But Isaac was tired, and he could not think, and the lies that welled up made him feel as if he would vomit. The patter died away silently, and instead Isaac walked across to Andrej and overpowered the decrepit man with ease, stifling his nasal wails with strips of cloth. Isaac bound Andrej with coils of ancient rope and propped him as comfortably as possible against a wall. The dying man hummed and exhaled in snotty terror.
Isaac tried to meet his eye, to murmur some apology, to tell him how sorry he was, but Andrej could not hear him for fear. Isaac turned away, aghast, and Derkhan met his eye and grasped his hand quickly, thankful that someone finally shared her burden.
There was much to be done.
Isaac began his final calculations and preparations.
Andrej squealed through his gag and Isaac looked up at him despairingly.
In curt whispers and brusque expostulations, Isaac explained to Derkhan and Yagharek what he was doing.
He looked over the battered engines in the shack, his analytical machines. He pored over his notes, checking and rechecking his maths, cross-referring them with the sheets of figures the Council had given him. He drew out the core of his crisis engine, the enigmatic mechanism that he had neglected to leave with the Construct Council. It was an opaque box, a sealed motor of interwoven cables, elyctrostatic and thaumaturgic circuits.
He cleaned it slowly, examined its moving parts.
Isaac readied himself and his equipment.
When Pengefinchess returned from some unstated errand, Isaac looked up briefly. She spoke quietly, refusing to meet anyone’s eye. She gathered herself slowly to leave, checked through her equipment, oiling her bow to keep it safe under the water. She asked what had become of Shadrach’s pistol, and clucked regretfully when Isaac told her he did not know.
“A shame. It was a powerful piece,” she said abstractedly, looking out of the window and away. “Charmed. A puissant weapon.”
Isaac interrupted her. He and Derkhan implored her to help once more before she left. She turned and stared at Andrej, seemed to see him for the first time, ignored Isaac’s pleading and demanded to know what in Hell he was doing. Derkhan drew her away from Andrej’s snorts of fear and Isaac’s grim industry, and explained.
Then Derkhan asked Pengefinchess again if she would perform one last task to help them. She could only beg.
Isaac half listened, but he shut his ears quickly to the hissed imploring. He worked instead on the task in hand, the complicated job of crisis mathematics.
Andrej whimpered unceasingly beside him.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
Just before four o’clock, as they prepared to go, Derkhan embraced Isaac and Yagharek in turn. She hesitated only a moment before holding the garuda close. He did not respond, but he did not pull away either.
“See you at the rendezvous,” she murmured.
“You know what you have to do?” Isaac said. She nodded and pushed him towards the door.
He hesitated now, at the hardest thing. He looked over to where Andrej lay in a kind of exhausted stupor of fear, his eyes glazed and his gag sticky with mucus.
They had to bring him, and he could not raise the alarm.
He had conferred with Yagharek about this, in whispers easily hidden under the old man’s terror. They had no drugs, and Isaac was no bio-thaumaturge, could not insinuate his fingers briefly through Andrej’s skull and turn his consciousness temporarily off.
Instead, they were forced to use Yagharek’s more savage skills.
The garuda thought back to the fleshpits, remembering the “milk fights”: those that ended with submission or unconsciousness rather than death. He remembered the techniques he had perfected, adjusting them to his human opponents.
“He’s an old man!” hissed Isaac. “And he’s dying, he’s frail . . . Be gentle . . .”
Yagharek sidled along the wall to where Andrej lay staring at him with tired, nauseous foreboding.
There was a quick feral movement, and Yagharek was leaning behind Andrej, on one knee, the old man’s head pinioned with his left arm. Andrej stared out at Isaac, his eyes bulging, unable to scream through his gag. Isaac—horrified, guilty and debased—could not help but meet his eye. He watched Andrej, knew that the old man thought he was about to die.
