Over breakfast he had told her about his triumph with the crisis engine. She had not really understood the scale of the achievement, but that was understandable. She had realized that he was excited as almost never before, and had done her best to enthuse sufficiently. For Isaac’s part, it had made the difference he had suspected it would, simply communicating the bare bones of the project in the most unscientific way. He felt more grounded, less as if he were living some preposterous dream. He had learnt of potential problems during his explanation, and had come away eager to rectify them.
Isaac and Lin had parted with deep affection, and with a mutual promise not to let so long go by without each other again.
And now Isaac could not get into his workshop.
“Lub! David! What the arse you up to?” he yelled, and shoved at the door again.
As he pushed, the door opened a tiny way and he could see a sliver of the sunlit interior. He could see the edge of whatever was blocking the door.
It was a hand.
Isaac’s heart skittered.
“Oh Jabber!” he heard himself shout as he leant with all his weight on the door. It opened before his mass.
Lublamai was sprawled prone across the doorway. As Isaac knelt by his friend’s head, he heard Sincerity sniffling some way away, between the treads of the construct. She was cowed.
Isaac turned Lublamai over and let out a juddering sigh of relief when he felt that his friend was warm, heard him breathing.
“Wake up, Lub!” he yelled.
Lublamai’s eyes were already open. Isaac started back from that impassive gaze.
“Lub…?” he whispered.
Drool had collected below Lublamai’s face, had blazed trails across his dusty skin. He lay completely limp, utterly motionless. Isaac felt his friend’s neck. The pulse was quite steady. Lublamai was taking in deep breaths, pausing a moment, then releasing. He sounded as if he were sleeping.
But Isaac flinched in horror before that imbecilic vacant glare. He waved his hand before Lublamai’s eyes, eliciting no response. Isaac slapped Lublamai’s face, softly, then hard twice. Isaac realized that he was shouting Lublamai’s name.
Lublamai’s head rocked back and forth like a sack full of stones.
Isaac closed his hand and felt something clammy. Lublamai’s hand was thinly coated in a clear, sticky liquid. He sniffed his hand and recoiled from the faint scent of lemons and rot. It made him feel momentarily light-headed.
Isaac fingered Lublamai’s face and saw that the skin around his mouth and nose was slippery and tacky with the slop, that what he had thought Lublamai’s saliva was mostly that thin slime.
No yells, no slaps, no pleas would make Lublamai wake.
When Isaac finally looked up and around the room, he saw the window by Lublamai’s desk was open, the glass broken and the wooden shutters splintered. He stood and ran over to the knocking window frame, but there was nothing to see inside or out.
Even as Isaac ran from corner to corner under his own raised laboratory, darting between Lublamai’s corner and David’s, whispering idiotic reassurances to the terrified Sincerity, looking for signs of intruders, he realized that a terrible idea had occurred to him some time ago, and had been squatting balefully in the back of his mind. He faltered to a stop. Slowly, he raised his eyes and looked up in cold horror at the underside of the walkway boards.
Fearful calm settled on him like snow. He felt his feet lift, trudging inexorably towards the wooden stairs. He turned his head as he walked, saw Sincerity sniffing gradually closer to Lublamai, her courage slowly returning now that she was not alone.
Everything Isaac saw seemed slowed. He walked as if through freezing water.
Stair by stair he ascended. He felt no surprise and only a very dull foreboding as he saw pools of weird spittle on each stair, saw the fresh scrapings left by some sharp-clawed newcomer. He heard his own heart pulsing with what seemed tranquillity, and he wondered if he was numb to shock.
But when he reached the top and turned to see the hutch thrown on its side, its thick wire mesh burst from within, little fingers of metal exploding away from the central hole, and when he saw the chrysalis split and empty and saw the trail of dark juices dribbling from within its husk, Isaac heard himself cry out aghast and felt his body shudder into immobility as an icy tide of goose-flesh swept him up. Horror billowed up within him and around him like ink in water.
“Oh dear gods…” he whispered through dry and quivering lips. “Oh Jabber…what have I done?”
The New Crobuzon militia did not like to be seen. They emerged in their dark uniforms at night, to perform duties such as fishing the dead from the river. Their airships and pods meandered and buzzed over the city with opaque ends. Their towers were sealed.
The militia, New Crobuzon’s military defence and its internal correction agents, only appeared in their uniforms, the infamous full-face masks and dark armour, the shields and flintlocks, when they were acting as guards at some sensitive locus, or at times of great emergency. They wore their colours openly during the Pirate Wars and the Sacramundi Riots, when enemies attacked the city’s order from without or within.
For their day-to-day duties they relied on their reputation and on their vast network of informers-rewards for information were generous-and plain-clothed officers. When the militia struck, it was the man drinking cassis in the cafe, the old woman weighed down with bags, the clerk in stiff collar and polished shoes who suddenly reached over their heads and pulled hoods from invisible folds in the cloth, who slipped enormous flintlocks from hidden holsters and poured into criminal dens. When a cutpurse ran from a shouting victim, it might be a portly man with a bushy moustache (palpably false, everyone would reflect afterwards, why had they not noticed that before?) who would grab the offender in a punishing necklock and disappear with him or her into the crowd, or a militia tower.
And afterwards, no witness could say for sure what those agents had looked like in their civilian guise. And no one would ever see the clerk or the portly man or any of them again, in that part of the city.
It was policing by decentralized fear.
It had been four in the morning when the prostitute and her client had been found in Brock Marsh. The two men walking the dark alleys with their hands in their pockets and their heads jaunty had paused, seeing the crumpled shape in the dim gaslight. Their demeanour had changed. They had looked about them, then trotted into the cul-de-sac.
They found the stupefied pair lying across each other, their eyes glazed and vacant, their breath ragged and smelling of cloying citrus. The man’s trousers and pants were dropped around his ankles, exposing his shrivelled penis. The woman’s clothes-her skirt complete with the surreptitious slit many prostitutes used to finish their work quickly-were intact. When the newcomers had failed to wake them, one man had remained with the mute bodies and the other had run off into the darkness. Both men had pulled dark hoods over their heads.
Some while later a black carriage had pulled up, drawn by two enormous horses, Remade with horns and fangs that glinted with slaver. A small corps of uniformed militia had leapt to the ground and, without words, had pulled the comatose victims into the darkness of the cab, which had sped off towards the Spike that towered over the centre of the city.
The two men remained behind. They waited until the carriage had disappeared over the cobbles of the labyrinthine quarter. Then they looked about them carefully, taking stock of the sparse harvest of lights that glinted from the backs of buildings and outhouses, from behind crumbling walls and through the thin fingers of fruit trees in gardens. Satisfied that they were unobserved, they slipped off their hoods and thrust their hands back into their pockets. They melted suddenly into a different character, laughing quietly with each other and chatting urbanely as, innocuous again, they resumed their graveyard-shift patrol.