Perdido Street Station

by China Miéville

  She crawled slowly, very slowly, towards him.

  Behind her, she heard a low, animal noise.

  The slake-moth stood, pugnacious and uneasy. It could taste minds all around, moving on all sides, threatening and fearing it.

  It was unsettled and nervous, still traumatized by the slaughter of its siblings. One of its spiny tentacles lashed the ground like a tail.

  Before it, one mind was captive. But the moth’s wings were spread out wide and yet it had captured only one . . . ? It was confused. It faced the main mass of its enemies, it batted its wings at them hypnotically, trying to pull them under and send their dreams bubbling to the surface.

  They remained resistant.

  The slake-moth grew panicked.

  The security behind Motley shifted in frustration. They tried to push past their boss, but he had frozen at the threshold to the room. His enormous body seemed fixed, his various legs planted hard on the ground. He gazed at the slake-moth wings in an intense trance.

  There were five Remade behind him. They were poised. They were equipped specifically to defend against slake-moths, in case of escapes. In addition to small arms, three wielded flamethrowers; one a spray of femtocorrosive acid; one an elyctro-thaumaturgic barb-gun. They could see their quarry. But they could not get past their boss.

  Motley’s men tried to aim their weapons around him, but his towering bulk occluded their line of fire. They shouted to each other and tried to devise strategies, but they could not. They gazed into their mirrors, watched the huge, predatory moth under Motley’s arms and limbs, through gaps in his outline. They were cowed by the monstrous sight.

  Isaac stretched his arm back, reached for Derkhan.

  “Come here, Lin,” he hissed, “and don’t look behind you.”

  It was like some terrifying children’s game.

  Yagharek and Derkhan shifted quietly, moving towards each other behind the moth. It chittered and looked up at their motion, but it remained more wary of the mass of figures before it, and it did not turn round.

  Lin slid fitfully along the floor towards Isaac’s back, his clutching arms. A little way from him, she hesitated. She saw Motley, transfixed as if amazed, gazing past Isaac and over her, captivated by . . . something.

  She did not know what was happening, what was behind her.

  She knew nothing about the moths.

  Isaac saw her hesitate, and began to howl at her not to stop.

  Lin was an artist. She created with her touch and taste, making tactile objects. Visible objects. Sculpture to be fondled and seen.

  She was fascinated by colour and light and shadow, by the interplay of shapes and lines, negative and positive spaces.

  She had been locked in the attic for a long time.

  In her position, some would have sabotaged the vast sculpture of Motley. The commission had become a sentence, after all. But Lin did not destroy it or skimp in her work. She poured everything she could, all her pent-up creative energy into that one monolithic and terrible piece. As Motley had known she would.

  It had been her only escape. Her only means of expression. Starved of all the light and colour and shapeliness of the world, she had focused in her fear and pain and become obsessed. Creating a presence herself, the better to beguile her.

  And now something extraordinary had entered her attic world.

  She knew nothing of the slake-moths. The command don’t look behind you was familiar from fables, made sense only as a moralistic injuncture, some heavy-handed lesson. Isaac must mean be quick or don’t doubt me, something like that. His command made sense only as an emotional exhortation.

  Lin was an artist. Savaged and tortured, confused by imprisonment and pain and degradation, Lin grasped only that something extraordinary, some utterly affecting sight had risen up behind her. And hungry for any kind of wonder after the weeks of pain in the shadow of those drab, colourless and shapeless walls, she paused, then quickly glanced behind her.

  Isaac and Derkhan screamed in terrible disbelief; Yagharek called out with shock like some livid crow.

  With her one good eye, Lin took in the extraordinary sweep of the slake-moth’s shape with awe; and then she caught sight of the gusting colours on the wings, and her mandibles clattered briefly and she was silent. Enthralled.

  She squatted on the floor, her head twisted over her left shoulder, gazing stupidly at the great beast, at the rush of colours. Motley and she stared at the slake-moth’s wings, their minds overflowing.

  Isaac howled and stumbled backwards, reaching out desperately.

