Perdido Street Station

by China Miéville

  He kept his eyes rigidly on the mirrors before him. He was dimly aware of the discoloured wall behind them. The vile shape of the slake-moth shook in the mirrors as his head moved.

  As Isaac emerged, the slake-moth stopped moving suddenly. Isaac stiffened. It turned its head upwards and flickered its enormous tongue through the air. The vestigial antennae in its ocular sockets waved uneasily from side to side. Isaac moved again, creeping towards the wall.

  The slake-moth moved its head uneasily. There was obviously some leakage, Isaac thought, from the edge of his helmet, some trickles of thought that wafted tantalizingly through the æther. But nothing clear enough for the slake-moth to find him.

  When Isaac had made his way to the wall, Shadrach followed him up and into the room. Again, his presence discomfited the slake-moth a little, but nothing more than that.

  After Shadrach, three monkey-constructs pulled themselves into view, leaving one to guard the tunnel. They began to walk slowly towards the slake-moth. It turned towards them, seemed to watch them without eyes.

  “I think it can sense their physical shape and their movement, and ours as well,” whispered Isaac. “But without any mental trail, it doesn’t see any . . . either of us as sapient life. We’re just moving physical stuff, like trees in the wind.”

  The slake-moth was turning to face the oncoming constructs. They separated and began to approach the moth from different directions. They did not move fast, and the slake-moth did not seem concerned. But it was a little wary.

  “Now,” whispered Shadrach. He and Isaac reached out and began slowly to haul in the metal piping that extended from the top of their helmets.

  As the open ends of the pipes drew closer, the slake-moth grew agitated. It skittered back and forth, returning to protect its eggs, then stalking forward a few feet, its teeth chattering in a terrible rictus.

  Isaac and Shadrach looked at each other and counted silently together.

  On three, they pulled the ends of their pipes out into the open room. In a single movement, as swiftly as they could, they whipped the metal around and sent the open ends into the corner, fifteen feet from them.

  The slake-moth went berserk. It hissed and screeched in a loathsome register. It hunched up its body, increasing its size, and a host of exoskeletal jags flicked out of hollows in its flesh in organic threat.

  Isaac and Shadrach stared into their mirrors, awed by its monstrous majesty. It had spread its wings and turned to face the corner where the pipe ends coiled. Its wing-patterns pulsed with misdirected, hypnotic energy.

  Isaac was frozen. The slake-moth’s wings eddied with uncanny patterns. It stalked towards the pipe-ends in a low, predatory crouch, now on four legs, now six, now two.

  Quickly, Shadrach pulled Isaac towards the dreamshit ball.

  They walked forward, passing the incensed, hungry slake-moth, almost close enough to touch. They saw it approaching in their mirrors, a massive looming animal weapon. As they passed it, both men turned smoothly on their heels, walking backwards towards the dreamshit at one moment, then forwards the next. That way, they kept the slake-moth behind them, visible in the mirrors.

  The moth walked straight past the constructs, knocking one aside without even noticing, as a serrated spine swung sideways in quivering, ravenous rage.

  Isaac and Shadrach walked carefully, checking in their mirrors that the ends of their mental exhaust-pipes remained where they had been thrown, acting as slake-moth bait. Two of the monkey-constructs followed the slake-moth at a small distance, the third approaching the eggs.

  “Quickly,” hissed Shadrach, and pushed Isaac to the floor. Isaac fumbled with the knife at his belt, wasting seconds with the clip. Then he had it out. He hesitated a moment, and then pushed it smoothly into the big, sticky mass.

  Shadrach watched intently in his mirrors. The slake-moth, shadowed by the hovering constructs, pounced absurdly on the snaking ends of the pipes.

  As Isaac drew his knife down the surface of the egg-case, the moth flailed with fingers and tongue to find the enemy whose mind remained tauntingly conscious.

  Isaac wound the ends of his shirt around his hands and began to tug at the split he had made in the mass of dreamshit. With a big effort, he pulled the yielding ball apart.

  “Quickly,” said Shadrach again.

  The dreamshit—raw, uncut, distilled and pure—seeped through the cloth around Isaac’s hands and made his fingers tingle. He gave one last tug. The centre of the dreamshit ball was laid open, and there in the centre was a little clutch of eggs.

  Each was translucent and oval, smaller than a hen’s. Through its semi-liquid skin, Isaac could see some faint, coiling shape. He looked up and beckoned the monkey-construct that stood nearby.

