“Why do you not perform the operation here?” asked the avatar. Isaac shook his head vaguely.

“It wouldn’t work. This is a backwater. We have to channel the power through the city’s focal point, where all the lines converge.

“We have to go to Perdido Street Station.”

Chapter Forty-Seven

Carrying a bloated sack of discarded technology between them, Isaac and Yagharek crept back through the quiet streets of Griss Twist, up the broken brick stairwell of the Sud Line. Like shambling city vagrants in clothes ill-suited to the sweltering air, they trudged a path through the skyline of New Crobuzon, back to their collapsing hideout by the railway line. They waited for a squealing onrush of train to pass, blowing energetically from its flared chimney, then picked their way through fences of wavering air poured upwards from the scalding iron tracks.

It was midday, and the air wrapped them like a heated poultice.

Isaac put down his end of the sack and tugged at the rickety door. It was pushed open from inside by Derkhan. She slipped through to stand in front of him, half closing the door behind her. Isaac glanced up and could see someone standing ill-at-ease in a dark corner.

“Found someone, ‘Zaac,” whispered Derkhan. Her voice was taut. Her eyes were bloodshot and nearly tearful in her dirty face. She pointed briefly back into the room. “We’ve been waiting.”

Isaac had to meet the Council; Yagharek would inspire awe and confusion but no confidence in those he approached; Pengefinchess would not go; so hours ago, it was Derkhan who had been forced out into the city on the grisly and monstrous errand. It had turned her into some bad spirit.

At first, when she left the hut and walked into the city, made her way quickly through the tarry darkness that filled the streets, she had cried in a drab fashion to ease the pressure of her tortured head. She had kept her shoulders skulking high, knowing that of the few figures she saw quickly pacing their way somewhere, a high proportion were likely to be militia. The heavy nightmare tension of the air drained her.

But then as the sun rose and the night sank slowly into the gutters, her way had become easier. She had moved more quickly, as if the very material of the darkness had resisted her.

Her task was no less horrendous, but urgency bleached her horror until it was an anaemic thing. She knew that she could not wait.

She had some way to go. She was making for the charity hospital of Syriac Well, through four or more miles of intricately twisting slum and collapsing architecture. She did not dare take a cab, in case it was driven by a militia spy, an agent out to catch perpetrators like her. So she paced as quickly as she dared in the shadow of the Sud Line. It raised itself higher and higher above the roofs as it passed further and further from the city’s heart. Yawning arches of dripping brick soared over the squat streets of Syriac.

At Syriac Rising Station, Derkhan had broken away from the tracks of the rails and borne off into the snarl of streets south of the undulating Gross Tar.

It had been easy to follow the noise of costermongers and stallholders to the squalor of Tincture Prom, the wide and dirty street that linked Syriac, Pelorus Fields and Syriac Well. It followed the course of the Gross Tar like an imprecise echo, changing its name as it went, becoming Wynion Way, then Silverback Street.

Derkhan had skirted its raucous arguments, its two-wheel cabs and resilient, decaying buildings from the side streets. She had tracked its length like a hunter, bearing north-east. Until finally, where the road kinked and bore north at a sharper angle, she had gathered her courage to scurry across it, scowling like a furious beggar, and plunged into the heart of Syriac Well, to the Veruline Hospital.

It was an old and sprawling pile, turreted and finessed with various brick and cement flounces: gods and daemons eyed each other across the tops of windows, and drakows rampant sprouted at odd angles from the multilevel roof. Three centuries previously, it had been a grandiose rest-home for the insane rich, in what was then a sparse suburb of the city. The slums had spread like gangrene and swallowed up Syriac Well: the asylum had been gutted, turned into a warehouse for cheap wool; then emptied out by bankruptcy; squatted by a thieves’ chapter, then a failed thaumaturges’ union; and finally bought by the Veruline Order and turned once more into a hospital.

Once more a place of healing, they said.

Without funds or drugs, with doctors and apothecaries volunteering odd hours when their consciences goaded them, with a staff of pious but untrained monks and nuns, the Veruline Hospital was where the poor went to die.

Derkhan had made her way past the doorman, ignoring his queries as if she were deaf. He raised his voice at her, but he did not follow. She had ascended the stairs to the first floor, towards the three working wards.

And there…there she had hunted.

She remembered stalking up and down past clean, worn beds, below massive arched windows full of cold light, past wheezing, dying bodies. To the harassed monk who scurried up to her and asked her business, she had blubbered about her dying father who had gone missing-stomped off into the night to die-who she had heard might be here with these angels of mercy, and the monk was mollified and a little puffed at his goodliness and he told Derkhan that she might stay and search. And Derkhan asked where the very ill were, tearful again, because her father, she explained, was close to death.

The monk had pointed her wordlessly through the double-doors at the end of the huge room.

And Derkhan had passed through and entered a hell where death was stretched out, where all that was available to ward off the pain and degradation was sheets without bed-bugs. The young nun who stalked the ward with eyes wide in endless appalled shock would pause occasionally and refer to the sheet clipped to the end of every bed, verifying that yes the patient was dying and that no they were still not dead.

Derkhan looked down and flipped a chart open. She found the diagnosis and the prescription. Lungrot, she had read. 2 dose laudanum/3 hours for pain. In in another hand: Laudanum unavailable.

In the next bed, the unavailable drug was sporr-water. In the next, calciach sudifile, which Derkhan read the chart correctly, would have cured the patient of their disintegrating bowel over eight treatments. It went [oniBched] the length of the room, a pointless, informational list of what would have ended the pain, one way or another.

Derkhan began to do what she had come for.

She examined the patients with a ghoulish eye, a hunter of the nearly dead. She had been highly aware of the criteria with which she gazed-of sound mind, and so ill they will not last the day-and she had felt sick to her stomach. The nun had seen her, had approached with a curious lack of urgency, demanding to know what or whom she sought.

Derkhan had ignored her and continued with her terrible cool assessment. Derkhan had walked the length of the room, stopping eventually beside the bed of an old man whose notes gave him a week to live. He slept with his mouth open, dribbling slightly and grimacing in his sleep.

There had been a ghastly moment of reflection when she had found herself applying [sained] and untenable ethics to the choice-Who here is a militia informer? she wanted to shout. Who here has raped? Who has [abused] a child? Who has tortured? She had closed down the [thoughts]. That could not be allowed, she had realized. That might drive her mad. This had to be exigency. This could not be a choice.