  The slake-moth reached out with a slithering clutch of tentacles and pulled Lin towards it. Its vast and dripping mouth slid open like a doorway into some stygian place. Rank citric spittle drooled across Lin’s face.

  As Isaac grabbed backwards for her hand, staring intently into his mirrors, the slake-moth’s tongue lurched out of its stinking throat and lapped at her headscarab briefly. Isaac shouted again and again, but he could not stop it.

  The long tongue, slippery with saliva, inveigled its way past Lin’s slack mouthparts and plunged into her head.

  At the sound of Isaac’s appalled yells, two of the Remade trapped behind Motley’s enormous bulk reached over and fired erratically with their flintlocks. One missed completely, the other clipped the slake-moth’s thorax, eliciting a brief dollop of liquid and an irritated hiss, but no more. It was not the right weapon.

  The two who had fired shouted at their fellows, and the small squadron began to shove at Motley’s bulk, in careful, timed thrusts.

  Isaac was clutching for Lin’s hand.

  The slake-moth’s throat swelled and shrank, its gristly throat swallowing in great swigs.

  Yagharek reached down and grabbed the oil-lamp that stood by the foot of the sculpture. He hefted it briefly in his left hand, raised his whip in his right.

  “Grab her, Isaac,” he called.

  As the slake-moth clutched her thin body to its thorax, Isaac felt his fingers close around Lin’s wrist. He clenched hard, tried to pull her free. He wept and swore.

  Yagharek hurled the lit oil-lamp against the back of the slake-moth’s head. The glass broke open and a little spray of incandescent oil spattered over the smooth skin. A burst of blue flame crawled across the dome of the skull.

  The slake-moth squealed. A flurry of limbs whipped up to batter out the little fire as the slake-moth jerked its head back momentarily in pain. Instantly, Yagharek snapped his whip with a savage stroke. It smacked loud and dramatic against the dark skin. Coils of the thick leather wound almost instantly around the slake-moth’s neck.

  Yagharek pulled hard and fast, with all his wiry strength. He drew the whip absolutely tight and braced himself.

  The small fire kept stinging, burning tenaciously. The whip cut off the slake-moth’s throat. It could not swallow or breathe.

  Its head lurched on its long neck. It emitted strangulated little cries. Its tongue swelled and it lashed it out of Lin’s mouth. The spurts of consciousness it had tried to drink clogged up in its throat. The moth clawed at the whip, frantic and terrified. It flailed and shook and spun.

  Isaac hung on to Lin’s shrunken wrist, tugging at her as the moth twirled in a hideous dance. Its twitching limbs flew away from her, clutching vainly at the thong that choked it. Isaac pulled her clear, dropped to the floor and scrabbled away from the rampaging creature.

  As it turned in its panic, its wings folded and it turned away from the door. Instantly, its hold on Motley was broken. Motley’s composite body stumbled forward and collapsed on the floor as his mind crawled back together. His men pushed over him, picking their way past a tangle of his legs into the room.

  In a hideous drumming of feet the slake-moth spun. The whip was wrenched from Yagharek’s hands, tearing his skin. He staggered back, towards Derkhan, out of range of the slake-moth’s razored, spinning limbs.

  Motley was standing. He stamped quickly away from the beast, passing back into the corridor.
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  “Kill the damn thing!” he shrieked.

  The moth danced in a frenzy into the centre of the room. The five Remade stood in a little clutch around the door. They aimed through their mirrors.

  Three jets of burning gas burst from the flamethrowers, scorching the vast creature’s skin. It tried to shriek as its wings and chitin roared and split and crisped, but the whip prevented it. A great gob of acid sprayed the twisting moth square in the face. It denatured the proteins and compounds of its hide in seconds, melting the moth’s exoskeleton.

  The acid and the flame ate swiftly through the whip. Its remnants flew away from the spinning moth, which could finally breathe, and scream.

  It shrieked in agony as fresh gouts of fire and acid caught it. It hurled itself blindly in the direction of its attackers.

  Bolts of dark energy from the fifth man’s gun burst into it, dissipating across its surface area, numbing and scorching it without heat. It screeched again, but hurtled on, a sightless storm of flame, spitting acid and flailing ragged bone.

