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 ætherwebs 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?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
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 Ghérou—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.
Some of the men kept their heads high, pugnaciously. Most walked as David did, carefully alone.
The sky was warm and dirty. The stars shimmered unclearly. In the air above the roofscape, there was a whispering and then a rush of wind as a pod passed by. It was a municipal irony that above the very centre of the fleshpits stretched a militia skyrail. On rare occasions the militia would raid the corrupt, sumptuous houses of the red-light zone. But for the most part, as long as payments were made and violence did not spill out of the rooms in which it had been paid for, the militia kept out.
The wafts of night air brought with them something unsettling, some brimming sense of unease. Something more profound than any usual anxiety.
In some of the houses, large windows were illuminated through soft, diffusing muslin. Women in shifts and tight nightgowns rubbed themselves lasciviously, or looked up at the passers-by through coy lashes. Here were also the xenian brothels, where drunken youths cheered each other on to rites of passage, fucking khepri or vodyanoi women or other more exotic breeds. Seeing these establishments, David thought of Isaac. He tried not to.
David did not stop. He did not take in the women around him. He plunged deeper.
He turned a corner into a row of lower, meaner houses. In the windows here were unsubtle hints as to the nature of the wares within. Whips. Cuffs. A girl of seven or eight in a baby’s crib, squalling and snotty.
David tracked on and on. The crowds thinned further, although David was never alone. The night air teemed with faint noises. Rooms full of conversation. Music, played well. Laughter. Cries of pain and the barks or howls of animals.
There was a tumbledown cul-de-sac near the hea
rt of the sector, a little still place in the maze. David turned onto its cobbles with a faint shudder. There were men at the doors of these establishments. They stood, heavy and surly in cheap suits, vetting the miserable men that came to them.
David shuffled up to one of the doors. The massive bouncer stopped him, one hand impassive on his chest.
“Mrs. Tollmeck sent me,” muttered David. The man let him pass.
Inside, the lampshades were thick and dirty brown. The hall seemed glutinous with shit-coloured light. Behind a desk sat a severe, middle-aged woman in a drab floral dress that matched the lampshades. She looked up at David through half-moon spectacles.
“Are you new to our establishment?” she asked. “Have you an appointment?”
“I’m due in room seventeen at nine o’clock. The name is Orrel,” said David. The woman behind the desk raised her eyebrows very slightly and inclined her head. She glanced down at a book before her.
“I see. Well, you’re . . .” she glanced at the wall-clock. “You’re ten minutes early, but you might as well go up. You know the way? Sally’s waiting for you.” She looked up at him and—horrendously, monstrously—gave him a complicitous little wink and smirk. David felt sick.
He turned from her quickly and headed up the stairs.
His heart was going very quickly as he climbed, as he emerged in the long corridor at the top of the house. He remembered when first he came here. At the end of the walkway was room seventeen.
David began to walk towards it.
He hated this floor. He hated the slightly blistering wallpaper, the peculiar smells that emanated from the rooms, the unsettling sounds that floated through the walls. Most of the doors on the corridor were open, by convention. Those that were closed were occupied by punters.
The door to room seventeen was kept shut, of course. It was an exception to the house rule.
David walked slowly along the foul carpet, approaching the first door. Mercifully, it was closed, but the wooden door could not contain the noises; peculiar, muffled, desultory cries; a creak of tightening leather; a hissing, hate-filled voice. David turned his head away and found himself gazing directly into the opposite room. He caught a glimpse of the nude figure on the bed. She stared up at him, a girl of no more than fifteen. She crouched on all fours . . . her arms and legs were hairy and pawed . . . dog’s legs.
His eyes lingered on her in hypnotic, prurient horror as he walked past, and she leapt to the floor in clumsy canine motion, turned awkwardly, an unpracticed quadruped, looked over her shoulder at him hopefully as she pushed out her arse and pudenda.
David’s mouth hung slightly open and his eyes were glazed.
This was where he shamed himself, in this brothel of Remade whores.
The city crawled with Remade prostitutes, of course. It was often the only strategy available to Remade women and men to keep themselves from starving. But here in the red-light district, peccadilloes were indulged in the most sophisticated manner.
Most Remade tarts had been punished for unrelated crimes: their Remaking was usually little more than a bizarre hindrance for their sex-work, pushing their prices way down. This district, on the other hand, was for the specialist, the discerning consumer. Here, the whores were Remade specifically for the profession. Here were expensive bodies Remade into shapes to indulge dedicated gourmets of perverted flesh. There were children sold by their parents and women and men forced by debt to sell themselves to the flesh-sculptors, the illicit Remakers. There were rumours that many had been sentenced to some other Remaking, only to find themselves Remade by the punishment factories according to strange carnal designs and sold to the pimps and madams. It was a profitable sideline run by the bio-thaumaturges of the state.
Time was stretched out and sickly in this endless corridor, like rancid treacle. At every door, every station along the way, David could not help but glance inside. He willed himself to look away but his eyes would not obey.
It was like a nightmare garden. Each room contained some unique flesh-flower, blossom of torture.
David paced past naked bodies covered in breasts like plump scales; monstrous crablike torsos with nubile girlish legs at both ends; a woman who gazed at him with intelligent eyes above a second vulva, her mouth a vertical slit with moist labia, a meat-echo of the other vagina between her splayed legs. Two little boys gazing bewildered at the massive phalluses they sprouted. A hermaphrodite with many hands.
