Perdido Street Station - China Mieville [186]
Isaac awoke in the throes of memory. He was recalling the extraordinary escape of the previous night. His eyes flickered, but remained closed.
Isaac’s breath caught.
Tentatively, he remembered. Impossible images assailed him. Silk strands a lifetime thick. Living things crawling insidiously across interlocking wires. Behind a beautiful palimpsest of coloured gossamer, a vast, timeless, infinite mass of absence . . .
In terror, he opened his eyes.
The web was gone.
Isaac looked around him slowly. He was in a brick cavern, cool and wet, dripping in the dark.
“You awake, Isaac?” said Derkhan’s voice.
Isaac struggled up onto his elbows. He groaned. His body hurt him in a variety of ways. He felt battered and torn. Derkhan sat a little way away from him on a ledge of brick. She smiled absolutely mirthlessly at him. It was a terrifying rictus.
“Derkhan?” he murmured. His eyes widened slowly. “What are you wearing?”
In the half-light emitted by a smoke-seeping oil-lamp, Isaac could see that Derkhan was dressed in a puffy dressing gown of bright pink material. It was decorated with garish needlework flowers. Derkhan shook her head.
“I don’t damn well know, Isaac,” she said bitterly. “All I know is I was knocked out by the officer with the stingbox and then I woke up here in the sewers, dressed in this. And that’s not all . . .” Her voice trembled for a brief moment. She pulled her hair back from the side of her head. He hissed at the raw, seeping clot of blood that caked the side of her face. “My . . . damned ear’s gone.” She let her hair fall back into place with an unsteady hand. “Lemuel’s been saying it was a . . . a Weaver that brought us here. You haven’t seen your own outfit yet, anyway.”
Isaac rubbed his head and sat up completely. He struggled to clear his mind of fog.
“What?” he said. “Where are we? The sewers . . . ? Where’s Lemuel? Yagharek? And . . .” Lublamai, he heard inside his mind, but he remembered Vermishank’s words. He remembered with cold horror that Lublamai was irrevocably lost.
His voice dissipated.
He heard himself, and realized that he was rambling hysterically. He stopped and breathed deeply, forced himself to calm down.
He looked around him, took in the situation.
He and Derkhan sat in a two-foot-wide alcove embedded into the wall of a windowless little brick chamber. It was about ten feet square—its far side only just visible in the faint light—with a ceiling no more than five feet above him. In each of the room’s four walls was a cylindrical tunnel, about four feet round.
The bottom of the room was completely submerged in filthy water. It was impossible to tell how deep below it the floor was. The liquid looked to be emerging from at least two of the tunnels, and slowly ebbing out of the others.
The walls were slick with organic slime and mould. The air stank richly of rot and shit.
Isaac looked down at himself and his face creased in confusion. He was dressed in an immaculate suit and tie, a dark, well-tailored piece that any Parliamentarian would be proud of. Isaac had never seen it before. Beside him, roughened and dirty, was his carpet bag.
He remembered, suddenly, the explosive pain and blood he had suffered the previous night. He gasped and reached up with trepidation. As his fingers fumbled, he exhaled explosively. His left ear was gone.
He gingerly prodded for ruined tissue, expecting to meet wet, ripped flesh or crusting scabs. Instead, unlike Derkhan, he found a well-healed scar, covered in skin. There was no pain at all. It was as if he had lost his ear years before. He frowned and clicked his fingers experimentally beside his wound. He could still hear, though doubtless his ability to pinpoint sounds would be reduced.
Derkhan shook slightly as she watched him.
“This Weaver saw fit to heal your ear, along with Lemuel’s. Not mine . . .” Her voice was subdued and miserable. “Although,” she added, “it did stop the bleeding on the wounds from that . . . damned stingbox.” She watched him for a moment. “So Lemuel wasn’t mad, or