The Scar - China Mieville [152]
Bellis was staring at him in a dignified, tearful rage. There was a long pause, and below the skin of her still, set face, Tanner saw her make a resolution.
“Read it,” she hissed suddenly. She slapped a long letter into his hands and slumped against the door.
“ ‘Status seven’?” he muttered. “What the fuck is a Code Arrowhead?” Bellis said nothing. She had stopped crying. She stared at him, sullen as a child (but now there is something in the back of her eyes, some hope).
Tanner continued, hacking his way through the thickets of code and finding trails of sense, places where meaning became suddenly and shockingly clear.
“ ‘Arrival of kissing magi’?” he whispered incredulously. “ ‘Canker to be clotted by wormtroopers’? ‘Algae-bombs’? What the fuck is this? This is about some fucking invasion! What the fuck is this?” Bellis watched him.
“This,” she echoed him remorselessly, “is about some fucking invasion.”
She kept him in a cruel silence for several seconds and then told him.
He leaned back, gripping the paper, staring sightlessly at its seal, running his fingers through the chain on Silas’ tag.
“You’re right about me, you know,” said Bellis. They whispered, to keep the woman in the other room from waking. Bellis’ voice sounded dead. “You are right,” she repeated. “Armada is not my place. I can see you. You think, ‘I wouldn’t trust that uptown bitch.’ ”
Tanner shook his head, trying to disagree, but she would not let him.
“You’re right. I’m not trustworthy. I want to go home, Tanner Sack. And if I could open a door and walk through and be in Brock Marsh, or Salacus Fields, or Mafaton or Ludmead or anywhere in New Crobuzon, then by Jabber I would walk through it.”
Tanner almost winced at her intensity.
“But I can’t,” she went on. “And yes, there was a time when I imagined rescue. I imagined the navy sailing in to whisk me home. But there are two things in the way of that.
“I want to go home, Sack. But . . .” She hesitated and slumped a little. “But there were others on the Terpsichoria without that urge. And I know what it would mean . . . for you, and for the others . . . for all the Crobuzoner Remade . . . to be . . . ‘rescued.’ ” She turned her eyes to him in an unflinching stare. “And you can believe me or not, as you like, but that’s not something I want. I have no illusions about New Crobuzon, about the transportation. You know nothing about my circumstances, Tanner Sack. You don’t know anything about what forced me onto that fucking loathsome ship.
“No matter how I want to return home,” she said, “I know that what’s best for me isn’t so for you, and I’d not willingly be party to that. And that’s true,” she said suddenly, as if in surprise, as if to herself. “I lost that argument. I concede. That is true.”
She hesitated, then looked up at him.
“And even if you think I’m full of nothing but lies, Mr. Sack, there’s always the second factor: There is nothing I can do. I can’t stow away with the Samheri; I can’t give directions to the New Crobuzon navy. I’m stuck with Armada. I’m damn well stuck with it.”
“So who’s Silas Fennec?” he said. “And what is this?” He waved the letter.
“Fennec is a Crobuzoner agent, no less marooned than me. Only with information,” she said coldly. “Information about a fucking invasion.”
“You want it to fall?” she demanded. “Godspit, I understand you’ve no love for the place. Why in Jabber’s name should you have? But do you really want New Crobuzon to fall?” Her voice was suddenly very hard. “Have you no friends left there? No family? There’s nothing left in the whole fucking city you’d preserve? You wouldn’t mind it falling to The Gengris?”
A little to the south of Wynion Street, in Pelorus Fields, was a tiny market. It appeared in a mews behind a warehouse on Shundays and Dustdays. It was too small to have a name.
It was a shoe market. Secondhand, new, stolen, imperfect, and perfect. Clogs, slippers, boots, and others.
For some years it had been Tanner’s favorite place in New Crobuzon.