Perdido Street Station - China Mieville [238]
He caught Shadrach’s eye in one of the big slivers of mirror.
“You must go. Be quick. Be patient. I will come to you and find you before the night is out. The moths must leave by this break, and so I will wait and watch for them.”
Shadrach’s face set. Yagharek was right. It was unthinkable that Isaac would be able to climb down the steep and dangerous iron rafters.
He nodded at Yagharek curtly, signalling goodbye into the garuda’s mirrors, then turned and scrambled back to the main ladder, descended at expert speed out of sight.
Yagharek turned and looked into the last of the sun. He breathed deeply and flickered his eyes from left to right, checking his vision in each jagged mirror. He calmed himself completely. He breathed in the slow rhythm of the yajhu-saak, the hunter’s reverie, the martial trance of the Cymek garuda. He composed himself.
After some minutes there came the skittering clatter of metal and wire on glass, and one by one three monkey-constructs came into view, approaching him from different directions. They gathered around him and waited, their glass lenses glinting rose in the evening, their thin pistons hissing as they moved.
Yagharek turned and regarded them through the mirrors. Then, gripping the rope carefully, he began to lower himself through the hole in the glass. He gesticulated at the constructs to follow him as he slipped past the gash. The heat of the dome washed up around him and closed over his head as he descended into the glass-bounded village, towards houses immersed in red light as the clear globe magnified and dispersed the setting sun’s rays, into the slake-moths’ lair.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Outside the dome, the air darkened inexorably. With the onset of the night, the bright rays that burst from the glass globe in the dome’s roof were snuffed out. The Glasshouse grew suddenly dimmer and more cool. But much of the heat was retained. The dome was still far warmer than the city outside. The lights from the torches and the buildings within reflected back on the glass. To the travellers looking back on the city from Flag Hill, to the slum-dwellers gazing desultorily down from the towerblocks of Ketch Heath, to the officer glancing from the skyrail and the driver of the south-bound Sud Line train, peering through smokestacks and flues, over the smoke-soiled roofscape of the city, the Glasshouse looked stretched out taut, distended with light.
As dusk fell, the Glasshouse began to glow.
Clinging to the metal on the inside skin of the dome, unnoticed like some infinitesimal tic, Yagharek slowly flexed his arms. He was affixed to a little knot of scaffolding about one-third of the way down the height of the dome. He was still easily high enough to look down on all the housetops, the tangles of architecture on all sides.
His mind was poised in yajhu-saak. He breathed slowly and regularly. He continued his hunter’s search, his eyes flitting restlessly from point to point below him, not spending more than a moment on each place, building up a composite picture. Occasionally he would unfocus and take in the whole sweep of the roofs below him, alert for any strange movements. He returned his attention often to the scum-covered trench of water where he had told Shadrach to assemble the others.
There was no sign of the band of intruders.
As the night deepened, the streets cleared at extraordinary speed. The cactacae flocked back to their houses. From a teeming township, the Glasshouse emptied, became a ghost town in a little over half an hour. The only figures left on the streets were the armed patrols. They moved nervously through the streets. Lights from windows were dimmed as shutters and curtains were closed. There were no gaslights in these streets. Instead, Yagharek watched lamp-lighters walk the length of the streets, reaching out with flaming poles to ignite oil-soaked torches ten feet above the pavements.
Each of the lamp-lighters was accompanied by a cactacae patrol, moving