The Scar - China Mieville [114]
They were protective of their riding, and insecure. The Uroc was their talisman, and no matter how raucous and chaotic the evening, they would glance occasionally at its skyline as if for reassurance.
That night, like every night, the mast-towers of the Uroc blossomed with the unearthly luminescence known as saint’s fire. It afflicted all ships at some time—during an elyctric storm, or when the air was desiccated—but for the moonship it was as certain and regular as tides.
Night birds, bats, and moths flocked to it and danced in its glare. They battered and snapped at each other, and some descended to be waylaid by the other, smaller lights emitted by windows. In the Brucolac’s meeting room, the Curhouse councilors looked up, made nervous by the constant drumming of little wings on the glass.
The meeting was not going well.
The Brucolac was struggling. He sincerely needed to engage with the councilors, and he tried to work with them, to propose strategies, to review possibilities. But he found it hard to rein in his ability to intimidate. It was at the heart of his power and his strategy. He was not Armadan born: the Brucolac had seen scores of cities and nations, in life and in ab-death, and something had been made clear to him: if the quick did not exist in fear, then the vampir would.
They might style themselves merciless night hunters, of course, where they hunkered and hid their identities in cities, emerging
at night to feed, but they slept and fed in fear. The quick would
not tolerate their presence—discovery meant true death. That had
become unacceptable to him. When he had brought haemophagy
to Armada two centuries back, he had come to a city free of the
reflexive, murderous horror for his kind—a place he could live openly.
But the Brucolac had always understood the payoff. He did not fear the quick, so they must fear him. Which he had always found easy to ensure.
And now, when he was sick of intrigue, when he hungered for complicity, when he needed help and this mixed bag of bureaucrats was all he had, the dynamic of terror was too strong to overcome. The Curhouse Council were too afraid to work with him. With every look, every lick of his teeth, every exhalation and slow clenching of his fists, he reminded them of what he was.
Perhaps it meant nothing, he reflected savagely. What help could they be? He could not tell them about the Scar. They would ask him how he knew, and he could say nothing; then they would not believe him. Or he could try to explain about Doul, in which case they would see him as a traitor, swapping secrets with the Garwater right-hand man. And still they would almost certainly not believe him.
Uther, he thought slowly, you are a clever, manipulative swine.
Sitting in this room surrounded by his supposed allies, all he could think was how much closer he felt to Doul, how much he and Doul shared. He could not shake the sensation—which made no sense at all—that the two of them were working together.
The Brucolac sat and listened to the pontifications and bad reasoning of the councilors, who were terrified of change, concerned for the balance of power. He endured preposterous and meaningless abstractions quite divorced from the real nature of
the problem. There were arguments over the precise nature of the Lovers’ transgression. There were suggestions that they might appeal to the bureaucrats of Garwater below their rulers’ noses—fleshless and unworkable ideas, without systematicity.
At one point, someone around the table mentioned the name Simon Fench. No one knew who he was, but his name was mentioned more and more frequently among that minority opposed to the Summoning. The Brucolac waited, eager to hear some concrete suggestion. But the debate degenerated again, quickly, into wasted air. He waited and waited, but nothing valid was said.
He could feel the passage of the sun below the world. A little more than an hour before dawn, he gave up trying to contain