Perdido Street Station - China Mieville [65]
The slum-dwellers of Dog Fenn and even Badside considered Spatters beneath their dignity. It was simply not part of the city, nothing but a strange little town that had grafted itself onto New Crobuzon without a by-your-leave. There was no money to entice industry, legal or illicit. The crimes in Spatters were nothing but small-scale acts of desperation and survival.
There was something else about Spatters, something that brought Isaac to visit its unwelcoming alleys. For the past thirty years, it had been New Crobuzon’s garuda ghetto.
Lin watched the huge towerblocks of Ketch Heath. She could see tiny figures riding the updrafts that they created, swirling above them. Wyrmen, and maybe a couple of garuda. The cab was passing under the skyrail that dipped gracefully out of the militia tower that loomed near to the blocks.
The cab pulled to.
“All right, guv, this is where I stop,” said the driver.
Isaac and Lin disembarked. On one side of the cab was a row of neat white houses. Each was fronted with a small garden, most of which were assiduously maintained. The street was lined with shaggy banyan trees. Opposite the houses, on the other side of the cab, was a long thin park, a strip of greenery three hundred or so yards wide that sloped steeply down and away from the street. This thin slip of grass acted as a no-man’s-land between the polite houses of Vaudois Hill inhabited by clerks and doctors and lawyers, and the crumbling chaos beyond the trees, at the bottom of the hill: Spatters.
“It’s no fucking wonder Spatters isn’t the most popular place, is it?” breathed Isaac. “Look, it’s ruined the view for all these nice people up here . . .” He gave an evil grin.
In the distance, Lin could see that the edge of the hill was split with the Sink Line. The trains passed through a chasm cut into the parkland of the hill’s western flank. The red brick of Fell Stop Station loomed out over the quagmire of Spatters. In this corner of the city, the tracks were only fractionally above the level of the houses, but it did not take much architectural grandeur for the station to tower over the surrounding makeshift dwellings. Of all Spatters’ buildings, only the refitted towerblock shells were taller.
Lin felt Isaac nudge her. He pointed at one clutch of blocks, close to the railway.
“See that?” She nodded. “Look up top.”
Lin followed his fingers. The bottom half of the big buildings looked deserted. From the sixth or seventh floor up, however, wooden boughs poked at odd angles out of crevices. The windows were covered with brown paper, unlike the empty sockets. And way up on the flat roofs, at nearly the same level as Lin and Isaac, little figures were visible.
Lin followed Isaac’s gesture up into the air. She felt a jolt of excitement. Winged creatures were visible sporting in the sky.
“Those are garuda,” Isaac said.
Lin and Isaac walked down the hill towards the railway lines, bearing slightly to their right to arrive at the garudas’ looming makeshift eyries.
“Almost all the garuda in the city live in those four buildings. There probably aren’t two thousand in the whole of New Crobuzon. That makes them about . . . uh . . . nought point fucking nought three per cent of the population . . .” Isaac grinned. “I’ve been doing my research, see?”
But they don’t all live here. What about Krakhleki?
“Oh sure, I mean, there are garuda that get out. I taught one once, nice geezer. There’s probably a couple in Dog Fenn, three or four in Murkside, six in Gross Coil. Jabber’s Mound and Syriac each have a handful, I’ve heard. And once or twice a generation, someone like Krakhleki makes it big. I’ve never read his stuff, by the way. Is he any good?” Lin nodded. “Right, so you’ve got people like him, and others . . . you know, what’s the name of that fucker . .