Perdido Street Station - China Mieville [234]
Derkhan nodded. “Nothing,” she said. “I mean, plenty of little cracks, even a few places where a fair bit of glass was missing, especially higher up, but there were no holes big enough to get through. That must be the one.”
Isaac and Lemuel nodded.
“So that’s how they’re getting in and out,” said Isaac softly. “Well, it seems to me the best way of tracking them is to reverse their journey. Much as I damn well hate to suggest it, I think we should get up there. What’s it like inside?”
“You can’t see all that much,” said Lemuel, and shrugged. “The glass is thick, old and damn dirty. They only clean it once every three or four years, I think. You can make out the basic shapes of houses and streets and what have you, but that’s about all. You’d have to look inside to get the lay of the place.”
“We can’t all troop up there,” said Derkhan. “We’ll be seen. We should’ve asked Lemuel to go in, he’s the man for the job.”
“I wouldn’t have gone anyway,” said Lemuel tightly. “I don’t enjoy being that high up, and I certainly damn well won’t dangle upside down hundreds of feet above thirty thousand pissed-off cactacae . . .”
“Well, what are we going to do?” Derkhan was irritated. “We could wait until nightfall, but then the bloody moths are active. What we’ll have to do is go up one at a time. If, that is, it’s safe to. We need someone to go first . . .”
“I will go,” said Yagharek.
There was silence. Isaac and Derkhan stared at him.
“Great!” said Lemuel archly, and clapped twice. “That’s that sorted. So you can go up, and then . . . um . . . you can look around for us, chuck us down a message . . .”
Isaac and Derkhan were ignoring Lemuel. They were still staring at Yagharek.
“It is right that I should go,” said Yagharek. “I am at home so high,” he said and his voice clucked slightly, as if at a sudden emotion. “I am at home so high, and I am a hunter. I can look down on the landscape within and see where the moths might lurk. I can gauge the possibilities within the glass.”
Yagharek retraced Lemuel’s steps up the shell of the Glasshouse.
He had unwrapped the foetid bandages from his feet, and his talons had stretched out in a delightful reflex. He had scrambled up the initial patch of bare metal with Lemuel’s grappling rope, and then had climbed far faster and more confidently than the human had done.
He stopped every so often and stood swaying in the warm wind, his avian toes gripping the metal slats tightly and securely. He would lean alarmingly and peer into the hazy air, hold out his arms a little, feel the wind fill his spreadeagled body like a sail.
Yagharek pretended he was flying.
Swinging from his thin belt was the stiletto and the bullwhip he had stolen the previous day. The whip was a clumsy thing, not nearly so fine as the one he had cracked in the hot desert air, stinging and snaring, but it was a weapon his hand remembered.
He was fast and assured. The airships that were visible were all far away. He was unseen.
At the top of the Glasshouse, the city seemed to be a gift to him, laid out ready to be taken. Everywhere he looked, fingers and hands and fists and spines of architecture thrust rudely into the sky. The Ribs like ossified tentacles reaching always up; the Spike slammed into the city’s heart like a skewer; the complex mechanistic vortex of Parliament, glowing darkly; Yagharek mapped them with a cold, strategic eye. He glanced up and to the east, to where the skyrail connecting Flyside Tower and the Spike thrummed.
When he had reached the edge of the enormous glass globe at the dome’s tip, it took him only a moment to find the rent in the glass. A part of him was surprised that his eyes, the eyes of a bird of prey,