Embassytown - China Mieville [95]
“I know.”
I stayed the night with him, for the second time. We said even less than we had the first time, but that was really alright, as alright as it got that night. “Do you think there are languages made up of three voices?” I asked him at one point.
“It’s a big out,” he said. “Sure. And four, and five.”
I said, “And places where exots speak Anglo in ways that mess up human heads.”
We stood naked by his window, his arm over my shoulder and mine around his waist, and listened to fires, shouts, shattering.
Bren got a buzz early the next morning. He would not say from whom, to my anger. He raced us to the border. A tide of Ariekei were coming. They galloped at the barricades in a wave, an invasion organised with last gasps of sentience. I very much stress that I wish to hear the voice of EzRa please, the Ariekei shouted as they came to kill us. Is there a possibility that we could hear EzRa speak?
The guards were calling for backup. MagDa, our comrades and Staff came. With animal-guns fast-bred without ears, with rapidly machinofactured bullets, with hurled clubs and polymer crossbows firing quarrels made of reclaimed stair-rods, we staved the Hosts off. Ariekei burst, screaming their polite requests, we most sincerely ask. Zelles scuttled up our barriers and we shot them too. Kedis were with us. There were Shur’asi playing out electrified wires. I saw Simmon firing expertly with what had once been his off arm.
With only the tiniest organising the Ariekei would have taken us, but they were drugless and incompetent. They had to clamber over hillocks of their dead. Scavengers came: wild house antibodies. Our own birds tasted the air over the carnage and arced away again. My eyes were watering from acrid Ariekene innards. There was a commotion from side streets. Something was slamming into the Hosts. I shouted for Bren’s attention. It was a mass of those other, self-mutilated Ariekei. They’d come hidden among the others, a fifth column. Bren watched them without expression, while the rest of us gaped, as they dispersed our junkie attackers brutally.
“Bren was the first here,” Da said quietly to me. She looked over to where Mag spoke to him. “With you. He knew this would happen, didn’t he? How?”
I shook my head. “He knows people.”
“Do you?”
I wasn’t going to mention YlSib. Da was no fool: it wouldn’t have surprised me if she was aware of everything, including relevant names. “Come on,” I said.
“What do you know, Avice?”
I didn’t answer but I met her eye, to make sure I didn’t seem embarrassed or ashamed; so if she could tell I was holding back, she knew it was because I was trying to show respect for something. I was buzzed right then, from an ID I didn’t recognise, sound only, no trid or flat. The voice was muffled beyond recognition.
“Say that again,” I shouted. “Who is this? Say that again.”
Whoever it was did and that time I heard. I held my breath and hoped I was wrong and put it to speaker, so Mag and Da and Bren could hear. But I was right. The words came one more time, much clearer.
“CalVin’s dead.”
All we found in their rooms was the detritus of drink and of sex. There was no answer on CalVin’s buzz. We went to clubs they’d been known to visit, where to my disgust a last fervent few were still trying to blot out the end of the world. They told us CalVin hadn’t been there for days. The last time, they’d been accompanied by some uninterested man.
Down to other bars, and nothing and still nothing. I knew abruptly who had been with CalVin. We took a route to where I’d once lived, where Scile had once lived, and to which now that I’d gone, he’d returned. My key still worked. Scile’s stuff was everywhere, the flat was all his now, but he was absent. There was a note from him, to me, on the bed that had once been ours. It had been opened already. I unfolded it just enough to read the line This is to say goodbye, and stopped.
CalVin were in another room. The message had been wrong: CalVin wasn’t dead. Vin was dead. He dangled. Cal was watching him move pendulum-precise. I saw another note,