Perdido Street Station

by China Miéville

  Motley’s troops stepped back towards the edge slowly, rain varnishing their impassive steel faces. Their heavy feet crushed the remnants of the engines that still lay split across the roof.

  As they watched, the Weaver reached down and grasped hold of a quailing militiaman, who wailed in terror as he was dragged up by his head. The man flailed, but the Weaver pushed his arms away and cuddled him like a baby.

  . . . OFF AND ON TO GO HUNTING WE WILL TAKE OUR LEAVE . . . whispered the Weaver to all present. It walked sideways off the edge of the roof, seemingly unencumbered, and disappeared.

  For two or three seconds, only the rain sounded fitful and depressing on the roof. Then Half-a-Prayer let off a last volley of shots from above, sending the assembled men and Remade scattering. When they emerged carefully, there were no more attacks. Jack Half-a-Prayer had gone.

  The Weaver and its companions had left no trail, and no trace.

  The slake-moth tore through currents of air. It was frantic and afraid.

  It sounded every so often, letting out a cry in a variety of sonic registers, but it was unanswered. It was miserable and confused.

  And yet beneath it all, its infernal hunger was growing again. It was not free of its appetite.

  Below it the Canker flowed through the city, its barges and pleasure boats little grubs of dirty light on the blackness. The slake-moth slowed and spiralled.

  A line of filthy smoke was drawn slowly across the face of New Crobuzon, marking it like a stub of pencil, as a late train went east on the Dexter Line, through Gidd and Barguest Bridge, on over the water towards Lud Fallow and Sedim Junction.

  The moth swept on over Ludmead, ducking low above the roofs of the university faculty, alighting briefly on the roof of the Magpie Cathedral in Saltbur, flitting away in a pang of hunger and lonely fear. It could not rest. It could not channel its rapacity to feed.

  As it flew, the slake-moth recognized the configuration of light and darkness below it. It felt a sudden pull.

  Behind the railway lines, rising from the shabby and decrepit architecture of Bonetown, the Ribs rose out into the night air in a colossal sweep and curve of ivory. They made memories eddy in the slake-moth’s head. It recalled the dubious influence of those old bones that had made Bonetown a fearful place, somewhere to be escaped, where air currents were unpredictable and noxious tides could pollute the æther. Distant images of days clamped still, being milked lasciviously, its glands sucked clean, a hazy sense of a suckling grub at its teat, but nothing being there . . . memories caught it up.

  The moth was utterly cowed. It sought relief. It hankered for a nest, somewhere to lie still, recuperate. Somewhere familiar, where it could tend itself and be tended. In its misery, it remembered its captivity in a selective, twisted light. It had been fed and cleaned by careful tenders there in Bonetown. It had been a sanctuary.

  Frightened and hungry and eager for relief, it conquered its fear of the Bonetown Ribs.

  It set off southwards, licking its way through half-forgotten routes in the air, skirting the blistered bones, seeking out a dark building in a little alley, a bitumened terrace of unclear purpose, from where it had crawled weeks ago.

  The slake-moth wheeled nervously over the dangerous city and headed for home.

  Isaac felt as if he had been asleep for several days, and he stretched luxuriously, feeling his body slide uncomfortably forward and back.

  He heard an appalling scream.

  Isaac froze as memories came back to him in torrents, let him know how he had come to be there, held tight in the Weaver’s arms (he jerked and spasmed as he recalled it all).

  The Weaver was stepping lightly over the worldweb, scuttling across metareal filaments connecting every moment to every other.

  Isaac remembered the vertiginous pitch of his soul when he had seen the worldweb. He remembered a nausea that had wracked his existential being at the sight of that impossible vista. He struggled not to open his eyes.

  He could hear the jabbering of Yagharek and Derkhan’s whispered curses. They came to him not as sounds but as intimations, floating fragments of silk that slipped into his skull and became clear to him. There was another voice, a jagged cacophony of bright fabric shrieking in terror.

  He wondered who that might be.

  The Weaver moved quickly across pitching threads alongside the damage and potentiality of damage that the slake-moth had wreaked, and might again. The Weaver disappeared into a hole, a dim funnel of connections that wound through the material of that complex dimension and

  emerged again into the city.

