China Mieville - The Scar

He was silent then, suddenly, his voice collapsing, as Uther Doul stepped out of the room, into what the cactacae had thought of as the safety of the open air. The Armadans gasped, but most of them kept chanting.

Bellis was at the door immediately, ready to slam it against any she-anophelii. She saw Doul stalking without hesitation toward Nurjhitt Sengka, his blade held poised. She could hear him speaking.

“I know you’re angry, Captain,” he said softly. “Control yourself, though. There’s no danger in Aum coming with us, and you know that. It’ll be his last contact with this island. You came to forbid it because you felt your authority leaching from you. That was a miscalculation, but so far only two of your men have seen this.”

The three cactacae were ranged a little way around him, their eyes meeting and parting again, wondering if they could rush him. Bellis was shoved aside suddenly as Hedrigall and several other Armadan cactacae and scabmettlers came to stand outside. They did not approach the stand-off.

“You will not stop us leaving, Captain,” Doul went on. “You don’t want to risk war with Armada. And besides, you know as well as I that it’s not my crew or even my boss you want to punish, it’s me. And that…,” he finished softly, “will not happen.”

Bellis heard the sound, then: the high drone of anophelii women approaching. She gasped, and heard others gasp, too. Sengka and his men began to look up shiftily, as if trying to avoid being seen.

Uther Doul’s eyes did not move from Captain Sengka’s face. A scudding shape cut across the sky, and Bellis pinched her mouth closed. The chant of “Doul!” had dwindled, but it continued almost subliminally. No one yelled out to him that he was in danger. They all knew that if they had heard the anophelii, he certainly had.

As the sound of their wings approached, Doul moved closer to the captain, suddenly, till he was staring very close into Sengka’s eyes.

“Do we understand each other, Captain?” he said, and Sengka bellowed and tried to grab Doul and crush him in a thorned bear hug. But Doul’s hands flickered in Sengka’s face then swung down to block his arm, and then Doul was standing a few feet back, and the cactus-man was doubled up and cursing as sap dripped from his smashed nose. Sengka’s crewmen watched with a kind of appalled indecision.

Doul turned his back to them then, and raised his sword to meet the first of the mosquito-women who came for him. Bellis stopped breathing. The she-anophelius was suddenly visible, plummeting through screaming air, a starved shape. The jag erupted from her mouth. She skirted over the earth, irregular and very fast, her arms outstretched, slavering and starving.

For long moments she was the only thing that moved.

Uther Doul was still, waiting for her, his sword held vertically on his right. And then suddenly, when the anophelius was so close that Bellis thought she could smell her, so that her proboscis seemed to be touching Doul’s flesh, his arm was suddenly stretched across his body, the sword still vertical and immobile but on the other side of him, and the mosquito-woman’s head and left forearm were tumbling free and bloody across the dry earth as her body crashed to the ground beyond him. Thick, sluggish gore streaked Doul’s blade, and the corpse and the dust.

Doul had moved again, and was turning, leaping up, reaching with his hands as if he were plucking a fruit, spitting the second she-anophelius ( which Bellis had not even seen ) as she flew over his head, and then twisting, pulling her out of the air on the end of his blade and flicking her to the ground, where she lay screaming and drooling and still trying to reach him.

He dispatched her quickly, to Bellis’ appalled relief.

And then the sky was quiet, and Doul had turned again to Sengka and was wiping his blade.

“This is the last you’ll hear of me, or any of us, Captain Sengka,” he assured the cactus-man, who stared at him with more fear than hatred now, and whose eyes took in the bloody corpses of those two mosquito-women, each stronger than a man. “Go now. This can end here.”

Then again the hateful sound of the she-anophelii, and Bellis almost cried out at the thought of more carnage. The humming grew closer, and Sengka’s eyes grew wide. He stood for a moment longer, looking quickly around him for the ravenous she-anophelii, a part of him still hoping that they might kill Doul, but knowing that they would not.

Doul did not move, no matter that the sound grew closer.

“Sun shit !” Sengka shouted, and turned away, defeated, waving his hands to bring his men with him. They walked quickly away.

Bellis knew that they wanted to get away before any more of the she-anophelii attacked and were killed. Not because they cared for the terrible woman-things, but because the sight of Doul’s mastery was appalling to them.

Uther Doul waited until the three cactus-people had disappeared. Only then did he turn, calmly, resheathing his sword, and walk back to the room.

The sound of wings was very close by that time, but mercifully, they were a little too slow, and they did not reach him. Bellis heard the screaming wings dissipate as the mosquito-women scattered.

Doul reentered the room, and the shout of his name went up again, proud and insistent like a battle cry. And he acknowledged it this time, bowed his head and raised his arms to the height of his shoulders, his palms outstretched. He stood immobile, lowering his eyes, as if adrift on the sound.

And it was night again, the last night, and Bellis was in her room, on her bed of dusty straw, Silas’ package in her hands.

Tanner Sack did not sleep. He was too wired from the excitement of the day, the fights. He was caught up in astonishment at what he now knew, what he had learned from Kruach Aum. Only tiny fragments of a much larger theory, but his new knowledge, the scale of the commission expected of him, was dizzying. Too dizzying to let him sleep.

And, besides, he was waiting for something.

It came between one and two in the morning. The curtain to the women’s room was drawn back, very gently, and Bellis Coldwine crept across the room.

Tanner twisted his mouth in a hard smile. He had no idea what it was that she had been doing the previous night, but it was obvious that pissing had not been on her mind. He gave a half smile, half wince as he thought of his little cruelty, forcing her into such a performance. He had felt somewhat guilty afterward, though the thought of the prim, tight Miss Coldwine squeezing out a few drops for his benefit had kept him grinning all the next day.

He had known then that her business, whatever it was, was unfinished, and that she would come back.

Tanner watched her. She did not know he was awake. He could see her standing by the door in her white underdress, peering through the window. She was holding something. It would be that leather packet she had tried not to draw his attention to the previous night.

He felt curiosity about her actions, and a spark of cruelty, some redirected revenge for his mistreatment on the Terpsichoria settling on Bellis. Those feelings had stopped him from informing Doul or the Lover of her actions.

Bellis stood and looked, then hunkered down and rummaged silently in her package, and stood and looked again and bent and stood and so on. Her hand hovered ineffectually around the bolt.

Tanner Sack stood and walked soundlessly toward her; she was too engrossed with her indecision to notice him. He stood a few feet behind her, watching her, irritated and amused by her irresolution, until he had had enough and he spoke.

“Got to go again, have you?” he whispered sardonically, and Bellis spun around to face him, and he saw with shock and shame that she was crying.