Perdido Street Station - China Mieville [182]
The Weaver was scattering a handful of bloody ears onto the ground.
Below its gently moving hand, blood spilt across the dust in slicks of dirty gore. The gobbets of freshly sliced flesh fell, tracing the perfect shape of a pair of scissors.
The Weaver looked up, impossibly laden with struggling figures, moving as if unencumbered.
. . . FERVENT AND LOVABLE . . . it whispered, and disappeared.
What was an experience becomes a dream and then a memory. I cannot see the edges between the three.
The Weaver, the great spider, came among us.
In the Cymek we call it furiach-yajh-hett: the dancing mad god. I never thought to see one. It came out of a funnel in the world to stand between us and the lawgivers. Their pistols were silent. Words died in throats like flies in a web.
The dancing mad god moved through the room with a savage and alien step. It gathered us to it—we renegades, we criminals. We refugees. Constructs that tell tales; earthbound garuda; reporters who make the news; criminal scientists and scientific criminals. The dancing mad god collected us all like errant worshippers, chiding us for going astray.
Its knife-hands flashed. The humans’ ears fell in flesh-rain to the dust. I was spared. My feather-hidden ears hold no delight for this mad power. Through the ululations and the despairing wails of pain the furiach-yajh-hett ran in circles of delight.
And then it tired and stepped through the twists of matter out of the warehouse.
Into another space.
I shut my eyes.
I moved in a direction I had never known existed. I felt the scuttling slide of that great multitude of legs as the dancing mad god moved along powerful threads of force. It scampered at obscure angles to reality, with all of us bobbing beneath it. My stomach pitched. I felt myself catch and snag on the fabric of the world. My skin prickled in the alien plane.
For a moment the god’s madness infected me. For a moment, the greed for knowledge forgot its place and demanded to be quenched. For a sliver of time, I opened my eyes.
For a terrible eternal breath I glimpsed the reality through which the dancing mad god was treading.
My eyes itched and watered, they felt as if they would burst, as if a thousand sandstorms afflicted them. They could not assimilate what was before them. My poor eyes struggled to see the unseeable. I beheld nothing but a fraction, the edge of an aspect.
I saw, or thought I saw, or have convinced myself I saw a vastness that dwarfed any desert sky. A yawning gap of Leviathan proportions. I whined and heard others whine around me. Spread across the emptiness, streaming away from us with cavernous perspective in all directions and dimensions, encompassing lifetimes and hugenesses with each intricate knot of metaphysical substance, was a web.
Its substance was known to me.
The crawling infinity of colours, the chaos of textures that went into each strand of that eternally complex tapestry . . . each one resonated under the step of the dancing mad god, vibrating and sending little echoes of bravery, or hunger, or architecture, or argument, or cabbage or murder or concrete across the æther. The weft of starlings’ motivations connected to the thick, sticky strand of a young thief’s laugh. The fibres stretched taut and glued themselves solidly to a third line, its silk made from the angles of seven flying buttresses to a cathedral roof. The plait disappeared into the enormity of possible spaces.
Every intention, interaction, motivation, every colour, every body, every action and reaction, every piece of physical reality and the thoughts that it engendered, every connection made, every nuanced moment of history and potentiality, every toothache and flagstone, every emotion