China Mieville - The Scar

Bellis could not fail to realize that research problems were being overcome, one by one. It had not taken long for Aum to rewrite his data appendix, and then for the Armadans to point out errors and miscalculations, holes in his research. The excitement of the scientists was palpable; they were almost drunk on it. It was a problem-a project-of unthinkable scale, and yet one by one, the problems, the objections and obstacles, were being overcome.

They were teetering on the edge of something extraordinary. The fact of its possibility was utterly giddying.

Bellis did not fraternize with the Armadans, but she could not spend her days without speaking to them. “There you go. Get that down you,” one might say, handing her a bowl of dull stew, and to refuse a word of thanks would have been a quite unnecessary violence.

Occasionally in the evenings-amid the Armadans’ dice and singsongs, which entranced the sough-voiced anophelii-she found herself on the edge of conversations.

The only one she knew by name was Tanner Sack. The fact that she had traveled above him on the Terpsichoria , free while he had been incarcerated, had poisoned any chance of trust between them, she supposed, though she had the sense that he was an open man. He was one of those who would make a little attempt to include her when he spoke. Bellis now came closer than she had ever been to Armadan society. She was allowed to listen to stories.

Most were about secrets. She heard about the chains that dangled below Armada: ancient, hidden for tens of decades; years’ worth of work, and many ships’ worth of metal. “Long before the Lovers made up their minds what to do with them,” the teller of one story said, “this was tried before.”

Uther Doul was prey to the storytellers, too.

“He comes from the land of the dead,” someone said once, conspiratorially. “Old Doul was born more’n three thousand years ago. It was him started the Contumancy. He was born a slave in the Ghosthead Empire, and he stole that sword, Mightblade, and fought free, and destroyed the empire. He died. But a warrior like him, greatest fighter there’s ever been, he’s the only man was able to fight his way out of the shadeworld, back to the living.”

Those listening made good-humored, derisory noises. They did not believe it, of course, but then they did not know what to believe about Uther Doul.

Doul himself spent his days quietly. The main person whose company he sought, the only one who came anything close to a friend, seemed to be Hedrigall. The cactus aeronaut and the human warrior often talked quietly at the edge of the room. They muttered in quick undertones, as if they were ashamed of friendship.

There was only one other person with whom Uther Doul was prepared to spend time, and to whom he talked, and that was Bellis.

It had not taken her long to realize that the apparently chance meetings, the brief pleasantries, were not coincidental. In an elliptical and tentative way, he was trying to make friends with her.

Bellis could not make sense of him, and she did not try to second-guess him. She trusted herself to cope. Though a sense of danger always remained, part of her enjoyed the encounters-the formal air, the slightest sense of flirtation. It was hardly coquetry. She did not compromise her dignity with simpering suggestiveness. But she was drawn to him, and she scolded herself for that.

Bellis thought of Silas. Not with any sense of guilt or betrayal-the idea of that made her pout in disdain. But she remembered the time he had taken her to the glad’ fight, specifically to see Uther Doul. That’s what’s trying to stop us leaving , he had told her, and she could not afford to forget it. Why , she asked herself, would you risk spending time with Doul?

Deep in her bag, she felt the weight of the box Silas had given her. She was acutely aware that she had a job to do on this island ( one she must plan soon ). It placed her very directly against Doul.

Bellis realized why she let their conversations continue. It was rare that she felt herself in the company of someone with as much or more control over his own reactions to the world, and its reception of them, as she had. Uther Doul was one. That was why they respected each other. To speak simply, without smiling, to someone else with the same manner; to know that of her would have intimidated most people but did not fluster him, and that the same was true the other way round: that was rare, and a pleasure.

Bellis felt that they should be looking out over a city, at night. They should be on a balcony. They should be wandering through backstreets, their hands in their pockets.

Instead they were in a small room that jutted off the central hall. They stood near one of the window slits, and Bellis was desperately sick of the colors of rock. She stared at the little patch of night-lit black hungrily.

“Do you understand it all?” Bellis asked.

Doul moved his head ambiguously. “Enough,” he said slowly, “to know that they’re close. I have very different expertise. My research will come after this. Your job will change soon. You’ll be asked to start teaching him Salt.”

Bellis blinked, and Doul nodded.

“It’s a breach of Samheri and Kohnid laws, but we’re not bringing new knowledge to the island. Aum will come with us.”

Of course , thought Bellis.

“So…” Doul continued. “So we return.” His wonderful voice was low. “With our prize. It’s a monumental project, what we’re attempting. Armada’s been stationed at a seam of oil and rockmilk since we left. Drilling, storing what’s needed for the invocation. We’ll make for the sinkholes. And then we use our fuel and our bait and the shackles we’ll build, and so on, and we… hook ourselves an avanc.” It sounded so bathetic. There was a long silence after that.

“And then,” said Doul very softly, “our work begins.”

Bellis did not speak.

I knew you were playing games with me , she thought coolly.

What work begins?

It did not surprise her. It was no great shock to realize that the avanc was only the start of the Lovers’ project, that there was more going on, that there was some grand scheme behind all this effort, an agenda to which virtually no one-certainly not she-was party.

Except that now, in one way, she was.

She did not understand why Doul was telling her. His motives were impenetrable. All Bellis knew was that she was being used. She did not even resent it, she realized-she would expect no less.

The following morning, the sun came up on the body of one of the human engineers. His skeleton was constricted by his newly tight skin: his arms were curled tight around his chest, and his hands were claws; his spine was arced as if with great age.

In the cavity below his ribs, his skin clung to the rubbery piping of his drained intestines. His eyes were half-shriveled like drying fruit, baking in the sun. The gums in his open mouth were almost as white as his teeth.

Surrounded by crooning mosquito-men, Hedrigall turned him over ( the body rocking on its curved spine like a wooden horse ) and found the fat hole between his ribs where the she-anophelius had punctured him.

The Armadans had become complacent. The death dismayed them.

“Stupid fucker,” Bellis heard Tanner Sack mutter. “What was he fucking doing?” She watched him turn from the window. He did not want to see Hedrigall bending down and with a gruff tenderness picking up the pathetic remains, cradling the skin-and-bone man and walking out of the village, to bury him.

But even that tragedy could not dampen the agitation in the air. Even in that shock and grief, Bellis could feel an excitement among the scientists. Even those who had known the engineer felt their sadness vie with a very different feeling.