  At the far end of the room, the slake-moth had picked up one of the metal tubes, putting its face in the flow of emotion from its open end. It shook it in confusion. It opened its mouth and unrolled its obscene, intrusive tongue. It licked the end of the pipe once, then plunged its tongue into it, eagerly seeking the source of this tempting flow.

  “Now!” said Shadrach. The slake-moth’s hands moved along the coiled metal, seeking purchase. Shadrach’s face went suddenly white. He spread his legs and braced himself. “Now, dammit, do it now!” he shouted. Isaac looked up in alarm.

  Shadrach was staring intently into his mirrors. With his left hand, he was aiming behind him, pointing his thaumaturgic pistol at the slake-moth.

  Time slowed down as Isaac looked into his own mirrors and saw the dull metal pipe in the hands of the moth. He saw Shadrach’s hand, steady as the dead, clutching his flintlock, pointing it behind his own back. He saw the monkey-constructs waiting for their order to attack.

  He looked down again at the vile clutch of eggs, seeping and glutinous below him.

  He opened his mouth to shout to the constructs, and as he inhaled to yell, the slake-moth leaned forward a moment then pulled at the piping with all its horrendous strength.

  Isaac’s voice was drowned by Shadrach’s wail and the explosion from his flintlock. He had waited a moment too long before firing. The enhanced ball smacked with a boom into the substance of the wall. Shadrach was pulled through the air. The leather strap attaching his helmet to his head snapped. The helmet flew away from him and arced at speed on the end of the pipe, tugging the connections from Isaac’s engine, shattering against the wall. Shadrach’s perfect curving trajectory collapsed as he was untethered. He tumbled in an ugly broken arc, his gun flying away from him, until he landed heavy and unwieldy on the concrete floor. His head smacked against the rough concrete floor, sending blood spattering out across the dust.

  Shadrach screamed and moaned, rolled, clutching his head, trying to right himself.

  His weltering mindwaves suddenly burst into the open. The slake-moth turned, growling.

  Isaac shouted at the constructs. As the slake-moth began to stamp horribly quickly towards Shadrach, the two that stood behind it leapt up at it simultaneously. Flame burst from their mouths, flaring across the slake-moth’s body.

  It screeched, and a clutch of skin-whips flailed across its smouldering back, battering against the constructs. The moth did not stop bearing down on Shadrach. A tentacular growth snapped around one of the construct’s necks and tugged it from the slake-moth’s back with awesome ease. It sent the metal body crunching against the wall as brutally as it had the helmet.

  There was a terrible sound of rending as the construct burst apart, spreading shattered metal and flaming oil across the floor. It roared a little way from Shadrach, melting metal and cracking the concrete.

  The construct by Isaac spat a gobbet of strong acid across the clutch of eggs. Instantly, they began to smoke, to split and hiss and dissolve.

  The slake-moth let out an unholy, merciless, terrible scream.

  Instantly it turned from Shadrach and tore across the room towards its brood. Its tail lashed violently from side to side, catching Shadrach as he lay moaning, sending him sprawl
ing through his own blood.

  Isaac stamped once, savagely, on the liquefying egg-clutch, then stumbled back and out of the slake-moth’s path. His foot slithered with the glabrous mess. He half ran, half crawled towards the wall, clutching his knife in one hand, the precious engine that kept his mindwaves hidden in the other.

  The construct still clinging to the slake-moth’s back breathed fire all across its skin once again, and it screeched in pain. The segmented arms flew back and clutched for purchase on the construct’s skin. Without pausing, the moth got a grip under the construct’s arms and tore the thing from its skin.

  It hammered it against the floor, shattering its glass lenses and bursting the metal casing of its head, sending valves and wire spewing in its wake. It flung the broken body away from it in a heap of rubbish. The last construct drew back, trying to gain range from which to spray its enormous, maddened enemy.

  Before the construct could spit its acid, two massive flanges of serrated bone snaked out faster than a whiplash and shattered it effortlessly into two.

  Its top half twitched and tried to drag itself across the floor. The acid it had carried pooled beneath it in the dust in an acrid smoking sump, corroding the dead cactacae around it.

  The slake-moth ran its hands through the viscid scum that had been its eggs. It hooted and crooned.

  Isaac crept away from the moth, gazing at it in his mirrors, feeling his way along the wall towards Shadrach, who lay moaning, crying out, befuddled with pain.

  In the mirrors before his eyes, Isaac saw the slake-moth turn. It hissed, its tongue flickering. It spread its wings, and bore down on Shadrach.

