Perdido Street Station (73 page)

Yagharek’s skin
was prickling with sweat. Wafts of woodsmoke blurred his vision. They
rose from a hundred chimneys at all different heights, trickling
gently into the sky and eddying in slow mushrooming gusts. A few hazy
threads found their way up and seeped from the cracks and holes in
the glass sky. But with the wind kept out and the sun magnified by
the vaulted translucent bubble, there were no breezes or bluster to
dissipate the fumes. The underside of the glass, Yagharek saw, was
coated in greasy soot.

There was still more
than an hour to sundown. Yagharek glanced to his left and saw that
the orb of glass atop the dome seemed to be bursting with light. It
was sucking up every scrap of the sun’s emissions,
concentrating them and sending them vividly into every nook of the
Glasshouse, filling it with unforgiving light and heat. He saw that
the metal casing which held it was wired for power, with cables
snaking down the insides of the dome and disappearing from sight.

The flat sand-garden at
the top of the layered tower at the Glasshouse’s centre was
covered in complex machinery. Exactly below the swollen nugget of
clear glass was a huge lensed machine, with fat pipes snaking out
into vats around it. A cactacae with a coloured sash polished its
copper workings.

Yagharek remembered
rumours he had heard in Shankell, stories about a heliochymical
engine of immense thaumaturgic power. He looked carefully at the
glowing contraption, but its purpose was quite opaque.

As he watched, Yagharek
became conscious of the large number of armed posses that were
evident. He narrowed his eyes. He was gazing down at them like some
god, seeing every surface of the little cactus town in the fierce
light of the glass globe. He could see almost all the rooftop
gardens, and it seemed to him that on at least half, a group of three
or four cactus were stationed. They sat or stood, their expressions
unreadable at such a distance, but the massive, weighty rivebows they
carried were unmistakable. Hatchets dangled from their belts, curved
poleaxes glowed in the reddening light.

There were more of the
little patrols beside stalls in the sprawling market, sitting alert
on the lowest level of the central temple, and walking the streets
with a deliberate step, rivebows cocked and ready.

Yagharek saw the looks
that the armed guards received, the nervous salutations and the
frequent skyward glances of the populace.

He did not think that
this situation was normal.

Something was making
the cactus people uneasy. They could be truculent and taciturn, in
his experience, but the subdued air of menace was like nothing he had
experienced in Shankell. Perhaps, he reflected, these cactacae were
different, a more sombre breed than their southern siblings. But he
felt his skin prickle. The air was fraught.

Yagharek concentrated,
and began to scan the inside of the dome with a hard, rigorous eye.
He focused carefully, went into something of a hunter’s trance.

He started looking at
the edges of the dome. He took in the whole inside circumference in
one long, slow sweep, then spiralled his vision carefully towards the
centre, examining and investigating the circle of houses and streets
a little way in, and then further in again.

In this exacting,
methodical way, he could cast his eye on every nook and cranny of the
Glasshouse’s surfaces. His eyes stopped briefly, momentarily,
on imperfections of the red stone, then moved on.

As the day came closer
to its end, the nervousness of the cactus people seemed to increase.

Yagharek came to the
end of his scanning sweep. There was nothing immediate, nothing
clearly wrong that leapt out at him. He turned his attention to the
inside of the roof immediately around him, looking for some purchase.

It would not be easy.
Some way from him the girders coalesced around the heavy glass globe,
but on the underside of the glass they were not as protuberant. He
believed that with some effort he could climb them: as, probably,
could Lemuel and perhaps Derkhan or one or two of the adventurers.
But it was hard to imagine Isaac clinging so close and holding his
bulk suspended, crawling hundreds of yards of dangerous metal piping
to the earth.

The sun was low
outside. Even with the languorous summer evenings, time was short.

He felt someone tap his
back. Yagharek raised his head up, lifting it out of the inverted
bowl into the air of New Crobuzon, air that felt suddenly chill.

Behind him, Shadrach
was crouched on the glass. He wore a mirror-helm, and held out a
similar piece cobbled together from plate iron towards Yagharek.

