The sky was riotous with birds and wyrmen. They flocked to buttresses and minarets, crowding the gently sloped roofs of militia towers and struts, coating them in white shit. They stormed in shifting spirals around the Ketch Heath towers and the skeletal edifices in Spatters.
They scudded over The Crow, wove intricately through the complex pattern of air that rose above Perdido Street Station. Rowdy jackdaws squabbled over the layers of clay. They flitted over the lower hulks of slate and tar at the station’s shabby rear, descending towards a peculiar plateau of concrete above a little brow of windowed roofs. Their droppings fouled its recently scrubbed surface, little pellets of white splattering against the dark stains where some noxious fluid had spilled copiously.
The Spike and the Parliament building swarmed with little avian bodies.
The Ribs bleached and split, their flaws worsening slowly in the sun. Birds alit briefly on the enormous shafts of bone, launching themselves free again quickly, seeking refuge elsewhere in Bonetown, skimming over the roof of a smoke-damaged black terrace, in the heart of which Mr. Motley ranted against the incomplete sculpture which mocked him with unending spite.
Gulls and gannets followed rubbish barges and fishing boats up along the Gross Tar and the Tar, swooping down to snatch organic morsels from the detritus. They wheeled away to other pickings, to the offal-piles in Badside, the fish market in Pelorus Fields. They landed briefly on the split, algaed cable that crawled out of the river by Spit Hearth. They explored the rubbish heaps in Stoneshell, and picked at half-dead prey crawling through the Griss Twist wasteland. The ground purred beneath them, as hidden cables hummed inches below the ragged topsoil.
A larger body than the birds rose up from the slums of St. Jabber’s Mound and soared into the air. It sailed at a massive height over the western city. The streets below became a mottled stain of khaki and grey like some exotic mould. It passed easily above the aerostats in the gusting breeze, warmed by the noon sun. It maintained a steady pace eastwards, crossing the city’s nucleus where the five rail lines burst out like petals.
In the air over Sheck, gangs of wyrmen looped the loop in vulgar aerobatics. The drifting figure passed over them serene and unnoticed.
It moved slowly, with langorous strokes that suggested it could increase its speed tenfold suddenly and with ease. It crossed the Canker and began a long descent, passing in and out of the air over the Dexter Line trains, riding their hot exhaust briefly, then gliding earthwards with unseen majesty, descending towards the canopy of roofs, weaving easily through the maze of the thermals gusting up from massive smokestacks and little hovels’ flues.
It banked towards the huge gas cylinders in Echomire, spiralled back easily, slipped under a layer of disturbed air and flew steeply down towards Mog Station, passing under the skyrails too fast to be seen, disappearing into the Pincod roofscape.
Isaac was not lost in his numbers.
He looked up every few minutes at Lin, who slept and moved her arms and wriggled like a helpless grub. His eyes looked as if they had never been lit up.
In the early afternoon, when he had worked for an hour, an hour and a half, he heard something clatter in the yard below. Half a minute later there were footsteps on the stairs.
Isaac froze and waited for them to stop, to disappear into one of the junkies’ rooms. They did not. They moved with a deliberate tread up the final two flights, making their careful way up the noisome steps and halting outside his door.
Isaac was still. His heart beat quickly in alarm. He looked around wildly for his gun.
There was a knock at the door. Isaac said nothing.
After a moment, whoever was outside knocked again: not hard, but rhythmically and insistently, repeatedly. Isaac stalked closer, trying to be quiet. He saw Lin twisting uncomfortably at the sound.
There was a voice outside the door, a weird, harsh, familiar voice. It was all grating treble, and Isaac could not understand it, but he reached out for the door suddenly, unsettled and aggressive and ready for trouble. Rudgutter would send a whole damn squadron, he thought as his hand closed on the handle, it’s bound to be some junkie begging. And although he did not believe that, he was reassured that it was not the militia, or Motley’s men.
He pulled the door open.
Standing before him on the unlit stairs, leaning slightly forward, sleek feathered head mottled like dry leaves, beak curved and glinting like an exotic weapon, was a garuda.
