China Mieville - The Scar

One of the mainstays of Jhour’s economy was airship building. For rigid, semi-, and nonrigid dirigibles, for aeroflots and engines, the Jhour factories were the guarantors of quality.

The Arrogance was the biggest craft in the Armadan sky. It had been captured decades back, crippled in the aftermath of some obscure battle, and had been retained as a folly and a watchtower. The city’s mobile aerostats were half its length, the greatest of them only a little more than two hundred feet, buzzing sedately around the city, bearing inappropriate names like Barracuda . The aerostatic engineers were constrained by space-nowhere in Armada was there room for the vast hangars in which huge craft like the largest of the New Crobuzon airships-the explorers and Myrshock shuttles, seven hundred feet of metal and leather-could be made. And, in any case, Armada had no need for any such craft.

Until now, it seemed.

The morning after the leaflets had fallen, the entire workforce of Jhour’s Custody Aeroworks-stitchers, engineers, designers, metallurgists, and countless others-were summoned by an incredulous-looking foreman. All around the plant in the reshaped steamer, the skeletal frames of dirigibles lay untended as he told the workers falteringly of their commission.

They had two weeks.

Silas was right, Bellis thought. There was no chance he could have unobtrusively smuggled himself onto the island trip. Even she, cut off as she was from the city’s scandal and intrigue, was hearing about Simon Fench with increasing regularity.

Of course it was still vague whisperings. Carrianne had mentioned something about someone who had doubts about the Summoning, who had read a pamphlet put out by someone known as Fink or Fitch or Fench. Shekel told Bellis that he thought the Summoning was an excellent idea but that he’d heard that someone called Fench said that the Lovers were heading for trouble.

Bellis was still amazed at Silas’ ability to insinuate himself under the city’s skin. Was he not at risk? she wondered. Weren’t the Lovers searching for him?

She smiled to think of Shekel. She had not been able to continue with his lessons for some time now, but when he had recently visited her he had taken a few quick, proud minutes to show her that her help was no longer necessary.

He had come to ask her what was in Kruach Aum’s book. Shekel was not stupid. It was clear to him that what he had given her must be related to the sudden tumultuous events of the last week-the cascade of leaflets, the extraordinary plan, Tanner’s bizarre new commission.

“You were right,” she had told him. “It took me a while to translate the book, but when I realized what it was-the account of an experiment-”

“They raised an avanc,” Shekel had interrupted her, and she had nodded.

“When I realized what the book was,” she went on, “I made sure that Tintinnabulum and the Lovers saw it. It was something that they needed, part of their plan…”

“The book I found,” Shekel had said and begun to grin incredulously.

In the Custody Aeroworks, a massive framework of wires and curving girders was taking shape.

At one corner of the enormous room there was a heavy cloud of buff-colored leather. A hundred men and women sat around its edges, thick finger-long needles in each hand, stitching ambidextrously. There were vats of chymicals and resin and gutta-percha to seal the enormous gasbags. Wood frames and metal incandescent from forges were beginning to take the outlines of control and observation gondolas.

The Custody workshop, big as it was, could not contain this commission in its final form. Instead, all the finished components were to be lifted onto the bare deck of the Grand Easterly , where the bags would be inserted, the sections of skeleton riveted together, and the leather covering stitched into place.

The Grand Easterly was the only ship in Armada big enough for that.

It was Chainday the twentieth, or the seventh Skydi of Hawkbill-Bellis no longer cared which. She had not seen Silas for four days.

The air was warm and thick with birdsong. Bellis felt claustrophobic in her rooms, but when she left to walk the streets the feeling did not ebb. The houses and flanks of ships seemed to sweat in the sea-heat. Bellis had not changed her opinion of the sea: its size and monotony affronted her. But that morning she suddenly and urgently needed to get out from under the city’s eaves.

She was reproachful with herself for the hours she had waited for Silas. She had no idea what had happened to him, but the sense that she was alone, that he might not be coming back, had hardened her quickly. She realized how vulnerable she had become, and she reerected a wall around herself, like bone. Sitting and waiting like a fucking child , she thought furiously.

The yeomanry came for her every day, took her to the Lover and Tintinnabulum and the Castor ’s hunters, and to committees whose roles in the Summoning she did not understand. Her translation was scrutinized and picked apart: she had to face a man who read High Kettai, though not so well as she. He had demanded intricate details: Why had she chosen this tense, this part of speech? why had she rendered this word in this way? His manner was combative, and she took a small pleasure in undermining him.

“And on this page here,” he had snapped in one typical exchange, “why render the word morghol ‘willing.’ It means the opposite!”

“Because of voice and tense,” she had responded without apparent emotion. “The entire clause is in the ironic-continuous.” She had almost added It’s common to mistake it for the pluperfect , but had contained herself.

Bellis had no idea what all this grilling meant. She felt as if she were being siphoned dry. She had been cautiously proud of her act. She was enthusiastic about the project and the island, then reined herself quickly in, as if a tussle was going on within her between an unfurling desire and a sulky, curmudgeonly, press-ganged response.

But no one had yet told her she would come with them to the island, the crux of her whole plan. She wondered if something had gone wrong. And, anyway, Silas had disappeared. Perhaps it was time, she told herself coolly, for a new plan. If it did not work out, if they left her behind for another translator, then she would tell them the truth, she decided. She would beg mercy for New Crobuzon, would tell them about the grindylow attack so that they would know and might send the message for her.

But with an unpleasant fear she remembered Uther Doul’s words just before he shot Captain Myzovic. The power I represent cares not at all about New Crobuzon, he had said. Not at all .

She crossed the Whiskey Bridge from the Badmark , a barge at the outer edge of Garwater, to the broad clipper Darioch’s Concern .

The streets of Shaddler seemed bleaker to her than Garwater, more pared down. Facades were simpler, where they existed at all. Wood was scrubbed and cut into spare, repeating patterns. Pomp’s Way was a market street abutting both Garwater and The Clockhouse Spur, and the pavement was full of carts and animals and visiting shoppers-khepri, human, and others-jostling with the scabmettlers who made up half of Shaddler.

Bellis could recognize the scabmettlers now even without their armor, from their distinctive, heavy physiognomy and ashen complexions. She passed a temple, its bloodhorns silent, its guards adorned with clot-plate. Beyond it was a herbarium, with sheafs of dried astringents smelling strong in the warmth.

There were sacks of the distinctive yellow blodfrey that boiled up into the anticoagulant tea. She could see men and women drinking it from a cauldron. It was taken to ward off allclot attacks: the scabmettlers were prone to sudden and total setting of the blood in their veins, which killed them quickly and painfully, transforming sufferers into twisted statues.