Read Perdido Street Station for Free Online Page A

almost shook his
head with awe at the great predator before he cleared his throat and
spoke.
    "Can I help you?"

Chapter Four
    Lin, to her mortal
horror, was running late.
    It did not help that
she was not an aficionado of Bonetown. The cross-bred architecture of
that outlandish quarter confused her: a syncresis of industrialism
and the gaudy domestic ostentation of the slightly rich, the peeling
concrete of forgotten docklands and the stretched skins of shantytown
tents. The different forms segued into each other seemingly at random
in this low, flat zone, full of urban scrubland and wasteground where
wild flowers and thick-stemmed plants pushed through plains of
concrete and tar.
    Lin had been given a
street name, but the signs around her crumbled on their perches and
drooped to point in impossible directions, or were obscured with
rust, or contradicted each other. She concentrated to read them,
looked instead at her scribbled map.
    She could orient
herself by the Ribs. She looked up and found them above her, shoving
vastly into the sky. Only one side of the cage was visible, the
bleached and blistered curves poised like a bone wave about to break
over the buildings to the east. Lin made her way for them.
    The streets opened out
around her and she found herself before another abandoned-looking
lot, but larger than the others by a huge factor. It did not look
like a square but a massive unfinished hole in the city. The
buildings at its edge did not show their faces but their backs and
their sides, as if they had been promised neighbours with elegant
façades that had never arrived. The streets of Bonetown edged
nervously into the scrubland with exploratory little fringes of brick
that petered quickly out.
    The dirty grass was
dotted here and there with makeshift stalls, foldaway tables put down
at random places and spread with cheap cakes or old prints or the
rubbish from someone’s attic. Street-jugglers chucked things
around in lacklustre displays. There were a few half-hearted
shoppers, and people of all races sitting on scattered boulders,
reading, eating, scratching at the dry dirt, and contemplating the
bones above them.
    The Ribs rose from the
earth at the edges of the empty ground.
    Leviathan shards of
yellowing ivory thicker than the oldest trees exploded out of the
ground, bursting away from each other, sweeping up in a curved ascent
until, more than a hundred feet above the earth, looming now over the
roofs of the surrounding houses, they curled sharply back towards
each other. They climbed as high again till their points nearly
touched, vast crooked fingers, a god-sized ivory mantrap.
    There had been plans to
fill the square, to build offices and houses in the ancient chest
cavity, but they had come to nothing.
    Tools used on the site
broke easily and went missing. Cement would not set. Something
baleful in the half-exhumed bones kept the gravesite free of
permanent disturbance.
    Fifty feet below Lin’s
feet, archaeologists had found vertebrae the size of houses; a
backbone which had been quietly reburied after one too many accidents
on-site. No limbs, no hips, no gargantuan skull had surfaced. No one
could say what manner of creature had fallen here and died millennia
ago. The grubby print-vendors who worked the Ribs specialized in
various lurid depictions of Gigantes Crobuzon, four-footed or
bipedal, humanoid, toothed, tusked, winged, pugnacious or
pornographic.
    Lin’s map
directed her to a nameless alley on the south side of the Ribs. She
wound her way to a quiet street where she found the black-painted
buildings she had been told to seek, a row of dark, deserted houses,
all but one with bricked-up doorways and windows sealed and painted
with tar.
    There were no
passers-by in this street, no cabs, no traffic. Lin was quite alone.
    Above the one remaining
door in the row was chalked what looked like a gameboard, a square
divided into nine smaller squares. There were no noughts or