Perdido Street Station - China Mieville [11]
Joshua nodded at Isaac and, with his fingers, carefully held his mouth closed over a straw, sucked greedily at his cider.
Isaac headed for the back of the room. The bar, in one corner, was very low, about three feet from the ground. Behind it, in a trough of dirty water, wallowed Silchristchek the landlord.
Sil lived and worked and slept in the tub, hauling himself from one end to the other with his huge, webbed hands and frog’s legs, his body wobbling like a bloated testicle, seemingly boneless. He was ancient and fat and grumpy, even for a vodyanoi. He was a bag of old blood with limbs, without a separate head, his big curmudgeonly face poking out from the fat at the front of his body.
Twice a month he scooped the water out from around him and had his regulars pour fresh buckets over him, farting and sighing with pleasure. The vodyanoi could spend at least a day in the dry without ill-effects, but Sil could not be bothered. He oozed surly indolence, and chose to do so in his filthy water. Isaac could not help feeling that Sil debased himself as a kind of aggressive show. He seemed to relish being more-disgusting-than-thou.
In the early days, Isaac had drunk here out of a youthful delight in plumbing the depths of squalor. Mature now, he frequented more salubrious inns for pleasure, returning to Sil’s hovel only because it was so close to his work, and, increasingly, unexpectedly, for research purposes. Sil had taken to providing him with experimental samples he needed.
Stinking piss-coloured water slopped over the edges of the tub as Sil wriggled his way towards Isaac.
“What you having, ’Zaac?” he barked.
“Kingpin.”
Isaac flipped a deuce into Sil’s hand. Sil brought down a bottle from one of the shelves behind him. Isaac sipped the cheap beer and slid onto a stool, grimacing as he sat in some dubious liquid.
Sil sat back in his tub. Without looking at Isaac, he began a monosyllabic, idiot conversation about the weather, about the beer. He went through the motions. Isaac said just enough to keep the discourse alive.
On the counter were several crude figures, rendered in water that seeped into the grain of the old wood before his eyes. Two were rapidly dissolving, losing their integrity and becoming puddles as Isaac watched. Sil idly scooped up another handful from his tub and kneaded it. The water responded like clay, holding the shape Sil gave it. Scraps of the dirt and discoloration of the tub eddied inside it. Sil pinched the figure’s face and made a nose, squeezed the legs to the size of small sausages. He perched the little homunculus in front of Isaac.
“That what you’re after?” he asked.
Isaac swallowed the rest of his beer.
“Cheers, Sil. Appreciate it.”
Very carefully, he blew on the little figure until it fell backwards into his cupped hands. It splashed a little, but he could feel its surface tension hold. Sil watched with a cynical smile as Isaac scurried to get the figurine out of the pub and to his laboratory.
Outside the wind had picked up a little. Isaac sheltered his prize and walked quickly up the little alley that adjoined The Dying Child with Paddler Way and his workshop-home. He pushed open the green doors with his bum and backed into the building. Isaac’s laboratory had been a factory and a warehouse years ago, and its huge, dusty floorspace swamped the little benches and retorts and blackboards that perched in its corners.
From the two corners of the floor came yelled greetings. David Serachin and Lublamai Dadscatt—rogue-scientists like Isaac, with whom he shared the rent and the space. David and Lublamai used the ground floor, each filling a corner