Two of the militiamen behind the officer nodded in unison and responded: “Aye.”
The officer cuffed Ben with a punishing backhand blow that dazed him and burst his lip. His eyes wavered drunkenly and he dribbled blood. The hugely armoured man swung Ben up over his shoulder and stomped from the room.
The constables who had entered the little print-room waited for the rest of the squad to follow the officer back out into the corridor. Then, in perfect time, they each pulled a large iron canister from their belts and pushed the plungers that set in motion a violent chymical reaction. They threw the cylinders into the cramped room where the construct still cranked the printing press handle in an endless, mindless circuit.
The militiamen ran like ponderous bipedal rhinos down the corridor after their officer. The acid and powder in the pipebombs mixed and fizzed, flared violently, ignited the tightly packed gunpowder. There were two sudden detonations that sent the damp walls of the building shuddering.
The corridor jacked under the impact, as innumerable gobbets of flaming paper spewed from the doorway, with hot ink and ripped snatches of pipe. Twists of metal and glass burst from the skylight in an industrial fountain. Like smouldering confetti, snippets of editorials and denunciations were sprinkled over the surrounding streets. WE SAY, said one, and BETRAYAL! another. Here and there the banner title was visible, Runagate Rampant. Here it was torn and burning, only a fragment visible.
Run . . .
One by one the militia attached themselves to the still-waiting ropes with a clip at their belt. They fumbled with levers embedded in their integral backpacks, setting in motion some powerful, hidden engine that dragged them off the streets and into the air as the belt-pulley turned, its powerful cogs interlocking and hauling the dark, bulky figures back up into the belly of their airship. The officer holding Ben clutched him tightly, but the pulley did not falter under the weight of the extra man.
As a weak fire played desultorily over what had been the slaughterhouse, something dropped from the roof, where it had caught on a ragged gutter. It tumbled through the air and crunched heavily on the stained ground. It was the head of Ben’s construct, its upper right arm still attached.
The thing’s arm twitched violently, trying to twist a handle that was no longer there. The head rolled, like a skull encased in pewter. Its metal mouth twitched and for a few ghastly seconds, it affected a disgusting parody of motion, crawling along the uneven ground by flexing and unflexing its jaw.
Within half a minute the last vestige of energy had leeched from it. Its glass eyes vibrated and snapped to a stop. It was still.
A shadow passed over the dead thing, as the airship, full now with all its troops, cruised slowly over the face of Dog Fenn, over the last brutal, sordid battles in the docklands, up past Parliament and over the enormity of the city, towards Perdido Street Station and the interrogation rooms of the Spike.
At first, I felt sick to be around them, all these men, their rushing, heavy, stinking breaths, their anxiety pouring through their skin like vinegar. I wanted the cold again, the darkness below the railways, where ruder forms of life struggle and fight and die and are eaten. There is a comfort in that brute simplicity.
But this is not my land and that is not my choice to make. I have struggled to contain myself. I have struggled with the alien jurisprudence of this city, all sharp divides and fences, lines that separate this from that and yours from mine. I have modelled myself on this. I have sought comfort and protection in owning myself, in being my own, my isolate, my private property for this the first time. But I have learnt with sudden violence that I am the victim of colossal fraud.
I have been duped. When the crisis breaks, I cannot be my own here any more than in the Cymek’s constant summer (where “my sand” or “your water” are absurdities that would kill their utterer). The splendid isolation I have sought has crumbled. I need Grimnebulin, Grimnebulin needs his friend, his friend needs succour from us all. It is simple mathematics to cancel common terms and discover that I need succour, too. I must offer it to others, to save myself.
I am stumbling. I must not fall.
I was once a creature of the air, and it remembers me. When I climb to the city heights and lean out into the wind, it tickles me with currents and vectors from my past. I can smell and see the passage of predators and prey in the eddying wash of this atmosphere.
I am like a diver who has lost his suit, who can still gaze through the glass bottom of a boat and watch the creatures of the upper and deeper darkness, can trace their passage and feel the tug of the tides, even though distorted and distant, veiled and half hidden.
