China Mieville - The Scar

How come I wasn’t told? he thought, searing. What fucker was it kept this from me?

When Shekel came looking for Bellis in her little office off the Reading Room, his manner surprised her.

She was very tired from Fennec’s visit the night before, but she made a little effort and focused on Shekel, asked him about his reading. To her own surprise, she found the fervor with which he answered her moving.

“How’s Angevine?” she asked, and Shekel tried to speak but could not. Bellis eyed him.

She had expected adolescent bragging and hyperbole, but Shekel was visibly crippled by emotions he had not learned to feel. She felt an unexpected gust of affection for him.

“I’m a bit worried about Tanner,” he said slowly. “He’s my best mate, and I think he’s feeling a bit… deserted. I don’t want to piss him off, you know? He’s my best mate.” And he began to tell her about his friend Tanner Sack and, in doing so, let her know, shyly, about how things stood with him and Angevine.

She smiled inwardly at that-an adult tactic, and he had performed it well.

He told her about their home on the factory ship. He told her about the big shapes that Tanner had half-seen under the water. He began to recite the words on boxes and books that lay around the room. He said them out loud and scribbled them on sheafs of paper, breaking them into syllables, treating each word with equal, analytical disinterest, participle or verb or noun or proper name.

As they strained to move a box of botanical pamphlets, the door to the office opened and an elderly man entered with a Remade woman. Shekel started, and moved toward the newcomers.

“Ange-” he started, but the woman (rolling forward on a stuttering pewter contraption where her legs should be) shook her head swiftly and folded her arms. The white-haired man waited for Angevine and Shekel’s wordless interaction to conclude. As Bellis watched him warily she realized that he was the one who had welcomed Johannes on board. Tintinnabulum.

He was brawny and held himself tall despite his age. His ancient bearded face, framed with stringy white hair to below his shoulders, looked transplanted onto a younger body. He turned his eyes to Bellis.

“Shekel,” said Bellis quietly, “would you mind leaving for a few moments?” But Tintinnabulum interrupted her.

“There’s no need for that,” he said. His voice seemed very distant: dignified and melancholy. He switched to good, accented Ragamoll. “You’re a New Crobuzoner, aren’t you?” She did not respond, and he nodded gently as if she had. “I’m speaking to all the librarians-particularly those like you, cataloging new acquisitions.”

What do you know about me? Bellis thought carefully. What has Johannes told you? Or does he protect me, despite our argument?

“I have here…” Tintinnabulum held out a sheet of paper. “I have here a list of authors whose books we’re most interested in tracing. These are writers of great use to us in our work. We’re requesting your help. We have some works by some of these writers, and we’re eager to find whatever else we can. Others are said to have written specific volumes for which we’re searching. About others we know only rumors. You’ll find three of them have works in the catalog-those books we already know about, but we’re interested in any others.

“It might be that one or other of these names surfaces in the next batch of books that arrives. Or it may be that the library has stocked their work for centuries, and they’re lost on the shelves. We’ve searched the relevant sections carefully-biology, philosophy, thaumaturgy, oceanology-and have found nothing. But we could have made mistakes. We would like you to keep a watch for us, on every new book you take in, on forgotten ones you find behind shelves, any time you catalog unlisted volumes. Two of these, those that aren’t from New Crobuzon, are old.”

Bellis took the list and looked at it, expecting it to be very long. But, typed very neatly, in the dead center of the sheet, there were only four names. None of them meant anything to her.

“Those are the core of our list,” Tintinnabulum said. “There are others-there’s a much longer version that will be posted at the desks-but those four are the ones we’d ask you to commit to memory, to search for… assiduously.”

Marcus Halprin . That was a New Crobuzon name. Angevine was motioning at Shekel surreptitiously as she and Tintinnabulum moved slowly toward the door.

Uhl-Hagd-Shajjer (transliteration), Bellis read, and beside it the original: a set of cursive pictograms she recognized as the lunar calligraphy of Khadoh.

Beneath that was the third name, A. M. Fetchpaw- New Crobuzon again.

“Halprin and Fetchpaw are relatively recent writers,” said Tintinnabulum from the doorway. “The other two are older, we think-probably a century or so. We’ll leave you to your work, Miss Coldwine. If you should find anything that we want, anything by any of these writers not listed in the catalogs, please come to my vessel. It’s by the for’ard tip of Garwater, the Castor . I can assure you that anyone able to help us will be rewarded.”

What do you know about me? thought Bellis anxiously as the door closed.

She sighed and looked at the paper again. Shekel looked over her shoulder and began, hesitantly, to say the names on the paper out loud.

Kruach Aum, Bellis read finally, ignoring Shekel’s slow progress through the syllables. How exotic , she thought sardonically, looking at the script, an archaic variant of Ragamoll. Johannes mentioned you. That’s a Kettai name .

Halprin and Fetchpaw each had books listed in the catalogs. Fetchpaw’s were volumes one and two of Against Benchamburg: A Radical Theory of Water . Halprin’s were Maritime Ecologies and The Biophysics of Brine .

Uhl-Hagd-Shajjer had a large number of works listed, Khadohi books apparently averaging little more than forty pages each. Bellis was familiar enough with the moon-writing alphabet to make out how the titles sounded, but she had no idea what they meant.

Of Kruach Aum there was nothing.

Bellis watched Shekel teaching himself to read, rifling through the sheets on which he had written difficult words, scribbling additions to them as he said their sounds, copying words from the papers around him, from files, from the list of names that Tintinnabulum had left her. It was as if the boy had once known how to read, and was now remembering.

At five o’clock he sat with her and went through The Courageous Egg . Shekel answered her questions about the egg’s adventures with a care that skirted the comic. She pronounced the words he did not know, syllable by slow syllable, guiding him through the confusions of silent or irregular letters. He told her he already had another book ready for her, that he had read in the library itself that day.

That night, for the first time, Bellis wrote in her letter about Silas Fennec. She mocked his pseudonym, but admitted that his company, his cocky edge, had been a relief after days of being alone. She continued to work her way through Johannes’ Essays on Beasts . She wondered whether Fennec would come by again, and when he did not, she went to bed in an irritated burst of boredom.

She dreamed, not for the first time, of the river journey to Iron Bay.

Tanner dreamed of being Remade.

He found himself back in the punishment factory in New Crobuzon, where his extra limbs had been grafted to him in searing, drugged minutes of pain and humiliation. Once again the air clamored with industrial noises and screams, and he lay strapped to damp, stained wood, but this time the man bending over him was not a masked biothaumaturge, but the Armadan chirurgeon.