Perdido Street Station (90 page)

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 aether. 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 aether.

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 aether 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.