The moth could not break free. It locked in, gorged and fixated. It could sense danger, but it could not care, could not think of anything apart from the entrancing, inebriating flow of food that held it, that focused it. It was fixed with the mindless intent of a night insect battering itself against cracked glass to find a way in to a deadly flame.
The slake-moth immolated itself, immersed itself in the torrential blasts of power.
Its stomach swelled and chitin creaked. The massive wash of mental emanations overwhelmed it. The huge and skulking creature jerked once; its belly and skull burst with wet, explosive sounds.
Instantly it snapped back, dying quickly in two sprays of ichor and ragged skin, entrails and brainstuff bursting in curves from its massive injuries, oozing with undigested, indigestible mind-liquor.
It slumped dead across Andrej’s insensible form, twitching with spastic motion, dripping and broken.
Isaac bellowed with delight, a massive shout of astonished triumph. Andrej was briefly forgotten.
Derkhan and Yagharek turned quickly and stared at the dead moth.
“Yes!” shouted Derkhan exultantly, and Yagharek emitted the wordless ululating cry of a successful hunter. Below them, the militia paused. They could not see what had happened, and they were unnerved by the sudden shouts of triumph.
The second moth was scrambling over the body of its fallen sibling, licking and sucking. The crisis engine still sounded; Andrej still crawled in agony in the rain, unaware of what was happening. The slake-moth scrabbled for the continuing flow of bait.
The third moth arrived, sending rainwater spraying in the downdrafts from its ferociously beating wings. It paused for a fraction of a second, tasting the dead moth in the air, but the stench of those astonishing Weaver/Council waves was irresistible. It crawled through the sticky slick of the fallen moth’s bowels.
The other moth was quicker. It found the outflow pipe of the helmet and thrust its mouth into the funnel, its tongue anchoring it like some vampiric umbilical cord.
It gulped and sucked, hungry and exhilarated, drunk, burnt up with its desires.
It was captivated. It could not resist when the power of the food began to burn a hole in its stomach wall. It whined and puked, metadimensional globules of brainpattern travelling back up its gullet and meeting the torrent that it still sucked like nectar, converging in its throat and suffocating it, until the soft skin of its throat distended and split.
It began to bleed and die from the ragged tracheotomy, still drinking from the helmet and hastening its own death. The swell of energy was too much: it destroyed the moth as quickly and completely as its own unadulterated milk would a human. The slake-moth’s mind burst flatly like a great blood-blister.
It fell back, its tongue retracting sluggishly like old elastic.
Isaac roared again as the third moth kicked away the twitching corpse of its sisterbrother and fed.
The militia were breaching the last rise of rooftop before the plateau. Yagharek moved in a lethal dance, suddenly murderous. His whip slashed; officers stumbled and fell away, ducked out of sight, moved warily behind the chimneys.
Derkhan fired again, into the face of a militiaman who rose before her, but the main wad of powder in the shaft of her pistol did not properly ignite. She cursed and held the gun away from her at arm’s length, trying to keep it trained on the officer. He moved forward and the powder finally exploded, sending a ball over his head. He ducked and slipped to one foot on the frictionless roofspace.
Isaac pointed his gun and fired as the man fought to stand, sending a bullet into the back of his skull. The man jerked and his head battered against the ground. Isaac reached for his powder horn, then slid back. There was no time to reload, he realized. The last clutch of officers was vaulting towards him. They had been waiting for him to fire.
“Get back, Dee!” he yelled, and moved away from the edge.
Yagharek knocked one man down with a whipstrike at his legs, but he had to withdraw as the officers approached. Derkhan, Yagharek and Isaac moved back from the brink and looked desperately around for weapons.
Isaac stumbled on the segmented limb of a fallen moth. Behind him, the third moth was emitting little cries of greed as it drank. They fused into a single wail, an extended animal sound of delight or misery.
Isaac turned at the sound of the bleating and was caught in a moist detonation of flesh. Shredded innards slopped noisily over the roof, rendering it treacherous.
The third moth had succumbed.
Isaac stared at the dark, lolling shape, hard and variegated, as big as a bear. It was spreadeagled in a radial burst of limbs and bodyparts, dripping from its emptied-out thorax. The Weaver bent forward like a child and prodded the splayed exoskeleton with a tentative finger.
