Perdido Street Station (5 page)

He stretched and paced
over to his pantry, throwing Sincerity a twist of dried meat, which
she began to gnaw happily. Isaac was growing conscious of the world
again, hearing boats through the walls behind him.

The door swung open and
shut again below.

He trotted to the top
of the stairs, expecting to see his colleagues returning.

Instead, a stranger
stood in the centre of the great empty space. Air currents adjusted
to his presence, investigated him like tentacles, sending a whirligig
of dust spinning around him. Spots of light littered the floor from
open windows and broken bricks, but none fell directly on him. The
wooden walkway creaked as Isaac rocked, very slightly. The figure
below jerked its head back and threw off a hood, hands clasped to its
chest, very still, staring up.

Isaac gazed in
astonishment.

It was a garuda.

He nearly stumbled down
the stairs, fumbling with the rail, loath to take his eyes off the
extraordinary visitor waiting for him. He touched earth.

The garuda stared down
at him. Isaac’s fascination defeated his manners, and he stared
frankly back.

The great creature
stood more than six feet tall, on cruel clawed feet that poked out
from under a dirty cloak. The ragged cloth dangled down almost to the
ground, draped loosely over every inch of flesh, obscuring the
details of physiognomy and musculature, all but the garuda’s
head. And that great inscrutable bird face gazed down at Isaac with
what looked like imperiosity. Its sharply curved beak was something
between a kestrel’s and an owl’s. Sleek feathers faded
subtly from ochre to dun to dappled brown. Deep black eyes stared at
his own, the iris only a fine mottling at the very edge of the dark.
Those eyes were set in orbits which gave the garuda face a permanent
sneer, a proud furrow.

And looming over the
garuda’s head, covered in the rough sackcloth it clasped about
itself, projected the unmistakable shapes of its huge furled wings,
promontories of feather and skin and bone that extended two feet or
more from its shoulders and curved elegantly towards each other.
Isaac had never seen a garuda spread its wings at close quarters, but
he had read descriptions of the dust-cloud they could raise, and the
vast shadows they threw across the garuda’s prey below.

What are you doing
here, so far from home?
thought Isaac with wonder.
Look at the
colour of you: you’re from the desert! You must have come miles
and miles and miles, from the Cymek. What the spit are you doing
here, you impressive fucker?

He almost shook his
head with awe at the great predator before he cleared his throat and
spoke.

"Can I help you?"

Lin, to her mortal
horror, was running late.

It did not help that
she was not an aficionado of Bonetown. The cross-bred architecture of
that outlandish quarter confused her: a syncresis of industrialism
and the gaudy domestic ostentation of the slightly rich, the peeling
concrete of forgotten docklands and the stretched skins of shantytown
tents. The different forms segued into each other seemingly at random
in this low, flat zone, full of urban scrubland and wasteground where
wild flowers and thick-stemmed plants pushed through plains of
concrete and tar.

Lin had been given a
street name, but the signs around her crumbled on their perches and
drooped to point in impossible directions, or were obscured with
rust, or contradicted each other. She concentrated to read them,
looked instead at her scribbled map.

She could orient
herself by the Ribs. She looked up and found them above her, shoving
vastly into the sky. Only one side of the cage was visible, the
bleached and blistered curves poised like a bone wave about to break
over the buildings to the east. Lin made her way for them.

The streets opened out
around her and she found herself before another abandoned-looking
lot, but larger than the others by a huge factor. It did not look
like a square but a massive unfinished hole in the city. The
buildings at its edge did not show their faces but their backs and
their sides, as if they had been promised neighbours with elegant
façades that had never arrived. The streets of Bonetown edged
nervously into the scrubland with exploratory little fringes of brick
that petered quickly out.

The dirty grass was
dotted here and there with makeshift stalls, foldaway tables put down
at random places and spread with cheap cakes or old prints or the
rubbish from someone’s attic. Street-jugglers chucked things
around in lacklustre displays. There were a few half-hearted
shoppers, and people of all races sitting on scattered boulders,
reading, eating, scratching at the dry dirt, and contemplating the
bones above them.

