The Scar - China Mieville [159]
We watched Aum, without words for a long time. Eventually, Doul spoke. (I am never the one to break silence.)
“Now that we have him,” he said, “I can’t see anything that could stop the invocation. Armada will soon enter a new period.”
“What of the ridings that are unhappy about this?” I asked.
“Certainly there are some who have concerns,” he said, “but imagine it. Currently the city crawls. With the avanc at our control . . . harnessed to a beast like that, there’s nothing we couldn’t do. We could cross the world in a tiny fraction of the time it takes us now.” He paused and moved his eyes briefly. “We could go to places currently denied us,” he said, his voice lowering.
There it was again: a hint at some motive undisclosed.
Silas and I have only learnt half the story. There is more to this project than the conjuring of the avanc. Having thought myself to have uncovered Armada’s secrets, I dislike this sudden sense of ignorance. I dislike it strongly.
“To the lands of the dead, maybe?” I said slowly. “To the shadeworld and back?”
I spoke as if idly, citing the rumors I had heard about him. To bait him into correcting me. I want to know the truth about the project, and I want to know the truth about him.
Doul astonished me then. I had expected perhaps some elliptical hint, some vague suggestions as to his origin. He gave me much more than that.
It must be part of his own project, the creation of some kind of link between us (I cannot yet work out what kind) but for whatever reason, he gave me much more.
“It’s a chain of whispers,” he said. He leaned in and spoke quietly, ensuring that our conversation was private.
“When they tell you that I came from the world of the dead, you’re at the end of a chain of whispers. Each link has an imperfect join with those around it, and meaning leaches out between them.”
If these were not his exact words they are like them. He speaks like this, in monologues that sound scripted. My silence was not begrudging—it was an audience’s.
“At my end of the chain is the truth,” he continued. He took my hand suddenly and shockingly and placed my two fingers on the slow pulse in his wrist. “I was born in your lifetime. More than three millennia after the Contumancy—do they still credit me with that? There’s no coming back from the world of the dead.” Beat beat beat went the pulse, languid like some cold-blooded lizard.
I know these stories are for children, I thought. I know you’re no revenant. And you know I know that. Do you just want me touching you?
“Not the world of the dead,” he continued. “But it’s true that I come from a place where the dead walk. I was born and raised in High Cromlech.”
It was all I could do not to cry out. As it was, I am sure my eyes must have spasmed wide.
Ask me six months ago and I would not have been certain that High Cromlech existed. I knew it only as a vague half-imagined place of zombie factories and the aristocratic dead. A place where the ghouls are hungry.
Then Silas tells me that he has been, that he has lived there—and I believe him. But still, his descriptions are more dreamlike than exact. Only the most nebulous and austere visions.
And now I know a second person who is familiar with that place? And not a traveler this time, but a native?
I realized that I was pressing the artery in Doul’s pulse hard. Gently he disengaged from my fingers.
“It’s a misconception,” he said, “to think that High Cromlech is all thanati. The quick are there, too.” (I am listening intently to him now, trying to detect his accent.) “We are a minority, it’s true. And of those born every year, many are farm-bred, kept in cages till they’re of strength, when they can be snuffed and recast as zombies. Others are raised by the aristocracy until they come of age, and are slain and welcomed to dead society. But . . .”
His voice petered out, and he became introspective for a moment. “But then there’s Liveside. The ghetto. That’s where the true quick live. My mother was prosperous. We lived at the better end.
“There are jobs