China Mieville - The Scar

“He sees it,” she said quietly. “When he sees the size of it he realizes that he’d only snagged it with his hooks and hexes. He’d thought he’d reel it in like an angler… Impossible. The avanc breaks the chains, effortlessly. And then it sinks again, and the sea’s empty. And he’s all alone, and he has to get himself all the way home.”

Bellis could picture it, and it moved her. She imagined the broken figure, sodden with brine and in the middle of a still-terrible storm, crawling to his feet, stumbling across the deck of his ill-prepared ship. Setting dying motors in motion, limping back across the sea hungry and exhausted, and above all alone.

“Do you think it’s the truth?” said Silas.

Bellis opened the book to its last section and held it out for him to see. The pages were crammed with strange-looking mathematic notations.

“The last twenty pages are taken up with equations, thaumaturgic notes, references to his colleagues. Aum calls it a data appendix. It’s almost impossible to translate. I don’t understand it-it’s high theory, crypto-algebra and the like. But it’s incredibly carefully done. If it’s a fake it’s needlessly complex. What he’s done… Aum has checked the details-of the dates, the techniques, the thaumaturgies, and the science… He’s worked out how it was done. These last pages… They’re an exposition, a scientific treatise, explaining how you’d go about it. How you’d raise an avanc.

“Silas, this book was written and printed in the last Kettai Vullfinch Year. That was twenty-three years ago. Which incidentally means that Tintinnabulum and his cohorts have it wrong-he thought Aum was writing in the last century. It was printed in Kohnid in Gnurr Kett, part of the imprint Shivering Wisdom. There aren’t too many Kettai works in this library, as you’d expect. And of those there are, the vast bulk are in Base Kettai. But there are a few High Kettai, and I’ve looked at them all. Shivering Wisdom publish in High Kettai: philosophy and science and ancient texts, gnostic mechonomy and the like.

“Shivering Wisdom obviously think this is on the level, Silas. If it’s a fraud, it’s taken in a scientific publishing house-as well, dammit, as the best fucking minds on Armada.

“What else are the Lovers’ scientists reading, Silas? My friend Johannes’ book Theories of MegaFauna . Another of his, about transplane life. Radical theories about the nature of water, books on maritime ecology. And they’re going crazy to find this little book here, probably because Tintinnabulum and his hunters have seen a few references to it, and they can’t damn well find it. Jabber’s sake, what do you think that’s all about?

“Silas, I’ve read this thing.” She made him meet her eyes. “This is for real. This is a book on how to raise an avanc. And how to control it. The anophelius Aum writes about… the avanc broke loose from him easy.” She leaned forward.

“But he was one man. Armada’s a city. He scavenged steam engines: Armada has whole industrial districts . There are giant chains under the city-did you know that? What do you think they plan on doing with them? And Armada has the Sorghum .” She let that sink in and saw his eyes change fractionally. “This city has hundreds of gallons of fucking rockmilk, Silas, and the means to get hundreds more. Jabber knows what thaumaturgy they can fuel with that shit.

“The Lovers think they can succeed where Aum’s man failed,” she said simply. “They’re heading for the sinkhole, to call up an avanc. They’re going to harness it to the city. And they’re going to control it.”

“Who else knows about the book?” said Silas, and Bellis shook her head.

“No one knows,” she said. “Only the boy, Shekel. He has no idea what it is, what it means.”

You did the right thing bringing this to me, Bellis had said. I’ll see what this is all about and pass it right on to Tintinnabulum as soon as I’ve seen if it’s of any use.

She remembered Shekel’s disquiet, his fear. He visited Tintinnabulum’s Castor often, to be with Angevine. Bellis knew, with a quick stab of pity, that he had not taken the book there directly himself because he was afraid that he had made a mistake. His reading was still inexpert, and faced with something of such apparent importance, his confidence had left him. He had stared at the combination of letters spelling Kruach , and had looked at the name he had copied from Tintinnabulum’s paper, and had seen that they were the same, but still, but still.

But still he was not quite sure. He did not want to make a fool of himself, or waste people’s time. He had taken it to Bellis, his friend and teacher, to check, to make sure. And ruthlessly, she had taken it from him, knowing that it gave her power.

The Lovers were bringing them south to a fissure in the seabed from where the avanc might rise. They had collected what was necessary-the scientist they needed, a rig to fuel the hexes-and now they were heading toward their quarry, their experts working in tight and ceaseless concert to complete their calculations, to solve the enigma of the summoning, even as they traveled.

And immediately Silas and Bellis saw this, as soon as they realized that they had achieved their aim, that they knew the Lovers’ plan, that they could work out where the city was heading, they began to talk frantically about how they could use that knowledge to escape.

What are we doing? thought Bellis in the silence. Another night we’re sitting in my stupid little round chimney room, saying oh gods oh gods to ourselves and each other, because we’ve picked off one layer of mystery and underneath is yet more shit, yet more trouble, that we can do nothing about. She felt like moaning with exhaustion. I don’t want to wonder what I’m going to do anymore , she thought. I want to just do something .

She drummed her fingers across the book’s script. A script that she and few others could read.

Looking at that arcane language, a vague, unpleasant suspicion ached in her. She felt as she had that night in the restaurant, when Johannes had told her that the Lovers used his books.

The constant grinding of the flotilla of tugs and others that dragged the city had become background noise. But, unnoticed and forgotten, they continued. There was not a moment of night or day that Armada did not inch south. The effort was prodigious and the pace glacial, slower than a human could crawl.

But days passed at that torturous rate, and the city did move. People shed coats and woolen trousers. The days were still short, but without fuss or proclamation, Armada had passed into a temperate zone of the sea. And it continued to move toward warmer water.

Armada’s plants-crops of wheat and barley, decktop grasslands, weed regiments reclaiming old stone and metal-felt the change. Scavenging constantly for heat, they drew sustenance from the random change of season and began rapidly to grow, to bud. The smells of the parklands became richer; the green began to be broken by hardy little flowers.

Every day there were more birds overhead. The pirate ships sailed over new and colorful fish in the warm waters. In Armada’s multitude of little temples, services welcomed the latest of the city’s irregular, contingent springs.

Tanner had seen the chains, and having done so, it did not take him very long to realize what was planned for the city.

Of course he could not know the details. But he remembered what he had seen, even through the shock and cold that had been settling on him as he rose through the water. He had come up below one of the forbidden ships and at the heart of an obscuring glamour, the scale of what he observed had at first confused him, but then it had resolved itself and he had realized it was a chain link, fifty feet long.