China Mieville - The Scar

Where, brine-soaked and dogged, the man hauled himself up the slats of the sixty-foot paddle, into the darkness. He was as quiet as he could be in the echoes. He climbed to the side of the wheel’s huge crankshaft and to a service hatchway, long forgotten, that he had known was there.

It took minutes of effort to break the scab of age, but the man finally managed to open it, to make his way along the crawl space into an enormous, silent engine room abandoned a long time ago to the dust.

He crept past the thirty-ton cylinders and huge, ignored engines. The chamber was a maze of walkways and monolithic pistons, thickets of gears and flywheels as tangled as a forest.

Neither dust nor light stirred. It was as if time had been bled dry and given up. The man picked the lock of the door, then stood motionless, holding the handle. He remembered the layout of the ship. He knew where he was heading-past the guards.

It was in the nature of the man’s profession that he knew a few hexes: passes to send dogs to sleep; words that made him sticky to shadows; hedge-magic and trickery. But he doubted very much that it would protect him here.

With a sigh, the man reached for the cloth-wrapped package tied to his belt. He felt a gust of foreboding.

And a trembling excitement.

As he unwrapped the heavy thing, he reflected nervously that if he really understood how to use it, the stiff lock of the service hatch and the unpleasant night swim could probably have been dispelled like breath. He was still a fumbling ignorant.

He picked the last of the stiff cloth away and held up a carving.

It was larger than his fist, cut out of a slick stone that looked black or grey or green. It was ugly. It curled around itself like a fetus, etched with lines and coils that suggested fins or tentacles or folds of skin. The work was expert but unpleasant, seemingly designed to make the eye recoil. The statue watched the man with its one open eye, a perfect black half-sphere above a round mouth ringed in little teeth like a lamprey’s. It gaped at him with a darkness in its throat.

Twisting down the little figurine’s back, curving tightly back and forth in layers, sandwiching its folds together, was a flap of thin, dark skin. A sliver of tissue. A fin.

It was embedded into the fabric of the stone. The man ran his finger along its length. His face wrinkled in distaste, but he knew what he had to do.

He placed his lips close to the statue’s head and began to whisper in a hissing language. The sibilants echoed faintly in the big room, threading through the still machinery.

The man recited puissant doggerel to the statue and caressed it in prescribed patterns. His fingers began to numb as something leached from him.

Finally, he swallowed and turned the statue so that its face regarded him. He brought it close, hesitated, and turning his head slightly in a ghastly parody of passion, he began to kiss its mouth.

He opened his own lips and pushed his tongue into the statue’s craw. He felt the cold thorns of its teeth, and he probed further. The figurine’s mouth was cavernous, and the man’s tongue seemed to reach into the center of the little piece. It was very cold to his mouth. He had to steel himself not to gag on its taste, musty and salt and piscine.

And as the man wriggled his tongue in the stone throat, something kissed him back.

He had expected it-hoped for it, relied on it. But still it came with a jolt of nausea and shock. A little flickering something tonguing his own tongue. Cold and wet and unpleasantly organic, as if a fat maggot lurked at the statue’s core.

The taste intensified. The man felt his gorge rise and his stomach spasm, but he kept his bile down. The statue lapped at him with stupid lasciviousness, and he steeled himself to its affections. He had asked a boon of it, and it graced him with a kiss.

He felt saliva flow from him and, abominably, back into him from the statue. His tongue numbed at its slippery touch, and the coldness faded back toward his teeth. Seconds passed, and he could hardly feel his mouth. The man felt tingling like a drug pass through his body, from the back of his throat down.

The statue stopped kissing him; the little tongue was withdrawn.

He pulled his own tongue out too fast and tore it on the obsidian teeth. He did not feel that, did not realize until he saw the blood drip onto his hand.

Carefully he rewrapped the statue, then stood and waited for its kiss to course through him. The man’s perception trembled, rippled. He smiled unsteadily and opened the door.

He could see musty oil portraits and heliotypes retreating in perspective on either side. He could sense a patrol of yeomen with dogs approaching him.

He grinned. He raised his arms, reached out and up, and pitched slowly forward, falling as if his knees had been shot out. He could taste his own blood, and the saltfish-rot of the statue. His tongue was filling his mouth, and he never hit the ground.

He moved in a new way.

He saw with the statue’s sight, which it had bestowed on him with a kiss, and he slipped and oozed through spaces as the statue dreamed of moving. He questioned the angles of the corridor, reconfigured them.

The man did not walk and did not swim. He inveigled his way through crevices in possible spaces and passed, without effort and sometimes with, along channels he could now see. When he saw two yeomen and their mastiffs approaching, his way was clear.

He was not invisible, nor did he pass into another plane. Instead he moved to the wall and watched its texture, looked at its scale anew, saw the dust motes close up so that they filled his view; then he slithered behind them, hidden away, and the patrol passed away without noticing him.

At the end of the corridor was a right turn. The man squinted at the corner after the patrol had disappeared, and he managed with a little effort to use it to head left instead.

He passed like that through the Grand Easterly , remembering the maps he had seen. When patrols came he turned the architecture against them by a variety of means and slipped quickly past them. Where he was trapped behind them at the wrong end of a long passage, he might pass them by looking askance and stretching out his arm, gripping hold of the far wall and pulling himself quickly around its corner. He turned so that doors were below him, plummeting, with gravity, the length of corridors for speed.

Giddy, queasy with a kind of motion sickness brought on by his new movements, the man went quickly and inexorably aft, toward the rear and bottom of the ship.

Toward the compass factory.

Its security was tight. Guards with flintlocks surrounded it. The man had to squeeze carefully and slowly through layers of slant and perspective to reach the door. He hid in front of the guards, too big and close for them to see, out of focus and looming, and he bent over them and peered into the keyhole, at the intricate gears that dwarfed him.

He conquered them and was inside.

The room was deserted. Desks and benches were laid out in rows. There were machines, their drive belts and motors still.

At some places were copper and brass housings like large fob watches. At others were slivers of glass and equipment to grind them. There were intricately carved hands, chains and engraving needles, tightly wound springs. And hundreds of thousands of gears. Ranging in size from small to minuscule, like atom-sized relations of the wheels in the engine room. They were scattered everywhere, like grooved coins or fish scales or dust.

It was an artisanal factory. Each station was worked by an expert, a craftsperson of exquisite skill, passing his or her part-finished work to the next. The intruder knew how specialized each job was, what rare minerals had to be incorporated, the precision of the thaumaturgy necessary. Each of the finished articles was worth many times its weight in gold.