  The five Remade moved back as it stumbled madly for them, following Motley into the corridor. The intense moving pyre slammed into the walls, igniting them, fumbling for the doorway.

  From the little hallway, the sounds of fire, spewing acid and quarrels of elyctro-thaumaturgy continued.

  For long seconds, Derkhan and Yagharek and Isaac stared up dumbfounded at the doorway. The moth still shrieked just out of sight, the corridor beyond was radiant with flickering light and heat.

  Then Isaac blinked and stared down at Lin, who slumped in his embrace.

  He hissed at her, shook her.

  “Lin,” he whispered. “Lin . . . We’re leaving.”

  Yagharek strode quickly over to the window and peered out over the street five floors below. Next to the window, a little jutting column of brick extended out from the wall, becoming a chimney. A drainpipe snaked up beside it. He stood quickly on the windowsill and reached up for the guttering, tugged it quickly. It was solid.

  “Isaac, bring her here,” said Derkhan urgently. Isaac lifted Lin up, biting his lip at how light she was. He walked quickly with her to the window. As he watched her, his face suddenly broke into an incredulous, an ecstatic smile. He began to weep.

  From the passage outside, the slake-moth keened weakly.

  “Dee, look!” he hissed. Lin’s hands were fluttering erratically in front of her as he cradled her. “She’s signing! She’s going to be all right!”

  Derkhan peered over, reading her words. Isaac watched, shook his head.

  “She’s not conscious, it’s just random words, but, Dee, it’s words . . . We were in time . . .”

  Derkhan smiled in delight. She kissed Isaac hard on the cheek, stroked Lin’s broken headscarab gently.

  “Get her out of here,” she said quietly. Isaac peered out of the window, where Yagharek had wedged himself into a corner of architecture, on a little extrusion of brick a few feet away.

  “Give her to me, and follow,” said Yagharek, jerking his head up above him. At the eastern end the long sloped roof of Motley’s terrace joined with the next street, which jutted perpendicularly south in a descending row of houses. The roofscape of Bonetown stretched out above and all around them; a raised landscape; linked islands of slate over the dangerous streets, extending for miles in the darkness, sweeping away from the Ribs to Mog Hill and beyond.

  Even then, devoured alive by tides of fire and acid, stunned with bolts of obscure energy, the last slake-moth might have survived.

  It was a creature of astonishing endurance. It could heal itself at frightening speeds.

  If it had been in the open air, it could have leapt up and spread those terribly wounded wings and disappeared from the earth. It might have forced itself up, ignoring the pain, ignoring the scorched flakes of skin and chitin that would flutter around it filthily. It could have rolled into the wet clouds to douse the flames, wash itself free of acid.

  If its family had survived, if it had been confident that it could return to its siblings, that they would hunt together again, it might not have panicked. If it had not witnessed a carnage of its kind, an impossible blast of poisonous vapour that enticed its brothersisters in and burst them, the moth would not have been insane with fear and anger, and it might not have become frenzied and lashed out, trapping itself further.

  But it was alone. Trapped under brick, in a claustrophobic warren that constricted it, flattened its wings, left it nowhere to go. Assailed on all sides by murderous, endless pain. The fire came and came again too fast for it to heal.

  It staggered the length of the corridor in Motley’s headquarters, a white-hot ball, reaching out to the last with ragged claws and spines, trying to hunt. It fell just before the top of the stairs.

  Motley and the Remade looked on in awe from halfway down, praying that it lay still, that it did not crawl over the lip of the stairway and tumble flaming onto them.

  It did not. It was still while it died.

  When they were sure the slake-moth was dead, Motley sent men and women up and down the stairs in quick columns, carrying sodden towels and blankets to control the blaze it had left in its wake.

  It took twenty minutes before the fire was subdued. The beams and boards of the attic were split and smoke-fouled. Massive footprints of charred wood and blistered paint stretched the length of the passage. The smouldering body of the moth rested on the top of the stairs, an unrecognizable pile of flesh and tissue, twisted by heat into an even more exotic shape than it had had in life.

