Perdido Street Station - China Mieville [159]
The city rocked and shivered. Dreams were become a pestilence, a bacillus that seemed to leap from sleeper to sleeper. They even inveigled their way into the minds of the waking. Nightwatchmen and militia agents; late-night dancers and frantic students; insomniacs: they found themselves losing their trains of thought, drifting into fantasies and ruminations of weird, hallucinatory intensity.
All over the city the night was fissured by cries of nocturnal misery.
New Crobuzon was gripped in an epidemic, an outbreak, a plague of nightmares.
The summer was clotting over New Crobuzon. Stifling it. The night air was as hot and thick as an exhaled breath. Way above the city, transfixed between the clouds and the sprawl, the great winged things drooled.
They spread out and flapped their vast irregular wings, sending fat gusts of air rolling with each sweeping motion. Their intricate appendages—tentacular and insectile, anthropoid, chitinous, numerous—trembled as they passed in febrile excitement.
They unhinged their disturbing mouths and long feathered tongues unrolled towards the rooftops. The very air was thick with dreams, and the flying things lapped eagerly at the succulent juices. When the fronds that tipped their tongues were heavy with the invisible nectar, their mouths gaped and they rolled up their tongues with an eager smacking. They gnashed their huge teeth.
They soared. As they flew they shat, exuding all the sewage from their previous meals. The invisible spoor spread out in the sky, psychic effluent that slid, lumpy and cloying, through the interstices of the mundane plane. It oozed its way through æther to fill the city, saturating the minds of the inhabitants, disturbing their rest, bringing forth monsters. The sleeping and the wakeful felt their minds churn.
The five went hunting.
Amid the vast swirling broth of the city’s nightmares, each of the dark things could discern individual snaking trails of flavour.
Usually, they were opportunistic hunters. They would wait until they scented some strong mental tumult, some mind particularly delicious in its own exudations. Then the intricate dark flyers would turn and dive, bear down on the prey. They used their slim hands to unlock top-floor windows, and paced across moonlit attics towards shivering sleepers to drink their fill. They clutched with a multitude of appendages at lonely figures walking the riverside, figures who screeched and screeched as they were taken into a night already full of plaintive cries.
But when they had discarded the flesh-husks of their meals to twitch and loll slack-mouthed on boards and shadowed cobbles, when their stabs of hunger had been assuaged and meals could be taken more slowly, for pleasure, the winged creatures became curious. They tasted the faint drippings of minds they had tasted before, and, like inquisitive, coldly intelligent hunting beasts, they pursued them.
Here was the tenuous mental thread of one of the guards, who had stood outside their cage in Bonetown and fantasized about his friend’s wife. His flavoursome imaginings wafted up to wrap around a twitching tongue. The creature that tasted that wheeled around in the sky, in the chaotic arc of a butterfly or a moth, and dived towards Echomire, following his prey’s scent.
Another of the great airborne shapes pulled up suddenly in a vast figure of eight, rolling over its own tracks, seeking out the familiar flavour that had flitted across its tastebuds. It was a nervous aroma that had permeated the cocoons of the pupating monsters. The great beast hovered over the city, saliva dissipating in various dimensions below it. The emissions were obscured, frustratingly tenuous, but the creature’s sense of taste was fine, and it bore down towards Mafaton, licking its way along the enticing trail of the scientist who had watched it grow, Magesta Barbile.
The twisted one, the malnourished runt that had liberated its fellows, found a taste-trail that it, too, remembered. Its mind was not so developed, its tastebuds less exact: it could not