There was nothing at all. Lin’s room was almost bare.
His head ached with the weight of disturbed sleep. He could feel the mass of New Crobuzon’s dream-torture. His own dreams bickered and brooded just below his skull, ready to attack him should he succumb to sleep.
Eventually, he had taken up all the time he feasibly could. He grew more nervous as the night lengthened. He turned to the miserable pair on the bed, gestured briefly at Yagharek.
“We have to go,” he said.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Throughout the next hot, sticky day, the city sprawled in heat- and nightmare-induced choler.
Rumours swept the underworld. Ma Francine had been found dead, they said. She had been shot in the night, three times with a longbow. Some freelance assassin had earned Mr. Motley’s thousand guineas.
There was no word from the Kinken headquarters of Ma Francine’s Sugardrop Gang. The internal war of succession had doubtless begun.
More comatose, imbecile bodies were found. More and more. There was a gradual sense of slow panic building. The nightmares would not cease, and some of the papers were linking them with the mindless citizens who were found every day, slumped over their tables before shattered windows, or lying in the streets, caught between buildings by the affliction that came from the sky. The faint smell of rotting citrus clung to their faces.
The plague of mindlessness was not discriminating. Whole and Remade were taken. Humans were found, and khepri and vodyanoi and wyrmen. Even the city garuda began to fall. And other, rarer creatures.
In St. Jabber’s Mound, the sun came up on a fallen trow, its grave-pale limbs heavy and lifeless, even though it breathed, lolling face down beside a slick of stolen and forgotten meat. It must have ventured up from the sewers for a scavenging foray into the midnight city, only to be struck down.
In East Gidd, a still more bizarre scene awaited the militia. There were two bodies half hidden in the bushes that sur-rounded the Gidd Library. One, a young streetwalker, was dead—genuinely dead, having bled dry from tooth-holes in her neck. Sprawled over her was the thin body of a well-known Gidd resident, the owner of a small, successful fabric factory. His face and chin were caked with her blood. His sightless eyes glared up at the sun. He was not dead, but his mind was quite gone.
Some spread the word that Andrew St. Kader had not been what he seemed, but many more the shocking truth that even vampir were prey to the mind-suckers. The city reeled. Were these agents, these germs or spirits, this disease, these dæmons, whatever they were, were they all-powerful? What could defeat them?
There was confusion and misery. A few citizens sent letters to their parents’ villages, made plans to leave New Crobuzon for the foothills and valleys to the south and east. But for millions, there was simply nowhere to flee.
Throughout the tedious warmth of the day, Isaac and Derkhan sheltered in the little hut.
When they had arrived, they saw that the construct was no longer waiting where they had left it. There was no sign of where it might be.
Lemuel left to see if he could link up with his comrades. He was nervous of venturing out while he was at war with the militia, but he did not like being isolated. In addition, Isaac thought, Lemuel did not like being around Derkhan and Isaac’s shared misery.
Yagharek, to Isaac’s surprise, left as well.
Derkhan reminisced. She chastised herself constantly for being maudlin, for making the feeling worse, but she could not stop. Derkhan told Isaac about her late-night conversations with Lin, the arguments about the nature of art.
Isaac was quieter. He toyed mindlessly with the pieces of his crisis engine. He did not stop Derkhan talking, but only occasionally did he interject with a remembrance of his own. His eyes were unfixed. He sat back dully against the crumbling wooden wall.
Before Lin, Isaac’s lover had been Bellis; human, like all his previous bedfellows. Bellis was tall and pale. She painted her lips bruise-purple. She was a brilliant linguist, who had become bored with what she had called Isaac’s “rumbustiousness,” and had broken his heart.
Between Bellis and Lin had been four years of whores and brief adventures. Isaac had curtailed all of that a year before meeting Lin. He had been at Mama Sudd’s one night, and had endured a shattering conversation with the young prostitute hired to service him. He had made a chance remark in praise of the amiable, matronly madame—who treated her girls well—and had been perturbed when his opinion had not been shared. Eventually the tired prostitute had snapped at him, forgetting herself, telling him what she really thought of the woman who hired out her orifices and let her keep three stivers in every shekel she made.