Yagharek’s right elbow swung down in a sharp arc and smacked with brutal precision into the back of the dying man’s head, where his skull gave way into the neck. Andrej gave a short, constricted bark of pain, that sounded very like vomiting. His eyes flickered out of focus, then closed. Yagharek did not let Andrej’s head fall away: he kept his arms tense, pulling his bony elbow hard into soft flesh, counting seconds.
Eventually he let Andrej slump.
“He will wake,” he said. “Perhaps in twenty minutes, perhaps in two hours. I must watch him. I can send him to sleep again. But we must be careful—too much and we will starve his brain of blood.”
They wrapped Andrej’s motionless body with random rags. They hauled him up between them, each with one arm over a shoulder. He was wasted, his insides devoured over years. He weighed shockingly little.
They moved together, supporting the enormous sack of equipment between them with their free arms, carrying it as carefully as if it were a religious relic, the body of some saint.
They were still swathed in their absurd, wearisome disguises, bent and shuffling like beggars. Under his hood, Isaac’s dark skin was still dappled with tiny scabs from his savage shaving. Yagharek wrapped his head, like his feet, in rotten cloth, leaving one tiny slit through which to see. He looked like a faceless leper hiding his decaying skin.
The three of them looked like some appalling caravan of vagrants, a travelling convocation of the dispossessed.
At the door, they turned their heads once, quickly. They both raised their hands in farewell to Derkhan. Isaac looked over to where Pengefinchess watched them placidly. Hesitantly, he raised his hand to her, raised his eyebrows in a query—Will I see you again? he might have been asking, or Will you help us? Pengefinchess raised her great splayed hand in noncommittal response and looked away.
Isaac turned away, set his lips.
He and Yagharek began the dangerous journey across the city.
They did not risk crossing the rail bridge. They were afraid in case an irate train driver did more than blast them with a steam-whistle as he tore past. He might stare at them and clock their faces, or report to his superiors at Sly or Spit Bazaar Stations, or at Perdido Street Station itself, that three stupid dossers had blundered their way onto the rails and were heading for disaster.
Interception was too dangerous. So instead, Isaac and Yagharek clambered down the crumbling stone slope by the railway line, hanging on to Andrej’s body as it tumbled and sprawled towards the quiet pavements.
The heat was intense, but not fierce: it seemed instead like some absence, some enormous citywide lack. It was as if the sun was etiolated, as if its rays bleached out the shadows and cool undersides that gave the architecture its reality. The sun’s heat stifled sounds and bled them of substance. Isaac sweated and cursed quietly beneath his putrid rags. He felt as if he stalked through some vaguely realized dream of heat.
With Andrej supported between them like a friend paralysed with cheap liquor, Isaac and Yagharek tramped through the streets, making for Cockscomb Bridge.
They were interlopers here. This was not Dog Fenn or Badside or the Ketch Heath slums. There, they would have been invisible.
They crossed the bridge nervously. They were hemmed in by its lively stones, surrounded by the sneers and jibes of shopkeepers and customers.
Yagharek kept one surreptitious hand clamped on a cluster of nerve and arterial tissue at the side of Andrej’s neck, ready to pinch hard if the old man gave any sign of waking. Isaac muttered, a coarse babble of swearing that sounded like drunken rambling. It was a disguise, in part. He was also steeling himself.
“Come on, fucker,” he grunted, tense and quiet, “come on, come on.
Fucker. Scum. Bastard.” He did not know who he was swearing at.
Isaac and Yagharek crossed the bridge slowly, supporting their companion and their precious bag of equipment. The flow of people parted around them, let them pass with only jeers behind them. They could not let the opprobrium grow and become confrontation. If some bored toughs decided to kill time by harassing beggars, it would be catastrophic.
But they passed over Cockscomb Bridge, where they felt isolated and open, where the sun seemed to etch out their edges and mark them for attack, and slipped into Petty Coil. The city seemed to close its lips around them and they felt safer again.
There were other beggars here, walking in the train of local notables, earringed villains and fat money-lenders and pinch-lipped madams. Andrej stirred slightly and Yagharek closed his mind down again, laid hands on him efficiently.
