The night shadows of the city reached up like fingers and drew the handlingers in, back to the sunless city of mundane betrayal and danger, away from the mad, impenetrable, unspeakable menace in the clouds.

Chapter Forty

Isaac damned the Construct Council to Hell, demanded to be released. Blood streamed from his nose and clotted in his beard. Some way from him, Yagharek and Derkhan struggled in the arms of their construct captors. They battled with a miserable lassitude. They knew they were trapped.

Through the migraine haze, Isaac saw the great Construct Council raise its bony metal arm to the skies. At the same moment, the gaunt and bloody human avatar pointed up with the same arm, in an unsettling visual echo.

“It is coming,” the Council said in the man’s dead voice.

Isaac howled in rage and twisted his head skyward, bucking and whipping from side to side in a fruitless effort to dislodge the helmet.

Below the skittering clouds he saw a huge spreadeagled shape approaching haphazardly through the sky. It lurched in an eager, chaotic movement. Derkhan and Yagharek saw it, and faltered into immobility.

The perplexing organic shape moved closer with a terrifying speed. Isaac closed his eyes, then opened them again. He had to see the thing.

It drew closer, dropping suddenly, cruising low and slow over the river. Its manifold limbs opened and shut. Its body juddered in complex unity.

Even from that distance and even through his fear, Isaac could see that the slake-moth that approached him was a sorry specimen, compared to the terrible predatory perfection of the one that had taken Barbile. The twists and convolutions, the half-random whorls and skeins of intricate flesh that had made up that rapacious totality had been functions of some unthinkable, inhuman symmetry, cells multiplying like obscure and imaginary numbers. This, though, this eager flapping shape with gnarled extremities, body segments misshapen and incomplete, its weaponry stubby and mangled in the cocoon…this was a freak, malformed.

This was the slake-moth that Isaac had fed on bastardized food. The moth that had tasted the dripping juices from Isaac’s own head, as he lay trembling in a dreamshit fix. It was still hunting that taste, it seemed, that first delicious intimation of a purer sustenance.

This unnatural birth was the start, Isaac realized, of all the troubles.

“Oh sweet Jabber,” whispered Isaac in a trembling voice, “Devil’s Tail…Gods help me…”

In a curling upsurge of industrial dust, the slake-moth landed. It folded its wings.

It crouched, its back curved and tight, a pose of simian pugnacity. It held its cruel arms-flawed, but still vicious and powerful-with the killing poise of a hunter. It swept its long, thin head slowly from side to side, its eyesocket antennae fumbling in the air.

All around it, constructs shifted minutely. The slake-moth ignored them all. Its brutal, coarse mouth opened and emitted that salacious tongue, flickered it like a huge ribbon across the gathering.

Derkhan moaned and the moth shuddered.

Isaac tried to yell to her to be quiet, not to let it feel her, but he could not speak.

The waves of Isaac’s mind oscillated like a heartbeat, rocking the psychosphere of the dump. The moth could taste it, knew it for the same mind-liquor it had sought before. The other little titbits it could sense were nothing beside it, little morsels by a feast.

The slake-moth quivered with anticipation, and turned its back on Yagharek and Derkhan. It faced Isaac. It stood slowly on four of its limbs, opened its mouth with a tiny, childish hiss, and spread its mesmeric wings.

For a moment, Isaac tried to close his eyes. A little adrenalized part of his brain threw up strategies for escape.

But he was so tired, so befuddled, so miserable and in so much pain, he left it too late. Blearily, unclearly at first, he saw the slake-moth’s wings.

The rippling tide of colours unfolded like anemones, a gentle, uncanny unfurling of enthralling shades. On both sides of the moth’s body, the perfectly mirrored midnight tinctures slipped like thieves down Isaac’s optic nerve and smeared themselves across his mind.

Isaac saw the slake-moth stalk slowly towards him across the wasteground, saw the perfectly symmetrical, curling wings flutter gently and bathe him in their narcotic display.

And then his mind slipped like a faltering flywheel, and he knew nothing except a slew of dreams. A froth of memories and impressions and regrets effervesced up from within him.

This was not like the dreamshit. There was no core of him to watch and cling to sentience. These were not invading dreams. They were his own and there was no he to watch them boil, he was the wash of images itself, he was the recall and the symbol. Isaac was the memory of parent-love, the deep sex fantasies and memories, the bizarre neurotic inventions, the monsters, the adventures, the slips in logic the aggrandizing self-memory the mutating mass of the undermind triumphant over ratiocination and cognition and the reflection that spawned it the terrible and awesome interlocking charges of subconsciousness the dreaming

the dreaming

it

it stopped

stopped suddenly and Isaac bellowed at the sudden breathtaking tug of reality.

He blinked fervently as his mind slatted suddenly down into layers, the subconscious falling back to where it belonged. He swallowed hard. His head felt as if it was imploding, reorganizing itself out of a chaos of unpicked shreds.

He heard Derkhan’s voice coming to the end of some announcement.

“…incredible!” she shouted. “Isaac? Isaac, can you hear me? Are you all right?”

Isaac closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them slowly. The night swam back into focus.

He stumbled forward onto his hands and knees, and realized that he was no longer held by the construct, that it had only been the slake-moth’s oneiric hold on him that had kept him standing. He looked up, wiping blood from his face.

It took a moment for him to make sense of the scene before him.

Derkhan and Yagharek were standing, unheld, at the edges of the wasteland. Yagharek had thrown back his hood to unveil his great bird-head. Both held themselves in poses of frozen action, ready to run or leap in any direction. Both stared into the centre of the rubbish arena.

In front of Isaac were several of the larger constructs that had been standing behind him when the moth had landed. They milled vaguely around an enormous shattered thing.

Towering over the Construct Council’s space in the dump was the enormous chain-dripping arm of a crane. It had swivelled away from the river, over the little defensive wall of waste, coming to a rest over the centre of the space.

Directly below it, burst open into a million dangerous fragments, were the remains of an enormous wooden crate, a cube taller than a man. Spilling from the smashed residue of its wooden walls was its cargo, a skittering mountain of iron and coal and stone, a chaotic aggregate of the heaviest detritus in the Griss Twist dump.

The mound of dense rubbish spilt slowly into an inverted cone, slipping past the shattered slats of the crate.

Below it, twisting and scrabbling weakly and emitting pathetic sounds, a mass of splintered exoskeleton and seeping tissue, its wings broken and buried beneath the crush of refuse, was the slake-moth.