“Down, Yag!” he yelled. “They’ll kill you!”
Yagharek dropped to the floor, out of sight of the assassin.
There was no sudden manifestation, no creeping flesh or vast stalking figure. All that happened was that the Weaver’s voice sounded in Rudgutter’s ear.
. . . I HAVE BOUNDED UNSEEN UP TANGLING WIRES OF SKYNESS AND SLIPPED MY LEGS SPLAYED WILLY-NILLY ON THE PSYCHIC DUNG OF THE WEB-REAVERS THEY ARE LOW CREATURES AND INELEGANT AND DRAB WHISPER WHAT HAPPENS MR. MAYOR THIS PLACE TREMBLES . . .
Rudgutter started. That’s all I need, he thought. He replied with a firm voice.
“Weaver,” he said. Stem-Fulcher turned to him with a sharp, curious gaze. “How nice to have you with us.”
It’s too damned unpredictable, Rudgutter thought furiously. Not now, not bloody now! Go and chase the moths, go hunting . . . what are you doing here? The Weaver was infuriating and dangerous, and Rudgutter had taken a calculated risk in engaging its aid. A loose cannon was still a lethal weapon.
Rudgutter had thought that the great spider and he had something of an arrangement. As much, at least, as it was possible to maintain with a Weaver. Kapnellior had helped him. Textorology was a tentative field, but it had borne some fruit. There were proven methods of communication, and Rudgutter had been using them to interact with the Weaver. Messages carved into the blades of scissors and melted. Apparently random sculptures, lit from below, whose shadows wrote messages across the ceiling. The Weaver’s responses were prompt and delivered even more bizarrely.
Rudgutter had politely bade the Weaver busy itself chasing the moths. Rudgutter could not order, of course, could only suggest. But the Weaver had responded positively, and Rudgutter realized that stupidly, absurdly, he had begun to think of it as his agent.
No more of that.
Rudgutter cleared his throat. “Might I ask why you have joined us, Weaver?”
The voice came again, resonating in his ear, bouncing on the bones inside his head.
. . . INSIDE AND OUTSIDE THE FIBRES ARE SPLIT AND BURST AND A TRAIL IS TORN ACROSS THE WARP OF THE WORLDWEB WHERE COLOURS ARE BLED AND WAN I HAVE SLID ACROSS THE SKY BELOW THE SURFACE AND DANCED ALONG THE RENT WITH TEARS OF MISERY AT THE UGLY RUIN WHICH STEMS AND SPREADS AND BEGINS IN THIS PLACE . . .
Rudgutter nodded slowly as the sense of the words emerged. “It started from here,” he agreed. “This is the centre. This is the source. Unfortunately . . .” He spoke very carefully. “Unfortunately, this is a somewhat inopportune moment. Might I prevail on you to investigate this—which is indeed the birthplace of the problem—in a little while?”
Stem-Fulcher was watching him. Her face was fraught. She listened intently to his responses.
For a strange moment, all the sounds around them ceased. The shots and yells from the warehouse momentarily died. There were no creaks or clanks from the militia’s arms. Stem-Fulcher’s mouth was open, as she hovered ready to speak, but she said nothing. The Weaver was silent.
Then there was a whispering sound inside Rudgutter’s skull. He gasped in consternation, then opened his mouth in outright dismay. He did not know how he knew, but he was listening to the uncanny sound of the Weaver picking its way across various dimensions towards the warehouse.
The officers bore down on Lemuel with a remorseless precision. They tramped across Vermishank’s corpse. They held their shields triumphantly before them.
Above, Isaac and Yagharek had run out of chymicals. Isaac was bellowing, hurling chairs and slats of wood and rubbish at the militia. They deflected them with ease.
Derkhan was as motionless as Lublamai, who lay still on a cot in the corner of Isaac’s living space.
Lemuel let out a desperate yell of rage and swung his powderhorn at his attackers, spraying them with acrid gunpowder. He fumbled for his tinderbox, but they were on him, truncheons swinging. The officer with the stingbox approached, twirling his blades.
The air in the centre of the warehouse vibrated uncannily.
Two militiamen were approaching this unstable patch, and they paused in puzzlement. Isaac and Yagharek each carried one end of an enormous bench, ready to hurl it at the officers below. Each caught sight of the phenomenon. They stopped moving and watched.