I know that something is wrong in the sky.
I can see it in the disturbed flocks of birds, that shy suddenly away from random patches of air. I can see it in the panicked passage of wyrmen that seem to glance behind them as they fly.
The air stills with summer, is heavy with heat and now with these newcomers, these intruders I cannot see. The air is laden with menace. My curiosity rises. My hunting instincts stir.
But I am earthbound.
PART FOUR
A Plague of Nightmares
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Something uncomfortable and insistent prodded Benjamin Flex awake. His head rocked nauseously, his stomach plunged.
He was sitting strapped to a chair in a small, antiseptic white room. On one wall was a window of frosted glass, admitting light but no sights, no clue at all as to what lay outside. A white-coated man stood over him, poking him with a long shard of metal attached by wires to a humming engine.
Benjamin looked up into the man’s face and saw his own. The man wore a mask of perfectly smooth, rounded mirror, a convex lens that sent Benjamin’s distorted face back at him. Even bowled and ridiculous, the bruises and blood that discoloured Benjamin’s skin shocked him.
The door was open slightly and a man was standing half in, half out of the room. He held the door and faced back the way he had come, speaking to someone in the corridor or main room beyond.
“. . . glad you like it,” Benjamin heard. “. . . off to the playhouse with Cassandra tonight, so you never know . . . no, these eyes are still killing me . . .” The man laughed briefly in response to some unheard pleasantry. He waved. Then he turned and entered the little room.
He turned towards the chair, and Benjamin saw a figure that he recognized from rallies, from speeches, from massive heliotypes plastered around the city. It was Mayor Rudgutter.
The three figures in the room were still, regarding each other.
“Mr. Flex,” said Rudgutter eventually. “We must talk.”
“Got word from Pigeon.” Isaac waved the letter as he returned to the table he and David had set up in Lublamai’s corner of the ground floor. It was where they had spent the hours of the previous day uselessly scrabbling for plans.
Lublamai lay and drooled and shat in a cot a little way away.
Lin sat with them at the table, listlessly eating slices of banana. She had arrived the previous day, and Isaac, stumbling and semicoherent, had told her what had happened. Both he and David had seemed in shock. It had been some minutes before she had noticed Yagharek, skulking against a wall in the shadows. She had not known whether to greet him, and had waved a brief introduction that he had not acknowledged. When the four of them ate a miserable supper, he had drifted over to join them, his enormous cloak draped over what she knew to be fake wings. Not that she would tell him she knew him to be engaged in a masquerade.
At one point in that long, miserable evening, Lin had reflected that something had finally happened to make Isaac acknowledge her. He had held her hands on arrival. He had not even ostentatiously thrown up a duplicitous spare bed when she had agreed to stay. It was not a triumph, though, not the final great vindication of love that she would have chosen. The reason for his change was simple.
David and he were worried about more important things.
There was a slightly sour part of her
mind which, even now, did not believe his conversion to be complete. She knew that David was an old friend, of similarly libertarian principles, who would understand—if he were even thinking about them—the difficulties of the situation, and who could be relied on to be discreet. But she did not allow herself to dwell on this, feeling mean-spirited and selfish to be thinking of herself with Lublamai . . . ruined.
She could not feel Lublamai’s affliction as deeply as his two friends, of course, but the sight of that dribbling, mindless thing in the cot shocked and frightened her. She was glad that something had happened to Mr. Motley to give her a few hours or days with Isaac, who seemed broken with guilt and misery.
Occasionally he would flare into angry, useless action, shouting “Right!” and clasping his hands decisively, but there was nothing to be decided, no action he could take. Without some lead, some hint, the start of some trail, there was nothing to be done.
That night, she and Isaac had slept together upstairs, he clutching her miserably, without a hint of arousal. David had gone home, promising to return early in the morning. Yagharek had refused a mattress, had curled into a peculiar, hunched, cross-legged crouch in the corner, obviously designed to keep from crushing his supposed wings. Lin did not know if he was maintaining his illusion for her sake, or if he truly slept, still, in the pose he had used since childhood.