Here there were backstreets. Isaac and Yagharek could peel away from the main roads and head down along overshadowed alleys. They passed under washing that linked the facing terraces of tall, narrow streets. They were watched by men and women in underclothes who idly leaned over balconies, flirting with their neighbours. They passed piles of rubbish and broken sewer coverings, and children leaned out from above and spat at them without rancour, or threw little pebbles and ran away.
As always, they sought the railway line. They found it at Sly Station, where the Salacus Fields trains branched away from the Sud Line. They sidled up to the raised path of arches that wove unsteadily above the cobbles of Spit Hearth. The air above the raucous crowds was reddening as the sun wound slowly towards gloaming. The arches were fouled with oil and soot, sprouting a microforest of mould and moss and tenacious climbing plants. They swarmed with lizards and insects, aspises sheltering from the heat.
Isaac and Yagharek ducked into a dirty cul-de-sac by the track’s concrete and brick foundations. They rested. Life rustled in the urban thicket above them.
Andrej was light, but he was beginning to weigh them down, his mass seeming to increase with every second. They stretched their aching arms and shoulders, drew deep breaths. A few feet away, the crowds emerging from the station thronged past the entrance to their little hideaway.
When they had rested and rearranged their burdens, they braced themselves and set out again, into the backstreets once more, walking in the shadow of the Sud Line, towards the city’s heart, the towers not yet visible over the surrounding miles of houses: the Spike and the turrets of Perdido Street Station.
Isaac began to talk. He told Yagharek what he thought would happen that night.
Derkhan made her way through the reclaimed filth of the Griss Twist dump towards the Construct Council.
Isaac had warned the great Constructed Intelligence that she would be coming. She knew she was expected. The idea made her uncomfortable.
As she approached the hollow that was the Council’s lair, she thought she heard a susurration of lowered voices. She stiffened instantly, and drew her pistol. She checked that it was loaded, and that the firing pan was full.
Derkhan picked up her feet, stalking with care, avoiding any sound. At the end of a channel of rubbish, she saw the opening-out of the hollow. Someone walked briefly past her field of view. She stole carefully closer.
Then another man walked past the end of the gorge of crushed garbage, and she saw that he was dressed in work overalls, and that he was staggering slightly under the weight of a burden. Slung over his broad shoulder was a massive coil of black-coated cable, entwining him vastly like some predatory constrictor.
She straightened up slightly. It was not the militia waiting for her. She walked on into the presence of the Construct Council.
She entered the hollow, glancing up nervously to ensure that there were no airships overhead. Then she turned to the scene before her, gasping at the scale of the gathering.
On all sides, engaged in all manner of opaque tasks, were nearly a hundred men and women. Mostly human, there were a handful of vodyanoi among them, and even two khepri. All were dressed in cheap and soiled clothes. And almost all were carrying or squatting before enormous coils of industrial cable.
It came in a variety of styles. Most was black, but there were brown and blue coatings as well, and red and grey. There were pairs of burly men staggering under loops nearly the thickness of a man’s thigh. Others carried skeins of wire no more than four inches in diameter.
The thin hubbub of speech died away quickly as Derkhan entered, and all the eyes in the place turned to her. The rubble crater was crammed with bodies. Derkhan swallowed and looked over them carefully. She saw the avatar stumbling towards her on halting, brittle legs.
“Derkhan Blueday,” he said quietly. “We are ready.”
Derkhan huddled for a short time with the avatar, checking carefully over a scribbled map.
The bloody concavity of the avatar’s open skull emitted an extraordinary reek. In the heat, his peculiar half-dead stench was utterly unbearable, and Derkhan held her breath as long as she could, gulping air when she had to through the sleeve of her filthy cloak.
While Derkhan and the Council conferred, the rest of the assembled kept a respectful distance.
“This is almost all of my bloodlife congregation,” said the avatar. “I sent out mobile Is with urgent messages, and the faithful have gathered, as you see.” He paused and clucked inhumanly. “We must proceed,” he said. “It is seventeen minutes past five o’clock.”
