Perdido Street Station (29 page)

I set out across the
continent to become whole.

The desert came with
me.

The spring winds were
becoming warmer. The soiled air over New Crobuzon was charged. The
city meteoromancers in the Tar Wedge cloudtower copied figures from
spinning dials and tore graphs from frantically scribbling
atmospheric gauges. They pursed their lips and shook their heads.

They murmured to each
other about the prodigiously hot, wet summer that was on the way.
They banged the enormous tubes of the aeromorphic engine that rose
vertically the height of the hollow tower like giant organ pipes, or
the barrels of guns demanding a duel between earth and sky.

"Bloody useless
bloody thing," they muttered in disgust. Halfhearted attempts
were made to start the engines in the cellars, but they had not moved
in one hundred and fifty years, and no one alive was capable of
fixing them. New Crobuzon was stuck with the weather dictated by gods
or nature or chance.

In the Canker Wedge
zoo, animals shifted uneasily in the changing weather. It was the
dying days of the rutting season, and the restless twitching of
lustful, segregated bodies had subsided some. The keepers were as
relieved as their charges. The sultry pall of variegated musk that
had wafted through the cages had made for aggressive, unpredictable
behaviour.

Now, as light stayed
longer every day, the bears and hyaenas and bony hippos, the lonely
alopex and the apes, lay still—tensely, it seemed—for
hours, watching the passers-by from their scrubbed-brick cells and
their muddy trenches. They were waiting. For the southern rains that
would never reach New Crobuzon, but were encoded in their bones,
perhaps. And when the rains had not come, they might settle down and
wait for the dry season that, similarly, did not afflict their new
home. It must be a strange, anxious existence, the keepers mused over
the roars of tired, disoriented beasts.

The nights had lost
nearly two hours since winter, but they seemed to have squeezed even
more essence into the shorter time. They seemed particularly intense,
as more and more illicit activity strove to fit the hours from
sundown to dawn. Every night the enormous old warehouse half a mile
south of the zoo attracted streams of men and women. The occasional
leonine roar might breach the thumping and the constant blare of the
crotchety, wakeful city entering the old building, sounding above the
throng. It would be ignored.

The bricks of the
warehouse had once been red and were now black with grime, as smooth
and meticulous as if they had been painted by hand. The original sign
still read the length of the building:
Cadnebar’s Soaps and
Tallow.
Cadnebar’s had gone bust in the slump of ‘57.
The enormous machinery for melting and refining fat had been taken
and sold as scrap. After two or three years of quiet mouldering,
Cadnebar’s had been reborn as the glad’ circus.

Like mayors before him,
Rudgutter liked to compare the civilization and splendour of the
City-State Republic of New Crobuzon with the barbarian muck in which
inhabitants of other lands were forced to crawl. Think of the other
Rohagi countries, Rudgutter demanded in speeches and editorials. This
was not Tesh, nor Troglodopolis, Vadaunk or High Cromlech. This was
not a city ruled by witches; this was not a chthonic burrow; the
seasons’ changes did not bring an onslaught of superstitious
repression; New Crobuzon did not process its citizenry through zombie
factories; its Parliament was not like Maru’ahm’s, a
casino where laws were stakes in games of roulette.

And this was not,
emphasized Rudgutter, Shankell, where people fought like animals for
sport.

Except, of course, at
Cadnebar’s.

Illegal it might have
been, but no one remembered any militia raids of the establishment.
Many sponsors of the top stables were Parliamentarians,
industrialists and bankers, whose intercession doubtless kept
official interest at a minimum. There were other fight-halls, of
course, that doubled as cockfight and ratfight pits, where bear- or
badger-baiting might go on at one end, snake-wrestling at another,
with glad’-fighting in the middle. But Cadnebar’s was
legendary.

Every night, the
evening’s entertainments would begin with an open slot, a
comedy show for the regulars. Scores of young, stupid, thickset
farmboys, the toughest lads in their villages, who had travelled for
days from the Grain Spiral or the Mendican Hills to make their names
in the city, would flex their prodigious muscles at the selectors.
Two or three would be chosen and pushed into the main arena before
the howling crowd. They would confidently heft the machetes they had
been given. Then the arena’s hatch would be opened and they
would pale as they faced an enormous Remade gladiator or impassive
cactacae warrior. The resulting carnage was short and bloody and
played for laughs by the professionals.

