After a moment, he spoke again.
“I’ll do the talking. I’ve dealt with it before.” He was unsure himself whether that was an advantage or a disadvantage.
The corridor had come to an end, terminating in a thick door of iron-banded oak. The man at the head of the militia unit slid a huge key into the lock and turned it smoothly. He tugged the door open, bracing himself at its weight, and trooped into the dark room beyond. He was well trained. His discipline was like steel. He must, after all, have been extremely frightened.
The rest of the officers followed him, then Rescue and Stem-Fulcher, and finally Bentham Rudgutter. He pulled the door closed behind them.
As they passed into the room, all felt a moment of dislocation, a wispy unease that prickled across their skin with a quasi-physical momentum. Long threads, invisible filaments of spun aether and emotion, were draped in intricate patterns around the room, and were rippling and sticking to the intruders.
Rudgutter twitched. From the corner of his eye he glimpsed threads that folded out of existence when he looked them full on.
The room was as obscure as if it were shrouded in cobwebs. On every wall, scissors were attached in bizarre designs. Scissors chased each other like predatory fish; they sported on the ceiling; they coiled around and through each other in convoluted, unsettling geometric designs.
The militia and their charges stood still against one wall of the room. No sources of light were visible, but they could still see. The atmosphere in the room seemed monochrome, or disturbed in some way, the light etiolated and cowed.
They stood still for a long time. There were no sounds.
Slowly and silently, Bentham Rudgutter reached into the bag he carried and brought out the large grey scissors he had had an aide buy in an ironmonger’s on the lowest commercial concourse of Perdido Street Station.
He parted the scissors without a noise, held them up in the cloying air.
Rudgutter brought the razor edges together. The room reverberated with the unmistakable sound of blade sliding along sharpened blade, and snapping shut with an inexorable division.
The echoes trembled like flies in a funnelweb. They slid into a dark dimension at the room’s heart.
A gust of cold sent gooseflesh dancing across the backs of those congregated.
The echoes of the scissors came back.
As they returned and crept up from below the threshold of hearing, they metamorphosed, becoming words, a voice, melodious and melancholy, that first whispered and then grew more bold, spinning itself into existence out of the scissor-echoes. It was not quite describable, heartbreaking and frightening, it tugged the listener close; and it sounded not in the ears but deeper inside, in the blood and bone, in the nerve-clusters.
…FLESHSCAPE INTO THE FOLDING INTO THE FLESHSCAPE TO SPEAK A GREETING IN THIS THE SCISSORED REALM I WILL RECEIVE AND BE RECEIVED…
In the fearful silence, Rudgutter gesticulated at Stem-Fulcher and Rescue, until they understood, and they raised their scissors as he had done, opened and sharply shut them, slicing the air with an almost tactile sound. He joined in, the three of them opening and closing their blades in macabre applause.
At the sound of that snapping susurration, the unearthly voice resonated into the room again. It moaned with an obscene pleasure. Each time it spoke, it was as if what faded into audibility was only a snatch of an unceasing monologue.
…AGAIN AGAIN AND AGAIN DO NOT WITHHOLD THIS BLADED SUMMONS THIS EDGED HYMN I ACCEPT I AGREE YOU SLICE SO NICE AND NICELY YOU LITTLE ENDOSKELETAL FIGURINES YOU SNIP AND SHAVE AND SLIVER THE CORDS OF THE WOVEN WEB AND SHAPE IT WITH AN UNCOUTH GRACE
From out of shadows cast by some unseen shapes, shadows that seemed stretched-out and taut, tethered from corner to corner of the square room, something stalked into view.
Into existence. It bulked suddenly where there had been nothing. It stepped out from behind some fold in space.
It picked its way forward, delicate on pointed feet, vast body bobbing, lifting multiple legs high. It looked down at Rudgutter and his fellows from a head that loomed colossally above them.
A spider.
Rudgutter had trained himself rigorously. He was an unimaginative man, a cold man who ruled himself with industrial discipline. He could no longer feel terror.
But, gazing at the Weaver, he came close.
It was worse, more frightening by far than the ambassador. The Hellkin were appalling and awesome, monstrous powers for which Rudgutter had the most profound respect. And yet, and yet…he understood them. They were tortured and torturing, calculating and capricious. Shrewd. Comprehensible. They were political.
The Weaver was utterly alien. There could be no bargaining and no games. It had been tried.
Rudgutter conquered himself, angry, judging himself harshly, studying the thing before him in an attempt to itemize and metabolize the sight.
The Weaver’s bulk was mostly its huge teardrop abdomen that welled up and hung downwards behind it from its neck-waist, a tight, bulbous fruit seven feet long and five wide. It was absolutely taut and smooth, its chitin a shimmering black iridescence.
The creature’s head was the size of a man’s chest. It was suspended from the front of the abdomen a third of the way from the top. The fat curve of its body loomed above it like skulking black-clad shoulders.
The head swivelled slowly to take in its visitors.
The top as smooth and spare as a human skull in black: multiple eyes a single, deep blood-red. Two main orbs as large as new-borns’ heads sat in sunken sockets at either side; between them a much smaller third; above it two more; above them three more still. An intricate, precise constellation of glints on dark crimson. An unblinking array.
The Weaver’s complicated mouthparts unhinged, its inner jaw flexing, something between a mandible and a black ivory trap. Its wet gullet flexed and vibrated deep within.
Its legs, thin and bony as human ankles, sprouted from the thin band of segmented flesh that linked its headpiece and abdomen. The Weaver walked on its hindmost four legs. They shot up and out at a forty-five-degree angle, hinging in knees a foot or more above the Weaver’s hunkered head, higher than the top of its abdomen. The legs rebounded from the joints almost straight down ten feet, culminating in a point as featureless and sharp as a stiletto.
Like a tarantula, the Weaver picked one leg up at a time, lifting it very high and placing it down with the delicacy of a surgeon or an artist. A slow, sinister and inhuman movement.
From the same intricate fold as that great quadrupedal frame emerged two sets of shorter legs. One pair, six feet long, rested pointing upwards at the elbows. Each thin, hard shaft of chitin ended in an eighteen-inch talon, a cruel, polished shard of russet shell edged like a scalpel. At the base of each weapon sprouted a curl of arachnid-bone, a sharpened hook to snag and slice and hold prey.
Those organic kukris jutted up like wide horns, like lances. An ostentatious display of murderous potential.
And in front of them, the final, shorter pair of limbs hung down. At their tips, held midway between the Weaver’s head and the ground, a pair of thin and tiny hands. Five-fingered and slender, only smooth fingertips without nails and skin the alien, nacreous black of pure pitch distinguished them from the hands of human children.