One of the dirigibles had lowered itself now until it hung sixty or seventy feet over the flattened roofscape below. It loomed like a bloated shark. A tangle of ropes was spilling untidily through the darkness towards the great expanse of clay.
Andrej’s brain went out like a broken lamp.
A confused tangle of information weltered through the analytical engines.
Without Andrej’s mind as referent, the combination of the Weaver’s and the Construct Council’s waves became suddenly random, their proportions skewing and rolling unsteadily. They no longer modelled anything: they were just an untidy slosh of oscillating particles and waves.
The crisis was gone. The thickening mixture of mindwaves was no more than the sum of its parts, and it had stopped trying to be. The paradox, the tension, disappeared. The vast field of crisis energy evaporated.
The burning gears and motors of the crisis engine stuttered to an abrupt stop.
With a crushing implosive collapse, the enormous wash of mental energy was snuffed instantly out.
Isaac, Derkhan, Yagharek and the militia for thirty feet around let out cries of pain. They felt as if they had walked from bright sunlight into a darkness so sudden and total it hurt them. They ached drably behind their eyes.
Isaac let Andrej’s body fall slowly to the wet ground.
In the wet heat a little way above the station, the last slake-moth eddied in confusion. It beat its wings in complex four-way patterns, sent coils of air in all directions. It hovered.
The rich trough of food, that unthinkable gush, was gone. The frenzy that had overtaken the moth, the terrible, uncompromising hunger, had gone.
It licked out and its antennae trembled. There were a handful of minds below it, but before it could attack the moth sensed the chaotic bubbling consciousness of the Weaver, and it remembered its agonizing battles and it screeched in fear and rage, stretching its neck back and baring its monstrous teeth.
And then the unmistakable taste of its own kind wafted up to it. It spun in shock as it tasted one, two, three dead siblings, all its siblings, every one of them, insides out, dead and crushed, spent.
The slake-moth was mad with grief. It keened in ultra-high frequencies and spun acrobatically, sending out little calls of sociality, echo-locating for other moths, fumbling through unclear layers of perception with its antennae and clutching empathically for any trace of an answer.
It was quite alone.
It rolled away from the roof of Perdido Street Station, away from that charnel-ground where its brothersisters lay burst, away from the memory of that impossible flavour, veering in terror away from The Crow and the Weaver’s claws and the fat dirigibles that stalked it, out of the shadow of the Spike towards the junction of the rivers.
The slake-moth fled in misery, searching for a place to rest.
Chapter Fifty-One
As the battered militia gathered themselves and began to peer, once more, over the edge of the roof at Isaac’s and Derkhan’s and Yagharek’s feet. They were wary now.
Three rapid bullets came flying down at them. One sent an officer flying without a word into the dark air beside the roof, to shatter a window four floors below with his weight. The other two buried themselves deep in the fabric of the bricks and stones, sending out wicked sprays of chips.
Isaac looked up. A dim figure was leaning out from a ledge twenty feet above them.
“It’s Half-a-Prayer again!” shouted Isaac. “How did he get there? What’s he doing?”
“Come on,” said Derkhan brusquely. “We have to go.”
The militia were still cowering just below them. Whenever an officer straightened up carefully and looked over the edge, Half-a-Prayer would send another bullet straight at him. He kept them caged in. One or two of them shot at him, but they were desultory, demoralized efforts.
Just beyond the rise of roofs and windows, unclear shapes were descending smoothly from the dirigible, sliding onto the slick surface below. They dangled loosely as they slipped through the air, attached by some hook on their armour. The ropes that held them uncoiled on smooth motors.
“He’s buying us some time, gods know why,” hissed Derkhan, stumbling over to Isaac and clutching at him. “He’s going to run out of bullets soon. These sods-” she waved vaguely at the half-hidden militia below them “-these are just the local flatfoots on roof-duty. Those bastards coming from the airships are going to be hardcore troops. We have to go.”
Isaac looked down and faltered towards the edge, but there were cowering militia visible on all sides. Bullets smacked down around Isaac as he moved. He yelled in fear, then realized that Half-a-Prayer was trying to clear the path before him.
It was no good, though. The militia were hunkering down and waiting.
“Fuck damn,” spat Isaac. He bent down and pulled a plug from Andrej’s helmet, disconnecting the Construct Council, which was still concertedly attempting to bypass the circuit-valve and gain control of the crisis engine. Isaac yanked the wire free, sending a damaging spasm of feedback and rerouted energy bolting down the line into the Council’s brain.
“Get this shit!” he hissed at Yagharek, and pointed at the engines that littered the roof, fouled with ichor and acid rain. The garuda dropped to one knee and scooped up the sack. “Weaver!” said Isaac urgently, and stumbled over to the enormous figure.
He kept looking back, over his shoulder, fearful of seeing some gung-ho militiaman reaching up to take a potshot. Over the rain, the sound of metallic crunching steps drew nearer on the roof below them in a pounding jog.
“Weaver!” Isaac clapped his hands in front of the extraordinary spider. The Weaver’s multifarious eyes slid up to meet him. The Weaver still wore the helmet that linked it to Andrej’s corpse. It was rubbing its hands in slake-moth viscera. Isaac looked down briefly at the pile of huge corpses. Their wings had faded to a pale, drab dun, without pattern or variation.
“Weaver, we need to go,” he whispered. The Weaver interrupted him.
…I TIRE AND GROW OLD AND COLD GRIMY LITTLING…the Weaver said quietly…YOU WORK WITH FINESSE I GRANT AND GIVE YOU BUT THIS SIPHONING OF PHANTASMS FROM MY SOLE SOUL LEAVES ME MELANCHOLIC SEE PATTERNS INHERE EVEN IN THESE THE VORACIOUS ONES PERHAPS I JUDGE QUICK AND SLICK TASTES FALTER AND ALTER AND I AM UNSURE…It raised 3 handful of glistening guts to Isaac’s eyes and began to pull them gently apart.
“Believe me, Weaver,” said Isaac urgently, “this was the right thing, we saved the city for you to…to judge, to weave…now that we’ve done this. But we need to go now, we need you to help us. Please…get us away from here…”
“Isaac,” hissed Derkhan, “I don’t know who these swine are that are coming but…but they’re not militia.”
Isaac stole a glance out over the roofs. His eyes widened incredulously.
Stomping purposefully towards them was a battery of extraordinary metal soldiers. The light slid from them, illuminating their edges in cold flashes. They were sculpted in astonishing and frightening detail. Their arms and legs swung with great bursts of hydraulic power, pistons hissing as they stormed closer. Little glimmers of reflected light came from somewhere a little behind their heads.
“Who the fuck are those bastards?” said Isaac in a strangled voice.
The Weaver interrupted him. Its voice was suddenly loud again, purposeful.
…BY GOODNESS ME YOU CONVINCE…it Said…LOOK AT THE INTRICATE SKEINS AND THREADLINES WE CORRECT WHERE THE DEADLINGS REAVED WE CAN RESHUFFLE AND SPIN AND FIX IT UP NICE…The Weaver bobbed excitedly up and down and stared at the dark sky. It plucked the helmet from its head in a smooth motion and threw it casually out into the night. Isaac did not hear it land…IT RUNS AND HIDES ITS HIDE…it said…IT IS ROOTING FOR A NEST POOR FRIGHTENED MONSTER WE MUST CRUSH IT LIKE ITS BROTHERS BEFORE IT GNAWS HOLES IN THE SKY AND THE CITY-WIDE COLOURFLOW COME AND LET US SLIDE DOWN LONG FISSURES IN THE WORLDWEB WHERE THE RENDER RUNS AND FIND ITS LAIR…