China Mieville - The Scar

“Gentlemen, ladies,” said the Brucolac in his guttural whisper. He smiled and pulled back his mass of hair; tasted the air with his long, serpentine tongue; and indicated that his guests should sit around the darkwood table. He watched them find places-human, hotchi, llorgiss, and others all watching him warily.

“We have been outmaneuvered,” the Brucolac continued. “I suggest we consider our response.”

Dry Fall seemed much like Garwater. The decks of a hundred skiffs and barges and hulks were lit up against the darkness, and bustled with the sound of pubs and playhouses.

But looming silently over them all was the Uroc ’s distorted silhouette. It watched over the convivials of Dry Fall without comment or censure or enthusiasm, and they responded, glancing at it now and then with a kind of wary, uneasy pride. They had more freedom and more say than those who lived in Garwater, they reminded themselves; more protection than Thee-And-Thine; more autonomy than Shaddler.

The Dry Fallers knew that many citizens of other ridings regarded the goretax as a price too high, but that was squeamish stupidity. It was the recently press-ganged who were most vociferous about that, Dry Fallers pointed out-superstitious outsiders who had not yet learned Armadan ways.

There were no floggings in Dry Fall, the inhabitants reminded such newcomers. Their goods and entertainments were subsidized for all those who carried a Dry Fall seal. For matters of importance, the Brucolac held meetings where everyone could have a say. He protected them. There was nothing like the anarchic, violent rule that existed elsewhere in the city. Dry Fall was safe, civilized, its streets well maintained. The goretax was a reasonable trade.

They were protective of their riding, and insecure. The Uroc was their talisman, and no matter how raucous and chaotic the evening, they would glance occasionally at its skyline as if for reassurance.

That night, like every night, the mast-towers of the Uroc blossomed with the unearthly luminescence known as saint’s fire. It afflicted all ships at some time-during an elyctric storm, or when the air was desiccated-but for the moonship it was as certain and regular as tides.

Night birds, bats, and moths flocked to it and danced in its glare. They battered and snapped at each other, and some descended to be waylaid by the other, smaller lights emitted by windows. In the Brucolac’s meeting room, the Curhouse councilors looked up, made nervous by the constant drumming of little wings on the glass.

The meeting was not going well.

The Brucolac was struggling. He sincerely needed to engage with the councilors, and he tried to work with them, to propose strategies, to review possibilities. But he found it hard to rein in his ability to intimidate. It was at the heart of his power and his strategy. He was not Armadan born: the Brucolac had seen scores of cities and nations, in life and in ab-death, and something had been made clear to him: if the quick did not exist in fear, then the vampir would.

They might style themselves merciless night hunters, of course, where they hunkered and hid their identities in cities, emerging at night to feed, but they slept and fed in fear. The quick would not tolerate their presence-discovery meant true death. That had become unacceptable to him. When he had brought haemophagy to Armada two centuries back, he had come to a city free of the reflexive, murderous horror for his kind-a place he could live openly.

But the Brucolac had always understood the payoff. He did not fear the quick, so they must fear him. Which he had always found easy to ensure.

And now, when he was sick of intrigue, when he hungered for complicity, when he needed help and this mixed bag of bureaucrats was all he had, the dynamic of terror was too strong to overcome. The Curhouse Council were too afraid to work with him. With every look, every lick of his teeth, every exhalation and slow clenching of his fists, he reminded them of what he was.

Perhaps it meant nothing, he reflected savagely. What help could they be? He could not tell them about the Scar. They would ask him how he knew, and he could say nothing; then they would not believe him. Or he could try to explain about Doul, in which case they would see him as a traitor, swapping secrets with the Garwater right-hand man. And still they would almost certainly not believe him.

Uther, he thought slowly, you are a clever, manipulative swine .

Sitting in this room surrounded by his supposed allies, all he could think was how much closer he felt to Doul, how much he and Doul shared. He could not shake the sensation-which made no sense at all-that the two of them were working together.

The Brucolac sat and listened to the pontifications and bad reasoning of the councilors, who were terrified of change, concerned for the balance of power. He endured preposterous and meaningless abstractions quite divorced from the real nature of the problem. There were arguments over the precise nature of the Lovers’ transgression. There were suggestions that they might appeal to the bureaucrats of Garwater below their rulers’ noses-fleshless and unworkable ideas, without systematicity.

At one point, someone around the table mentioned the name Simon Fench. No one knew who he was, but his name was mentioned more and more frequently among that minority opposed to the Summoning. The Brucolac waited, eager to hear some concrete suggestion. But the debate degenerated again, quickly, into wasted air. He waited and waited, but nothing valid was said.

He could feel the passage of the sun below the world. A little more than an hour before dawn, he gave up trying to contain himself.

“Gods and fuck,” he growled in his graveyard whisper. The councilors were silent instantly, and aghast. He stood and spread out his arms. “I have been listening to you for hours,” he hissed, “spewing your trite horseshit. Platitudes and desperation. You are ineffectual .” He made the word sound like a soul-blasting curse. “You are failures. You are pointless. Get out of my boat.”

There was a moment’s silence before the mass of councilors began to scramble to their feet, trying and failing to retain at least a part of their dignity. One of them-Vordakine, one of the better ones, a woman for whom the Brucolac retained a scrap or two of respect-opened her mouth to remonstrate with him. Her face was white, but she stood her ground.

The Brucolac curved his arms above has head like wings and opened his mouth, unrolling his tongue and letting his poisoned fangs snap down, his hands crooked and feral.

Vordakine’s mouth swiftly closed, and she followed her colleagues to the door, anger and fear on her face.

When they had all left, and he was alone, the Brucolac sank back into his chair. Run home, you little fuck bloodbags , he thought. He gave a sudden bone-cold grin, thinking of his absurd pantomime at the end. Moon’s tits, he thought wryly, they probably think I can change into a bat.

Recalling their terror, he suddenly remembered the only other place he had ever lived openly as ab-dead, and he shuddered. The exception to his rule, the only place where the payoff of fear between quick and vampir did not apply.

Thank the bloodlords, the shriven, the gods of salt and fire, I will never have to go back there again . To that place where he was free-forced to be free-of all pretense, all illusion. Where the true nature of the quick, the dead, and the ab-dead was laid bare.

Uther Doul’s homeland. In the mountains. He remembered the cold mountains, the merciless flint skree, more forgiving by far than Doul’s fucking city.

In the great workshops of Jhour riding, an extraordinary commission had arrived.