“Well?” demanded Isaac.
Lemuel nodded slowly.
“I was told right,” he said quietly. “There’s a big crack up near the top of the dome, in the north-eastern quarter. From where I was it was a bit hard to tell the size, but I figure it’s at least…six feet by four. I looked pretty hard up there, and that was the only break I saw big enough for anything man-sized or thereabouts to get in or out. Did you have a little glance around the base?”
Derkhan nodded. “Nothing,” she said. “I mean, plenty of little cracks, even a few places where a fair bit of glass was missing, especially higher up, but there were no holes big enough to get through. That must be the one.”
Isaac and Lemuel nodded.
“So that’s how they’re getting in and out,” said Isaac softly. “Well, it seems to me the best way of tracking them is to reverse their journey. Much as I damn well hate to suggest it, I think we should get up there. What’s it like inside?”
“You can’t see all that much,” said Lemuel, and shrugged. “The glass is thick, old and damn dirty. They only clean it once every three or four years, I think. You can make out the basic shapes of houses and streets and what have you, but that’s about all. You’d have to look inside to get the lay of the place.”
“We can’t all troop up there,” said Derkhan. “We’ll be seen. We should’ve asked Lemuel to go in, he’s the man for the job.”
“I wouldn’t have gone anyway,” said Lemuel tightly. “I don’t enjoy being that high up, and I certainly damn well won’t dangle upside down hundreds of feet above thirty thousand pissed-off cactacae…”
“Well, what are we going to do?” Derkhan was irritated. “We could wait until nightfall, but then the bloody moths are active. What we’ll have to do is go up one at a time. If, that is, it’s safe to. We need someone to go first…”
“I will go,” said Yagharek.
There was silence. Isaac and Derkhan stared at him.
“Great!” said Lemuel archly, and clapped twice. “That’s that sorted. So you can go up, and then…um…you can look around for us, chuck us down a message…”
Isaac and Derkhan were ignoring Lemuel. They were still staring at Yagharek.
“It is right that I should go,” said Yagharek. “I am at home so high,” he said and his voice clucked slightly, as if at a sudden emotion. “I am at home so high, and I am a hunter. I can look down on the landscape within and see where the moths might lurk. I can gauge the possibilities within the glass.”
Yagharek retraced Lemuel’s steps up the shell of the Glasshouse.
He had unwrapped the foetid bandages from his feet, and his talons had stretched out in a delightful reflex. He had scrambled up the initial patch of bare metal with Lemuel’s grappling rope, and then had climbed far faster and more confidently than the human had done.
He stopped every so often and stood swaying in the warm wind, his avian toes gripping the metal slats tightly and securely. He would lean alarmingly and peer into the hazy air, hold out his arms a little, feel the wind fill his spreadeagled body like a sail.
Yagharek pretended he was flying.
Swinging from his thin belt was the stiletto and the bullwhip he had stolen the previous day. The whip was a clumsy thing, not nearly so fine as the one he had cracked in the hot desert air, stinging and snaring, but it was a weapon his hand remembered.
He was fast and assured. The airships that were visible were all far away. He was unseen.
At the top of the Glasshouse, the city seemed to be a gift to him, laid out ready to be taken. Everywhere he looked, fingers and hands and fists and spines of architecture thrust rudely into the sky. The Ribs like ossified tentacles reaching always up; the Spike slammed into the city’s heart like a skewer; the complex mechanistic vortex of Parliament, glowing darkly; Yagharek mapped them with a cold, strategic eye. He glanced up and to the east, to where the skyrail connecting Flyside Tower and the Spike thrummed.
When he had reached the edge of the enormous glass globe at the dome’s tip, it took him only a moment to find the rent in the glass. A part of him was surprised that his eyes, the eyes of a bird of prey, could still perform for him as they used to.
Below him, a foot or two under the gently curving ladder, the glass of the dome was dry and scaled with bird and wyrmen droppings. He tried to peer through, but he could make out nothing beyond the shadowy suggestions of roofs and streets.
Yagharek struck out across the glass itself.
He moved tentatively, feeling with his talons, tapping the glass to test it, sliding as quickly as he could to a metal frame for his claws to grip. As he moved he realized how at ease he had become with climbing. All those weeks and weeks of night-time climbing, on the roof of Isaac’s workshop, up into deserted towers, seeking the city’s crags. He climbed easily and without fear. He was more ape than bird, it seemed.
He skittered nervously across the dirty panes, until he breached the final wall of girders that separated him from the split in the glass. And when he vaulted that, the fault was before him.
Leaning over, Yagharek could feel heat gusting from the lamplit depths within. The night outside was warm, but the temperature within must be very high.
He wound the grappling hook carefully around the metal joist at one side of the crack and tugged it hard to ensure it was secure. Then he wrapped the end of the rope three times around his waist. He gripped it near the hook, lay across the girder and put his head in through the lips of broken glass.
It felt like pushing his face into a bowl of strong tea. The air inside the Glasshouse was hot, almost stiflingly so, and full of smoke and steam. It shone with a hard, white light.
Yagharek blinked his eyes clean and shielded them, then looked down on the cactus town.
In the centre, below the massive nugget of glass at the dome’s tip, the houses had been cleared away and a stone temple had been built. It was red stone, a steep ziggurat, that reached a third of the way to the Glasshouse roof. Every stepped level was lush with desert and veldt vegetation, abloom in garish reds and oranges against their waxy green skins.
A little rim of land, about twenty feet wide, had been cleared all around it, beyond which point the streets of Riverskin had been left. The cartography was a snarled puzzle, a collection of road-ends and the rumps of avenues, here the corner of a park and there half a church, even the stump of a canal, now a trough of stagnant water, cut off by the edge of the dome. Lanes criss-crossed the little township at odd angles, segments cut from longer streets where the dome had been placed over them. A little random patch of alleys and roads had been contained, sealed under glass. Its content had changed even as the outlines remained mostly the same.
The chaotic aggregate of street-stubs had been reformed by the cactacae. What, years ago, had been a wide thoroughfare had been made a vegetable garden, the edges of its lawns flush with the houses on either side, little trails from front doors indicating the routes between patches of pumpkin and radishes.
Ceilings had been removed four generations ago to convert human houses into homes for their new, much taller inhabitants. Rooms had been added to the tops and backsides of buildings, styled like weird miniature effigies of the stepped pyramid in the centre of the Glasshouse. The additional buildings had been wedged into every space possible, to cram the dome with cactacae, and strange agglomerations of human architecture and monolithic, stone-slab edifices stretched in big blocks of variegated colour. Some were several storeys tall.