Perdido Street Station - China Mieville [237]
Yagharek saw the looks that the armed guards received, the nervous salutations and the frequent skyward glances of the populace.
He did not think that this situation was normal.
Something was making the cactus people uneasy. They could be truculent and taciturn, in his experience, but the subdued air of menace was like nothing he had experienced in Shankell. Perhaps, he reflected, these cactacae were different, a more sombre breed than their southern siblings. But he felt his skin prickle. The air was fraught.
Yagharek concentrated, and began to scan the inside of the dome with a hard, rigorous eye. He focused carefully, went into something of a hunter’s trance.
He started looking at the edges of the dome. He took in the whole inside circumference in one long, slow sweep, then spiralled his vision carefully towards the centre, examining and investigating the circle of houses and streets a little way in, and then further in again.
In this exacting, methodical way, he could cast his eye on every nook and cranny of the Glasshouse’s surfaces. His eyes stopped briefly, momentarily, on imperfections of the red stone, then moved on.
As the day came closer to its end, the nervousness of the cactus people seemed to increase.
Yagharek came to the end of his scanning sweep. There was nothing immediate, nothing clearly wrong that leapt out at him. He turned his attention to the inside of the roof immediately around him, looking for some purchase.
It would not be easy. Some way from him the girders coalesced around the heavy glass globe, but on the underside of the glass they were not as protuberant. He believed that with some effort he could climb them: as, probably, could Lemuel and perhaps Derkhan or one or two of the adventurers. But it was hard to imagine Isaac clinging so close and holding his bulk suspended, crawling hundreds of yards of dangerous metal piping to the earth.
The sun was low outside. Even with the languorous summer evenings, time was short.
He felt someone tap his back. Yagharek raised his head up, lifting it out of the inverted bowl into the air of New Crobuzon, air that felt suddenly chill.
Behind him, Shadrach was crouched on the glass. He wore a mirror-helm, and held out a similar piece cobbled together from plate iron towards Yagharek.
Shadrach’s helmet looked different. Yagharek’s was a rude piece of rescued metal. Shadrach’s was intricate, wired and valved with copper and brass. At the top was a socket, with holes to screw in some fitting. It was only the mirrors that seemed a makeshift addition.
“You forgot this,” Shadrach said in his gentle voice, waving the helmet. “No waved flag, no word from you for twenty minutes. I’m here to check you’re alive and all right.”
Yagharek showed him the girders inside the dome. He and Shadrach discussed the problem of Isaac in urgent whispered tones.
“You must go down,” said Yagharek. “You must go by the sewers, with Lemuel as your guide. You must find your way as fast as you can into the dome. Send some of the mechanical monkeys to me, to aid me if I am attacked. Look inside.”
Shadrach leaned over carefully and peered into the darkening glass. Yagharek pointed down, across the thronging village at a crumbling ghost-building by the vile canal end. The water, its towpaths and a little finger of torn land on which the broken house stood were all enclosed by an accidental fence of rubble, brambles and long-rusted barbed wire. The rejected sliver of space backed directly onto the dome, which swept up steeply over it like a flat cloud.
“You must find your way there.” Shadrach began to make some sound, murmuring about the impossibility, but Yagharek cut him off. “It is difficult. It will be difficult. But you cannot climb down from here on the inside, and if you can then Isaac certainly cannot. We need him inside. You must take him in. As fast as you can. I will come down to you, I will find you, when I have found the slake-moths. Wait for me.”
As he spoke, Yagharek