There were about thirty constructs and perhaps sixty humans. Every human, every construct, every creature in that space except Isaac and his companions bided their time with supernatural calm. He felt that extraordinary stillness, that timeless waiting, like a kind of cold.
He shivered at the patience collected in that rubbish land.
The ground quivered.
Instantly the humans in the corner of the enclosed space fell to their knees, heedless of the sharp detritus around their feet. They gave obeisance, murmuring some complex chant in time, tracing some sacred hand movement like interlocking wheels.
The constructs shifted a little to adjust, remained standing.
Isaac and his companions moved closer together.
“What the godsdamned fuck is this?” hissed Lemuel.
There was another subterraneous tug, a juddering as if the earth wanted to slough off the rubbish heaped onto it. In the north wall of discarded and cast-off produce, two enormous lights came slamming silently on. The gathering was pinned in the cold light, spots so tight nothing spilt from their edges. The humans murmured and made their sign all the more fervently.
Isaac’s mouth dropped slowly open.
“Sweet Jabber protect us,” he whispered.
The wall of rubbish was moving. It was sitting up.
The bedsprings and old windows, the girders and steam engines from ancient locomotives, the air-pumps and fans, the pulleys and belts and shattered powerlooms were falling like an optical illusion into an alternative configuration. He had been staring at it for ages, but only now that it slowly, ponderously, impossibly moved, did Isaac see it. That was an upper arm, the knot of guttering; that broken child’s buggy and the enormous inverted wheelbarrow were feet; that little inverted triangle of roof-beams was a hip-bone; the enormous chymical drum was a thigh and the ceramic cylinder a calf…
The rubbish was a body. A vast skeleton of industrial waste twenty-five feet from skull to toe.
It sat, its back leaning against and permeable with the mounds of rubbish behind it. It raised stumpy knees from the ground. They were fashioned from enormous hinges where the arm of some vast mechanism had been torn by age from its casing. It sat with its knees raised and its feet on the ground, each one attached with a haphazard industry to the sprawling girder-legs.
It cannot stand! thought Isaac, giddy. He looked to one side and saw that Lemuel and Derkhan were gaping just as wide, that Yagharek’s eyes were shining with astonishment under his hood. It isn’t solid enough to, it can’t stand, it can only wallow in the muck!
The body of the creature was a tangled, welded lump of congealed circuitry and engineering. All kinds of engines were embedded in that huge trunk. A massive proliferation of wires and tubes of metal and thick rubber spewed from valves and outputs in its body and limbs, snaking off in all directions in the wasteland. The creature reached up with an arm powered by a massive steamhammer piston. Those lights, those eyes, swivelled from the air and looked down on the constructs and the humans below. The lights were streetlamp bulbs, jets powered by huge cylinders of gas visible in the construct’s skull. The grille of a massive air-vent had been riveted to the lower half of its face to mimic the slatted teeth of a skull.
It was a construct, an enormous construct, formed of cast-off pieces and stolen engines. Thrown together and powered without the intervention of human design.
There was the hum of powerful engines as the creature’s neck swivelled and optical lenses swept the illuminated crowd. Springs and strained metal creaked and snapped.
The human worshippers began to chant, softly.
The enormous composite construct seemed to catch sight of Isaac and his companions. It strained its constrained neck out to its limits. The gaslight beams swung down and pinioned the four.
The light did not move. It was completely blinding.
Then, abruptly, it was shut off. From somewhere close by, a thin and tremulous voice sounded.
“Welcome to our meeting, der Grimnebulin, Pigeon, Blueday and Cymek visitor.”
Isaac cast his head around, blinking furiously, his eyes bleached and unseeing.
As the fog of old light cleared from his head, Isaac caught blurred sight of a man stumbling uncertainly towards them on the broken ground. Isaac heard Derkhan breathe in sharply, heard her swear in disgust and fear.
For a moment he was confused, and then as his eyes acclimatized to the moon’s half-hearted glow and he saw the approaching figure clearly for the first time, he emitted a horrified noise at the same moment as Lemuel. Only Yagharek, the desert warrior, was silent.
The man approaching them was nude and horrifically thin. His face was stretched into a permanent wide-eyed aspect of ghastly discomfort. His eyes, his body, jerked and ticced as if his nerves were breaking down. His skin looked necrotic, as if he was submitting to slow gangrene.
But what caused the watchers to shudder and exclaim was his head. His skull had been sheered cleanly in two just above his eyes. The top was completely gone. There was a little fringe of congealed blood below the cut. From the wet hollow inside the man’s head snaked a twisting cable, two fingers thick. It was surrounded with a spiral of metal, which was bloodied and red-silver at the bottom, where it plunged into the empty brainpan.
The cable hauled up into the air, dangling down into the man’s skull. Isaac followed it slowly up with his eyes, dumbfounded and aghast. It swept back at an angle till it was twenty feet above the ground, and there it rested in the curling metal hand of the giant construct. It passed through the thing’s hand and disappeared ultimately somewhere in its bowels.
The constructed hand seemed to be made of some giant umbrella, torn apart and rewired, attached to pistons and chain-tendons, opening and closing like some vast cadaverous claw. The construct played out the cable a little at a time, allowing the man to stumble towards the waiting interlopers, literally at the end of his tether.
As the monstrous puppet-man approached, Isaac moved backwards instinctively. Lemuel and Derkhan, even Yagharek followed suit. They backed unseeingly into the impassive bodies of five large constructs that had moved into position behind them.
Isaac turned in alarm, then quickly looked back at the man crawling towards him.
The man’s expression of horrified concentration did not falter as he opened his arms in a paternal gesture.
“Welcome all,” he said in his quivering voice, “to the Construct Council.”
Montjohn Rescue’s body soared at speed through the air. The nameless dextrier-handlinger that was parasitic upon him-a parasite that thought of itself, after all these years, as Montjohn Rescue-had subdued the fear at flying blind. It rushed through the air with its body held vertically, hands folded carefully, a pistol in one. Rescue looked as if he was standing and waiting for something while the night sky sped around him.
The soft presence of the sinistral-handlinger in the dog behind him had opened the door between their minds. It kept up a sinuous flow of information.
fly left go low speed up higher up and right now left faster faster dive drift hover, the sinistral said, and stroked the inside of the dextrier’s mind to calm it. Flying blind was new and terrifying, but they had practised yesterday, unseen, away in the foothills, where they had been transported by militia dirigible. The sinistral had quickly trained itself to convert left into right and to leave nothing unsaid.
The Rescue-handlinger was aggressively obedient. It was a dextrier, the soldier-caste. It channelled enormous powers through its host-flight and spitsearing, massive strength. But even with the power this particular dextrier had as handlinger representative to the Fat Sun bureaucracy, it was subservient to the noble-caste, the seers, the sinistrals. To be otherwise was to risk massive psychic attack. The sinistrals could punish by closing down the assimilation gland of the wayward dextrier, killing its host and rendering it unable to take another, reducing it to a blind, clutching handthing, without a host through which to channel.