Perdido Street Station (36 page)

By five o’clock
the sun was still high, but it was curving towards earth. The light
was thickening fast, becoming tawny.

Deep within the
pendulous chrysalis the pupating lifeform could sense the lateness of
the day. It shivered and flexed its nearly finished flesh. In its
ichor and the byways of its body, a final set of chymical reactions
began.

At half past six, an
ungainly thud outside the window interrupted Lublamai, who looked out
to see Teafortwo in the little alley outside, rubbing his head with
his prehensile foot. The wyrman looked up at Lublamai and let out a
yell of greeting.

"Guvnor Lublub!
Doing me rounds, saw your red flapper..."

"Evening,
Teafortwo," said Lublamai. "Fancy coming in?" He stood
back from the window and let the wyrman in. Teafortwo flopped to the
floor in a heavy, flapping motion. His russet skin was beautiful in
the shards of late light that caught it. He grinned up at Lublamai
with his cheerful, hideous face.

"What’s the
plan, boss?" shouted Teafortwo. Before Lublamai could answer,
Teafortwo looked over at where Sincerity was eyeing him dubiously. He
spread his wings, stuck out his tongue and leered at her. She
scampered off in disgust.

Teafortwo laughed
uproariously and burped.

Lublamai smiled
indulgently. Before Teafortwo had a chance to get more sidetracked,
he tugged him over to the desk where his shopping list waited. He
gave Teafortwo a slab of chocolate to keep his attention on the job
in hand.

As Teafortwo and
Lublamai bickered over how many groceries the wyrman could carry in
the air, something above them stirred.

In the rapidly
darkening shadows of the cage in Isaac’s raised laboratory, the
cocoon was oscillating under a force that was not a wind. Movement
within the tight, organic package was sending it in a quick, hypnotic
motion. It spun, then faltered, bucked slightly. There was an
infinitesimal ripping noise, much too low for Lublamai or Teafortwo
to hear.

A moist, sculpted black
claw split the fibres of the cocoon. It slid slowly upwards, ripping
the stiff material as effortlessly as an assassin’s knife. A
welter of utterly alien senses spilt like invisible guts from the
ragged hole. Disorienting gusts of feeling rolled briefly around the
room, making Sincerity growl, and Lublamai and Teafortwo look up
nervously for a moment.

Intricate hands emerged
from the darkness and held the edges of the rent. They pushed
silently, forcing the thing apart and open. There was the softest of
thumps as a trembling body slid from the cocoon, as wet and slippery
as a newborn.

For a minute it huddled
on the wood, weak and bewildered, in the same hunched pose it had
maintained within the chrysalis. Slowly, it pushed outwards,
luxuriating in the sudden space. When it encountered the wire mesh of
the hutch it tore it effortlessly from the door and crawled into the
larger space of the room.

It discovered itself.
It learnt its shape.

It learnt that it had
needs.

**

Lublamai and Teafortwo
looked up at the screech and discordant plucking of torn wire. The
sound seemed to start above them and wash throughout the room. They
looked at each other, then up again.

"Wassat,
guvnor...?" said Teafortwo.

Lublamai walked away
from the desk. He glanced up at Isaac’s balcony, turned slowly,
took in the whole of the ground floor. There was silence. Lublamai
stood still, frowning, gazing at the front door. Had the sound come
from outside? he wondered.

A movement was
reflected in the mirror beside the door.

A dark thing rose from
the floor at the top of the stairs.

Lublamai spoke, emitted
some tremulous noise of disbelief, of fear, of confusion, but it
dissipated soundlessly after the briefest moment. He stared with an
open mouth at the reflection.

The thing unfolded. The
sense was of a blossoming. An expansion after being enclosed, like a
man or woman standing and spreading their arms wide after huddling
foetally, but multiplied and made vast. As if the thing’s
indistinct limbs could bend a thousand times, so that it unhinged
like a paper sculpture, standing and spreading arms or legs or
tentacles or tails that opened and opened. The thing that had huddled
like a dog stood and opened itself, and it was nearly the size of a
man.

