and sniffed deeply of the
darkness. He looked up at Yagharek.

"You have to stay
here," he said. Before the garuda could protest, Isaac pointed
to his head. "Me and Shad here, we’ve got the helmets that
the Council gave us. And with this—" he patted his bag
"—we might be able to get close to whatever, if anything,
is in there." He reached in and brought out a dynamo. It was the
same engine the Council had used to amplify Isaac’s mindwaves,
attracting his erstwhile pet. He also brought out a large tangle of
metal-sheathed piping, coiled around his hand.

Shadrach kneeled next
to him and lowered his head. Isaac slotted an end of piping into
place on the helmet’s outlet, and twisted the bolts that held
it.

"According to the
Council, channellers use a setup like this for some technique
called...displacement-ontolography," mused Isaac. "Don’t
ask me. Point is, these exhaust pipes will flush out
our...uh...psychic
effluvia...
and discharge it out here."
He glanced up at Yagharek. "No mindprint. No taste, no trail."
He spun the last bolt firmly and rapped Shadrach’s helmet
gently. He lowered his own head and Shadrach began to repeat the
operation. "See, if there
is
a moth down there, Yag, and
you go anywhere near it, it’ll taste you. But it shouldn’t
taste us. That’s the theory."

When Shadrach was done,
Isaac stood and threw the ends of the piping to Yagharek.

"Each of those is
about...twenty-five, thirty feet. Hang on to it till it’s taut,
then let us go on with it trailing behind. All right?" Yagharek
nodded. His stood stiff, angry at being left, but understanding
without question that there was no choice.

Isaac took two coiling
wires and attached them first to the motor he held, then slotted the
other end of each into a valve on his and Shadrach’s helmets.

"There’s a
little antacidic chymical battery in there," he said, waving the
engine. "It works in conjunction with a metaclockwork design
pinched from the khepri. Are we ready?" Quickly, Shadrach
checked his gun, touched each of his other weapons in turn, then
nodded. Isaac felt for his flintlock and the unfamiliar knife at his
belt. "All right then."

He snapped the little
lever on the dynamo. A little humming hiss emerged from the engine.
Yagharek held the outlets dubiously, peered into them. He felt some
vague sensation, some weird little wash, trembling through him from
the rims of the pipes. A little tremble passed through him from the
hands up, a tiny tremor of fear that was not his own.

Isaac pointed at three
of the monkey-constructs.

"Go in," he
said. "Four feet ahead of us. Move slowly. Halt for danger.
You—" he pointed at another "—go behind us. One
stay with Yag."

Slowly, one by one, the
constructs trooped into the darkness.

Isaac briefly laid a
hand on Yagharek’s shoulder.

"Back soon, old
son," he said quietly. "Watch out for us."

He turned away and
kneeled, preceded Shadrach into the shaft of shattered brick,
crouching and working his way into the stygian hole.

**

The tunnel was part of
a subversive topography.

It crept at bizarre
angles between the walls of the terrace, tight and close, sending the
sound of his breath and the clanking of the monkeys’ bouncing
into Isaac’s ears. His hands and knees ached from the crushing
pressure of the sharp stone-shards under him. Isaac estimated that
they were moving back through the terraced houses. They were
shuffling downwards, and Isaac remembered how the curve of the dome
had decapitated the houses at a lower and lower point as they
approached the glass. The closer the houses were to the edge of the
dome, he realized, the lower they would be, the more filled with old
wreckage.

They were shuffling
their way along the little stub of the street, towards the glass
dome, down through deserted floors in an interstitial burrow. Isaac
shivered for a moment in the dark. He was sweating from heat and from
fear. He was terribly frightened. He had seen the slake-moths. He had
seen them feed. He knew what might be before them in the depths of
this wedge of rubble.

After a short time of
crawling Isaac felt a moment’s drag on him, then a release. He
had reached the full extent of his piping, and Yagharek had let it go
to drag behind him.

Isaac did not speak. He
could hear Shadrach behind him, breathing deeply and grunting. The
two men could not move more than five feet apart, because the wires
connected their helmets to a single motor.

Isaac threw up his face
and swung it around him, desperately searching for light.

The monkey-constructs
swung their way up. Every few moments, one would momentarily turn on
the lights in its eyes, and for a minuscule fraction of a second,
Isaac would see a stark crawl-way of littered brick and the metal
gleam of the constructs’ bodies. Then the lights would go out.
Isaac would try to negotiate by the ghost image that slowly ebbed
from his eyes.