The next morning they sat around the table, drinking coffee and tea, eating stolidly, wondering what to do. When he checked the post, Isaac was quick to discard the rubbish and return with Lemuel’s note: unstamped, hand-delivered by some minion.
“What does he say?” asked David quickly.
Isaac held the paper so that David and Lin could read over his shoulder. Yagharek hung back.
Have tracked down source of Peculiar Caterpillar in my records. One Josef Cuaduador. Acquisitions clerk for Parliament. Not wanting to waste time, and remembering promise of Fat Fee, have already been to speak to Mr. Cuaduador along with my Large Associate Mr. X. Exerted some little pressure for cooperation. At first Mr. C. thought I was militia. Reassured him otherwise, then ensured his loquacity with X’s friend Flintlock. Seems our Mr. C. liberated caterpillar from official shipment or somesuch. Been regretting it ever since. (I did not even pay him much for it.) No knowledge of purpose or source of grub. No knowledge of fate of others from original group—took only one. One lead only: (Useless? Useful?) Recipient of packet named Dr. Barbell? Barrier? Berber? Barlime? etc. in R&D.
Am keeping track of services rendered, Isaac. Itemized bill to follow.
Lemuel Pigeon.
“Fantastic!” Isaac exploded, on finishing the letter. “A fucking lead . . .”
David looked utterly aghast.
“Parliament?” he said, a strangled gasp. “We’re fucking about with Parliament? Oh dear Jabber, do you have any idea of the scale of shit we’re messed up in? What the fuck d’you mean ‘Fantastic!’ you fucking cretin, Isaac? Oh, marvellous! We just have to ask Parliament for a list of all those in the top secret Research and Development department whose names begin with B, then find them one by one and ask if they know anything about flying things that scare their victims comatose, specifically how to catch them. We’re home free.”
No one spoke. A pall settled slowly on the room.
At its south-westerly corner, Brock Marsh met Petty Coil, a dense knot of chancers, crime and architecture of decayed splendour wedged into a kink in the river.
A little over a hundred years previously, Petty Coil had been an urban hub for the major families. The Mackie-Drendas and the Turgisadys; Dhrachshachet, the vodyanoi financier and founder of the Drach Bank; Sirrah Jeremile Carr, the merchant-farmer: all had their great houses in Petty Coil’s wide streets.
But industry had exploded in New Crobuzon, much of it bankrolled by those very families. Factories and docks budded and proliferated. Griss Twist, just across the river, enjoyed a short-lived boom of small machinofacture, with all the noise and stink that that entailed. It became the site of massive riverside tips. A new landscape of ruin and refuse and industrial filth was created, in a speeded-up parody of geological process. Carts dumped load after load of broken machines, rotting paper, slag, organic offal and chymical detritus into the fenced-off rubbish tips of Griss Twist. The rejected matter settled and shifted and fell into place, affecting some shape, mimicking nature. Knolls, valleys, quarries and pools bubbling with foetid gas. Within a few years the local factories had gone but the dumps remained, and the winds that blew in from the sea could send a pestilential stench over the Tar into Petty Coil.
The rich deserted their homes. Petty Coil degenerated in a lively fashion. It became noisier. Paint and plaster bubbled, desquamating grotesquely, as the massive houses became homes for more and more of New Crobuzon’s swelling population. Windows broke, were fixed roughly, broke again. As small food-shops and bakers and carpenters moved in, Petty Coil fell willing prey to the city’s ineluctable capacity for spontaneous architecture. Walls and floors and ceilings were called into question, amended. New and inventive uses were found for deserted constructions.
Derkhan Blueday made her way hurriedly towards this mess of abused, misused grandeur. She carried a bag close. Her face was set and miserable.
