“They’re on to us,” said Isaac. He did not feel fearful, only tense and weirdly sad. “They’re coming. Godspit and shit! We’ve got about ten, fifteen minutes before they get here. We just have to hope the moths are quicker.”
“No. No.” Yagharek was shaking his head with quick violence. His head was cocked. His arms moved quickly, motioning them all to silence. Isaac and Derkhan froze. The Weaver continued its insane monologue, but it was subdued and hushed. Isaac prayed that it would not become bored and disappear. The apparatus, the constructed mind, the crisis would all collapse.
The air around them all was welting, splitting like troubled skin, as the force of that unthinkable and burgeoning blast of power continued to grow.
Yagharek was listening intently through the rain.
“People are approaching,” he said urgently, “across the roof.” With practised movements, he plucked his whip from his belt. His long knife seemed to dance into his left hand and pose, glinting in the refracted sodium lights. He had become a warrior and a hunter again.
Isaac stood and drew his flintlock. He checked hurriedly that it was clean and he filled the pan with powder, trying to shield it from the rain. He felt for his little pouch of bullets and his powder horn. His heart, he realized, was beating only very slightly faster.
He saw Derkhan readying herself. She drew her two pistols and checked them, her eyes cold.
On the roof’s plateau, forty feet below, a little troop of dark-uniformed figures had appeared. They ran nervously between the outcroppings of architecture, their pikes and rifles rattling. There were perhaps twelve of them, their faces invisible behind their sheer reflective helmets, their segmented armour flapping against them, subtle insignia displaying rank. They spread out, came at the gradient of roofs from different angles.
“Oh dear Jabber,” swallowed Isaac. “We’re fucked.”
Five minutes, he thought in despair. That’s all we need. The fucking moths won’t resist this, they’re coming here already, couldn’t you have taken a little longer?
The dirigibles still prowled closer and closer, sluggish and ineluctable.
The militia had reached the outer edges of the tumbling slate hill. They began to climb, keeping low, ducking behind chimney stacks and dormer windows. Isaac stepped back from the edge, keeping them out of sight.
The Weaver was tracing its index finger through the water on the roof, leaving a trail of scorched dry stone, drawing patterns and pictures of flowers, whispering to itself. Andrej’s body spasmed as the current rocked him. His eyes wavered unnervingly.
“Fuck!” shouted Isaac, in despair and rage.
“Shut up and fight,” hissed Derkhan. She lay down and peered carefully over the edge of the roof. The highly trained militia were frighteningly close. She aimed and fired with her left hand.
There was a snapping explosion that seemed muffled by the rain. The closest officer, who had scaled nearly halfway up the slope, staggered back as the ball struck his armoured breast and ricocheted into the darkness. He teetered momentarily on the edge of his little roof-step, managed to right himself. As he relaxed and stepped forward, Derkhan fired her other gun.
The officer’s faceplate shattered in an explosion of bloody mirror. A cloud of flesh burst from the back of his skull. His face was momentarily visible, a shocked gaze embedded with slivers of reflecting glass, blooming with blood from a hole below his right eye. He seemed to leap out backwards like a champion diver, sailing elegantly twenty feet to crack loudly against the base of the roof.
Derkhan bellowed with triumph, her cry becoming words. “Die, you swine!” she screamed. She ducked back out of sight as a rapid battery of shots smacked into the brick and stone above and below her.
Isaac dropped onto all fours beside her, staring at her. It was impossible to say, in the rain, but he thought she was sobbing angrily. She rolled back from the edge of the roof and began to reload her pistols. She caught Isaac’s eye.
“Do something!” she screamed at him.
Yagharek was standing, hanging back from the edge, grabbing glimpses every few seconds, waiting until the men were in reach of his whip. Isaac rolled forward, peered over the rim of the little platform. The men were drawing nearer, moving more carefully now, hiding at each level, staying out of sight, but still moving terribly fast.
Isaac aimed and fired. His bullet burst dramatically against slate, showering the lead militiaman with particles.
“Godsdamnit!” he hissed and ducked back to refill his gun.
