Perdido Street Station

Chapter Fifty-Two

“We have to leave.”

Derkhan spoke quickly. Isaac looked up at her dully. He was feeding Lin, who squirmed uncomfortably, unsure of what she wanted to do. She signed at him, her hands tracing words and then simply moving, tracing shapes that had no meaning. He flicked fruit detritus from her shirt.

He nodded and looked down. Derkhan continued as if he had disagreed with her, as if she were convincing him.

“Every time we move, we’re afraid.” She spoke quickly. Her face was hard. Terror, guilt, exhilaration and misery had scoured her. She was exhausted. “Every time any kind of automaton goes past, we think the Construct Council’s found us. Every man or woman or xenian makes us freeze up. Is it the militia? Is it one of Motley’s thugs?” She kneeled down. “I can’t live like this, ‘Zaac,” she said. She looked down at Lin, smiled very slowly and closed her eyes. “We’ll take her away,” she whispered. “We can look after her. We’re finished here. It can’t be long before one of them finds us. I’m not waiting around for that.”

Isaac nodded again.

“I…” He thought carefully. He tried to organize his mind. “I’ve got…a commitment,” he said quietly.

He rubbed the flab below his chin. It itched as his stubble re-grew, pushing through his uneven skin. Wind blew through the windows. The house in Pincod was tall and mouldering and full of junkies. Isaac and Derkhan and Yagharek had claimed the top two floors. There was one window on each side, overlooking the street and the wretched little yard. Weeds had burst out through the stained concrete below like subcutaneous growths.

Isaac and the others barricaded the doors whenever they were in: slipped out carefully, disguised, mostly at night. Sometimes they would venture out in the daylight, as Yagharek had now. There was always some reason given, some urgency that meant the vague trip could not wait. It was just claustrophobia. They had freed the city: it was untenable that they should not walk under the sun.

“I know about the commitment,” Derkhan said. She looked over at the loosely connected components of the crisis engine. Isaac had cleaned them up the previous night, slotted them into place.

“Yagharek,” he said. “I owe him. I promised.”

Derkhan looked down and swallowed, then turned her head to him again. She nodded.

“How long?” she said. Isaac glanced up at her, broke her gaze and looked away. He shrugged briefly.

“Some of the wires are burnt out,” he said vaguely, and shifted Lin into a more comfortable position on his chest. “There was a shitload of feedback, melted right through some of the circuits. Um…I’m going to have to go out tonight and rummage around for a couple of adapters…and a dynamo. I can fix the rest of it myself,” he said, “but I’ll have to get the tools. Trouble is, every time we nick something we put ourselves even more at risk.” He shrugged slowly. There was nothing he could do. They had no money. “Then I have to get a cell-battery or something. But the hardest thing is going to be the maths. Fixing all this up is mostly just…mechanics. But even if I can get the engines to work, getting the sums right to…you know, formulating this in equations…that’s damn hard. That’s what I got the Council to do last time.” He closed his eyes and rested his head against the wall.

“I have to formulate the commands,” he said quietly. “Fly. That’s what I’ve got to tell it. Put Yag in the sky and he’s in crisis, he’s about to fall. Tap that and channel it, keep him in the air, keep him flying, keep him in crisis, so tap the energy and so on. It’s a perfect loop,” he said. “I think it’ll work. It’s just the maths…”

“How long?” Derkhan repeated quietly. Isaac frowned.

“A week…or two, maybe,” he admitted. “Maybe more.”

Derkhan shook her head. She said nothing.

“I owe him, Dee!” Isaac said, his voice tense. “I’ve promised him this for ages, and he…”

He got the slake-moth off Lin, he had been about to say, but something in him had preempted him, asked if that was such a good thing after all, and appalled, Isaac faltered into silence.

It’s the most powerful science for hundreds of years, he thought in a sudden rage, and I can’t come out of hiding. I have to…to spirit it away.

He stroked Lin’s carapace and she began to sign to him, mentioning fish and cold and sugar.

“I know, ‘Zaac,” said Derkhan without anger. “I know. He’s…he deserves it. But we can’t wait that long. We have to go.”

I’ll do what I can, promised Isaac, I have to help him, I’ll be quick.

Derkhan accepted it. She had no choice. She would not leave him, or Lin. She did not blame him. She wanted him to honour his agreement, to give Yagharek what he wanted.

The stink and sadness of the damp little room overwhelmed her. She muttered something about scouting out the river and she left. Isaac smiled without warmth at her half-hearted excuse.

“Be careful,” he said unnecessarily as she left.

He lay cuddling Lin with his back to the foetid wall.

After a while he felt Lin relax into sleep. He slipped out from behind her and walked over to the window, looked out over the bustle below.

Isaac did not know the name of the street. It was wide, lined with young trees all pliant and hopeful. At the far end, a cart had been parked sideways, deliberately creating a cul-de-sac. A man and a vodyanoi were arguing ferociously beside it, while the two cowed donkeys drawing it hung their heads, trying not to be noticed. A group of children materialized in front of the motionless wheels, kicking a ball of tied rags. They scampered, their clothes flapping like flightless wings.

An argument broke out, four little boys prodding one of the two vodyanoi children in the group. The fat little vodyanoi backed away on all fours, crying. One of the boys threw a stone. The argument was forgotten quickly. The vodyanoi sulked a brief moment, then hopped back into the game, stealing the ball.