He saw instantly that it was not Yagharek.
Its wings rose up and swelled around it like a corona, vast and magnificent, feathered in ochre and smooth red-stained brown.
Isaac had forgotten what an uncrippled garuda looked like. He had forgotten the extraordinary scale and grandeur of those wings.
He understood what was happening almost immediately, in some inchoate and unstructured way. A wordless intimation hit him.
Following it by a fraction of a second came a massive gust of doubt and alarm and curiosity and a slew of questions.
“Who the fuck are you?” he breathed, and: “What are you fucking doing here? How did you find me . . . What . . .” Half-answers came unbidden to him. He stepped back from the threshold quickly, trying to banish them.
“Grim . . . neb . . . lin . . .” The garuda struggled with his name. It sounded as if he was a dæmon being invoked. Isaac jerked his arm quickly for the garuda to follow him into the little room. He closed the door and pushed the chair back up against it.
The garuda stalked into the centre of the room, into a sunlit patch. Isaac watched it warily. It wore a dusty loincloth and nothing more. Its skin was darker than Yagharek’s, its feathered head more mottled. It moved with incredible economy, tiny snapping movements and great stillness, its head cocked to take in the room.
It stared at Lin for a long time, until Isaac sighed and the garuda looked up at him.
“Who are you?” Isaac said. “How did you fucking find me?” What did he do? Isaac thought, but did not say. Tell me.
They stood, slim, tight-muscled garuda and fat, thickset human, at opposite ends of the room. The garuda’s feathers were shiny with sun. Isaac stared at them, suddenly tired. Some sense of inevitability, of finality, had entered with the garuda. Isaac hated it for that.
“I am Kar’uchai,” the garuda said. Its voice was harder even than Yagharek’s with Cymek intonations. It was difficult to understand. “Kar’uchai Sukhtu-h’k Vaijhin-khi-khi. Concrete Individual Kar’uchai Very Very Respected.”
Isaac waited.
“How did you find me?” he said eventually, bitterly.
“I have . . . come a long way, Grimneb . . . lin,” Kar’uchai said. “I am yahj’hur . . . hunter. I have hunted for days. Here I hunt with . . . gold and paper-money . . . My quarry leaves a trail of rumour . . . and memory.”
What did he do?
“I come from Cymek. I have hunted . . . since Cymek.”
“I can’t believe you found us,” said Isaac suddenly, nervously. He talked quickly, hating the pervasive sense of ending and ignoring it aggressively, blotting it. “If you did the damn militia can for sure and if they can . . .” He strode quickly back and forth. He knelt down by Lin, stroked her gently, drew breath to say more.
“I am come for justice,” said Kar’uchai, and Isaac could not speak. He felt suffocated.
“Shankell,” said Kar’uchai. “Meagre Sea. Myrshock.” I’ve heard about the journey, thought Isaac in anger, you don’t have to tell me. Kar’uchai continued. “I have . . . hunted across a thousand miles. Seek justice.”
Isaac spoke slowly, in rage and sadness.
“Yagharek is my friend,” he said.
Kar’uchai continued as if he had said nothing. “When we found that he was gone, after . . . judgement . . . I was chosen to come . . .”
“What do you want?” said Isaac. “What are you going to do to him? You want to take him back with you? You want to . . . what, cut off . . . more of him?”
“I have
not come for Yagharek,” said Kar’uchai. “I have come for you.”
Isaac stared in miserable confusion.
“It is up to you . . . to let justice be . . .”
Kar’uchai was relentless. Isaac could say nothing.
What did he do?
“I heard your name first in Myrshock,” said Kar’uchai. “It was on a list. Then here, in this city, it came back again and again until . . . all others melted away. I hunted. Yagharek and you . . . were linked. People whispered . . . of your researches. Flying monsters and thaumaturgic machines. I knew that Yagharek had found what he sought. What he came a thousand miles for. You would deny justice, Grimneb’lin. I am here to ask you . . . not to do that.
