Perdido Street Station (84 page)

The thin hubbub of
speech died away quickly as Derkhan entered, and all the eyes in the
place turned to her. The rubble crater was crammed with bodies.
Derkhan swallowed and looked over them carefully. She saw the avatar
stumbling towards her on halting, brittle legs.

"Derkhan Blueday,"
he said quietly. "We are ready."

**

Derkhan huddled for a
short time with the avatar, checking carefully over a scribbled map.

The bloody concavity of
the avatar’s open skull emitted an extraordinary reek. In the
heat, his peculiar half-dead stench was utterly unbearable, and
Derkhan held her breath as long as she could, gulping air when she
had to through the sleeve of her filthy cloak.

While Derkhan and the
Council conferred, the rest of the assembled kept a respectful
distance.

"This is almost
all of my bloodlife congregation," said the avatar. "I sent
out mobile Is with urgent messages, and the faithful have gathered,
as you see." He paused and clucked inhumanly. "We must
proceed," he said. "It is seventeen minutes past five
o’clock."

Derkhan looked up at
the sky, which was deepening slowly, warning of dusk. She was sure
that the clock the Council was checking, some timepiece buried deep
in the bowels of the dump, was second-perfect. She nodded.

At a command from the
avatar, the congregation began to stagger out of the dump, wobbling
under their loads. Before they left, each turned to the place in the
wall of the dump where the Construct Council was hidden. They paused
a moment, then performed their devotional gesture with their hands,
that vague suggestion of interlocking wheels, putting down their
cable if necessary.

Derkhan watched them
with foreboding.

"They’ll
never make it," she said. "They haven’t the
strength."

"Many have brought
carts," responded the avatar. "They will leave in shifts."

"Carts...?"
said Derkhan. "From where?"

"Some own them,"
said the avatar. "Others have bought or rented them at my orders
today. None were stolen. We cannot risk the attention and detection
that might result."

Derkhan looked away.
The control that the Council wielded over his human followers
disturbed her.

As the last stragglers
left the dump, Derkhan and the avatar walked over to the immobile
head of the Construct Council. The Council lay on its side and became
strata of rubbish, invisible.

A short, thick coil of
cable lay waiting beside it. Its end was ragged, the thick rubber
carbonized and split for the last foot or so. Tangles of wires
splayed out of the end, unpicked from their neat skeins and plaits.

There was one vodyanoi
still in the junk-basin. Derkhan saw him standing some feet away,
watching the avatar nervously. She beckoned him to come closer. He
waddled towards them, now on all fours, now bipedally, his big webbed
toes splayed to remain steady on the treacherous ground. His overalls
were the light, waxed material the vodyanoi sometimes used: they
repelled liquid, so did not become saturated or heavy when the
vodyanoi swam. "Are you ready?" said Derkhan. The vodyanoi
nodded quickly. Derkhan studied him, but she knew little about his
people. She could see nothing about him which gave any clue as to why
he devoted himself to this strange, demanding sect, worshipping this
weird intelligence, the Construct Council. It was obvious to her that
the Council treated its worshippers like pawns, that it drew no
satisfaction or pleasure from their worship, only a degree
of...usefulness.

She could not
understand, not begin to understand, what release or service this
heretical church offered its congregation.

"Help me lift this
down to the river," she said, and picked up one end of the thick
cable. She was unsteady under its weight, and the vodyanoi picked its
way quickly over to her, helped brace her.

The avatar was still.
He watched as Derkhan and the vodyanoi made their way away from him,
towards the idle, looming cranes which burst up to the north-west,
from behind the low rise of garbage that surrounded the Construct
Council.

The cable was massive.
Derkhan had to stop several times and put the end down, then brace
herself to continue. The vodyanoi moved stolidly beside her, stopping
with her and waiting for her to carry on. Behind them, the squat
pillar of coiled cable shrank slowly as it unwound.

Derkhan chose their
passage, moving through the piles of murk towards the river like a
prospector.

"D’you know
what all this is about?" she asked the vodyanoi quickly, without
looking up. He glanced at her sharply, then back up at the thin
silhouette of the avatar, still visible against a background of
rubbish. He shook his jowly head.

