The Scar - China Mieville [121]
Opposite him was the enormous sweeping curve of the Grand Easterly’s starboard sponson, the cover to the paddlewheel. From the bottom of its bell-shaped covering, the slats of a great wheel within emerged like ankles from a skirt.
The man emerged from the shade of the sickly trees. He removed his shoes, tying them to his belt. When no one came, and there were no sounds, he walked to the curving edge of the Plengant and slid suddenly into the cool water, with only a faint sound. It was only a short swim to the flank of the Grand Easterly, and into the shadows below the sponson.
Where, brine-soaked and dogged, the man hauled himself up the slats of the sixty-foot paddle, into the darkness. He was as quiet as he could be in the echoes. He climbed to the side of the wheel’s huge crankshaft and to a service hatchway, long forgotten, that he had known was there.
It took minutes of effort to break the scab of age, but the man finally managed to open it, to make his way along the crawl space into an enormous, silent engine room abandoned a long time ago to the dust.
He crept past the thirty-ton cylinders and huge, ignored engines. The chamber was a maze of walkways and monolithic pistons, thickets of gears and flywheels as tangled as a forest.
Neither dust nor light stirred. It was as if time had been bled dry and given up. The man picked the lock of the door, then stood motionless, holding the handle. He remembered the layout of the ship. He knew where he was heading—past the guards.
It was in the nature of the man’s profession that he knew a few hexes: passes to send dogs to sleep; words that made him sticky to shadows; hedge-magic and trickery. But he doubted very much that it would protect him here.
With a sigh, the man reached for the cloth-wrapped package tied to his belt. He felt a gust of foreboding.
And a trembling excitement.
As he unwrapped the heavy thing, he reflected nervously that if he really understood how to use it, the stiff lock of the service hatch and the unpleasant night swim could probably have been dispelled like breath. He was still a fumbling ignorant.
He picked the last of the stiff cloth away and held up a carving.
It was larger than his fist, cut out of a slick stone that looked black or grey or green. It was ugly. It curled around itself like a fetus, etched with lines and coils that suggested fins or tentacles or folds of skin. The work was expert but unpleasant, seemingly designed to make the eye recoil. The statue watched the man with its one open eye, a perfect black half-sphere above a round mouth ringed in little teeth like a lamprey’s. It gaped at him with a darkness in its throat.
Twisting down the little figurine’s back, curving tightly back and forth in layers, sandwiching its folds together, was a flap of thin, dark skin. A sliver of tissue. A fin.
It was embedded into the fabric of the stone. The man ran his finger along its length. His face wrinkled in distaste, but he knew what he had to do.
He placed his lips close to the statue’s head and began to whisper in a hissing language. The sibilants echoed faintly in the big room, threading through the still machinery.
The man recited puissant doggerel to the statue and caressed it in prescribed patterns. His fingers began to numb as something leached from him.
Finally, he swallowed and turned the statue so that its face regarded him. He brought it close, hesitated, and turning his head slightly in a ghastly parody of passion, he began to kiss its mouth.
He opened his own lips and pushed his tongue into the statue’s craw. He felt the cold thorns of its teeth, and he probed further. The figurine’s mouth was cavernous, and the man’s tongue seemed to reach into the center of the little piece. It was very cold to his mouth. He had to steel himself not to gag on its taste, musty and salt and piscine.
And as the man wriggled his tongue