The Scar - China Mieville [183]
Bellis did not know precisely what manner of crisis had overtaken the scientists and thaumaturgists. The promised storm did not appear. The rockmilk engines did not move.
It was no surprise, she reflected. The techniques were unique, unproven and experimental. It was no surprise that they did not work straight away.
Still, the anticlimax was overwhelming. Within two hours the city was as it had been. The unnatural hush abated.
Disappointed pirates bickered and told jokes about the failure. No one from Garwater, no scientist or bureaucrat, made any announcement about what had happened. Armada sat in the gentle water and the heat, and the hours of official silence became half a day, and continued.
Bellis could not find Doul, who had gone to find out what had happened. She spent her evening alone. She should have been delighted at Armada’s failure, but a ruefulness infected even her. A curiosity.
Two days passed.
In the deadeye’s still water, some of the city’s effluent congealed around the city, and lolling in the sun, Armada began to smell. Once, Bellis and Carrianne walked in Croom Park, but the odor and the raucous cries of too-hot animals, feral and in farm-ships, made the atmosphere unpleasant. It was not refreshing to be out of doors. Bellis confined herself and her smoking to her room.
Apart from that brief meeting with Carrianne, she spent the hours alone. Doul did not reappear. Bellis fidgeted in the heat and smoked and waited, watching the city return to its raucous routine with willful speed. It infuriated her. How can you all pretend that nothing’s going on? she thought, watching the vendors in Winterstraw Market. As if this is just a place like any other, as if this is a normal time?
There was still no word as Krüach Aum, his assistants, and the crews of engineers and hunters, all unseen, worked over their calculations again, took measurements, tinkered with their engines, as Bellis was sure they must be doing.
Two days passed.
Tanner lay under the city, floating motionless, facing down. It was as if he stood at the entrance to a dark pentangular tunnel edged with chains. In line with his head, each arm and each leg, the five great fetters soared downward, converging with perspective and disappearing into the dark.
He was exhausted. The frantic repairs since the first attempt had robbed him of sleep. He had been yelled at by overseers livid from failure.
The enormous chain corridor stretched out below him was more than four miles long. Hanging absolutely motionless in the darkness at its end was the bridle, bigger than any ship. It dangled into the pit below, investigated, perhaps, by the oarfish and huge-mouthed eels that frequented that depth.
Sitting and reading beside her window, Bellis became slowly aware of an odd stillness: a silence and a shift in the quality of the light. A neurotic pause, as if the air and the bleaching sun were waiting. She knew with a shock of amazed fear what was happening.
At last, she thought. Gods help me, they’ve done it.
From her front step, high up on the Chromolith chimney, she looked out over Armada’s gently bobbing vessels, at the Grand Easterly’s masts. She stared into the crowded city. There had been no warning that another attempt was to be made: there were people everywhere. They were standing still in the markets and streets, peering up, trying to work out what they had sensed.
The sky began to change.
“Dear Jabber,” whispered Bellis. “Oh my gods.”
In the middle of the sun-bleached blue stretched out over Armada, a darkness unfolded. Thousands of feet above them, the clear sky spasmed for an instant and shat out of nothingness a tiny smear of cloud, a mote, an atom of impurity that unfurled like a flower, like a trick box—a conjuror’s prop that opened again and again, multiplying itself with its own substance.
It