The Scar - China Mieville [143]
The blade was not, as Bellis had supposed, stained metal.
“May I touch it?”
Doul nodded. She tapped the flat of the blade with a fingernail. It sounded dull and unresonant.
“It’s ceramic,” he said. “More like china than iron.”
The edges of the sword did not have the matte sheen of a sharpened blade. They were the same featureless white as the flat (a white stained fractionally yellow, like teeth or ivory).
“It’ll cut deeper than bone,” Doul said quietly in that melodious voice. “This is not a ceramic you’ve seen or used before. It won’t bend or give—it has no flex—but nor is it brittle. And it’s strong.”
“How strong?”
Uther looked at her, and she felt his respect again. Something inside her responded.
“Diamond,” he said. He sheathed his blade (with another exquisite, instantaneous motion).
“Where does it come from?” she said, but he did not answer her. “Is it from the same place as you?” She was surprised by her own persistence and . . . what? Bravery?
She did not feel as if she was being brave. Instead, she felt as if she and Uther Doul understood each other. He turned to her from the doorway and inclined his head in farewell.
“No,” he said. “It would be . . . hard to be less accurate.” For the first time, she saw a smile take him, very quickly.
“Good night,” he said.
Bellis took the solitary moments she had craved, steeped herself in her own company. She breathed deeply. And finally, she allowed herself to wonder about Uther Doul. She wondered why he was speaking to her, tolerating her company, respecting her, it seemed.
She could not read him, but she realized that she felt a faint connection to him, something woven out of shared cynicism, detachment, strength, understanding, and—yes—attraction. She did not know when or why she had stopped fearing him. She had no idea what he was doing.
Chapter Twenty-five
Two days became three, and four, and then a week had passed, every day in the inexact light of that little room. Bellis felt as if her eyes were atrophying, only able to see the earth shades inside the mountain, surrounded by halfhearted, edgeless shadows.
In the night, she would make the same short run across the open air (looking up eagerly to see naked light and colors, even the scorched colors of that sky). The mosquito whine of the women came at her sometimes, to her abject terror, and sometimes it did not. But always she huddled in the shelter of the cactus warrior or scabmettler who protected her.
Sometimes she could hear the scuffling and muttering of the she-anophelii outside the long window shafts. The mosquito-women were appalling, and strong, and their hunger was a force of almost elemental power. They would kill any bloodwalkers who landed, might drain an entire ship in a day and then lie bloated on the beach. For all that, there was something indelibly pathetic about the women of this ghetto island.
Bellis did not know what chain of circumstances had allowed the Malarial Queendom to exist, but they were unthinkable to her. It was impossible to imagine these shrieking creatures on other shores, their petty terrorism despoiling half a continent.
The food was as monotonous as the setting. Bellis’ tongue was quite numb to the fish-and-grass taste, and she chewed stolidly on whatever rust-nourished sealife the cactacae caught in the bay, whatever edible weed they uprooted.
The Samheri officers tolerated them uneasily, but did not trust them. Captain Sengka continued to curse the cactus Armadans in rapid Sunglari as turncoats and renegades.
With each morning’s fevered calculations, the scientists became more and more excited. The stacks of their notes and calculations grew massive. The ember that distinguished Krüach Aum from his compatriots—which Bellis thought of as true curiosity—waxed.
Bellis struggled but did not fail. She was translating now without even trying to understand what she said, just passing on what was said as if she were an analytical engine breaking down and reconstituting formulae. She knew that to the men and women hunched