David paused at this, waited for it to impact on the man, then continued.
“So it’s all connecting and I do not know what’s going on. And I don’t want to. I can just see that we’re . . . treading on your toes. Maybe it’s a coincidence but I can’t see it myself . . . I don’t mind chasing monsters but I am not getting on the wrong side of the fucking militia, and the secret police, and the government and everything. You have to clear this shit up.”
The man on the bed clasped his hands. David remembered something else.
“Damn, yeah, listen! I’ve been racking my brains, trying to work out what’s going on, and . . . well, I don’t know if this is right, but is it something to do with crisis energy?”
The man shook his head very slowly, his face guarded, not comprehending. “Go on,” he said.
“Well, at one point during the run-up to all this, Isaac lets slip . . . sort of hints . . . that he’s built a . . . a working crisis engine . . . d’you know what that means?”
The man’s face was set hard and his eyes were very wide.
“I am a liaison for those who report from Brock Marsh,” he hissed. “I know what it would mean . . . it cannot . . . is it . . . Wait a minute, that would make no sense . . . is it . . . is it true?” For the first time, the man seemed truly rattled.
“I don’t know,” said David hopelessly. “But he wasn’t boasting . . . he sort of mentioned it in passing . . . I just . . . have no idea. But I know that’s what he’s been working on, on and off, for years and fucking years . . .”
There was a long time of silence, when the man on the bed looked thoughtfully into the far corner of the room. His face ran a quick gamut of emotions. He looked thoughtfully at David. “How do you know all this?” he said.
“ ’Zaac trusts me,” said David (and that place inside him winced again, and he ignored it again). “At first this woman . . .”
“Name?” interrupted the man.
David hesitated.
“Derkhan Blueday,” he muttered eventually. “So Blueday, at first she’s really chary of talking in front of me, but Isaac . . . he vouches for me. He knows my politics, we’ve done demos together . . .” (again that wince: you have no politics, you fucking traitor) “It’s just that at a time like this . . .” he hesitated, unhappy. The man waved peremptorily. He had no interest in David’s guilt, or his rationalizations. “So Isaac tells her she can trust me and she tells us everything.”
There was a long time of silence. The man on the bed waited. David shrugged.
“That’s all I know,” he whispered.
The man nodded and stood.
“Right,” he said. “That’s all . . . extremely useful. We’ll probably have to bring your friend Isaac in. Don’t worry,” he added with a reassuring smile. “We’ve no interest in disposing of him, I promise. We may just need his help. You’re right, obviously. There is a . . . circle to be squared, connections to be made, and you’re not in a position to do it, and we might be. With Isaac’s help.
“You’re going to have to stay in touch,” said the man. “You’ll receive written instructions. Be sure to obey them. Obviously I don’t have to stress that, do I? We’ll make sure der Grimnebulin doesn’t know where our information comes from. We may not move for a few days . . . don’t panic. That’s our affair. Just you stay quiet, and try to keep der Grimnebulin doing what he’s doing. All right?”
David nodded miserably. He waited. The man looked at him sharply.
“That’s all,” he said. “You can go.”
With a guilty, grateful haste, David stood and hurried to the door. He felt as if he was swimming in mire, his own shame engulfing him like a mucal sea. He was longing to walk away from this room, and forget what he had said and done, and not think of the coins and notes that would be sent to him, and think only of how loyal he felt to Isaac, and tell himself it was all for the best.
The other man opened the door for him, released him, and David rushed gratefully away, almost ran down along the passageway, eager to escape.
But hurry as he would through the streets of Spit Hearth, guilt clung to him, tenacious as quicksand.
CHAPTER THIRTY
One night the city lay sleeping with reasonable peace.
Of course, the usual interruptions oppressed it. Men and women fought each other and died. Blood and spew fouled the old streets. Glass shattered. The militia streaked overhead. Dirigibles sounded like monstrous whales. The mutilated, eyeless body of a man who would later be identified as Benjamin Flex washed ashore in Badside.
