The silhouette of the airship Ganymede receded behind a soupy veil of afternoon smog, leaving its sole passenger alone and friendless upon the wharves. He gazed about for a moment with the slightly harassed air of the truly overwhelmed—this was his first time in the city, and its strangeness and clamor was off-putting—but a splash of brackish water across his boots brought him back to his senses. A horse-drawn carriage had rattled to a stop nearby, its wheels gleaming with the foul effluence of the gutters. Bemused, he leaned forward to examine the creature standing between its shafts. It tossed its head and snorted a thick gust of steam, and he realized that what he had first taken for ribs were overlapping plates of tarnished bronze, its gleaming sides were black with oil, not sweat, and then the mechanical beast turned to look at him—he thought he caught a glimpse of fire deep within the round glass orbs of its eyes.
He fumbled with his suitcase and hurried away, squinting at the address the Ganymede’s captain had scribbled down for him on a scrap of paper. It was not until a whore beckoned to him from a street corner that he realized he had wandered into a seedy part of town. “Excuse me,” he said, to a dark-skinned man passing by; but the stranger simply shook his head and muttered something incomprehensible back, and then breathed out a wreath of pungent smoke in lieu of an answer. As it coalesced upward, and before it dissipated amongst the tattered skeins of laundry strung overhead, the newcomer saw it assume the form of chimaeric, long-necked birds.
Thoroughly disgruntled, he pushed onward through the crowd. A woman wearing a red sari hawked grime-encrusted radiators from the mouth of an alley. A dirty, pale girl rode past him on the back of a giant bear. Darkness fell. The streets began to clear, but the city by no means grew quiet. Tram cars continued to thunder overhead, sifting down thin streams of dust and corrosion, and the sky overhead proved starless beneath a reddish haze. At one point he encountered a group of homeless children rummaging through trashcans, but they scattered as he approached, leaving one metal lid ringing round and round on the pavement in their wake. As they fled their shadows were not the shadows of children, but the thin, starving shadows of cats.
Antillia had conquered him; soon he was too exhausted to move on, and in the early hours of the morning he curled himself up beneath the shelter of a moldering stone doorway, gathered his suitcase beneath his head as a pillow, and fell asleep. The ornamental gargoyle crouched above him opened one lambent eye, and smiled. When the sun finally rose, its light fell upon an empty doorstep; unmoved, the city filled its arteries with life and noise and embraced another day.
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