A cold certainty of defeat was settling within him. There were too many men, coming too quickly. As soon as the militia reached the top, Isaac would have no defence. If the Weaver came to their aid they would lose their bait, and the slake-moths would escape. They might take one, two or three of the officers with them, but they could not escape.
Andrej was jerking up and down, arcing his back and straining against his bonds. The nerves between Isaac’s eyes were singing as the blast of energy continued to scald the æther. The airships were pulling near. Isaac screwed up his face, looked back over the edge of the plateau. On the broken plain of the roof below, drunkards and vagrants were rousing themselves and scurrying away like terrified animals.
Yagharek screeched like a crow and pointed with his knife.
Behind the militia, on the flattened roofscape they had left behind, a cloaked figure slipped out of some shadow, appearing like an eidolon, manifesting as if from nothing.
There was a flurry of bottle-green from its coiling cloak.
Something spat intense fire and noise from the figure’s outstretched hand, three, four, five times. Halfway up the slope, Isaac saw a militiaman bow away from the roof, collapsing in an ugly organic cascade down the length of the clay. As he fell, two more of the men staggered and collapsed. One was dead, blood pooling below his sprawled body and diluting in the rain. The other slid a little way and emitted a horrendous shriek from behind his mask, clutching at his bleeding ribs.
Isaac gazed in shock.
“Who the fuck is that?” he shouted. “What the fuck is going on?” Below him, their shadowed benefactor had ducked into a puddle of darkness. He seemed to be fumbling with his gun.
Below them, the militia had frozen. Orders were shouted in impenetrable shorthand. It was clear that they were confused and afraid.
Derkhan was staring into the darkness with a look of astonished hope.
“Gods bless you,” she screamed down the slate, into the night. She fired again with her left hand, but the bullet passed loudly and harmlessly into brick.
Thirty feet below them, the injured man still screamed. He fumbled ineffectually to undo his mask.
The unit split. One man ducked beneath outcroppings of brick and raised his rifle, aiming into the darkness where the newcomer hid. Several of the remaining men began to descend towards their new attacker. The others began to climb again, at redoubled speed.
As the two little groups moved up and down across the slippery roofscape, the dark figure stepped out again and fired with extraordinary rapidity. He’s got some kind of repeating pistol, thought Isaac with astonishment, and then started as two more officers reared up from the roof a little way below him and fell, twisting and screaming, to bounce brutally down the incline.
Isaac realized that the man below them was not firing at the militia who had turned and were approaching him, but was concentrating on protecting the little platform, picking off the closest officers with superb marksmanship. He had left himself vulnerable to a massed attack.
All across the roof the militia froze at the volley of bullets. But as Isaac looked down he saw that the second group of officers had descended to the base of the roof and were running in clumsily furtive formation at the shady assassin.
Ten feet below Isaac, the militia were closing in. He fired again, knocking the wind from one man, but failing to penetrate his armour. Derkhan shot, and below them, the poised marksman screeched an oath and dropped his rifle,
which slid noisily away.
Isaac filled his gun with desperate haste. He glanced over at his machinery, saw that Andrej was curled under the wall. He was shuddering, with spittle fouling his face. Isaac’s head throbbed in time to some weird beat from the growing blaze of mental waves. He looked up at the sky. Come on, he thought, come on, come on. He looked down again as he reloaded, trying to find the mysterious newcomer.
He almost cried out in fear for their half-hidden protector, as four burly and heavily armed militia jogged towards the pitch-shade where he had hidden.
Something emerged from the darkness at speed, leaping from shadow to shadow, drawing the militia’s fire with extraordinary ease. A pathetic spatter of shots sounded, and the four men’s rifles were empty. As they dropped to one knee and began to reload, the cloaked figure emerged from the sheltering gloom and stood a few paces before them.
Isaac saw him from slightly behind, illuminated in the sudden cold light from some phlogistic lamp. His face was turned away, towards the militia. His cloak was patched and shabby. Isaac could just see a stubby little gun in his left hand. As the impassive glass masks glimmered in the light and the four officers seemed to falter into momentary stillness, something extended from the man’s right hand. Isaac could not see it well, squinted carefully until the man moved slightly and raised his arm, uncovering the toothed thing as the sleeve of the cloth fell away.
