Perdido Street Station - China Mieville [10]
There were few cabs or animals in the narrow twisting streets of the Scientific Quarter, the oldest part of the ancient city. There were pedestrians of all races, as well as bakeries and laundries and guildhalls, all the sundry services any community needed. There were pubs and shops and even a militia tower; a small, stubby one at the apex of Brock Marsh where the Canker and the Tar converged. The posters plastered on the crumbling walls advertised the same dancehalls, warned of the same coming doom, demanded allegiance to the same political parties as elsewhere in the city. But for all that apparent normality, there was a tension to the area, a fraught expectancy.
Badgers—familiars by tradition, believed to have a certain immunity to the more dangerous harmonics of hidden sciences—scampered past with lists in their teeth, their pear-shaped bodies disappearing into special flaps in shop doorways. Above the thick glass storefronts were attic rooms. Old warehouses on the waterfront had been converted. Forgotten cellars lurked in temples to minor deities. In these and all the other architectural crevices, the Brock Marsh dwellers pursued their trades: physicists; chimerists; biophilosophers and teratologists; chymists; necrochymists; mathematicians; karcists and metallurgists and vodyanoi shaman; and those, like Isaac, whose research did not fit neatly into any of the innumerable categories of theory.
Strange vapours wafted over the roofs. The converging rivers on either side ran sluggishly, and the water steamed here and there as its currents mixed nameless chymicals into potent compounds. The slop from failed experiments, from factories and laboratories and alchymists’ dens, mixed randomly into bastard elixirs. In Brock Marsh, the water had unpredictable qualities. Young mudlarks searching the river quag for scrap had been known to step into some discoloured patch of mud and start speaking long-dead languages, or find locusts in their hair, or fade slowly to translucency and disappear.
Isaac turned down a quiet stretch of the river’s edge onto the decaying flagstones and tenacious weeds of Umber Promenade. Across the Canker, the Ribs jutted over the roofs of Bonetown like a clutch of vast tusks curling hundreds of feet into the air. The river sped up a little as it bore south. Half a mile away he could see Strack Island breaking its flow where it met the Tar and curled away grandly to the east. The ancient stones and towers of Parliament rose hugely from the very edges of Strack Island. There was no gradual incline or urban scrub before the blunt layers of obsidian shot out of the water like a frozen fountain.
The clouds were dissipating, leaving behind a washed-out sky. Isaac could see the red roof of his workshop rising above the surrounding houses; and before it, the weed-choked forecourt of his local, The Dying Child. The ancient tables in the outside yard were colourful with fungus. No one, in Isaac’s memory, had ever sat at one of them.
He entered. Light seemed to give up the struggle halfway through the thick, soiled windows, leaving the interior in shadows. The walls were unadorned except by dirt. The pub was empty of all but the most dedicated drinkers, shambolic figures huddled over bottles. Several were junkies, several were Remade. Some were both: The Dying Child turned no one away. A group of emaciated young men lay draped across a table twitching in perfect time, strung out on shazbah or dreamshit or very-tea. One woman held her glass in a metal claw that spat steam and dripped oil onto the floorboards. A man in the corner lapped quietly from a bowl of beer, licking the fox’s muzzle that had been grafted to his face.
Isaac quietly greeted the old man by the door, Joshua,