Further along the road, a few doors down from Isaac’s building, a young woman was chalking some symbol onto the wall. It was an unfamiliar, angular device, some witch’s talisman. Two old men sat together on a stoop, tossing dice and laughing uproariously at the results. The buildings were bird-limed and grotty, the tarred pavement punctuated with water-filled potholes. Rooks and pigeons threaded through smoke from thousands of chimneys.

Cuttings from conversations reached Isaac’s ears.

“…so he says a stiver for that?…”

“…damaged the engine, but then he was always a cunt…”

“…don’t say nothing about it…”

“…it’s on Dockday next, and she copped a total crystal…”

“…savage, absofuckinglutely savage…”

“…remembrance? For who?”

For Andrej, thought Isaac suddenly, without warning or reason. He listened again.

There was much more. There were languages he did not speak. He recognized Perrickish and Fellid, the intricate cadences of Low Cymek. And others.

He did not want to leave.

Isaac sighed and turned back into the room. Lin squirmed on the floor in sleep.

He looked at her, saw her breasts pushing at her torn shirt. Her skirt rode up her thighs. He looked away.

Since recovering Lin, twice he had woken with the warmth and pressure of her against him, his prick erect and eager. He had rubbed his hand over the swell of her hips and down into her parted legs. Sleep had rolled off him like fog as his arousal grew and he had opened his eyes to see her, moving her beneath him as she woke, forgetting that Derkhan and Yagharek were sleeping nearby. He had breathed at her and spoken lovingly and explicitly of what he wanted to do, and then he had jerked backwards in horror as she began to sign babble at him and he remembered what had happened to her.

She had rubbed against him and stopped, rubbed him again (like some capricious dog, he had thought, appalled), her erratic arousal and confusion absolutely clear. Some lustful part of him had wanted to continue, but the weight of sorrow had shrivelled his penis almost instantly.

Lin had seemed disappointed and hurt, then she hugged him, happily and suddenly. Then she curled up in despair. Isaac had tasted her emissions in the air around them. He had known she was crying herself to sleep.

Isaac glanced out at the day again. He thought of Rudgutter and his cronies; of the macabre Mr. Motley; he imagined the cold analysis of the Construct Council, cheated of the engine it coveted. He imagined the rages, the arguments, the orders given and received that week that cursed him.

Isaac walked over to the crisis engine, took brief stock of it. He sat down, folded paper in his lap, and began to write calculations.

He was not worried that the Construct Council might mimic his engine itself. It could not design one. It could not calculate its parameters. The blueprint had come to him in an intuitive leap so natural that he had not recognized it for hours. The Construct Council could not be inspired. Isaac’s fundamental model, the conceptual basis of the engine, he had never even had to write down. His notes would be quite opaque to any reader.

Isaac positioned himself so that he worked in a shaft of sunlight.

The grey dirigibles patrolled the air, as they did every day. They seemed uneasy.

It was a perfect day. The wind from the sea seemed constantly to renew the sky.

Yagharek and Derkhan, in separate quarters of the city, enjoyed their furtive times in the sun, and tried not to court danger. They walked away from arguments and stuck to the crowded streets.

The sky was riotous with birds and wyrmen. They flocked to buttresses and minarets, crowding the gently sloped roofs of militia towers and struts, coating them in white shit. They stormed in shifting spirals around the Ketch Heath towers and the skeletal edifices in Spatters.

They scudded over The Crow, wove intricately through the complex pattern of air that rose above Perdido Street Station. Rowdy jackdaws squabbled over the layers of clay. They flitted over the lower hulks of slate and tar at the station’s shabby rear, descending towards a peculiar plateau of concrete above a little brow of windowed roofs. Their droppings fouled its recently scrubbed surface, little pellets of white splattering against the dark stains where some noxious fluid had spilled copiously.

The Spike and the Parliament building swarmed with little avian bodies.

The Ribs bleached and split, their flaws worsening slowly in the sun. Birds alit briefly on the enormous shafts of bone, launching themselves free again quickly, seeking refuge elsewhere in Bonetown, skimming over the roof of a smoke-damaged black terrace, in the heart of which Mr. Motley ranted against the incomplete sculpture which mocked him with unending spite.

Gulls and gannets followed rubbish barges and fishing boats up along the Gross Tar and the Tar, swooping down to snatch organic morsels from the detritus. They wheeled away to other pickings, to the offal-piles in Badside, the fish market in Pelorus Fields. They landed briefly on the split, algaed cable that crawled out of the river by Spit Hearth. They explored the rubbish heaps in Stoneshell, and picked at half-dead prey crawling through the Griss Twist wasteland. The ground purred beneath them, as hidden cables hummed inches below the ragged topsoil.

A larger body than the birds rose up from the slums of St. Jabber’s Mound and soared into the air. It sailed at a massive height over the western city. The streets below became a mottled stain of khaki and grey like some exotic mould. It passed easily above the aerostats in the gusting breeze, warmed by the noon sun. It maintained a steady pace eastwards, crossing the city’s nucleus where the five rail lines burst out like petals.

In the air over Sheck, gangs of wyrmen looped the loop in vulgar aerobatics. The drifting figure passed over them serene and unnoticed.

It moved slowly, with langorous strokes that suggested it could increase its speed tenfold suddenly and with ease. It crossed the Canker and began a long descent, passing in and out of the air over the Dexter Line trains, riding their hot exhaust briefly, then gliding earthwards with unseen majesty, descending towards the canopy of roofs, weaving easily through the maze of the thermals gusting up from massive smokestacks and little hovels’ flues.

It banked towards the huge gas cylinders in Echomire, spiralled back easily, slipped under a layer of disturbed air and flew steeply down towards Mog Station, passing under the skyrails too fast to be seen, disappearing into the Pincod roofscape.

