Eventually, after several minutes climbing, the intruder reached a metal lip that surrounded the apex of the great structure. The keystone itself was a single globe of limpid glass about eight feet in diameter. It sat perfectly in the circular hole at the dome’s apogee, suspended half in, half out like some great plug. The man stopped and looked out over the city, through the tips of the supporting struts and the thick suspension wires. The wind whipped about him, and he clung to the handholds with vertiginous terror. He looked up into the darkening sky, the stars dim to him from all the clotted light that surrounded him, that ebbed through the glass below his body.
He turned his attention to that glass, scanned its surface minutely, pane by pane.
After some minutes he raised himself and began to climb backwards down the rails. Down, fumbling with his feet, feeling for holds, gently probing with outstretched toes, pulling himself back towards the earth.
The ladder ran out twelve feet from the earth, and the man slid down on the grappling hook he had used to get up. He touched the dusty ground and looked around him.
“Lem,” he heard someone hiss. “Over here.”
Lemuel Pigeon’s companions were hiding in a gutted building at the edge of a rubble-strewn wasteground flanking the dome. Isaac was just visible, gesticulating at him from behind the doorless threshold.
Lemuel paced quickly across the thin scrub, treading on bricks and concrete overgrown and anchored with grass. He turned his back on the early evening light and slipped into the gloom of the burnt-out shell.
In the shadow before him crouched Isaac, Derkhan, Yagharek and the three adventurers. There was a pile of ruined equipment behind them, steam-pipes and conducting wires, the clasps from retort stands, lenses like marbles. Lemuel knew that the mess would resolve itself into five monkey-constructs as soon as they moved.
“Well?” demanded Isaac.
Lemuel nodded slowly.
“I was told right,” he said quietly. “There’s a big crack up near the top of the dome, in the north-eastern quarter. From where I was it was a bit hard to tell the size, but I figure it’s at least . . . six feet by four. I looked pretty hard up there, and that was the only break I saw big enough for anything man-sized or thereabouts to get in or out. Did you have a little glance around the base?”
Derkhan nodded. “Nothing,” she said. “I mean, plenty of little cracks, even a few places where a fair bit of glass was missing, especially higher up, but there were no holes big enough to get through. That must be the one.”
Isaac and Lemuel nodded.
“So that’s how they’re getting in and out,” said Isaac softly. “Well, it seems to me the best way of tracking them is to reverse their journey. Much as I damn well hate to suggest it, I think we should get up there. What’s it like inside?”
“You can’t see all that much,” said Lemuel, and shrugged. “The glass is thick, old and damn dirty. They only clean it once every three or four years, I think. You can make out the basic shapes of houses and streets and what have you, but that’s about all. You’d have to look inside to get the lay of the place.”
“We can’t all troop up there,” said Derkhan. “We’ll be seen. We should’ve asked Lemuel to go in, he’s the man for the job.”
“I wouldn’t have gone anyway,” said Lemuel tightly. “I don’t enjoy being that high up, and I certainly damn well won’t dangle upside down hundreds of feet above thirty thousand pissed-off cactacae . . .”
“Well, what are we going to do?” Derkhan was irritated. “We could wait until nightfall, but then the bloody moths are active. What we’ll have to do is go up one at a time. If, that is, it’s safe to. We need someone to go first . . .”
“I will go,” said Yagharek.
There was silence. Isaac and Derkhan stared at him.
“Great!” said Lemuel archly, and clapped twice. “That’s that sorted. So you can go up, and then . . . um . . . you can look around for us, chuck us down a message . . .”
Isaac and Derkhan were ignoring Lemuel. They were still staring at Yagharek.
“It is right that I should go,” said Yagharek. “I am at home so high,” he said and his voice clucked slightly, as if at a sudden emotion. “I am at home so high, and I am a hunter. I can look down on the landscape within and see where the moths might lurk. I can gauge the possibilities within the glass.”
Yagharek retraced Lemuel’s steps up the shell of the Glasshouse.
