Perdido Street Station - China Mieville [204]
The rubbish was a body. A vast skeleton of industrial waste twenty-five feet from skull to toe.
It sat, its back leaning against and permeable with the mounds of rubbish behind it. It raised stumpy knees from the ground. They were fashioned from enormous hinges where the arm of some vast mechanism had been torn by age from its casing. It sat with its knees raised and its feet on the ground, each one attached with a haphazard industry to the sprawling girder-legs.
It cannot stand! thought Isaac, giddy. He looked to one side and saw that Lemuel and Derkhan were gaping just as wide, that Yagharek’s eyes were shining with astonishment under his hood. It isn’t solid enough to, it can’t stand, it can only wallow in the muck!
The body of the creature was a tangled, welded lump of congealed circuitry and engineering. All kinds of engines were embedded in that huge trunk. A massive proliferation of wires and tubes of metal and thick rubber spewed from valves and outputs in its body and limbs, snaking off in all directions in the wasteland. The creature reached up with an arm powered by a massive steamhammer piston. Those lights, those eyes, swivelled from the air and looked down on the constructs and the humans below. The lights were streetlamp bulbs, jets powered by huge cylinders of gas visible in the construct’s skull. The grille of a massive air-vent had been riveted to the lower half of its face to mimic the slatted teeth of a skull.
It was a construct, an enormous construct, formed of cast-off pieces and stolen engines. Thrown together and powered without the intervention of human design.
There was the hum of powerful engines as the creature’s neck swivelled and optical lenses swept the illuminated crowd. Springs and strained metal creaked and snapped.
The human worshippers began to chant, softly.
The enormous composite construct seemed to catch sight of Isaac and his companions. It strained its constrained neck out to its limits. The gaslight beams swung down and pinioned the four.
The light did not move. It was completely blinding.
Then, abruptly, it was shut off. From somewhere close by, a thin and tremulous voice sounded.
“Welcome to our meeting, der Grimnebulin, Pigeon, Blueday and Cymek visitor.”
Isaac cast his head around, blinking furiously, his eyes bleached and unseeing.
As the fog of old light cleared from his head, Isaac caught blurred sight of a man stumbling uncertainly towards them on the broken ground. Isaac heard Derkhan breathe in sharply, heard her swear in disgust and fear.
For a moment he was confused, and then as his eyes acclimatized to the moon’s half-hearted glow and he saw the approaching figure clearly for the first time, he emitted a horrified noise at the same moment as Lemuel. Only Yagharek, the desert warrior, was silent.
The man approaching them was nude and horrifically thin. His face was stretched into a permanent wide-eyed aspect of ghastly discomfort. His eyes, his body, jerked and ticced as if his nerves were breaking down. His skin looked necrotic, as if he was submitting to slow gangrene.
But what caused the watchers to shudder and exclaim was his head. His skull had been sheered cleanly in two just above his eyes. The top was completely gone. There was a little fringe of congealed blood below the cut. From the wet hollow inside the man’s head snaked a twisting cable, two fingers thick. It was surrounded with a spiral of metal, which was bloodied and red-silver at the bottom, where it plunged into the empty brainpan.
The cable hauled up into the air, dangling down into the man’s skull. Isaac followed it slowly up with his eyes, dumbfounded and aghast. It swept back at an angle till it was twenty feet above the ground, and there it rested in the curling metal hand of the giant construct. It passed through the thing’s hand and disappeared ultimately