Perdido Street Station - China Mieville [92]
The bricks of the warehouse had once been red and were now black with grime, as smooth and meticulous as if they had been painted by hand. The original sign still read the length of the building: Cadnebar’s Soaps and Tallow. Cadnebar’s had gone bust in the slump of ’57. The enormous machinery for melting and refining fat had been taken and sold as scrap. After two or three years of quiet mouldering, Cadnebar’s had been reborn as the glad’ circus.
Like mayors before him, Rudgutter liked to compare the civilization and splendour of the City-State Republic of New Crobuzon with the barbarian muck in which inhabitants of other lands were forced to crawl. Think of the other Rohagi countries, Rudgutter demanded in speeches and editorials. This was not Tesh, nor Troglodopolis, Vadaunk or High Cromlech. This was not a city ruled by witches; this was not a chthonic burrow; the seasons’ changes did not bring an onslaught of superstitious repression; New Crobuzon did not process its citizenry through zombie factories; its Parliament was not like Maru’ahm’s, a casino where laws were stakes in games of roulette.
And this was not, emphasized Rudgutter, Shankell, where people fought like animals for sport.
Except, of course, at Cadnebar’s.
Illegal it might have been, but no one remembered any militia raids of the establishment. Many sponsors of the top stables were Parliamentarians, industrialists and bankers, whose intercession doubtless kept official interest at a minimum. There were other fight-halls, of course, that doubled as cockfight and ratfight pits, where bear- or badger-baiting might go on at one end, snake-wrestling at another, with glad’-fighting in the middle. But Cadnebar’s was legendary.
Every night, the evening’s entertainments would begin with an open slot, a comedy show for the regulars. Scores of young, stupid, thickset farmboys, the toughest lads in their villages, who had travelled for days from the Grain Spiral or the Mendican Hills to make their names in the city, would flex their prodigious muscles at the selectors. Two or three would be chosen and pushed into the main arena before the howling crowd. They would confidently heft the machetes they had been given. Then the arena’s hatch would be opened and they would pale as they faced an enormous Remade gladiator or impassive cactacae warrior. The resulting carnage was short and bloody and played for laughs by the professionals.
The sport at Cadnebar’s was driven by fashion. In the dying days of that spring, the taste was for matches between teams of two Remade and three khepri guard-sisters. The khepri units were enticed out of Kinken and Creekside with massive prizes. They had practised together for years, units of three religious warriors trained to emulate the khepri guard gods, the Tough Sisters. Like the Tough Sisters, one would fight with hooknet and spear, one with crossbow and flintlock, and one with the khepri weapon that humans had christened the stingbox.
As summer began to well up under the skin of spring, the bets got bigger and bigger. Miles away in Dog Fenn, Benjamin Flex reflected morosely on the fact that Cadnebar’s Wax, the illegal organ of the fight trade, had a circulation five times that of Runagate Rampant.
The Eyespy Killer left another mutilated victim in the sewers. It was discovered by mudlarks. It was hanging like someone exhausted out of an outflow pipe into the Tar.
In the outskirts of Nigh Sump a woman died of massive puncture wounds to both sides of her neck, as if she had been caught between the blades of huge serrated scissors. When her neighbours found her, her body was scattered with documents