The Scar - China Mieville [180]
And so she kept that No loud in the back of her head, undiluted by doubt.
She woke the next day and leaned from her window into the warm wind, watching the exhausted, hungover crews clear the detritus of last night’s party from the streets and decks. They swept up huge piles of dust and colored paper, costumes and disguises from the masque parties, the debris of drug-taking.
The bilious flames had stopped rolling from the top of the Sorghum’s derrick. The rig had gone cold, its harvest of oil and rockmilk siphoned up and stored. Over the ships’ roofscape, the steamers, the tugs, the squat industrial vessels were moving back toward the city, like iron filings toward a magnet. Bellis watched their crews attach them again to the edge of Armada.
When all the servant ships had attached themselves to the city, they bore off to the southeast, venting black smoke, their gears grinding, devouring huge quantities of stolen coal and anything else that might burn. With appalling slowness, Armada began to move.
Below, in the clear water, the divers continued working. The stripping down of ship after ship continued, their substances delivered to the industrial works. An endless train of dirigibles passed between the vessels’ corpses and the forges.
The sea moved in faint currents around the massive bridle hidden below the waves. Armada’s pace was almost imperceptible: only a mile or two every hour.
But it did not slacken. It was ceaseless. Bellis knew that when it reached the place it sought, when the chains were lowered, when the thaumaturgy was attempted, everything would change. And she heard herself again, No, refusing to acquiesce, refusing to make her home here.
As her days passed, she was needed less and less. Her translation sessions with the engineers were fewer, as the bridle’s crews worked their endless hours and problems of design were reached, one by one, and solved. Bellis felt herself slipping from the core of things.
Except for Doul. He still spoke to her, still gave her wine in his cabin. There was still something shadowy between them, but Bellis could not make it out. And Doul’s conversations were as cryptic as ever, and she took no comfort in them. Once, twice more, he took her again to that little room, the sound box below the Lovers’ chamber. Why she went with him she could not say. It was always at night, always a secret. She heard their gasping declarations, their mews of pain and desire. The emotion still appalled and nauseated her, like something rotting in her stomach.
The second time she had heard them hiss with whatever passed for pleasure in their minds, and the next day, when she entered the meeting room with Aum, the Lovers stared at her with fresh wounds, blood crusting on their foreheads, scored deep in mirror images across their faces.
And Bellis had faltered. She could not bear the thought that she was at the mercy of people hooked on the emotion she had heard.
No.
Even as the weather grew hotter still, day after day till a week and then two had passed, and the bridle was nearly done, and Silas had not come to her, and Doul still made no sense; even as she slipped from the center of power, and her relief that she need not see the Lovers every day was effaced by the fear of her own growing ineffectuality; even as she lost the last semblance of power she had had; even as it became clear that she was trapped, the voice inside Bellis hardened and was absolutely clear.
No.
Chapter Thirty-two
Armada found the place it was looking for.
The city was near the southern border between the Swollen Ocean and the Black Sandbar Sea. Bellis was stunned when she heard that. Have we really come so fucking far? she had thought.
They lay absolutely still in the water. By arcane techniques like echo-catching and sensory projection, Armada had found its way to the center of a deadeye. These existed randomly across the oceans—patches of water a few miles across, where there were no currents or winds. Without motive power, things floating on the surface of deadeyes would bob up and