Isaac was not lost in his numbers.

He looked up every few minutes at Lin, who slept and moved her arms and wriggled like a helpless grub. His eyes looked as if they had never been lit up.

In the early afternoon, when he had worked for an hour, an hour and a half, he heard something clatter in the yard below. Half a minute later there were footsteps on the stairs.

Isaac froze and waited for them to stop, to disappear into one of the junkies’ rooms. They did not. They moved with a deliberate tread up the final two flights, making their careful way up the noisome steps and halting outside his door.

Isaac was still. His heart beat quickly in alarm. He looked around wildly for his gun.

There was a knock at the door. Isaac said nothing.

After a moment, whoever was outside knocked again: not hard, but rhythmically and insistently, repeatedly. Isaac stalked closer, trying to be quiet. He saw Lin twisting uncomfortably at the sound.

There was a voice outside the door, a weird, harsh, familiar voice. It was all grating treble, and Isaac could not understand it, but he reached out for the door suddenly, unsettled and aggressive and ready for trouble. Rudgutter would send a whole damn squadron, he thought as his hand closed on the handle, it’s bound to be some junkie begging. And although he did not believe that, he was reassured that it was not the militia, or Motley’s men.

He pulled the door open.

Standing before him on the unlit stairs, leaning slightly forward, sleek feathered head mottled like dry leaves, beak curved and glinting like an exotic weapon, was a garuda.

He saw instantly that it was not Yagharek.

Its wings rose up and swelled around it like a corona, vast and magnificent, feathered in ochre and smooth red-stained brown.

Isaac had forgotten what an uncrippled garuda looked like. He had forgotten the extraordinary scale and grandeur of those wings.

He understood what was happening almost immediately, in some inchoate and unstructured way. A wordless intimation hit him.

Following it by a fraction of a second came a massive gust of doubt and alarm and curiosity and a slew of questions.

“Who the fuck are you?” he breathed, and: “What are you fucking doing here? How did you find me…What…” Half-answers came unbidden to him. He stepped back from the threshold quickly, trying to banish them.

“Grim…neb…lin…” The garuda struggled with his name. It sounded as if he was a daemon being invoked. Isaac jerked his arm quickly for the garuda to follow him into the little room. He closed the door and pushed the chair back up against it.

The garuda stalked into the centre of the room, into a sunlit patch. Isaac watched it warily. It wore a dusty loincloth and nothing more. Its skin was darker than Yagharek’s, its feathered head more mottled. It moved with incredible economy, tiny snapping movements and great stillness, its head cocked to take in the room.

It stared at Lin for a long time, until Isaac sighed and the garuda looked up at him.

“Who are you?” Isaac said. “How did you fucking find me?” What did he do? Isaac thought, but did not say. Tell me.

They stood, slim, tight-muscled garuda and fat, thickset human, at opposite ends of the room. The garuda’s feathers were shiny with sun. Isaac stared at them, suddenly tired. Some sense of inevitability, of finality, had entered with the garuda. Isaac hated it for that.

“I am Kar’uchai,” the garuda said. Its voice was harder even than Yagharek’s with Cymek intonations. It was difficult to understand. “Kar’uchai Sukhtu-h’k Vaijhin-khi-khi. Concrete Individual Kar’uchai Very Very Respected.” Isaac waited.

“How did you find me?” he said eventually, bitterly. “I have…come a long way, Grimneb…lin,” Kar’uchai said. “I am yahj’hur…hunter. I have hunted for days. Here I hunt with…gold and paper-money…My quarry leaves a trail of rumour…and memory.”

What did he do?

“I come from Cymek. I have hunted…since Cymek.”

“I can’t believe you found us,” said Isaac suddenly, nervously. He talked quickly, hating the pervasive sense of ending and ignoring it aggressively, blotting it. “If you did the damn militia can for sure and if they can…” He strode quickly back and forth. He knelt down by Lin, stroked her gently, drew breath to say more.

“I am come for justice,” said Kar’uchai, and Isaac could not speak. He felt suffocated.

“Shankell,” said Kar’uchai. “Meagre Sea. Myrshock.” I’ve heard about the journey, thought Isaac in anger, you don’t have to tell me. Kar’uchai continued. “I have…hunted across a thousand miles. Seek justice.”

Isaac spoke slowly, in rage and sadness.

“Yagharek is my friend,” he said.

Kar’uchai continued as if he had said nothing. “When we found that he was gone, after…judgement…I was chosen to come…”

“What do you want?” said Isaac. “What are you going to do to him? You want to take him back with you? You want to…what, cut off…more of him?”

“I have not come for Yagharek,” said Kar’uchai. “I have come for you.”

Isaac stared in miserable confusion.

“It is up to you…to let justice be…”

Kar’uchai was relentless. Isaac could say nothing.

What did he do?

“I heard your name first in Myrshock,” said Kar’uchai. “It was on a list. Then here, in this city, it came back again and again until…all others melted away. I hunted. Yagharek and you…were linked. People whispered…of your researches. Flying monsters and thaumaturgic machines. I knew that Yagharek had found what he sought. What he came a thousand miles for. You would deny justice, Grimneb’lin. I am here to ask you…not to do that.

“It was finished. He was judged and punished. And it was over. We did not think…we did not know that he might…find a way…that justice could be retracted.

“I am here to ask you not to help him fly.”