"No," he said
quickly. "Just heard that...that God-machine demanded our
presence, ready for an evening’s work. Heard Its bidding when I
got here." He sounded quite normal. His tone was curt, but
conversational. Not zealous. He sounded like a worker complaining
philosophically about management’s demands for unpaid overtime.

But when Derkhan,
wheezing with effort, began to ask more—"How often do you
meet?"

"What other things
does It bid you do?"—he looked at her with fear and
suspicion, and his answers became monosyllabic, then nods, then
quickly nothing at all.

Derkhan became silent
again. She concentrated on hauling the great wire.

**

The dumps sprawled
untidily to the very edge of the river. The river banks around Griss
Twist were sheer walls of slimy brick that rose up from the dark
water. When the river was swollen, perhaps only three feet of the
decaying clay prevented a flood. At other times, there were as many
as eight feet between the top of the river-wall and the choppy
surface of the Tar.

Jutting directly from
the splintered brick was a six-foot fence of iron links and wooden
slats and concrete, built years ago to contain the dumps in their
infancy. But now the weight of accumulated filth made the old
wirelinks bow alarmingly over the water. With the decades, sections
of the flimsy wall had burst and split from its concrete moorings,
spewing rubbish into the river below. The fence had gone unrepaired,
and in those places now it was only the solidity of the crushed
rubbish itself which held the dump in place.

Blocks of compressed
garbage regularly cascaded into the water in greasy landslides of
slag.

The huge cranes which
took cargo from the trash-barges had originally been separated from
the garbage they unloaded by a few yards of no-man’s-land—flat
scrub and baked earth—but that had rapidly disappeared as the
rubbish encroached. Now the dump workers and crane operators had to
hike across the scoriatic landscape to cranes that sprouted directly
from the vulgar geology of the dump.

It was as if the trash
was fertile, and that it bore great structures.

Derkhan and the
vodyanoi turned corners in the muck until they could no longer see
the Council’s hide. They left a trail of cable that became
invisible the moment it touched the ground, transformed into one
meaningless piece of litter in a whole vista of mechanical refuse.

The hillocks of garbage
subsided as they approached the Tar. Ahead of them, the rusted fence
rose four feet or so from the surface layer of detritus. Derkhan
changed course fractionally, headed for a wide break in the wire,
where the dump was open to the river.

Across the squalid
water Derkhan could see New Crobuzon. For a moment, the lumpy spires
of Perdido Street Station were just visible, perfectly framed in the
fence’s hole, bulging distantly over the city. She could see
the rail-lines pick their way between towers that stabbed randomly
from the bedrock. Militia struts jutted ugly into the skyline.

Opposite her, Spit
Hearth welled up fatly to the river’s edge. There was no
unbroken promenade by the side of the Tar, only sections of streets
that traced it for a short time, then private gardens, sheer
warehouse walls and wasteground. There was no one to watch Derkhan’s
preparations unfold.

A few feet from the
edge, Derkhan dropped the end of the cable and moved cautiously
towards the break in the fence. She felt with her feet, making sure
the ground would not fall forward and pitch her into the filthy river
seven or more feet below. She leaned out as far as she dared, and
scanned the gently moving surface.

The sun was slowly
approaching the rooftops to the west, and the dirty black of the
river was varnished with reddening light.

"Penge!"
Derkhan hissed. "You there?"

After a moment, there
was a small splashing sound. One of the indistinct pieces of flotsam
that littered the river bobbed suddenly closer. It moved against the
current.

Slowly, Pengefinchess
raised her head from the river. Derkhan smiled. She felt an odd,
desperate relief.

"All right then,"
said Pengefinchess. "Time for my last job." Derkhan nodded
with absurd gratitude. "She’s here to help," Derkhan
said to the other vodyanoi, who stared at Pengefinchess in alarmed
suspicion. "This cable’s too big and heavy for you to
manage yourself. If you get in, then I’ll feed it down to you
both."

