The Scar - China Mieville [115]
himself.
“Gods and fuck,” he growled in his graveyard whisper. The councilors were silent instantly, and aghast. He stood and spread out his arms. “I have been listening to you for hours,” he hissed, “spewing your trite horseshit. Platitudes and desperation. You are ineffectual.” He made the word sound like a soul-blasting curse. “You are failures. You are pointless. Get out of my boat.”
There was a moment’s silence before the mass of councilors began to scramble to their feet, trying and failing to retain at least a part of their dignity. One of them—Vordakine, one of the better ones, a woman for whom the Brucolac retained a scrap or two of respect—opened her mouth to remonstrate with him. Her face was white, but she stood her ground.
The Brucolac curved his arms above has head like wings and opened his mouth, unrolling his tongue and letting his poisoned fangs snap down, his hands crooked and feral.
Vordakine’s mouth swiftly closed, and she followed her colleagues to the door, anger and fear on her face.
When they had all left, and he was alone, the Brucolac sank back into his chair. Run home, you little fuck bloodbags, he thought. He gave a sudden bone-cold grin, thinking of his absurd pantomime at the end. Moon’s tits, he thought wryly, they probably think I can change into a bat.
Recalling their terror, he suddenly remembered the only other place he had ever lived openly as ab-dead, and he shuddered. The exception to his rule, the only place where the payoff of fear between quick and vampir did not apply.
Thank the bloodlords, the shriven, the gods of salt and fire, I will never have to go back there again. To that place where he was free—forced to be free—of all pretense, all illusion. Where the true nature of the quick, the dead, and the ab-dead was laid bare.
Uther Doul’s homeland. In the mountains. He remembered the cold mountains, the merciless flint skree, more forgiving by far than Doul’s fucking city.
Chapter Nineteen
In the great workshops of Jhour riding, an extraordinary commission had arrived.
One of the mainstays of Jhour’s economy was airship building. For rigid, semi-, and nonrigid dirigibles, for aeroflots and engines, the Jhour factories were the guarantors of quality.
The Arrogance was the biggest craft in the Armadan sky. It had been captured decades back, crippled in the aftermath of some obscure battle, and had been retained as a folly and a watchtower. The city’s mobile aerostats were half its length, the greatest of them only a little more than two hundred feet, buzzing sedately around the city, bearing inappropriate names like Barracuda. The aerostatic engineers were constrained by space—nowhere in Armada was there room for the vast hangars in which huge craft like the largest of the New Crobuzon airships—the explorers and Myrshock shuttles, seven hundred feet of metal and leather—could be made. And, in any case, Armada had no need for any such craft.
Until now, it seemed.
The morning after the leaflets had fallen, the entire workforce of Jhour’s Custody Aeroworks—stitchers, engineers, designers, metallurgists, and countless others—were summoned by an incredulous-looking foreman. All around the plant in the reshaped steamer, the skeletal frames of dirigibles lay untended as he told the workers falteringly of their commission.
They had two weeks.
Silas was right, Bellis thought. There was no chance he could have unobtrusively smuggled himself onto the island trip. Even she, cut off as she was from the city’s scandal and intrigue, was hearing about Simon Fench with increasing regularity.
Of course it was still vague whisperings. Carrianne had mentioned something about someone who had doubts about the Summoning, who had read a pamphlet put out by someone known as Fink or Fitch or Fench. Shekel told Bellis that he thought the Summoning was an excellent idea but that he’d heard that someone called Fench said that the Lovers were heading for trouble.
Bellis was still amazed at Silas’ ability to insinuate himself under the city’s skin. Was he not at risk? she wondered. Weren