“Yagharek is my friend,” said Isaac steadily. “He came to me and employed me. He was generous. When things…went wrong…got complicated and dangerous…well, he was brave and he helped me-us. He’s been part of…of something extraordinary. And I owe him…a life.” He glanced at Lin and then away again. “I owe him…for the times…He was ready to die, you know? He could have died, but he stayed and without him…I don’t think I could have come through.”

Isaac spoke quietly. His words were sincere and affecting.

What did he do?

“What did he do?” said Isaac, defeated.

“He is guilty,” said Kar’uchai quietly, “of choice-theft in the second degree, with utter disrespect.”

“What does that mean?” shouted Isaac. “What did he do? What’s fucking choice-theft anyway? This means nothing to me.”

“It is the only crime we have, Grimneb’lin,” replied Kar’uchai in a harsh monotone. “To take the choice of another…to forget their concrete reality, to abstract them, to forget that you are a node in a matrix, that actions have consequences. We must not take the choice of another being. What is community but a means to…for all we individuals to have…our choices.”

Kar’uchai shrugged and indicated the world around them vaguely. “Your city institutions…Talking and talking of individuals…but crushing them in layers and hierarchies…until their choices might be between three kinds of squalor.

“We have far less, in the desert. We hunger, sometimes, and thirst. But we have all the choices that we can. Except when someone forgets themselves, forgets the reality of their companions, as if they were an individual alone…And steals food, and takes the choice of others to eat it, or lies about game, and takes the choice of others to hunt it; or grows angry and attacks without reason, and takes the choice of another not to be bruised or live in fear.

“A child who steals the cloak of some beloved other, to smell at night…they take away the choice to wear the cloak, but with respect, with a surfeit of respect.

“Other thefts, though, do not have even respect to mitigate them.

“To kill…not in war or defence, but to…murder…is to have such disrespect, such utter disrespect, that you take not only the choice of whether to live or die that moment…but every other choice for all of time that might be made. Choices beget choices…if they had been allowed their choice to live, they might have chosen to hunt for fish in a salt-swamp, or to play dice, or to tan hides, to write poesy or cook stew…and all those choices are taken from them in that one theft.

“That is choice-theft in the highest degree. But all choice-thefts steal from the future as well as the present.

“Yagharek’s was a heinous…a terrible forgetting. Theft in the second degree.”

“What did he do?” shouted Isaac, and Lin woke with a flutter of hands and a nervous twitching.

Kar’uchai spoke dispassionately.

“You would call it rape.”

Oh, I would call it rape, would I? thought Isaac in a molten, raging sneer; but the torrent of livid contempt was not enough to drown his horror.

I would call it rape.

Isaac could not but imagine. Immediately.

The act itself, of course, though that was a vague and nebulous brutality in his mind (did he beat her? Hold her down? Where was she? Did she curse and fight back?). What he saw most clearly, immediately, were all the vistas, the avenues of choice that Yagharek had stolen. Fleetingly, Isaac glimpsed the denied possibilities.

The choice not to have sex, not to be hurt. The choice not to risk pregnancy. And then…what if she had become pregnant? The choice not to abort? The choice not to have a child?

The choice to look at Yagharek with respect?

Isaac’s mouth worked and Kar’uchai spoke again.

“It was my choice he stole.”

It took a few seconds, a ludicrously long time, for Isaac to understand what Kar’uchai meant. Then he gasped and stared at her, seeing for the first time the slight swell of her ornamental breasts, as useless as bird-of-paradise plumage. He struggled for something to say, but he did not know what he felt: there was nothing solid for words to express.

He murmured some appallingly loose apology, some solicitation.

“I thought you were…the garuda magister…or the militia, or something,” he said.

“We have none,” she replied.

“Yag…a fucking rapist” he hissed, and she clucked.

“He stole choice,” she said flatly.

“He raped you,” he said, and instantly Kar’uchai clucked again.

“He stole my choice,” she said. She was not expanding on his words, Isaac realized: she was correcting him. “You cannot translate into your jurisprudence, Grimneb’lin,” she said. She seemed annoyed.

Isaac tried to speak, shook his head miserably, stared at her and again saw the crime committed, behind his eyes.

“You cannot translate, Grimneb’lin,” Kar’uchai repeated. “Stop. I can see…all the texts of your city’s laws and morals that I have read…in you.” Her tone sounded monotonous to him. The emotion in the pauses and cadences of her voice was opaque.

“I was not violated or ravaged, Grimneb’lin. I am not abused or defiled…or ravished or spoiled. You would call his actions rape, but I do not: that tells me nothing. He stole my choice, and that is why he was…judged. It was severe…the last sanction but one…There are many choice-thefts less heinous than his, and only a few more so…And there are others that are judged equal…many of those are actions utterly unlike Yagharek’s. Some, you would not deem crimes at all.

“The actions vary: the crime…is the theft of choice. Your magisters and laws…that sexualize and sacralize…for whom individuals are defined abstract…their matrix-nature ignored…where context is a distraction…cannot grasp that.

“Do not look at me with eyes reserved for victims…And when Yagharek returns…I ask you to observe our justice-Yagharek’s justice-not to impute your own.

“He stole choice, in the second highest degree. He was judged. The band voted. That is the end.”

Is it? thought Isaac. Is that enough? Is that the end?

Kar’uchai watched him struggle.

Lin called to Isaac, clapping her hands like a clumsy child. He knelt quickly and spoke to her. She signed anxiously at him and he signed back as if what she said made sense, as if they were conversing.

She was calmed, and she hugged him and looked nervously up at Kar’uchai with her unbroken compound eye.