Derkhan looked up at the sky, which was deepening slowly, warning of dusk. She was sure that the clock the Council was checking, some timepiece buried deep in the bowels of the dump, was second-perfect. She nodded.
At a command from the avatar, the congregation began to stagger out of the dump, wobbling under their loads. Before they left, each turned to the place in the wall of the dump where the Construct Council was hidden. They paused a moment, then performed their devotional gesture with their hands, that vague suggestion of interlocking wheels, putting down their cable if necessary.
Derkhan watched them with foreboding.
“They’ll never make it,” she said. “They haven’t the strength.”
“Many have brought carts,” responded the avatar. “They will leave in shifts.”
“Carts . . . ?” said Derkhan. “From where?”
“Some own them,” said the avatar. “Others have bought or rented them at my orders today. None were stolen. We cannot risk the attention and detection that might result.”
Derkhan looked away. The control that the Council wielded over his human followers disturbed her.
As the last stragglers left the dump, Derkhan and the avatar walked over to the immobile head of the Construct Council. The Council lay on its side and became strata of rubbish, invisible.
A short, thick coil of cable lay waiting beside it. Its end was ragged, the thick rubber carbonized and split for the last foot or so. Tangles of wires splayed out of the end, unpicked from their neat skeins and plaits.
There was one vodyanoi still in the junk-basin. Derkhan saw him standing some feet away, watching the avatar nervously. She beckoned him to come closer. He waddled towards them, now on all fours, now bipedally, his big webbed toes splayed to remain steady on the treacherous ground. His overalls were the light, waxed material the vodyanoi sometimes used: they repelled liquid, so did not become saturated or heavy when the vodyanoi swam.
“Are you ready?” said Derkhan. The vodyanoi nodded quickly.
Derkhan studied him, but she knew little about his people. She could see nothing about him which gave any clue as to why he devoted himself to this strange, demanding sect, worshipping this weird intelligence, the Construct Council. It was obvious to her that the Council treated its worshippers like pawns, that it drew no satisfaction or pleasure from their worship, only a degree of . . . usefulness.
She could not understand, not begin to understand, what release or service this heretical church offered its congregation.
“Help me lift this down to the ri
ver,” she said, and picked up one end of the thick cable. She was unsteady under its weight, and the vodyanoi picked its way quickly over to her, helped brace her.
The avatar was still. He watched as Derkhan and the vodyanoi made their way away from him, towards the idle, looming cranes which burst up to the north-west, from behind the low rise of garbage that surrounded the Construct Council.
The cable was massive. Derkhan had to stop several times and put the end down, then brace herself to continue. The vodyanoi moved stolidly beside her, stopping with her and waiting for her to carry on. Behind them, the squat pillar of coiled cable shrank slowly as it unwound.
Derkhan chose their passage, moving through the piles of murk towards the river like a prospector.
“D’you know what all this is about?” she asked the vodyanoi quickly, without looking up. He glanced at her sharply, then back up at the thin silhouette of the avatar, still visible against a background of rubbish. He shook his jowly head.
“No,” he said quickly. “Just heard that . . . that God-machine demanded our presence, ready for an evening’s work. Heard Its bidding when I got here.” He sounded quite normal. His tone was curt, but conversational. Not zealous. He sounded like a worker complaining philosophically about management’s demands for unpaid overtime.
But when Derkhan, wheezing with effort, began to ask more—“How often do you meet?” “What other things does It bid you do?”—he looked at her with fear and suspicion, and his answers became monosyllabic, then nods, then quickly nothing at all.
Derkhan became silent again. She concentrated on hauling the great wire.
The dumps sprawled untidily to the very edge of the river. The river banks around Griss Twist were sheer walls of slimy brick that rose up from the dark water. When the river was swollen, perhaps only three feet of the decaying clay prevented a flood. At other times, there were as many as eight feet between the top of the riverwall and the choppy surface of the Tar.
Perdido Street Station Page 61
