Perdido Street Station - China Mieville [15]
The door opened.
Standing before Lin was a vast Remade. Her face was still the same mournful, pretty human woman’s it had always been, with dark skin and long plaited hair, but it supplanted a seven-foot skeleton of black iron and pewter. She stood on a tripod of stiff telescoping metal. Her body had been altered for heavy labour, with pistons and pulleys giving her what looked like ineluctable strength. Her right arm was levelled at Lin’s head, and from the centre of the brass hand extended a vicious harpoon.
Lin recoiled in astonished terror.
A large voice sounded from behind the sad-faced woman.
“Ms. Lin? The artist? You’re late. Mr. Motley is expecting you. Please follow me.”
The Remade stepped backwards, balancing on her central leg and swinging the others behind it, giving Lin room to step around her. The harpoon did not waver.
How far can you go? thought Lin to herself, and stepped into the dark.
At the far end of an entirely black corridor was a cactacae man. Lin could taste his sap in the air, but very faintly. He stood seven feet tall, thick-limbed and heavy. His head broke the curve of his shoulders like a crag, his silhouette uneven with nodules of hardy growth. His green skin was a mass of scars, three-inch spines and tiny red spring flowers.
He beckoned to her with gnarled fingertips.
“Mr. Motley can afford to be patient,” he said as he turned and climbed the stairs behind him, “but I’ve never known him relish waiting.” He looked back clumsily and raised an eyebrow at Lin pointedly.
Fuck off, lackey, she thought impatiently. Take me to the big man.
He stomped off on shapeless feet like small tree-stumps.
Behind her, Lin could hear the explosive bursts of steam and thumps as the Remade took the stairs. Lin followed the cactus through a twisting, windowless tunnel.
This place is huge, Lin thought, as they moved on and on. She realized that it must be the whole row of houses, dividing walls destroyed and rebuilt, custom-made, renovated into one vast convoluted space. They passed doors from which suddenly emerged an unnerving sound, like the muffled anguish of machines. Lin’s antennae bristled. As they left it behind, a volley of thuds sounded, like a score of crossbow bolts fired into soft wood.
Oh Broodma, thought Lin querulously. Gazid, what the fuck have I let you talk me into?
It was Lucky Gazid, the failed impresario, who had started the process leading Lin to this terrifying place.
He had run off a set of heliotypes of her most recent batch of work, hawked them around the city. It was a regular process, as he attempted to establish a reputation among the artists and patrons of New Crobuzon. Gazid was a pathetic figure forever reminding anyone who would listen of the one successful show he had arranged for a now-dead æther sculptress thirteen years previously. Lin and most of her friends viewed him with pity and contempt. Everyone she knew let him take his heliotypes and slipped him a few shekels or a noble, “an advance on his agent’s fee.” Then he would disappear for a few weeks, to emerge again with puke on his trousers and blood on his shoes, buzzing on some new drug, and the process would begin again.
Only not this time.
Gazid had found Lin a buyer.
When he had sidled up to her in The Clock and Cockerel she had protested. It was someone else’s turn, she had scribbled on her pad, she had “advanced” him a whole guinea only a week or so ago; but Gazid had interrupted her and insisted she retreat from the table with him. And as her friends, the artistic elite of Salacus Fields, laughed and cheered them on, Gazid had handed her a stiff white card stamped with a simple crest of a three-by-three chessboard. On it was a short printed note.
Ms. Lin, it said. My employer was most impressed with the examples of your work your agent showed him. He wonders whether you might be interested in meeting him to discuss a possible