“It was finished. He was judged and punished. And it was over. We did not think . . . we did not know that he might . . . find a way . . . that justice could be retracted.
“I am here to ask you not to help him fly.”
“Yagharek is my friend,” said Isaac steadily. “He came to me and employed me. He was generous. When things . . . went wrong . . . got complicated and dangerous . . . well, he was brave and he helped me—us. He’s been part of . . . of something extraordinary. And I owe him . . . a life.” He glanced at Lin and then away again. “I owe him . . . for the times . . . He was ready to die, you know? He could have died, but he stayed and without him . . . I don’t think I could have come through.”
Isaac spoke quietly. His words were sincere and affecting.
What did he do?
“What did he do?” said Isaac, defeated.
“He is guilty,” said Kar’uchai quietly, “of choice-theft in the second degree, with utter disrespect.”
“What does that mean?” shouted Isaac. “What did he do? What’s fucking choice-theft anyway? This means nothing to me.”
“It is the only crime we have, Grimneb’lin,” replied Kar’uchai in a harsh monotone. “To take the choice of another . . . to forget their concrete reality, to abstract them, to forget that you are a node in a matrix, that actions have consequences. We must not take the choice of another being. What is community but a means to . . . for all we individuals to have . . . our choices.”
Kar’uchai shrugged and indicated the world around them vaguely. “Your city institutions . . . Talking and talking of individuals . . . but crushing them in layers and hierarchies . . . until their choices might be between three kinds of squalor.
“We have far less, in the desert. We hunger, sometimes, and thirst. But we have all the choices that we can. Except when someone forgets themselves, forgets the reality of their companions, as if they were an individual alone . . . And steals food, and takes the choice of others to eat it, or lies about game, and takes the choice of others to hunt it; or grows angry and attacks without reason, and takes the choice of another not to be bruised or live in fear.
“A child who steals the cloak of some beloved other, to smell at night . . . they take away the choice to wear the cloak, but with respect, with a surfeit of respect.
“Other thefts, though, do not have even respect to mitigate them.
“To kill . . . not in war or defence, but to . . . murder . . . is to have such disrespect, such utter disrespect, that you take not only the choice of whether to live or die that moment . . . but every other choice for all of time that might be made. Choices beget choices . . . if they had been allowed their choice to live, they might have chosen to hunt for fish in a salt-swamp, or to play dice, or to tan hides, to write poesy or cook stew . . . and all those choices are taken from them in that one theft.
“That is choice-theft in the highest degree. But all choice-thefts steal from the future as well as the present.
“Yagharek’s was a heinous . . . a terrible forgetting. Theft in the second degree.”
“What did he do?” shouted Isaac, and Lin woke with a flutter of hands and a nervous twitching.
Kar’uchai spoke dispassionately.
“You would call it rape.”
Oh, I would call it rape, would I? thought Isaac in a molten, raging sneer; but the torrent of livid contempt was not enough to drown his horror.
I would call it rape.
Isaac could not but imagine. Immediately.
The act itself, of course, though that was a vague and nebulous brutality in his mind (did he beat her? Hold her down? Where was she? Did she curse and fight back?). What he saw most clearly, immediately, were all the vistas, the avenues of choice that Yagharek had stolen. Fleetingly, Isaac glimpsed the denied possibilities.
The choice not to have sex, not to be hurt. The choice not to risk pregnancy. And then . . . what if she had become pregnant? The choice not to abort? The choice not to have a child?
The choice to look at Yagharek with respect?
Isaac’s mouth worked and Kar’uchai spoke again.
“It was my choice he stole.”
It took a few seconds, a ludicrously long time, for Isaac to understand what Kar’uchai meant. Then he gasped and stared at her, seeing for the first time the slight swell of her ornamental breasts, as useless as bird-of-paradise plumage. He struggled for something to say, but he did not know what he felt: there was nothing solid for words to express.
He murmured some appallingly loose apology, some solicitation.
“I thought you were . . . the garuda magister . . . or the militia, or something,” he said.
“We have none,” she replied.
“Yag . . . a fucking rapist,” he hissed, and she clucked.