Andrej still moved, though his scissoring kicks were fitful. The moths had not drunk him, but the massive wash of artificial thoughts that bubbled up from the helmet. His mind still worked, bewildered and fearful and locked in the terrible feedback loop of the crisis engine. He was slowing down, his body collapsing under the extraordinary strain. His mouth worked in exaggerated yawns to clear itself of the thick, rotten-smelling saliva.
Directly above him, the final moth had spiralled into the fountain of energy from his helmet. Its wings were still, angled to control its fall, as it dropped like some murderous weapon out of the sky towards the tangled carnage. It bore down on the source of the feast, a clutch of arms and hands and hooks extended in frantic predation.
The militia lieutenant rose a foot or so over the grooved guttering at the edge of the plateau. He faltered and shouted something at his men—“. . . ing Weaver!”—then fired wildly at Isaac. Isaac leapt sideways, grunted in quick triumph when he realized that he was uninjured. He grabbed a spanner from the pile of tools by his foot and hurled it at the mirrored helmet.
Something rocked unsteadily in the air around Isaac. His gut tensed and fluttered. He looked around wildly.
Derkhan was moving backwards from the edge of the roof, her face creased with inarticulate horror. She was staring around her in inchoate fear. Yagharek was holding his left hand to his head, the long knife dangling uncertainly from his fingers. His right hand, his whip, was motionless.
The Weaver looked up and muttered.
There was a small round hole in Andrej’s chest where the officer’s bullet had caught him. Blood was welling out of it in lazy pulses, dribbling across his belly and saturating his filthy clothes. His face was white, his eyes closed.
Isaac shouted and rushed to him, held the old man’s hand.
The pattern of Andrej’s brainwaves faltered. The engines combining the Weaver’s and the Council’s exudations skittered uncertainly as their template, their reference, suddenly ebbed.
Andrej was tenacious. He was an old man whose body was collapsing under the oppressive weight of a rotting, wasting disease, whose mind was stiff with coagulated dream-emissions. But even with a bullet lodged under his heart and his lung haemorrhaging, it took him nearly ten seconds to die.
Isaac held Andrej as he breathed bloodily. The bulky helmet lolled absurdly on his head. Isaac clenched his teeth as the old man died. At the very end, in what might have been a twitch of dying nerves, Andrej tensed and clutched Isaac, hugging him back in what Isaac desperately wanted to be forgiveness.
I had to I’m sorry I’m sorry, he thought giddily.
Behind Isaac the Weaver still drew patterns in the spilt juices of the slake-moths. Yagharek and Derkhan were calling to Isaac, screaming at him, as the militia came over the edge of the roof.
One of the dirigibles had lowered itself now until it hung sixty or seventy feet over the flattened roofscape below. It loomed like a bloated shark. A tangle of ropes was spilling untidily through the darkness towards the great expanse of clay.
Andrej’s brain went out like a broken lamp.
A confused tangle of information weltered through the analytical engines.
Without
Andrej’s mind as referent, the combination of the Weaver’s and the Construct Council’s waves became suddenly random, their proportions skewing and rolling unsteadily. They no longer modelled anything: they were just an untidy slosh of oscillating particles and waves.
The crisis was gone. The thickening mixture of mindwaves was no more than the sum of its parts, and it had stopped trying to be. The paradox, the tension, disappeared. The vast field of crisis energy evaporated.
The burning gears and motors of the crisis engine stuttered to an abrupt stop.
With a crushing implosive collapse, the enormous wash of mental energy was snuffed instantly out.
Isaac, Derkhan, Yagharek and the militia for thirty feet around let out cries of pain. They felt as if they had walked from bright sunlight into a darkness so sudden and total it hurt them. They ached drably behind their eyes.
Isaac let Andrej’s body fall slowly to the wet ground.
In the wet heat a little way above the station, the last slake-moth eddied in confusion. It beat its wings in complex four-way patterns, sent coils of air in all directions. It hovered.
The rich trough of food, that unthinkable gush, was gone. The frenzy that had overtaken the moth, the terrible, uncompromising hunger, had gone.
