Iron Council - China Mieville [125]
He was in a train. On the Sink Line, passing over the shantytown of Spatters, toward the incline and grand houses of Vaudois Hill. Someone farther on in the carriage gave a shriek that he ignored, but others came then, too, and he looked up through the window.
They were raised, the train on arches, so they pushed through chimneys like little swells, minarets, towers with damp-splintered skins like swamp trees. They saw clearly across to the east and the morning sun spreading shadows and thick light, and at its centre something was swimming. A figure tiny in the core of the sun’s glare and made of the deepest silhouette, neither human nor ciliated plankton nor rapid startling bird but all of them and other things, in turn or at one instant. It moved with an impossible crawl, straight out, emerging from the sun with a swimming motion that used all of its contradicting limbs.
A spit of chymical fear hit Ori’s face from the khepri woman beside him, and he blinked till it dissipated. Later he learnt that wherever people stood in the city, from Flag Hill north, to Barrackham seven miles south, every compass point, they all saw the thing swim straight for them, growing in the heart of the sun.
It came closer, occluding the light so the city was drabbed. A dancing, swimming thing. The train was slowing—they would stop before Lich Sitting Station. The driver must have seen the sun and stopped in terror.
The sky over New Crobuzon shimmered like grease. Like plasma. The thing stuttered, palsied between sizes, was dwarfed by the sun around it and then for one dreadful instant was there above the heads of everyone in the city so looming, so massive it dwarfed New Crobuzon itself and all there was that moment was an eye with starred iris in baleful alien colours looking straight down between all the buildings, onto all the streets, into the eyes of everyone staring up at it so there was a tremendous, city-wide scream of fear, and then the thing was gone.
Ori heard his own shout. His eyes hurt, and it took him seconds to realise the sun was burning them, that he was staring where the thing had been, and now there was only the sun again. All that day he saw through the ghost of green colours, where his sight was burnt.
That evening there were riots in Smog Bend. The raged workforce of the factories ran for St. Jabber’s Mound, to assault the militia tower for something—failing to protect them from that dreadful haint vision. Others ran for Creekside, and the khepri ghetto, to punish the outlanders there, as if they had sent the apparition. The stone idiocy of this had the Caucusers in the crowd screaming, but they could not hold back the armed few who went to punish the xenians.
Word was quick, and across the city Ori knew of the attacks while they were still occurring. He knew, only minutes after it had happened, that a hard wall of militia faced the rioters from the base of their tower, and that they had been ready with men-o’-war, and that the jellyfish things had come at the crowd.
He feared for the khepri of the ghetto. “We need to get there,” Ori said, and while he and his comrades disguised their faces and pulled on guns he saw Baron look at him with cool incomprehension. Ori knew Baron was coming not because he cared about the khepri of Creekside, but only because this organisation to which he had allied himself had made a decision. “Toro’ll find us,” Ori said.
In a commandeered carriage they went fast through Echomire, under the colossal Ribs of Bonetown, across Danechi’s Bridge and through Brock Marsh, and the sky was dark-studded with dirigibles, many more than usual, black and lit against the black. There were militia on the streets, shielded, their faces hidden behind mirrors, specialist squads with hexed truncheons and blunderbusses for crowd control. Enoch whipped the pterabirds. Through the fringes of The Crow, where crowds