Teafortwo screeched
something. Lublamai opened his mouth wider and tried to move. He
could not see its shape. Only its dark, glistening skin and hands
that clutched like a child’s. Cold shadows. Eyes that were not
eyes. Organic folds and jags and twists like rats’ tails that
shuddered and twitched as if newly dead. And those finger-long shards
of colourless bone that shone white and parted and dripped and that
were
teeth...

As Teafortwo tried to
bolt past Lublamai and Lublamai tried to open his mouth to scream,
his eyes still fixed to the creature in the mirror, his feet
skittering on the flagstones, the thing at the top of the stairs
opened its wings.

Four rustling
concertinas of dark matter flickered outwards on the creature’s
back, and outwards again and again, slotting into position, fanning
and expanding in vast folds of thick mottled flesh, expanding to an
impossible size: an explosion of organic patterns, a flag unfurling,
clenched fists opening.

The thing made its body
thin and spread those colossal wings, massive flat folds of stiff
skin that seemed to fill the hall. They were irregular, chaotic in
shape, random fluid whorls; but mirror-perfect left and right, like
spilt ink or paint patterns on folded paper.

And on those great flat
planes were dark stains, rude patterns that seemed to flicker as
Lublamai watched and Teafortwo fumbled with the door, wailing. The
colours were midnight, sepulchral, black-blue, black-brown,
black-red. And then the patterns
did
flicker, the
shadow-shapes moved like amoeba in a magnifying lens or oil on water,
the patterns left and right still matching, moving in time, hypnotic
and heavy, faster. Lublamai’s face creased. His back itched
maniacally with the thought that the thing was behind him. Lublamai
spun to face it, gazed directly into the mutating colours, the dusky
vivid show...

...and Lublamai no
longer thought of screaming but only of watching as those dark
markings rolled and boiled in perfect symmetry across the wings like
clouds in a night sky above, in water below.

Teafortwo howled. He
turned to see the thing that was now descending the stairs, those
wings still unfurled. Then the patterns on the wings caught him and
he stared, his mouth open.

The dark designs on
those wings moved beguilingly.

Lublamai and Teafortwo
stood still and silent, agog, slack-jawed and shivering, gazing at
the magnificent wings.

**

The creature tasted the
air.

It looked briefly at
Teafortwo, and opened its mouth, but the pickings were meagre. It
turned its head and faced Lublamai, keeping those wings spread and
enthralling. It moaned with hunger in a soundless timbre that made
Sincerity, already sick with fear, cry out. She huddled closer into
the shadow of the motionless construct, propped against the wall in
the corner of the room, weird shadows twitching in its lenses. The
air hummed with the taste of Lublamai. The creature salivated and its
wings flickered into a frenzy, and Lublamai’s taste grew
stronger and stronger until the thing’s monstrous tongue
emerged and it moved forward, flicking Teafortwo effortlessly out of
its way.

The winged creature
took Lublamai in its hungry embrace.

Sunset bled into the
canals and the converging rivers of New Crobuzon. They ran thick and
gory with light. Shifts changed and working days ended. Retinues of
exhausted smelters and foundry workers, clerks and bakers and
coke-loaders, trudged from factory and office to the stations. The
platforms were full of tired, boisterous argument, cigarillos and
booze. Steam cranes in Kelltree worked into the night, hauling exotic
cargoes from foreign ships. From the river and the great docks,
striking vodyanoi stevedores yelled insults at the human crews on the
jetties. The sky above the city was smeared with cloud. The air was
warm, and smelt alternately lush and foul, as trees fruited and
factory waste coagulated in thickening flows.

Teafortwo bolted from
the warehouse on Paddler Way like cannonshot. He tore into the sky
from the broken window trailing blood and tears, blubbering and
sniffling like a baby, flying in a ragged spiral towards Pincod and
Abrogate Green.

Minutes passed before
another, darker form followed him into the skies.

The intricate hatchling
thing flexed itself through an upper window and launched into the
gloaming. Its movements on the ground were tentative, every motion
seemed to be experimental. In the air it soared. There was no
hesitation, only a glorying in the motion.

The irregular wings
clapped together and swept apart in huge, soundless gusts that
scooped away great swathes of air. The creature spun, beating its
wings languorously, its body careering across the sky with the
chaotic graceless speed of a butterfly. It sent eddies of wind and
sweat and aphysical exudations in its wake.

