The Scar - China Mieville [135]
All around the clearing, the same is happening to the other animals. Some are adorned with one woman, some with two. All are shriveling, as if sun-dried and desiccated, and all the anophelii are growing gross and tight with blood.
It has taken that first mosquito-woman a minute and a half to suck the last of the liquid from the pig (Bellis could never shake the memories of that sight, or of the little sounds of the woman-thing’s satisfaction).
The anophelius rolls from the animal’s shrunken carcass, sleepy-eyed, drooling a little blood as her proboscis retracts. She withdraws, leaving the pig a sack of tubes and bone.
The hot air around Bellis is thick now with the stink of spew as her companions lose control of themselves at the sight of the anophelii feeding. Bellis does not vomit, but her mouth twists violently and she feels herself raising her pistol in what does not feel like anger or fear, but disgust.
But she does not fire. (And what would have happened if someone untrained as she had pulled the trigger? Bellis wondered much later, looking back.) The danger seems to have passed. The Armadans are moving on up the hill, past that little clearing and the smells of dung and hot blood, past more rocks and pestilential water, toward the township they had seen from the air.
The sequence of events became less blurred, less mashed together by heat and fear and disbelief. But then, at that point, at
that moment, as Bellis retreated from that hot carnage of pig and sheep blood and drained offal, the repulsive frenzy of the anophelii repast and then (worse) their bloated torpor, a mosquito-woman looked up from the sheep she had arrived at too late
to drain and saw their retreat. She hunched her shoulders and
flew dangling toward them, her mouth agape and her proboscis
dripping, her stomach only a little swelled by her sisters’ leftovers, eager for fresh meat, angling past the cactacae and scabmettler guards and bearing down on the terrified humans, her wings
awail.
Bellis felt herself jerked by fear back toward that confused trash of disjointed images, and she saw Uther Doul step forward calmly into the mosquito-woman’s path, raise his hands (carrying two guns now) and wait until she was nearly upon him, till her mouthparts jutted at his face and he fired.
Heat and noise and black lead exploded from his weapons and burst the mosquito-woman’s stomach and face.
Even half-empty as she was, the woman’s gut split audibly, in a great gout of blood. She collapsed from the air, her shattered face runnelling in the dirt, her proboscis still extended, a greasy red slick soaking rapidly into the earth. Her body came to rest in front of Doul.
Bellis was back in linear time. She felt stunned, but remote from what she saw. Some yards away, the gorged anophelii did
not notice their fallen sister. As the landing party turned on the steep path and headed into the foothills, the mosquito-women were beginning to haul their newly heavy bodies away from the now-bloodless carnage they left to rot. Swollen as grapes, they hung below their malevolently piping wings and flew slowly back toward their jungle.
Chapter Twenty-three
They waited, silent: the Lover, Doul, Tintinnabulum, Hedrigall, and Bellis. And standing before their visitors, their faces cocked in what looked like polite confusion, were two anophelii.
Bellis was astonished by the two mosquito-men. She had expected something dramatic, skin discolored by chitin, stiff little wings like their women’s.
They looked like nothing more or less than small men, bent a little by age. Their ocher robes were discolored with dust and the stains of plants. The older man was balding, and the arms protruding from his sleeves were extraordinarily thin. They had no lips, no jawbones, no teeth.