  Isaac felt air against his cheek, wood below him. He woke and opened his eyes.

  His head hurt. He looked up. His neck wobbled as he adjusted to the weight of his helmet, still perched tight on his head, its mirrors miraculously unbroken.

  He was lying in a shaft of moonlight in some dusty little attic. Sounds filtered into the space through the wooden floors and walls.

  Derkhan and Yagharek were raising themselves slowly and carefully onto their elbows, shaking their heads. As Isaac watched, Derkhan reached up quickly and gently felt the sides of her head. Her remaining ear—and his, he quickly ascertained—was untouched.

  The Weaver loomed in the corner of the room. It stepped forward slightly, and behind it, Isaac saw a militiaman. The officer seemed paralysed. He sat with his back against the wall, shaking quietly, his smooth faceplate skewwhiff and falling from his head. His rifle lay across his lap. Isaac’s eyes widened when he saw it.

  It was glass. A perfect and useless model of a flintlock rifle rendered in glass.

  . . . THIS WOULD BE HOMESTEAD FOR THE FLEETING WINGED ONE . . . crooned the Weaver. It sounded subdued again, as if its energy had ebbed from it during the journey through the planes of the web . . . SEE MY LOOKING-GLASS MAN MY PLAYMATE MY FRIENDLING . . . it whispered . . . HE AND ME SHALL WHILE TIME AWAY THIS IS THE RESTING PLACE OF THE VAMPIR MOTH THIS IS WHERE IT FOLDS ITS WINGS AND HIDES TO EAT AGAIN I WILL PLAY TIC-TAC-TOE AND BOXES WITH MY GLASS-GUNNER . . .

  It stepped back into the corner of the room and set itself down suddenly with a jerk of its legs. One of its knife-hands flashed like elyctricity, moving with extraordinary speed, scoring a three-by-three grid onto the boards before the comatose officer’s lap.

  The Weaver etched a cross into a corner square, then sat back and waited, whispering to itself.

  Isaac, Derkhan and Yagharek shuffled into the centre of the room.

  “I thought it was going to get us away,” mumbled Isaac. “It’s followed the fucking moth . . . It’s here, somewhere . . .”

  “We have to take it,” whispered Derkhan, her face set. “We’ve almost got them all. Let’s finish it.”

  “With what?” hissed Isaac. “We’ve got our fucking helmets and that’s it. We’ve not got any weapons to face the likes of that thing . . . we don’t even know where we damn-well are . . .”

  “We have to get the Weaver to help us,” said Derkhan.

  But their attempts were quite fruitless. The gigantic spider ignored them utterly, wittering quietly to itself and waiting intently, as if waiting for the frozen militia officer to complete his move in tic-tac-toe. Isaac and the others entreated with the Weaver, begged it to help them, but they seemed suddenly invisible to it. They turned away in frustration.

  “We have to go out there,” said Derkhan suddenly. Isaac met her eyes. Slowly, he nodded. He strode across to the window and peered out.

  “I can’t tell where we are,” he said eventually. “It’s just streets.” He moved his head exaggeratedly from side to side, seeking some landmark. He re-entered the room eventually, shaking his head. “You’re right, Dee,” he said. “Maybe we’ll . . . find something . . . maybe we can get out of here.”

  Yagharek moved without sound, stalking from the little room into a dimly lit corridor. He looked up and down its length, carefully.

  The wall to his left slanted steeply in with the roof. To his right, the narrow p
assage was broken with two doors, before it curved away to the right and disappeared in shadows.

  Yagharek kept crouched down. He beckoned slowly behind him, without looking, and Derkhan and Isaac emerged slowly. They carried their guns loaded with the last of their powder, damp and unreliable, aiming vaguely into the darkness.

  They waited while Yagharek crept slowly on, then followed him in faltering, pugnacious steps.

  Yagharek stopped by the first door and flattened his feathered head against it. He waited a moment, then pushed it open slowly, slowly. Derkhan and Isaac crept over, peered into an unlit storeroom.

  “Is there anything in there we can use?” hissed Isaac, but the shelves were empty of everything except dry and dusty bottles, ancient decaying brushes.

