It banked towards the huge gas cylinders in Echomire, spiralled back easily, slipped under a layer of disturbed air and flew steeply down towards Mog Station, passing under the skyrails too fast to be seen, disappearing into the Pincod roofscape.
Isaac was not lost in his numbers.
He looked up every few minutes at Lin, who slept and moved her arms and wriggled like a helpless grub. His eyes looked as if they had never been lit up.
In the early afternoon, when he had worked for an hour, an hour and a half, he heard something clatter in the yard below. Half a minute later there were footsteps on the stairs.
Isaac froze and waited for them to stop, to disappear into one of the junkies’ rooms. They did not. They moved with a deliberate tread up the final two flights, making their careful way up the noisome steps and halting outside his door.
Isaac was still. His heart beat quickly in alarm. He looked around wildly for his gun.
There was a knock at the door. Isaac said nothing.
After a moment, whoever was outside knocked again: not hard, but rhythmically and insistently, repeatedly. Isaac stalked closer, trying to be quiet. He saw Lin twisting uncomfortably at the sound.
There was a voice outside the door, a weird, harsh, familiar voice. It was all grating treble, and Isaac could not understand it, but he reached out for the door suddenly, unsettled and aggressive and ready for trouble. Rudgutter would send a whole damn squadron, he thought as his hand closed on the handle, it’s bound to be some junkie begging. And although he did not believe that, he was reassured that it was not the militia, or Motley’s men.
He pulled the door open.
Standing before him on the unlit stairs, leaning slightly forward, sleek feathered head mottled like dry leaves, beak curved and glinting like an exotic weapon, was a garuda.
He saw instantly that it was not Yagharek.
Its wings rose up and swelled around it like a corona, vast and magnificent, feathered in ochre and smooth red-stained brown.
Isaac had forgotten what an uncrippled garuda looked like. He had forgotten the extraordinary scale and grandeur of those wings.
He understood what was happening almost immediately, in some inchoate and unstructured way. A wordless intimation hit him.
Following it by a fraction of a second came a massive gust of doubt and alarm and curiosity and a slew of questions.
“Who the fuck are you?” he breathed, and: “What are you fucking doing here? How did you find me…What…” Half-answers came unbidden to him. He stepped back from the threshold quickly, trying to banish them.
“Grim…neb…lin…” The garuda struggled with his name. It sounded as if he was a daemon being invoked. Isaac jerked his arm quickly for the garuda to follow him into the little room. He closed the door and pushed the chair back up against it.
The garuda stalked into the centre of the room, into a sunlit patch. Isaac watched it warily. It wore a dusty loincloth and nothing more. Its skin was darker than Yagharek’s, its feathered head more mottled. It moved with incredible economy, tiny snapping movements and great stillness, its head cocked to take in the room.
It stared at Lin for a long time, until Isaac sighed and the garuda looked up at him.
“Who are you?” Isaac said. “How did you fucking find me?” What did he do? Isaac thought, but did not say. Tell me.
They stood, slim, tight-muscled garuda and fat, thickset human, at opposite ends of the room. The garuda’s feathers were shiny with sun. Isaac stared at them, suddenly tired. Some sense of inevitability, of finality, had entered with the garuda. Isaac hated it for that.
“I am Kar’uchai,” the garuda said. Its voice was harder even than Yagharek’s with Cymek intonations. It was difficult to understand. “Kar’uchai Sukhtu-h’k Vaijhin-khi-khi. Concrete Individual Kar’uchai Very Very Respected.” Isaac waited.
“How did you find me?” he said eventually, bitterly. “I have…come a long way, Grimneb…lin,” Kar’uchai said. “I am yahj’hur…hunter. I have hunted for days. Here I hunt with…gold and paper-money…My quarry leaves a trail of rumour…and memory.”
What did he do?
“I come from Cymek. I have hunted…since Cymek.”
“I can’t believe you found us,” said Isaac suddenly, nervously. He talked quickly, hating the pervasive sense of ending and ignoring it aggressively, blotting it. “If you did the damn militia can for sure and if they can…” He strode quickly back and forth. He knelt down by Lin, stroked her gently, drew breath to say more.
“I am come for justice,” said Kar’uchai, and Isaac could not speak. He felt suffocated.
“Shankell,” said Kar’uchai. “Meagre Sea. Myrshock.” I’ve heard about the journey, thought Isaac in anger, you don’t have to tell me. Kar’uchai continued. “I have…hunted across a thousand miles. Seek justice.”
Isaac spoke slowly, in rage and sadness.
“Yagharek is my friend,” he said.
Kar’uchai continued as if he had said nothing. “When we found that he was gone, after…judgement…I was chosen to come…”
“What do you want?” said Isaac. “What are you going to do to him? You want to take him back with you? You want to…what, cut off…more of him?”
“I have not come for Yagharek,” said Kar’uchai. “I have come for you.”
Isaac stared in miserable confusion.
“It is up to you…to let justice be…”
Kar’uchai was relentless. Isaac could say nothing.
What did he do?
“I heard your name first in Myrshock,” said Kar’uchai. “It was on a list. Then here, in this city, it came back again and again until…all others melted away. I hunted. Yagharek and you…were linked. People whispered…of your researches. Flying monsters and thaumaturgic machines. I knew that Yagharek had found what he sought. What he came a thousand miles for. You would deny justice, Grimneb’lin. I am here to ask you…not to do that.
“It was finished. He was judged and punished. And it was over. We did not think…we did not know that he might…find a way…that justice could be retracted.
“I am here to ask you not to help him fly.”
“Yagharek is my friend,” said Isaac steadily. “He came to me and employed me. He was generous. When things…went wrong…got complicated and dangerous…well, he was brave and he helped me-us. He’s been part of…of something extraordinary. And I owe him…a life.” He glanced at Lin and then away again. “I owe him…for the times…He was ready to die, you know? He could have died, but he stayed and without him…I don’t think I could have come through.”
Isaac spoke quietly. His words were sincere and affecting.
What did he do?
“What did he do?” said Isaac, defeated.
“He is guilty,” said Kar’uchai quietly, “of choice-theft in the second degree, with utter disrespect.”
“What does that mean?” shouted Isaac. “What did he do? What’s fucking choice-theft anyway? This means nothing to me.”
“It is the only crime we have, Grimneb’lin,” replied Kar’uchai in a harsh monotone. “To take the choice of another…to forget their concrete reality, to abstract them, to forget that you are a node in a matrix, that actions have consequences. We must not take the choice of another being. What is community but a means to…for all we individuals to have…our choices.”
Kar’uchai shrugged and indicated the world around them vaguely. “Your city institutions…Talking and talking of individuals…but crushing them in layers and hierarchies…until their choices might be between three kinds of squalor.