Shadrach’s helmet
looked different. Yagharek’s was a rude piece of rescued metal.
Shadrach’s was intricate, wired and valved with copper and
brass. At the top was a socket, with holes to screw in some fitting.
It was only the mirrors that seemed a makeshift addition.

"You forgot this,"
Shadrach said in his gentle voice, waving the helmet. "No waved
flag, no word from you for twenty minutes. I’m here to check
you’re alive and all right."

Yagharek showed him the
girders inside the dome. He and Shadrach discussed the problem of
Isaac in urgent whispered tones.

"You must go
down," said Yagharek. "You must go by the sewers, with
Lemuel as your guide. You must find your way as fast as you can into
the dome. Send some of the mechanical monkeys to me, to aid me if I
am attacked. Look inside."

Shadrach leaned over
carefully and peered into the darkening glass. Yagharek pointed down,
across the thronging village at a crumbling ghost-building by the
vile canal end. The water, its tow-paths and a little finger of torn
land on which the broken house stood were all enclosed by an
accidental fence of rubble, brambles and long-rusted barbed wire. The
rejected sliver of space backed directly onto the dome, which swept
up steeply over it like a flat cloud.

"You must find
your way there." Shadrach began to make some sound, murmuring
about the impossibility, but Yagharek cut him off. "It is
difficult. It will be difficult. But you cannot climb down from here
on the inside, and if you can then Isaac certainly cannot. We need
him inside. You must take him in. As fast as you can. I will come
down to you, I will find you, when I have found the slake-moths. Wait
for me."

As he spoke, Yagharek
strapped the makeshift helmet on his head and investigated the field
of view it gave behind him.

He caught Shadrach’s
eye in one of the big slivers of mirror.

"You must go. Be
quick. Be patient. I will come to you and find you before the night
is out. The moths must leave by this break, and so I will wait and
watch for them."

Shadrach’s face
set. Yagharek was right. It was unthinkable that Isaac would be able
to climb down the steep and dangerous iron rafters.

He nodded at Yagharek
curtly, signalling goodbye into the garuda’s mirrors, then
turned and scrambled back to the main ladder, descended at expert
speed out of sight.

Yagharek turned and
looked into the last of the sun. He breathed deeply and flickered his
eyes from left to right, checking his vision in each jagged mirror.
He calmed himself completely. He breathed in the slow rhythm of the
yajhu-saak,
the hunter’s reverie, the martial trance of
the Cymek garuda. He composed himself.

After some minutes
there came the skittering clatter of metal and wire on glass, and one
by one three monkey-constructs came into view, approaching him from
different directions. They gathered around him and waited, their
glass lenses glinting rose in the evening, their thin pistons hissing
as they moved.

Yagharek turned and
regarded them through the mirrors. Then, gripping the rope carefully,
he began to lower himself through the hole in the glass. He
gesticulated at the constructs to follow him as he slipped past the
gash. The heat of the dome washed up around him and closed over his
head as he descended into the glass-bounded village, towards houses
immersed in red light as the clear globe magnified and dispersed the
setting sun’s rays, into the slake-moths’ lair.

Outside the dome, the
air darkened inexorably. With the onset of the night, the bright rays
that burst from the glass globe in the dome’s roof were snuffed
out. The Glasshouse grew suddenly dimmer and more cool. But much of
the heat was retained. The dome was still far warmer than the city
outside. The lights from the torches and the buildings within
reflected back on the glass. To the travellers looking back on the
city from Flag Hill, to the slum-dwellers gazing desultory down from
the towerblocks of Ketch Heath, to the officer glancing from the
skyrail and the driver of the south-bound Sud Line train, peering
through smokestacks and flues, over the smoke-soiled roofscape of the
city, the Glasshouse looked stretched out taut, distended with light.

As dusk fell, the
Glasshouse began to glow.

Clinging to the metal
on the inside skin of the dome, unnoticed like some infinitesimal
tic, Yagharek slowly flexed his arms. He was affixed to a little knot
of scaffolding about one-third of the way down the height of the
dome. He was still easily high enough to look down on all the
housetops, the tangles of architecture on all sides.