He had unwrapped the foetid bandages from his feet, and his talons had stretched out in a delightful reflex. He had scrambled up the initial patch of bare metal with Lemuel’s grappling rope, and then had climbed far faster and more confidently than the human had done.
He stopped every so often and stood swaying in the warm wind, his avian toes gripping the metal slats tightly and securely. He would lean alarmingly and peer into the hazy air, hold out his arms a little, feel the wind fill his spreadeagled body like a sail.
Yagharek pretended he was flying.
Swinging from his thin belt was the stiletto and the bullwhip he had stolen the previous day. The whip was a clumsy thing, not nearly so fine as the one he had cracked in the hot desert air, stinging and snaring, but it was a weapon his hand remembered.
He was fast and assured. The airships that were visible were all far away. He was unseen.
At the top of the Glasshouse, the city seemed to be a gift to him, laid out ready to be taken. Everywhere he looked, fingers and hands and fists and spines of architecture thrust rudely into the sky. The Ribs like ossified tentacles reaching always up; the Spike slammed into the city’s heart like a skewer; the complex mechanistic vortex of Parliament, glowing darkly; Yagharek mapped them with a cold, strategic eye. He glanced up and to the east, to where the skyrail connecting Flyside Tower and the Spike thrummed.
When he had reached the edge of the enormous glass globe at the dome’s tip, it took him only a moment to find the rent in the glass. A part of him was surprised that his eyes, the eyes of a bird of prey, could still perform for him as they used to.
Below him, a foot or two under the gently curving ladder, the glass of the dome was dry and scaled with bird and wyrmen droppings. He tried to peer through, but he could make out nothing beyond the shadowy suggestions of roofs and streets.
Yagharek struck out across the glass itself.
He moved tentatively, feeling with his talons, tapping the glass to test it, sliding as quickly as he could to a metal frame for his claws to grip. As he moved he realized how at ease he had become with climbing. All those weeks and weeks of night-time climbing, on the roof of Isaac’s workshop, up into deserted towers, seeking the city’s crags. He climbed easily and without fear. He was more ape than bird, it seemed.
He skittered nervously across the dirty panes, until he breached the final wall of girders that separated him from the split in the glass. And when he vaulted that, the fault was before him.
Leaning over, Yagharek could feel heat gusting from the lamplit depths within. The night outside was warm, but the temperature within must be very high.
He wound the grappling hook carefully around the metal joist at one side of the crack and tugged it hard to ensure it was secure. Then he wrapped the end of the rope three times around his waist. He gripped it near the hook, lay across the girder and put his head in through the lips of broken glass.
It felt like pushing his face into a bowl of strong tea. The air inside the Glasshouse was hot, almost stiflingly so, and full of smoke and steam. It shone with a hard, white light.
Yagharek blinked his eyes clean and shielded them, then looked down on the cactus town.
In the centre, below the massive nugget of glass at the dome’s tip, the houses had been cleared away and a stone temple had been built. It was red stone, a steep ziggurat, that reached a third of the way to the Glasshouse roof. Every stepped level was lush with desert and veldt vegetation, abloom in garish reds and oranges against their waxy green skins.
A little
rim of land, about twenty feet wide, had been cleared all around it, beyond which point the streets of Riverskin had been left. The cartography was a snarled puzzle, a collection of road-ends and the rumps of avenues, here the corner of a park and there half a church, even the stump of a canal, now a trough of stagnant water, cut off by the edge of the dome. Lanes criss-crossed the little township at odd angles, segments cut from longer streets where the dome had been placed over them. A little random patch of alleys and roads had been contained, sealed under glass. Its content had changed even as the outlines remained mostly the same.
The chaotic aggregate of street-stubs had been reformed by the cactacae. What, years ago, had been a wide thoroughfare had been made a vegetable garden, the edges of its lawns flush with the houses on either side, little trails from front doors indicating the routes between patches of pumpkin and radishes.