Shocked and ashamed, Isaac had left without even removing his shoes. He had paid double.
After that he had been chaste for a long time, had immersed himself in work. Eventually a friend had asked him to the opening show of a young khepri gland-artist. In a small gallery, a cavernous room on the wrong side of Sobek Croix, overlooking the weather-beaten sculpted knolls and copses at the edge of the park, Isaac had met Lin.
He had found her sculpture captivating, and had sought her out to say so. They had endured a slow, slow conversation—she scribbling her responses on the pad she always carried—but the frustrating pace did not undermine a sudden shared intimation of excitement. They drifted from the rest of the little party, examined each piece in turn, their twisted forms and tortured geometry.
After that they met often. Isaac surreptitiously learnt a little more signing between each time, so that their conversations progressed fractionally quicker every week. In the middle of showing off, laboriously signing a dirty joke one night, Isaac, very drunk, had clumsily pawed her, and they had pulled each other to bed.
The event had been clumsy and difficult. They could not kiss as a first step: Lin’s mouthparts would tear Isaac’s jaw from his face. For just a moment after coming, Isaac had been overcome with revulsion, and had almost vomited at the sight of those bristling headlegs and waving antennae. Lin had been nervous of his body, and had stiffened suddenly and unpredictably. When he had woken he had felt fearful and horrified, but at the fact of having transgressed rather than at the transgression itself.
And over a shy breakfast, Isaac had realized that this was what he wanted.
Casual cross-sex was not uncommon, of course, but Isaac was not an inebriated young man frequenting a xenian brothel on a dare.
He was falling, he realized, in love.
And now after the guilt and the uncertainty had ebbed away, after the atavistic disgust and fear had gone, leaving only a nervous, very deep affection, his lover had been taken from him. And she would never return.
Sometimes in the day he would see (he could not help himself) Lin quivering as Motley, that uncertain personage Lemuel described, ripped her wings from her head.
Isaac could not help moaning at that thought, and Derkhan would try to comfort him. He cried often, sometimes quiet and sometimes very fierce. He howled with misery.
Please, he prayed to human and then khepri gods, Solenton and Jabber and . . . and the Nurse and the Artist . . . let her have died without pain.
But he knew that she was probably beaten or tortured before she was dispatched, and the knowledge made him mad with grief.
The summer stretched out the daylight as if on a rack. Each moment was drawn out until its anatomy collapsed. Time broke down. The day progressed in an endless sequence of dead moments. Birds and wyrmen lingered in the sky like particles of filth in water. Church bells rang desultory and insincere praise for Palgolak and Solenton. The rivers oozed eastward.
Isaac and Derkhan looked up in the late afternoon when Yagharek returned, his hooded cloak fast bleaching in the scouring light. He did not speak of where he had been, but he brought food, which the three of them shared. Isaac composed himself. He battened down his anguish. He set his jaw.
After unending hours of monotonous daylight glow, the shadows moved across the faces of the mountains
beyond. The west-facing sides of buildings were stained a slick rose by the sun before it slid behind the peaks. The valedictory spears of sunlight were lost in the rock duct of Penitent’s Pass. The sky was lit for a long time after the sun had disappeared. It was still darkening when Lemuel returned.
“I’ve communicated our predicament to a few colleagues,” he explained. “I thought it might be a mistake to make hard plans till we’ve seen whatever we’re going to see tonight. Our appointment in Griss Twist. But I can call on a little aid, here and there. I’m using up favours. Apparently, there’s a few serious adventurers in town right now, claiming to have just liberated some major trow haul from the ruins in Tashek Rek Hai. Might be up for a little paid work.”
Derkhan looked up. Her face creased in distaste. She shrugged unhappily.
“I know they’re some of the hardest people in Bas-Lag,” she said slowly. It took some moments for her to turn her mind to the issue. “I don’t trust them, though. Thrill-seekers. They court danger. And they’re quite unscrupulous graverobbers for the most part. Anything for gold and experience. And I suspect if we actually told them what we’re trying to do, even they’;d balk at helping. We don’t know how to fight these moth-things.”