It licked out and its antennae trembled. There were a handful of minds below it, but before it could attack the moth sensed the chaotic bubbling consciousness of the Weaver, and it remembered its agonizing battles and it screeched in fear and rage, stretching its neck back and baring its monstrous teeth.
And then the unmistakable taste of its own kind wafted up to it. It spun in shock as it tasted one, two, three dead siblings, all its siblings, every one of them, insides out, dead and crushed, spent.
The slake-moth was mad with grief. It keened in ultra-high frequencies and spun aerobatically, sending out little calls of sociality, echo-locating for other moths, fumbling through unclear layers of perception with its antennae and clutching empathically for any trace of an answer.
It was quite alone.
It rolled away from the roof of Perdido Street Station, away from that charnel-ground where its brothersisters lay burst, away from the memory of that impossible flavour, veering in terror away from The Crow and the Weaver’s claws and the fat dirigibles that stalked it, out of the shadow of the Spike towards the junction of the rivers.
The slake-moth fled in misery, searching for a place to rest.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
As the battered militia gathered themselves and began to peer, once more, over the edge of the roof at Isaac’s and Derkhan’s and Yagharek’s feet. They were wary now.
Three rapid bullets came flying down at them. One sent an officer flying without a word into the dark air beside the roof, to shatter a window four floors below with his weight. The other two buried themselves deep in the fabric of the bricks and stones, sending out wicked sprays of chips.
Isaac looked up. A dim figure was leaning out from a ledge twenty feet above them.
“It’s Half-a-Prayer again!” shouted Isaac. “How did he get there? What’s he doing?”
“Come on,” said Derkhan brusquely. “We have to go.”
The militia were still cowering just below them. Whenever an officer straightened up carefully and looked over the edge, Half-a-Prayer would send another bullet straight at him. He kept them caged in. One or two of them shot at him, but they were desultory, demoralized efforts.
Just beyond the rise of roofs and windows, unclear shapes were descending smoothly from the dirigible, sliding onto the slick surface below. They dangled loosely as they slipped through the air, attached by some hook on their armour. The ropes that held them uncoiled on smooth motors.
“He’s buying us some time, gods know why,” hissed Derkhan, stumbling over to Isaac and clutching at him. “He’s going to run out of bullets soon. These sods—” she waved vaguely at the half-hidden militia below them “—these are just the local flatfoots on roof-duty. Those bastards coming from the airships are going to be hardcore troops. We have to go.”
Isaac looked down and faltered towards the edge, but there were cowering militia visible on all sides. Bullets smacked down around Isaac as he moved. He yelled in fear, then realized that Half-a-Prayer was trying to clear the path before him.
It was no good, though. The militia were hunkering down and waiting.
“Fuck damn,” spat Isaac. He bent down and pulled a plug from Andrej’s helmet, disconnecting the Construct Council, which was still concertedly attempting to bypass the circuit-valve and gain control of the crisis engine. Isaac yanked the wire free, sending a damaging spasm of feedback and rerouted energy bolting down the line into the Council’s brain.
“Get this shit!” he hissed at Yagharek, and pointed at the engines that littered the roof, fouled with ichor and acid rain. The garuda dropped to one knee and scooped up the sack. “Weaver!” said Isaac urgently, and stumbled over to the enormous figure.
He kept looking back, over his shoulder, fearful of seeing some gung-ho militiaman reaching up to take a potshot. Over the rain, the sound of metallic crunching steps drew nearer on the roof below them in a pounding jog.
“Weaver!” Isaac clapped his hands in front of the extraordinary spider. The Weaver’s multifarious eyes slid up to meet him. The Weaver still wore the helmet that linked it to Andrej’s corpse. It was rubbing its hands in slake-moth viscera. Isaac looked down briefly at the pile of huge corpses. Their wings had faded to a pale, drab dun, without pattern or variation.
“Weaver, we need to go,” he whispered. The Weaver interrupted him.
