China Mieville - The Scar

Silas was gone for three days.

Bellis explored.

She ventured finally into the farthest parts of the city. She saw the burn temples of Bask riding, and its triptych statues spread across the fabric of several boats. In Thee-And-Thine (which was not as rough or as frightening as she had been led to believe, was little more than an exaggerated, pugnacious marketplace) she saw the Armada asylum, a massive edifice that loomed from a steamer, cruelly placed, it seemed to Bellis, right next to the haunted quarter.

There was a little outcropping of Garwater boats like a buffer between Curhouse and Bask, separated off from the main body of their riding by some historical caprice. There, Bellis found the Lyceum, its workshops and classrooms staggering precipitously down the sides of a ship, layered like a mountainside town.

Armada had all the institutions of any city on land, devoted to learning and politics and religion, only perhaps in a harder form. And if the city’s scholars were tougher than their landside equivalents, and looked more like rogues and pirates than doctors, it did not invalidate their expertise. There were different constabularies in each riding, from the uniformed proctors of Bask to Garwater’s loosely defined yeomanry who were marked out only by their sashes-a badge as much of loyalty as office. Each riding’s law was different. There was a species of court and disputation in Curhouse, while the lax, violent, piratical discipline of Garwater was doled out with the whip.

Armada was a profane and secular city, and its unkempt churches were treated as irreverently as its bakers. There were temples to the deified Croom; to the moon and her daughters, to thank them for the tides; to sea gods.

If she ever became lost, Bellis needed only to find her way out from backstreets or alleys, look up through all the aerostats moored to masts, and find the Arrogance , looming stately over the glowering Grand Easterly . It was her beacon, and by it she steered her way home.

In the midst of the city there were rafts-wooden floats extending scores of yards to each side. Houses perched ludicrously on them. There were needle-thin submarines bobbing tethered between barquentines, and chariot ships filled with hotchi burrows. Tumbledown buildings smothered decks or perched precarious across the backs of tens of tiny vessels in the cheap neighborhoods. There were playhouses and prisons and deserted hulks.

When she raised her eyes to the horizon, Bellis could see disturbances out to sea: churning water, wakes without obvious cause. Wind- and weather-born, usually, but sometimes she might glimpse a pod of porpoises, or a plesiaur or seawyrm neck, or the back of something big and fast that she could not identify. The life beyond the city, and all around it.

Bellis watched the city’s fishing boats return in the evenings. Sometimes pirate ships would appear and be welcomed back into the harbors of Basilio or Urchinspine, the motors of Armada’s economy finding their way, uncannily, home.

Armada was full of figureheads. They poked up in unlikely places, ornate and ignored like the carved door knockers on New Crobuzon houses. At the end of a terrace, walking between rows of close brick dwellings, Bellis might come face-to-face with a splendid corroded woman, her breastplate moldering, her painted gaze flaked and vague. Hanging in the air like a spirit, below the bowsprit of her ship, which jutted across its neighbor’s deck and pointed into the alley.

They were all around. Otters, drakows, fish, warriors, and women. Above all women. Bellis hated the blank-eyed, curvaceous figures, wobbling up and down moronically with the swell, haunting the city like banal ghosts.

In her room, she finished Essays on Beasts and remained uncomprehending of Armada’s secret project.

She wondered where Silas was, and what he was doing. She was not upset or angry at his absence, but she was curious and a little frustrated. He was, after all, the closest thing she had to an ally.

He returned on the evening of the fifth of Lunuary.

Bellis let him enter. She did not touch him, nor he her.

He was tired and subdued. His hair was mussed, his clothes dusty. He sat back in a chair and covered his hands with his eyes, murmuring something inaudible, some greeting. Bellis made him tea. She waited for him to speak, and when after a while he did not, she returned to her book and her cigarillo.

She had made several more pages of notes before he spoke.

“Bellis. Bellis.” He rubbed his eyes and looked up at her. “I have to tell you something. I have to tell you the truth. I’ve kept things from you.”

She nodded, turning to face him. His eyes were closed.

“Let’s… take stock,” he said slowly. “The city’s heading south. The Sorghum … Do you know what the Sorghum ’s for? The Sorghum , and the other rigs that I gather the Terpsichoria took you past, suck fuel from under the sea.”

He spread his hands wide, indicating massiveness. “There are fields of oil and rockmilk and mercus under the earth, Bellis. You’ve seen the screwbores they use to plumb for the stuff on land. Well, geo-empaths and the like have found vast deposits under the rock, lying under the sea.

“There’s oil under southern Salkrikaltor. That’s why the Manikin and the Trashstar and Sorghum have been perched out there for more than three decades. The supports of the Manikin and Trashstar go down four hundred feet and sit on the bottom. But the Sorghum … The Sorghum ’s different.” He spoke with a morbid relish. “Someone in Armada knew what they were doing, I tell you. The Sorghum sits on two iron hulls-submersibles. The Sorghum ’s not tethered. The Sorghum ’s a deepwater rig. The Sorghum can travel.

“You can just keep adding sections to its drill shaft, and it can go down Jabber fucking knows how far. Miles down. You can’t find oil and so on everywhere. That’s why we were stationary for so long. Armada was sitting over a field of something or other the Sorghum could get at, and we couldn’t move off until it had stored up for wherever it’s going.”

How do you know all this? thought Bellis. What’s this truth you have to tell me?

“I don’t think it’s just oil,” Silas continued. “I’ve been watching the flame over the rig, Bellis. I think they’ve been drawing up rockmilk.”

Rockmilk. Lactus saxi . Viscous and heavy as magma, but bone cold. And dense with thaumaturgons, the charged particles. Worth several times its considerable weight in gold, or diamonds, or oil or blood.

“Ships don’t use fucking rockmilk to fire their engines,” Silas said. “Whatever they’ve stockpiled for, it’s not just to keep their vessels trim. Look at what’s happening. We’re heading south, to deeper, warmer seas. I’ll bet you a finial we’re skirting close to ridges beneath, where there are deposits, a route that lets the Sorghum drill. And when we get wherever we’re going, your friend Johannes and his new employers are going to use… what, several tons of rockmilk and Jabber knows how much oil to do… something. By which time…” He paused, and held her gaze. “By which time it’ll be too late.”

Tell me , Bellis thought, and Silas was nodding as if he had heard her.

“When we met on the Terpsichoria , I was in something of a state, I remember. I told you I had to return to New Crobuzon immediately. You reminded me of that yourself, recently. And I told you that I’d been lying. But I wasn’t. What I said on Terpsichoria was true: I have to return. Dammit, you probably realized all this.”