Read Online Perdido Street Station by China Miéville - Free Book Online

looming bulk of his fake wings behind him, he
looked small and vulnerable.
    He turned slowly, and
Isaac caught his breath as the scars he had glimpsed were brought
into view.
    Two long trenches of
flesh on Yagharek’s shoulderblades were twisted and red with
tissue that looked as if it were boiling. Slice marks spread like
small veins from the main eructations of ugly healing. The strips of
ruined flesh on either side of his back were a foot and a half long,
and perhaps four inches at their widest point. Isaac’s face
wrinkled in empathy: the torn holes were criss-crossed with rough,
curving slice marks, and Isaac realized that the wings had been sawed from Yagharek’s back. No single, sudden cut but a long,
drawn-out torturous disfigurement. Isaac winced.
    Thinly hidden knobs of
bone shifted and flexed; muscles stretched, grotesquely visible.
    "Who did this?"
breathed Isaac. The stories were right, he thought. The
Cymek is a savage, savage land.
    There was a long
silence before Yagharek responded.
    "I...I did this."
    At first Isaac thought
he had misunderstood.
    "What do you mean?
How the fuck could you...?"
    "I brought this
onto me." Yagharek was shouting. "This is justice. It is I
who did this."
    "This is a fucking
punishment? Godshit, fuck, what could...what did you do?"
    "Do you judge
garuda justice, Grimnebulin? I cannot hear that without thinking of
the Remade..."
    "Don’t try
to turn it round! You’re absolutely right, I’ve no
stomach for the law in this city...I’m just trying to
understand what happened to you..."
    Yagharek sighed, with a
shockingly human slump of the shoulders. When he spoke, it was quiet
and pained, a duty that he resented.
    "I was too
abstract. I was not worthy of respect. There...was a madness...I was
mad. I committed a heinous act, a heinous act..." His words
broke down into avian moans.
    "What did you do?"
Isaac steeled himself to hear of some atrocity.
    "This language
cannot express my crime. In my tongue..." Yagharek stopped for a
moment. "I will try to translate. In my tongue they said...they
were right...I was guilty of choice-theft...choice-theft in the
second degree...with utter disrespect."
    Yagharek was gazing
back at the window. He held his head high, but he would not meet
Isaac’s eyes.
    "That is why they
deemed me Too Too Abstract. That is why I am not worthy of respect.
That is who I am now. I am no longer Concrete Individual and
Respected Yagharek. He is gone. I told you my name, and my
name-title. I am Too Too Abstract Yagharek Not To Be Respected. That
is who I will always be, and I will be true enough to tell you."
    Isaac shook his head as
Yagharek sat slowly on the edge of Isaac’s bed. He cut a
forlorn figure. Isaac stared at him for a long time before speaking.
    "I have to tell
you..." said Isaac. "I don’t really...uh...Plenty of
my clients are...not entirely on the right side of the law, shall we
say? Now, I’m not going to pretend that I even slightly
understand what you did, but as far as I’m concerned it’s
not my business. Like you said, there’s no words for your crime
in this city: I don’t think I could ever understand what it was
you’d done wrong." Isaac spoke slowly and seriously, but
his mind was already racing away. He began to speak with more
animation.
    "And your
problem...is interesting." Representations of forces and lines
of power, of femtomorphic resonances and energy fields were beginning
to leap into his consciousness. "It’s easy enough to get
you into the air. Balloons, force manipulation and whatnot.
Even easy to get you up there more than once. But to get you up there whenever you want it, under your own steam... which is
what you’re after, yes?" Yagharek nodded. Isaac stroked
his chin.
    "Godspit...!
Yes...now that is a much more...interesting conundrum."
    Isaac was beginning to
retreat into his computations. One prosaic part of his mind