The Scar - China Mieville [158]
What are they doing?
What are they doing?
The taste of the sea here is reminiscent. This is drool that the hunters can taste; this is the world’s spittle. It dribbles (they remember) from ragged mouths cut by the platforms that suck up what they find, where beside concrete plinths men in inefficient swaddlings of leather and glass gaze wide, and are easily stolen and questioned and killed.
The floating city is drilling.
The currents here are labyrinthine, a morass of competing flows that dissipate the impurities in convoluted chains, taste-trails that make little sense, little pockets of different dirts.
They are hard to follow.
The whales are dead.
And what of others? Dolphins (willful) or manatee (slow and too stupid) or?
There are none suitable; we are alone.
There are others, of course, who might be called from the deep sea, but they are not trackers. Their work is very different.
Alone, but still the hunters can hunt. With a patience that is implacable (that does not sit well with this hot, quick place), they continue searching, teasing through the skeins of flavor and pollution and rumor, finding the path and taking it.
They are much closer to their quarry than they were before.
Even so, this warm water is hard, and sticky and prickling, and disorienting. The hunters circle, chasing ghost spoor and lies and illusions. They cannot quite, cannot quite find the trail.
Part Five
Storms
Chapter Twenty-seven
Dockday 9th Soluary 1780/Ninth Markindi Hawkbill
Quarto 6/317. Trident
He speaks to me again.
Uther Doul has decided that we will be—what? Friends? Companions? Discussants?
Since we left the island, the crew have been bustling, and the rest of us have sat quiet and watched and waited. I have been numb. Ever since Tanner Sack returned last night—wet and salt-stained and terrified by his short time under the open sky—I have been unable to settle. I shift in my seat and think about that precious letter, that ugly tin necklace—a priceless proof—and the long journey that awaits them. Tanner Sack has told me that Sengka agreed to ferry them. It is a long way, an arduous journey. I hope he does not change his mind. I pray that Silas has offered enticement enough.
Tanner Sack and I avoid each other’s eyes. We shift past each other in the Trident’s luxurious gondola, and we are stiff with guilt. I do not know him or he me: that is our consensus.
I have spent my hours watching Krüach Aum.
It is affecting to see him. It is moving.
He is shaking with fascination and excitement. His eyes are stretched wide, and his puckered sphincter-mouth is dilating and contracting with his breath. He moves—not quite running, but if it is a walk it is an undignified and frantic one—from window to window, staring at the engines that power the vessel, going to the pilot’s control booth at the front, to the privies, to the berths, and up into the great cathedral of the balloon itself, filled with the gasbags.
Aum can communicate with no one but me, and I expected him to hanker for my services. But, no, I have nothing to do. He is content to watch. I need only sit here and watch him, trotting past me this way and that like a child.
He has spent his lifetime on that rock. He is gorging on what is around him now.
Doul approached me. As before (that first time) he sat opposite me, his arms gently crossed, his eyes impassive. He spoke in his lovely voice.
This time I felt congested with terror—as if he had seen what I did with Tanner Sack—but I could face him with the calm he would expect.
I remain convinced that we understand each other, Doul and I. That this is what underlies the connection I feel, and I have used this conviction. He sees me (I am sure) struggling to control the fear I feel in seeing him, and he respects me for not giving in to nervousness at facing the legendary Uther Doul . . .
Of course my nervousness is that he will discover that I am