A massive serrated blade, slowly opening and shutting like wicked scissors. Gnarled chitin jutting ungainly from the man’s elbow, recurved razor tip gleaming at the end of the trapping jaw.
The man’s right arm had been replaced, Remade, with a vast mantis claw.
At the same instant, Isaac and Derkhan gasped and shouted his name: “Jack Half-a-Prayer!”
Half-a-Prayer, the Escapee, the fReemade Boss, the Man-’tis, stepped up lightly towards the four militia.
They fumbled with their guns, jabbed out with the glinting bayonets.
Half-a-Prayer sidestepped them with balletic speed and snapped his Remade limb shut, then backed easily away. One of the officers fell, blood bursting from his lacerated neck and welling up behind his mask.
Jack Half-a-Prayer had gone again, was stalking half in, half out of sight.
Isaac’s attention was diverted as an officer appeared over the brim of a window five feet below him. He fired too quickly and missed, but something snaked out above him and smacked violently against the man’s helmet. The officer reeled and fell back, gathering himself from another attack. Yagharek quickly gathered up his heavy whip, ready to strike again.
“Come on, come on!” screamed Isaac to the sky.
The airships were fat and looming now, descending, ready to pounce. Half-a-Prayer danced rings around his attackers, leaping in to maim and then dissolving into the dark. Derkhan was crying out, a little defiant shout every time she shot. Yagharek stood poised, his whip and dagger trembling in his hands. The militia were encroaching, but slowly, cowed and fearful, waiting for relief and back-up.
The Weaver’s monologue grew slowly louder, from a whispering in the back of the skull into a voice that crept forward through flesh and bone, filling the brain.
. . . IS IT IS IT THOSE NAUGHTY MAULERS THOSE TIRESOME PATTERNVAMPIRS THAT BLEED WEBSCAPE DRY IT IS THEY THEY COME THEY WHISTLE FOR THIS TORRENT THIS CORNUCOPIC SLEW OF FOOD THAT IS NOT TAKE CARE AND WHISPER WATCH . . . it said . . . RICH BREWS SIT UNEASY ON THE PALATE . . .
Isaac looked up with a soundless shout. He heard a fluttering, a buffet of disordered air. The raw emblazoning, the blast of invented brainwaves that made his spine tremble inside him continued unabated as a sound approached, oscillating frantically between materia and æther.
A glinting carapace dipped through thermals: weaving patterns of dark colour shot violently through the sky on two reflected pairs of shapeshifting wings. Convoluted limbs and spiny organic jags trembled in anticipation.
Famished and trembling, the first slake-moth came in.
The heavy segmented body came spiralling down, sliding tightly around the column of burning æther as if on a funfair ride. The moth’s tongue lapped avidly around it: it was immersed in intoxicating brain-liquor.
As Isaac stared into the sky exultantly, he saw another shape flit closer, and another, black on black. One of the moths ducked in a sharp arc directly below a fat and sluggish airship, careering towards the storm of mindwaves that sent ripples through the fabric of the city.
The force of militia arrayed on the roof chose that moment to renew their attack, and the sulphurous snap of Derkhan’s pistols woke Isaac to the danger. He looked round to see Yagharek crouched in a feral pose, his bullwhip unrolling like some half-trained mamba towards the officer whose head had appeared over the rim of the plateau. It constricted around his neck and Yagharek pulled hard, slamming the man’s forehead against the wet slates.
He snapped his whip free as the choking officer fell clattering away.
Isaac fumbled with his cumbersome pistol. He leaned over and saw that two of the officers who had turned on Jack Half-a-Prayer were down and dying, blood spewing languidly from enormous rents in their flesh. A third was stumbling away, holding his gashed thigh. Half-a-Prayer and the fourth man were gone.
All over the low hill of roofs, the calls of the militia sounded, half routed, terrified and confused. Urged on by their lieutenant they drew steadily closer.
“Keep them away,” shouted Isaac. “The moths are coming!”