. . . I TIRE AND GROW OLD AND COLD GRIMY LITTLING . . . the Weaver said quietly . . . YOU WORK WITH FINESSE I GRANT AND GIVE YOU BUT THIS SIPHONING OF PHANTASMS FROM MY SOLE SOUL LEAVES ME MELANCHOLIC SEE PATTERNS INHERE EVEN IN THESE THE VORACIOUS ONES PERHAPS I JUDGE QUICK AND SLICK TASTES FALTER AND ALTER AND I AM UNSURE . . . It raised a handful of glistening guts to Isaac’s eyes and began to pull them gently apart.
“Believe me, Weaver,” said Isaac urgently, “this was the right thing, we saved the city for you to . . . to judge, to weave . . . now that we’ve done this. But we need to go now, we need you to help us. Please . . . get us away from here . . .”
“Isaac,” hissed Derkhan, “I don’t know who these swine are that are coming but . . . but they’re not militia.”
Isaac stole a glance out over the roofs. His eyes widened incredulously.
Stomping purposefully towards them was a battery of extraordinary metal soldiers. The light slid from them, illuminating their edges in cold flashes. They were sculpted in astonishing and frightening detail. Their arms and legs swung with great bursts of hydraulic power, pistons hissing as they stormed closer. Little glimmers of reflected light came from somewhere a little behind their heads.
“Who the fuck are those bastards?” said Isaac in a strangled voice.
The Weaver interrupted him. Its voice was suddenly loud again, purposeful.
. . . BY GOODNESS ME YOU CONVINCE . . . it said . . . LOOK AT THE INTRICATE SKEINS AND THREADLINES WE CORRECT WHERE THE DEADLINGS REAVED WE CAN RESHUFFLE AND SPIN AND FIX IT UP NICE . . . The Weaver bobbed excitedly up and down and stared at the dark sky. It plucked the helmet from its head in a smooth motion and threw it casually out into the night. Isaac did not hear it land. . . . IT RUNS AND HIDES ITS HIDE . . . it said . . . IT IS ROOTING FOR A NEST POOR FRIGHTENED MONSTER WE MUST CRUSH IT LIKE ITS BROTHERS BEFORE IT GNAWS HOLES IN THE SKY AND THE CITYWIDE COLOURFLOW COME AND LET US SLIDE DOWN LONG FISSURES IN THE WORLDWEB WHERE THE RENDER RUNS AND FIND ITS LAIR . . .
It staggered forward, always seeming to teeter on the edge of collapse. It opened its arms to Isaac like a loving parent, swept him quickly and effortlessly up. Isaac grimaced in fear as he was taken into its weird, cool embrace. Don’t cut me, he thought fervently, don’t slice me up!
The militia peered furtive and aghast over the roof at the sight. The enormous, towering spider stalked edgily this
way and that, Isaac tucked lolling like some absurd, vast baby under its arm.
It moved with sure, fleeting motions across the sodden tar and clay. It could not be followed. It moved in and out of conventional space with motions too fast to see.
It stood before Yagharek. The garuda swung the sack of mechanical components that he had hastily gathered over onto his back. Yagharek delivered himself thankfully to the dancing mad god, throwing up his arms and clutching at the smooth waist between the Weaver’s head and abdomen . . . GRAB TIGHT LITTLE ONE WE MUST FIND A WAY AWAY . . . sang the Weaver.
The weird metallic troops were approaching the little elevation of flat land, their mechanical anatomy hissing with efficient energy. They swept past the lower militia, terrified junior officers who gazed up in astonishment at the human faces peering intently from the back of the iron warriors’ heads.
Derkhan looked round at the encroaching figures, then swallowed and walked quickly over to the Weaver, which stood with humanoid arms wide. Isaac and Yagharek were perched on its weapon arms, their legs scrabbling for purchase across its broad back.
“Don’t hurt me again,” whispered Derkhan, her hand flickering over the scabbed wound on the side of her face. She holstered her guns and raced across into the Weaver’s terrifying, cradling arms.
The second dirigible arrived at the roof of Perdido Street Station and threw out ropes for its troops to descend. Motley’s Remade squadron had reached the top of the rise of architecture and was vaulting over without pause. The militia gazed up at them, cowed. They did not understand what they were seeing.
The Remade breached the low rise of bricks without hesitation, only faltering when they saw the Weaver’s huge and skulking form scampering to and fro across the bricks, three figures jouncing like dolls on its back.
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