“Will you observe our judgement?” said Kar’uchai quietly. Isaac looked at her quickly. He busied himself with Lin.

Kar’uchai was silent for a long time. When Isaac did not speak, she repeated her question. Isaac turned to her and shook his head, not in denial but confusion.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Please…”

He turned back to Lin, who slept. He slumped against her and rubbed his head.

After minutes of silence, Kar’uchai stopped her swift pacing and called his name.

He started as if he had forgotten she was there.

“I will leave. I ask you again. Please do not mock our justice. Please let our judgement be.” She moved the chair from the door and stalked out. Her taloned feet scratched at the old wood as she descended.

And Isaac sat and stroked Lin’s iridescent carapace-marbled now with stress-fractures and lines of cruelty-thinking about Yagharek.

Do not translate, Kar’uchai had said, but how could he not?

He thought of Kar’uchai’s wings shuddering with rage as she was pinioned by Yagharek’s arms. Or had he threatened with a knife? A weapon? A fucking whip?

Fuck them, he would think suddenly, staring at the crisis engine’s parts. I don’t owe their laws respect…Free the prisoners. That was what Runagate Rampant always said.

But the Cymek garuda did not live like the citizens of New Crobuzon. There were no magisters, Isaac remembered, no courts or punishment factories, no quarries and dumps to pack with Remade, no militia or politicians. Punishment was not doled out by backhanding bosses.

Or so he had been told. So he remembered. The band voted, Kar’uchai had said.

Was that true? Did that change things?

In New Crobuzon punishment was for someone. Some interest was served. Was that different in the Cymek? Did that make the crime more heinous?

Was a garuda rapist worse than a human one?

Who am I to judge? Isaac thought in sudden anger, and stormed towards his engine, picked up his calculations, ready to continue, but then, Who am I to judge? he thought, in sudden hollow uncertainty, the ground taken from under him, and he put his papers down slowly.

He kept glancing at Lin’s thighs. Her bruises had almost gone, but his memory of them was as savage a stain as they had been.

They had mottled her in suggestive patterns around her lower belly and inner thighs.

Lin shifted and woke and held him and shied away in fear and Isaac’s teeth set at the thought of what might have been done to her. He thought of Kar’uchai.

This is all wrong, he thought. That’s just exactly what she told you not to do. This isn’t about rape, she said…

But it was too hard. Isaac could not do it. If he thought of Yagharek he thought of Kar’uchai, and if he thought of her he thought of Lin.

This is all arse-side up, he thought.

If he took Kar’uchai at her word, he could not judge the punishment. He could not decide whether he respected garuda justice or not: he had no grounds at all, he knew nothing of the circumstances. So it was natural, surely, it was inevitable and healthy, that he should fall back on what he knew: his scepticism; the fact that Yagharek was his friend. Would he leave his friend flightless because he gave alien laws the benefit of the doubt?

He remembered Yagharek scaling the Glasshouse, fighting beside him against the militia.

He remembered Yagharek’s whip savaging the slake-moth, ensnaring it, freeing Lin.

But when he thought of Kar’uchai, and what had been done to her, he could not but think of that as rape. And he thought of Lin, and everything that might have been done to her, until he felt as if he would puke with anger.

He tried to extricate himself.

He tried to think himself away from the whole thing. He told himself desperately that to refuse his services would not imply judgement, that it would not mean he pretended knowledge of the facts, that it would simply be a way of saying, “This is beyond me, this is not my business.” But he could not convince himself.

He slumped and breathed a miserable moan of exhaustion. If he turned from Yagharek, he realized, no matter what he said, Isaac would feel himself to have judged, and to have found Yagharek wanting. And Isaac realized that he could not in conscience imply that, when he did not know the case.

But on the heels of that thought came another; a flipside, a counterpoint.

If withholding help implied negative judgement he could not make, thought Isaac, then helping, bestowing flight, would imply that Yagharek’s actions were acceptable.

And that, thought Isaac in cold distaste and fury, he would not do.

He folded his notes slowly, his half-finished equations, his scribbled formulae, and began to pack them away.

When Derkhan returned, the sun was low and the sky was blemished with blood-coloured clouds. She tapped the door in the quick rhythm they had agreed, bundling past Isaac when he opened it.

“It’s an amazing day,” she said with sadness. “I’ve been sniffing quietly all over the place, getting a few leads, a few ideas…” She turned to face him and was instantly quiet.

His dark, scarred face bore an extraordinary expression. Some complex composite of hope and excitement and terrible misery. He seemed to brim with energy. He shifted as if he crawled with ants. He wore his long beggar’s cloak. A sack sat beside the door, bulging with heavy, bulky contents. The crisis engine was gone, she realized, disassembled and hidden away in the sack.

Without the spread-out mess of metal and wire, the room seemed utterly bare.

With a little gasp, Derkhan saw that Isaac had wrapped up Lin in a foul, tattered blanket. Lin clutched at it fitfully and nervously, signing nonsense up at him. She saw Derkhan and jerked happily.

“Let’s go,” said Isaac in a hollow voice that strained with tension.

“What are you talking about?” said Derkhan angrily. “What are you talking about? Where’s Yagharek? What’s come over you?”

“Dee, please…” whispered Isaac. He took her hands. She reeled at his imploring fervour. “Yag’s still not come back. I’m leaving this for him,” he said, and plucked a letter from his pocket. He tossed it nervously into the centre of the floor. Derkhan began to speak again and Isaac cut her off, shaking his head violently.

