China Mieville - The Scar

Bellis looked up. Jabber knows , she thought, what I’ve got my hands on .

She thought quickly, trying to work out what she should do. Her hands still turned the pages like a construct’s, and she looked down to see that, midway through the volume, the man was at sea in a little boat. He and his vessel were drawn very small. He was lowering a chain and a massive recurved hook into the sea.

Deep below, in the midst of the spirals that signified the water, were concentric circles, dwarfing his yacht.

The picture held her attention.

She stared at it, and something deep within her moved. She held her breath. And with a wash of realization the picture reconfigured itself like a child’s optical illusion. She saw what it was-she knew what she was looking at-and her stomach pitched so hard that she felt she was falling.

She knew what Garwater’s secret project was. She knew where they were heading. She knew what Johannes was doing.

Shekel was still talking. He had moved on to the dinichthys attack.

“Tanner was down there,” she heard him say with pride. “Tanner went to help ’em, only he couldn’t get there in time. But I’ll tell you a funny thing. You remember a while ago I told you there’s things under the city, shapes he couldn’t make out? And he weren’t allowed to see? Well, after the bonefish swims off yesterday, poor old Tanner comes up right underneath one, doesn’t he? He gets to see it clearly-he knows what’s under there, now. So guess what it was…”

He paused theatrically for Bellis to guess. She still stared at the picture.

“A bridle,” she said, almost inaudible. Shekel’s expression changed to confusion. Suddenly she spoke loudly. “A giant bridle, a bit, reins, a harness bigger than a building.

“Chains, Shekel, the size of boats,” she said. He stared at her and nodded in bewilderment as she concluded. “Tanner saw chains.”

She still did not take her gaze from the picture she held: a little man in a little ship on a sea of frozen waves that overlapped in perfect sequence like fish scales, and below them deeps rendered in crosshatched and tightly spiraled ink, and at the bottom, easily eclipsing the vessel above, a circle in a circle in a circle, vast no matter how vague the perspective, unthinkably big, with darkness at the center. Looking up, looking up at the fisherman hunting his prey.

Sclera, iris, and pupil.

An eye.

There are intruders in Salkrikaltor. They sit quiet, their eyes taking in the city and the cray, measured and inexorable like plugholes.

They have left a trail of missing farmers and submarine adventurers and wanderers and minor bureaucrats. They have extracted information with coddling tones and thaumaturgy and torture.

The intruders watch with eyes like oil.

They have explored. They have seen the temples and the shark pits and the galleries and arcades, and the cray slums, the architecture of the shallows. As light fails and Salkrikaltor’s globes glow, traffic increases. Young cray dandies fight and posture on the spiraling walkways above (their actions are reflected in the hidden watchers’ eyes).

Hours pass. The streets empty out. The globes dim a little in the hours before dawn.

And there is silence. And dark. And cold.

And the intruders move.

They pass through empty streets, cloaked in darkness.

The intruders move like ribbons of waste, as if they are nothing, as if they are tugged by random ebbs and tides. They trace anemone-scarred backstreets.

Nothing living is in the trench-streets except night fishes, the snails, the crabs that freeze with fear as the intruders approach. They pass beggars in the atomies of buildings. Through a rip in a warehouse poised on the brink of being dust. Out over the lowest level of a water-beaten roofscape like coral, insinuating themselves into shadows that seem too small for them. Quick as morays.

A name was whispered to them in a coil of blood, a clue that they have accepted, and stalked and found.

They rise and look down on the roofscape through the sea.

He sleeps there, his legs folded below him, his torso rocking faintly in the current, his eyes closed-the he-cray they have hunted. The intruders hunker low. They stroke him and touch him and make sounds from within their throats, and his eyes open slowly and he spasms violently in the bonds in which they have spread-eagled him ( as quietly and gently as nannies, not to wake him ), and his mouth strains so wide that it looks as if it will split and bleed. He would be screaming and screaming in cray vibrato if they had not fit him with a collar of bone that skewers painlessly into certain nerves in his neck and back and cuts off his sound.

Little gouts of blood float up from the cray’s throat. The intruders watch him curiously. When finally his frenzy exhausts him, a captor moves with alien grace and speaks.

– you know something it says.- we need to know it too.

They begin their work, whispering questions as they touch and touch the cray translator with unthinkable expertise, and he snaps back his head and screams again.

Again, without a sound.

The intruders continue.

And later.

The wormcast floor of the ocean plunges out of sight and the water opens endlessly and the dark figures (far from home) sit motionless suspended in the dark, and ponder.

The trail has exploded.

Little filigrees of rumor twist away from them, recurve, and tease. The southern ship has disappeared. From the rock edges of the continent, where land rises to separate fresh- from saltwater, they have tracked to the Basilisk Channel, to the up-pointing fingers of Salkrikaltor City, to the ship puttering between the sea and New Crobuzon the river-straddler. But that ship has disappeared, leaving lies and stories eddying behind it.

Mouths from the deep. Ghost pirates. Torque. Hidden storms. The floating city.

Again and again the floating city.

The hunters investigate the rigs that loom from Salkrikaltor’s southern waters: supports like outsize trees, like pachyderms’ legs, crumbling concrete shafts in the seabed, mud oozing up around them as if around toes.

Drills worry at the soft rock, sucking at its juices. The rigs feed in shallows like swamp things.

Men in shells of leather and air descend on chains to tend to the mumbling giants, and the hunters spirit them away with predatory ease. They take away the masks, and the men scrabble futilely and emit their lives in bubbling howls of air. Their captors keep them alive with hexes, with mouth-kisses of oxygen, with massage to slow their hearts, and in caves under the light water the men beg for mercy and, at their captors’ insistence, tell them all manner of stories.

Stories, above all, of the floating city that snatched the Terpsichoria away.

Night falls, and the shadows shed by day are smothered.

The unclear figures have all the water of the world to search. The Oceans: the Rime; the Boxash; the Vassilly and Tarribor and Teuchor; the Muted and Swollen. And the Gentleman’s Sea and the Spiral Sea and the Clock and Hidden and others; and all the straits and sounds and channels. And the bays, and the bights.

How can they search it all? How can they start?

They ask the sea.

They strike out for the deep waters.

– where is the floating city? they ask.

The king of the goblin sharks does not know or care. The corokanth will not tell. The hunters ask elsewhere. - where is the floating city?

They find monkish intelligences masquerading as cod and congers that claim ignorance and swim away for more contemplation. The hunters ask the salinae, the brine elementals, but cannot make sense of the liquid shrieks of information with which they are answered.