There was a thump inside David’s head. He felt groggy with exhausted horror.
Room seventeen was before him. David did not turn back. He imagined the eyes of the Remade behind him, on him, staring from their prisons of blood and bone and sex.
He knocked on the door. After a moment, he heard the chain being lifted from within and the door opened a little. David entered, his gorge rising, leaving that shameful corridor into his own private corruption. The door was closed.
A suited man sat waiting on a dirty bed, smoothing down his tie. Another man, who had opened and closed the door, stood behind David with folded arms. David glanced at him briefly and turned all his attention to the seated man.
The man indicated a chair at the foot of the bed, bade David pull it up in front of him.
David sat.
“Hello ‘Sally,’ “ he said quietly.
“Serachin,” said the man. He was thin and middle-aged. His eyes were calculating and intelligent. He looked wildly out of place in this crumbling room, this vile house, and yet his face was quite composed. He had waited as patient and comfortable among the Remade whores as he would in the corridors of Parliament.
“You asked to see me,” said the man. “It’s been quite a time since we’ve heard from you. We had designated you a sleeper.”
“Well . . .” said David uneasily. “Not much to report. Till now.” The man nodded judiciously and waited.
David licked his lips. He found it hard to speak. The man looked at him oddly, frowned.
“The rate is still the same, you know,” the man said. “A little more, even.”
“No, gods, I . . .” David stuttered. “I’m just . . . You know . . . Out of practice.” The man nodded again.
Very out of practice, thought David helplessly. Been six years since the last time and I swore I wouldn’t do it again. Got myself out of it. You got bored of blackmail and I didn’t need the money . . .
The very first time, fifteen years ago, they had entered this very room as David spent himself in one of the mouths of some ruined, cadaverous Remade girl. The suited men had shown him their camera. They had told him they would send their pictures to the newspapers and the journals and the university. They had offered him a choice. They paid well.
He had informed. Freelance only; once, maybe twice a year. And then he had stopped for a long time. Until now. Because now he was frightened.
David breathed in deeply and began.
“Something big’s going on. Oh, Jabber, I don’t know where to start. You know the disease that’s going round? The mindlessness thing? Well, I know where it started. I thought we could just get on with things, I thought it’d all be . . . containable . . . but Devil’s Tail! It just gets bigger and bigger and . . . and I think we need help.” (Somewhere deep inside his guts some small part of him spat disgust at this, this cowardice, this self-delusion, but David spoke quickly, kept talking.) “It’s all down to Isaac.”
“Dan der Grimnebulin?” said the man. “Who you share your workspace with? The renegade theorist. The guerrilla scientist with a talent for self-importance. What’s he been up to?” The man smiled coldly.
“Right, listen. He got commissioned by . . . well, he got commissioned to look into flight, and he got hold of shitloads of flying things to do research on. Birds, insects, aspises, fucking everything. And one of the things he gets is this big caterpillar. Damn thing looks like it’s going to die for the longest time, then ’Zaac must’ve worked out how to keep the thing alive, because suddenly it starts growing. Huge. Fucking
. . . this big.” He held out his hands in a reasonable estimate of the grub’s size. The man opposite him was looking intently at him, face set, hands clenched.
“Then it pupates, right, and we were all sort of curious about what’d come out. So we get home one day and Lublamai—the other guy in the building, you know—Lublamai’s lying there, drooling. Whatever the fucking thing was that hatched out, it fucking ate his mind . . . and . . . and it got away and the damn thing’s loose . . .”
The man jerked his head in a decisive nod, quite different from his earlier casual invitations to information. “So you thought you’d better keep us informed.”
“Shit, no! I didn’t think . . . even then I thought we could deal with it. I mean Jabber, I was pissed off with Isaac, I was completely at a loss, but I thought maybe we could find some way of tracking the damn thing down, fixing Lub . . . Well, first off there starts being more and more of these things, these stories about people’s . . . minds going . . . But the main thing was that we tracked down who got these things to ’Zaac. It’s some fucking clerk nicking them from R&D in the sodding Parliament. And I’m thinking ‘Fuck, I don’t want to muck about with the government.’ “ The man on the bed nodded at David’s judgement. “So then I’m thinking we’re way, way out of our depth . . .”
David paused. The man on the bed opened his mouth and David cut him off.
“No, listen! It doesn’t stop there! ’Cause I heard about the riot down in Kelltree, and I know you’ve banged up the editor of Runagate Rampant, right?” The man waited, flicked imaginary lint from his jacket in an automatic motion. The fact had not been advertised, but the ruined abattoir left no doubt that some pit of sedition had been raided in Dog Fenn, and rumours abounded. “So one of Isaac’s friends is a writer on the damn thing, and she’s contacted the editor—I don’t know how, some fucking thaumaturgy—and he’s told her two things. One is that the inquisitors . . . your lot . . . think he knows something he doesn’t, and the other is that they’re asking him about some story in Double-R and the contact for the story, who presumably does know whatever they think he does, is called Barbile. So get this! That’s who our clerk nicked the monster caterpillar from!”
Perdido Street Station Page 35
