Perdido Street Station (61 page)

"Why would he keep
her alive?" he said. "It just...It just doesn’t make
sense...
She’s a...an added complication, that’s
all. Something...something it’s easier to dispense with. He’s
done what he needed to do," he said, louder suddenly, raising
his hand to gesticulate at Isaac. "He’s got you coming to
him. He’s got revenge and he’s got you doing his bidding.
He just wants you there… doesn’t matter how he gets it.
And if he keeps her alive, there’s a tiny chance that she’d
be trouble. But if he...dangles her like bait, you’ll come for
her no matter what. Don’t matter if she’s alive." He
shook his head in sorrow.
"There’s nothing in it for
him not to kill her...
She’s
dead,
Isaac. She’s
dead." Isaac’s eyes were glazing, and Lemuel spoke
quickly. "And I’ll tell you this: the best way of getting
your revenge is to keep those moths out of Motley’s hands. He
won’t kill ‘em, you know. He’ll keep them alive,
so’s to get more dreamshit out of them."

Isaac was stamping
around the room now, shouting denials, now in anger, now misery, now
rage, now disbelief. He rushed at Lemuel, began to beg with him
incoherently, tried to convince him that he must be mistaken. Lemuel
could not watch Isaac’s supplication. He closed his eyes and
spoke over the desperate babble.

"If you go to him,
‘Zaac, Lin won’t be any less dead. And you’ll be
considerably more so."

Isaac’s noises
dried. There was a long, quiet moment, while Isaac stood and his
hands shook. He looked over at Lucky Gazid’s corpse, at
Yagharek standing silent and hooded in the corner of the room, at
Derkhan hovering near him, her own eyes filling, at Lemuel, watching
him nervously.

Isaac cried in earnest.

Isaac and Derkhan sat,
arms draped over each other, sniffling and weeping.

Lemuel stalked over to
Gazid’s stinking cadaver. He knelt before it, holding his mouth
and nose with his left hand. With his right he broke the seal of
scabbing blood that glued Gazid’s jacket closed, and rummaged
inside its pockets. He fumbled, looking for money or information.
There was nothing.

He straightened up,
looked around the room. He was thinking strategically. He sought
anything that might be useful, any weapons, anything to bargain with,
anything he could use to spy.

There was nothing at
all. Lin’s room was almost bare.

His head ached with the
weight of disturbed sleep. He could feel the mass of New Crobuzon’s
dream-torture. His own dreams bickered and brooded just below his
skull, ready to attack him should he succumb to sleep.

Eventually, he had
taken up all the time he feasibly could. He grew more nervous as the
night lengthened. He turned to the miserable pair on the bed,
gestured briefly at Yagharek.

"We have to go,"
he said.

Throughout the next
hot, sticky day, the city sprawled in heat- and nightmare-induced
choler.

Rumours swept the
underworld. Ma Francine had been found dead, they said. She had been
shot in the night, three times with a longbow. Some freelance
assassin had earned Mr. Motley’s thousand guineas.

There was no word from
the Kinken headquarters of Ma Francine’s Sugardrop Gang. The
internal war of succession had doubtless begun.

More comatose, imbecile
bodies were found. More and more. There was a gradual sense of slow
panic building. The nightmares would not cease, and some of the
papers were linking them with the mindless citizens who were found
every day, slumped over their tables before shattered windows, or
lying in the streets, caught between buildings by the affliction that
came from the sky. The faint smell of rotting citrus clung to their
faces.

The plague of
mindlessness was not discriminating. Whole and Remade were taken.
Humans were found, and khepri and vodyanoi and wyrmen. Even the city
garuda began to fall. And other, rarer creatures.

In St. Jabber’s
Mound, the sun came up on a fallen trow, its grave-pale limbs heavy
and lifeless, even though it breathed, lolling face down beside a
slick of stolen and forgotten meat. It must have ventured up from the
sewers for a scavenging foray into the midnight city, only to be
struck down.

In East Gidd, a still
more bizarre scene awaited the militia. There were two bodies half
hidden in the bushes that surrounded the Gidd Library. One, a young
streetwalker, was dead—genuinely dead, having bled dry from
tooth-holes in her neck. Sprawled over her was the thin body of a
well-known Gidd resident, the owner of a small, successful fabric
factory. His face and chin were caked with her blood. His sightless
eyes glared up at the sun. He was not dead, but his mind was quite
gone.

