Perdido Street Station - China Mieville [143]
Derkhan checked the directions she had been given, and found her way to St. Sorrel’s Mews. It was a tight little passage ending in a collapsed wall. To her right, Derkhan saw the tall, rust-coloured building described in the note. She entered through the doorless threshold and picked her way over building debris, through a short unlit passage that virtually dripped with damp. At the end of the corridor, she saw the bead curtain she had been told to look for, strings of broken glass on wire, swaying gently.
She steeled herself, drawing the vicious shards back gently, drawing no blood. Derkhan entered the little parlour beyond.
Both of the room’s windows had been covered: thick material was glued to them in great fibrous clumps that clotted the air with heavy shadow. The furnishings were minimal. The same shade of brown as the darkened atmosphere, they seemed half invisible. Behind a low table, sipping tea in an absurdly dainty manner, a plump, hairy woman basked in a sumptuous decaying armchair.
She eyed Derkhan.
“What can I do for you?” she asked evenly, in a tone of resigned irritation.
“You’re the communicatrix?” said Derkhan.
“Umma Balsum.” The woman inclined her head. “Got some business for me?”
Derkhan made her way across the room and hovered nervously by a bursting sofa until Umma Balsum indicated that she should sit. Derkhan did so abruptly, and fumbled in her bag.
“I need . . . uh . . . to talk to Benjamin Flex.” Her voice was taut. She spoke in little bursts, gearing up to each announcement, then spitting it out. She pulled out a little pouch of the detritus she had found at the site of the abattoir.
She had gone to Dog Fenn the previous evening, as news of the militia’s crushing of the dock strike washed over New Crobuzon. It swept along with rumours in its wake. One of the rumours concerned a subsidiary attack on a seditious newspaper in Dog Fenn.
It had been late when Derkhan had arrived, disguised as always, in the dank streets in the south-east of the city. It had rained; warm, fat drops bursting like rotting things on the rubble in the cul-de-sac. The entrance was blocked, so Derkhan had entered through the low portal through which meat and animals were slung. She had clung to the noisome stones, dangling over the lip into the butchers’ den, stained with shit and gore from a thousand terrified animals, and dropped the few feet into the bloody darkness of the deserted charnel-house.
She had crawled over the ruined conveyor-belt, snagged herself on the meathooks that littered the floor. The sanguinary slick in which she stumbled was cold and sticky.
Derkhan had fought her way past the stones that had burst from walls, over the ruined stairs, up towards Ben’s room, the centre of the destruction. Her way was paved with ripped and ruined shards of printing machinery, and smoke-charred pieces of cloth and paper.
The room itself was little more than a hole full of rubbish. Chunks of masonry had crushed the bed. The wall between Ben’s bedroom and the hidden printing press was almost completely destroyed. Languorous summer drizzle had been falling through the burst skylight onto the shattered skeleton of the press.
Derkhan’s face had hardened. She had searched with a fervent intensity. She had unearthed small pieces of evidence, small proofs that this was once where a man had lived. She brought them out now, put them on the table before Umma Balsum.
She had found his razor, with a little stubble and bloodrust still staining its blade. The torn remnants of a pair of trousers. A piece of paper discoloured with his blood from where she had rubbed and rubbed it against a red stain on the wall. The last two issues of Runagate Rampant that she had found under the ruins of his bed.
Umma Balsum watched the pathetic collection emerge.
“Where is he?” she asked.
“I . . . I think he’s in the Spike,” said Derkhan.
“Well, that’s going to cost you an extra noble straight off,”