Perdido Street Station - China Mieville [153]
Wyrmen were being taken.
At first they were just stories. Even through their fear, the wyrmen half-relished the yarns. But then they started to know the protagonists. Their names were ululated through the city at night, when their dribbling, idiot bodies were found. Arfamo and Sideways; Minty; and most frighteningly, Buggerme, the boss-boy of the eastern city. He never lost a fight. Never backed down. His daughter found him, head lolling, oozing mucus from mouth and nose, eyes fat and pale and as alert as poached eggs, in the scrubland by a rusting gas tower in Abrogate Green.
Two khepri matrons were found sat slack and vacant in the Plaza of Statues. A vodyanoi lolled at the edge of the river in Murkside, his capacious mouth pouting in a moronic leer. The number of humans found with their minds gone rose steadily into double figures. The increase did not slow.
The elders of the Riverskin Glasshouse would not say if any cactus had been afflicted.
The Quarrel ran a story on its second page, entitled “Mystery Epidemic of Imbecility.”
It was not only the wyrmen who were seeing things that should not have been there. First two or three, then more and slowly more hysterical witnesses claimed to have been in the company of one of those whose mind was taken. They were confused, they had been in some trance, they said, but they gabbled descriptions of monsters, insect devils without eyes, dark hunched bodies unfolding in a nightmare conjunction of limbs. Protruding teeth and hypnotic wings.
The Crow spread out around Perdido Street Station in an intricate confusion of thoroughfares and half-hidden alleys. The main arteries—LeTissof Street, Concubek Pass, Boulevard Dos Ghérou—burst out in all directions around the station and BilSantum Plaza. They were wide and packed, a confusion of carts and cabs and pedestrian crowds.
Every week new and elegant shops opened amid the throng. Huge stores that took up three floors of what had been noble houses; smaller, no less thriving establishments with windows full of the very latest in gaslight produce, lamps of intricately twisting brass and extension-valve fittings; food; luxury snuff-boxes; tailored clothes.
In the smaller branches that spread from these massive streets like capillaries, the offices of lawyers and doctors, actuaries, apothecaries and benevolent societies jostled with exclusive clubs. Patrician men in immaculate suits patrolled these roads.
Tucked into more or less obscure corners of The Crow, pockets of penury and diseased architecture were judiciously ignored.
Spit Hearth, to the south-east, was bisected from above by the skyrail connecting the militia tower at the point of Brock Marsh to Perdido Street Station. It was part of the same boisterous zone as Sheck, a wedge of smaller shops and houses made of stone and patched with brick. Spit Hearth had a twilight industry: Remaking. Where the borough met the river, subterranean punishment factories emitted wails of pain, sometimes, and hastily smothered screams. But for the sake of its public face, Spit Hearth was able to ignore that hidden economy with only a slight show of distaste.
It was a busy place. Pilgrims made their way through it to the Palgolak temple at the northern edge of Brock Marsh. For centuries, Spit Hearth had been a haven for dissenting churches and religious societies. Its walls were held together with the paste from a thousand mouldering posters advertising theological debates and discussions. The monks and nuns of peculiar contemplative sects walked the streets hurriedly, avoiding eye contact. Dervishes and hieronomers argued on corners.
Wedged gaudily between Spit Hearth and The Crow was the city’s worst-kept secret. A grubby, guilty stain. It was a little region, in the city’s terms. A few streets where the ancient houses were narrow and close, could easily be joined by walkways