China Mieville - The Scar

Uther Doul looked down at his sword.

“Not our deaths,” he said, and smiled unexpectedly and beautifully. “Nothing so straightforward.”

The Brucolac shook his head.

“You’re the bravest man I’ve known, Doul, in more ways than I can count.” His tone was wistful, regretful. “Which is why it bewilders me to face this side of you. This base, pusillanimous, cowardly, recreant, craven aspect.” Doul did not move or react, and the Brucolac did not sound as if he was taunting. “Have you convinced yourself that the bravest thing is to do your duty, come what may, Uther?”

He shook his head, his gaze incredulous. “Are you a masochist, Uther Doul? Is that it? Does it make you hard to debase yourself like this? Do you find yourself erect when those cut-up cunts give you orders you know to be idiocy? Do you come, do you touch yourself when you obey them regardless? Well good godspit, your cock must be raw from tugging by now, because these are the most lunatic orders you have ever tried to obey, and you know that.

“And I will not allow you to carry them out.”

Doul watched, motionless, as the Brucolac turned his back and strode away.

The vampir wrapped shadow around himself as he walked, vanishing quickly into a fog of glamour, his footsteps muting as he disappeared. There was a rustling sound in the air, and way above the deck the old rigging thrummed briefly as something brushed it and was gone.

Doul followed the noises up through the air with his eyes. Only when everything around him was still did he turn back to the sea and the haunted quarter, his hand resting on the pommel of his sword.

With atlases and explorers’ monographs, Bellis and Silas drew maps of Gnurr Kett and the Cymek and Iron Bay. They tried to trace a route home.

The anophelii island was unmarked, but interpreting the stories of the cactacae merchants, they worked it out to be some scores of miles from the southern tip of Gnurr Kett, a thousand miles or so from the island’s civilized northern shores. And from that northern edge it was almost another two thousand to New Crobuzon.

Bellis knew how uncommon it was to see Kettai ships at harbor in the city’s Kelltree docks. She foraged in works of political economy and traced the routes of commodities from Dreer Samher to Gnurr Kett, to Shankell, to the Mandrake Islands and Perrick Nigh and Myrshock, and eventually, perhaps, by some tortuous route or other, to New Crobuzon.

“From the mosquito island we’ll be almost as far from the city as if we’d made it to the damn colonies,” said Bellis bitterly. “Thousands of miles of unknown waters and mapless places and rumors and crap in between. Right at the wrong end of a long, long trading chain.”

All their free moments were spent like this, hunched together in Bellis’ cylindrical room, ignoring the sounds and the daylight or lamplight outside, she smoking furiously, cursing at Armada’s unpleasant ship-grown tobacco, both of them scribbling note after note, hunting through old books. Trying to make something from the knowledge they’d stolen. Trying to work out an escape.

They had hunted hard for the city’s secret. Now that they had it, the slowly dawning understanding that still, even so, even with that knowledge they might not make it home, appalled them.

If we can just work out where we’ll be… Bellis would think, and a queasy understanding would grow in her that it was not as if the whole damn city would dock, or would trundle past Kohnid or some other port in plain view. And if it did, she would still have to fight her own way from the city to the shore, to the docks, to a ship, across the water again, home. And there was no way at all that she could make that happen.

Get me to the shore, she thought. If I could get to the shore, maybe I could persuade someone to help me, or I could steal a boat, or I could stow away, or… something…

But she could not get to the shore. And even if she could, all those ideas might come to nothing, and she knew it.

“Shekel came to see me today,” she said. “It’s been near enough a week since he gave me the book, Silas. He asked me what it was, whether it was what Tintinnabulum was looking for. I told him I’d know for certain soon.”

“It won’t be long,” she said ominously. “It won’t be long till he overcomes his shyness and tells someone. He’s friends with some loyal dockhand who works for the Lovers. He’s fucking Tintinnabulum’s servant, for Jabber’s sake.

“We have to move, Silas. We have to make a decision. We have to decide what we’re going to do. When he tells his friends that he found the book by Kruach Aum, the yeomanry’ll be here in minutes. And then not only will they have the book, but they’ll know we were keeping it from them. And gods know I don’t want to see the inside of an Armadan jail.”

It was impossible to judge how much exactly the Lovers knew about raising the avanc. They must know something-the location of the sinkholes, the scale of the engines and thaumaturgy necessary, perhaps some parts of the science required. But they were particularly seeking the volume by Kruach Aum.

The only description of a successful attempt to call and capture an avanc , Bellis thought. They know whereabouts in the world to go, but I’m betting there’s a load they don’t know. They must think they can piece it together, and probably they can, in time. But I just bet this would make things a damn sight easier .

And she wrestled with stupid ideas, like demanding her freedom in exchange for the book, knowing miserably that that would never work. Hope was slipping away from her, and that made her cold.

In a kind of desperate carelessness, she talked with Carrianne about escape. Couching all her questions and ideas in an idiotically unconvincing what if? register, she asked Carrianne whether she had ever wanted to leave the city.

Carrianne grinned with friendly cruelty. “Never crossed my mind,” she said.

They were in a pub in Dry Fall, and Carrianne looked around ostentatiously before turning back to Bellis and speaking more quietly. “Of course. But what had I got to go back to, Bellis? Why would I risk something like that? Some press-ganged try it every few years, you know. Off in a little boat, or what have you. They’re always, always stopped.”

Only the ones you hear about , thought Bellis.

“What happens to them?” she said.

Carrianne looked down at her drink for a while, then back up at Bellis with another hard smile.

“It’s just about the one thing that every ruler in Armada agrees on,” she said, “the Lovers, the Brucolac, King Friedrich and Bragi-nod and the Council and all. Armada can’t afford to be found. Of course there are sailors that know we’re out here somewhere, and there are communities like Dreer Samher that we can trade with. But to be found out by some big power-like New Crobuzon? That would want us off the seas? People trying to escape are stopped, Bellis. Not caught, you understand. Stopped.”

Carrianne slapped Bellis on the back.

“Godsdammit, don’t look so appalled!” she said heartily. “You can’t really tell me you’re surprised. You know what would happen if they got home and let out the wrong sort of information, and your lot got hold of Armada? Just ask any of the Remade who made it out of the New Crobuzon slave ships, see how loyal they feel about the Crobuzoner navy. Ask some of those who’ve been to Nova Esperium and seen what happened to the natives. Or some of the sailors who’ve come up against New Crobuzon freebooters waving their damn letters of marque. You think we’re pirates, Bellis? Drink up and shut up!”