The Scar - China Mieville [184]
There was a wind, suddenly, slapping Armada’s shanks and towers, strumming the city’s rigging. Something was drifting down around Bellis, minuscule particles like mist, an arcane stink descending from the Grand Easterly’s funnels and spreading out, the effluent of whatever forces were tearing the clouds out of nothing. Bellis recognized the smell: rockmilk. Some aeromorphic engine was being boosted.
The sun was completely occluded. Bellis shivered in the newborn dark and cold. Beyond the city limits, the sea had become choppy, seesawing with foam. The sound from the sky increased: from low vibrations it became purring, and then a drawn-out shout, and finally a bark of thunder, and with that percussive noise the storm erupted out of the cloudmass.
The wind went berserk. The sea pitched. Thunder again, and with it the oily darkness over the city shattered a thousand ways, and through every crack lightning glared incandescent. Rain raced in screaming swells, dousing Bellis in moments.
Across all the ridings of the city, Armadans scrambled to get below. The decks emptied fast. Men and women struggled to uncouple the bridges as the vessels they linked began to buck. Here and there stood people transfixed like Bellis, in fear or fascination, staring into the storm.
“Godspit!” shouted Bellis. “Sweet Jabber protect us!” She could not hear her own voice.
The storm was muted for Tanner, cosseted deep as he was in the water of the deadeye. The surface above him lost its integrity in the rain. The city rose and fell as if the sea were trying to shuck it off. The huge chains moved below it.
Even through the tons of water, Tanner realized, the sound of thunder and the water’s motions were increasing. He swam, agitated, waiting for the storm to reach its final pitch, growing more and more nervous as the violence did not dissipate, as it continued to increase.
’Stail, he thought in awe and fear. They’ve done it this time, ain’t they? What the fuck kind of storm is this? What the fuck have they done?
Bellis held tight to the rail, terrified that the wind would pull her out and over, to be crushed between vessels.
The air was stained by shadows, a darkness burst by lightning like camera flashes.
Even with air rinsed by the torrent, the weird stink of rockmilk vapor was strong and increasing. Bellis could see ripples distorting the air. Lightning struck the city’s masts again and again, lingering around the huge copper-shrouded column on the Grand Easterly.
Armada danced as the sky boiled. As the aeromorphic engine vented ever more power, the lightning patterns began to change. Bellis watched the clouds, mesmerized.
At first the streaks and jags were random, snapping and shivering like brilliant snakes in the darkness. But they began to synchronize. They grew closer in time, so that the light from one still scored Bellis’ eyes while the next fired, and their movements grew more purposeful. The lightning bursts bolted toward the center of the cloud, vanishing at its core.
The thunder grew more intense. The rockmilk smell was nauseating. Bellis was hypnotized by what she saw through the deluge, capable only of thinking come on come on! without consciousness of what she was waiting for.
And then finally, with a single stunning report of thunder, the lightning reached phase.
They burst out of nothing at the same moment around the storm’s edge, scored through the dark air together toward its heart as if they were spokes, meeting at the axis of the tempest in a single, painfully intense point of light that crackled and did not dissipate.
Energy burst up, invisible, amplified through the valves and transformers of occult engines, spurting out of the Grand Easterly’s smokestacks, racing skyward into the storm.
The invocation burst in the heart of the cloud.
The crackling star of lightning shone cold and intense and blue-white, trembling, glowing brighter, taut as if pregnant as if full