Like some eldritch flower, a patch of organic darkness bloomed from nothing in the centre of the room. It expanded into physical reality with the animal ease of a stretching cat. It opened itself, and it stood to fill the room, a colossal segmented thing, a massive spider-presence that hummed with power and sucked the light out of the air.
The Weaver.
Yagharek and Isaac dropped the bench simultaneously.
The militia stopped pummelling Lemuel and turned, alerted by the changing nature of the æther.
Everyone stopped and stared, utterly aghast.
The Weaver had manifested standing directly over two trembling officers. They let out little cries of terror. One dropped his sword as his fingers numbed. The other, more bravely but no less ineffectually, raised a pistol in his violently shaking hand.
The Weaver looked down at the two men. It raised its pair of human hands. As they cringed, it brought one hand down on each of their heads, patting them like dogs.
It raised its hand and pointed up at the walkway, where Isaac and Yagharek stood dumbfounded and afraid. Its unearthly singsong voice resonated in the suddenly quiet room.
. . . OVER AND UP IN THE LITTLE PASSAGE IT WAS IT WAS BORN THE CRINGING THUMB THE TWISTED RUNT THAT FREED ITS SIBLINGS IT CRACKED THE SEAL ON ITS SWADDLING AND BURST OUT I SMELL THE REMNANTS OF ITS BREAKFAST STILL LOLLING OH I LIKE THIS I ENJOY THIS WEB THE WEFT IS INTRICATE AND FINE THOUGH TORN WHO HERE CAN SPIN WITH SUCH ROBUST AND NAIVE EXPERTISE . . .
The Weaver’s head moved with alien smoothness from one to the other side. It took in the room in its multiple and glinting eyes. Still no humans moved.
From outside came Rudgutter’s voice. It was tense. Angry.
“Weaver!” he shouted. “I have a gift and a message for you!” There was a moment of silence, and then a pair of pearl-handled scissors came skittering through the door of the warehouse. The Weaver clasped its hands in a very human motion of delight. From outside came the distinctive sound of scissors being opened and closed.
. . . LOVELY LOVELY, moaned the Weaver, THE SNIPSNAP OF SUPPLICATION AND YET THOUGH THEY SMOOTH EDGES AND ROUGH FIBRES WITH COLD NOISE AN EXPLOSION IN REVERSE A FUNNELLING IN A FOCUS I MUST TURN MAKE PATTERNS HERE WITH AMATEURS UNKNOWING ARTISTS TO UNPICK THE CATASTROPHIC TEARING THERE IS BRUTE ASYMMETRY IN THE BLUE VISAGES THAT WILL NOT DO IT CANNOT BE THAT THE RIPPED UP WEB IS DARNED WITHOUT PATTERNS AND IN THE MINDS OF THESE DESPERATE AND GUILTY AND BEREFT ARE EXQUISITE TAPESTRIES OF DESIRE THE DAPPLED GANG PLAIT YEARNINGS FOR FRIENDS FEATHERS SCIENCE JUSTICE GOLD . . .
The Weaver’s voice shivered in some crooning delight. Its legs moved suddenly at terrifying speed, picking its intricate way through the room, rippling through the space.
The militia crouching over Lemuel dropped their staffs and scrabbled to get out of its way. Lemuel looked up at its arachnid bulk through swollen eyes. He raised his hands and tried to cry out in fear.
The Weaver hovered for a moment before him, then looked up at the platform above. It stepped up lightly and was instantly, incomprehensibly, on the walkway, a few feet from Isaac and Yagharek. They stared in terror at the vast and monstrous form. Those pointed spike-feet pranced towards them. They were immobilized. Yagharek tried to move backwards but the Weaver was too quick . . . SAVAGE AND IMPENETRABLE . . . it sang, and scooped Yagharek up with a sudden motion, sweeping him under its humanlike arm where he twisted and cried out like a terrified baby.
. . . BLACK AND RUSSET . . . sang the Weaver. It tottered elegantly like a dancer on her toes, moved sideways through twisted dimensions and was once more by Lemuel’s cowering form. It grabbed him and bundled him dangling beside Yagharek.
The militia stood back, dumbfounded and terrified. Mayor Rudgutter’s voice sounded from
outside again, but no one listened.
The Weaver stepped up and was once again on Isaac’s raised living space. It skittered up to Isaac and grabbed him under its free arm . . . EXTRAVAGANT SECULAR SWARMING . . . it chanted as it took hold of him.
