Perdido Street Station (86 page)

They dropped the loops
of cable, and one looked up into the child’s eyes, winked
impishly and grinned. The other man dropped to one knee and peered
through the bars of the circular manhole in the courtyard floor.

From the darkness below
a voice hailed him curtly. A filthy hand shot up towards the metal
seal.

The first man tugged
his companion’s leg and hissed at him—"They’re
here...this is the right place!"—then grabbed the rough
end of the cable and tried to thrust it between the bars in the
sewer’s entrance. It was too thick. He cursed and fumbled in
his toolbox for a hacksaw, began to work on the tough grille, wincing
at the screech of metal.

"Hurry," said
the invisible figure below. "Something’s been following
us."

When the cutting was
done, the man in the courtyard shoved the cable hard into the ragged
hole. His companion glanced down at the unsettling scene. It looked
like some grotesque inversion of birth.

The men below grabbed
at the cable, hauled it into the darkness of the sewers. The yards of
wire coiled in the still, close courtyard began to unwind into the
city’s veins.

The child watched
curiously as the two men waited, wiping their hands on their
overalls. When the cable was pulled taut, when it disappeared sharply
under the ground, pulled at a tight angle around the corner of the
little cul-de-sac, then they sauntered quickly out of that shadowed
hole.

As they turned the
corner, one man looked up, winked again, then walked on and
disappeared from the child’s view.

In the main street the
two men separated without a word, walking away in different
directions under the setting sun.

**

At the monastery, the
two men waiting by the wall were looking up.

On the building across
the street, a concrete edifice mottled with damp, three men had
appeared over the crumbling edge of the roof. They were hauling their
own cable with them, the last forty or so feet of a much longer roll
that now snaked away behind them, tracking their rooftop journey from
the southern corner of Spit Hearth.

The cable trail they
left wound among the rooftop shacks of squatters. It joined the
legions of pipes that made erratic paths among the pigeon hutches.
The cable was squeezed around spires and tacked like some ugly
parasite onto slates. It bowed slightly across streets, twenty, forty
or more feet above the ground, next to the little bridges thrown up
across the divides. Here and there, where the gap was six feet or
less, the cable simply spanned the drop, where its bearers had leapt
across.

The cable disappeared
south-eastwards, plunging suddenly down and through a slimy
storm-drain, into the sewers.

The men made their way
to the fire-escape of their building, and began to descend. They
hauled the thick cable down to the first floor, looked down over the
monastery garden and the two men watching on the ground.

"Ready?"
shouted one of the newcomers, and made a throwing motion in their
direction. The pair looking up, nodded. The three on the fire-escape
paused, and swung the remnants of the cable in time.

When they threw it, it
wriggled in the air like some monstrous flying serpent, descending
with a heavy smack into the arms of the man who ran to catch it. He
yelped, but held it, kept the end high above his head and pulled it
as tight as he could across the divide.

He held the heavy wire
against the monastery wall, positioning himself so that the new
length of cable would link up snugly with the piece already attached
to the Vedneh Gehantock garden wall. His companion hammered it into
place.

The black cable crossed
the street above the pedestrians’ heads, descending at a steep
angle.

The three on the iron
fire-escape leaned over, watching the frantic engineering of their
fellows. One of the men below them began to twist together the huge
snarls of wire, connecting the conducting material. He worked
quickly, until the two bare ends of fibrous metal were conjoined in
an ugly, functional knot.

He opened his toolkit
and brought forth two little bottles. He shook them both briefly,
then opened the stopper on one and dripped it quickly across the
thicket of wires. The viscous liquid seeped in, saturating the
connection. The man repeated the operation with the second bottle. As
the two liquids met there was an audible chymical reaction. He stood
back, stretched his arm to continue pouring, closing his eyes as
smoke began to billow out from the rapidly heating metal.

The two chymicals met
and mixed and combusted, spewing out noxious fumes with a quick burst
of heat intense enough to weld the wires into a sealed mesh.

When the heat had
lessened, the two men began the final job, laying ragged strips of
sacking across the new connection and cracking the seals on a tin of
thick, bituminous paint, slathering it on thickly, covering the bare
metal seal, insulating it.

The men on the
fire-escape were satisfied. They turned and retraced their steps,
returning to the roof, from where they dissipated into the city as
quick and untraceable as smoke in a breeze.

**

All along a line
between Griss Twist and The Crow, similar operations were taking
place.

In the sewers, furtive
men and women picked their way through the hiss and drip of the
subterranean tunnels. Where possible, these large gangs were led by
workers who knew a little of the undercity: sewage workers;
engineers; thieves. They were all equipped with maps, torches, guns
and strict instructions. Ten or more figures, several with lengths of
heavy cable, would pick their way together along their allotted
route. When one piece of slowly unrolling wire ran out, they would
connect another and continue.

There were dangerous
delays as parties lost each other, blundering towards lethal zones:
ghul-nests and undergang lairs. But they corrected themselves and
hissed for help, making their way back towards their comrades’
voices.

When they finally met
the tail end of another team in some main node of tunnel, some medium
hub of sewer, they connected the two huge ends of wire, welding them
with chymicals or heat-torches or backyard thaumaturgy. Then the
cable was attached to the enormous arterial clutches of pipes that
travelled the lengths of the sewers.

Their job done, the
company would scatter and disappear.

In unobtrusive places,
with extended backstreets or great stretches of interlinked roofs,
the cable would poke from underground and be taken by the crews
working above the streets. They unrolled the cable over hillocks of
rank sedge behind warehouses, up stairways of damp brick, over roofs
and along chaotic streets, where their industry was invisible in its
banality.

They met others, the
cable lengths were sealed. The men and women dispersed.

