Perdido Street Station - China Mieville [291]
Isaac felt as if his gums were rotting, as if his teeth were trying to escape his jaw.
The Weaver danced on in delight.
An enormous beacon was scorched into the æther. A huge and rapidly growing column of energy, a pretend consciousness, the map of a counterfeit mind that swelled and fattened in a fearful curve of growth, impossible and vastly there, the portent of a nonexistent god.
Across New Crobuzon, more than nine hundred of the city’s best communicators and thaumaturges paused and looked suddenly in the direction of The Crow, their faces twisted with confusion and nebulous alarm. The most sensitive held their heads and moaned with inexplicable pain.
Two hundred and seven began to jabber in nonsense combinations of numerological code and lush poetry. One hundred and fifty-five suffered massive nosebleeds, two of them ultimately unstaunchable and fatal.
Eleven, who worked for the government, scrabbled from their workshop at the top of the Spike and ran, with handkerchiefs and tissues ineffectually stopping the bloody slick from their noses and ears, towards Eliza Stem-Fulcher’s office.
“Perdido Street Station!” was all they could say. They gabbled it like idiots for some minutes, to the home secretary and the mayor who was with her, shaking them with frustration, their lips twitching for other sounds, blood spattering their bosses’ immaculate tailoring.
“Perdido Street Station!”
Way out above the wide empty streets of Chnum; swooping slowly past the curve of temple towers in Tar Wedge; skirting the river above Howl Barrow and soaring widespread over the pauper slum of Stoneshell, intricate bodies moved.
With sluggish strokes and drooling tongues, the slake-moths sought prey.
They were hungry, eager to gorge themselves and ready their bodies and breed again. They must hunt.
But in four sudden, identical and simultaneous movements—separated by miles, in different quadrants of the city—the four slake-moths snapped their heads up as they flew.
They beat their complex wings and slowed, until they were almost still in the air. Four slobbering tongues lolled and lapped at the air.
In the distance, over the skyline that glimmered with grots of filthy light, on the outskirts of the central mass of building, a column was rising from the earth. Even as they licked and tastesmelled it, it grew and grew, and their wings beat back frantically as the wafts of flavour came over them, and the incredible succulent stench of the thing boiled and eddied in the æther.
The other smells and tastes of the city dissipated into nothing. With an amazing speed, the extraordinary flavour-trail doubled its intensity, suffusing the slake-moths, making them mad.
One by one they emitted a chittering of astounded, delighted greed, a single-minded hunger.
From all the way across the city, from the four compass points, they converged in a frenzy of flapping, four starving exultant powerful bodies, descending to feed.
There was a tiny putter of lights on a little console. Isaac edged closer, keeping his body low, as if he could duck under the beacon of energy pouring from Andrej’s skull. The old man lolled and twitched on the ground.
Isaac was careful not to look at Andrej’s sprawling form. He peered at the console, making sense of the little play of diodes.
“I think it’s the Construct Council,” he said over the drab rainfall sound. “It’s sending instructions to get round the firewall, but I don’t think it’ll be able to. This is too simple for it,” he said, and patted the circuit-valve. “There’s nothing for it to get control of.” Isaac visualized a struggle in the femtoscopic byways of wiring.
He looked up.
The Weaver was ignoring him and them all, drumming its little fingers against the slick concrete in complicated rhythms. Its low voice was impenetrable.
Derkhan was staring in exhausted disgust at Andrej. Her head jerked gently back and forward as if she was rocked by waves. Her mouth moved. She spoke in silent tongues. Don’t die, thought Isaac fervently,