Perdido Street Station - China Mieville [308]
“Isaac, bring her here,” said Derkhan urgently. Isaac lifted Lin up, biting his lip at how light she was. He walked quickly with her to the window. As he watched her, his face suddenly broke into an incredulous, an ecstatic smile. He began to weep.
From the passage outside, the slake-moth keened weakly.
“Dee, look!” he hissed. Lin’s hands were fluttering erratically in front of her as he cradled her. “She’s signing! She’s going to be all right!”
Derkhan peered over, reading her words. Isaac watched, shook his head.
“She’s not conscious, it’s just random words, but, Dee, it’s words . . . We were in time . . .”
Derkhan smiled in delight. She kissed Isaac hard on the cheek, stroked Lin’s broken headscarab gently.
“Get her out of here,” she said quietly. Isaac peered out of the window, where Yagharek had wedged himself into a corner of architecture, on a little extrusion of brick a few feet away.
“Give her to me, and follow,” said Yagharek, jerking his head up above him. At the eastern end the long sloped roof of Motley’s terrace joined with the next street, which jutted perpendicularly south in a descending row of houses. The roofscape of Bonetown stretched out above and all around them; a raised landscape; linked islands of slate over the dangerous streets, extending for miles in the darkness, sweeping away from the Ribs to Mog Hill and beyond.
Even then, devoured alive by tides of fire and acid, stunned with bolts of obscure energy, the last slake-moth might have survived.
It was a creature of astonishing endurance. It could heal itself at frightening speeds.
If it had been in the open air, it could have leapt up and spread those terribly wounded wings and disappeared from the earth. It might have forced itself up, ignoring the pain, ignoring the scorched flakes of skin and chitin that would flutter around it filthily. It could have rolled into the wet clouds to douse the flames, wash itself free of acid.
If its family had survived, if it had been confident that it could return to its siblings, that they would hunt together again, it might not have panicked. If it had not witnessed a carnage of its kind, an impossible blast of poisonous vapour that enticed its brothersisters in and burst them, the moth would not have been insane with fear and anger, and it might not have become frenzied and lashed out, trapping itself further.
But it was alone. Trapped under brick, in a claustrophobic warren that constricted it, flattened its wings, left it nowhere to go. Assailed on all sides by murderous, endless pain. The fire came and came again too fast for it to heal.
It staggered the length of the corridor in Motley’s headquarters, a white-hot ball, reaching out to the last with ragged claws and spines, trying to hunt. It fell just before the top of the stairs.
Motley and the Remade looked on in awe from halfway down, praying that it lay still, that it did not crawl over the lip of the stairway and tumble flaming onto them.
It did not. It was still while it died.
When they were sure the slake-moth was dead, Motley sent men and women up and down the stairs in quick columns, carrying sodden towels and blankets to control the blaze it had left in its wake.
It took twenty minutes before the fire was subdued. The beams and boards of the attic were split and smoke-fouled. Massive footprints of charred wood and blistered paint stretched the length of the passage. The smouldering body of the moth rested on the top of the stairs, an unrecognizable pile of flesh and tissue, twisted by heat into an even more exotic shape than it had had in life.
“Grimnebulin and his bastard friends’ll be gone,” said Motley. “Find them. Find where they went. Track them down. Trace them. Tonight. Now.”
It was easy to see how they had escaped, out of the window and onto the roof. From there, though, they could have gone in almost any direction. Motley’s men shifted, looking uneasily at each other.
“Move,