The Scar - China Mieville [190]
But there had never been really serious decisions before, only the vaguest agreement that the steamers would haul roughly in such-and-such a direction, in the hope that in a year or two—currents, tides, and Torque permitting—the city might reach congenial water. Now, with the avanc, came a new kind of power, and there were some who realized that everything had changed—that there were now real decisions to be made, and that the Lovers were making them.
In the absence of information, rumor flowered. Armada was heading for Gironella’s Dead Sea, where the water was ossified in its wave forms, entombing all the life within. It was heading for the Malmstrom, for the edge of the world. It was heading for a cacotopic stain. It was heading for a land of ghosts, or talking wolves, or men and women whose eyes were jewels or who had teeth like polished coal, or a land of sentient coral, or an empire of fungus, or it was heading somewhere else, maybe.
On the third Bookdi of the quarto, Tintinnabulum and his crew left Armada.
For the best part of a decade, the Castor had been embedded near Garwater’s foremost point, where it met Shaddler riding. Lashed beside the Tolpandy, it had sat for a long time beside an iron-clad warship that had become a shopping district, its greys mottled with commercial coloration, the byways between its derelict guns surrounded by alleys of tin-shack shops.
People had forgotten that the Castor was not a permanent fixture. Bridges had linked it to its surrounds, and chains and ropes and buffers had tethered it. Those links were cut, one by one.
Under a hot sun, the hunters swung machetes and removed themselves from the flesh of Armada, till they were free-floating, a foreign body. Between the Castor and the open sea a pathway was cleared between vessels. Bridges were uncoupled, tethers were broken on a route leading by the barge Badmark into Shaddler, then alongside the Darioch’s Concern with its cheap houses and raucous industry. It continued past the Dearly, a submersible long surface-bound, its interior a theater, and twisted starboard between an ancient trading cog and a big chariot ship, its rein stubs refitted to hold colored lights; then there was an open patch of water and beyond it the Shaddler Sculpture Garden on the Thaladin, the outer edge of Armada.
Beyond that was the sea.
The vessels that lined the pathway were crowded as people leaned over to shout good-bye at the Castor. Yeomanry and Shaddler guards kept the new channel free of traffic. The sea was calm and the avanc’s passage steady.
When the first of the city’s clocks began to strike noon, the Castor’s motors started up, to a great squall of excitement from the crowd. They cheered raucously as the vessel, a little over a hundred feet long, topped by its absurdly tall bell tower, began to putter forward.
The bridges, lines and chains and girders, were reconnected in the vessel’s wake. The Castor slipped like a splinter from the city’s flesh, which reknitted behind it.
In many places the route was only a little wider than the Castor itself, and it bumped against its neighbors, its swaddling of rope and rubber absorbing the impact. It progressed sluggishly, thumping its way toward the open sea. Beside it, the crowds were shouting and waving, as triumphant as if they had freed the hunters after years of imprisonment.
The ship finally slipped past the Thaladin into the ocean, traveling in the same direction as the avanc but outpacing it in order to emerge from the city. In that wide water, the Castor kept its speed up. It skirted around the front edge of Armada, turning to the south, letting the city drift past it as the avanc continued onward. Armada moved on, till the Castor was by the outskirts of The Clockhouse Spur; and then by the open entrance to the Basilio docks, thronging with free boats; and then it was past Jhour, and the Castor’s engine sounded again and it headed away, in among the free vessels