Isaac could not resist. The Weaver’s touch was cool and unchanging, quite unreal. Its skin was as smooth as polished glass. He felt himself lifted with breathtaking ease and enfolded, cosseted under that bony arm.
. . . DIAMETRICAL NEGLIGENT FEROCIOUS . . . Isaac heard the Weaver say as it retraced its impossible steps and was twenty feet away, standing by Derkhan’s motionless body. The militia around her moved away in concerted fear. The Weaver fumbled for her unconscious form and tucked her up next to Isaac, who felt her warmth through his clothes.
Isaac’s head was spinning. The Weaver moved sideways again and was across the room, beside the construct. For a few minutes, Isaac had forgotten it even existed. It had returned to its customary resting place in the corner of the room, from where it had watched the militia attacks. It turned the one feature on its smooth head, its glass lens, towards the Weaver. The ineluctable spider-presence flicked the construct up onto its dagger-limbs and tossed it nimbly up. The Weaver caught the ungainly man-sized machine on its curving chitinous back. The construct balanced precariously, but did not fall no matter how the Weaver moved.
Isaac felt a sudden, murderous pain in his head. He cried out in agony, felt hot blood pumping across his face. He heard Lemuel scream a moment later, echoing him.
Through eyes bleary with confusion and blood, Isaac saw the room flicker around him as the Weaver paced through interlocking planes. It appeared beside all the militiamen in turn and moved one of its bladed arms too fast to see. As it touched them, each of the men screamed, so that a weird virus of agonized sound seemed to pass around the room at whiplash speed.
The Weaver stopped in the centre of the warehouse. Its elbows were pinioned, so that its captives could not move. With its forearms it dropped red-stained things across the floor. Isaac raised his head and looked around the room, trying to see through the burning pain below his temple. Everyone in the room was crying out, cringing, clapping their hands to the sides of their faces, trying without success to staunch gouts of blood with their fingers. Isaac looked down again.
The Weaver was scattering a handful of bloody ears onto the ground.
Below its gently moving hand, blood spilt across the dust in slicks of dirty gore. The gobbets of freshly sliced flesh fell, tracing the perfect shape of a pair of scissors.
The Weaver looked up, impossibly laden with struggling figures, moving as if unencumbered.
. . . FERVENT AND LOVABLE . . . it whispered, and disappeared.
What was an experience becomes a dream and then a memory. I cannot see the edges between the three.
The Weaver, the great spider, came among us.
In the Cymek we call it furiach-yajh-hett: the dancing mad god. I never thought to see one. It came out of a funnel in the world to stand between us and the lawgivers. Their pistols were silent. Words died in throats like flies in a web.
The dancing mad god moved through the room with a savage and alien step. It gathered us to it—we renegades, we criminals. We refugees. Constructs that tell tales; earthbound garuda; reporters who make the news; criminal scientists and scientific criminals. The dancing mad god collected us all like errant worshippers, chiding us for going astray.
Its knife-hands flashed. The humans’ ears fell in flesh-rain to the dust. I was spared. My feather-hidden ears hold no delight for this mad power. Through the ululations and the despairing wails of pain the furiach-yajh-hett ran in circles of delight.
And then it tired and stepped through the twists of matter out of the warehouse.
Into another space.
I shut my eyes.
I moved in a direction I had never known existed. I felt the scuttling slide of that great multitude of legs as the dancing mad god moved along powerful threads of force. It scampered at obscure angles to reality, with all of us bobbing beneath it. My stomach pitched. I felt myself catch and snag on the fabric of the world. My skin prickled in the alien plane.
For a moment the god’s madness infected me. For a moment, the greed for knowledge forgot its place and demanded to be quenched. For a sliver of time, I opened my eyes.
For a terrible eternal breath I glimpsed the reality through which the dancing mad god was treading.
My eyes itched and watered, they felt as if they would burst, as if a thousand sandstorms afflicted them. They could not assimilate what was before them. My poor eyes struggled to see the unseeable. I beheld nothing but a fraction, the edge of an aspect.
I saw, or thought I saw, or have convinced myself I saw a vastness that dwarfed any desert sky. A yawning gap of Leviathan proportions. I whined and heard others whine around me. Spread across the emptiness, streaming away from us with cavernous perspective in all directions and dimensions, encompassing lifetimes and hugenesses with each intricate knot of metaphysical substance, was a web.
Its substance was known to me.
