Perdido Street Station - China Mieville [127]
Rudgutter reached out with his right hand and opened the door. The four of them shuffled forward, maintaining their positions relative to each other, keeping the triangle in place around them. Stem-Fulcher pushed the door closed again behind them.
They were in an absolutely dark room. They could see only by the faint ambient glow of the lines of power, until Vansetty hung the clockwork motor around his neck on a strap and lit a candle. In its inadequate light they saw that the room was perhaps twelve feet by ten, dusty and absolutely empty apart from an old desk and chair by the far wall, a gently humming boiler by the door. There were no windows, no shelves, nothing else at all. The air was very close.
From his bag Vansetty extracted an unusual hand-held machine. Its twists of wire and metal, its knots of multicoloured glass were intricate and lovingly crafted. Its use was quite opaque. Vansetty leaned briefly out of the circle and plugged an input valve into the boiler beside the door. He pulled a lever on the top of the little machine, which began to hum and blink with lights.
“ ’Course, in your old days, before I came into the profession, you had to use a live offering,” he explained as he unwound a tight coil of wire from the underside of the machine. “But we’re not savages, are we? Science is a wonderful thing. This little darling—” he patted the machine proudly “—is an amplifier. Increases the output from that engine by a factor of two hundred, two hundred and ten, and transforms it into an ætherial energy form. Bleed that through the wires so . . .” Vansetty slung the uncoiled wire into the far corner of the tiny room, behind the desk. “And there you go! The victimless sacrifice!”
He grinned with triumph, then turned his attention to the dials and knobs of the little engine, and began to twist and prod them with intense attention. “No more learning stupid languages, neither,” he muttered quietly. “Invocation’s automatic now and all. We’re not actually going anywhere, you understand?” He spoke louder, suddenly. “We ain’t abyssonauts, and we ain’t playing with nearly enough power to do an actual transplantropic leap. All we’re doing is peering through a little window, letting the Hellkin come to us. But the dimensionality of this room is going to be just a damn touch unstable for a while, so stick within the protection and don’t muck about. Got it?”
Vansetty’s fingers skittered over the box. For two or three minutes, nothing happened. There was nothing but the heat and pounding from the boiler, the drumming and whining of the little machine in Vansetty’s hands. Beneath it all, Rudgutter’s foot tapped impatiently.
And then the little room began to grow perceptibly warmer.
There was a deep, subsonic tremor. An insinuation of russet light and oily smoke. Sound became muted and then suddenly sharp.
There was a disorientating moment of tugging, and a red marbling of light flickered onto every surface, moving constantly as if through bloody water.
Something fluttered. Rudgutter looked up, his eyes smarting in air that seemed suddenly clotted and very dry.
A heavy man in an immaculate dark suit had appeared behind the desk.
He leaned forward slowly, his elbows resting on the papers that suddenly littered the desk. He waited.
Vansetty peered over Rescue’s shoulder and jerked his thumb at the apparition.
“His Infernal Excellency,” he declared, “the ambassador of Hell.”
“Mayor Rudgutter,” the dæmon said, in a pleasant, low voice. “How nice to see you again. I was just doing some paperwork.” The humans looked up with a flicker of unease.
The ambassador had an echo: half a second after he spoke his words were repeated in the appalling shriek of one undergoing torture. The screamed words were not loud. They were audible just beyond the walls of the room, as if they had soared up through miles of unearthly heat from some trench in Hell’s floor.
“What can I do for you?” he continued (What can I do for you? came the soulless