His mind was poised in
yajhu-saak.
He breathed slowly and regularly. He continued his
hunter’s search, his eyes flitting restlessly from point to
point below him, not spending more than a moment on each place,
building up a composite picture. Occasionally he would unfocus and
take in the whole sweep of the roofs below him, alert for any strange
movements. He returned his attention often to the scum-covered trench
of water where he had told Shadrach to assemble the others.

There was no sign of
the band of intruders.

As the night deepened,
the streets cleared at extraordinary speed. The cactacae flocked back
to their houses. From a teeming township, the Glasshouse emptied,
became a ghost town in a little over half an hour. The only figures
left on the streets were the armed patrols. They moved nervously
through the streets. Lights from windows were dimmed as shutters and
curtains were closed. There were no gaslights in these streets.
Instead, Yagharek watched lamp-lighters walk the length of the
streets, reaching out with flaming poles to ignite oil-soaked torches
ten feet above the pavements.

Each of the
lamp-lighters was accompanied by a cactacae patrol, moving nervously,
pugnacious and furtive through the obscuring streets.

On the top of the
central temple, a group of cactus elders was moving around the
central mechanism, pulling levers and tugging at handles. The
enormous lens at the top of the device swung down on a ponderous
hinge. Yagharek peered closely, but he could not discern what they
were doing or what the machine was for. He watched without
comprehension as the cactacae swung the thing around, about a
vertical and a horizontal axis, checking and adjusting gauges
according to obscure calibrations.

Above Yagharek’s
head, two of the chimpanzee-constructs clung to the metal. The other
was a few feet below him, on a strut parallel to his own. They were
quite motionless, waiting for him to move.

Yagharek settled back,
and waited.

**

Two hours after
sundown, the glass of the dome looked black. The stars were
invisible.

The streets of the
cactacae Glasshouse glowed with a forbidding, sepia firelight. The
patrols had become shadows on a darker street.

There were no sounds
beyond the undertone of burning, the soft complaints of architecture
and the sound of whispering. Occasional lights flitted like
will-o-the-wisps between the slowly cooling bricks.

There was still no sign
of Lemuel, Isaac and the others. A small part of Yagharek’s
mind was unhappy at this, but for the most part he was still inside,
concentrating on the relaxation technique of the hunting trance.

He waited.

Some time between ten
and eleven o’clock, Yagharek heard a sound.

His attention, which
had spread out to suffuse him, to saturate his awareness, focused
instantly. He did not breathe.

Again. The tiniest
rippling, a snap like cloth in the wind.

He twisted his neck
around and stared towards the noise, down at the mass of streets,
into the fearful dark.

There was no response
from the watchtower at the Glasshouse’s centre. Fancies crept
through Yagharek’s mind, deep inside. Perhaps he had been
deserted, a part of him thought. Perhaps the dome was empty but for
him and the monkey-constructs, and some unearthly floating lights in
the depths of the streets.

He did not hear the
sound again, but a shade of deep black passed across his eyes.
Something huge flitted up through the murk.

Terrified at some
semi-conscious level far below the calm surface of his thoughts,
Yagharek felt himself stiffen and grip the metal in his fingers,
flatten himself painfully against the dome’s supports. He
snapped his head away, facing the metal that he held. Intently,
carefully, he stared into the mirrors before his eyes.

Some fell-creature
inched its way up the Glasshouse skin.

The shape was almost
exactly opposite him, as far away as it could be. It had sprung from
some building below and flown a tiny distance to the glass, from
there to crawl hand over tendril over claw, up towards the cooler air
and the uncontained darkness.

Even through the
yajhu-saak,
Yagharek’s heart reeled. He watched the
thing progress in his mirrors. It fascinated him in an unholy way. He
tracked its dark-winged silhouette, like some deranged angel, all
studded with dangerous flesh and dripping bizarrely. Its wings were
folded, though the slake-moth gently opened and closed them, now and
then, as if to dry them in the warm air.