The city tossed uneasily through its nightland, as it had for centuries. It was a fractured sleep, but it was all the city had ever had.
But the next night, when David performed his furtive task in the red-light zone, something had changed. New Crobuzon night had always been a chaos of jarring beats and sudden violent chords. But a new note was sounding. A tense, whispering undertone that made the air sick.
For one night, the tension in the air was a thin and tentative thing, that inveigled its way into the minds of the citizens and sent shadows across their sleeping faces. Then day, and no one remembered anything more than a moment’s nocturnal unease.
And then as the shadows dragged out and the temperature dropped, as the night returned from under the world, something new and terrible settled on the city.
All around the city, from Flag Hill in the north to Barrackham below the river, from the desultory suburbs of Badside in the east to the rude industrial slums of Chimer, people thrashed and moaned in their beds.
Children were the first. They cried out and dug their nails into their hands, their little faces crunching down into hard grimaces; they sweated heavily, with a cloying stench; their heads oscillated horrendously to and fro; and all without waking.
As the night wore on the adults also suffered. In the depths of some other, innocuous dream, old fears and paranoias suddenly crashed through mental firewalls like invading armies. Successions of ghastly images assaulted the afflicted, animated visions of deep fears, and absurdly terrifying banalities—ghosties and goblins they need never face—they would have laughed at when awake.
Those arbitrarily spared the ordeal were woken suddenly in the depths of the night by the moans and screams from their sleeping lovers, or their heavy despairing sobs. Sometimes the dreams might be dreams of sex or happiness, but heightened and feverish and become terrifying in their intensity. In this twisted night-trap, bad was bad and good was bad.
The city rocked and shivered. Dreams were become a pestilence, a bacillus that seemed to leap from sleeper to sleeper. They even inveigled their way into the minds of the waking. Nightwatchmen and militia agents; late-night dancers and frantic students; insomniacs: they found themselves losing their trains of thought, drifting into fantasies and ruminations of weird, hallucinatory intensity.
All over the city the night was fissured by cries of nocturnal misery.
New Crobuzon was gripped in an epidemic, an outbreak, a plague of nightmares.
The summer was clotting over New Crobuzon. Stifling it. The night air was as hot and thick as an exhaled breath. Way above the city, transfixed between the clouds and the sprawl, the great winged things drooled.
They spread out and flapped their vast irregular wings, sending fat gusts of air rolling with each sweeping motion. Their intricate appendages—tentacular and insectile, anthropoid, chitinous, numerous—trembled as they passed in febrile excitement.
They unhinged their disturbing mouths and long feathered tongues unrolled towards the rooftops. The very air was thick with dreams, and the flying things lapped eagerly at the succulent juices. When the fronds that tipped their tongues were heavy with the invisible nectar, their mouths gaped and they rolled up their tongues with an eager smacking. They gnashed their huge teeth.
They soared. As they flew they shat, exuding all the sewage from their previous meals. The invisible spoor spread out in the sky, psychic effluent that slid, lumpy and cloyi
ng, through the interstices of the mundane plane. It oozed its way through æther to fill the city, saturating the minds of the inhabitants, disturbing their rest, bringing forth monsters. The sleeping and the wakeful felt their minds churn.
The five went hunting.
Amid the vast swirling broth of the city’s nightmares, each of the dark things could discern individual snaking trails of flavour.
Usually, they were opportunistic hunters. They would wait until they scented some strong mental tumult, some mind particularly delicious in its own exudations. Then the intricate dark flyers would turn and dive, bear down on the prey. They used their slim hands to unlock top-floor windows, and paced across moonlit attics towards shivering sleepers to drink their fill. They clutched with a multitude of appendages at lonely figures walking the riverside, figures who screeched and screeched as they were taken into a night already full of plaintive cries.
