Perdido Street Station (72 page)

Aerial friction
dissipated its momentum quickly: it did not have nearly the range of
a longbow or a flintlock. But it could sever a cactus limb or head—or
a human one—at nearly one hundred feet, and slice savagely some
way beyond that.

The cactacae guards
glowered, and swung their rivebows with surly arrogance.

**

The late rays of the
day blazed out from above the far-off peaks. The west-facing aspects
of the Glasshouse dome glowed like rubies.

Straddling a corroded
ladder that swept up to the peak of the dome, a silhouetted human
figure grasped and clung to the metal. The man crept gradually up the
rungs, rising up the curved firmament of the dome like the moon.

The walkway was one of
three that extended at regular intervals from the very top of the
dome’s arch, designed originally for the repair crews that had
never appeared. The curve of the dome seemed to break the surface of
the earth like the tip of a bent back, implying a vast body below
ground. The figure was riding a gargantuan whaleback. He was buoyed
up by the light that the dome trapped, that played on the underside
of the glass and made the whole great edifice shine. He kept low,
moving very slowly to avoid being seen. He had chosen the ladder on
the Glasshouse’s northwestern side, so as to avoid the trains
on the Salacus Fields branch of the Sud Line. The tracks passed close
by the glass on the opposite side of the dome, and any observant
passengers would see the man crawling up the curved surface.

Eventually, after
several minutes climbing, the intruder reached a metal lip that
surrounded the apex of the great structure. The keystone itself was a
single globe of limpid glass about eight feet in diameter. It sat
perfectly in the circular hole at the dome’s apogee, suspended
half in, half out like some great plug. The man stopped and looked
out over the city, through the tips of the supporting struts and the
thick suspension wires. The wind whipped about him, and he clung to
the handholds with vertiginous terror. He looked up into the
darkening sky, the stars dim to him from all the clotted light that
surrounded him, that ebbed through the glass below his body.

He turned his attention
to that glass, scanned its surface minutely, pane by pane.

After some minutes he
raised himself and began to climb backwards down the rails. Down,
fumbling with his feet, feeling for holds, gently probing with
outstretched toes, pulling himself back towards the earth.

**

The ladder ran out
twelve feet from the earth, and the man slid down on the grappling
hook he had used to get up. He touched the dusty ground and looked
around him.

"Lem," he
heard someone hiss. "Over here."

Lemuel Pigeon’s
companions were hiding in a gutted building at the edge of a
rubble-strewn wasteground flanking the dome. Isaac was just visible,
gesticulating at him from behind the doorless threshold.

Lemuel paced quickly
across the thin scrub, treading on bricks and concrete overgrown and
anchored with grass. He turned his back on the early evening light
and slipped into the gloom of the burnt-out shell.

In the shadow before
him crouched Isaac, Derkhan, Yagharek and the three adventurers.
There was a pile of ruined equipment behind them, steam-pipes and
conducting wires, the clasps from retort stands, lenses like marbles.
Lemuel knew that the mess would resolve itself into five
monkey-constructs as soon as they moved.

"Well?"
demanded Isaac.

Lemuel nodded slowly.

"I was told
right," he said quietly. "There’s a big crack up near
the top of the dome, in the north-eastern quarter. From where I was
it was a bit hard to tell the size, but I figure it’s at
least...six feet by four. I looked pretty hard up there, and that was
the only break I saw big enough for anything man-sized or thereabouts
to get in or out. Did you have a little glance around the base?"

Derkhan nodded.
"Nothing," she said. "I mean, plenty of little cracks,
even a few places where a fair bit of glass was missing, especially
higher up, but there were no holes big enough to get through. That
must be the one."

Isaac and Lemuel
nodded.

"So that’s
how they’re getting in and out," said Isaac softly. "Well,
it seems to me the best way of tracking them is to reverse their
journey. Much as I damn well hate to suggest it, I think we should
get up there. What’s it like inside?"

"You can’t
see all that much," said Lemuel, and shrugged. "The glass
is thick, old and damn dirty. They only clean it once every three or
four years, I think. You can make out the basic shapes of houses and
streets and what have you, but that’s about all. You’d
have to look inside to get the lay of the place."

