“The blinds are down in the office, aren’t they?” said Mr. Motley. “Because I think you should see what you will be working with. Your mind is mine, Lin. You work for me now.”

Mr. Motley stood and pushed the screen to the floor.

Lin got half to her feet, her headlegs bristling with astonishment and terror. She gazed at him.

Scraps of skin and fur and feathers swung as he moved; tiny limbs clutched; eyes rolled from obscure niches; antlers and protrusions of bone jutted precariously; feelers twitched and mouths glistened. Many-coloured skeins of skin collided. A cloven hoof thumped gently against the wood floor. Tides of flesh washed against each other in violent currents. Muscles tethered by alien tendons to alien bones worked together in uneasy truce, in slow, tense motion. Scales gleamed. Fins quivered. Wings fluttered brokenly. Insect claws folded and unfolded.

Lin backed away, stumbling, feeling her terrified way away from his slow advance. Her chitinous headbody was twitching neurotically. She shook.

Mr. Motley paced towards her like a hunter.

“So,” he said, from one of the grinning human mouths. “Which do you think is my best side?”

Chapter Five

Isaac waited, facing his guest. The garuda stood silent. Isaac could see it was concentrating. It was preparing to speak.

The garuda’s voice, when it came, was harsh and monotone.

“You are the scientist. You are…Grimnebulin.”

It had difficulty with his name. Like a parrot trained to speak, the shaping of consonants and vowels came from within the throat, without the aid of versatile lips. Isaac had only ever conversed with two garuda in his life. One was a traveller who had long-practised the formation of human sounds; the other was a student, one of the tiny garuda community born and raised in New Crobuzon, which grew up shouting the city slang. Neither had sounded human, but neither had sounded half so animal as this great birdman struggling with an alien tongue. It took Isaac a moment to understand what had been said.

“I am.” He held out his hand, spoke slowly. “What is your name?”

The garuda looked imperiously at his hand, then shook it with a strangely fragile grip.

“Yagharek…” There was a shrieking stress on the first syllable. The great creature paused, and shifted uncomfortably, before continuing. It repeated its name, but this time added an intricate suffix.

Isaac shook his head.

“Is that all your name?”

“Name…and title.”

Isaac raised an eyebrow.

“Am I, then, in the presence of nobility?”

The garuda stared at him blankly. Eventually it spoke slowly without breaking his gaze.

“I am Too Too Abstract Individual Yagharek Not To Be Respected.”

Isaac blinked. He rubbed his face.

“Um…right. You have to forgive me, Yagharek, I’m not familiar with…uh…garuda honorifics.”

Yagharek shook his great head slowly.

“You will understand.”

Isaac asked Yagharek to come upstairs, which he did, slowly and carefully, leaving gouges in the wooden stairs where he gripped with his great claws. But Isaac could not persuade him to sit down, or to eat, or to drink.

The garuda stood by Isaac’s desk, while his host sat and stared up at him.

“So,” said Isaac, “why are you here?”

Again, Yagharek gathered himself for a moment before he spoke.

“I came to New Crobuzon days ago. Because this is where the scientists are.”

“Where are you from?”

“Cymek.”

Isaac whistled quietly. He had been right. That was a huge journey. At least a thousand miles, through that hard, burning land, through dry veldt, across sea, swamp, steppe. Yagharek must have been driven by some strong, strong passion.

“What do you know about New Crobuzon’s scientists?” asked Isaac.

“We have read of the university. Of the science and industry that moves and moves here like nowhere else. Of Brock Marsh.”

“But where do you hear all this stuff?”

“From our library.”

Isaac was astonished. He gaped, then recovered.

“Forgive me,” he said. “I thought you were nomads.”

“Yes. Our library travels.”

And Yagharek told Isaac, to Isaac’s growing amazement, of the Cymek library. The great librarian clan who strapped the thousands of volumes into their trunks and carried them between them as they flew, following the food and the water in the perpetual, punishing Cymek summer. The enormous tent village that sprung up where they landed, and the garuda bands that congregated on the vast, sprawling centre of learning whenever it was in their reach.

The library was hundreds of years old, with manuscripts in uncountable languages, dead and alive: Ragamoll, of which the language of New Crobuzon was a dialect; hotchi; Fellid vodyanoi and Southern vodyanoi; high khepri; and a host of others. It even contained a codex, Yagharek claimed with discernible pride, written in the secret dialect of the handlingers.

Isaac said nothing. He was ashamed at his ignorance. His view of the garuda was being torn up. This was more than a dignified savage. Time to get me down my library and learn about the garuda. Pig ignorant bastard, he reproached himself.

“Our language has no written form, but we learn to write and read in several others as we grow,” said Yagharek. “We trade for more books from travellers and merchants, of whom many have passed through New Crobuzon. Some are native to this city. It is a place we know well. I have read the histories, the stories.”

“Then you win, mate, because I know shit about your place,” said Isaac despondently. There was a silence. Isaac looked back up at Yagharek.

“You still haven’t told me why you’re here.”

Yagharek turned away and looked out of the window. Barges floated aimlessly below.

It was difficult to discern emotion in Yagharek’s scraping voice, but Isaac thought he could hear disgust.

“I have crawled like vermin from hole to hole for a fortnight. I have sought journals and gossip and information, and it led me to Brock Marsh. And in Brock Marsh it led me to you. The question that led me has been: ‘Who can change the powers of material?’ ‘Grimnebulin, Grimnebulin,’ everyone says. ‘If you have gold,’ they say, ‘he is yours, or if you have no gold but you interest him, or if you bore him but he pities you, or if a whim takes him.’ They say you are a man who knows the secrets of matter, Grimnebulin.”

Yagharek looked directly at him.

“I have some gold. I will interest you. Pity me. I beg you to help me.”

“Tell me what you need,” said Isaac.

Yagharek looked away from him again.

“Perhaps you have flown in a balloon, Grimnebulin. Looked down at roofs, at the earth. I grew up hunting from the skies. Garuda are a hunting people. We take our bows and spears and long whips and we scour the air of birds, the ground of prey. It is what makes us garuda. My feet are not built to walk your floors, but to close around small bodies and tear them apart. To grip dry trees and rock pillars between the earth and the sun.”

Yagharek spoke like a poet. His speech was halting, but his language was that of the epics and histories he had read, the curious stilted oration of someone who has learnt a language from old books.

“Flight is not a luxury. It is what makes me garuda. My skin crawls when I look up at roofs that trap me. I want to look down at this city before I leave it, Grimnebulin. I want to fly, not once, but whenever I will.

“I want you to give me back flight.”

Yagharek unclipped his cloak and threw it away across the floor. He stared at Isaac with shame and defiance. Isaac gasped.

Yagharek had no wings.

Strapped across his back was an intricate frame of wooden struts and leather straps that bobbed idiotically behind him as he turned. Two great carved planks sprouted from a kind of leather jerkin below his shoulders, jutting way above his head, where they hinged and dangled down to his knees. They mimicked wing-bones. There was no skin or feathers or cloth or leather stretched between them, they were no kind of gliding apparatus. They were only a disguise, a trick, a prop on which to drape Yagharek’s incongruous cloak, to make it seem as if he had wings.