“They make some mention of the generous funds they have provided the government and the Fat Sun party over the years. We have been given our orders, ladies and gentlemen. They are not at all happy about the slake-moths, and would like such dangerous animals contained forthwith. But not surprisingly, they are having a conniption about the possibility of crisis energy. Now, we searched the warehouse very thoroughly last night, and there is absolutely no sign of any such apparatus. We have to consider the possibility that der Grimnebulin is mistaken or lying. But in case he’s not, we must also bear in mind that he may have taken his engine and his notes with him last night. With,” he sighed heavily, “the Weaver.”
Stem-Fulcher spoke carefully. “Do we understand yet,” she ventured, “what happened?”
Rudgutter shrugged brusquely.
“We presented the evidence of the militia who saw the Weaver and heard what it said to Kapnellior. I’ve been trying to contact the thing, and I’ve had one curt, incomprehensible reply . . . It was scribbled in soot on my mirror. All we can say for sure is that it thought it improved the pattern of the worldweb to abduct der Grimnebulin and his friends from under our noses. We don’t know where it’s gone or why. Whether it’s left them alive. Anything really. Although Kapnellior’s quite confident it’s still hunting the moths.”
“What about the ears?” asked Stem-Fulcher.
“I have no idea!” shouted Rudgutter. “It made the web prettier! Obviously! So now we have twenty terrified, one-eared militia in the infirmary!” He calmed a little. “I have been thinking. It’s my belief that part of our problem is that we started with plans that were too grand. We’ll keep trying to locate the Weaver, but in the meantime we’re going to have to rely on less ambitious methods of moth-hunting. We are going to put together a unit of all our guards, militia, and scientists who have had any dealings with the creatures. We’re putting together a specialist squad. And we are going to do it in conjunction with Motley.” Stem-Fulcher and Rescue looked at him and nodded.
“It’s necessary. We’re pooling our resources. He has trained men, as do we. We have set procedures in motion. He will have his units, and we will have ours, but they will operate in tandem. Motley and his men have an unconditional amnesty on all criminal activity while we conduct this operation.
“Rescue . . .” said Rudgutter quietly. “We need your particular skills. Quietly, of course. How many of your . . . kin do you think you can mobilize within a day? Knowing the nature of the operation . . . It is not without its dangers.”
MontJohn Rescue fingered his scarf again. He made a peculiar noise under his breath. “Ten or so,” he said.
“You’ll receive training, of course. You’ve worn a mirror-guard before, I think?” Rescue nodded. “Good. Because the sentience model of your kind is . . . broadly similar to a human’s, is it not? Your mind is as tempting to the moths as mine. Whatever your host?”
Rescue nodded again.
“We dream, Mr. Mayor,” he said in his flattened voice. “We can be prey.”
“I understand that. Your—and your kin’s—bravery will not go unnoticed. We will provide whatever we can to ensure your safety.” Rescue nodded without visible emotion. He stood slowly.
“Time being of such importance, I’ll make a start now on spreading the word.” He bowed. “You will have my squad by sundown tomorrow,” he said. He turned and left the room.
Stem-Fulcher turned to Rudgutter with pursed lips.
“He’s not too happy about this, is he?” she said. Rudgutter shrugged.
“He’s always known that his role might involve danger. The slake-moths are as much of a threat to his people as to ours.”
Stem-Fulcher nodded.
“How long ago was he taken? The original Rescue, I mean, the human one.”
Rudgutter calculated for a moment.
“Eleven years. He was planning to supersede me. Have you set the squad in motion?” he demanded. Stem-Fulcher sat back and drew lengthily on her clay pipe. Aromatic smoke danced.
“We’re going through two days’ intensive training today and tomorrow . . . you know, aiming backwards with the mirror-guards, that sort of thing. Motley is apparently doing the same. The rumours are that Motley’s troop includes several Remade specifically designed for slake-moth husbandry and capture . . . built-in mirrors, back-pointing arms and the like. We have only one such officer.” She shook her head jealously. “We’re also having several of the scientists who worked on the project work on detecting the moths. They’re at pains to impress on us that this is unreliable, but if they come through they may give us some kind of edge.”