“I’m not…I can’t…I don’t work for Yag no more, Dee…I’m terminating our contract…I’ll explain everything, I promise, but let’s go. You’re right, we’ve stayed much too long.” He flicked his hand at the window, where the evening sounded boisterous and easygoing. “The fucking government are after us, and the biggest damn gangster on the continent…And the…the Construct Council…” He shook her gently.

“Let’s go. The…the three of us. Let’s get out and away.”

“What happened, Isaac?” she demanded. She shook him back.

“Tell me now.”

He looked away quickly, and back at her.

“I had a visitor…” She gasped and her eyes widened, but he shook his head slowly. “Dee…a visitor from the fucking Cymek.” He held her eyes and swallowed. “I know what Yagharek did, Dee.” He was quiet as her face rearranged itself into a cold calm. “I know what he got…punished for.

“There’s nothing holding us here, Dee. I’ll tell you everything-everything, I swear-but there’s nothing holding us here. I’ll tell you while we…while we go.”

For days he had been in an awful lassitude, distracted by crisis maths and utterly, exhaustingly despondent about Lin. Quite suddenly, the urgency of their situation had come home to him. He realized their danger. He understood how patient Derkhan had been, and he understood that they must leave.

“Godsdamnit,” she said quietly. “I know it’s only a few months, but he…he’s your friend. Isn’t he? We can’t just…can we just leave him…?” She looked at him and her face creased. “Is it…what is it? Is it so terrible? Is it bad enough that it…that it cancels everything else out? Is it so terrible?” Isaac closed his eyes.

“No…yes. It’s not that simple. I’ll explain when we go.

“I’m not going to help him. That’s the bottom line. I can’t, I fucking can’t, Dee, I fucking can’t. And I can’t see him, I don’t want to see him. So there’s nothing here, so we can go.

“We really must go.”

Derkhan argued, but briefly and without conviction. She was gathering her tiny bag of clothes, her little notebook, even while she said she was not sure. She was caught up in Isaac’s wake.

She scrawled a tiny addendum to the back of Isaac’s note, without opening it. Good luck, she scribbled. We will meet again. Sorry to disappear so suddenly. You know how to get out of the city. You know what to do. She paused for quite a long time, unsure of how to say goodbye, and then wrote Derkhan. She replaced the letter.

She wrapped her scarf about her, let her new black hair slide like oil over her shoulders. It rubbed against the scab left by her ruined ear. She looked out of the window, to where the sky grew thick with evening, then turned and put her arm gently around Lin, helped her walk in her erratic fashion. Slowly, the three of them descended.

“There’s a bunch of guys over in Smog Bend,” Derkhan said. “Bargemen. They can take us south without any questions.”

“Fuck, no!” hissed Isaac. He looked up from below his hood with wide eyes.

They stood at the end of the street, where the cart had acted as goal for the children hours before. The warm evening air was full of smells. There were loud disagreements and hysterical laughter from a parallel avenue. Grocers and housewives and steelwrights and minor criminals chatted on corners. The lights were emerging with the sputter of a hundred different fuels and currents. Flames in various colours sprang up behind frosted glass.

“Fuck no,” Isaac said again. “Not inland…Let’s go out…Let’s go to Kelltree. Let’s go to the docks.”

So they walked together slowly south and west. They skirted between Saltbur and Mog Hill, shuffling through the busy streets, an unlikely trio. A tall and bulky beggar with a hidden face, a striking crow-haired woman and a hooded cripple walking in unsteady spasming gait, half-supported and half-pulled by her companions.

Every steaming construct that walked past made them duck their heads uncomfortably away. Isaac and Derkhan kept their eyes down, talking quickly under their breath. They glanced up nervously as they passed below skyrails, as if the militia streaking above them could sniff them out from all that way above. They avoided catching the eyes of the men and women who lounged aggressively on street corners.

They felt as if they held their breath. An agonizing journey. They were tremulous with adrenalin.

They looked around them as they walked, taking in everything they could as if their eyes were cameras. Isaac snatched glimpses of opera posters curling ragged off walls, twists of barbed wire and concrete embedded with broken glass, the arches of the Kelltree rail-link that branched from the Dexter Line, hovering over Sunter and Bonetown.

He looked up at the Ribs that loomed colossal to his right, and he tried to remember their angles, exactly.

With every step they pulled themselves free of the city. They could feel its gravity receding. They felt light-headed. As if they might cry.

Unseen, just below the clouds, a shadow drifted lazily after them. It turned and spiralled as their course became clear. It swept giddily in a moment of lonely aerobatics. As Isaac and Lin and Derkhan continued, the figure broke off its circles and shot away at speed through the sky, heading out of the city.

Stars appeared and Isaac began to whisper goodbye to The Clock and Cockerel, to Aspic Bazaar and Ketch Heath and his friends.

It stayed warm as they made their way south, shadowing the trains, into a wide-open landscape of industrial estates. Weeds escaped from lots and encroached onto the pavement, tripping the pedestrians that still filled the night-city, making them swear. Isaac and Derkhan guided Lin carefully through the outskirts of Echomire and Kelltree, bearing south, the trains beside them, heading for the river.

The Gross Tar, shimmering prettily under the neon and the gaslight, its pollution obscured by reflections: and the docks full of tall ships with heavy furled sails and steamboats leaking iridescently into the water, merchant vessels drawn by bored seawyrms chewing on vast bridles, unsteady factory-freighters that bristled with cranes and steamhammers; ships for whom New Crobuzon was just one stop on a journey.

In the Cymek, we call the moon’s little satellites the mosquitoes. Here in New Crobuzon they call them her daughters.