"We can’t
all troop up there," said Derkhan. "We’ll be seen. We
should’ve asked Lemuel to go in, he’s the man for the
job."

"I wouldn’t
have gone anyway," said Lemuel tightly. "I don’t
enjoy being that high up, and I certainly damn well won’t
dangle upside down hundreds of feet above thirty thousand pissed-off
cactacae..."

"Well, what are we
going to do?" Derkhan was irritated. "We could wait until
nightfall, but then the bloody moths are active. What we’ll
have to do is go up one at a time. If, that is, it’s safe to.
We need someone to go first..."

"I will go,"
said Yagharek.

There was silence.
Isaac and Derkhan stared at him.

"Great!" said
Lemuel archly, and clapped twice. "That’s that sorted. So
you can go up, and then...um...you can look around for us, chuck us
down a message..."

Isaac and Derkhan were
ignoring Lemuel. They were still staring at Yagharek.

"It is right that
I should go," said Yagharek. "I am at home so high,"
he said and his voice clucked slightly, as if at a sudden emotion. "I
am at home so high, and I am a hunter. I can look down on the
landscape within and see where the moths might lurk. I can gauge the
possibilities within the glass."

**

Yagharek retraced
Lemuel’s steps up the shell of the Glasshouse.

He had unwrapped the
foetid bandages from his feet, and his talons had stretched out in a
delightful reflex. He had scrambled up the initial patch of bare
metal with Lemuel’s grappling rope, and then had climbed far
faster and more confidently than the human had done.

He stopped every so
often and stood swaying in the warm wind, his avian toes gripping the
metal slats tightly and securely. He would lean alarmingly and peer
into the hazy air, hold out his arms a little, feel the wind fill his
spreadeagled body like a sail.

Yagharek pretended he
was flying.

Swinging from his thin
belt was the stiletto and the bullwhip he had stolen the previous
day. The whip was a clumsy thing, not nearly so fine as the one he
had cracked in the hot desert air, stinging and snaring, but it was a
weapon his hand remembered.

He was fast and
assured. The airships that were visible were all far away. He was
unseen.

At the top of the
Glasshouse, the city seemed to be a gift to him, laid out ready to be
taken. Everywhere he looked, fingers and hands and fists and spines
of architecture thrust rudely into the sky. The Ribs like ossified
tentacles reaching always up; the Spike slammed into the city’s
heart like a skewer; the complex mechanistic vortex of Parliament,
glowing darkly; Yagharek mapped them with a cold, strategic eye. He
glanced up and to the east, to where the skyrail connecting Flyside
Tower and the Spike thrummed.

When he had reached the
edge of the enormous glass globe at the dome’s tip, it took him
only a moment to find the rent in the glass. A part of him was
surprised that his eyes, the eyes of a bird of prey, could still
perform for him as they used to.

Below him, a foot or
two under the gently curving ladder, the glass of the dome was dry
and scaled with bird and wyrmen droppings. He tried to peer through,
but he could make out nothing beyond the shadowy suggestions of roofs
and streets.

Yagharek struck out
across the glass itself.

He moved tentatively,
feeling with his talons, tapping the glass to test it, sliding as
quickly as he could to a metal frame for his claws to grip. As he
moved he realized how at ease he had become with climbing. All those
weeks and weeks of night-time climbing, on the roof of Isaac’s
workshop, up into deserted towers, seeking the city’s crags. He
climbed easily and without fear. He was more ape than bird, it
seemed.

He skittered nervously
across the dirty panes, until he breached the final wall of girders
that separated him from the split in the glass. And when he vaulted
that, the fault was before him.

Leaning over, Yagharek
could feel heat gusting from the lamplit depths within. The night
outside was warm, but the temperature within must be very high.

He wound the grappling
hook carefully around the metal joist at one side of the crack and
tugged it hard to ensure it was secure. Then he wrapped the end of
the rope three times around his waist. He gripped it near the hook,
lay across the girder and put his head in through the lips of broken
glass.