The three slake-moths came down in a long interweaving helix, eddying below and above each other, rotating in descending order around the massive stele of energy that yawned vastly from Andrej’s helmet. On the ground below them the Weaver danced a subdued little jig, but the slake-moths did not see it. They noticed nothing except Andrej’s spasming form, the source, the wellspring of the enormous sweet bounty that gushed precipitously up and into the air. They were frenzied.
Watertowers and brick turrets rose up around them like reaching hands as one by one they breached the skyline and descended into the city’s gaslight nimbus.
Faint waves of anxiety gusted through them as they plunged. There was something fractionally wrong with the flavour that surrounded them—but it was so strong, so unbelievably powerful, and they were so drunk on it, unsteady on their wings and shaking with greedy delight, that they could not stop their vertiginous approach.
Isaac heard Derkhan shout a foul oath. Yagharek had leapt across the roof to her and flailed expertly with his whip, sending her attacker spinning. Isaac turned and fired at the falling figure, heard him grunt with pain as the bullet tore open the muscle of his shoulder.
The airships were almost overhead now. Derkhan was sitting back from the brink a little, blinking rapidly, her eyes fouled with clods of brickdust from where a bullet had shattered the wall beside her.
There were about five militia left on the roofs, and they were still coming, slow and stealthy.
A final insectile shadow swooped towards the roof from the south-east of the city. It looped in a long S-curve under the Spit Hearth skyrail and shot up again, riding the updrafts in the hot night, coming in towards the station.
“They’re all here,” whispered Isaac.
As he refilled his gun, spilling powder inexpertly about him, he looked up. His eyes widened: the first moth approached. It was a hundred feet above him and then sixty, then suddenly twenty and ten. He stared at it in awe. It seemed to move with no pace at all as time stretched out thin and very slow. Isaac saw the clutching half-simian paws and jagged tail, the enormous mouth and chattering teeth, eyesockets with their clumsy antennae stubs like fumbling maggots, a hundred extrusions of flesh that whiplashed and unfolded and pointed and snapped shut in a hundred mysterious motions . . . and the wings, those prodigious, untrustworthy, constantly altering wings, tides of weird colour drenching them and retreating like sudden squalls.
He watched the moth directly, ignoring the mirrors before his eyes. It had no time for him. It ignored
him.
He was frozen for a long moment, in a terror of memories.
The slake-moth swept past him and a great backwash of air sent his hair and coat flailing.
The clutching multilimbed creature reached out, unrolled its enormous tongue, spat and chittered in obscene hunger. It landed on Andrej like some nightmare spirit, clutched him and sought desperately to drink.
As its tongue slid rapidly in and out of Andrej’s orifices, coating him in that thick citric saliva, another moth careened in on a trough of air, crashing into the first moth and fighting it for position on Andrej’s body.
The old man was twitching as his muscles fought to make sense of the slew of absurd stimuli engulfing them. The torrent of Weaver/ Council brainwaves blasted up and out of his skull.
The engine lying on the roofspace rattled. It grew dangerously hot as its pistons fought to retain control of the enormous wash of crisis energy. Rain spat and evaporated as it hit it.
As the third moth came in to land, the struggle to feed at the mouth of the font, at the pseudo-mind pouring from Andrej’s skull, continued. In an irritated convulsive motion, the first moth slapped the second a few feet away, where it licked eagerly at the back of Andrej’s head.
The first moth plunged its tongue into Andrej’s slavering mouth, then removed it with a sickening plop and sought another outflow. It found the little trumpet on Andrej’s helmet, from which the whole bursting wash of ever-increasing output poured. The moth slid its tongue into the opening and around dimensional corners into and out of the æther, rolling the sinuous organ around the multifarious planes of the flow.
It squealed in delight.
Its skull vibrated in its flesh. Gouts of the intense artificial mindwaves spurted down its throat and dripped invisibly from its mouth, a burning jet of intense, sweet thought-calories that poured and poured into the moth’s belly, more powerful, more concentrated than its day-to-day feed by a vast and increasing factor, an uncontrollable torrent of energy that raged through the slake-moth’s gullet and filled its stomach in seconds.
Perdido Street Station Page 66