The Scar - China Mieville [107]
She looked at her partner. As always, they seemed to be communicating silently.
“We need lists,” the Lover said, “of everyone who should go to the island. We must look at new arrivals—there may be expertise we’ve missed. And we need security details for all candidates. And we have to represent all ridings.” He smiled, his scars tracing the contours of his face, and picked up Bellis’ translation.
When Johannes reached the door, the Lovers called his name.
“Come with us,” said the Lover, and Johannes’ stomach yawed uneasily.
Oh Jabber, he thought. What now? I’ve had enough of your
company.
“Come and talk to us,” the Lover continued, and waited while his partner finished for him.
“We want to talk to you about this woman, Coldwine,” she said.
Past midnight, Bellis was woken by a repeated banging on her door. She looked up, thinking it must be Silas, until she saw him lying motionless and awake beside her.
It was Johannes. She tugged her hair out of her face and blinked at him on her doorstep.
“I think they’re going to go ahead,” he said. Bellis gasped.
“Listen, Bellis. They were . . . well, intrigued by you. What they’ve heard has suggested that . . . well, that you’re not their material. Nothing bad, you know?” He was eager to mollify her. “Nothing, you know, dangerous . . . but not exactly sympathetic. Like a lot of press-ganged: best left aboard at all costs. It’s normally years before incomers get letters of pass.”
Was that all it was? thought Bellis slowly. The misery and loneliness, the aching for New Crobuzon that made her feel something had been torn from her—was it just an everyday symptom, shared by a thousand like her? Was it so banal?
“But . . . well I told them all the things you’d said to me,” Johannes said, and smiled. “And I can’t promise anything, but . . . I think you’d be the best person, and I told them that.”
Silas seemed to be sleeping when she returned to bed, but something in the shallowness of his breath told her he was not. She leaned over him as if about to kiss him hard, her lips found his ear, and she whispered, “It’s working.”
They came for her the next morning.
It was after Silas had left, heading for Armada’s underworld to perform his opaque, illegal activities. To the work that kept him under the city’s skin, that made him too dangerous even to attempt passage to the anophelii island.
Two of the Garwater yeomanry, pistols slung easy in their belts, steered Bellis to an aerostat cab. It was not far from Chromolith to the Grand Easterly. The mass of the enormous steamer stretched out above the city. Its six colossal masts, its chimneys, its bare decks unadorned by houses or towers.
The sky was full of aerostats: Scores of little cabs studding the air like bees around a hive; outlandish vessels built for freight, transporting heavy goods between the ridings; the peculiar little single-rider balloons with their pendulous occupants. A little way out were warflots, elliptical flying guns. And above them all the massive, crippled Arrogance.
They wound over the skyscape of Armada, lower than Bellis was used to, rising and sinking with the topography of roofs and rigging. Warrens of brick like New Crobuzon slums passed below. Built on the cramped space of deck tops, they looked precarious: their outer walls too close to the water, the alleyways that riddled them impossibly thin.
Beyond the haze above the Gigue, whose fore was an industrial district of foundries and chymical plants, the Grand Easterly was approaching.
Bellis was uncertain. She had never been inside the Grand Easterly before.
Its architecture was austere: darkwood panels, lithographs and heliotypes, stained glass. A little age-blistered, but well kept, its innards were a tangle of passageways and staterooms. Bellis was left to wait in a small chamber. The door was locked on her.
She went to the iron-fringed window and looked down over Armada’s random ships. In the distance she could see the green of Croom Park, spread like disease across the bodies of several