Ceilings had been removed four generations ago to convert human houses into homes for their new, much taller inhabitants. Rooms had been added to the tops and backsides of buildings, styled like weird miniature effigies of the stepped pyramid in the centre of the Glasshouse. The additional buildings had been wedged into every space possible, to cram the dome with cactacae, and strange agglomerations of human architecture and monolithic, stone-slab edifices stretched in big blocks of variegated colour. Some were several storeys tall.
Swaying, dipping bridges of wood and rope were draped between many of the upper floors, linking rooms and buildings on opposite sides of streets. In many of the yards and on the tops of many buildings, low walls enclosed flat desert-gardens, with tiny patches of scrubby grass, a few low cactuses and undulating sand.
Little flocks of captive birds that had never found the shattered vents to the outside city swept low over the houses and called out in hunger. With a lurch of adrenalin and nostalgic shock, Yagharek recognized a bird-call from the Cymek. There were dune-eagles, he realized, perching on one or two roofs.
Rising around them on all sides, the dome refracted New Crobuzon like a dirty glass sky, rendering the surrounding houses a confusion of darkness and deflected light. The whole diorama below him thronged with cactus people. Yagharek scanned slowly, but he could not see another sapient race.
The simple bridges swung as cactacae passed over them in all directions. In the sand-gardens, Yagharek saw cactacae with big rakes and wooden paddles carefully sculpting the sastrugi that mimicked the rippling dunes made by the wind. Here in this tightly closed space, bounded on every side, there were no gusts to carve patterns, and the desert landscape had to be wrought by hand.
The streets and paths were tight crammed with cactacae buying and selling in the market, arguing gruffly too low for Yagharek to hear. They pulled wooden carts by hand, two working together if the vehicle or load was particularly large. There were no constructs in sight, no cabs, no animals of any sort beyond the birds and a few rock-rabbits Yagharek caught sight of on the ledges of buildings.
In the city outside, cactacae women wore great shapeless dresses like sheets. Here in the Glasshouse they wore only loincloths of white and beige and dun cloth, exactly like the men. Their breasts were somewhat larger than the men’s, and tipped with dark green nipples. In a few places, Yagharek could see a woman carrying a baby held tight to her chest, the child unworried by the pinprick wounds its mother’s spines inflicted. Boisterous little gangs of cactacae children played on corners, ignored or cuffed absently by passing adults.
On every part of the pyramid temple were cactacae elders, reading, gardening, smoking and talking. Some wore sashes of red or blue around their shoulders, that stood out strongly against their pale green skin.
Yagharek’s skin was prickling with sweat. Wafts of woodsmoke blurred his vision. They rose from a hundred chimneys at all different heights, trickling gently into the sky and eddying in slow mushrooming gusts. A few hazy threads found their way up and seeped from the cracks and holes in the glass sky. But with the wind kept out and the sun magnified by the vaulted translucent bubble, there were no breezes or bluster to dissipate the fumes. The underside of the glass, Yagharek saw, was coated in greasy soot.
There was still more than an hour to sundown. Yagharek glanced to his left and saw that the orb of glass atop the dome seemed to be bursting with light. It was sucking up every scrap of the sun’s emissions, concentrating them and sending them vividly into every nook of the Glasshouse, filling it with unforgiving light and heat. He saw that the metal casing which held it was wired for power, with cables snaking down the insides of the dome and disappearing from sight.
The flat sand-garden at the top of the layered tower at the Glasshouse’s centre was covered in complex machinery. Exactly below the swollen nugget of clear glass was a huge lensed machine, with fat pipes snaking out into vats around it. A cactacae with a coloured sash polished its copper workings.
Yagharek remembered rumours he had heard in Shankell, stories about a heliochymical engine of immense thaumaturgic power. He looked carefully at the glowing contraption, but its purpose was quite opaque.
