Читать книгу The Grand Dark онлайн | страница 75
Smoke from the coal towers blanketed the district in perpetual darkness. A thick crust of carbonous dust covered everything. Around the active buildings, workers left black footprints in their wake. By the warehouses where trains offloaded their cargo, there were great ebony dunes that turned to thick mud in the rain. Machtviertel had a hellish reputation in the city, partly for the environment, but also for its inhabitants. People lived in the older, disused power stations and warehouses. There was a saying in Lower Proszawa: “Those who live in Machtviertel are insane. But those who seek them out are madmen.”
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It took Largo almost an hour to bicycle there. He stopped beside the largest of the abandoned power plants, commonly known as the Black Palace. When it had been built, the dynamos’ home was a showcase for Lower Proszawa’s strength and ingenuity. The smokestacks rose one hundred feet into the air and the stonework on the front of the plant had been carved into old mythological scenes. At the top, giants pulled iron from the ground and molded it with volcanic fire. Lower and at street level, smaller spirits and artisans molded the iron into metal towers and wires, spreading light and power to a darkened land. Now, however, the Black Palace was a crumbling ebony hulk of sooty stone and rusted beams in a bleak field of coarse weeds.
Largo chained his bicycle to the base of a collapsed light tower. A murder of crows huddled a few yards away. They lifted off at the sound of his chain on the steel, cawing and circling overhead, black bird-shaped holes against an obsidian sky. He looked up at the building, sure that if Herr Branca wasn’t trying to get his throat slit, then the delivery was his supervisor’s way of telling Largo that he’d been demoted to the point that he’d spend the rest of his days delivering God knew what to Lower Proszawa’s most desolate wastelands.
Maybe I’ll be lucky enough to visit High Proszawa’s plague pits. Perhaps I’ll even get hazard pay. Then I’ll be able to afford a new flat and Remy can visit me there as I die of every foul disease known to man.