  When Yagharek reached the second door, he repeated the operation, waving at Isaac and Derkhan to be still and listening intently through the thin wood. This time he was still for much longer. The door was bolted several times, and Yagharek fumbled with all the simple slide-locks. There was a fat padlock, but it was resting open across one of the bolts, as if it had been left for a moment. Yagharek pushed slowly at the door. He poked his head through the resulting gap and stood like that, perched half in, half out of the room for a disconcertingly long time.

  When he withdrew, he turned.

  “Isaac,” he said quietly. “You must come.”

  Isaac frowned and stepped forward, his heart beating hard in his chest.

  What is it? he thought. What’s going on? (And even as he thought that a voice in the deepest part of his mind told him what was waiting for him, and he only half heard it, would not listen for fear that it was wrong.)

  He pushed past Yagharek and walked hesitantly into the room.

  It was a large, rectangular attic space, lit by three oil-lamps and the thin wisps of gaslight that found their way up from the street and through the grubby, sealed window. The floor was littered with a tangle of metal and discarded rubbish. The room stank.

  Isaac was only fleetingly conscious of any of this.

  In a dim corner, turned away from the door, kneeling up and chewing dutifully with her back and head and gland attached to an extraordinary twisted sculpture, was Lin.

  Isaac cried out.

  It was an animal wail, and it grew and grew in strength until Yagharek hissed at him, unheeded.

  Lin turned with a start at the sound. She trembled when she saw him.

  He stumbled over to her, weeping at the sight of her, at her russet skin and flexing headscarab; and as he approached he cried out again, this time in anguish, as he saw what had been done to her.

  Her body was bruised and covered with burns and scratches, welts that hinted at vicious acts and brutalizations. She had been beaten across her back, through her ragged shift. Her breasts were criss-crossed with thin scars. She was bruised heavily around her belly and thighs.

  But it was her head, the twitching headbody, that almost made him fall.

  Her wings had been taken: he knew that, from the envelope, but to see them, to see the tiny ragged stubs flit in agitation . . . Her carapace had been snapped and bent backwards in places, uncovering the tender flesh beneath, which was scabbed and broken. One of her compound eyes was crumpled and sightless. The middle headleg on her right and the hind one on her left had been torn from their sockets.

  Isaac fell forward and held her, closing her into him. She was so thin . . . so tiny and ragged and broken, she was trembling as she touched him, her whole body tense as if she could not believe he were real, as if he might be taken away as some new torture.

  Isaac clutched her and cried. He held her carefully, feeling her thin bones beneath her skin.

  “I would have come,” he moaned in abject misery and joy. “I would’ve come, I thought you were dead . . .”

  She pushed him back just a little, until she had space for her hands to move.

  Wanted you, love you, she signed chaotically, help me save me take me away, couldn’t he couldn’t let me die till had finished this . . .

  For the first time, Isaac looked up at the extraordinary sculpture that rose above and behind her, onto which she was spreading khepri-spit. It was an incredible multicoloured thing, a horrific kaleidoscopic figure of composite nightmares, limbs and eyes and legs sprouting in weird combinations. It was almost finished, with only a smooth framework where what looked like a head must be, and an empty clutch of air that suggested a shoulder.

  Isaac gasped at it, looked back at her.

  Lemuel had been right. There was, strategically, no reason at all for Motley to keep Lin alive. He would not have done so for any other captive. But his vanity, his mystical self-aggrandizement and philosophical dreamings were stimulated by Lin’s extraordinary work. Lemuel could not have known that.

  Motley could not bear for the sculpture to remain unfinished.

  Derkhan and Yagharek entered. When she saw Lin, Derkhan cried out as Isaac had done. She ran across the room to where Isaac and Lin embraced and put her own arms around the two of them, crying and smiling.

  Yagharek paced uneasily towards them.

  Isaac was murmuring to Lin, telling her over and over how sorry he was, that he thought she was dead, that he would have come.

  Kept me working, beating and . . . and torturing, taunting me, Lin signed, giddy and exhausted with emotion.

  Yagharek was about to speak, but he snapped his head suddenly around.

