Perdido Street Station - China Mieville [244]
The five monkey-constructs scampered mechanically beside their organic companions. Their heavy metal bodies were quiet. They emitted only a few strange sounds. Isaac did not doubt that for the cactus people of the dome, the regular diet of nightmares would that night be amended to include some metallic scuttling thing, some clattering menace that stalked the streets.
Isaac found walking in the dome deeply unsettling. Even with the red-stone additions to the architecture and the spitting torchlight, the streets seemed basically normal. They could have been anywhere in the city. And yet, stretching over everything, creeping inwards from horizon to horizon, encircling the world like some claustrophobic sky, the enormous dome defined everything. Glimmers of light came through from outside, warped by the thick glass, uncertain and vaguely threatening. The black lattice of ironwork that held the glass in place ensnared the little townscape like a netting, like a vast spider’s web.
At that thought, Isaac felt a sudden shuddering lurch of emotion.
He felt a vertiginous sense of certainty.
The Weaver was somewhere nearby.
He faltered as he ran and looked up. He had seen the world as a web, for a split second, had glimpsed the worldweb itself, and had sensed the proximity of that mighty arachnid spirit.
“Isaac!” hissed Derkhan, running past him. She pulled him with her. He had been standing still in the street, gazing skyward, desperately trying to find his way into that awareness again. He tried to whisper to her, to let her know what he had realized, as he stumbled after her, but he could not be clear and she could not listen. She dragged him with her through the dark streets.
After a twisting journey, ducking out of sight of patrols and glancing up at the glowering glass sky, they halted before a clutch of dark buildings, at the intersection of two deserted streets. Yagharek waited until they were all close enough to hear him, before turning and gesturing.
“From that top window there,” he said.
The swooping dome bore down inexorably on the tail of the terrace, destroying the rooftops and reducing the mass of the street’s houses to ever-more-squat piles of rubble. But Yagharek was pointing at the end furthest from the wall, where the buildings were mostly intact.
The three floors below the attic were occupied. Glimmers of light spilt from the edges of curtains.
Yagharek ducked back around the edge of a little alley and pulled the others in after him. Way off to the north, they could still hear the consternated shouting from the confused patrols, desperate to decide what to do.
“Even if it wasn’t too risky to get the cactacae on our side,” hissed Isaac, “we’d be fucked if we tried to get them to help us now. They’re in a damn frenzy. One sniff of us and they’ll go berserk, hack us up with those rivebows faster’n you can say ‘knife.’ “
“We must go past the rooms where the cactus people sleep,” said Yagharek. “We must get to the top of the house. We must find where the slake-moths come from.”
“Tansell, Penge,” said Shadrach decisively, “you watch the door.” They looked at him for a moment, then both nodded. “Prof? I reckon you’d best come in with me. And these constructs . . . you think they’ll be helpful, yes?”
“I think they’ll be damn well essential,” said Isaac. “But listen . . . I think the . . . I think there’s a Weaver here.”
Everyone stared at him.
Derkhan and Lemuel looked incredulous. The adventurers were quite impassive.
“What makes you say