The Scar - China Mieville [167]
The avanc’s harness would sport girders and screws still marked with the scars of previous service. In foundries, iron too ruined to be reshaped was melted down.
Armada was not a city with a grand tradition of thaumaturgy. But there were competent metallo-thaumaturgists among the pirates, and gangs of them entered the factories. They worked closely with the engineers, mixing arcane compounds in great vats to strengthen and lighten and bind the metal. At last, some of Garwater’s stores of rockmilk were used. The liquid was brought in vials, vastly heavy and dense. When it was unstoppered it gave off disorienting vapors like spice and oil. It moiled behind the glass, a cold mother-of-pearl.
The metallo-thaumaturges would add measured drops of it as they mouthed incantations and passed their hands over the melting metal in puissant currents, charging it and sealing it.
And after rolling out the metal and hammering and more arcane procedures, the components of the avanc’s bridle began to be dragged by submersibles into place below the city. An army of divers worked on them with chymical welders that sputtered colorfully in the water, and wielded hammers and wrenches with water-slowed motions.
It was an incredible, sudden industry.
The chains were anchored in the bases of five ships. The Psire of Booktown; Jhour’s Saskital; the big steamer Tailor’s Moan, the capital ship of Bask; the Wordhoard in the haunted riding; and Garwater’s Grand Easterly. From the keels and sloping flanks of each of these old, massive ships curved an arc of iron the size of some great church doorway, bolted on and veiled thaumaturgically. And from each of those stretched links the size of boats.
The guard sharks were let free. It seemed impossible that the chains had ever been hidden. The rumors spread—about what had been done before and what might happen now. It was said that Bask riding had tried to sever the chain below their vessel, to scupper Garwater’s plans, but that it had been too strong, too massive, too protected by puissant charms.
In a big, windowless chamber at the bottom of the Grand Easterly, a new engine was being built. The redundant boilers and their tangle of head-height pipes were stripped away, like clearing a rusty forest. When the ghosts of engines were gone, two great stamped-flat discs of iron were visible, embedded in the floor. Waist-high and many yards around, encrusted with age and grease. They were the ends of the chain attached to the ship, pushed through its hull, then hammered and flattened to attach them tight, centuries ago. The first time this had been tried.
Someone planned this before, Tanner Sack thought. He was stunned by the hours of work, the thaumaturgy that had been tried, the industry, the planning, the effort that had been made, generations ago, and then deliberately forgotten.
Between these two chain stubs, Tanner Sack and his colleagues began to build an extraordinary engine. They worked to specifications calculated over long hours by Krüach Aum.
Tanner examined the plans carefully. The motor they constructed did not work to any rules that he understood. It would be huge: it would fill the room with pounding hammers and ratchets, powered by some source that he did not fathom.
He worked from the base of what would be the piston-pounding boilers, upward. He started with the stumps of giant chain, drilling into them and embedding them with molten alloys, into which he plunged wrist-thick wires in rubber and tar. They passed through transformers the size of his leg, ribbed columns of white clay, and on to thickets of cables and insulators and difference engines.
This was the pacific engine, by which complex energies would be transmitted along the Grand Easterly chain, into that great bridle and whatever it contained, miles below the surface. A goad. Bait and whip.
The sea was clear. Divers thronged the huge underwater construction site. Components were lowered from the cranes of factory ships. The massive harness was