China Mieville - The Scar

Bastard John and the Bask menfish followed it, unable to match its effortless pace. In shock, Tanner kicked toward them pointlessly, the memory of the monstrous fish’s presence slowing him and making him cold. He was vaguely aware that he should surface, should keep himself warm and drink sweetened tea, that he felt sick and very frightened.

The dinichthys was heading down now, into the realms of crushing pressures its pursuers could not hope to survive. Tanner watched it go, moving slowly, trying not to breathe in any dissipating blood. He was alone now.

He dragged himself through water like tar, up past unfamiliar undersides, disoriented and lost. He could still see the dead man’s face and slick bowels. And as he found his bearings, as he twisted and saw the mobile ships in Basilio docks and the sprinkled crumblike boats of Winterstraw Market, he looked up and saw in the cold lancing shadow of the boat above him one of the huge, vague shapes that dangled from the city’s undersides, that was obscured by charms and carefully guarded, that he was forbidden to see. He saw that it was linked to others, and he drifted higher, unchallenged now the shark that had guarded it was dead, and the shape was clearer, and suddenly he was close, he was only a few yards from it, and he had penetrated the murk and the obfuscatory hexes, and he could see it clearly now, and he knew what it was.

The next day, Bellis was treated to lurid descriptions of the monster’s attack from several of her colleagues.

“Gods and fuck above,” said Carrianne to her, appalled. “Can you imagine? Sliced in pieces by that bastard?” Her descriptions became more grotesque and unpleasant.

Bellis did not give Carrianne her attention. She was thinking about what Silas had told her. She approached it as she did most things-coolly, trying to grasp it intellectually. She searched for books on The Gengris and the grindylow, but found very little that was not children’s myths or absurd speculation. She found it hard-impossibly hard, almost-to grasp the scale of danger to New Crobuzon. All the years of her life the city had squatted around her, massive and variegated and permanent. The idea that it could be threatened was almost inconceivable.

But, then, the grindylow were inconceivable, too.

Bellis found herself truly alarmed by Silas’ descriptions and his obvious fear. With a kind of morbid extravagance, Bellis had tried to imagine New Crobuzon after an invasion. Ruined and broken. It started as a game, a sort of dare, where she filled her mind with horrifying images. But then they flickered through her unstoppably, as if projected by a magic lantern, and they appalled her.

She saw the rivers congealed with bodies, and shimmering as grindylow passed beneath. She saw petal-ash spewing from the burnt-out Fuchsia House; shattered rubble in Gargoyle Park; the Glasshouse cracked open like an egg and stacked with cactus corpses. She imagined Perdido Street Station itself in collapse, its train lines twisted and splayed, its facade torn off, forcing its intricate architectural byways into the light.

Bellis imagined the ancient, massive Ribs that arced over the city snapped, their curves interrupted in a cascade of bone-dust.

It chilled her. But there was nothing she could do. No one here, no one in power in this city, could possibly care. She and Silas were alone, and until they understood what was happening in Armada, until they knew where they were going, Bellis could not think of any way she could get away.

Bellis heard the door open and looked up from her piles of books. Shekel stood at the threshold, holding something in his hands. She was about to greet him, but paused at the sight of his face.

He wore an expression of great seriousness and uncertainty, as if not sure whether he had done something wrong.

“I’ve got something to show you,” he said slowly. “You know I write down all the words I can’t work out at first. And then when I find them again in other books, I know them. Well…” He looked at the book he was holding. “Well, I found one of them yesterday. And the book’s not in Ragamoll, and the word’s not a… not a verb or a noun or whatever.” He stressed the technical words she had taught him: not with pride, but to make a point.

He handed the little book to her. “It’s a name.”

Bellis examined it. Sunk into the cover and picked out in stained metal leaf was the author’s name.

Kruach Aum .

The work that Tintinnabulum was looking for, one central to the Lovers’ project. Shekel had found it.

He had picked it off the children’s shelves. As Bellis sat and flicked through its pages, she saw that it was no wonder it had been misshelved. It was full of pictures in a primitive style: executed in thick, simple lines with childish perspective, so that proportions were unclear, and a man might be nearly the size of a tower next to him. Each recto page was text, each verso a picture, so that the whole short book had the feel of an illustrated fable.

Whoever had shelved it had obviously looked at it briefly without understanding it, and put it, without examination, with other picture books-children’s books. It had not been recorded. It had lain undisturbed for years.

Shekel was talking to Bellis, but she did not hear him clearly: don’t know what to do , he was saying awkwardly, thought you could help, the one Tintinnabulum was looking for, did the best thing. Adrenaline and tremulous excitement were filling her as she studied the volume. There was no title. She turned to the first page, and her heartbeat quickened in her throat as she realized that she had been right about Aum’s name. The book was in High Kettai.

It was the arcane, classical language of Gnurr Kett, the island nation thousands of miles south of New Crobuzon, at the edge of the Swollen Ocean, where the warm water became the Black Sandbar Sea. It was a strange, very difficult tongue that used the Ragamoll script but derived from quite another root. Base Kettai, the everyday language, was much easier, but the relationship between the two was attenuated and ancient. Fluency in one gave only the slightest understanding of the other. High Kettai, even in Gnurr Kett itself, was the preserve of the cantors and a few intellectuals.

Bellis had studied it. Fascinated by its structures of embedded verbs, it was High Kettai that Bellis had made the subject of her first book. It was fifteen years since she had published High Kettai Grammatology, but even rusty as she was, looking at the opening chapter of the book, the meaning came slowly to her.

“I would lie if I told you that I write this without pride,” Bellis read silently, and looked up, trying to calm herself, almost afraid to go on.

She turned the pages rapidly, looking at the pictures. A man in a tower by the sea. The man on the shore, the skeletons of great engines littering the sand. The man making calculations by the sun, and by the shadows of strange trees. She turned to the fourth picture and caught her breath. A rill of goosebumps came and went over her.

In the fourth picture, the man stood again on the shore-his blank, stylized eyes the only features on his face, rendered by the artist as placid as a cow’s-and above the sea, swarming toward an approaching boat, was a cloud of dark figures. The picture was vague, but Bellis could see thin arms and legs dangling, and a blur of wings.

It made her uneasy.

She scanned, trying to remember the language. There was something very odd about this book. It felt very different from all the other High Kettai works Bellis had seen. Something incongruous was in the tone, quite at odds with the poetry that characterized the old Gnurr Kett canon.

“He would have sought help from outsiders,” she hesitantly made out, “but all others shun our island, fearful of our hungry women.”