Perdido Street Station - China Mieville [323]
The brick wall that contains the roofspace is five feet high. I lean on it and look out, to all sides.
I know what it is I see.
I can place myself exactly.
That is a glimpse of the Glasshouse dome, a smudge of dirty light between two gas towers. The clenching Ribs are only a mile away, dwarfing the railways and the stubby houses. Dark clutches of trees pepper the city. The lights, the lights of all the different colours, all around me.
I vault easily onto the wall, and stand.
I am on top of New Crobuzon now.
It is such an enormous thing. Such a great wallow. There is everything within it, spread out under my feet.
I can see the rivers. The Canker is about six minutes’ flying time away. I stretch out my arms.
The winds rush up to me and hammer me with joy. The air is boisterous and alive.
I close my eyes.
I can imagine it with absolute exactitude. A flight. To kick out with the legs and feel my wings grab the air and throw it easily earthward, scooping great chunks away from me like paddles. The hard slog into a thermal where the feathers plump and prime, spread out, drifting, easing, gliding up around in a spiral over this enormity below me. It is another city from above. The hidden gardens become spectacles to delight me. The dark bricks are something to shake off like mud. Every building becomes an eyrie. The whole of the city can be treated with disrespect, landing and alighting on a whim, soiling the air in passing.
From the air, in flight, from above, the government and militia are pompous termites, the squalor a dulled patch passing quickly away, the degradations that take place in the shadow of the architecture are none of my concern.
I feel the wind force my fingers apart. I am buffeted invitingly. I feel the twitching as my ragged flanges of wingbone stretch.
I will not do this any more. I will not be this cripple, this earthbound bird, any longer.
This half-life ends now, with my hope.
I can so well picture a last flight, a swift, elegant curving sweep through the air that parts like a lost lover to welcome me.
Let the wind take me.
I lean forward on the wall, out over the tumbling city, into the air.
Time is quite still. I am poised. There is no sound. The city and the air are poised.
And I reach up slowly and run my fingers through my feathers. Pushing them slowly aside as my skin bristles, rubbing them mercilessly the wrong way, against the grain. I open my eyes. My fingers close and clutch at the stiff shafts and oiled fibres on my cheeks and I snap my beak shut so I will not cry out, and I begin to pull.
And a long time later, hours later, in the deepest part of the night, I step back down through that pitch stairwell and emerge.
A single cab clatters quickly through the deserted street and then there is no sound. Across the cobbles, beige light drools down from a guttering gasjet.
A dark figure has been waiting for me. He steps into the little pool of light, and stands, his face shadowed. He waves slowly to me. There is a fractional moment when I think of all my enemies and wonder which this man is. Then I see the huge scissoring mantis limb with which he greets me.
I find that I am not surprised.
Jack Half-a-Prayer extends his Remade arm again and with a slow, portentous movement, he beckons me.
He invites me in. Into his city.
I step forward into what little light there is.
I do not see him start as I pass out of silhouette and he sees me.
I know how I must look.
My face a mass of raw and ragged flesh, bleeding copiously from a hundred little punctures where the feathers left my flesh. Tenacious fluffs of down that I have missed patch me like stubble. My eyes peer out from bald, pink, ruined skin, blistered and sickly. Trickles of blood draw paths along my skull.
My feet are constricted again by filthy strips of rag, their monstrous shape hidden. The fringes of feathers that segued into their scales are ripped clean. I walk gingerly, my groin as raw and newly plucked as my head.
I tried to break my beak, but I could not.
I stand before the