Un Lun Dun - China Mieville [64]
They clung in darkness. The noise was enormous. Below the hammering of the Smog’s attack Deeba could hear shouts, and screams of pain. And underlying everything a noise that could be thunder, or could be an enormous growling voice.
“It’s showing what it can do,” Hemi whispered. “It’s been attacking like this every few days. And it’s had its addicts or its smombies start fires. It’s declaring war.”
The cacophony eventually eased, and stopped, and only the moans of injured could be heard. Slowly, Hemi pushed back the lid and they stepped out.
Throughout the market, injured people lay. A few were lying still, punctured and bleeding from where the Smog’s missiles had hit them. The stalls were ripped and smoking.
All over the pavement and between the rows of tents the market was littered with remnants of the attack. Nuggets of metal and mineral from thumb- to fist-sized lay and smoldered. As Deeba watched, they slowly evaporated. They fizzed like dissolvable pills, and their matter boiled off in smoke that wafted away.
The sky was clear. The Smog had gone.
People emerged from dugouts and the cellars and the barricaded emptish buildings into which they had leapt. They examined the shredded awnings.
There were also the lucky few with unbrellas.
“This is going to work,” said a woman. She twirled her broken unbrella, its spokes bent into an ugly claw, its upper surface boiling with smoke from the attacks it had deflected. “Did you see?”
Her companion was a man in an outfit of tied-together ribbons. “You’re right,” Deeba heard him say reverentially. He twirled his own unbrella. It was bent in its shaft. “Nothing could touch us. I wasn’t even doing anything—were you? It’s all Brokkenbroll. They’re all obeying him.”
Hemi knelt by a victim of the terrible mineral rain, a woman in a puffy dress interwoven with ivy. He looked up at Deeba and shook his head.
Some of the injured were being carried away, or tended to by various strange-looking doctors. There were a few others beyond help.
The market after the attack was a strange mixture of the exhilarated and the destroyed. Deeba and Hemi walked through the triumphant, the injured, and, here and there, the dead.
46
Old Friends
“Obaday!”
The needle-headed designer looked up in astonished delight.
“Deeba!”
Obaday was dressed in a natty suit of poems. He was sweeping up chunks of coal and iron into a big pile in front of his stall, which effervesced back into little threads of smog and drifted away even as he built it. He swept Deeba up in a hug. She laughed and hugged him back. “Deeba, what are you doing here?” He held her at arm’s length and looked at her.
From the rear of Obaday’s stall came an excited snuffling.
“Is that…?” Deeba said, and Curdle came bouncing out from behind the curtain. The little milk carton rolled its cardboard body at them and leapt into Deeba’s hands.
“Curdle!” she said. She tickled it and it squirmed. “What’s it doing with you, Obaday?”
He looked sheepish.
“Well,” he said. “After you left, the silly little thing was miserable. It was pining. Lectern was going to let it go back in the Backwall Maze, but I thought that maybe it would rather…live with someone who knew you and the Shwazzy…sort of thing.”
“Oh right,” she said and smiled. “You’re keeping it for its sake. You don’t care one way or the other.”
“Alright, alright,” he said. “Anyway. How on earth did you get here? Why did you come? It’s a difficult time…”
His words petered out. He stared at Hemi.
Hemi stood tense and ready to run. If you didn’t know, you wouldn’t take him for part-ghost—but you’d know he wanted to be somewhere else. He looked at Obaday suspiciously.
“Obaday,” Deeba said. “Think what you say.”
“But Deeba,” he hissed. “You don’t know who that is. He’s a—”
“I know exactly who that is. His name’s Hemi, and he’s a half-ghost. He’s a pain in the arse, but he’s also who got me here, and who helped me.”
“But he’ll try to—”
“Shut up, Obaday. No he won’t. I mean it.” Deeba spoke sternly. “He helped me. And we’ve got something