Perdido Street Station - China Mieville [205]
The constructed hand seemed to be made of some giant umbrella, torn apart and rewired, attached to pistons and chaintendons, opening and closing like some vast cadaverous claw. The construct played out the cable a little at a time, allowing the man to stumble towards the waiting interlopers, literally at the end of his tether.
As the monstrous puppet-man approached, Isaac moved backwards instinctively. Lemuel and Derkhan, even Yagharek followed suit. They backed unseeingly into the impassive bodies of five large constructs that had moved into position behind them.
Isaac turned in alarm, then quickly looked back at the man crawling towards him.
The man’s expression of horrified concentration did not falter as he opened his arms in a paternal gesture.
“Welcome all,” he said in his quivering voice, “to the Construct Council.”
MontJohn Rescue’s body soared at speed through the air. The nameless dextrier-handlinger that was parasitic upon him—a parasite that thought of itself, after all these years, as MontJohn Rescue—had subdued the fear at flying blind. It rushed through the air with its body held vertically, hands folded carefully, a pistol in one. Rescue looked as if he was standing and waiting for something while the night sky sped around him.
The soft presence of the sinistral-handlinger in the dog behind him had opened the door between their minds. It kept up a sinuous flow of information.
fly left go low speed up higher up and right now left faster faster dive drift hover, the sinistral said, and stroked the inside of the dextrier’s mind to calm it. Flying blind was new and terrifying, but they had practised yesterday, unseen, away in the foothills, where they had been transported by militia dirigible. The sinistral had quickly trained itself to convert left into right and to leave nothing unsaid.
The Rescue-handlinger was aggressively obedient. It was a dextrier, the soldier-caste. It channelled enormous powers through its host—flight and spitsearing, massive strength. But even with the power this particular dextrier had as handlinger representative to the Fat Sun bureaucracy, it was subservient to the noble-caste, the seers, the sinistrals. To be otherwise was to risk massive psychic attack. The sinistrals could punish by closing down the assimilation gland of the wayward dextrier, killing its host and rendering it unable to take another, reducing it to a blind, clutching handthing, without a host through which to channel.
The dextrier thought with a hard, fierce intelligence.
It had been vital that the Rescue-handlinger won the debate with the sinistrals. If they had refused to go along with Rudgutter’s plans, the dextrier would not have been able to go against them: only sinistrals could decide. But to antagonize the government would have spelt the end for the handlingers in the city. They had power, but they existed on sufferance in New Crobuzon. They were simply outnumbered by such a massive factor. The government suffered them only so long as they performed services. Rescue-dextrier was sure that any insubordination, and the government would announce that it had discovered the murderous, parasitic handlingers were loose in the city. Rudgutter might even let slip the whereabouts of the host-farm. The handlinger community would be destroyed.
So there was a certain joy in Rescue-dextrier as it flew.
Even so, it did not relish this weird experience. To bear a sinistral through the air was not unprecedented, although this kind of joint hunting had never been attempted before; but to fly without sight was utterly terrifying.
The dog-sinistral cast its mind out like fingers, like antennae that crept out in all directions for hundreds of yards. It scanned for weird soundings in the psychosphere, and whispered gently at the dextrier, telling it where to fly. The dog stared in the mirrors of its helmet and directed its carrier’s flight.
It kept links extended with all of the other hunting pairs.
anything feeling anything? it questioned. Cautiously, the other sinistrals told it that