Rudgutter nodded. “Add to that,” he said, “our Weaver, still out there somewhere, still hunting the moths busy tearing up his precious worldweave . . . We’ve got a reasonable collection of troops.”
“But they’re not co-ordinated,” said Stem-Fulcher. “That’s what worries me. And morale in the city is slipping. Obviously very few people know the truth, but everyone knows they can’t sleep at night, for fear of their dreams. We’re plotting a map of the nightmare hotspots, see if we can’t see some pattern, track the moths in some way. There’s been a spate of violent crime over the last week. Nothing big and planned: the sudden attacks, the spur-of-the-moment murders, the brawls. Tempers,” she said slowly, “are fraying. People are paranoid and afraid.”
After the silence had settled for a moment, she spoke again.
“This afternoon you should receive the fruits of some scientific labours,” she said. “I’ve asked our research team to make some helmet that’ll stop the moth-shit seeping into your skull when you sleep. You’ll look absurd in bed, but at least you’ll rest.” She stopped. Rudgutter was blinking rapidly. “How are your eyes?” she asked.
Rudgutter shook his head.
“Going,” he said sadly. “We just can’t solve the problem of rejection. It’s about time for a fresh set.”
Bleary-eyed citizens made their way to work. They were surly and unco-operative.
At the Kelltree docks, the broken strike was not mentioned. The bruises on the vodyanoi stevedores were fading. They heaved spilt cargos from the dirty water as always. They directed ships into tight spaces on the banks. They muttered in secret about the disappearance of the stewards, the strike-leaders.
Their human workmates stared at the defeated xenians with a mixture of emotions.
The fat aerostats patrolled the skies over the city with restless, clumsy menace.
Arguments broke out with bizarre ease. Fights were common. The nocturnal misery reached out and took victims from the waking world.
In the Bleckly Refinery in Gross Coil, an exhausted crane operator hallucinated one of the torments that had ripped up his sleep the previous night. He shuddered just long enough to send the controls spasming. The massive steam-powered machine disgorged its load of molten iron a second too early. It spewed in a white-hot torrent over the lip of the waiting container and spattered the crew like a siege engine. They screamed and were consumed by the merciless cascade.
At the top of the great deserted concrete obelisks of Spatters the city garuda lit huge fires at night. They banged gongs and saucepans and shouted, screaming obscene songs and raucous cries. Charlie the big man told them that would keep the evil spirits from visiting their towers. The flying monsters. The dæmons that had come to town to suck the brains out of the living.
The raucous café gatherings in Salacus Fields were subdued.
The nightmares pushed some artists into frenzies of creation. An exhibition was being planned: Dispatches from a Troubled City. It was to be a showcase of art and sculpture and soundwork inspired by the morass of foul dreams in which the city wallowed.
There was a fear in the air, a nervousness at invoking certain names. Lin and Isaac, the disappeared. To speak them would be to admit that something might be wrong, that they might not just be busy, that their enforced, silent absence from regular haunts was sinister.
The n
ightmares were splitting the membrane of sleep. They were spilling into the everyday, haunting the sunlit realm, drying conversations in the throat and stealing friends away.
Isaac awoke in the throes of memory. He was recalling the extraordinary escape of the previous night. His eyes flickered, but remained closed.
Isaac’s breath caught.
Tentatively, he remembered. Impossible images assailed him. Silk strands a lifetime thick. Living things crawling insidiously across interlocking wires. Behind a beautiful palimpsest of coloured gossamer, a vast, timeless, infinite mass of absence . . .
In terror, he opened his eyes.
The web was gone.
Isaac looked around him slowly. He was in a brick cavern, cool and wet, dripping in the dark.
“You awake, Isaac?” said Derkhan’s voice.
Isaac struggled up onto his elbows. He groaned. His body hurt him in a variety of ways. He felt battered and torn. Derkhan sat a little way away from him on a ledge of brick. She smiled absolutely mirthlessly at him. It was a terrifying rictus.