The Ribs rose from the
earth at the edges of the empty ground.

Leviathan shards of
yellowing ivory thicker than the oldest trees exploded out of the
ground, bursting away from each other, sweeping up in a curved ascent
until, more than a hundred feet above the earth, looming now over the
roofs of the surrounding houses, they curled sharply back towards
each other. They climbed as high again till their points nearly
touched, vast crooked fingers, a god-sized ivory mantrap.

There had been plans to
fill the square, to build offices and houses in the ancient chest
cavity, but they had come to nothing.

Tools used on the site
broke easily and went missing. Cement would not set. Something
baleful in the half-exhumed bones kept the gravesite free of
permanent disturbance.

Fifty feet below Lin’s
feet, archaeologists had found vertebrae the size of houses; a
backbone which had been quietly reburied after one too many accidents
on-site. No limbs, no hips, no gargantuan skull had surfaced. No one
could say what manner of creature had fallen here and died millennia
ago. The grubby print-vendors who worked the Ribs specialized in
various lurid depictions of
Gigantes Crobuzon,
four-footed or
bipedal, humanoid, toothed, tusked, winged, pugnacious or
pornographic.

Lin’s map
directed her to a nameless alley on the south side of the Ribs. She
wound her way to a quiet street where she found the black-painted
buildings she had been told to seek, a row of dark, deserted houses,
all but one with bricked-up doorways and windows sealed and painted
with tar.

There were no
passers-by in this street, no cabs, no traffic. Lin was quite alone.

Above the one remaining
door in the row was chalked what looked like a gameboard, a square
divided into nine smaller squares. There were no noughts or crosses,
however, no other mark at all.

Lin hovered in the
vicinity of the houses. She fidgeted with her skirt and blouse until,
exasperated with herself, she walked up to the door and knocked
quickly.

Bad enough that I’m
late,
she thought,
without pissing him off even more.

She heard hinges and
levers slide somewhere above her, and detected a tiny glint of
reflected light over her head: some system of lenses and mirrors was
being deployed so those within could judge whether those without were
worthy of attention.

The door opened.

**

Standing before Lin was
a vast Remade. Her face was still the same mournful, pretty human
woman’s it had always been, with dark skin and long plaited
hair, but it supplanted a seven-foot skeleton of black iron and
pewter. She stood on a tripod of stiff telescoping metal. Her body
had been altered for heavy labour, with pistons and pulleys giving
her what looked like ineluctable strength. Her right arm was levelled
at Lin’s head, and from the centre of the brass hand extended a
vicious harpoon.

Lin recoiled in
astonished terror.

A large voice sounded
from behind the sad-faced woman.

"Ms. Lin? The
artist? You’re late. Mr. Motley is expecting you. Please follow
me."

The Remade stepped
backwards, balancing on her central leg and swinging the others
behind it, giving Lin room to step around her. The harpoon did not
waver.

How far can you go?
thought Lin to herself, and stepped into the dark.

At the far end of an
entirely black corridor was a cactacae man. Lin could taste his sap
in the air, but very faintly. He stood seven feet tall, thick-limbed
and heavy. His head broke the curve of his shoulders like a crag, his
silhouette uneven with nodules of hardy growth. His green skin was a
mass of scars, three-inch spines and tiny red spring flowers.

He beckoned to her with
gnarled fingertips.

"Mr. Motley can
afford to be patient," he said as he turned and climbed the
stairs behind him, "but I’ve never known him relish
waiting." He looked back clumsily and raised an eyebrow at Lin
pointedly.

Fuck off, lackey,
she thought impatiently.
Take me to the big man.

He stomped off on
shapeless feet like small tree-stumps.

Behind her, Lin could
hear the explosive bursts of steam and thumps as the Remade took the
stairs. Lin followed the cactus through a twisting, windowless
tunnel.