Mindful of the
likelihood that some crews—especially those in the
undercity—would become lost and miss their rendezvous points,
the Construct Council had stationed spare crews along the route. They
waited in building sites and by the banks of canals with their
serpentine load beside them, for word that some connection had not
been made.

But the work seemed
charmed. There were problems, lost moments, wasted time and brief
panics, but no team disappeared or missed its meeting. The spare men
remained idle.

A great sinuous circuit
was constructed through the city. It wound through more than two
miles of textures: its matt-black rubber skin slid under faecal
slime; across moss and rotting paper; through scrubby undergrowth,
patches of brick-strewn grassland, disturbing the trails of feral
cats and street-children; plotting the ruts in the skin of
architecture, littered with granulated clots of damp brickdust.

The cable was
inexorable. It moved on, its path deviating briefly here and there
with whiplash curves, scoring a path through the hot city. It was as
determined as some spawning fish, fighting its way towards the
enormous rising monolith at the centre of New Crobuzon.

The sun was sinking
behind the foothills to the west, making them magnificent and
portentous. But they could not challenge the chaotic majesty of
Perdido Street Station.

Lights flickered on
across its vast and untrustworthy topography, and it received the
now-glowing trains into its bowels like offerings. The Spike skewered
the clouds like a spear held ready, but it was nothing beside the
station: a little concrete addendum to that great disreputable
leviathan building, wallowing in fat satisfaction in the city-sea.

The cable wound towards
it without pause, rising above and falling beneath New Crobuzon’s
surface in waves.

**

The west-facing front
of Perdido Street Station opened onto BilSantum Plaza. The plaza was
thronging and beautiful, with carts and pedestrians circulating
constantly around the parkland at its centre. In this lush green,
jugglers and magicians and stall-holders kept up raucous chants and
sales pitches. The citizenry were blithely careless of the monumental
structure that dominated the sky. They only noticed its façade
with offhand pleasure when the low sun’s rays struck it full
on, and its patchwork of architecture glowed like a kaleidoscope: the
stucco and painted wood were rose; the bricks went bloody; the iron
girders were glossy with rich light. BilSantum Street swept under the
huge raised arch that connected the main body of the station to the
Spike. Perdido Street Station was not discrete. Its edges were
permeable. Spines of low turrets swept off its back and into the
city, becoming the roofs of rude and everyday houses. The concrete
slabs that scaled it grew squat as they spread out, and were suddenly
ugly canal walls. Where the five railway lines unrolled through great
arches and passed along the roofs, the station’s bricks
supported and surrounded them, cutting a path over the streets. The
architecture oozed out of its bounds.

Perdido Street itself
was a long, narrow passageway that jutted perpendicularly from
BilSantum Street and wound sinuously east towards Gidd. No one knew
why it had once been important enough to give the station its name.
It was cobbled, and its houses were not squalid, though they were in
ill-repair. It might once have described the station’s northern
boundary, but it had long been overtaken. The storeys and rooms of
the station had spread out and rapidly breached the little street.

They had leapt it
effortlessly and spread like mould into the roofscape beyond,
transforming the terrace at the north of BilSantum Street. In some
places Perdido Street was open to the air: elsewhere it was covered
for long stretches, with vaulted bricks festooned with gargoyles or
lattices of wood and iron. There in the shade from the station’s
underbelly, Perdido Street was gaslit all the time.

Perdido Street was
still residential. Families rose every day beneath that dark
architecture sky, walked its winding length to work, passing in and
out of shadow.

The tramp of heavy
boots often sounded from above. The front of the station, and much of
its roofscape, was guarded. Private security, foreign soldiers and
the militia, some in uniform and some in disguise, patrolled the
façade and the mountainous landscape of slate and clay,
protecting the banks and stores, the embassies and the government
offices that filled the various floors within. They would tread like
explorers along carefully plotted routes through the spires and
spiral iron staircases, past dormer windows and through hidden
rooftop courtyards, journeying across the lower layers of the station
roof, looking down over the plaza and the secret places and the
enormous city.

But further to the
east, towards the rear of the station, spotted with a hundred trade
entrances and minor establishments, the security lapsed and became
more haphazard. The towering construction was darker here. When the
sun set, it cast its great shadow across a huge swathe of The Crow.

Some way out from the
main mass of the building, between Perdido Street and Gidd Stations,
the Dexter Line passed through a tangle of old offices that long ago
had been ruined by a minor fire.

It had not damaged the
structure, but it had been enough to bankrupt the company that had
traded within. The charred rooms had long been empty of all but
vagrants unperturbed by the smell of carbon, still tenacious after
nearly a decade.

After more than two
hours of torturously slow motion, Isaac and Yagharek had arrived at
this burned shell, and collapsed thankfully within. They released
Andrej, retied his hands and feet and gagged him before he woke. Then
they ate what little food they had, and sat quietly, and waited.

Although the sky was
light, their shelter was in the darkness shed by the station. In a
little over an hour twilight would come, with night just behind it.

They talked quietly.
Andrej woke and began to make his noises again, casting piteous looks
around the room, begging for freedom, but Isaac looked at him with
eyes too exhausted and miserable for guilt.

At seven o’clock
there was a fumbling noise at the heat-blistered door. It was
instantly audible above the rattling street sounds of The Crow. Isaac
drew his flintlock and motioned Yagharek to silence.

It was Derkhan,
exhausted and very dirty, her face smeared with dust and grease. She
held her breath as she passed through the door and closed it behind
her, releasing a sobbing exhalation as she slumped against it. She
moved over and gripped Isaac’s hand, then Yagharek’s.
They murmured greetings.

"I think there’s
someone watching this place," Derkhan said urgently. "He’s
standing under the tobacconist’s awning opposite, in a green
cloak. Can’t see his face."