The Scar - China Mieville [130]
They are not beholden to Armada’s dynamics. What are their priorities?
I want to know the Lovers’ names.
Except when he fights (I remember that, and it terrifies me), Uther Doul’s face is almost motionless. It is compelling and a little tragic, and it is nigh impossible to tell what he thinks or believes. Whatever he says to me, I have seen the Lover’s scars, and they are ugly and unpleasant. And the fact that they bespeak some sordid ritual, some game for the emotionally arrested to play, does not change that.
They are ugly and unpleasant.
Chapter Twenty-two
Thirty-six hours after the aerostat had risen over Armada and headed away to the southwest, land began to appear beneath them.
Bellis had slept little. She was not tired, however, and rose before five on the second morning to watch the dawn from the stateroom.
When she entered, there were others already awake and watching: several of the crewmen, Tintinnabulum and his companions, and Uther Doul. Her heart sank a little at the sight of him. She found his manner—even more reserved and measured than her own—troubling, and she did not understand his interest in her.
He noticed her and wordlessly indicated the windows.
In the sunless predawn light, rocks were breaking the water
below. It was hard to judge the size or distance of the land formations. A scatter-pattern of stones like whales’ backs, none more than a mile across, few larger than Armada itself. Bellis could see no birds or animals—nothing but bleak brown rock and the green of scrubland.
“We’ll reach the island within the hour,” someone said.
The airship hummed with vague industry, with preparations that Bellis did not care to understand. She returned to her berth and packed quickly, then sat in the stateroom in her black clothes, her thick carpetbag at her feet. Deep within it, nestled in the folds of her spare skirts, was the little leather pouch and its contents that Silas Fennec had given her, along with the letter she was writing.
The crew were walking quickly back and forth, barking incomprehensible orders to each other. Those of them who were not working congregated by the windows.
The airship had descended considerably. They were only a thousand feet or so above the water, and the face of the sea had grown more intricate. Its wrinkles had resolved themselves into wave shapes and foam and currents, and the darknesses and colors of reefs and weed forests—and was that a wreck?—below.
The island was ahead of them. Bellis shivered to see it, laid out so stark in the hot sea. It stretched perhaps thirty miles long and twenty across. It was jagged with dust-colored peaks and little mountains.
“Sunshit, I didn’t think I’d have to see this place again!” said Hedrigall in Sunglari-accented Salt. He pointed at the island’s farthest shore. “There’s more than a hundred and fifty miles between it and Gnurr Kett,” he continued. “They’re not strong in the air, the anophelii. Couldn’t last more than sixty miles. That’s why the Kettai let them live, and trade with them through the likes of me and my old comrades, knowing they’ll never make the mainland. That—“ He jerked a thick green thumb. “—is a ghetto.”
The dirigibles were slanting, skirting the coastline. Bellis watched the island intently. There was nothing to see, no life apart from plants. With a sudden chill, Bellis realized that the skies were empty. There were no birds. Every other island they had passed had been a mass of shifting feathered bodies, the rocks that edged it smeared with guano. The gulls had surrounded every landmass in a little gusting corona, swooping to take fish from the warm seas, squabbling on thermals.
The air above the anophelii island’s volcanic cliffs was as dead as bone.
The aerostat passed over silent ocher hills.