The Scar - China Mieville [120]
She could not stop watching him.
Outside, the aerostat took shape like some enormous vague-edged whale. Bellis saw ladders being laid internally. Flimsy-seeming cabins were constructed. Tar- and sap-coated leather was hauled into position.
It had been a mass of parts, and then a cut-up body, and then a work in progress, and now it was becoming a vast airship. It lolled on the deck. It was like some insect just emerged from chrysalis: still too weak to fly, but now clearly become what it would be.
Bellis sat alone in her bed, in the hot nights, sweating and smoking, terribly afraid of what she had to do but almost trembling with excitement. She would rise, sometimes, and walk, just to hear her feet slapping on the metal floor, relishing the fact that she was the only thing in her room making a sound.
Chapter Twenty
Short, uncomfortably hot days and interminable sweaty nights. Daylight lasted longer as the weeks progressed, but still early every evening the light had gone and the stretched-out, sticky summer night drained the city of strength.
There were half-hearted fights at the junctions of ridings. Bravos from Garwater out drinking might end up in the same bar as a group of Dry Fallers. At first there would be nothing but a few surly murmurs: the Garwater lads might mutter about leech lovers or daemon’s bum-boys. The Dry Fall mob would make a loud joke or two about perverts at the helm, and laugh too much at bad puns about cutting.
A few drinks or sniffs or puffs later and the punches would be thrown, but somehow the antagonists’ energies rarely seemed entirely in the fray. They did what they expected of themselves—little more than that.
By midnight the streets were clearing out, and by two or three they were mostly empty.
The drone from the surrounding ships never dimmed. There were factories and workshops in various industrial districts, perched stinking and smoke-bawling on the arse-ends of old ships, which did not stop. The nightwatch moved through the city’s shadows, each riding’s in its own colors.
Armada was not like New Crobuzon. Here there was not a whole alternative economy of rubbish and squalor and survival: the basements of empty buildings did not harbor a mass of beggars and homeless. There were no dumps to plunder: the city’s rubbish was stripped of everything that could be reused, and the remainder was jettisoned into the sea with the city’s corpses, spoor dissolving as it sank.
There were slums draped across the sloops and frigates, found housing moldering in the brine air and heat, sweating matter onto their inhabitants. The cactacae laborers of Jhour stood, sleeping, tight-packed in cheap flophouses. But the New Crobuzon pressganged could see the difference. Poverty here was less likely to kill. Fights were more likely to be fueled by booze than desperation. A roof was likely to be found, even if it drizzled plaster. There were no vagrants huddled in angles of architecture to watch late-night walkers.
So in the dead hours, as a man made his way toward the Grand Easterly, he was unseen.
He walked without hurry along Garwater’s less salubrious byways. Needle Street and Blodmead Street and the Wattlandaub Maze on the Surge Instigant; the Cable’s Weft, a barquentine decaying into fungus-mottled camouflage; and on to the submersible Plengant. He picked his way past the trapdoors cut into its top, stayed in shadow close to the blistering periscope tower.
Behind him, its tower unlit among the spires and masts, he could see the derrick of the Sorghum.
The flat flank of the Grand Easterly swept up beside the Plengant like the side of a canyon. From deep within it, behind its metal skin, there were the vibrations of unceasing industry. There were trees on the surface of the submersible, gripping the iron with roots like knotted toes. The man walked in their shadow and heard the quick skin-sounds of bats above him.
There were thirty or forty feet of sea between the submarine and the cliff face of the