The room is full of light from the moon and her daughters, and empty of all else.

I have stood here for a long time, Isaacs letter in my hand.

In a moment, I will read it again.

I heard the emptiness of the decaying house from the stairs. The echoes receded for too long. I knew before I touched the door that the attic was deserted.

I was away for hours, seeking some spurious, faltering freedom in the city.

I wandered into the pretty gardens of Sobek Croix, through fussing clouds of insects and past the sculpted lakes of overfed fowl. I found the ruins of the monastery, the little shell displayed proudly at the park’s heart. Where romantic vandals carve their lovers’ names onto the ancient stone. The little keep was deserted a thousand years before New Crobuzon’s foundations were laid. The god to which it was consecrated died.

Some people come at night to honour the dead god’s ghost. What tenuous, desperate theology.

I visited Howl Barrow today. I saw Lichford. I stood before a grey wall in Barrackham, the crumbling skin of a dead factory, and read all the graffiti.

I was foolish. I took risks. Did not remain carefully hidden.

I felt almost drunk with that little snatch of freedom, eager for more.

So I returned at last through the night, to that hollow and forsaken attic, to Isaac’s brutal betrayal.

What breach of faith, what cruelty.

I open it once more (ignoring Derkhan’s pathetic little words, like some dusting of sugar on poison). The extraordinary tension in the words seems to make them crawl. I can see Isaac striving for so many things as he writes. Bluff no-nonsense. Anger, stern disapproval. True misery. Objectivism. And some weird comradeship, some shame-faced apology.

…had a visitor today…I read, and…under the circumstances…

Under the circumstances. Under the circumstances I will flee you. I will turn and judge you. I will leave you with your shame, I will know you from the inside and I will pass on and I will not help you.

…not going to ask you “how could you?” I read and I feel weak suddenly, truly weak, not as if I will faint or vomit but as if I will die.

It makes me cry out.

It makes me scream. I cannot stop this noise, I do not want to, I shriek and shriek and as my voice grows, memories of war-cries come to me, memories of my band racing in to hunt or fight, memories of funereal ululation and exorcism wails but this is none of these, this is my pain, unstructured, uncultured, unregulated and illicit and my own, my agony, my loneliness, my misery, my guilt.

She told me no, that Sazhin had asked for her that summer; that as it was his gathering-year she had said yes; that she wanted to pair exclusively as a present to him.

She told me I was unfair, that I should leave her immediately, respect her, show respect and leave her be.

It was an ugly, vicious coupling. I was only a little stronger than her. It took a long time to subdue her. She clawed and bit me every moment, battered me viciously. I was unrelenting.

I grew infuriated. Lustful and jealous. I beat her and entered her when she lay stunned.

Her anger was extraordinary and awesome. It woke me to what I had done.

Shame has draped me since that day. Remorse came only a little later. They gather about me as if to replace my wings.

The band’s vote was unanimous. I did not contest the facts (it entered my mind to do so for the briefest moment and a wave of self-loathing made me retch).

There could be no question about judgement.

I knew it was the correct decision. I could even show a little dignity, a tiny shred, as I walked between the elected finishers of the law. I was slow, shuffling with the enormous weight of ballast attached to me, to stop me fleeing and flying, but I walked on without pause or question.

It was only at the last that I faltered, when I saw the stakes that would tether me to the baked earth.

They had to drag me the last twenty feet, into the dried-up bed of the Ghost River. I twisted and fought at every step. I begged for mercy I did not deserve. We were half a mile from our encampment and I am sure that my band heard every scream.

I was stretched out cruciform, my belly in the dust and the sun driving upon me. I tugged at my bonds until my hands and feet were absolutely numb.

Five on each side, holding my wings. Holding my great wings tight as I thrashed and sought to beat them hard and viciously against my captors’ skulls. I looked up and saw the sawman, my cousin, red-feathered San’jhuarr.

Dust and sand and heat and the coursing wind in the channel. I remember them.

I remember the touch of the metal. The extraordinary sense of intrusion, the horrific in-out-in-out motion of the serrated blade. It fouled with my flesh many times, had to be withdrawn and wiped clean. I remember the breathtaking inrush of hot air on tissue laid bare, on nerves torn from their roots. The slow, slow, merciless cracking of bone. I remember the vomit that quenched my screams, briefly, before my mouth cleared and I drew breath and screamed again. Blood in frightening quantities. The sudden, giddying weightlessness as one wing was lifted away and the stubs of bone trembled shatteringly back into my flesh and ragged fringes of meat slithered from my wound and the agonizing pressure of clean cloth and unguents on my lacerations and the slow stalk of Sanjhuarr around my head and the knowledge, the unbearable knowledge that it was all about to happen again.

I never questioned that I deserved the judgement. Even when I fled to find flight again. I was doubly ashamed. Crippled and shorn of respect for my choice-theft; I would add to that the shame of overturning a just punishment.

I could not live. I could not be earthbound. I was dead.

I put Isaac’s letter in my ragged clothes without reading his merciless, miserable farewell. I cannot say for sure that I despise him. I cannot say for sure I would do other than he has done.

I step out and down.

Some streets away in Saltbur, a fifteen-storey towerblock rises over the eastern city. The front door will not lock. It is easy to clamber over the gate that supposedly blocks access to the flat roof. I have climbed that edifice before.

It is a short walk. I feel as if I am sleeping. The citizens stare at me as I step past them. I am not wearing my hood. I cannot see that it matters.

