“If the city comes to a stop, the variables will ebb almost to nothing. The flow of information will dry. I do not wish to live in an empty city. I have fed the variables of the slake-moth problem into my analytical network. The outcome is straightforward. Unchecked, the prognosis for bloodlife in New Crobuzon is extremely bad. I will help you.”
Isaac looked to Derkhan and Lemuel, took in Yagharek’s shadow-hidden eyes. He looked back at the shivering avatar. Derkhan caught his eye. Tread carefully, she mouthed exaggeratedly at him.
“Well, we’re all…damned grateful, Council…uh…how…Can I ask what you intend to do?”
“I have calculated that you will best believe and understand if I show you,” said the man.
A pair of massive metal clamps snapped into position on Isaac’s forearms. He yelled out in surprise and fear and tried to turn. He was held by the largest of the industrial constructs, a model with hands designed to connect to scaffolding, to hold up buildings. Isaac was a strong man, but he was quite incapable of breaking free.
He cried out to his companions to help him, but another of the huge constructs stepped ponderously between him and them. For an unclear moment, Derkhan and Lemuel and Yagharek hovered confusedly. Then Lemuel broke and ran. He raced away down one of the long trenches in the rubbish, peeling away to the east, out of sight.
“Pigeon, you bastard!” screamed Isaac. As Isaac struggled, he saw with amazement that Yagharek moved before Derkhan. The crippled garuda was so quiet, so passive, such a cypher of a presence, that Isaac had discounted him. He would follow, and he might do as he was asked. That was all.
And yet here was Yagharek now leaping up in a spectacular sideways motion, sliding round the side of the guarding construct, scrambling for Isaac. Derkhan saw what he was doing and moved the other way, causing the construct to dither between them, then stride purposefully towards her.
She turned to run, but a steel-sheathed cable whipped up like a predatory snake from the trash-undergrowth and whiplashed around her ankle, pulling her to the ground. She fell hard across the shattered ground, cried out in pain.
Yagharek was scrabbling heroically with the construct’s clamps, but it was quite ineffectual. The construct simply ignored him. One of its fellows moved in behind Yagharek.
“Yag, dammit!” shouted Isaac. “Run!” But he spoke too late. The newcomer was a similarly enormous industrial construct, and the wire-mesh that looped down and ensnared Yagharek was much too hard to break.
Out of the fray, the bloody man, that flesh-extension of the Construct Council, raised his voice.
“You are not being attacked,” he said. “You will not be harmed. We start here. We lay bait. Please do not be alarmed.”
“Are you out of your godsdamned mind?” shouted Isaac. “What the fuck d’you mean?. What are you doing?”
The constructs in the heart of the rubbish-maze were moving back to the edges of the empty space, the Construct Council’s throne room. The cable that had ensnared Derkhan tugged her across the shattered ground. She fought it, shouting and gritting her teeth, but she had to rise and stumble with it to stop the laceration of her flesh. The construct holding Yagharek lifted him effortlessly and stalked away from Isaac. Yagharek thrashed violently, his hood falling from his face, his fierce avian eyes sending cold looks of utter rage in all directions. But he was powerless before that ineluctable artificial force.
Isaac’s captor pulled him into the centre of the widening space. The avatar danced around him.
“Try to relax,” he said. “This will not hurt.”
“What?” roared Isaac. From the opposite side of the little amphitheatre, a little construct made its jerky, childish way across the rubble. It carried a weird-looking piece of apparatus, a rude helmet with what looked like a funnel expanding up out of it, the whole connected to some portable engine. It leapt up to Isaac’s shoulders, gripping painfully with its toes, and shoved the helmet on his head.
Isaac struggled, and shouted, but pinioned as he was by those mighty arms he could not possibly break free. It was not long before the helmet was fastened to him tightly, yanking his hair and bruising his scalp.
“I am the machine,” said the naked dead man, dancing nimbly from rock to engine debris to broken glass. “What is discarded here is my flesh. I fix it more quickly than your body mends bruises or broken bones. Everything is left here for dead. What is not here now will be brought here soon, or my worshippers will bring for me, or I can build. The equipment on your head is a piece like those used by channellers and seers, communicators and psycho-nauts of all kinds. It is a transformer. It can channel and redirect and amplify psychic discharge. At the moment, it is set to augment and radiate.
“I have adjusted it. It is much stronger than those at use in the city.
“You remember the Weaver warned you that the slake-moth you raised is hunting you? It is a crippled one, a stunted outcast. It cannot track you without help.”
The man looked at Isaac. Derkhan was shouting something in the background, but Isaac was not listening, could not take his eyes from the looming eyes of the avatar.
“You will see what we can do,” said the man. “We are going to help it.”
Isaac did not hear his own howl of outrage and fear. A construct reached forward and turned on the engine. The helmet vibrated and hummed so hard and loud that Isaac’s ears hurt.
Waves of Isaac’s mental print went pulsing out into the city night. They passed through the malign fur of bad dreams that clogged up the city’s pores, and beamed out into the atmosphere.
Blood trickled from Isaac’s nose. His head began to ache.
A thousand feet above the city, the handlingers congregated in Ludmead. The sinistrals tentatively investigated the psychic wake of the slake-moths.
on fast attack before suspicion, urged one pugnaciously.
urge caution, intimated another, track with care and follow, find nest.
They quarrelled quickly and silently. They were motionless as they hung in the air, the quintumvirate of dextriers, each bearing a sinistral noble. The dextriers were respectfully silent as the sinistrals debated tactics.
on slow, they agreed. With the exception of the dog, each sinistral and dextrier raised its host’s arm, held its flintlock carefully at the ready. They swept slowly forward through the air, a fantastic search party, combing the rippling psychosphere for the driblets of slake-moth consciousness.
They followed the trail of spattered dream-residue in a twisting spiral over New Crobuzon, moving slowly in a curving passage towards the sky over Spit Hearth, and on to Sheck and the south of the Tar, in Riverskin.
As they curled round to the west, they sensed the wafts of psyche emanating from Griss Twist. For a moment, the handlingers were confused. They hovered and investigated the rippling sensation, but it was quickly clear that they were human radiations.
some thaumaturge, intimated one.
not our concern, its fellows agreed. The sinistrals bade their dextrier mounts continue with their airborne tracking. The little figures hovered like dust-motes above the skyrails of the militia. The sinistrals moved their heads uneasily from side to side, scanning the empty sky.
There was a sudden burgeoning swell of foreign exudations. The surface tension of the psychosphere ballooned with pressure, and that hideous sense of alien greed oozed through its pores. The psychic plane was thick with the glutinous effluvia of incomprehensible minds.
The sinistrals squirmed in a glut of fear and confusion. It was so much, so strong, so quick! They bucked on the backs of their mounts. The links they had opened with the dextriers were suddenly full of psychic backwash. Each of the dextriers felt a flood of terror as the sinistrals’ emotions overflowed.