  Isaac tried desperately to reach the other man, but he was too slow. The slake-moth stamped past him again, and Isaac turned smoothly once more, always keeping the terrible predator in his mirrors.

  As he watched in horror, Isaac saw the slake-moth pull Shadrach upright. Shadrach’s eyes rolled. He was concussed and in pain, coated in blood.

  He began to slide down the wall again. The slake-moth spread his arms wide and then, so fast that it was completed before Isaac realized it had started, it thrust at him with two of its long, jagged claws, slamming them through Shadrach’s wrists and into the brick and concrete behind them, physically pinning him to the wall.

  Shadrach and Isaac cried out together.

  With its two bone-spears wedged in place, the moth reached out with its quasi-human hands and coaxed at Shadrach’s eyes. Isaac moaned at him to beware, but the big warrior was confused and in agony, and desperately looking around to see what it was that hurt him so.

  Instead, he saw the slake-moth’s wings.

  He quietened suddenly, and the slake-moth, its back still smouldering and cracking with the heat from the construct’s attack, leaned forward to feed.

  Isaac looked away. He turned his head carefully, so that he would not see that probing tongue suck the sentience from Shadrach’s brain. Isaac swallowed and began to walk slowly across the room, towards the hole and the tunnel. His legs shook and he clenched his jaw. His only hope was to leave. That way, he might survive.

  He was careful to ignore the slobbering, sucking noises, the liquid grunts of pleasure and the drip-drip-drip of saliva or blood that came from behind him. Isaac made his careful way towards the only exit in the room.

  As he neared it, he saw the end of the metal pipe that attached to his helmet still lying undisturbed by the wall. He breathed a prayer. His mental essence was still leaking into the room. The slake-moth must know that there was another sentient being in there with it. The closer Isaac came to the tunnel, the closer he would be to the pipe’s outlet. It would no longer be misleading about his location.

  And yet, and yet, it seemed that he was lucky. The slake-moth was so intent on drinking its fill and, judging by the sounds of ripping tissue, of wreaking revenge on poor Shadrach’s wracked body, that it was paying no attention to the terrified presence behind it. Isaac was able to walk on, past it, away, right to the lip of the burrow.

  But there, as he stood poised, ready to drop quietly into the dark where the construct still waited and creep his way out into the dome and away from this nightmare nest, he felt a trembling beneath his feet.

  He looked down.

  The sound of frantic clawing feet was skittering through the tunnel towards him. He stepped back, utterly aghast. He felt the brickwork tremble deep inside.

  With an almighty crash, the monkey-construct came catapulting from the tunnel to slam against the wall of bricks. It tried to push back with its arms, to somersault up into the room, but its momentum took it far too fast, and both its arms snapped neatly off at the shoulder.

  It tried to raise itself, smoke and fire gouting from its mouth, but a slake-moth tore out of the tunnel and trod on its head, bursting its intricate machinery.

  The moth leapt up into the room, and for a long merciless moment, Isaac was staring directly at it, with its wings outstretched.

  It was only after several moments of terror and despair that Isaac realized the newcomer was ignoring him, was hurling itself past him across the bodies in the room towards the ruined eggs. And as it ran, it turned its head on its long, sinuous neck, and chattered its teeth in something like fear.

  Isaac flattened himself against the wall again, peering into his mirrors at both the slake-moths.

  The second moth forced open its teeth and spat out some high, gibbering sound. The first moth gave a last almighty suck and let Shadrach’s spent and ruined body fall. Then it moved back with its sibling, towards the glutinous ruins of the dreamshit and the eggs.

  The two moths spread their wings. They stood wingtip to wingtip, their various armoured limbs extended, and waited.

  Isaac crept slowly into the hole, not daring to wonder what was happening, why they were ignoring him. Behind him, the metal exhaust pipe snaked like an idiotic tail. As Isaac stared in bewilderment into his mirrors, unable to make sense of the scene behind him, the space around the tunnel entrance rippled for a moment. It buckled and suddenly flowered, and there in the pit with him stood the Weaver.

  Isaac gaped in awe. The enormous arachnid creature loomed over him, looked down through a clutch of glinting eyes. The slake-moths bristled.

  . . . GRIM AND NEBULOUS GRIMY AND NEBULAR YOU ARE YOU ARE . . . came that unmistakable voice, crooning into Isaac’s ears—especially his missing ear.

  “Weaver!” He almost sobbed.