As he watched, Yagharek became conscious of the large number of armed posses that were evident. He narrowed his eyes. He was gazing down at them like some god, seeing every surface of the little cactus town in the fierce light of the glass globe. He could see almost all the rooftop gardens, and it seemed to him that on at least half, a group of three or four cactus were stationed. They sat or stood, their expressions unreadable at such a distance, but the massive, weighty rivebows they carried were unmistakable. Hatchets dangled from their belts, curved poleaxes glowed in the reddening light.
There were more of the little patrols beside stalls in the sprawling market, sitting alert on the lowest level of the central temple, and walking the streets with a deliberate step, rivebows cocked and ready.
Yagharek saw the looks that the armed guards received, the nervous salutations and the frequent skyward glances of the populace.
He did not think that this situation was normal.
Something was making the cactus people uneasy. They could be truculent and taciturn, in his experience, but the subdued air of menace was like nothing he had experienced in Shankell. Perhaps, he reflected, these cactacae were different, a more sombre breed than their southern siblings. But he felt his skin prickle. The air was fraught.
Yagharek concentrated, and began to scan the inside of the dome with a hard, rigorous eye. He focused carefully, went into something of a hunter’s trance.
He started looking at the edges of the dome. He took in the whole inside circumference in one long, slow sweep, then spiralled his vision carefully towards the centre, examining and investigating the circle of houses and streets a little way in, and then further in again.
In this exacting, methodical way, he could cast his eye on every nook and cranny of the Glasshouse’s surfaces. His eyes stopped briefly, momentarily, on imperfections of the red stone, then moved on.
As the day came closer to its end, the nervousness of the cactus people seemed to increase.
Yagharek came to the end of his scanning sweep. There was nothing immediate, nothing clearly wrong that leapt out at him. He turned his attention to the inside of the roof immediately around him, looking for some purchase.
It would not be easy. Some way from him the girders coalesced around the heavy glass globe, but on the underside of the glass they were not as protuberant. He believed that with some effort he could climb them: as, probably, could Lemuel and perhaps Derkhan or one or two of the adventurers. But it was hard to imagine Isaac clinging so close and holding his bulk suspended, crawling hundreds of yards of dangerous metal piping to the earth.
The sun was low outside. Even with the languorous summer evenings, time was short.
He felt someone tap his back. Yagharek raised his head up, lifting it out of the inverted bowl into the air of New Crobuzon, air that felt suddenly chill.
Behind him, Shadrach was crouched on the glass. He wore a mirror-helm, and held out a similar piece
cobbled together from plate iron towards Yagharek.
Shadrach’s helmet looked different. Yagharek’s was a rude piece of rescued metal. Shadrach’s was intricate, wired and valved with copper and brass. At the top was a socket, with holes to screw in some fitting. It was only the mirrors that seemed a makeshift addition.
“You forgot this,” Shadrach said in his gentle voice, waving the helmet. “No waved flag, no word from you for twenty minutes. I’m here to check you’re alive and all right.”
Yagharek showed him the girders inside the dome. He and Shadrach discussed the problem of Isaac in urgent whispered tones.
“You must go down,” said Yagharek. “You must go by the sewers, with Lemuel as your guide. You must find your way as fast as you can into the dome. Send some of the mechanical monkeys to me, to aid me if I am attacked. Look inside.”
Shadrach leaned over carefully and peered into the darkening glass. Yagharek pointed down, across the thronging village at a crumbling ghost-building by the vile canal end. The water, its towpaths and a little finger of torn land on which the broken house stood were all enclosed by an accidental fence of rubble, brambles and long-rusted barbed wire. The rejected sliver of space backed directly onto the dome, which swept up steeply over it like a flat cloud.
“You must find your way there.” Shadrach began to make some sound, murmuring about the impossibility, but Yagharek cut him off. “It is difficult. It will be difficult. But you cannot climb down from here on the inside, and if you can then Isaac certainly cannot. We need him inside. You must take him in. As fast as you can. I will come down to you, I will find you, when I have found the slake-moths. Wait for me.”
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