Perdido Street Station - China Mieville [277]
They broke the surface together, and kicked the last few feet into the shadow of the riverwall.
Rusting iron rings were driven into the bricks, creating a rough staircase up to the riverside walk above them. The sound of cabs and pedestrians sank down around them.
Pengefinchess adjusted her bow slightly, making it more comfortable. She looked at the surly male and spoke to him in Lubbock, the polysyllabic guttural language of most of the eastern vodyanoi. He spoke a city dialect, which had been bastardized with human Ragamoll, but they could still understand each other.
“Your companions know to find you here?” Pengefinchess enquired brusquely. He nodded (another human trait the city vodyanoi had adopted). “I am done,” she announced. “You must hold the cable alone. You can wait for them. I am leaving.” He looked at her, still surly, and nodded again, raised his hand in a choppy motion which might have been some kind of salute. Pengefinchess was amused. “Be fecund,” she said. It was a traditional farewell.
She sank under the surface of the Tar and powered herself away.
Pengefinchess swam east, following the course of the river. She was calm, but a rising excitement filled her up. She had no plans, no ties. She wondered, suddenly, what she would do.
The current took her towards Strack Island, where the Tar and Canker met in a confused current and became the Gross Tar. Pengefinchess knew that the submerged base of the Parliament’s island was patrolled by vodyanoi militia, and she kept her distance, branching away from the pull of the water and bearing sharply north-west, swimming upstream, transferring into the Canker.
The current was stronger than the Tar’s, and colder. She was exhilarated, briefly, until she entered a sluice of pollution.
It was the effluent from Brock Marsh, she knew, and she kicked quickly through the murk. Her undine familiar trembled against her skin as she approached certain random patches of water, and she would arc away and pick another route through the fouled river by the magicians’ quarter. She breathed the disgusting liquid shallowly, as if she might avoid contamination that way.
Eventually the water seemed to thin. A mile or so upstream from the rivers’ convergence, the Canker grew suddenly more clear and pure.
Pengefinchess felt something almost like quiet joy.
She began to feel other vodyanoi pass her in the current. She kicked low, here and there felt the gentle outflow of tunnels that led up to some wealthy vodyanoi’s house. These were not the absurd hovels of the Tar, of Lichford and Gross Coil: there, sticky, pitch-coated buildings of palpably human design had simply been built in the river itself, decades ago, to crumble in unsanitary fashion into the water. Those were the vodyanoi slums.
Here, on the other hand, the cold clear water that ran down from the mountains might lead through some carefully crafted passage below the surface into a riverside house all done in white marble. Its façade would be tastefully designed to fit in with the human homes on either side, but inside it would be a vodyanoi home: empty doorways connecting huge rooms above and below the water; canal passageways; sluices refreshing the water every day.
Pengefinchess swam on past the vodyanoi rich, staying low. As the centre of the city passed further away behind her, she grew happier, more relaxed. She felt her escape with great pleasure.
She spread her arms and sent a little mental message to her undine, and it burst away from her skin through the pores of the thin cotton shift she wore. After days of dryness and sewers and effluent, the elemental undulated away through the cleaner water, rolling with enjoyment, being free, a moving locus of quasi-living water in the great wash of the river.
Pengefinchess felt it swim ahead and followed it playfully, reaching out for it and closing her fingers through its substance. It squirmed happily.
I’ll go up-coast, Pengefinchess