Perdido Street Station Read Online Free PDF Page A

the ancient city. There were pedestrians of all races,
as well as bakeries and laundries and guildhalls, all the sundry
services any community needed. There were pubs and shops and even a
militia tower; a small, stubby one at the apex of Brock Marsh where
the Canker and the Tar converged. The posters plastered on the
crumbling walls advertised the same dancehalls, warned of the same
coming doom, demanded allegiance to the same political parties as
elsewhere in the city. But for all that apparent normality, there was
a tension to the area, a fraught expectancy.
    Badgers—familiars
by tradition, believed to have a certain immunity to the more
dangerous harmonics of hidden sciences—scampered past with
lists in their teeth, their pear-shaped bodies disappearing into
special flaps in shop doorways. Above the thick glass storefronts
were attic rooms. Old warehouses on the waterfront had been
converted. Forgotten cellars lurked in temples to minor deities. In
these and all the other architectural crevices, the Brock Marsh
dwellers pursued their trades: physicists; chimerists;
biophilosophers and teratologists; chymists; necrochymists;
mathematicians; karcists and metallurgists and vodyanoi shaman; and
those, like Isaac, whose research did not fit neatly into any of the
innumerable categories of theory.
    Strange vapours wafted
over the roofs. The converging rivers on either side ran sluggishly,
and the water steamed here and there as its currents mixed nameless
chymicals into potent compounds. The slop from failed experiments,
from factories and laboratories and alchymists’ dens, mixed
randomly into bastard elixirs. In Brock Marsh, the water had
unpredictable qualities. Young mudlarks searching the river quag for
scrap had been known to step into some discoloured patch of mud and
start speaking long-dead languages, or find locusts in their hair, or
fade slowly to translucency and disappear.
    Isaac turned down a
quiet stretch of the river’s edge onto the decaying flagstones
and tenacious weeds of Umber Promenade. Across the Canker, the Ribs
jutted over the roofs of Bonetown like a clutch of vast tusks curling
hundreds of feet into the air. The river sped up a little as it bore
south. Half a mile away he could see Strack Island breaking its flow
where it met the Tar and curled away grandly to the east. The ancient
stones and towers of Parliament rose hugely from the very edges of
Strack Island. There was no gradual incline or urban scrub before the
blunt layers of obsidian shot out of the water like a frozen
fountain.
    The clouds were
dissipating, leaving behind a washed-out sky. Isaac could see the red
roof of his workshop rising above the surrounding houses; and before
it, the weed-choked forecourt of his local, The Dying Child. The
ancient tables in the outside yard were colourful with fungus. No
one, in Isaac’s memory, had ever sat at one of them.
    He entered. Light
seemed to give up the struggle halfway through the thick, soiled
windows, leaving the interior in shadows. The walls were unadorned
except by dirt. The pub was empty of all but the most dedicated
drinkers, shambolic figures huddled over bottles. Several were
junkies, several were Remade. Some were both: The Dying Child turned
no one away. A group of emaciated young men lay draped across a table
twitching in perfect time, strung out on shazbah or dreamshit or
very-tea. One woman held her glass in a metal claw that spat steam
and dripped oil onto the floorboards. A man in the corner lapped
quietly from a bowl of beer, licking the fox’s muzzle that had
been grafted to his face.
    Isaac quietly greeted
the old man by the door, Joshua, whose Remaking had been very small
and very cruel. A failed burglar, he had refused to testify against
his gang, and the magister had ordered his silence made permanent: he
had had his mouth taken away, sealed with a seamless stretch of
flesh. Rather than live on tubes of soup pushed through his