Free Perdido Street Station by China Miéville Page B

have watched
mutant creatures crawl from sewers into cold flat starlight and
whisper shyly to each other, drawing maps and messages in the faecal
mud.
    I have sat with the
wind at my side and seen cruel things, wicked things.
    **
    My scars and
bonestubs itch. I am forgetting the weight, the sweep, the motion of
wings. If I were not garuda I would pray. But I will not obeise
myself before arrogant spirits.
    Sometimes I make my
way to the warehouse where Grimnebulin reads and writes and scrawls,
and I climb silently to the roof, and I lie with my back to the
slate. The thought of all that energy of his mind channelled towards
flight, my flight, my deliverance, lessens the itching in my ruined
back. The wind tugs me harder when I am here: it feels betrayed. It
knows that if I am made whole it will lose its night-time companion
in the brick mire and midden of New Crobuzon. So it chastises me when
I lie there, suddenly threatening to pull me from my perch into the
wide stinking river, clutching my feathers, fat petulant air warning
me not to leave it; but I grip the roof with my claws and let the
healing vibrations pass up from Grimnebulin’s mind through the
crumbling slate into my poor flesh.
    I sleep in old
arches under the thundering railtracks.
    I eat whatever
organic thing I find that will not kill me.
    I hide like a
parasite in the skin of this old city that snores and farts and
rumbles and scratches and swells and grows warty and pugnacious with
age.
    Sometimes I clamber
to the top of the huge, huge towers that teeter like porcupine spines
from the city’s hide. Up in the thinner air, the winds lose the
melancholy curiosity they have at street level. They abandon their
second-floor petulance. Stirred by towers that poke above the host of
city light—intense white carbide lamps, smoke-burnished red of
lit grease, tallow twinkling, frenetic sputtering gas flare, all
anarchic guards against the dark—the winds rejoice and play.
    I can dig my claws
into the rim of a building’s crown and spread my arms and feel
the buffets and gouts of boisterous air and I can close my eyes and
remember, for a moment, what it is to fly.

Part Two :Physiognomies of Flight

Chapter Six
    New Crobuzon was a city
unconvinced by gravity.
    Aerostats oozed from
cloud to cloud above it like slugs on cabbages. Militia-pods streaked
through the heart of the city to its outlands, the cables that held
them twanging and vibrating like guitar strings hundreds of feet in
the air. Wyrmen clawed their way above the city leaving trails of
defecation and profanity. Pigeons shared the air with jackdaws and
hawks and sparrows and escaped parakeets. Flying ants and wasps, bees
and bluebottles, butterflies and mosquitoes fought airborne war
against a thousand predators, aspises and dheri that snapped at them
on the wing. Golems thrown together by drunken students beat
mindlessly through the sky on clumsy wings made of leather or paper
or fruit-rind, falling apart as they flew. Even the trains that moved
innumerable women and men and commodities around New Crobuzon’s
great carcass fought to stay above the houses, as if they were afraid
of the putrefaction of architecture.
    The city thrust upwards
massively, as if inspired by those vast mountains that rose to the
west. Blistering square slabs of habitation ten, twenty, thirty
storeys high punctuated the skyline. They burst into the air like fat
fingers, like fists, like the stumps of limbs waving frantically
above the swells of the lower houses. The tons of concrete and tar
that constituted the city covered ancient geography, knolls and
barrows and verges, undulations that were still visible. Slum houses
spilt down the sides of Vaudois Hill, Flyside, Flag Hill, St.
Jabber’s Mound like scree.
    The smoky black walls
of Parliament jutted from Strack Island like a shark’s tooth or
a stingray’s jag, some monstrous organic weapon rending the
sky. The building was