Some spread the word
that Andrew St. Kader had not been what he seemed, but many more the
shocking truth that even vampir were prey to the mind-suckers. The
city reeled. Were these agents, these germs or spirits, this disease,
these daemons, whatever they were, were they all-powerful? What could
defeat them?

There was confusion and
misery. A few citizens sent letters to their parents’ villages,
made plans to leave New Crobuzon for the foothills and valleys to the
south and east. But for millions, there was simply nowhere to flee.

**

Throughout the tedious
warmth of the day, Isaac and Derkhan sheltered in the little hut.

When they had arrived,
they saw that the construct was no longer waiting where they had left
it. There was no sign of where it might be.

Lemuel left to see if
he could link up with his comrades. He was nervous of venturing out
while he was at war with the militia, but he did not like being
isolated. In addition, Isaac thought, Lemuel did not like being
around Derkhan and Isaac’s shared misery.

Yagharek, to Isaac’s
surprise, left as well.

Derkhan reminisced. She
chastised herself constantly for being maudlin, for making the
feeling worse, but she could not stop. Derkhan told Isaac about her
late-night conversations with Lin, the arguments about the nature of
art.

Isaac was quieter. He
toyed mindlessly with the pieces of his crisis engine. He did not
stop Derkhan talking, but only occasionally did he interject with a
remembrance of his own. His eyes were unfixed. He sat back dully
against the crumbling wooden wall.

**

Before Lin, Isaac’s
lover had been Bellis; human, like all his previous bedfellows.
Bellis was tall and pale. She painted her lips bruise-purple. She was
a brilliant linguist, who had become bored with what she had called
Isaac’s "rumbustiousness," and had broken his heart.

Between Bellis and Lin
had been four years of whores and brief adventures. Isaac had
curtailed all of that a year before meeting Lin. He had been at Mama
Sudd’s one night, and had endured a shattering conversation
with the young prostitute hired to service him. He had made a chance
remark in praise of the amiable, matronly madame—who treated
her girls well—and had been perturbed when his opinion had not
been shared. Eventually the tired prostitute had snapped at him,
forgetting herself, telling him what she really thought of the woman
who hired out her orifices and let her keep three stivers in every
shekel she made.

Shocked and ashamed,
Isaac had left without even removing his shoes. He had paid double.

After that he had been
chaste for a long time, had immersed himself in work. Eventually a
friend had asked him to the opening show of a young khepri
gland-artist. In a small gallery, a cavernous room on the wrong side
of Sobek Croix, overlooking the weather-beaten sculpted knolls and
copses at the edge of the park, Isaac had met Lin.

He had found her
sculpture captivating, and had sought her out to say so. They had
endured a slow, slow conversation—she scribbling her responses
on the pad she always carried—but the frustrating pace did not
undermine a sudden shared intimation of excitement. They drifted from
the rest of the little party, examined each piece in turn, their
twisted forms and tortured geometry.

After that they met
often. Isaac surreptitiously learnt a little more signing between
each time, so that their conversations progressed fractionally
quicker every week. In the middle of showing off, laboriously signing
a dirty joke one night, Isaac, very drunk, had clumsily pawed her,
and they had pulled each other to bed.

The event had been
clumsy and difficult. They could not kiss as a first step: Lin’s
mouthparts would tear Isaac’s jaw from his face. For just a
moment after coming, Isaac had been overcome with revulsion, and had
almost vomited at the sight of those bristling headlegs and waving
antennae. Lin had been nervous of his body, and had stiffened
suddenly and unpredictably. When he had woken he had felt fearful and
horrified, but at the fact of having transgressed rather than at the
transgression itself.

And over a shy
breakfast, Isaac had realized that this was what he wanted.

Casual cross-sex was
not uncommon, of course, but Isaac was not an inebriated young man
frequenting a xenian brothel on a dare.

He was falling, he
realized, in love.

And now after the guilt
and the uncertainty had ebbed away, after the atavistic disgust and
fear had gone, leaving only a nervous, very deep affection, his lover
had been taken from him. And she would never return.