“Derkhan?” he murmured. His eyes widened slowly. “What are you wearing?”
In the half-light emitted by a smoke-seeping oil-lamp, Isaac could see that Derkhan was dressed in a puffy dressing gown of bright pink material. It was decorated with garish needlework flowers. Derkhan shook her head.
“I don’t damn well know, Isaac,” she said bitterly. “All I know is I was knocked out by the officer with the stingbox and then I woke up here in the sewers, dressed in this. And that’s not all . . .” Her voice trembled for a brief moment. She pulled her hair back from the side of her head. He hissed at the raw, seeping clot of blood that caked the side of her face. “My . . . damned ear’s gone.” She let her hair fall back into place with an unsteady hand. “Lemuel’s been saying it was a . . . a Weaver that brought us here. You haven’t seen your own outfit yet, anyway.”
Isaac rubbed his head and sat up completely. He struggled to clear his mind of fog.
“What?” he said. “Where are we? The sewers . . . ? Where’s Lemuel? Yagharek? And . . .” Lublamai, he heard inside his mind, but he remembered Vermishank’s words. He remembered with cold horror that Lublamai was irrevocably lost.
His voice dissipated.
He heard himself, and realized that he was rambling hysterically. He stopped and breathed deeply, forced himself to calm down.
He looked around him, took in the situation.
He and Derkhan sat in a two-foot-wide alcove embedded into the wall of a windowless little brick chamber. It was about ten feet square—its far side only just visible in the faint light—with a ceiling no more than five feet above him. In each of the room’s four walls was a cylindrical tunnel, about four feet round.
The bottom of the room was completely submerged in filthy water. It was impossible to tell how deep below it the floor was. The liquid looked to be emerging from at least two of the tunnels, and slowly ebbing out of the others.
The walls were slick with organic slime and mould. The air stank richly of rot and shit.
Isaac looked down at himself and his face creased in confusion. He was dressed in an immaculate suit and tie, a dark, well-tailored piece that any Parliamentarian would be proud of. Isaac had never seen it before. Beside him, roughened and dirty, was his carpet bag.
He remembered, suddenly, the explosive pain and blood he had suffered the previous night. He gasped and reached up with trepidation. As his fingers fumbled, he exhaled explosively. His left ear was gone.
He gingerly prodded for ruined tissue, expecting to meet wet, ripped flesh or crusting scabs. Instead, unlike Derkhan, he found a well-healed scar, covered in skin. There was no pain at all. It was as if he had lost his ear years before. He frowned and clicked his fingers experimentally beside his wound. He could still hear, though doubtless his ability to pinpoint sounds would be reduced.
Derkhan shook slightly as she watched him.
“This Weaver saw fit to heal your ear, along with Lemuel’s. Not mine . . .” Her voice was subdued and miserable. “Although,” she added, “it did stop the bleeding on the wounds from that . . . damned stingbox.” She watched him for a moment. “So Lemuel wasn’t mad, or lying, or dreaming,” she said quietly. “You’re telling me that a Weaver appeared and rescued us?”
Isaac nodded slowly.
“I don’t know why . . . I have no idea why . . . but it’s true.” He thought back. “I heard Rudgutter outside, yelling something at it. It sounded like he wasn’t completely surprised it was there . . . he was trying to bribe it, I think. Maybe the damn fool’s been trying to do deals with it . . . Where are the others?”
Isaac looked around. There was nowhere to hide in the alcove, but across the little room was another just like it, completely swathed in darkness. Anything crouching within it would have been invisible in the shadow.
“We all woke up here,” said Derkhan. “All of us except Lemuel had these weird clothes on. Yagharek was . . .” She shook her head in confusion and touched her bloody wound gently. She winced. “Yagharek was shoehorned into some dollymop’s dress. There were a couple of lamps, lit and waiting for us when we woke. Lemuel and Yagharek told me what happened . . . Yagharek was talking . . . he was being very weird, talking about a web . . .” She shook her head.
“I understand that,” said Isaac heavily. He paused and felt his mind scurry in awe away from the vague memories he had. “You were unconscious when the Weaver hauled us out. You wouldn’t have seen what we saw . . . where he took us . . .”