The sport at Cadnebar’s
was driven by fashion. In the dying days of that spring, the taste
was for matches between teams of two Remade and three khepri
guard-sisters. The khepri units were enticed out of Kinken and
Creekside with massive prizes. They had practised together for years,
units of three religious warriors trained to emulate the khepri guard
gods, the Tough Sisters. Like the Tough Sisters, one would fight with
hooknet and spear, one with crossbow and flintlock, and one with the
khepri weapon that humans had christened the stingbox.

As summer began to well
up under the skin of spring, the bets got bigger and bigger. Miles
away in Dog Fenn, Benjamin Flex reflected morosely on the fact that
Cadnebar’s Wax,
the illegal organ of the fight trade,
had a circulation five times that of
Runagate Rampant.

**

The Eyespy Killer left
another mutilated victim in the sewers. It was discovered by
mudlarks. It was hanging like someone exhausted out of an outflow
pipe into the Tar.

In the outskirts of
Nigh Sump a woman died of massive puncture wounds to both sides of
her neck, as if she had been caught between the blades of huge
serrated scissors. When her neighbours found her, her body was
scattered with documents which proved her to be a colonel-informer in
the militia. The word went out. Jack Half-a-Prayer had struck. In the
gutters and the slums, his victim was not mourned.

**

Lin and Isaac snatched
furtive nights together when they could. Isaac could tell that all
was not well with her. Once, he sat her down and demanded that she
tell him what was troubling her, why she had not entered the
Shintacost Prize this year (something which had given her usual
bitchery about the standard of the shortlist an added bitterness),
what she was working on, and where. There was no sign of any artistic
debris at all in any of her rooms.

Lin had stroked his
arm, clearly grateful for his concern. But she would tell him
nothing. She said she was working on a piece of which she was
tentatively very proud. She had found a space that she could not and
did not want to talk about, in which she was producing a large piece
that he mustn’t ask her about. It was not as if she had
disappeared from the world. Once a fortnight, perhaps, she was back
in one of the Salacus Fields bars, laughing with her friends, if with
a little less vigour than she had two months ago.

She teased Isaac about
his anger at Lucky Gazid, who had vanished, with suspiciously good
timing. Isaac had told Lin about his inadvertent sampling of
dreamshit, and had raged around looking to punish Gazid. Isaac had
described the extraordinary grub which seemed to thrive on the drug.
Lin had not seen the creature, had not been back to Brock Marsh since
that forlorn day the previous month, but even allowing for a degree
of exaggeration on Isaac’s part, the creature sounded
extraordinary.

Lin thought fondly of
Isaac as she adeptly changed the subject. She asked him what
nourishment he thought the caterpillar might gain from its peculiar
food, and sat back as his face expanded with fascination and he would
tell her enthusiastically that he did not know, but that these were a
few of his ideas. She would ask him to try to explain to her about
crisis energy, and whether he thought it would help Yagharek to fly,
and he would talk animatedly, drawing her diagrams on slips of paper.

It was easy to work on
him. Lin felt, sometimes, that Isaac knew he was being manipulated,
that he felt guilty about the ease with which his worries for her
were transformed. She sensed gratitude in his lurching changes of
subject, along with contrition. He knew it was his role to be worried
for her, given her melancholy, and he was, he truly was, but it was
an effort, a duty, when most of his mind was crammed with crisis and
grub food. She gave him permission not to worry, and he accepted it
with thanks.

Lin wanted to displace
Isaac’s concerns for her, for a time. She could not afford for
him to be curious. The more he knew, the more she was in danger. She
did not know what powers her employer might possess: she doubted he
was capable of telepathy, but she was risking nothing. She wanted to
finish her piece, to take the money and to get away from Bonetown.