She came up over Cockscomb Bridge, one of the city’s most ancient edifices. It was narrow and roughly cobbled, with houses built into the very stones. The river was invisible from the centre of the bridge. On either side, Derkhan could see nothing but the squat, rough-edged skyline of houses nearly a thousand years old, their intricate marble façades crumbled long ago. Lines of washing stretched across the width of the bridge. Raucous shouted conversations and arguments bounced back and forth.
In Petty Coil itself, Derkhan walked quickly under the raised Sud Line and bore north. The river she had passed over bent sharply back on itself, veering towards her in an enormous S, before righting its course and heading east and down to meet the Canker.
Petty Coil was blurring with Brock Marsh. The houses were smaller, the streets narrower and more intricately twisted. Mildewing old houses tottered overhead, their steeply slanting roofs like capes slung over narrow shoulders, making them furtive. In their cavernous front rooms and central courtyards, where trees and bushes died as filth encroached, rude signs were plastered advertising scarabomancy and automatic reading and enchantment therapy. Here, the poorest or most unruly of Brock Marsh’s delinquent chymists and thaumaturges fought for space with charlatans and liars.
Derkhan checked the directions she had been given, and found her way to St. Sorrel’s Mews. It was a tight little passage ending in a collapsed wall. To her right, Derkhan saw the tall, rust-coloured building described in the note. She entered through the doorless threshold and picked her way over building debris, through a short unlit passage that virtually dripped with damp. At the end of the corridor, she saw the bead curtain she had been told to look for, strings of broken glass on wire, swaying gently.
She steeled herself, drawing the vicious shards back gently, drawing no blood. Derkhan entered the little parlour beyond.
Both of the room’s windows had been covered: thick material was glued to them in great fibrous clumps that clotted the air with heavy shadow. The furnishings were minimal. The same shade of brown as the darkened atmosphere, they seemed half invisible. Behind a low table, sipping tea in an absurdly dainty manner, a plump, hairy woman basked in a sumptuous decaying armchair.
She eyed Derkhan.
“What can I do for you?” she asked evenly, in a tone of resigned irritation.
“You’re the communicatrix?” said Derkhan.
“Umma Balsum.” The woman inclined her head. “Got some business for me?”
Derkhan made her way across the room and hovered nervously by a bursting sofa until Umma Balsum indicated that she should sit. Derkhan did so abruptly, and fumbled in her bag.
“I need . . . uh . . . to talk to Benjamin Flex.” Her voice was taut. She spoke in little bursts, gearing up
to each announcement, then spitting it out. She pulled out a little pouch of the detritus she had found at the site of the abattoir.
She had gone to Dog Fenn the previous evening, as news of the militia’s crushing of the dock strike washed over New Crobuzon. It swept along with rumours in its wake. One of the rumours concerned a subsidiary attack on a seditious newspaper in Dog Fenn.
It had been late when Derkhan had arrived, disguised as always, in the dank streets in the south-east of the city. It had rained; warm, fat drops bursting like rotting things on the rubble in the cul-de-sac. The entrance was blocked, so Derkhan had entered through the low portal through which meat and animals were slung. She had clung to the noisome stones, dangling over the lip into the butchers’ den, stained with shit and gore from a thousand terrified animals, and dropped the few feet into the bloody darkness of the deserted charnel-house.
She had crawled over the ruined conveyor-belt, snagged herself on the meathooks that littered the floor. The sanguinary slick in which she stumbled was cold and sticky.
Derkhan had fought her way past the stones that had burst from walls, over the ruined stairs, up towards Ben’s room, the centre of the destruction. Her way was paved with ripped and ruined shards of printing machinery, and smoke-charred pieces of cloth and paper.
The room itself was little more than a hole full of rubbish. Chunks of masonry had crushed the bed. The wall between Ben’s bedroom and the hidden printing press was almost completely destroyed. Languorous summer drizzle had been falling through the burst skylight onto the shattered skeleton of the press.
Derkhan’s face had hardened. She had searched with a fervent intensity. She had unearthed small pieces of evidence, small proofs that this was once where a man had lived. She brought them out now, put them on the table before Umma Balsum.
Perdido Street Station Page 32