“Fair enough, Blueday,” said Lemuel. “But I tell you, right at the moment I’ll take whatever the fuck I can get. Know what I mean? Let’s see what happens tonight. Then we can decide whether or not to hire the delinquents. What d’you say, ’Zaac?”
Isaac looked up very slowly and his eyes focused. He shrugged.
“They’re scum,” he said quietly. “But if they’ll do the job . . .”
Lemuel nodded. “When do we have to go?” he said.
Derkhan looked at her watch. “It’s nine,” she said. “An hour to go. We should leave half an hour to get there, for safety’s sake.” She turned to look through the window, out at the glowering sky.
Militia pods rushed overhead as skyrails thrummed. Elite units of officers were stationed throughout the city. They carried strange backpacks, full of odd, bulky equipment hidden in leather. They closed the doors on their disgruntled colleagues in the towers and struts, waited in hidden rooms.
There were more dirigibles than usual in the sky. They cried out to each other, booming vibrato greetings. They carried cargoes of officers, checking their massive guns and polishing mirrors.
A little way from Strack Island, further into the Gross Tar, beyond the confluence of the two rivers, was a little stand-alone island. Some called it Little Strack, though it had no real name. It was a lozenge of scrub, wooden stumps and old ropes, used very occasionally for emergency moorings. It was unlit. It was cut off from the city. There were no secret tunnels that connected it to Parliament. No boats were anchored to the mouldering wood.
And yet that night its weed-strewn silence was interrupted.
MontJohn Rescue stood in the centre of a little group of silent figures. They were surrounded by the wrenched shapes of runt banyans and cow-parsley. Behind Rescue the ebon enormity of Parliament thrust its way into the sky. Its windows glimmered. The water’s sibilant murmur muffled the night-sounds.
Rescue stood, dressed in his usual immaculate suit. He looked slowly around him. The congregation was a variegated group. There were six humans apart from him, one khepri and one vodyanoi. There was a large, well-fed pedigree dog. The humans and xenians looked well-to-do or nearly so, except for one Remade street-sweeper and a ragged little child. There was an old woman dressed in tattered finery and a comely young debutante. A muscular, bearded man and a thin, bespectacled clerk.
All the figures, human and otherwise, were unnaturally still and calm. All wore at least one item of voluminous or concealing clothing. The vodyanoi loincloth was twice the size as most, and even the dog sported an absurd little waistcoat.
All eyes were motionless, trained on Rescue. Slowly he unwound his scarf from his neck.
As the last layer of cotton fell from his body, a dark shape shifted underneath.
Something coiled tightly around Rescue’s flesh.
Clamped to his neck was what looked like a human right hand. The skin was livid purple. At the wrist, the flesh of the thing tapered quickly into a foot-long tail like a snake’s. The tail was wound around Rescue’s neck, its tip embedded under his skin, pulsating wetly.
The fingers of the hand moved slightly. They dug into the flesh of the neck.
After a moment, the rest of the figures unrobed. The khepri unbuttoned her flapping trousers, the old woman her outdated bustle. All removed some piece of covering to unveil a moving hand coiling and uncoiling its snake-tail subcutaneously, its fingers moving softly as if it played their nerve-ends like a piano. Here it clung to the inside of a thigh, here to a waist, here the scrotum. Even the dog fumbled with its waistcoat until the urchin helped it, unbuttoning the preposterous thing and unveiling another ugly hand-tumour clamped to the dog’s hairy flesh.
There were five right hands and five left, their tails coiling and uncoiling, their skin mottled and thick.
The humans and xenians and the dog shuffled closer. They made a tight circle.
At a signal from Rescue, the thick tails emerged from the flesh of the hosts with a viscous plopping. Each of the humans, the vodyanoi and khepri and dog, jerked a little and faltered, their mouths falling open spastically, their eyes flickering neurotically in their heads. The entry wounds began to ooze as sluggish and thick as resin. The blood-wet tails waved blindly in the air for a moment like massive worms. They stretched out and quivered as they touched one another.
