China Mieville - The Scar

Rising with the sun and breaching, the hunters bob in waves and think again.

They ask the whales.

– where is the floating city? they ask the great stupid krill-swillers, the grey and the humpback and the blue. They straddle them like mountaineers and manipulate the pleasure centers of their heavy brains. They bribe them, funneling tons of plankton in a panicked soup into the whale’s gurning grins.

The hunters make the question a demand.

– find the floating city, they say carefully, in concepts simple enough for the whales to understand.

Which they do. The huge animals ponder, their synapses so sluggish the hunters grow impatient (but they know they must wait). Finally, after minutes when the only noise is a sluicing as the whales jaw the water, with a concerted thunder of flukes they break their silence.

They moan across thousands of miles; echo-locating; sounding; sending friendly, stupid messages to each other; doing what they have been told: Looking for Armada.

“They’re raising an avanc.”

Silas’ face fluttered with astonishment, with denial, with a gamut of incredulities.

“That can’t be,” he said quietly, shaking his head.

Bellis’ mouth twisted. “Because avancs are legends?” she offered harshly. “Extinct? Stories for children?” She pursed her lips and shook Kruach Aum’s book. “Whoever shelved this, twenty years ago, thought that they were children’s stories, Silas. I can read High Kettai.” Her voice was urgent. “This is not a children’s book.”

The day was waning, and the muttering of the city continued outside. Bellis looked through the window at the light dying in sheets of spectacular colors. She handed Silas the book and spoke again.

“I’ve been doing little else for two days. I’ve been haunting the library like a damned eidolon, reading Aum’s book.” Silas was turning the pages one by one, carefully, his eyes scanning the text as if he could understand it, which Bellis knew he could not.

“It’s in High Kettai,” she said, “but it’s not from Gnurr Kett, and it’s not old. Kruach Aum is anophelii.”

Silas looked up, aghast. There was a very long silence.

“Believe me,” said Bellis. She felt, and sounded, drained. “I know how it sounds. I’ve spent the last two days trying to find out everything I can.

“I thought they were dead, too, but they’re only dying, Silas. They’ve been dying for more than two thousand years. When the Malarial Queendom collapsed they were eradicated in Shoteka, in Rohagi, in most of the Shards. But they managed to survive… They’ve clung on to a little hold on some shithole of a rock south of Gnurr Kett. And believe it or not, even after the Queendom, there are people who trade with them.” She nodded grimly. “They have some arrangement with Dreer Samher or Gnurr Kett or both, or something. I can’t work it out.

“And they write books, it seems.” She pointed at the volume. “Gods only knows why it’s in High Kettai. Maybe that’s what they speak now-they’d be the only people in the world who do. I don’t know, Godsdammit, Silas. Maybe it’s all crap,” she snapped with sudden irritation. “Maybe that damn thing’s a forgery or a lie or, yes, a children’s story. But I’ve been told by Tintinnabulum to look for anything by Kruach Aum, so do you think the subject matter of this damn book is just coincidence?”

“What does it say?” he asked.

Bellis took the book from him and slowly translated the first lines.

“ ‘I would lie if I told you that I write this without pride. I am full of it like food, because I have… found a story to tell, of what had not been done since the Ghosthead Empire and was achieved once more, a thousand years ago. One of our ancestors, after our queens collapsed and we came here to hide… With… devices and thaumaturgy… he went out over the water… to a dark place… and he sent hexes into the mouth of the water and after twenty-one days of heat and thirst and hunger he… drew out a great and mysterious thing.’ ” She looked up at Silas and concluded, “ ‘The mountain-that-swims, the godwhale, the greatest beast ever to visit our world, the avanc.’ ”

She closed the book softly.

“He called up an avanc, Silas.”

“What happened?” he said. “You’ve read it, what happened ?”

Bellis sighed. “It doesn’t say how or where, but Aum found a bunch of old manuscripts, an old story. And he’s put them together and made sense of them, and retold them. The story of an anophelius, who’s never named. Centuries ago. There are ten pages about his preparations. The man fasts; he researches; he stares out to sea a lot; he gathers the things he needs: barrels, liquor, old machines that have been moldering on the beach. He goes out to sea. Alone. Trying to keep control of a yacht way too big for one man, but no one would come with him. He’s looking for a particular place, some kind of… deep, deep shaft, a hole in the ocean’s floor. That’s where he’s hunting. That’s where he casts. That’s where he wants the avanc to… come through, from where they normally live.

“Then we get twenty very dull pages about the privations of the sea. Hungry, thirsty, tired, wet, hot… That sort of thing. He knows he’s in the right place. He’s sure his hook is… extending into somewhere else. Bleeding through the world. But he can’t attract the avanc. There’s no worm that big.

“Then on the third day, when he’s totally exhausted, and his ship’s being moved around by weird currents, the sky darkens. There’s an elyctric storm coming. And he decides it’s not enough to be in the right place-he needs power to snare the thing. He’s being pounded by hail and rain, and the sea’s going berserk. The boat’s plowing through huge waves, banging like it’s going to shatter.”

Silas was listening to her with eyes wide, and Bellis had a sudden ridiculous image of herself as a teacher telling the children a story.

“As the middle of the storm gets nearer and nearer, he yanks a load of wire to the top of the mainmast, coiling it round the rigging, and links it up to some kind of generator. Then…”

Bellis sighed. “I couldn’t really follow what happened then. He does some thaumaturgy or other. I think he was trying to conjure fulmen, elyctric elementals, or sacrifice them or something, but it’s not clear. Well…” She shrugged. “Whether he succeeds or not, whether it’s an elemental answering him or just the result of winding copper wire up a hundred-foot mast in the middle of a thunderstorm, lightning strikes the conductor.”

She held open the relevant illustration: the boat in silhouette, outlined in white, with a rather squat, geometrically rendered lightning bolt stuck like a saw into the top of the mast.

“There’s a massive burst of energy through the engines. The thaumaturgic controls he’s rigged up to try to bait and control the avanc suddenly spasm with supercharged puissance, then burn out instantly. And his boat lurches, and the cranes and winches tethering his hook bend suddenly, and there’s a rushing from underneath.

“He hooked an avanc, says Aum. And it rose.”

Bellis fell quiet. She turned the pages and read Aum’s words to herself.

The ocean vibrated with a scream five miles down, and the water rose and shuddered and was unsteady as it was displaced, vastly, and the waves died as the tides were supplanted by a great onrush from below and the water tossed the boat like a mote, and the horizon disappeared as the avanc surfaced.

That was all. No description of the creature. The verso page that should have held an illustration was left blank.