Derkhan frowned. She had tears in her eyes.
“My damn . . . my damn ear hurts so much, ’Zaac,” she said. Isaac rubbed her shoulder clumsily, his face creasing, until she continued. “Anyway, you were out, so Lemuel took off, and Yagharek went with him.”
“What?” shouted Isaac, but Derkhan shushed him with her hands.
“You know Lemuel, you know the sort of work he does. It turns out he knows the sewers well. Apparently they can be a useful bolthole. He did a little reconnaissance trip into the tunnels, and came back actually knowing where we are.”
“Which is?”
“Murkside. He left and Yagharek demanded to go with him. They swore they’d be back within three hours. They’ve gone to get some food, some clothes for me and Yagharek, and to see the lay of the land. They left about an hour ago.”
“Well godsdamn, let’s go and join them . . .”
Derkhan shook her head.
“Don’t be an idiot, ’Zaac,” she said, sounding exhausted. “We can’t afford to get separated. Lemuel knows the sewers . . . they’re dangerous. He told us to stay put. There’s all manner of things down here . . . ghuls, trows, gods know what. That’s why I stayed with you while you were out. We have to wait for them here.
“And besides which, you’re probably the most wanted person in New Crobuzon right now. Lemuel’s a successful criminal: he knows how not to be seen. He’s at much less risk than you.”
“But what about Yag?” howled Isaac.
“Lemuel gave him his cloak. With the hood up and that dress torn up and wrapped round his feet, he just looked like a weird old man. Isaac, they’ll be back soon. We have to wait for them. We have to make plans. And you have to listen.” He looked up at her, concerned at her miserable tone.
“Why’s it taken us here, ’Zaac?” she said. Her face creased in pain. “Why did it hurt us, why did it dress us like this . . . ? Why didn’t it heal me . . . ?” She wiped tears of pain away angrily.
“Derkhan,” Isaac said gently. “I could never know . . .”
“You should see this,” she said, sniffing quickly. She handed him a crumpled and stinking sheet of newspaper. He took it slowly, his face curling with distaste as he touched the sodden, filthy thing.
“What is it?” he said, unfolding it.
“When we woke up, all disorientated and confused, it came bobbing down one of the little tunnels there, folded into a little boat.” She looked at him askanc
e. “It was coming against the current. We fished it out.”
Isaac opened it out and looked at it. It was the centre pages from The Digest, one of New Crobuzon’s weekly papers. He saw from the date at the top of the page—9th Tathis 1779—that it had come out that same morning.
Isaac scanned his eyes over the little collection of stories. He shook his head in incomprehension.
“What am I missing?” he asked.
“Look at the letters to the editor,” said Derkhan.
He turned the sheet over. There it was, second letter down. It was written in the same formal, stilted fashion as the others, but its content was wildly different.
Isaac’s eyes widened as he read.
Sirs and Madam—
Please accept my compliments on your exquisite tapestry skills. For the furtherment of your craftwork I have taken it upon myself to extricate you from an unfortunate situation. My efforts are urgently required elsewhere and I am unable to accompany you. Doubtless we will meet again before much time has elapsed. In the meantime please note that he of your number whose inadvertent animal husbandry has led to the city’s present unfortunate predicament may find himself the victim of unwanted attentions from his escaped charge.
I urge you to continue your fabric work, of which I find myself a devotee.
Most faithfully yours,
W.
Isaac looked up slowly at Derkhan.
“Gods only knows what the rest of The Digest’s readers will think of that . . .” he said in a hushed voice. “ ’Stail, that damn spider’s powerful!”
Derkhan nodded slowly. She sighed.
“I just wish,” she said unhappily, “I understood what it was doing . . .”
“You never could, Dee,” said Isaac. “Never.”
“You’re a scientist, ’Zaac,” she said sharply. She sounded desperate. “You have to know something about these damn things. Now please try to tell us what it’s saying . . .”
Isaac did not argue. He reread the note and rummaged inside his head for whatever scraps of information he could find.
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