Perdido Street Station - China Mieville [239]
On the top of the central temple, a group of cactus elders was moving around the central mechanism, pulling levers and tugging at handles. The enormous lens at the top of the device swung down on a ponderous hinge. Yagharek peered closely, but he could not discern what they were doing or what the machine was for. He watched without comprehension as the cactacae swung the thing around, about a vertical and a horizontal axis, checking and adjusting gauges according to obscure calibrations.
Above Yagharek’s head, two of the chimpanzee-constructs clung to the metal. The other was a few feet below him, on a strut parallel to his own. They were quite motionless, waiting for him to move.
Yagharek settled back, and waited.
Two hours after sundown, the glass of the dome looked black. The stars were invisible.
The streets of the cactacae Glasshouse glowed with a forbidding, sepia firelight. The patrols had become shadows on a darker street.
There were no sounds beyond the undertone of burning, the soft complaints of architecture and the sound of whispering. Occasional lights flitted like will-o’-the-wisps between the slowly cooling bricks.
There was still no sign of Lemuel, Isaac and the others. A small part of Yagharek’s mind was unhappy at this, but for the most part he was still inside, concentrating on the relaxation technique of the hunting trance.
He waited.
Some time between ten and eleven o’clock, Yagharek heard a sound.
His attention, which had spread out to suffuse him, to saturate his awareness, focused instantly. He did not breathe.
Again. The tiniest rippling, a snap like cloth in the wind.
He twisted his neck around and stared towards the noise, down at the mass of streets, into the fearful dark.
There was no response from the watchtower at the Glasshouse’s centre. Fancies crept through Yagharek’s mind, deep inside. Perhaps he had been deserted, a part of him thought. Perhaps the dome was empty but for him and the monkey-constructs, and some unearthly floating lights in the depths of the streets.
He did not hear the sound again, but a shade of deep black passed across his eyes. Something huge flitted up through the murk.
Terrified at some semi-conscious level far below the calm surface of his thoughts, Yagharek felt himself stiffen and grip the metal in his fingers, flatten himself painfully against the dome’s supports. He snapped his head away, facing the metal that he held. Intently, carefully, he stared into the mirrors before his eyes.
Some fell-creature inched its way up the Glasshouse skin.
The shape was almost exactly opposite him, as far away as it could be. It had sprung from some building below and flown a tiny distance to the glass, from there to crawl hand over tendril over claw, up towards the cooler air and the uncontained darkness.
Even through the yajhu-saak, Yagharek’s heart reeled. He watched the thing progress in his mirrors. It fascinated him in an unholy way. He tracked its dark-winged silhouette, like some deranged angel, all studded with dangerous flesh and dripping bizarrely. Its wings were folded, though the slake-moth gently opened and closed them, now and then, as if to dry them in the warm air.
It crawled with a horrible sluggish torpor towards the invigorating city night.
Yagharek had not pinpointed its nest, and that was critical. His eyes batted inconstantly between the insidious creature itself and the patch of domed darkness from where he had first seen it rise.
And as he watched intently through his mounted mirrors, he won his prize.
He kept his eyes on a tangle of old architecture at the southwestern edge of the Glasshouse. The buildings, amended and tinkered with after centuries of cactus occupation, had once been a clot of smart houses. There was almost nothing to distinguish them from their surroundings. They were a little taller than the neighbouring edifices, and their tops had been sliced off by the descending curve of the dome. But rather than demolish them outright, the buildings had been