Perdido Street Station - China Mieville [242]
On the ground below the lights were moiling in confusion. The armed patrols were running in circles, shouting to each other, aiming their weapons skyward and lowering them again, cursing. They could see almost nothing. All they knew was that some vague, fluttering things were whirling like leaves around the top of the temple, and that the elders had stopped firing the sunspear.
A group of hard, brave warriors ran in to the entrance of the temple, racing up its wide staircases towards their leaders. They were too slow. They were helpless. The moths moved away from the building, slipping smoothly through the sky, their wings still stretched out, somehow flying while the wings presented an unmoving, mesmerizing vista. Each moth dipped slightly in the air as its prey was dragged from the edge of the brick. The three cactus elders dangled in snares, cat’s-cradles of eerie slake-moth limbs, gazing up in stupor at the tumbling storm of night-colours on their captors’ wings.
Several seconds before the squad of cactacae burst up from the trapdoor onto the roof, the moths disappeared. One by one, according to some flawless unspoken order, they shot straight up and burst out of the crack in the dome. They slipped out by some breakneck charm, passing without a moment’s pause through a gap not quite large enough for their wings.
They took their comatose prey with them, tugging the deadweight bodies into the night-city with a repulsive grace.
The cactus elders left beside the wilting sunspear shook themselves in confusion and exclaimed in amazement and discomfort as their minds returned to them. Their shouts became horrified when they saw that their companions had been taken. They wailed in rage and swung the sunspear up, aiming pointlessly at the empty skies. The younger warriors appeared, their rivebows and machetes poised. They looked around in confusion at the miserable scene and lowered their weapons.
Only then, finally, with the victims shouting blood-oaths and caterwauling in anger, with the night full of confused sounds, with the slake-moths flying out across the dark metropolis, did Yagharek emerge from the martial trance and continue climbing down the girders inside the Glasshouse dome. The monkey-constructs saw him move, and followed him towards the streets.
He moved sideways along cross-beams, ensuring that he came to ground behind the backs of the houses, in the little scrap of wasteland that surrounded the foetid stub of the canal.
Yagharek dropped the last few feet and landed silently, rolling on the broken bricks. He crouched and listened.
There were three little crunches as the mechanical apes landed around him and waited for orders or suggestions.
Yagharek peered into the filthy water beside him. The bricks were slippery with years of organic muck and slime. At one end, thirty feet or so within the dome’s walls, it came to an abrupt brick end. This must have been the start of a little tributary onto the main canal system. Where it met the dome’s wall, the canal was cut off with a rudely made blockage of concrete and iron. It had been hammered into place in the water, its edges sealed as tight as they could. There were still enough tiny impurities and channels in the sodden brickwork to ensure that the trench was kept full of water from outside. It seeped in through the decaying stone and eddied to a stop, thick with rubbish and dead things, a cloying broth of water-rotting filth.
Yagharek could smell it. He crept a little further away, towards the squat stumps of a wall that rose out of the shattered architecture. Outside, he realized, in the streets of the Glasshouse, the frantic shouts continued. The air was full of idiot demands for action.
He was about to settle down, to wait for Shadrach and the others, when Yagharek saw mounds of the broken bricks rising all around him. They tumbled to the ground with a little thudding downpour. Isaac and Shadrach, Pengefinchess and Derkhan and Lemuel and Tansell rose out of the brickdust. Yagharek saw that a pile of scrap-wire and glass behind them