**

Sometimes in the day he
would see (he could not help himself) Lin quivering as Motley, that
uncertain personage Lemuel described, ripped her wings from her head.

Isaac could not help
moaning at that thought, and Derkhan would try to comfort him. He
cried often, sometimes quiet and sometimes very fierce. He howled
with misery.

Please,
he
prayed to human and then khepri gods,
Solenton and Jabber
and...and the Nurse and the Artist...let her have died without pain.

But he knew that she
was probably beaten or tortured before she was dispatched, and the
knowledge made him mad with grief.

**

The summer stretched
out the daylight as if on a rack. Each moment was drawn out until its
anatomy collapsed. Time broke down. The day progressed in an endless
sequence of dead moments. Birds and wyrmen lingered in the sky like
particles of filth in water. Church bells rang desultory and
insincere praise for Palgolak and Solenton. The rivers oozed
eastward.

Isaac and Derkhan
looked up in the late afternoon when Yagharek returned, his hooded
cloak fast bleaching in the scouring light. He did not speak of where
he had been, but he brought food, which the three of them shared.
Isaac composed himself. He battened down his anguish. He set his jaw.

After unending hours of
monotonous daylight glow, the shadows moved across the faces of the
mountains beyond. The west-facing sides of buildings were stained a
slick rose by the sun before it slid behind the peaks. The
valedictory spears of sunlight were lost in the rock duct of
Penitent’s Pass. The sky was lit for a long time after the sun
had disappeared. It was still darkening when Lemuel returned.

"I’ve
communicated our predicament to a few colleagues," he explained.
"I thought it might be a mistake to make hard plans till we’ve
seen whatever we’re going to see tonight. Our appointment in
Griss Twist. But I can call on a little aid, here and there. I’m
using up favours. Apparently, there’s a few serious adventurers
in town right now, claiming to have just liberated some major trow
haul from the ruins in Tashek Rek Hai. Might be up for a little paid
work."

Derkhan looked up. Her
face creased in distaste. She shrugged unhappily.

"I know they’re
some of the hardest people in Bas-Lag," she said slowly. It took
some moments for her to turn her mind to the issue. "I don’t
trust them, though. Thrill-seekers. They court danger. And they’re
quite unscrupulous graverobbers for the most part. Anything for gold
and experience. And I suspect if we actually told them what we’re
trying to do, even they’d balk at helping. We don’t know
how to fight these moth-things."

"Fair enough,
Blueday," said Lemuel. "But I tell you, right at the moment
I’ll take whatever the fuck I can get. Know what I mean? Let’s
see what happens tonight. Then we can decide whether or not to hire
the delinquents. What d’you say, ‘Zaac?"

Isaac looked up very
slowly and his eyes focused. He shrugged.

"They’re
scum," he said quietly. "But if they’ll do the
job..."

Lemuel nodded. "When
do we have to go?" he said.

Derkhan looked at her
watch. "It’s nine," she said. "An hour to go. We
should leave half an hour to get there, for safety’s sake."
She turned to look through the window, out at the glowering sky.

**

Militia pods rushed
overhead as skyrails thrummed. Elite units of officers were stationed
throughout the city. They carried strange backpacks, full of odd,
bulky equipment hidden in leather. They closed the doors on their
disgruntled colleagues in the towers and struts, waited in hidden
rooms.

There were more
dirigibles than usual in the sky. They cried out to each other,
booming vibrato greetings. They carried cargoes of officers, checking
their massive guns and polishing mirrors.

A little way from
Strack Island, further into the Gross Tar, beyond the confluence of
the two rivers, was a little stand-alone island. Some called it
Little Strack, though it had no real name. It was a lozenge of scrub,
wooden stumps and old ropes, used very occasionally for emergency
moorings. It was unlit. It was cut off from the city. There were no
secret tunnels that connected it to Parliament. No boats were
anchored to the mouldering wood. And yet that night its weed-strewn
silence was interrupted. Montjohn Rescue stood in the centre of a
little group of silent figures. They were surrounded by the wrenched
shapes of runt banyans and cow-parsley. Behind Rescue the ebon
enormity of Parliament thrust its way into the sky. Its windows
glimmered. The water’s sibilant murmur muffled the
night-sounds.