China Mieville - The Scar

Sometimes he opened books and found words that had defeated him the first time he had seen them, and that he had then written down and learned. It delighted him. He felt like a fox that had tracked them. That was how it was with thorough , and climber , and khepri . When he encountered them for the second time, they surrendered to him, and he read them without pause.

In the shelves of foreign volumes, Shekel found release. He was fascinated by their cryptic alphabets and orthographies, their strange pictures for foreign children. He came and rummaged among them when he needed quiet in his head. He could be assured that they would be silent.

Until the day that he picked one up and turned it in his hands, and it spoke to him.

At twilight, something idled out of the deep sea and came toward Armada.

It approached the last day-shift of engineers below the water. They were coming slowly up, clambering hand over hand up the ladders and pitted surfaces of the undercity, wheezing into their helmets, not looking down, not seeing what was coming.

Tanner Sack was sitting with Hedrigall on the edge of the Basilio docks. They dangled their legs like children over the side of a little cog, watching the cranes shift cargo.

Hedrigall was hinting at something. He spoke to Tanner obliquely. He hedged and implied, and Tanner understood that this was about the secret project, the unspoken thing that so many of his workmates shared. Without a scrap of that knowledge, Tanner could not make sense of what Hedrigall was saying. He could tell only that his friend was unhappy, and fearful of something.

A little way away they could see the corps of engineers emerge streaming from the water, climbing the ladders to rafts and weather-beaten steamers where juddering engines and colleagues and constructs pumped air for them.

The water in that little corner of the harbor began abruptly to bubble as if at a boil. Tanner touched Hedrigall’s forearm to quiet him, and stood, craning his neck.

There was a commotion at the water’s edge. Several workers rushed over and began to haul in the divers. More men surfaced, breaking the water in little bursts and scrabbling desperately at their helmets and at the ladders, fighting to get into the air. A furrow in the water swelled and broke the surface as Bastard John breached. He thrashed his tail wildly until it looked as if he stood unsteadily on the surface of the sea, and chattered like a monkey.

One man, hanging from a ladder, hunched out of the green water, finally threw off his helmet, and shrieked for help.

“Bonefish!” he screamed. “There are men down there!”

All around them people looked out of windows in alarm, left their work, and ran to the water, leaning out over the little trawlers bobbing in the middle of the harbor, pointing into the water and shouting to those on the docksides.

Tanner’s heart froze as billows of red coiled to the surface.

“Your knife!” he shouted to Hedrigall. “Give me your fucking knife!” He threw off his shirt and ran, without hesitating.

He leaped, his tentacles unwrapping from him, Hedrigall bellowing something unheard behind him. Then his long, webbed toes broke the surface, and with a burst of cold, he was in the water, and then under it.

Tanner blinked frantically, sliding his inner eyelid into place and peering down. In the middle distance, obscured by the sea, the shadows of submersibles prowled clumsily under the city.

He could see the last of the men clambering desperately toward the light, appallingly slow and clumsy in their suits. He saw places where great patches of blood discolored the water. A chunk of cartilage was drifting down through a haze of flesh, where one of Armada’s guard sharks had been torn apart.

Tanner kicked down, swimming fast. Some way off, at the base of a huge sunken pipe, sixty or more feet down, he saw a man clinging, immobilized by fear. And under him in the shadowy water, flickering this way and that like a flame, was a dark body.

Tanner balked, appalled. The thing was massive.

Above him, he heard the flattened reports of bodies hitting the water. Armed men were descending, lowered from cranes, standing in harnesses, bristling with harpoons and spears, but they moved slowly, edging down by inches, at the mercy of the engines above them.

Bastard John streaked past Tanner, startling him, and from hidden corners of the city’s underside, Tanner saw the silent menfish of Bask riding slip through the water toward the predator below.

Emboldened, he kicked and plunged down again.

His mind rushed. He knew that attacks by big predators occurred sometimes-red sharks, wolfish, hooksquid, and others smashing into the fish cages and attacking the workers-but he had never experienced one. He had never seen a dinichthys, a bonefish.

He hefted Hedrigall’s knife.

With sudden disgust Tanner realized that he was passing through a cloud of blood-fouled water, and he could taste it in his mouth and across his gills. His stomach lurched as he saw, sinking slowly beside him, the ragged remnants of a diving suit with indistinct shreds waving within it.

And then he reached the bottom of the pipe, a few bodies’ lengths from the bleeding, motionless diver, and the creature beneath rose up to meet him.

He heard the pounding of water and felt an onrush of pressure, and looked down and screamed silently into the brine.

A great blunt-faced fish was rushing up toward him. Its head was encased in skull-armor, smooth and round like a cannonball, split by massive jaws in which Tanner saw not teeth, but two razor-ridges of bone chewing at the water, scraps of flesh fluttering from them. Its body was long and tapered, without contours or a fanning tail; its dorsal fin was low and streamlined, merging with its tailbone like some fat-bodied eel.

It was more than thirty feet long. It came at him, its mouth big enough to bite him in half without effort, its tiny little eyes stupid and malevolent behind their protective ridge.

Tanner howled with idiot bravery, brandishing his little knife.

Bastard John streaked across Tanner’s view, coming up behind the dinichthys, and butted it hard in the eye. The huge predator swerved with frightening speed and grace and snapped at the dolphin. The slabs of bone in its mouth crunched together and grated.

It veered violently and shot after Bastard John. With rushes of displaced water, little ivory lances streaked past as the newt-people fired their strange weapons at the dinichthys. It ignored them and bore down on the dolphin.

Tanner kicked violently away, his legs spasming as he raced toward the clinging diver. As he swam he looked around him and saw, to his horror, that the massive bone-plated fish had gone deep, despite Bastard John’s attempts to goad it, and was doubling back from below, heading straight for Tanner.

With a last kick, Tanner touched the rough metal of the pipe and scrabbled for the diver. Tanner stared at the dinichthys, his heart hammering as the monstrous thing powered toward him. The suckers of his tentacles anchored him to the shaft. He waved the knife in his right hand, praying for Bastard John or the newt-men or the armed divers to reach him. With his left he reached out for the trapped man.

His fumbling hand reached into something warm and soft, something that gave to his fingers in a horrifying way, and Tanner snatched his hand back. He glanced up for a second at the man beside him.

He looked into a faceplate full of water, and a wide-eyed white face, eyes protuberant, mouth distended and still. The leather in the center of the suit had been gouged away, and the man’s stomach was torn from him. Entrails waved in the water like anemones.

Tanner moaned and snapped away, sensing the dinichthys below him, kicking out fearfully, slashing ineffectually at nothing as with a sudden vicious tide the ridges and scales swept past him, tons of muscle flexing, the sound of bone on bone jarring through the water. The pipe shuddered as the corpse was snatched from it. The snub-skulled hunter zigzagged away through the inverted forest of Armada’s keels, the dead man dangling in its jaws.