The Scar - China Mieville [186]
His head hurts; his blood is constricted. He hangs still in the water when he can go no further. He does not know how far he has come down. He cannot see the great chain by his side. He can see nothing. He is suspended in the cold and the grey, and he is quite alone.
A long time passes while the signals from the rockmilk engine continue to reverberate enticingly into the deep water. Everything is still.
Until Tanner’s eyes snap open (he did not know they were closed).
There has been a sound, a sudden feeling of slick grinding, like the snapping of bolts, things slotting into grooves. A long, rumbling report that travels through the water like whalesong, that he feels in his stomach more than he hears.
Tanner is still. He listens.
He knows what he has heard.
It was the restraints on the quarter-mile bridle—the jags and pegs and pins and rivets, the bolts as long as ships—sliding into place. Something has come snuffling up through layers of water and reality, he thinks, to investigate the delicious rockmilk pulses, and has slipped its neck or some part of itself into the collar until the harness is around it, and the spines and studs like tree trunks have jutted forward, piercing its flesh, and the cinctures have tightened, and the thing is trapped.
There is silence again, and stillness. Tanner knows that above him, the thaumaturges and engineers are sending carefully measured signals into what approximates the creature’s cortex, soothing, suggesting, cajoling.
He feels minute shifts of tide and temperature—thaumaturgic washes rolling up at him.
Tanner feels vibrations against his skin and then, harder, inside him.
The thing is moving, way below the dying fringes of sunlight, in the midnight water miles down, past lantern fish and spider crabs, eclipsing their feeble phosphorescence. He feels it creeping nearer, displacing great gouts of cold water and sending them rolling up and out of the abyss in uncanny tides.
He is enthralled.
There is a lazy booming that makes the water shudder. Tanner imagines some monstrous appendage casually slapping the continental shelf, an unthinking apocalypse wiping out scores of crude bottom dwellers.
The water around him swirls. Thaumaturgic tides wash dissonant up from the hole. There is a sudden spasm of water pressure, and then a very faint sound of pounding reaches Tanner’s ears. Uncertain, he strains to hear.
It is a faint, regular beat that he feels in his innards. A ponderous, smashing stroke. His stomach pitches.
He hears it only for an instant, a quirk of space and thaumaturgy, but he knows what it is, and the knowledge stuns him.
It is a heart the size of a cathedral, beating far below him in the dark.
On the rain-wet steps, below a fierce sun and cloudless skies, Bellis waited.
Armada was like a ghost town. All but the most enthralled of its inhabitants hid, still terrified.
Something had happened. Bellis had felt the shifting of the Chromolith and the knocking of the chains. There had been many minutes now of silence.
She started, once again hearing metal on metal: a slow, threatening percussion as the chains below the city shifted, moving up and stretching out, emerging from the sinkhole below the world, returning to their home dimension, immersing themselves fully in the waters of the Swollen Ocean.
They angled slowly away from vertical, extending until they were stretched taut out in front of the city. Miles below, the bridle was just above the ocean floor.
There was a sudden juddering noise, and Armada shifted violently against itself, its ships shifting into subtly new positions, pulled in new directions from below, altering its outlines.
The city began to move.
The spasm almost knocked Bellis down.
She was agog.
The city was moving.
Cruising southward at a leisurely pace that easily eclipsed anything that had ever been achieved by the scores of tugboats.
Bellis could see the waves against the flanks