No one stops me as I climb the huge building. On two levels, doors open very slightly as I walk past on the treacherous stairwell, and I am stared at by eyes too hidden in darkness for me to see. But I am not challenged, and within minutes I am on the roof.

One hundred and fifty feet or more. There are plenty of taller structures in New Crobuzon. But this is high enough that the block rears out of the streets and stone and brick like something enormous emerging from water.

I stalk past the rubble and the signs of bonfires, the detritus of intruders and squatters. I am alone in the skyline tonight.

The brick wall that contains the roofspace is five feet high. I lean on it and look out, to all sides.

I know what it is I see.

I can place myself exactly.

That is a glimpse of the Glasshouse dome, a smudge of dirty light between two gas towers. The clenching Ribs are only a mile away, dwarfing the railways and the stubby houses. Dark clutches of trees pepper the city. The lights, the lights of all the different colours, all around me.

I vault easily onto the wall, and stand.

I am on top of New Crobuzon now.

It is such an enormous thing. Such a great wallow. There is everything within it, spread out under my feet.

I can see the rivers. The Canker is about six minutes’ flying time away. I stretch out my arms.

The winds rush up to me and hammer me with joy. The air is boisterous and alive.

I close my eyes.

I can imagine it with absolute exactitude. A flight. To kick out with the legs and feel my wings grab the air and throw it easily earthward, scooping great chunks away from me like paddles. The hard slog into a thermal where the feathers plump and prime, spread out, drifting, easing, gliding up around in a spiral over this enormity below me. It is another city from above. The hidden gardens become spectacles to delight me. The dark bricks are something to shake off like mud. Every building becomes an eyrie. The whole of the city can be treated with disrespect, landing and alighting on a whim, soiling the air in passing.

From the air, in flight, from above, the government and militia are pompous termites, the squalor a dulled patch passing quickly away, the degradations that take place in the shadow of the architecture are none of my concern.

I feel the wind force my fingers apart. I am buffeted invitingly. I feel the twitching as my ragged flanges of wingbone stretch.

I will not do this any more. I will not be this cripple, this earth-bound bird, any longer.

This half-life ends now, with my hope.

I can so well picture a last flight, a swift, elegant curving sweep through the air that parts like a lost lover to welcome me.

Let the wind take me.

I lean forward on the wall, out over the tumbling city, into the air.

Time is quite still. I am poised. There is no sound. The city and the air are poised.

And I reach up slowly and run my fingers through my feathers. Pushing them slowly aside as my skin bristles, rubbing them mercilessly the wrong way, against the grain. I open my eyes. My fingers close and clutch at the stiff shafts and oiled fibres on my cheeks and I snap my beak shut so I will not cry out, and I begin to pull.

And a long time later, hours later, in the deepest part of the night, I step back down through that pitch stairwell and emerge.

A single cab clatters quickly through the deserted street and then there is no sound. Across the cobbles, beige light drools down from a guttering gasjet.

A dark figure has been waiting for me. He steps into the little pool of light, and stands, his face shadowed. He waves slowly to me. There is a fractional moment when I think of all my enemies and wonder which this man is. Then I see the huge scissoring mantis limb with which he greets me.

I find that I am not surprised.

Jack Half-a-Prayer extends his Remade arm again and with a slow, portentous movement, he beckons me.

He invites me in. Into his city.

I step forward into what little light there is.

I do not see him start as I pass out of silhouette and he sees me.

I know how I must look.

My face a mass of raw and ragged flesh, bleeding copiously from a hundred little punctures where the feathers left my flesh. Tenacious fluffs of down that I have missed patch me like stubble. My eyes peer out from bald, pink, ruined skin, blistered and sickly. Trickles of blood draw paths along my skull.

My feet are constricted again by filthy strips of rag, their monstrous shape hidden. The fringes of feathers that segued into their scales are ripped clean. I walk gingerly, my groin as raw and newly plucked as my head.

I tried to break my beak, but I could not.

I stand before the building in my new flesh.

Half-a-Prayer pauses, but not for very long. With another languorous stroke, he repeats his invitation.

It is generous, but I must decline.

He offers me the half-world. He offers to share his bastard liminal life, his interstitial city. His obscure crusades and anarchic vengeance. His scorn for doors.

Escaped Remade, fReemade. Nothing. He does not fit in. He has wrested New Crobuzon into a new city, and he strives to save it from itself.

He sees another broken-down half-thing, another exhausted relic that he might convert to fight his unthinkable fight, another for whom existence in any world is impossible, a paradox, a bird that cannot fly. And he offers me a way out, into his uncommunity, his margin, his mongrel city. The violent and honourable place from where he rages.

He is generous, but I decline. That is not my city. Not my fight.

I must leave his half-breed world alone, his demimonde of weird resistance. I live in a simpler place.

He is mistaken.

I am not the earthbound garuda any more. That one is dead. This is a new life. I am not a half-thing, a failed neither-nor.

I have torn the misleading quills from my skin and made it smooth, and below that avian affectation, I am the same as my citizen fellows. I can live foresquare in one world.

I indicate him thanks and farewell and turn away, stepping off into the dim lamplight to the east, towards the university campus and Ludmead Station, through my world of bricks and mortar and tar, bazaars and markets, sulphur-lit streets. It is night and I must hurry to my bed, to find my bed, to find a bed in this my city where I can live [my foresquare] life.

I turn away from him and step into the vastness of New Crobuzon, this towering edifice of architecture and history, this complexitude of money and slum, this profane steam-powered god. I turn and walk into the city my home, not bird or garuda, not miserable crossbreed.

I turn and walk into my home, the city, a man.