“He stole choice,” she said flatly.
“He raped you,” he said, and instantly Kar’uchai clucked again.
“He stole my choice,” she said. She was not expanding on his words, Isaac realized: she was correcting him. “You cannot translate into your jurisprudence, Grimneb’lin,” she said. She seemed annoyed.
Isaac tried to speak, shook his head miserably, stared at her and again saw the crime committed, behind his eyes.
“You cannot translate, Grimneb’lin,” Kar’uchai repeated. “Stop. I can see . . . all the texts of your city’s laws and morals that I have read . . . in you.” Her tone sounded monotonous to him. The emotion in the pauses and cadences of her voice was opaque.
“I was not violated or ravaged, Grimneb’lin. I am not abused or defiled . . . or ravished or spoiled. You would call his actions rape, but I do not: that tells me nothing. He stole my choice, and that is why he was . . . judged. It was severe . . . the last sanction but one . . . There are many choice-thefts less heinous than his, and only a few more so . . . And there are others that are judged equal . . . many of those are actions utterly unlike Yagharek’s. Some, you would not deem crimes at all.
“The actions vary: the crime . . . is the theft of choice. Your magisters and laws . . . that sexualize and sacralize . . . for whom individuals are defined abstract . . . their matrix-nature ignored . . . where context is a distraction . . . cannot grasp that.
“Do not look at me with eyes reserved for victims . . . And when Yagharek returns . . . I ask you to observe our justice—Yagharek’s justice—not to impute your own.
“He stole choice, in the second highest degree. He was judged. The band voted. That is the end.”
Is it? thought Isaac. Is that enough? Is that the end?
Kar’uchai watched him struggle.
Lin called to Isaac, clapping her hands like a clumsy child. He knelt quickly and spoke to her. She signed anxiously at him and he signed back as if what she said made sense, as if they were conversing.
She was calmed, and she hugged him and looked nervously up at Kar’uchai with her unbroken compound eye.
“Will you observe our judgement?” said Kar’uchai quietly. Isaac looked at her quickly. He busied himself with Lin.
Kar’uchai was silent for a long time. When Isaac did not speak, she repeated her question. Isaac turned to her and shook his head, not in denial but confusion.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Please . . .”
He turned b
ack to Lin, who slept. He slumped against her and rubbed his head.
After minutes of silence, Kar’uchai stopped her swift pacing and called his name.
He started as if he had forgotten she was there.
“I will leave. I ask you again. Please do not mock our justice. Please let our judgement be.” She moved the chair from the door and stalked out. Her taloned feet scratched at the old wood as she descended.
And Isaac sat and stroked Lin’s iridescent carapace—marbled now with stress-fractures and lines of cruelty—thinking about Yagharek.
Do not translate, Kar’uchai had said, but how could he not?
He thought of Kar’uchai’s wings shuddering with rage as she was pinioned by Yagharek’s arms. Or had he threatened with a knife? A weapon? A fucking whip?
Fuck them, he would think suddenly, staring at the crisis engine’s parts. I don’t owe their laws respect . . . Free the prisoners. That was what Runagate Rampant always said.
But the Cymek garuda did not live like the citizens of New Crobuzon. There were no magisters, Isaac remembered, no courts or punishment factories, no quarries and dumps to pack with Remade, no militia or politicians. Punishment was not doled out by backhanding bosses.
Or so he had been told. So he remembered. The band voted, Kar’uchai had said.
Was that true? Did that change things?
In New Crobuzon punishment was for someone. Some interest was served. Was that different in the Cymek? Did that make the crime more heinous?
Was a garuda rapist worse than a human one?
Who am I to judge? Isaac thought in sudden anger, and stormed towards his engine, picked up his calculations, ready to continue, but then, Who am I to judge? he thought, in sudden hollow uncertainty, the ground taken from under him, and he put his papers down slowly.
He kept glancing at Lin’s thighs. Her bruises had almost gone, but his memory of them was as savage a stain as they had been.
They had mottled her in suggestive patterns around her lower belly and inner thighs.
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