  “Grimnebulin and his bastard friends’ll be gone,” said Motley. “Find them. Find where they went. Track them down. Trace them. Tonight. Now.”

  It was easy to see how they had escaped, out of the window and onto the roof. From there, though, they could have gone in almost any direction. Motley’s men shifted, looking uneasily at each other.

  “Move, you Remade scum,” raged Motley. “Find them now, track them down and bring them to me.”

  Terrified gangs of Remade, of humans, of cactacae and vodyanoi set out from Motley’s terrace-den, off into the city. They made pointless plans, compared notes, frantically raced down to Sunter, to Echomire and Ludmead, to Kelltree and Mog Hill, all the way to Badside, over the river to Brock Marsh, to West Gidd and Griss Fell and Murkside and Saltpetre.

  They might have walked past Isaac and his companions a thousand times.

  There was an infinity of holes in New Crobuzon. There were far more hiding places than there were people to hide. Motley’s troops never had a chance.

  On nights like that one, when rain and streetlamp light made all the lines and edges of the city complex—a palimpsest of gusting trees and architecture and sound, ancient ruins, darkness, catacombs, building sites, guesthouses, barren land, lights and pubs and sewers—it was an endless, recursive, secretive place.

  Motley’s men made their way home empty-handed and afraid.

  Motley raged and raged at the unfinished statue that taunted him, perfect and incomplete. His men searched the building, in case some clue had been missed.

  In the last room on the attic corridor, they found a militiaman sitting with his back to the wall, comatose and alone. A bizarre, beautiful glass flintlock lay across his lap. A game of tic-tac-toe was scratched into the wood by his feet.

  Crosses had won, in three moves.

  We run and hide like hunted vermin, but it is with relief and joy.

  We know that we have won.

  Isaac carries Lin in his arms, sometimes hauling her over his shoulder apologetically when the way is tough. We race away. We run as if we are spirits. Weary and exhilarated. The shabby geography in the east of the city cannot restrain us. We clamber over low fences and into narrow swathes of backyards, rude gardens of mutant apple trees and wretched brambles, dubious compost, mud and broken toys.

  Sometimes a shade will pass across Derkhan’s face and she will murmur something. She thinks of Andrej; but it is hard that night to reta
in guilt, even when it is deserved. There is a sombre moment, but under that spew of warm rain, above the city lights that bloom promiscuous as weeds, it is hard not to catch each other’s eyes and smile or caw softly in astonishment.

  The moths are gone.

  There have been terrible, terrible costs. There has been Hell to pay. But tonight as we settle in a rooftop shack in Pincod, beyond the reach of the skyrails, a little way north of the railway and the squalor of Dark Water Station, we are triumphant.

  In the morning, the newspapers are full of dire warnings. The Quarrell and The Messenger both hint that severe measures are to come.

  Derkhan sleeps for hours, then sits alone, her sadness and her guilt finally given space to flower. Lin moves fitfully, in and out of consciousness. Isaac dozes and eats the food we have stolen. He cradles Lin constantly. He talks of Jack Half-a-Prayer in wondering tones.

  He sifts through the battered and broken components of the crisis engine, tuts and purses his lips. He tells me he can get it working again, no problem.

  At that I come alive with longing. A final freedom. I want it badly. Flight.

  He reads the pilfered papers over my shoulder.

  In the climate of crisis, the militia are to be given extraordinary powers, we read. They may revert to open, uniformed patrols. Civilian rights may be curtailed. Martial law is mooted.

  But throughout that blustery day, the shit, the filthy discharge, the dream-poison of the slake-moths is sinking slowly through the æther and on into the earth. I fancy I can feel it as I lie under these dilapidated planks; it subsides gently around me, denatured by the daylight. It drifts like polluted snow through the planes that entangle the city, on through layers of materia, leeching out of our dimension and away.

  And when the night comes, the nightmares have gone.

  It is as if some gentle sob, some mass exhalation of relief and languor sweeps the city. A wave of calm gusts in from the nightside, from the west, from Gallmarch and Smog Bend to Gross Coil, to Sheck and Brock Marsh, Ludmead and Mog Hill and Abrogate Green.