The host bodies were bending in towards each other, as if whispering in some strange huddled greeting. They were utterly still.
The handlingers communed.
The handlingers were a symbol of perfidy and corruption, a smear on history. Complex and secretive. Powerful. Parasitic.
They spawned rumours and legends. People said that handlingers were the spirits of the spiteful dead. That they were a punishment for sin. That if a murderer committed suicide, their guilty hands would twitch and stretch, snap the rotting skin and crawl away, that that was how handlingers were born.
There were many myths, and some things that were known to be true. Handlingers lived by infection, taking their hosts’ minds, controlling their bodies and imbuing them with strange powers. The process was irreversible. The handlingers could only live the lives of others.
They kept hidden through the centuries, a secret race, a living conspiracy. Like an unsettling dream. Occasionally, rumours would hint that some well-known and loathed individual had fallen to the handlinger menace, with stories of strange shapes writhing beneath jackets, inexplicable changes in behaviour. All manner of iniquities were put down to handlinger machinations. But despite the stories and the warnings and all the children’s games, no handlingers were ever found.
Many people in New Crobuzon believed that the handlingers, if they had ever existed in the city, were gone.
In the shadows of their motionless hosts, the handlinger tails slid over each other, their skins lubricated with thickened blood. They squirmed like an orgy of lower lifeforms.
They shared information. Rescue’s told what it knew, gave orders. It repeated to its kin what Rudgutter had said. It explained again that the future of the handlingers also depended on the capture of the slake-moths. It told how Rudgutter had intimated, gently, that future good relations between the government and the New Crobuzon handlingers might depend on their willingness to contribute to the secret war.
The handlingers squabbled in their oozing tactile language, debated and came to conclusions.
After two, three minutes, they withdrew from each other regretfully and dug their way back into the gaping holes in their hosts’ bodies. Each body spasmed as the tail was reinserted. Eyes were blinked and mouths snapped shut. The trousers and scarves were replaced.
As they had agreed, they separated into five pairs. Each consisted of one right handlinger, like Rescue’s, and one
left. Rescue himself was paired with the dog.
Rescue strode a little way through the grassland and tugged out a large bag. He removed five mirrored helmets, five thick blindfolds, several sets of heavy leather straps and nine primed flintlock pistols. Two of the helmets were specially made, one for the vodyanoi and an elongated one for the dog.
Each left-handlinger bent its host down to retrieve its helmet, each right-handlinger a blindfold. Rescue fitted his canine partner’s helmet on its head, strapping it tight, before attaching his blindfold, tying it tight so that he could see nothing at all.
Each of the pairs moved away. Each blind right-handlinger held its partner tight. The vodyanoi held the debutante; the old woman the clerk; the Remade held the khepri; the street-child, bizarrely, clasped the muscled man protectively; and Rescue held on to the dog he could no longer see.
“Instructions waterclear?” said Rescue aloud, too far apart to speak the handlingers’ real touch-tongue. “Remember training. Hard and bizarre, tonight, no question. Never tried before. Sinistrals, you must steer. Your onus. Open to your partner and never close tonight. Your battle rages. Keep with other sinistrals, too. Slightest sign of target, mental alarm, grab all the sinistrals up tonight. We’ll join forces, there in minutes.
“Dextriers, obey without thinking. Our hosts must be blind. Can’t look at the wings, not anyhow never. With mirror-helms we could see but not spitsear, looking wrongward. So we face forward, but without seeing. Tonight we carry our sinistral as our host carries us, without mind or fear or question. Understand?” There were muted sounds of acquiescence. Rescue nodded. “Then attach.”
The sinistral of each pair picked up the relevant straps and attached itself tightly to their dextrier. Each sinistral host wound the straps between its legs and around its waist and shoulders, ensnared their dextrier and locked themselves to their partners’ backs, facing behind them. Peering into their mirror-helms, they saw behind their own backs, over their dextriers’ shoulders and out in front.
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