a bruise scuttled from its clothes. It came with arachnid gait.
They scattered. Pomeroy’s gun boomed but the thing did not let up, and it was only feet from Elsie screaming when Drogon’s repeated shots stopped it. The whispersmith walked toward it firing as he went, three bullets sent precisely to the thing hidden in grass. He kicked it, hauled it up ragged and bloody.
It was a hand. A mottled right hand. From its wrist a short tail grew. It swung deadweight and dripping.
“Dextrier,”
the whispersmith said to Cutter.
“Warrior caste.”
There was another commotion, like some big animal was shifting through trees. Cutter turned and tried to bring unloaded guns to bear.
The noise again, and something shifted in a grove a half mile off. Something came out into the sun. A giant, an immense grey man. They watched without knowing what to do or say as it walked toward them. Cutter cried out and began to run. He picked up speed as the clay man approached and he saw someone waving to him from its back: a man who leapt down and came toward him with his arms wide, shouting something no one could hear, every one of his steps, and Cutter’s, sending up pollen and sticky insects that stained them.
Cutter ran up; the man ran down. Cutter called out; he called the man by name. Cutter was crying. “We found you,” he said. “We found you.”
part two
RETURNS
CHAPTER SIX
A window burst open high above the market. Windows everywhere opened above markets. A city of markets, a city of windows.
New Crobuzon again. Unceasing, unstintingly itself. Warm that spring, gamy: the rivers were stinking. Noisy. Uninterrupted New Crobuzon.
What circled around and over the city’s upreached fingers? Birdlife, aerial vermin, wyrmen (laughing, monkey-footed things), and airships of cool colours, and smoke and clouds. The natural
inclines of the land were all forgotten by New Crobuzon, which
rose or fell according to quite other whims: it was mazed in three dimensions. Tons of brick and wood, concrete, marble and
iron, earth, water, straw and daub, made roofs and walls.
In the days the sun burned away the colours of those walls, burned the raggedy ends of posters that covered them like feathers, making them all slowly a tea-yellow. Oddments of ink told of old entertainments, while concrete desiccated. There was the famous stencil-painting of the Iron Councillor, repeated in incompetent series by some dissident graffitist. There were skyrails, strung between jags of architecture like the broken-off pillars of some godly vault. The wires sliced air and made sound, so wind played New Crobuzon as an instrument.
Night brought new light, elyctro-barometric tubes of glowing gas, glass in convolutes, made to spell out names and words or sketch pictures in outline. A decade gone they had not existed or had been very long forgotten: now the streets after dark were all dappled by their distinct and vivid glare, washing out the gaslamps.
There was such noise. It came without remorse. There were always people everywhere. New Crobuzon.
“. . . and then the
oth
er op-er-at-or told the
form
al in-stee-gay-tor that his
suit
could not be heard the very
thought
was quite absurd . . .”
On stage chanteuse Adeleine Gladner, under her singing name Adely Gladly (pronounced to rhyme,
Aderly Gladerly
), yelled and crooned through her number “Formal Instigation” to applause and catcalls drunken but loud and totally heartfelt. She minced, kicking under her skirts (her costume a long-dated exaggeration of a streetwalker’s flounces, so she looked more coy than libertine). She shook her lace trimmings at the punters and smiled, scooping up the flowers they threw without breaking her song.
Her celebrated voice was everything it was held to be, raucous and very beautiful. The audience were hers completely. Ori Ciuraz, at the rear of the hall, was sardonic but by no means immune. He did not know the others at his table well, only to
They scattered. Pomeroy’s gun boomed but the thing did not let up, and it was only feet from Elsie screaming when Drogon’s repeated shots stopped it. The whispersmith walked toward it firing as he went, three bullets sent precisely to the thing hidden in grass. He kicked it, hauled it up ragged and bloody.
It was a hand. A mottled right hand. From its wrist a short tail grew. It swung deadweight and dripping.
“Dextrier,”
the whispersmith said to Cutter.
“Warrior caste.”
There was another commotion, like some big animal was shifting through trees. Cutter turned and tried to bring unloaded guns to bear.
The noise again, and something shifted in a grove a half mile off. Something came out into the sun. A giant, an immense grey man. They watched without knowing what to do or say as it walked toward them. Cutter cried out and began to run. He picked up speed as the clay man approached and he saw someone waving to him from its back: a man who leapt down and came toward him with his arms wide, shouting something no one could hear, every one of his steps, and Cutter’s, sending up pollen and sticky insects that stained them.
Cutter ran up; the man ran down. Cutter called out; he called the man by name. Cutter was crying. “We found you,” he said. “We found you.”
part two
RETURNS
CHAPTER SIX
A window burst open high above the market. Windows everywhere opened above markets. A city of markets, a city of windows.
New Crobuzon again. Unceasing, unstintingly itself. Warm that spring, gamy: the rivers were stinking. Noisy. Uninterrupted New Crobuzon.
What circled around and over the city’s upreached fingers? Birdlife, aerial vermin, wyrmen (laughing, monkey-footed things), and airships of cool colours, and smoke and clouds. The natural
inclines of the land were all forgotten by New Crobuzon, which
rose or fell according to quite other whims: it was mazed in three dimensions. Tons of brick and wood, concrete, marble and
iron, earth, water, straw and daub, made roofs and walls.
In the days the sun burned away the colours of those walls, burned the raggedy ends of posters that covered them like feathers, making them all slowly a tea-yellow. Oddments of ink told of old entertainments, while concrete desiccated. There was the famous stencil-painting of the Iron Councillor, repeated in incompetent series by some dissident graffitist. There were skyrails, strung between jags of architecture like the broken-off pillars of some godly vault. The wires sliced air and made sound, so wind played New Crobuzon as an instrument.
Night brought new light, elyctro-barometric tubes of glowing gas, glass in convolutes, made to spell out names and words or sketch pictures in outline. A decade gone they had not existed or had been very long forgotten: now the streets after dark were all dappled by their distinct and vivid glare, washing out the gaslamps.
There was such noise. It came without remorse. There were always people everywhere. New Crobuzon.
“. . . and then the
oth
er op-er-at-or told the
form
al in-stee-gay-tor that his
suit
could not be heard the very
thought
was quite absurd . . .”
On stage chanteuse Adeleine Gladner, under her singing name Adely Gladly (pronounced to rhyme,
Aderly Gladerly
), yelled and crooned through her number “Formal Instigation” to applause and catcalls drunken but loud and totally heartfelt. She minced, kicking under her skirts (her costume a long-dated exaggeration of a streetwalker’s flounces, so she looked more coy than libertine). She shook her lace trimmings at the punters and smiled, scooping up the flowers they threw without breaking her song.
Her celebrated voice was everything it was held to be, raucous and very beautiful. The audience were hers completely. Ori Ciuraz, at the rear of the hall, was sardonic but by no means immune. He did not know the others at his table well, only to
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