The crawling infinity of colours, the chaos of textures that went into each strand of that eternally complex tapestry . . . each one resonated under the step of the dancing mad god, vibrating and sending little echoes of bravery, or hunger, or architecture, or argument, or cabbage or murder or concrete across the æther. The weft of starlings’ motivations connected to the thick, sticky strand of a young thief’s laugh. The fibres stretched taut and glued themselves solidly to a third line, its silk made from the angles of seven flying buttresses to a cathedral roof. The plait disappeared into the enormity of possible spaces.
Every intention, interaction, motivation, every colour, every body, every action and reaction, every piece of physical reality and the thoughts that it engendered, every connection made, every nuanced moment of history and potentiality, every toothache and flagstone, every emotion and birth and banknote, every possible thing ever is woven into that limitless, sprawling web.
It is without beginning or end. It is complex to a degree that humbles the mind. It is a work of such beauty that my soul wept.
It crawled with life. There were others like our bearer, more of the dancing mad gods, glimpsed across an infinity of webwork.
There were other creatures, too, terrible intricate shapes I will not recall.
The web is not without flaw. In innumerable places the silk is torn and the colours ruined. Here and there the patterns are strained and unstable. As we passed these wounds, I felt the dancing mad god pause and flex its spinneret, repairing and restaining.
A little way off was the tight silk of the Cymek. I swear I caught its oscillations as the worldweb flexed under the weight of time.
Around me was a little localized tangle of metareal gossamer . . . New Crobuzon. And there rending the woven strands in the centre was an ugly tear. It spread out and split the fabric of the city-web, taking the multitude of colours and bleeding them dry. They were left a drab and lifeless white. A pointless emptiness, a pallid shade a thousand times more soulless even than the eye of some sightless caveborn fish.
As I watched, my pained eyes wide with insight, I saw that the rip was widening.
I was so afraid of the spreading rent. And I was dwarfed by the enormity of it all, of the whole of the web. I shut my eyes tight.
I could not close down my mind. It scrambled, unbidden, to remember what it had seen. But it could not contain it. I was left only with a sense of it all. I remember it now as a description. The weight of its immensity is no longer present in my head.
That is the etiolated memory that captivates me now.
I have danced with the spider. I have cut a caper with the dancing mad god.
PART FIVE
Councils
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
In the Lemquist Room, Rudgutter, Stem-Fulcher and Rescue held a council of war.
They had been up all night. Rudgutter and Stem-Fulch
er were tired and irritable. They sipped huge bowls of strong coffee as they pored over papers.
Rescue was impassive. He fingered his swaddling scarf.
“Look at this,” said Rudgutter, and waved a piece of paper at his subordinates. “This arrived this morning. It was couriered in person. I had the opportunity to discuss its content with the authors. It was not a social call.”
Stem-Fulcher leaned over, reaching for the letter. Rudgutter ignored her and began to reread it himself.
“It’s from Josiah Penton, Bartol Sedner and Mashek Ghrashietnichs.” Rescue and Stem-Fulcher looked up. He nodded slowly. “The heads of Arrowhead Mines, Sedner’s Bank of Commerce and the Paradox Concerns have taken the time to write a letter together. So I think we can add a long list of lesser names below theirs, in invisible ink, hm?” He smoothed the letter. “Messrs. Penton, Sedner and Ghrashietnichs are ’most concerned,’ it says here, at ’scurrilous reports’ reaching their ears. They have wind of our crisis.” He watched as Stem-Fulcher and Rescue glanced at each other. “It’s all rather garbled. They aren’t at all sure what’s happening, but none of them have been sleeping well. In addition to which, they’ve got der Grimnebulin’s name. They want to know what’s being done to counter, ah . . . ‘this threat to our great city-state.’ “ He put the paper down as Stem-Fulcher shrugged and opened her mouth to answer. He cut her off, rubbing his eyes with exasperated exhaustion.
“You’ve read Inspector Tormlin’s—’Sally’s’—report. According to Serachin, who is now recuperating in our care, der Grimnebulin claims to have a working prototype of some kind of crisis engine. We all understand the gravity of that. Well . . . our good businessmen have found that out. And as you can imagine, they are all—particularly Mr. Penton—most desirous of putting a stop to this absurd claim as quickly as possible. Any preposterous fake engines that Mr. der Grimnebulin might have fabricated to fool the credulous should, we are advised, be summarily destroyed.” He sighed and looked up.
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