This place is huge,
Lin thought, as they moved on and on. She realized that it must be
the whole row of houses, dividing walls destroyed and rebuilt,
custom-made, renovated into one vast convoluted space. They passed
doors from which suddenly emerged an unnerving sound, like the
muffled anguish of machines. Lin’s antennae bristled. As they
left it behind, a volley of thuds sounded, like a score of crossbow
bolts fired into soft wood.

Oh Broodma,
thought Lin querulously.
Gazid, what the fuck have I let you talk
me into?

**

It was Lucky Gazid, the
failed impresario, who had started the process leading Lin to this
terrifying place.

He had run off a set of
heliotypes of her most recent batch of work, hawked them around the
city. It was a regular process, as he attempted to establish a
reputation among the artists and patrons of New Crobuzon. Gazid was a
pathetic figure forever reminding anyone who would listen of the one
successful show he had arranged for a now-dead aether sculptress
thirteen years previously. Lin and most of her friends viewed him
with pity and contempt. Everyone she knew let him take his heliotypes
and slipped him a few shekels or a noble, "an advance on his
agent’s fee." Then he would disappear for a few weeks, to
emerge again with puke on his trousers and blood on his shoes,
buzzing on some new drug, and the process would begin again.

Only not this time.

Gazid had found Lin a
buyer.

When he had sidled up
to her in The Clock and Cockerel she had protested. It was someone
else’s turn, she had scribbled on her pad, she had "advanced"
him a whole guinea only a week or so ago; but Gazid had interrupted
her and insisted she retreat from the table with him. And as her
friends, the artistic elite of Salacus Fields, laughed and cheered
them on, Gazid had handed her a stiff white card stamped with a
simple crest of a three-by-three chessboard. On it was a short
printed note.

Ms. Lin,
it
said.
My employer was most impressed with the examples of your
work your agent showed him. He wonders whether you might be
interested in meeting him to discuss a possible commission. We look
forward to hearing from you.
The signature was illegible.

Gazid was a wreck and
an addict of most things going, who could not help going to any
lengths to secure money for drugs; but this was not like any scam
that Lin could imagine. There was no angle for him, unless there was
indeed someone wealthy in New Crobuzon prepared to pay for her work,
giving him a cut.

She had dragged him out
of the bar, to catcalls and whoops and consternation, and had
demanded to know what was going on. Gazid was circumspect at first,
and seemed to rack his brains to think of what lies to spout. He
realized quite quickly that he needed to tell her the truth.

"There’s a
guy I buy some stuff from occasionally..." he started shiftily.
"Anyway, I had the prints of your statues lying around...uh...on
the shelf when he came round, and he loved them and wanted to take a
couple away, and...uh...I said ‘yeah.’ And then a while
later he told me that he showed them to the guy who supplies
him
with the stuff I sometimes buy, and
that
guy liked them, and
took them away, and showed them to
his
boss, and then they got
to the kind of top man, who’s huge into art—bought some
of Alexandrine’s stuff last year—and he liked them and
wants you to do a piece for him."

Lin translated the
evasive language.

Your drug dealer’s
boss wants me to work for him???
she scrawled.

"Oh shit, Lin,
it’s not like that...I mean, yeah, but..." Gazid paused.
"Well, yeah," he finished lamely. There was a pause.
"Only...only...he wants to meet you. If you’re interested
he has to actually meet you."

Lin pondered.

It was certainly an
exciting prospect. Judging by the card, this was not some minor
hustler: this was a big player. Lin was not stupid. She knew that
this would be dangerous. She was excited, she could not help it. It
would be such an event in her art-life. She could drop hints about
it. She could have a criminal patron. She was intelligent enough to
realize that her excitement was childish, but not mature enough to
care.

And while she was
deciding that she didn’t care, Gazid named the kinds of sums
the mysterious buyer was quoting. Lin’s headlegs flexed in
astonishment.

I have to talk to
Alexandrine,
she wrote, and went back inside.

Alex knew nothing. She
milked the kudos of having sold canvases to a crime boss for what she
could, but she had only ever met an at-best middle-ranking messenger,
who had offered her enormous sums for two paintings that she had just
finished. She had accepted, handed them over, and never heard
anything again.