  The tramp of hurried feet was audible in the corridor outside.

  Isaac stood, supporting Lin as he came, keeping her enfolded in his embrace. Derkhan moved away from the two of them. She drew her pistols and turned to face the door. Yagharek flattened himself against the wall in the shadow of the sculpture, his whip coiled and ready.

  The door burst open and hammered against the wall, sprang back.

  Motley stood before them.

  He was silhouetted. Isaac saw a twisted outline against the black-painted walls of the corridor. A garden of multifarious limbs, a walking patchwork of organic forms. Isaac’s mouth dropped open in amazement. He realized as he watched the shuffling goat- and bird- and dog-footed creature, as he saw the clutching tentacles and knots of tissue, the composite bones and invented skin, that Lin’s piece was taken, without fancy, from life.

  At the sight of him, Lin went limp with fear and the memory of pain. Isaac felt rage begin to engulf him.

  Motley stepped back slightly and turned to face the way he had come.

  “Security!” shouted Motley from some unclear mouth. “Get here now!” He stepped back into the room.

  “Grimnebulin,” he said. His voice was quick and tense. “You came. Didn’t you get my message? Bit remiss, aren’t you?” Motley stepped into the room and the faint light.

  Derkhan fired twice. Her bullets tore through Motley’s armoured skin and patches of fur. He staggered back on multiple legs with a bellow of pain. His cry became a vicious laugh.

  “Far too many internal organs to hurt me, you useless slut,” he shouted. Derkhan spat with fury and edged closer to the wall.

  Isaac stared at Motley, saw teeth gnashing in a multitude of mouths. The floor shook as people pounded along the corridor outside, racing towards the room.

  Men appeared in the doorway behind Motley, waved weapons, waited uncertainly. For a moment Isaac’s stomach pitched: the men had no faces, only smooth skin stretched tight over their skulls. What kind of fucking Remades are these? he thought giddily. Then he caught sight of the mirrors extending backwards from the helmets.

  His eyes widened as he realized that these were shaven-headed Remade with their heads turned one hundred and eighty degrees, specially and perfectly adapted to dealing with the slake-moths. They waited now for their boss’s orders, their muscular bodies facing Isaac, their heads turned permanently away.

  One of Motley’s limbs—an ugly, segmented and suckered thing—shot out to indicate Lin.

  “Finish your godsdamned job, you bugger bitch, or you know
what you’ll get!” he shouted, and hobbled towards Lin and Isaac.

  With an utterly bestial roar, Isaac pushed Lin to one side. A spray of chymical anguish burst from her. Her hands twisted as she begged him to stay with her, but he was launching himself at Motley in an agony of guilt and fury.

  Motley shouted wordlessly, meeting Isaac’s challenge.

  There was a sudden loud concussion. An explosion of glass scintillas sprayed across the room, leaving blood and curses.

  Isaac froze in the centre of the room. Motley was frozen before him. The ranks of security were fumbling with their weapons, shouting orders at each other. Isaac looked up, into the mirrors before his eyes.

  The last slake-moth stood behind him. It was framed in the ragged stubs of the window. Glass still dripped around it like viscous liquid.

  Isaac gasped.

  It was a huge, a terrifying presence. It stood, half crouched, a little way forward from the wall and the window-hole, various savage limbs clutching the floor. It was massive as a gorilla, a body of terrible solidity and intricate violence.

  Its unthinkable wings were wide open. Patterns burst across them like negative fireworks.

  Motley had been facing the great beast: his mind was captured. He gazed at the wings with an array of unblinking eyes. Behind him his troops were shouting in agitation, levelling weapons.

  Yagharek and Derkhan had been standing with their backs to the wall. Isaac saw them in his mirrors behind the thing. The patterned sides of its wings were hidden from them: they were still with shock, but not in thrall.

  Between the slake-moth and Isaac, sprawled on the boards where she had fallen in the ragged cascade of glass, was Lin.

  “Lin!” shouted Isaac desperately. “Don’t turn round! Don’t look behind you! Come to me!”

  Lin froze at his panicked tone. She saw him reach backwards in an appallingly clumsy gesture, step hesitatingly towards her without turning round.