Free Perdido Street Station by China Miéville

annexes and behind
hoardings. Most picked a living from the margins of the city. The
huge dumps and rubbish-heaps at the outskirts of Stoneshell and
Abrogate Green, the wastescape by the river in Griss Twist, all
swarmed with wyrmen, squabbling and laughing, drinking from stagnant
canals, fucking in the sky and on the earth. Some, like Teafortwo,
supplemented this with informal employment. When scarfs flapped on
roofs, or chalk marks defaced walls near attic windows, the odds were
that someone was calling some wyrman or other for a task.
    Isaac foraged in his
pocket and held up a shekel. "Fancy earning this, Teafortwo?"
    "Betcha, captain!"
shouted Teafortwo. "Look out below!" he added and shat
loudly. The stool spattered on the street. Teafortwo guffawed.
    Isaac handed him the
list he had made, rolled into a scroll. "Take that to the
university library. You know it? Over the river? Good. It’s
open late, you should catch ‘em open. Give that to the
librarian. I’ve signed it, so they shouldn’t give you any
trouble. They’ll load you up with some books. Think you can
bring them back to me? They’ll be pretty heavy."
    "No problem,
captain!" Teafortwo swelled his chest like a bantam. "Big
strong lad!"
    "Fine. Manage it
in one go and I’ll slip you a bit more moolah." Teafortwo
clutched the list and turned to go with some rude childish yell, when
Isaac grabbed the edge of his wing. The wyrman turned, surprised.
"Problem, boss?"
    "No, no..."
Isaac was staring at the base of his wing, thoughtfully. He gently
opened and closed Teafortwo’s massive wing with his hands.
Under that vivid red skin, horny and pockmarked and stiff like
leather, Isaac could feel the specialized muscles of flight winding
through the flesh to the wings. They moved with a magnificent
economy. He bent the wing through a full circle, feeling the muscles
tug it into a paddling, scooping motion that would shovel air out and
under the wyrman. Teafortwo giggled.
    "Captain tickle
me! Saucy devil!" he screamed.
    Isaac reached for some
paper, having to stop himself from dragging Teafortwo with him. He
was visualizing the wyrman wing represented mathematically, as simple
component planes.
    "Teafortwo...tell
you what. When you get back, I’ll toss you another shekel if I
can take a few heliotypes of you and do a couple of experiments. Only
half an hour or so. What do you say?"
    "Lovely-jubbly,
captain!"
    Teafortwo hopped onto
the window-sill and lurched out into the gloaming. Isaac squinted,
studying the rolling motion of the wings, watching those strong
muscles unique to the airborne send eighty or more pounds of twisted
flesh and bone powering through the sky.
    When Teafortwo had
disappeared from sight, Isaac sat and made another list, by hand this
time, scribbling at speed.
    Research, he
wrote at the top of the page. Then below it: physics; gravity;
forces/planes/vectors; unified field . And a little
below that, he wrote: Flight i) natural ii) thaumaturgical iii)
chymico-physical iv) combined v) other.
    Finally, underlined and
in capitals, he wrote PHYSIOGNOMIES OF FLIGHT.
    He sat back, not
relaxed but poised to leap. He was humming abstractedly. He was
desperately excited.
    He fumbled for one of
the books he had fished from under his bed, an enormous old volume.
He let it topple flat onto the desk, relishing the heavy sound. The
cover was embossed in unrealistic fake gold.
    A Bestiary Of The
Potentially Wise: The Sentient Races Of Bas-Lag.
    Isaac stroked the cover
of Shacrestialchit’s classic, translated from the Lubbock
vodyanoi and updated a hundred years ago by Benkerby Carnadine, human
merchant, traveller and scholar of New Crobuzon. Constantly reprinted
and imitated, but still unsurpassed. Isaac put his finger on the G of
the thumb-index and flipped the pages, until he found the exquisite
watercolour sketch of the Cymek bird-people that introduced the essay
on the garuda.
    As the light ebbed from
the