China Mieville - The Scar

He was living by various vague means, sharing a house with a Remade man from the Terpsichoria . Bellis offered Shekel a brass flag to help her with reshelving, which he accepted. Since then he had come several times, done a little work, talking to her about Armada and the scattered remnants of their ship.

She learned a lot from him.

But it was not Shekel who was now approaching her in the narrow corridor, but a nervous, quizzically smiling Johannes Tearfly.

It was with some embarrassment, later, that she remembered herself rising at his arrival (with a cry of pleasure like a gushy child, for gods’ sakes) and throwing her arms around him.

He opened to her, too, smiling with shy warmth. And after a long moment of close greeting, they disengaged and looked at each other.

This was the first chance he’d had to get out, he told her, and she demanded to know what he had been doing. He’d been sent to the library and had taken the chance to seek her out, and again she told him to tell her what he had been damn well doing . When he told her that he could not, that he had to go now, she almost stamped in frustration, but he was telling her wait , wait, that he had more free time now, and that she should just listen a moment.

“If you’re free tomorrow night,” he said, “I’d like to take you to supper. There’s a place in starboard Garwater, on the Raddletongue , called the Unrealized Time. Do you know it?”

“I’ll find it,” she said.

“I could come and collect you,” he began, and she cut him off.

“I’ll find it.”

He smiled at her, with the bemused pleasure she remembered. If you’re free indeed! she thought sardonically. Does he really think… Is it possible? She felt suddenly uncertain, almost afraid. Do the others go out every night? Am I alone in exile? Are the Terpsichoria ’s passengers carousing every evening in their new home?

As she left the library that evening, Armada’s close quarters and narrow streets oppressed Bellis. But when she raised her eyes and looked beyond the skyline, the Swollen Ocean weighed down on her like granite, and she felt breathless. She could not believe that the mass of water and air beyond Armada did not drown it, disappear it in an instant. She counted her coins and approached a skycab driver refilling his dirigible from a gas depot on Aronnax Lab .

She swayed in the cradle as it buzzed sedately a hundred feet above the highest deck. Bellis could see the edges of the city bobbing randomly, moving very slowly with whatever currents took it. There, the distant wood of the haunted quarter. The arena. The stronghold of the Brucolac.

And in the center of Garwater riding, something extraordinary that Bellis never grew accustomed to seeing-the source of the riding’s strength. Something looming enormously over the shipscape around it: the largest ship in the city, the largest ship that Bellis had ever seen.

Almost nine hundred feet of black iron. Five colossal funnels and six masts stripped of canvas, more than two hundred feet high; and tethered way above them a huge, crippled dirigible. A vast paddle on each side of the ship, like industrial sculptures. The decks seemed almost bare, unbroken by the haphazard building that misshaped other vessels. The Lovers’ stronghold, like a beached titan: the Grand Easterly , lolling austere amid Armada’s baroque.

“I’ve changed my mind,” Bellis said suddenly. “Don’t take me to Chromolith .”

She directed the pilot aft-aft-star’d-the city’s directions all relative to the colossal Grand Easterly itself. As the man gently tugged at his rudder she looked down over the crowds. Air eddied as the aeronaut picked a way through the masts and rigging that jutted up around them in the Armada sky. Around the towers Bellis saw the city birds: gulls and pigeons and parakeets. They brooded on roofs and in decktop aeries, alongside other presences.

The sun was gone, and the city sparkled. Bellis felt a gust of melancholy as she passed light-strung rigging close enough to grasp. She saw her destination, the Boulevard St. Carcheri on the steamer Glomar’s Heart , a shabby-opulent promenade of gently colored streetlamps, knotted rustwood trees, and stucco facades. As the gondola began to descend, she kept her eyes on the shabbier, darker shape beyond the parkland.

Across four hundred feet of water glinting with impurities rose a tower of intertwined girders as high as the dirigibles, gushing with flame. A massive concrete body on legs like four splintering pillars emerging from the dirtied sea. Dark cranes moving without visible purpose.

It was a monstrous thing, awe-inspiring and ugly and foreboding. Bellis sat back in her descending aerostat and kept her eye on the Sorghum , New Crobuzon’s stolen rig.

It rained remorselessly all the next day, hard grey drops like shards of flint.

The costermongers were quiet; very little business was done. Armada’s bridges were slippery. There were accidents: the drunk or the clumsy slipping into the cold sea.

The city’s monkeys sat subdued under awnings and bickered. They were pests, feral tribes that raced across the floating city, fighting, vying for scraps and territory, brachiating below bridges and careering up rigging. They were not the only animals living wild in the city, but they were the most successful scavengers. They huddled in the cold damp and groomed each other without enthusiasm.

In the dim light of Grand Gears Library, the signs requesting silence were made absurd by the percussion of rain.

The bloodhorns of Shaddler riding sounded mournfully, as they customarily did when it rained hard and the scabmettlers said that the sky was bleeding. Water beaded weirdly on the surface of the Uroc , Dry Fall riding’s flagship. The dark and rotting fabric of the haunted quarter mildewed and glowered. People in the neighboring Thee-And-Thine riding pointed at the deserted quarter’s decrepit skyline and warned, as they always did, that somewhere within, the tallow ghast was moving.

In the first hour after dusk, in the muted edifice of Barrow Hall on the Therianthropus , the heart of Shaddler, a bad-tempered meeting came to an end. The scabmettler guards outside could hear delegations leaving. They fingered their weapons and ran their hands over the crust of their organic armor.

There was a man among them: a few inches shy of six feet and prodigiously muscled, dressed in charcoal-colored leather, a straight sword by his side. He spoke and moved with quiet grace.

He discussed weaponry with the scabmettlers, then had them show him strokes and sweeps from mortu crutt , their fighting science. He let them touch the filigree of wires that wound around his right arm and down the side of his armor into the battery on his belt.

The man was comparing the Stubborn Nail strike of stampfighting with the sadr punch of mortu crutt . He and his sparring partner swept their arms in slow demonstration attacks, when the doors opened at the top of the stairs above them and the guards came to quick attention. The man in grey straightened slowly and walked to the corner of the entresol.

A coldly furious man descended toward them. He was tall and young-looking and built like a dancer, with freckled skin the color of pale ash. His hair seemed to belong to someone else: it was dark and long and very tightly curled, and it hung in unruly locks from his scalp like an unkempt fleece. It jounced and coiled as he descended.

As he passed the scabmettlers he gave a peremptory little bow, which they returned with more ceremony. He stood still before the man in grey. The two men eyed each other with impenetrable expressions.