Perdido Street Station - China Mieville [220]
I would not trust Rudgutter, he thought coldly, if the murdering bastard swore by his children’s souls.
If the state found the moths, Isaac realized, it would do everything in its power to recapture them. Because they were so damned valuable. They might be dragged out of the night skies, the danger might be contained again, but they would be locked up once more in some laboratory, hawked in another foul auction, returned to their commercial purpose.
Once again, they would be milked. And fed.
No matter how ill-suited he was to tracking the slake-moths down and destroying them, Isaac knew he would try. He would not be party to the alternatives.
They talked on, until the darkness began to leech from the eastern fringe of the sky. Tentative suggestions began to coalesce. They were all conditionals. But even hedged around with a hundred qualifications, the half-schemes grew and took shape. Slowly, a sequence of actions suggested itself. With a growing astonishment, Isaac and Derkhan realized that they had a kind of plan.
As they talked, the Council sent its mobile selves into the depths of the dump. They rummaged unseen among the mounds of trash, to re-emerge carrying bent wire, battered saucepans and colanders, even one or two broken helmets, and great glinting piles of mirror, savage random jags.
“Can you find a welder, or a metallo-thaumaturge?” asked the avatar. “You must make defensive helmets.” He described the mirrors that must be mounted before the lines of sight.
“Yeah,” said Isaac. “We’ll return tomorrow night to make the helmets. And then . . . then we have a day to . . . to ready ourselves. Before we go in.”
While the night was still fully ascendant, the various constructs began to creep away. They returned to their masters’ homes, early enough that their night’s journeys were unnoticed.
The daylight had spread and the occasional guttural sound of the trains increased. The raucous and filthy early morning dialogue of the barge-families began, shouted across the water on the other side of the rubbish. The early shifts of workers began to trudge into the factories and abase themselves before the vast chains, the steam engines and juddering hammers of those profane cathedrals.
There were only the five figures left in the clearing: Isaac and his companions; the ghastly lich that spoke for the Construct Council; and the looming Council itself, moving its segmented limbs sedately.
Isaac, Derkhan and Yagharek rose to go. They were exhausted and in varying degrees of pain, from knees and hands flayed by the barbed ground to Isaac’s still-shuddering head. They were smeared with muck and grime. They shed dust as thick as smoke. It was as if they burned.
They stashed the mirrors and the material to make helmets in a place they would remember in the dump. Isaac and Derkhan looked around in confusion at the landscape so utterly changed by daylight, its threatening demeanour become pathetic, the half-glimpsed looming forms revealed as broken prams and torn mattresses. Yagharek picked his bound feet up high, stumbling a little, and walked unerringly towards the pathway from where they had come.
Isaac and Derkhan joined him. They were utterly drained. Derkhan’s face was white, and she dabbed in miserable pain at her missing ear. As they were about to disappear behind the shifting walls of crushed rubbish, the avatar called out.
When Isaac heard what the avatar said, he began to frown, and did not stop while he turned away and walked out of the Council’s presence with his companions, nor did he stop all the while he wound his way through the channels in the industrial midden and out into the slowly illuminated estates of Griss Twist. The Construct Council’s words stayed with him, and he thought them over, carefully.
“You cannot hold on safely to everything you carry, der Grimnebulin,” the avatar had said. “In future, do not leave your precious things beside the railway.
“Bring your crisis