Perdido Street Station - China Mieville [306]
It was like some terrifying children’s game.
Yagharek and Derkhan shifted quietly, moving towards each other behind the moth. It chittered and looked up at their motion, but it remained more wary of the mass of figures before it, and it did not turn round.
Lin slid fitfully along the floor towards Isaac’s back, his clutching arms. A little way from him, she hesitated. She saw Motley, transfixed as if amazed, gazing past Isaac and over her, captivated by . . . something.
She did not know what was happening, what was behind her.
She knew nothing about the moths.
Isaac saw her hesitate, and began to howl at her not to stop.
Lin was an artist. She created with her touch and taste, making tactile objects. Visible objects. Sculpture to be fondled and seen.
She was fascinated by colour and light and shadow, by the interplay of shapes and lines, negative and positive spaces.
She had been locked in the attic for a long time.
In her position, some would have sabotaged the vast sculpture of Motley. The commission had become a sentence, after all. But Lin did not destroy it or skimp in her work. She poured everything she could, all her pent-up creative energy into that one monolithic and terrible piece. As Motley had known she would.
It had been her only escape. Her only means of expression. Starved of all the light and colour and shapeliness of the world, she had focused in her fear and pain and become obsessed. Creating a presence herself, the better to beguile her.
And now something extraordinary had entered her attic world.
She knew nothing of the slake-moths. The command don’t look behind you was familiar from fables, made sense only as a moralistic injuncture, some heavy-handed lesson. Isaac must mean be quick or don’t doubt me, something like that. His command made sense only as an emotional exhortation.
Lin was an artist. Savaged and tortured, confused by imprisonment and pain and degradation, Lin grasped only that something extraordinary, some utterly affecting sight had risen up behind her. And hungry for any kind of wonder after the weeks of pain in the shadow of those drab, colourless and shapeless walls, she paused, then quickly glanced behind her.
Isaac and Derkhan screamed in terrible disbelief; Yagharek called out with shock like some livid crow.
With her one good eye, Lin took in the extraordinary sweep of the slake-moth’s shape with awe; and then she caught sight of the gusting colours on the wings, and her mandibles clattered briefly and she was silent. Enthralled.
She squatted on the floor, her head twisted over her left shoulder, gazing stupidly at the great beast, at the rush of colours. Motley and she stared at the slake-moth’s wings, their minds overflowing.
Isaac howled and stumbled backwards, reaching out desperately.
The slake-moth reached out with a slithering clutch of tentacles and pulled Lin towards it. Its vast and dripping mouth slid open like a doorway into some stygian place. Rank citric spittle drooled across Lin’s face.
As Isaac grabbed backwards for her hand, staring intently into his mirrors, the slake-moth’s tongue lurched out of its stinking throat and lapped at her headscarab briefly. Isaac shouted again and again, but he could not stop it.
The long tongue, slippery with saliva, inveigled its way past Lin’s slack mouthparts and plunged into her head.
At the sound of Isaac’s appalled yells, two of the Remade trapped behind Motley’s enormous bulk reached over and fired erratically with their flintlocks. One missed completely, the other clipped the slake-moth’s thorax, eliciting a brief dollop of liquid and an irritated hiss, but no more. It was not the right weapon.
The two who had fired shouted at their fellows, and the small squadron began to shove at Motley’s bulk, in careful, timed thrusts.
Isaac was clutching for Lin’s hand.
The slake-moth’s throat swelled and shrank, its gristly throat swallowing in great swigs.
Yagharek reached down and grabbed the oil-lamp that stood by the foot of the sculpture. He hefted it briefly in his left hand,