Shadow Captain by Alastair Reynolds

Author:Alastair Reynolds
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Orbit
Published: 2019-01-28T16:00:00+00:00

14

Sneed insisted on showing us to our lodgings. We left Surt at the infirmary, where she said she would wait until there was more news about Strambli, and followed our swaggering guide through a warren of dark streets and passages, taking a generally steepening course toward the main avenue.

Gradually there were more signs of life. Windows lit in one building, a smell of cooking from another. Shouts and laughter from a cellar door. A cove nursing a bleeding nose in a back alley, another sniffing into a bottle before tossing it aside. Mutts fighting over scraps. A robot going round and round in circles, one of his wheels jammed in a gutter, his head just a little glowing orb like a light-bulb. We climbed some more. The larger streets, running all the way around the rim, were built on the level, with ledges and terraces cut into the steepening ground. The connecting streets and alleys were all steep, eventually needing to zig-zag back on themselves. There were sheer walls with staircases going up the side of them, some rickety and some carved out of massive stone blocks and looking as if they had been that way for a thousand years, and there were buildings rising from ledges, or with their foundations jutting out into space, only a bit less precarious-looking than the infirmary.

With Sneed in our company there had been scant chance to discuss recent developments, much less the unwelcome news about the damaged ship. We would all have been happier finding our own hotel, but as Prozor reminded me in a quiet moment, it was very likely that Mister Glimmery had his own contacts in such establishments, so our whereabouts and activities would not have remained private for very long.

My legs were turning weary by the time we climbed up the last zig-zag and stumbled out into Shine Street, the name of the main avenue on this side of the wheel. At long last we had arrived at something like civilisation. We almost had to blink at the colour and brightness of it. The rainlit pavements were busy with people coming and going or clotting together by tram stops or outside the shops, bars, boutiques and hotels. The tall, narrow-fronted buildings were jumbled together like books in a badly organised library, with a slovenly disregard for content. There might be a hotel, then a sail-merchant’s emporium, then a coffee house, then a tattoo parlour, then a red-windowed house of ill-repute, then perhaps a Bone Merchants or a Limb Broker.

There was a choice of possible lodgings and Sneed seemed content to allow us the final decision in this matter. Prozor selected a tall hotel with a crumbling, many-balconied facade called The Happy Return. It did not look happy to us, nor the sort of place to which one might wish to return, but Prozor had a discerning eye for such things, and she was adamant that this was the type of place most likely to do business with visiting crews, and therefore our best chance for a sort of anonymity.

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