Perdido Street Station - China Mieville [218]
“Fuck it!” shouted Isaac in alarm. “What shall we do?”
“They will not come,” replied the man. “They are quicker and stronger, less credulous than their backward brother. They can tell that all is not right. They can taste only you three, but they can sense the physical vibrations of all my bodies. The disparity unnerves them. They will not come.”
Slowly, Isaac, Derkhan and Yagharek relaxed.
They looked at each other, at the bone-thin avatar. Behind them, the slake-moth wailed in its death-agony. It was ignored.
“What,” said Derkhan, “are we going to do?”
After some minutes, the flickering, baleful shadows overhead disappeared. In the tiny desolate patch of the city, surrounded by the ghosts of industry, the pall of nightmare energy seemed to lift for a few hours.
Even exhausted and bereaved as they were, Isaac and Derkhan, even Yagharek, were buoyed by the Council’s triumph. Isaac stalked closer to the dying moth, investigated its tortured head, its indistinct, illogical features. Derkhan wanted to torch it, destroy it completely, but the avatar would not allow it. It wanted to keep the creature’s head, investigate it in the quiet minutes of its day, learn about the inside of the slake-moth mind.
The thing kept a tenacious claw-hold on life until past two in the morning, when it expired with a long moan and a trickle of foul citric saliva. There was a quivering release of pent-up alien misery, a ripple that dispersed quickly across the dump as the slake-moth’s empathic ganglions flexed in death.
There was a sublime stillness in the dump.
With a companionable motion, the avatar sat beside the two humans and the garuda. They began to talk. They tried to formulate plans. Even Yagharek spoke, with a quiet excitement. He was a hunter. He knew how to set traps.
“We can’t do anything until we know where the damn things are,” said Isaac. “Either we hunt them or we just have to sit and act as bait, hoping the bastard creatures come for us out of the millions of souls in the city.”
Derkhan and Yagharek nodded in agreement.
“I know where they are,” said the avatar.
The others stared at him in astonishment.
“I know where they hide,” he said. “I know where they nest.”
“How?” hissed Isaac. “Where?” He grasped the avatar’s arm in his excitement, then shocked, withdrew his grasp. He was leaning in close to the avatar’s face, and something of the horror of that visage struck him. He could see the rim of shorn skull just inside the man’s curling skin, drab white, streaked with bloody residue. He could see the gory cable plunge into the intricate fold at the bottom of the hollow in the man’s head, from where his brain had been torn.
The avatar’s skin was dry and stiff and cold, like hanging meat.
Those eyes, with their unchanging expression of concentration and thinly hidden anguish, regarded him.
“All of me have tracked the attacks. I have cross-referenced dates and places. I have found correlations, systematized them. I have factored in the evidence of the cameras and the computing engines whose information I steal, the unexplainable shapes in the night sky, the shadows that do not correspond to any city-race.
“There are complex patterns. I have formalized them. I have discarded possibilities and applied high-level mathematical programmes to the remaining potentialities. With unknown variables, absolute certainty is impossible. But according to the data available, the chance is seventy-eight per cent that the nest is where I say.
“The moths are living in the Glasshouse, above the cactus people, in Riverskin.”
“Damn,” hissed Isaac, after a silence. “Are they animals? Or are they cunning? It’s inspired, whichever. Best damn place I can think of.”
“Why?” said Yagharek unexpectedly.
Isaac and Derkhan looked at him.
“New Crobuzon cactacae ain’t like the Cymek variety, Yag,” said Isaac. “Or rather, they are, and maybe that’s the problem. You’ve dealt with ’em in Shankell, doubtless. You know what they’re like. Our cactus people here are