The creature was still
drying.

It exalted. It licked
the cooling air.

The city festered like
mould below it. A palimpsest of sense-impressions washed over the
flying thing. Sounds and smells and lights that filtered into its
obscure mind in a synaesthetic wash, an alien perception.

New Crobuzon steamed
with the rich taste-scent of prey.

The thing had fed, was
sated, but the glut of food confused it, gloriously, and it slobbered
and gnashed its huge teeth in a frenzy.

It dived. Its wings
fluttered and trembled as it swooped towards the unlit alleys below
it. It knew in its hunter’s heart to avoid the great scabs of
light clotted at irregular spaces around the city, to seek out the
darker places. It trailed its tongue in the air and found food, swept
with chaotic aerobatics into the shadow of the bricks. It came down
like a fallen angel in the gnarled cul-de-sac where a prostitute and
her client fucked against a wall. Their desultory jerks faltered as
they sensed the thing beside them.

Their screams were
brief. They ceased quickly as the creature’s wings spread.

The thing fell on them
with eager greed.

**

Afterwards it flew
again, drunk with the taste.

It hovered, seeking the
centre of the city, turning, drawn slowly to the enormous sprawl of
Perdido Street Station. It beat its way west over Spit Hearth and the
red-light zone, over the contradictory tangle of commerce and squalor
that was The Crow. Behind it, snagging the air like a trap, was the
dark edifice of Parliament, and the militia towers of Strack Island
and Brock Marsh. The creature traced an uneven course over the path
of the skyrail that linked those lower towers to the Spike that
loomed at the westernmost shoulder of Perdido Street Station.

The flying thing
started as pods streaked along that rail. It hovered momentarily,
fascinated at the rattling passage of the trains that expanded
outwards from the station, that monstrous architectural enormity.

Vibrations in a hundred
registers and keys beckoned the thing, as forces and emotions and
dreams spilt and were amplified in the brick chambers of the station
and blasted outwards into the sky. A massive, invisible flavour
trail.

The few night-birds
swerved violently away from the weird thing that beat its heavy way
towards the city’s dark heart. Wyrmen on errands saw its
incomprehensible silhouette and wheeled off in other directions,
shouting obscenities and oaths. Booms and drones vibrated as the
dirigibles sounded to each other, sliding slowly between city and sky
like fat pike. As they turned ponderously, the thing flapped past
them, unseen except by an engineer who did not report his sighting,
but made a religious sign and whispered to Solenton for protection.

Caught in the updraft,
the wash of senses, from Perdido Street Station, the flying thing let
itself be caught and swept up until it was way, way above the city.
It turned slowly with a quiver from its wings, orienting itself to
its new territory.

It noted the paths of
the river. It felt the vents of different energies from the city’s
different zones. It sensed the city in a flickering passage of
different modes. Concentrations of food. Shelter.

The creature sought one
more thing. Others of its kind.

It was social. When it
was born for the second time it was with a hunger for company. Its
tongue unrolled and it tasted the gritty air for anything that was
like itself.

The thing shuddered.

Faintly, so faintly, it
could sense something in the east. It could taste frustration. Its
wings trembled in empathy.

It arced around and
beat its way back in the direction from which it had come. It bore a
little north this time, passing over the parks and elegant old
buildings of Gidd and Ludmead. The splintering enormities of the Ribs
splayed extraordinarily to the south, and the flying thing felt a
queasiness, an anxiety, at the awareness of those looming bones. The
power that drooled upward from them was not at all to its liking. But
its unease battled with its deeply encoded sympathy for its own kind,
whose taste grew stronger, much stronger, in the shadow of the great
skeleton.

The thing descended
tentatively. It approached circuitously, from the north and the east.
It flew low and tight, below the skyrail that extended northwards
from the militia tower of Mog Hill to that in Chnum. It shadowed an
eastbound train on the Dexter Line, gliding in its filthy thermals.
Then it swung in a long arc around the Mog Hill tower and over the
northern fringe of Echomire’s industrial zone. The thing swept
in towards Bonetown’s raised railway, cringing at the influence
of the Ribs, but dragged on towards the taste of its fellows.