Chapter Twenty-Two

Sunset bled into the canals and the converging rivers of New Crobuzon. They ran thick and gory with light. Shifts changed and working days ended. Retinues of exhausted smelters and foundry workers, clerks and bakers and coke-loaders, trudged from factory and office to the stations. The platforms were full of tired, boisterous argument, cigarillos and booze. Steam cranes in Kelltree worked into the night, hauling exotic cargoes from foreign ships. From the river and the great docks, striking vodyanoi stevedores yelled insults at the human crews on the jetties. The sky above the city was smeared with cloud. The air was warm, and smelt alternately lush and foul, as trees fruited and factory waste coagulated in thickening flows.

Teafortwo bolted from the warehouse on Paddler Way like cannonshot. He tore into the sky from the broken window trailing blood and tears, blubbering and sniffling like a baby, flying in a ragged spiral towards Pincod and Abrogate Green.

Minutes passed before another, darker form followed him into the skies.

The intricate hatchling thing flexed itself through an upper window and launched into the gloaming. Its movements on the ground were tentative, every motion seemed to be experimental. In the air it soared. There was no hesitation, only a glorying in the motion.

The irregular wings clapped together and swept apart in huge, soundless gusts that scooped away great swathes of air. The creature spun, beating its wings languorously, its body careering across the sky with the chaotic graceless speed of a butterfly. It sent eddies of wind and sweat and aphysical exudations in its wake.

The creature was still drying.

It exalted. It licked the cooling air.

The city festered like mould below it. A palimpsest of sense-impressions washed over the flying thing. Sounds and smells and lights that filtered into its obscure mind in a synaesthetic wash, an alien perception.

New Crobuzon steamed with the rich taste-scent of prey.

The thing had fed, was sated, but the glut of food confused it, gloriously, and it slobbered and gnashed its huge teeth in a frenzy.

It dived. Its wings fluttered and trembled as it swooped towards the unlit alleys below it. It knew in its hunter’s heart to avoid the great scabs of light clotted at irregular spaces around the city, to seek out the darker places. It trailed its tongue in the air and found food, swept with chaotic aerobatics into the shadow of the bricks. It came down like a fallen angel in the gnarled cul-de-sac where a prostitute and her client fucked against a wall. Their desultory jerks faltered as they sensed the thing beside them.

Their screams were brief. They ceased quickly as the creature’s wings spread.

The thing fell on them with eager greed.

Afterwards it flew again, drunk with the taste.

It hovered, seeking the centre of the city, turning, drawn slowly to the enormous sprawl of Perdido Street Station. It beat its way west over Spit Hearth and the red-light zone, over the contradictory tangle of commerce and squalor that was The Crow. Behind it, snagging the air like a trap, was the dark edifice of Parliament, and the militia towers of Strack Island and Brock Marsh. The creature traced an uneven course over the path of the skyrail that linked those lower towers to the Spike that loomed at the westernmost shoulder of Perdido Street Station.

The flying thing started as pods streaked along that rail. It hovered momentarily, fascinated at the rattling passage of the trains that expanded outwards from the station, that monstrous architectural enormity.

Vibrations in a hundred registers and keys beckoned the thing, as forces and emotions and dreams spilt and were amplified in the brick chambers of the station and blasted outwards into the sky. A massive, invisible flavour trail.

The few night-birds swerved violently away from the weird thing that beat its heavy way towards the city’s dark heart. Wyrmen on errands saw its incomprehensible silhouette and wheeled off in other directions, shouting obscenities and oaths. Booms and drones vibrated as the dirigibles sounded to each other, sliding slowly between city and sky like fat pike. As they turned ponderously, the thing flapped past them, unseen except by an engineer who did not report his sighting, but made a religious sign and whispered to Solenton for protection.

Caught in the updraft, the wash of senses, from Perdido Street Station, the flying thing let itself be caught and swept up until it was way, way above the city. It turned slowly with a quiver from its wings, orienting itself to its new territory.

It noted the paths of the river. It felt the vents of different energies from the city’s different zones. It sensed the city in a flickering passage of different modes. Concentrations of food. Shelter.

The creature sought one more thing. Others of its kind.

It was social. When it was born for the second time it was with a hunger for company. Its tongue unrolled and it tasted the gritty air for anything that was like itself.

The thing shuddered.

Faintly, so faintly, it could sense something in the east. It could taste frustration. Its wings trembled in empathy.

It arced around and beat its way back in the direction from which it had come. It bore a little north this time, passing over the parks and elegant old buildings of Gidd and Ludmead. The splintering enormities of the Ribs splayed extraordinarily to the south, and the flying thing felt a queasiness, an anxiety, at the awareness of those looming bones. The power that drooled upward from them was not at all to its liking. But its unease battled with its deeply encoded sympathy for its own kind, whose taste grew stronger, much stronger, in the shadow of the great skeleton.

The thing descended tentatively. It approached circuitously, from the north and the east. It flew low and tight, below the skyrail that extended northwards from the militia tower of Mog Hill to that in Chnum. It shadowed an eastbound train on the Dexter Line, gliding in its filthy thermals. Then it swung in a long arc around the Mog Hill tower and over the northern fringe of Echomire’s industrial zone. The thing swept in towards Bonetown’s raised railway, cringing at the influence of the Ribs, but dragged on towards the taste of its fellows.

It flitted from roof to roof, its tongue dangling obscenely as it traced them. Sometimes the downdraft from its wings would make a passer-by look up, as hats and paper bowled down the deserted streets. If they saw the dark shape that loomed momentarily over them and then was gone, they shivered and hurried on, or furrowed their brows and denied what they had seen.

The winged thing let its tongue dangle as it slowly beat the air. It used it as a bloodhound would its nose. It passed over the undulating roofscape that seemed buckled by the Ribs. It licked its way along a faint trail.

Then it crossed the aura of a large, bituminous building in a deserted street, and its long tongue spasmed like a whip. It sped up, arced up and back down in an elegant loop towards the tarred roof. There at the far corner, below that ceiling through which the sensations of its kind leaked like brine through a sponge…

It scrambled over the slates flexing its peculiar limbs. Solicitous feelings were oozing from it, and there was a befuddled moment of confusion as its captive kin reacted to its presence. Then their nebulous misery became impassioned: pleas and joy and demands for freedom, and among that, cold and exact instructions on what to do.

The creature found its way to the edge of the roof and descended in a motion halfway between flying and climbing, until it clung to the outer edge of a sealed window forty feet above the pavement. The glass was painted opaque. It vibrated minutely in eldritch dimensions, buffeted by the emanations from within.