It took a few seconds
for him to decide the risks posed by the newcomer were less important
than the job in hand. He glowered at Derkhan in nervous fear, and
nodded. He padded quickly to the break in the link-fence, paused for
a fraction of a second, then hopped elegantly up and plunged into the
water. His dive was so controlled that there was only a tiny splash.

Pengefinchess eyed him
suspiciously as he kicked closer to her. Derkhan looked quickly
around, saw a cylindrical metal pipe thicker than her thigh. It was
long and incredibly heavy, but working urgently, ignoring her
tortured muscles, Derkhan hauled it inch by inch across the gap in
the fence, wedging it across the tear. She held her arms out, wincing
at the acid burn of her muscles. She stumbled back to the cable and
tugged it to the edge of the water.

She began to feed it
down over the top of the pipe towards the waiting vodyanoi, hauling
it as hard as she could. She pulled more and more free from the coils
hidden in the heart of the dump and sent the slack towards the water.
Finally, Derkhan had lowered it enough for Pengefinchess to kick up,
launch herself almost out of the water and grab hold of the dangling
end. Her weight pulled several feet of cable down into the water. The
edge of the dump listed alarmingly towards the river, but the cable
slid across the smooth surface of the pipe, pulling it tight against
the fence on either side and rolling smoothly across its top.

Pengefinchess reached
up again and hauled, submerging and powering towards the bottom of
the river. Kept free of the ensnaring hooks and edges of the
inorganic topsoil, the cable came in great gouts, skimming roughly
across the surface of the rubbish and plummeting into the water.

Derkhan watched its
halting progress, sudden bursts of motion as the vodyanoi hidden at
the bottom of the river jack-knifed their legs and swam hard. She
smiled, a small and brief moment of triumph, and leaned exhausted
against a broken concrete pillar.

There was nothing on
the surface of the water to give any hint of the operation below. The
great cable slipped in spurts into the water by the riverwall. It
plunged absolutely precipitately into the darkness, hitting the
surface at ninety degrees. The vodyanoi, Derkhan realized, must be
tugging masses of slack into the water first, rather than pulling the
end of the wire directly across the river and having it stretch out
across the top of the water.

Eventually the cable
was still. Derkhan watched quietly, waiting for some sign of the
operation under way.

Minutes passed.
Something emerged in the absolute centre of the river.

It was a vodyanoi,
raising an arm in triumph or salute or signal. Derkhan waved back,
squinted to see who it was, to work out if she was being given a
message.

The river was very
wide, and the figure was unclear. Then Derkhan saw that the arm
carried a composite bow, and she realized that it was Pengefinchess.
She saw then that the wave was one of curt farewell, and she
responded more fulsomely, her brows furrowing.

It made very little
sense, Derkhan realized, to have begged Pengefinchess to help at this
last stage of the hunt. Undoubtedly it had made things easier, but
they could have managed without her, with the help of more of the
Council’s vodyanoi followers. And it made little sense to feel
affected by her leaving, even if remotely; to wish Pengefinchess
luck; to wave with feeling and feel a faint lack. The vodyanoi
mercenary was taking her leave, was disappearing for more lucrative
and safer contracts. Derkhan owed her nothing, least of all thanks or
affection.

But circumstances had
made them comrades, and Derkhan was sorry to see her go. She had been
part, a small part, of this chaotic nightmare struggle, and Derkhan
marked her passing.

The arm and bow
disappeared. Pengefinchess submerged again.

Derkhan turned her back
on the river and headed back into the Council’s labyrinth.

She followed the trail
of decaying cable through the twists of the junkyard scenery, into
the Council’s presence. The avatar stood waiting by the
diminished coil of rubber-swathed wire.

"Is the crossing
successful?" he asked as soon as he saw her. He stumbled
forwards, the cable that burst from his brainpan rattling behind him.
Derkhan nodded.

"We’ve got
to get things ready here," she said. "Where’s the
output?"

The avatar turned and
indicated for her to follow him. He stopped for a moment and picked
up the other end of the cable. He staggered under its weight, but he
did not complain or ask for help, and Derkhan did not volunteer.