China Mieville - The Scar

“No.” He interrupted her with a hard manner quite unlike the amiable arrogance he had so far displayed. “That is not what I said. I’m a New Crobuzon man, Bellis. I want somewhere to come home to… even if I leave it again. I’m not rootless; I’m not some vague wanderer. I’m a businessman, a merchant, with a base and a house in East Gidd and friends and contacts, and New Crobuzon is always where I return to. Here… I’m a prisoner.

“This isn’t the kind of exploring that I have in mind. I’m damned if I’m staying here.”

And hearing that, Bellis opened another bottle of wine and poured him some more.

“What were you doing in Salkrikaltor?” she asked. “More business ?”

Fennec shook his head. “I got picked up,” he said. “Salkrikaltor patrols sometimes deploy hundreds of miles away from the city, checking the kraals. One of their craft picked me up in the outskirts of the Basilisk Channel. I was heading south in a crippled ammonite-sub, leaking and very slow. The cray in the shallows east of the Sols told them about this dubious-looking tub limping round the edge of their village.” He shrugged. “I was damn well livid to get picked up, but I think they did me a favor. I doubt I’d have made it home. By the time I met any cray who could understand me, we were all the way out in Salkrikaltor City.”

“Where’d you come from?” said Bellis. “Jhesshul Islands?”

Fennec shook his head and observed her, without speaking, for several seconds.

“Nothing like that,” he said. “I crossed over from the other side of the mountains. I was in the Cold Claw Sea. In The Gengris.”

Bellis looked up sharply, ready to laugh or sniff dismissively, but she saw Fennec’s face. He nodded slowly.

“The Gengris,” he said again, and she looked away, astonished.

More than a thousand miles west of New Crobuzon was a huge lake, four hundred miles across-Cold Claw Loch. From its northern tip jutted Cold Claw Sound, a corridor of freshwater a hundred miles wide and eight hundred long. At its northern end the sound expanded massively and suddenly, stretching back eastward almost the width of the continent, narrowing like a talon, became the jaggedly curving Cold Claw Sea.

These were the Cold Claws, a conjoined body of water too vast to be anything but an ocean. A massive, freshwater, inland sea ringed by mountains and scrubland and swamps and the few hardy, remote civilizations that Fennec claimed to know.

At its easternmost edge, Cold Claw Sea was separated from the saltwater of the Swollen Ocean by a tiny strip of land: a ribbon of mountainous rock less than thirty miles wide. The sea’s sharp southernmost tip-the point of the talon-was almost directly north of New Crobuzon, more than seven hundred miles away. But the few travelers who made the journey from the city always bore a little west, to reach the waters of Cold Claw Sea two hundred miles or so away from its southern vertex. Because lodged like an impurity in the sea’s jag was an extraordinary, dangerous place, something between an island, a half-sunk city, and a myth. An amphibious badland about which the civilized world knew next to nothing, except that it existed and that it was dangerous.

That place was called The Gengris.

It was said to be the home of the grindylow, aquatic demons or monsters or degenerate crossbred men and women, depending on which story one believed. It was said to be haunted.

The grindylow, or The Gengris (the distinction between race and place was unclear), controlled the south of the Cold Claw Sea with unbreakable power and a cruel, capricious isolationism. Their waters were lethal and uncharted.

And here was Fennec claiming-what?-to have lived there?

“It isn’t true that there are no outsiders there,” he was saying, and Bellis quieted her mind enough to listen. “There are even a few native human, born and bred in The Gengris…” His mouth twisted. “And bred is the word, though I’m not sure human is, anymore. It suits them fine that everyone thinks it’s… like a little piece of hell there in the water, that it’s beyond any kind of pale. But, shit, they deal with traders like everyone else. There’re a few vodyanoi, a couple of humans… and others.

“I was there for more than half a year. Oh, it’s dangerous like nowhere else I’ve been, don’t get me wrong. You know if you trade in The Gengris that the rules… are very different. That you’ll never learn, never understand them. I’d been there six weeks when my best friend there, a vodyanoi from Jangsach who’d been there for seven years , trading back and forth… he was taken away. I never found out what happened to him, or why,” Fennec said flatly. “It might be that he insulted one of the grindylow gods, or it might have been that the catgut he supplied wasn’t thick enough.”

“So why did you do it?”

“Because, if you could last,” he snapped, suddenly excited, “it was so worth it. There was no reason to grindylow trades, no point bartering or trying to second-guess. They ask me for a bushel of salt and glass beads in equal parts-fine. No questions, no queries; I’ll provide it. Mixed fruit? It’s there for them. Cod, sawdust, resin, fungus, I don’t care. Because, by Jabber, when they paid, when they were happy…

“It was worth it.”

“But you left.”

“I left.” Fennec sighed. He got up and rummaged around in her cupboard. She did not scold him for it.

“I was there for months, buying, selling, exploring The Gengris and its environs-diving, you understand-and keeping my journal.” He spoke with his back to her, fussing with the kettle. “Then I got word that I’d… that I’d transgressed. That the grindylow were angry with me, and that my life was over unless I could get out, fast.”

“What had you done?” said Bellis slowly.

“I have no idea,” he snapped. “No idea at all. Maybe the ball bearings I provided were the wrong kind of metal, or the moon was in the wrong house, or some grindylow magus had died and they blamed me. I don’t know. All I knew was that I had to leave.

“I left a few things that gave them a false trail. See… I’d come to know the southern jag of Cold Claw Sea pretty well. They like to keep it secret, but I could find my way around it better than any outsider’s supposed to. There are tunnels. Fissures in the ridge that cuts off Cold Claw Sea from the Swollen Ocean. Through those burrows, out to the coast.”

He paused and looked out into the sky. It was nearly five o’clock. “I was trying to head south once I got into the ocean, but I got dragged out into the edges of the channel. Which is where the cray found me.”

“And you waited for a New Crobuzon ship to take you home,” Bellis said. He nodded. “Ours was going in the wrong direction, so you decided to commandeer it… with the powers vested in your little letter.”

He was lying, or leaving out some important part of the truth. That was trivially obvious, but Bellis did not comment. If he wanted to fill out his story he would do so. She would not pester him.

As she sat back in her chair, her half-drunk tea beside her on the uneven floor, she felt a sudden gush of tiredness, so that all of a sudden she could barely speak. She saw the first sickly light of dawn and knew it was too late to go to bed.

Fennec watched her. He saw her slump with exhaustion. He was more awake than she. He made himself another cup of tea as she let fits of dozing lap at her like little waves. She flirted with dreams.

Fennec began to tell her stories about his time in High Cromlech.

He told her the smells of the city, flint dust and rot and ozone, myrrh and embalming spices. He told her about the pervading quiet, and the duels, and the high-caste men with lips sewn shut. He described the descent of the Bonestrasse, great houses looming to either side on ornate catafalques, the Shatterjacks visible at the thoroughfare’s end, spilling out for miles. He talked on for nearly an hour.