Perdido Street Station - China Mieville [39]
Isaac and Derkhan wandered slowly past jars of yellowing alcohol in which broken body parts floated. Two-headed foetuses and sections of a kraken’s arm. A deep red shining jag that could have been a Weaver’s claw, or could have been a burnished carving; eyes that spasmed and lived in jars of charged liquid; intricate, infinitesimal paintings on ladybirds’ backs, visible only through magnifying lenses; a human skull scuttling in its cage on six insectile brass legs. A nest of rats with intertwined tails that took it in turns to scrawl obscenities on a little blackboard. A book made of pressed feathers. Druds’ teeth and a narwhal’s horn.
Derkhan scribbled notes. Isaac gazed avariciously about him at the charlatanism and cryptoscience.
They left the museum. To their right was Anglerina, Queen of the Deepest Sea; to their left Bas-Lag’s Oldest Cactus-Man.
“I’m getting depressed,” said Derkhan.
Isaac agreed.
“Let’s find the Bird-Man Chief of the Wild Desert quickly, and fuck off. I’ll buy you some candyfloss.”
They wound through the ranks of the deformed and obese, the bizarrely hirsute and the small. Isaac suddenly pointed above them, at the sign that had come into view.
King Garuda! Lord of the Air!
Derkhan tugged at the heavy curtain. She and Isaac exchanged glances, and entered.
“Ah! Visitors from this strange city! Come, sit, hear stories of the harsh desert! Stay a while with a traveller from far, far away!”
The querulous voice burst out of the shadows. Isaac squinted through the bars before them. A dark, shambolic figure stood painfully and lurched out of the darkness at the back of the tent.
“I am a chief of my people, come to see New Crobuzon of which we have heard.”
The voice was pained and exhausted, high-pitched and raw, but it made nothing like the alien sounds that burst from Yagharek’s throat. The speaker stepped out of obscurity. Isaac opened his eyes and mouth wide to bellow in triumph and wonder, but his shout mutated as it began and died in an aghast whisper.
The figure before Isaac and Derkhan shivered and scratched its stomach. Its flesh hung heavy off it like a pudgy schoolboy’s. Its skin was pale and pockmarked with disease and cold. Isaac’s eyes wove all over its body in dismay. Bizarre nodes of tissue burst from its bunched toes: claws drawn by children. Its head was swathed in feathers, but feathers of all sizes and shapes, jammed at random from its crown to its neck in a thick, uneven, insulating layer. The eyes that peered myopically at Isaac and Derkhan were human eyes, fighting to open lids encrusted in rheum and pus. The beak was large and stained, like old pewter.
Behind the wretched creature stretched a pair of dirty, foul-smelling wings. They were no more than six feet from tip to tip. As Isaac watched, they half-opened, jerked and twitched spastically. Tiny pieces of organic muck spilt from them as they shuddered.
The creature’s beak opened and, underneath it, Isaac caught a glimpse of lips forming the words, nostrils above. The beak was nothing but a roughly made fixture shoved and sealed into place like a gas-mask over the nose and mouth, he realized.
“Let me tell you of the times I have soared into the air with my prey . . .” began the pathetic figure, but Isaac stepped forward and held up a hand to cut it off.
“Please gods, enough!” he shouted. “Spare us this . . . embarrassment . . .”
The false garuda staggered backwards, blinking in fear.
There was silence for a long time.
“What’s the matter, guvnor?” whispered the thing behind bars eventually. “What’d I do wrong?”
“I came here to see a fucking garuda,” rumbled Isaac. “What d’you take me for? You’re Remade, mate . . . as any fool can see.”
The big dead beak clicked