But when they had discarded the flesh-husks of their meals to twitch and loll slack-mouthed on boards and shadowed cobbles, when their stabs of hunger had been assuaged and meals could be taken more slowly, for pleasure, the winged creatures became curious. They tasted the faint drippings of minds they had tasted before, and, like inquisitive, coldly intelligent hunting beasts, they pursued them.
Here was the tenuous mental thread of one of the guards, who had stood outside their cage in Bonetown and fantasized about his friend’s wife. His flavoursome imaginings wafted up to wrap around a twitching tongue. The creature that tasted that wheeled around in the sky, in the chaotic arc of a butterfly or a moth, and dived towards Echomire, following his prey’s scent.
Another of the great airborne shapes pulled up suddenly in a vast figure of eight, rolling over its own tracks, seeking out the familiar flavour that had flitted across its tastebuds. It was a nervous aroma that had permeated the cocoons of the pupating monsters. The great beast hovered over the city, saliva dissipating in various dimensions below it. The emissions were obscured, frustratingly tenuous, but the creature’s sense of taste was fine, and it bore down towards Mafaton, licking its way along the enticing trail of the scientist who had watched it grow, Magesta Barbile.
The twisted one, the malnourished runt that had liberated its fellows, found a taste-trail that it, too, remembered. Its mind was not so developed, its tastebuds less exact: it could not follow the flickering scent through the air. But, uncomfortably, it tried. The full taste of the mind was so familiar . . . it had surrounded the twisted creature during its flourishing into consciousness, during its pupation and self-creation in the silk shell . . . It lost and found the scent, lost it again, floundered.
The smallest and weakest of the night-hunters, stronger by far than any man, hungry and predatory, licked its way through the sky, trying to regain the trail of Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin.
Isaac, Derkhan and Lemuel Pigeon fidgeted on the streetcorner, in the smoky glare of the gaslight.
“Where the fuck’s your mate?” hissed Isaac.
“He’s late. Probably can’t find it. I told you, he’s stupid,” said Lemuel calmly. He took out a flick-knife and began to clean his nails.
“Why do we need him?”
“Don’t come the fucking innocent, Isaac. You’re good at waving enough brass at me to get me to do all sorts of jobs that go against my better judgement, but there are limits. I’m not getting involved in anything which irritates the damn government without protection. And Mr. X is that, in spades.”
Isaac swore silently, but he knew Lemuel was right.
He had been very uneasy at the notion of involving Lemuel in this adventure, but events had rapidly conspired to give him no choice. David had clearly been reluctant to help him find Magesta Barbile. He seemed paralysed, a mass of helpless nerves. Isaac was losing patience with him. He needed support, and he wanted David to get off his arse and do something. But now was not the time to confront him.
Derkhan had inadvertently provided the name that seemed key to the interlocking mysteries of the presence in the skies and the militia’s enigmatic interrogation of Ben Flex. Isaac sent word, got the name and what information they had—Mafaton, scientist, R&D—to Lemuel Pigeon. He included money, several guineas (and realized as he did so that the gold Yagharek had given him was slowly dwindling), and begged for information, and help.
That was why he contained his anger at Mr. X’s late show. For all that he pantomimed impatience, that kind of protection was precisely what he had approached Lemuel for.
Lemuel himself had not taken much persuasion to accompany Isaac and Derkhan to the address in Mafaton. He affected an insouciant disregard for particulars, a mercenary desire simply to be paid for his efforts. Isaac did not believe him. He thought that Lemuel was growing interested in the intrigue.
Yagharek was adamant he would not come. Isaac had tried to persuade him, quickly and fervently, but Yagharek had not even replied. What the fuck are you doing here then? Isaac felt like asking, but he swallowed his irritation and let the garuda be. Perhaps it would take a little time before he would behave as if he were part of any collective at all. Isaac would wait.
Lin had left just before Derkhan’s arrival. She had been reluctant to leave Isaac in his despondency, but she had also seemed somewhat distracted. She had stayed only one night, and when she had gone she had promised Isaac she would return as soon as she could. But then the next morning Isaac had received a letter in her cursive hand, couriered across the city with an expensive guaranteed delivery.
