The Scar - China Mieville [133]
“The anophelii are fast,” she said. “Famined, and dangerous. You remember the briefings, I hope, so you know what we face. The menfolk are somewhere in that village, and we have to find them. A little way over there are the swamplands, and the waters. Where the women live. And if they hear or smell us, they’ll come. So move quickly. Is everybody ready?”
She indicated with her arms, and cactacae guards corralled them. They unlocked the animal pen, still attached like an anchor to the Trident by its chains. Bellis raised her eyebrow on seeing that the pigs and sheep wore collars and strained against leashes. The muscular cactacae held them in check.
“Then let’s go.”
It was a nightmarish journey from Machinery Beach to the hillside township. When it was done, and she thought back on it, days or weeks later, Bellis found it impossible to distinguish events into any coherent stream. There was no sense of time in her memories, nothing but snippets of images pieced into something like a dream.
There is the heat, which clots the air around her and stops up her pores and her eyes and ears, and the rich smell of rot and sap; insects in relentless profusion, stinging and licking. Bellis has been given a flintlock, and (she remembered) holds it away from herself as if it stinks.
She is herded, shuffling with the other passengers—the solitary hotchi’s spines bristling and relaxing in nervous alternation, the khepri headlegs squirming—surrounded by those whose physiognomy makes them safe: the cactacae and the scabmettlers, who drag the livestock after them. The one group is bloodless, the other full of blood so sensitive it protects them. They carry guns and rivebows. Uther Doul is the only human guard. He holds weapons in each hand, and Bellis would swear that whenever she looks at him they have changed: knife and knife; gun and knife; gun
and gun.
Looking out over the vine-smothered rocks and into clearings, down inland, over slopes of dense foliage and pools that look as thick as snot. Hearing sounds. Bursts of motion in the leaves, at first; nothing more offensive. But then the start of a horrible keening, impossible to pinpoint, as if the air itself is in pain.
The proliferation of that sound, all around them.
Bellis and her neighbors bump into each other, clumsy with terror and exhaustion and the wet heat, trying to watch all sides at once, and seeing the first signs of movement, shapes zigzagging through the trees like buffeted dust motes, always getting closer, an unstable mix of random motion and malign intent.
And then the first of the she-anophelii breaks the cover of the trees, running.
Like a woman bent double and then bent again against the grain of her bones, crooked and knotted into a stance subtly wrong. Her neck twisted too far and hard, her long bony shoulders thrown back, her flesh worm-white and her huge eyes open very wide, utterly emaciated, her breasts empty skin rags, her
arms outstretched like twists of wire. Her legs judder insanely fast as she runs until she falls forward but does not hit the ground,
continues toward them, just above the earth, her arms and legs
dangling ungainly and predatory, as (Gods and Jabber and fuck) wings open on her back and take her weight, giant mosquito wings, nacreous paddles shudder into motion with that sudden
vibrato whine, moving so fast they cannot be seen, and the terrible woman seems borne toward them below a patch of unclear air.
What happened next came back to Bellis again and again in memories and dreams.
Gazing hungrily, the mosquito-woman stretches her mouth open, spewing slaver, lips peeled back from toothless gums. She retches, and with a shocking motion a jag snaps from her mouth. A spit-wet proboscis,