**

Every day that she saw
Mr. Motley, he pulled her—unwilling as she was—into his
city. He talked idly of turf wars in Griss Twist and Badside, dropped
hints of gangland massacres in the heart of The Crow. Ma Francine was
extending her reach. She had taken possession of a huge part of the
shazbah market west of The Crow, which Mr. Motley was prepared for.
But now she was creeping into the east. Lin chewed and spat and
moulded and tried not to hear the details, the nicknames of dead
couriers, the safe-house addresses. Mr. Motley was implicating her.
It must be deliberate.

The statue grew thighs
and another leg, the beginnings of a waist (insofar as Mr. Motley had
anything so identifiable). The colours were not naturalistic, but
they were evocative and compelling, hypnotic. It was an astonishing
piece, as befitted its subject.

Despite her attempts to
insulate her mind, Mr. Motley’s blithe chat crept in, past her
defences. She found herself musing on it. Horrified, she would pull
her mind away, but it was an unsustainable attempt. Eventually she
would find herself idly wondering who
was
more likely to win
control of the very-tea clearing house in Chimer’s End. She
became numb. It was another defence. She let her mind pick its way
dully over the dangerous information. She tried to remain studiously
ignorant of its import.

Lin found herself
thinking more and more of Ma Francine.

Mr. Motley discussed
her in carefree tones, but she came up again and again in his
monologues, and Lin realized that he was a little concerned.

To her surprise, Lin
began to root for Ma Francine.

She was not sure how it
started. The first she was aware of it was when Mr. Motley had been
talking with mock humour about a disastrous attack on two couriers
the previous night, during which a huge quantity of some undisclosed
substance, some raw material for the manufacture of something, had
been snatched by khepri raiders from Ma Francine’s gang. Lin
had realized that she was thinking a little mental cheer. She was
astonished, her glandwork stopping for a moment as she thought
through her own feelings.

She wanted Ma Francine
to win.

There was no logic to
it. As soon as she applied any rigorous thought to the situation she
had no opinion at all. Intellectually speaking, the triumph of one
drug-dealer and hoodlum over another was of no interest to her. But
emotionally, she was beginning to see the unseen Ma Francine as her
champion. She found herself booing silently when she heard Mr.
Motley’s slyly smug assurance that he had a plan that would
radically alter the shape of the marketplace.

What’s this?
she thought wryly.
After all these years, the stirrings of khepri
consciousness?

She mocked herself, but
there was some truth in the ironic thought.
Maybe it would be the
same for anyone who was opposing Motley,
she thought. Lin was so
fearful of reflecting on her relationship with Mr. Motley, so nervous
of being anything more than an employee, that it had taken her a long
time to realize that she hated him.
My enemy’s enemy...
she
thought. But there was more to it than that. Lin realized that she
felt solidarity with Ma Francine because she was khepri. But—and
maybe this was at the heart of her feelings—Francine was not
good
khepri.

These thoughts pricked
at Lin, discomforted her. For the first time in many years, they made
her think of her relationship with the khepri community in other than
a straightforward, righteous, confrontational way. And that made her
think of her childhood.

After each day with Mr.
Motley ended, Lin took to visiting Kinken. She would leave him and
catch a cab from the edge of the Ribs. Across Danechi’s or
Barguest Bridge, past the restaurants and offices and houses of Spit
Hearth.

Sometimes she would
stop at Spit Bazaar and take her time wandering through its subdued
lights. She felt the linen dresses and coats hanging from the stalls,
ignoring the passers-by staring rudely, wondering at the khepri
shopping for human clothes. Lin would meander through the bazaar
until she came to Sheck, dense and chaotic with intricate streets and
sprawling brick apartment buildings.

This was not a slum.
The buildings of Sheck were solid enough, and most kept the rain out.
Compared to the mutant sprawl of Dog Fenn, the rotting brick mulch of
Badside and Chimer’s End, the desperate shacks of Spatters,
Sheck was a desirable place. A little crowded, of course, and not
without drunkenness and poverty and thievery. But all things
considered, there were many worse places to live. This was where the
shopkeepers lived, the lower managers and better-paid factory workers
that every day crowded Echomire and Kelltree docks, Gross Coil and
Didacai Village, known universally as Smog Bend.