It felt like pushing
his face into a bowl of strong tea. The air inside the Glasshouse was
hot, almost stiflingly so, and full of smoke and steam. It shone with
a hard, white light.

Yagharek blinked his
eyes clean and shielded them, then looked down on the cactus town.

**

In the centre, below
the massive nugget of glass at the dome’s tip, the houses had
been cleared away and a stone temple had been built. It was red
stone, a steep ziggurat, that reached a third of the way to the
Glasshouse roof. Every stepped level was lush with desert and veldt
vegetation, abloom in garish reds and oranges against their waxy
green skins.

A little rim of land,
about twenty feet wide, had been cleared all around it, beyond which
point the streets of Riverskin had been left. The cartography was a
snarled puzzle, a collection of road-ends and the rumps of avenues,
here the corner of a park and there half a church, even the stump of
a canal, now a trough of stagnant water, cut off by the edge of the
dome. Lanes criss-crossed the little township at odd angles, segments
cut from longer streets where the dome had been placed over them. A
little random patch of alleys and roads had been contained, sealed
under glass. Its content had changed even as the outlines remained
mostly the same.

The chaotic aggregate
of street-stubs had been reformed by the cactacae. What, years ago,
had been a wide thoroughfare had been made a vegetable garden, the
edges of its lawns flush with the houses on either side, little
trails from front doors indicating the routes between patches of
pumpkin and radishes.

Ceilings had been
removed four generations ago to convert human houses into homes for
their new, much taller inhabitants. Rooms had been added to the tops
and backsides of buildings, styled like weird miniature effigies of
the stepped pyramid in the centre of the Glasshouse. The additional
buildings had been wedged into every space possible, to cram the dome
with cactacae, and strange agglomerations of human architecture and
monolithic, stone-slab edifices stretched in big blocks of variegated
colour. Some were several storeys tall.

Swaying, dipping
bridges of wood and rope were draped between many of the upper
floors, linking rooms and buildings on opposite sides of streets. In
many of the yards and on the tops of many buildings, low walls
enclosed flat desert-gardens, with tiny patches of scrubby grass, a
few low cactuses and undulating sand.

Little flocks of
captive birds that had never found the shattered vents to the outside
city swept low over the houses and called out in hunger. With a lurch
of adrenalin and nostalgic shock, Yagharek recognized a bird-call
from the Cymek. There were dune-eagles, he realized, perching on one
or two roofs.

Rising around them on
all sides, the dome refracted New Crobuzon like a dirty glass sky,
rendering the surrounding houses a confusion of darkness and
deflected light. The whole diorama below him thronged with cactus
people. Yagharek scanned slowly, but he could not see another sapient
race.

The simple bridges
swung as cactacae passed over them in all directions. In the
sand-gardens, Yagharek saw cactacae with big rakes and wooden paddles
carefully sculpting the sastrugi that mimicked the rippling dunes
made by the wind. Here in this tightly closed space, bounded on every
side, there were no gusts to carve patterns, and the desert landscape
had to be wrought by hand.

The streets and paths
were tight crammed with cactacae buying and selling in the market,
arguing gruffly too low for Yagharek to hear. They pulled wooden
carts by hand, two working together if the vehicle or load was
particularly large. There were no constructs in sight, no cabs, no
animals of any sort beyond the birds and a few rock-rabbits Yagharek
caught sight of on the ledges of buildings.

In the city outside,
cactacae women wore great shapeless dresses like sheets. Here in the
Glasshouse they wore only loincloths of white and beige and dun
cloth, exactly like the men. Their breasts were somewhat larger than
the men’s, and tipped with dark green nipples. In a few places,
Yagharek could see a woman carrying a baby held tight to her chest,
the child unworried by the pinprick wounds its mother’s spines
inflicted. Boisterous little gangs of cactacae children played on
corners, ignored or cuffed absently by passing adults.

On every part of the
pyramid temple were cactacae elders, reading, gardening, smoking and
talking. Some wore sashes of red or blue around their shoulders, that
stood out strongly against their pale green skin.