Perdido Street Station - China Mieville [68]
“Dear sweet Jabber’s arse, Lin . . . go on without me. I’m dying. I’m just going to lie here and die.”
Isaac lay on the mezzanine between the sixth and seventh floors. He hissed and wheezed and spat. Lin stood over him, her hands on her hips with exasperation.
Get up, you fat bastard, she signed. Yes, exhausting. Me too. Think of the gold. Think of the science.
Moaning as if he were being tortured, Isaac staggered to his feet. Lin chivvied him to the edge of the concrete stairs. He swallowed and braced himself, then staggered on up.
The stairwell was grey and unlit except by light filtering round corners and through cracks. Only now, as they emerged onto the seventh floor, did the stairs look as if they had ever been used. Rubbish began to build up around their feet. The stairs were grubby rather than thick in fine dust. At each floor were two doors, and the harsh sounds of garuda conversations were audible through the splintered wood.
Isaac settled into a slow, miserable pace. Lin followed him, ignoring his declarations of imminent heart attack. After several long, painful minutes, they had reached the top floor.
Above them was the door onto the roof. Isaac leaned against the wall and wiped his face. He was drenched in sweat.
“Just give me a minute, sweetheart,” he murmured, and even managed to grin. “Oh gods! For the sake of science, right? Get your camera ready . . . All right. Here we go.”
He stood and breathed slowly, then strode slowly up the last flight to the door, opened it and walked out into the flat light on the roof. Lin followed, her camera in her hands.
Khepri eyes needed no time to adjust from light to darkness and back again. Lin stepped out onto a rough concrete roof littered with rubbish and broken concrete and saw Isaac desperately shielding his eyes and squinting. She looked coolly around her.
A little way to the north-east rose Vaudois Hill, a sinuous wedge of high land which rose up as if trying to block the view to the centre of the city. The Spike, Perdido Street Station, Parliament, the Glasshouse dome: all were visible, butting their way over that raised horizon. Opposite the hill, Lin saw miles and miles of Rudewood disappear over uneven ground. Here and there little rock knolls broke free of the leaf-cover. Off to the north there was a long uninterrupted line of sight over to the middle-class suburbs of Serpolet and Gallmarch, the militia tower of St. Jabber’s Mound, the raised tracks of the Verso Line cutting through Creekside and Chimer. Lin knew that just beyond those soot-stained arches two miles away was the twisting course of the Tar, bearing barges and their cargo into the city from the steppes of the south.
Isaac lowered his hands as his pupils tightened.
Whirling over their heads aerobatically were hundreds of garuda. They began to drop, to spiral neatly out of the sky and drop to their clawed feet in rows around Lin and Isaac. They fell thickly from the air like overripe apples.
There were two hundred at least, Lin estimated. She moved a little closer to Isaac nervously. The garuda averaged at least a couple of inches over six feet, not counting the magnificent peaks of their folded wings. There was no difference in height or musculature between men and women. The females wore thin shifts, the males wore loincloths or cut-off trousers. That was all.
Lin stood five feet tall. She could see no further than the first circle of garuda who surrounded her and Isaac at arms’ length, but she could see more and more dropping from the sky; she had the sense of the numbers building up around her. Isaac patted her shoulder absently.
A few shapes still swept and hunted and played in the air around them. When the garuda had stopped landing on the roof, Isaac broke the silence.
“Righto,” he yelled. “Thanks very much for inviting us up here. I want to make a proposition to you.”
“To who?” came a voice from the crowd.
“Well, to all of you,” he replied. “See, I’m doing some work on . . . well, on flight. And you are the only creatures in New Crobuzon who can fly and have