  The vast spider presence leapt up, landing square on its four hind legs. It gesticulated intricately in the air with its knife hands.

  . . . FOUND THE REAVER TEARING WORLDWEAVE OVER THE BLISTERING GLASS AND WE DANCED A BLOODTHIRSTY DUET EACH SAVAGE MOMENT MORE VIOLENT I CANNOT WIN WHEN THESE FOUR DASTARDLY CORNERS SQUARE UP TO ME . . . the Weaver said, and advanced on its prey. Isaac could not move. He gazed into the shards of mirror at the extraordinary contest behind him. . . . RUN HIDE LITTLE ONE YOU ARE A SKILFUL ONE FIXING THE RUCKS AND TEARS IT COMES AROUND YOU ONE HAS GONE TRAPPED INTO TRAPPING YOU AND CRUSHED LIKE WHEAT AND IT IS TIME TO FLEE BEFORE THE BEREFT BROTHERSISTER INSECTS ARRIVE TO MOURN THE MULCH YOU HELPED MELT . . .

  They were coming, Isaac realized. The Weaver was warning him that they had sensed the death of the eggs, and were returning, too late, to protect the nest.

  Isaac gripped hold of the edges of the tunnel, prepared to disappear into its folds. But he was held for a few seconds, his mouth hanging open in awe, his breathing shallow and amazed, by the sight of the slake-moths and the Weaver joining battle.

  It was an elemental scene, something way beyond human ken. It was a flickering vision of horn blades moving much too fast for a human to see, an impossibly intricate dance of innumerable limbs across several dimensions. Gouts of blood sprayed in various colours and textures across the walls and floor, fouling the dead. Behind the unclear bodies, silhouetting them, the chymical fire hissed and rolled across the concrete floor. And all the while it fought, the Weaver sang its ceaseless monologue.

&nbs
p; . . . OH HOW IT DOES HOW IT BRINGS ME TO THE BOIL I BUBBLE AND EFFERVESCE I AM DRUNK INTOXICATED ON THE JUICE OF ME THAT THESE MAD-WINGERS FERMENT . . . it sang.

  Isaac stared in astonishment. Extraordinary things were happening. The slashing and the punishing thrusts continued with fervour, but now the slake-moths were whipping their vast tongues back and forth through the air. They ran them at lightning speed over the body of the Weaver as it shuddered in and out of the material plane. Isaac saw their stomachs distend and contract, saw them lick the length of the Weaver’s abdomen then reel back as if drunk, then come back hard and attack again.

  The Weaver slipped in and out of sight, was one minute focused and brutal and would then become giddy, hop for a moment on the point of one leg, singing without words, before snapping back to become a voracious killer again.

  Unthinkable patterns flitted across the slake-moths’ wings, utterly unlike any Isaac had seen them produce before. They licked hungrily as they slashed and stabbed at their enemy. The Weaver spoke calmly to Isaac as it fought.

  . . . NOW LEAVE THIS PLACE AND REGROUP WHILE I THE DRINKARD AND THESE MY BREWERS BICKER AND GASH BEFORE THESE TWO BECOME A TRIUMVIRATE OR WORSE AND I SCAMPER FOR SAFETY GO NOW DOMEWARD AND OUT WE WILL SEE THEE AND ME WE WILL COMMUNE GO NAKED GO NAKED AS A DEAD MAN ON THE RIVER’S DAWN AND I WILL FIND YOU EASY AS CAKE WHAT A PATTERN WHAT COLOURS WHAT INTRICATE THREADS THAT WILL BE WEAVE WELL AND PRETTY NOW RUN FOR YOUR SKIN . . .

  The mad inebriated fight continued. As Isaac watched, he saw the Weaver being forced back, its energy always ebbing and flowing, moving like a vicious wind, but gradually retreating. Isaac’s terror suddenly returned. He ducked into the brick burrow and crawled away.

  There was a frantic minute in the dark, as Isaac felt his way at speed along the broken floor of the tunnel. The skin on his hands and knees was flayed by stone.

  Light glimmered ahead of him, around a corner and he sped up. He cried out in pain and astonishment as his palms slapped down onto a patch of smooth, scorching metal. He hesitated, groped around him with his ragged sleeve over his hand. The wall and floor and ceiling was plated with a buffed surface of what, in the faint light, looked like a band of pressed steel four feet wide. His face creased in incomprehension. He braced himself, then slid quickly over the metal, hot as a kettle on a fire, trying to keep his skin from its surface.