Free Perdido Street Station by China Miéville Page A

room he turned on the gaslamp that sat on his desk. Out in the
cool air, away to the east, Teafortwo beat his wings heavily and
grasped the sack of books that dangled below him. He could see the
bright glimmer of Isaac’s gasjet, and just beyond it, outside
the window, the sputtering ivory of the streetlamp. A constant stream
of night-insects spiralled it like elyctrons, finding their
occasional way through a crack in the glass and immolating themselves
in its light with a little combustive burst. Their carbonized remains
dusted the bottom of the glass.
    The lamp was a beacon,
a lighthouse in that forbidding city, steering the wyrman’s way
over the river and out of the predatory night.
    **
    In this city, those
who look like me are not like me. I made the mistake once (tired and
afraid and desperate for help) of doubting that.
    Looking for a place
to hide, looking for food and warmth at night and respite from the
stares that greet me whenever I set foot on the streets. I saw a
young fledgling, running easily along the narrow passageway between
drab houses. My heart nearly burst. I cried out to him, this boy of
my own kind, in the desert tongue...and he gazed back at me and
spread his wings and opened his beak and broke into some cacophonous
laughter.
    He swore at me in a
bestial croaking. His larynx fought to shape human sounds. I cried
out to him but he would not understand. He yelled something behind
him and a group of human street-children congregated from holes in
the city, like spirits spiteful to the living. He gesticulated at me,
that bright-eyed chick, and he screamed curses too fast for me to
understand. And these, his comrades, these dirty-faced roughnecks,
these dangerous brutalized amoral little creatures with pinched faces
and ragged trousers, spattered with snot and rheum and urban dirt,
girls in stained shifts and boys with jackets too big, grabbed
cobblestones from the earth and pelted me where I lay in the darkness
of a decaying threshold.
    And the little boy
whom I will not call garuda, who was nothing but human with freakish
wings and feathers, my little lost non-brother threw the stones with
his comrades and laughed and broke windows behind my head and called
me names.
    I realized then as
the stones splintered my pillow of old paint that I was alone.
    **
    And so, and so, I
know that I must live without respite from this isolation. That I
will not speak to any other creature in my own tongue.
    I have taken to
foraging alone after nightfall when the city quiets and becomes
introspective. I walk as an intruder on its solipsistic dream. I came
by darkness, I live by darkness. The savage brightness of the desert
is like some legend I heard a long time ago. My existence grows
nocturnal. My beliefs change.
    I emerge into
streets that wind like dark rivers through cavernous brick rockfaces.
The moon and her little shining daughters glimmer wanly. Cold winds
ooze like molasses down from the foothills and the mountains and clog
the night-city with drifting rubbish. I share the streets with
aimlessly moving scraps of paper and little whirlwinds of dust, with
motes that pass like erratic thieves under eaves and through doors.
    I remember the
desert winds: the Khamsin that scourges the land like smokeless fire;
the Fohm that bursts from hot mountainsides as if in ambush; the sly
Simoom that inveigles its way through leather sandscreens and library
doors.
    The winds of this
city are a more melancholy breed. They explore like lost souls,
looking in at dusty gaslit windows. We are brethren, the city-winds
and I. We wander together.
    We have found
sleeping beggars that clutch each other and congeal for warmth like
lower creatures, forced back down evolutionary strata by their
poverty.
    We have seen the
city’s night-porters fish the dead from the rivers. Dark-suited
militia tugging with hooks and poles at bloated bodies with eyes
ripped from their heads, the blood set and gelatinous in their
sockets.
    We