Darkness gathered. Judah’s mechanism sucked the dark. It shifted, a tenebrous plasma; it was dragged in a slow resentful mass, the shadows become a cloud of unlight, and like water coiling down a plughole they wound into the cone, condensing, becoming darker as they went. The bricks it left were a catastrophe of physics, utterly abnatural. No light fell on them, but with their darkness gone they were clearly visible, as if harshly illuminated, but without colour, a perfect-edged grey. The cul-de-sac had become impossible: unglowing, unlit, uncoloured visibility in the absolute dark.
Shadows emerged from the funnel’s spigot to congeal in a shape between a body and a puddle of oil, a presence of dark, unsolid but profoundly there, a human shape of blackness. Gods, is that what you got from your study? Cutter thought. He had seen Judah animate hundreds of golems, but never one so uncorporeal. Judah raised his hands. The darkness golem stood. Eight feet of silhouette. It stepped into the night and became half-visible, a darkness on the dark that moved like a man.
Judah gathered his equipment and whispered, “Go!” He ran, and his companions, dumbed by what they had seen, let him pass before they found their energy again. Beside him with utterly silent steps was the golem, like a gorilla made of shade.
Left, left. Into alleys overlooked by the upreach of dark brown masonry, windows without doors, doorless brick-and-mortar cliffs that seemed a glimpse on something unfinished, the land behind the facades.
There was Toro ahead, one horn on fire and vibrating. He called to them, but his voice was drowned by the shuddering of the helmet, the unpeeling, the splitting of his horns. Screaming and with the metal itself spitting on fire, Ori scrabbled to undo the straps. He fought the helmet free and straightened, his face rivered with sweat. “There!” He pointed.
An old man at the far end of the street watched them, holding a paintbrush poised and dripping. He turned and shuffled with an incompetent run toward where the street curved away. Spiral Jacobs.
“Keep him in your sights!” Ori shouted, and ran, leaving his helmet to be eaten by blue fire. Cutter saw the thaumaturged glass eyes crack, the strange colours of fire and sparks as the heat ate arcana in the metal. It did not look like a statue’s head anymore but a skull, a bovine skull on fire.
They tried to catch Ori, who ran as if Toro’s strength were still in him. “Keep up, keep on him,” he shouted.
At the limits of their vision, where the leftward curve shut off the long alley from their view, Jacobs moved fast despite his age and gait. Judah and Cutter followed Ori, the golem loping dark beside them, and Drogon behind, and the others in changing order. The alleyway was full of echoes, of the sounds of all their feet. There were no other sounds, no gunfire of the war, no horns or noise of the Collective or the mayor’s city. Only footsteps on winter-damp brick.
“Where’s he going?” Ori shouted. Cutter turned and saw Rahul, two three seconds behind him, disappear momentarily around the corner and not emerge. Where was he? He had slipped beyond the influence of Jacobs’ reconfiguration, been tipped out into New Crobuzon; he would turn the corner into gods-knew-where.
Jacobs was still running, and was that, was he laughing? They ran faster, and from over the rooftops came light and sound again. Drogon was suddenly slow, and Jacobs was walking, his paint still dripping in his hand, and the alley was ended, and his footsteps were suddenly open as he emerged into a clearing. His pursuers ran out after him. They were in cold wind, in the city again, on the other end of that impossible alleyway.
Rahul was gone, and Drogon. They had stumbled and were lost somewhere in the errant geography. Cutter came forward. Judah walked and the darkness golem walked with him, step for step. Scores of yards away was Spiral Jacobs. He was not even looking at them.
Where were they? Cutter found the moon. He looked down between towers and walls. He was half enclosed. He struggled to make sense of it: this then that monolith spired, and here a minaret, and here one much fatter studded with lights, and above them the huge lines of airships. They were outside the Collective.
Above them an enormous column crowned with radial wires. The Spike. They were in an irregular courtyard. The walls were different stones, in different colours. A shaking came up at them through the concrete. They were high up. Cutter looked down over a spread-out skyline, over the city.
Perdido Street Station. Of course. They were in a huge and empty amphitheatre made by chance, floored with scrub, a little wilderness on the station’s roof. Undesigned, a forgot space in the vastness. The passage that had brought them looked now not like a street but a kink in concrete.
The wall, an edifice of huge bricks that made them feel shrunk to dolls, was broken by the remnants of wooden floors where once this open place had been interior. It was surfaced completely with spirals. A thicket rising, as high as a canopy. Some as intricate and complex as tangled briars, some the simplest snailshell patterns. Thousands. Months of industry. Cutter breathed out. From the very top of the wall descended one black line, through the forest of helix pictograms. A spiral, pinpointing this place.
Across the brickdust and savage weeds was Jacobs, the Tesh ambassador. He was drawing marks in the air, and he was singing.
“He’s hurried,” Qurabin said. His disembodied voice was close. “Has to move. He weren’t ready, but he’s moving now, early… He’ll try to force it, the thysiac, the murderspirit… feel! Quick,” and the voice was gone.
Ori ran. Across waste through dead thigh-high grass that cracked with cold, the plateau open and the lights of New Crobuzon splayed beneath him. The others followed, though no one knew what to do.
Spiral Jacobs tremored, and the air all around tremored with him. A hundred shapes began to solidify from nothing. Cutter saw a patch of milky air, a cataract, that took lumpy shape, peristalsed maggotlike and was a pale ghost stool, a three-legged kitchen thing hanging over his brow. Beside it was an insect, impossibly big, and a flower, a pot and a hand, a candle, a lamp, all the haints that had beset New Crobuzon. They looked undercooked, not quite fine, without colour, hanging and spinning. And as Cutter came closer the haints began to turn and move around each other in decaying orbits, an impossibly complex interpenetration of silent spiral paths. The things never collided, nor touched anyone. The apparitions moved fast, centring over Spiral Jacobs. A vortex of the everyday, the uncanny quotidian.
Ori batted at the things. They had not yet come full; they were not murderously sucking his colour. He reached Spiral Jacobs. The old man looked at him and said something: a greeting, Cutter thought.
He watched as Ori swung his fists, and kept missing Spiral Jacobs, kept always missing, each punch consistently mistimed, misjudged. Ori screamed and went onto his knees. Judah was just behind him, and the darkness golem stepped up.
The great thing swung its enormous shadow hands and unlight swept over Spiral Jacobs as it gripped him. It obscured him a long moment. Jacobs faltered, went obscure and dimmed, and all the ectoplasm shapes faltered with him, waning in time like dimming lamps. They came back again as he regained strength and light, and then he growled, showed anger for the first time.
He moved his hands, and the school of moving haints changed, came together, gusted suddenly through the golem, and where they passed they left a light in the core of the thing. It staggered like a wounded man and reached to throttle Jacobs once again, mimicking Judah’s motions. The light in the darkness golem’s core was growing.