The Scar - China Mieville [117]
But with an unpleasant fear she remembered Uther Doul’s words just before he shot Captain Myzovic. The power I represent cares not at all about New Crobuzon, he had said. Not at all.
She crossed the Whiskey Bridge from the Badmark, a barge at the outer edge of Garwater, to the broad clipper Darioch’s Concern.
The streets of Shaddler seemed bleaker to her than Garwater, more pared down. Façades were simpler, where they existed at all. Wood was scrubbed and cut into spare, repeating patterns. Pomp’s Way was a market street abutting both Garwater and The Clockhouse Spur, and the pavement was full of carts and animals and visiting shoppers—khepri, human, and others—jostling with the scabmettlers who made up half of Shaddler.
Bellis could recognize the scabmettlers now even without their armor, from their distinctive, heavy physiognomy and ashen complexions. She passed a temple, its bloodhorns silent, its guards adorned with clot-plate. Beyond it was a herbarium, with sheafs of dried astringents smelling strong in the warmth.
There were sacks of the distinctive yellow blodfrey that boiled up into the anticoagulant tea. She could see men and women drinking it from a cauldron. It was taken to ward off allclot attacks: the scabmettlers were prone to sudden and total setting of the blood in their veins, which killed them quickly and painfully, transforming sufferers into twisted statues.
Bellis was standing between wheel ruts in front of a warehouse, and she ducked out of the way of the beast tugging a wagon toward her, some crossbred pygmy horse, onto a swaying bridge leading to a quieter part of town. Poised between two vessels, Bellis looked across the water. She could see the stubby bulk of a chariot ship, the curves of a cog, a fat paddleboat. And beyond them there were more. Each vessel embedded in a web of bridges, suspended by gently belling walkways.
There was a constant traffic of people on them. Bellis felt alone.
The Sculpture Garden took up the front of a two-hundred-foot corvette. Its guns were long gone; its cowls and masts had been crushed.
A little plaza of cafés and pubs passed seamlessly into the garden, like a beach into the sea. Bellis felt her footing change as she passed from the wood and gravel paths to the garden’s soft earth.
It was only a fraction the size of Croom Park, a patch of young trees and well-tended grass interspersed with decades’ worth of sculpture in various styles and materials. There were curlicued wrought-iron benches under the trees and the artwork. And at the edge of the park, over a little low railing, was the sea.
Bellis’ breath caught on seeing it. She could not help herself.
Men and women sat at tables covered with liqueurs and teas, or walked the garden. They looked bright and garish in the sun. Watching them wander calmly and sip their drinks, Bellis almost shook her head to remember that these were pirates: grizzled, scarred, armed, living off plunder. They were all of them pirates.
She looked up at her favored sculptures as she passed them: The Threatening Rossignol; Doll and Teeth.
Bellis sat and looked past The Proposal, a slab of featureless jade like a tombstone, over the wooden wall, out to sea—at the steamers and tugboats doggedly dragging the city. She could see two gunboats, an armed airship above them, prowling protectively at the edge of Armada’s waters.
A pirate brig was sailing north, around the edge of the city and away. She watched it set out on its month-long, or two- or three- or four-month hunting voyage. According to the will of its captain? According to some grand scheme handed down by the ridings’ rulers?
At the other edge of the sea, miles off, Bellis caught sight of a steamer heading in toward