Dear Heart,
I am afraid you might feel angry and betrayed at this, but please be forbearing. Waiting for me here was another letter from my employer, my commissioner, my patron, if you will. Hot on the heels of his missive telling me I would not be needed for the foreseeable future, came another message saying I was to return.
I know the timing of this could not be worse. I ask only that you believe that I would disobey if I could, but that I cannot. I cannot, Isaac. I will try to finish my job with him as quickly as possible—within a week or two, I hope—and return to you.
Wait for me.
With my love, Lin
So, waiting on the corner of Addley Pass, camouflaged by the chiaroscuro of full moon through the clouds and the shadows of the trees in Billy Green, were only Isaac, Derkhan and Lemuel.
All three were shifting uneasily, looking up at passing shades, starting at imagined noises. From the streets around them there came intermittent sounds of horrendously disturbed sleep. At each savage moan or ululation, the three would catch each other’s eyes.
“Godsdamnit,” hissed Lemuel in irritation and fear. “What is going on?”
“There’s something in the air . . .” murmured Isaac, and his voice petered out as he stared blindly up.
To cap the tension, Derkhan and Lemuel, who had met the previous day, had quickly decided they despised each other. They did their best to ignore one another.
“How did you get the address?” asked Isaac, and Lemuel shucked his shoulders irritably.
“Connections, ’Zaac, contacts, and corruption. How d’you think? Dr. Barbile vacated her own rooms a couple of days ago and has since been seen at this less salubrious location. It’s only about three streets away from her old house, though. The woman has no imagination. Hey . . .” He batted Isaac’s arm and pointed across the gloomy street. “There’s our man.”
Opposite them, a vast figure tugged free of the shadows and lumbered towards them. He glowered at Isaac and Derkhan, before nodding at Lemuel in the most absurdly jaunty fashion.
“All right, Pigeon?” he said, too loud. “What we up to, then?”
“Voice down, man,” said Lemuel tersely. “What you carrying?”
The massive man pushed his finger across his lips to show he understood. He held open one side of his jacket, displaying two enormous flintlock pistols. Isaac started slightly at their size. Both he and Derkhan were armed, but neither with any such cannons. Lemuel nodded approvingly at the sight.
“
Right. Probably won’t be needed, but . . . y’know. Right. Don’t talk.” The big man nodded. “Don’t hear either, right? You have no ears tonight.” The man nodded again. Lemuel turned to Isaac and Derkhan. “Listen. You know what you want to ask the geezer. Wherever possible, we’re just shadows. But we have reason to think the militia are interested in this, and that means we can’t fuck about. If she’s not forthcoming, we’re giving her a helpful push, right?”
“Is that gangsterese for torture?” hissed Isaac. Lemuel looked at him coldly.
“No. And don’t fucking preach at me: you’re paying for this. We don’t have time to arse around, so I’m not going to let her arse around. Any problems?” There was no answer. “Good. Wardock Street is down here to the right.”
They did not pass any other late-night walkers as they picked their way along the backstreets. They walked variously: Lemuel’s sidekick stolidly and without fear, seemingly unaffected by the ambient nightmare quality in the air; Lemuel himself with many glances into dark doorways; and Isaac and Derkhan with a nervous, miserable haste.
They halted at Barbile’s door on Wardock Street. Lemuel turned and indicated for Isaac to go forward, but Derkhan pushed to the front.
“I’ll do it,” she whispered furiously. The others fell back. When they stood half out of sight at the edge of the doorway, Derkhan turned and pulled the bell cord.
For a long time, nothing happened. Then, gradually, footsteps slowly descended stairs and approached the door. They halted just beyond it, and there was silence. Derkhan waited, hushing the others with her hands. Eventually a voice called out from behind the door.
Perdido Street Station Page 36
