The Scar - China Mieville [207]
Still the Armadan ships approach. They fire and come closer and explode and capsize and burst into flames and still come closer, their crews doggedly driving them toward the dreadnoughts.
A mass of dark bodies rises.
Crobuzoner thaumaturges, channeling puissance from batteries and their own bodies, have animated flocks of golems: clumsy constructions of wire and leather and clay, inelegant and rough-hewn, with claws like umbrella’s innards and clear glass eyes. Their ugly wings beat frantically to bring them skyward. They are strong as monkeys, mindless and tenacious.
They grip the ankles of the Armadan aeronauts and scrabble up their bodies, ripping open their flesh and tearing their balloons apart, sending them bleeding into the decks below.
Golems rise like smoke from the Crobuzoner fleet and slam themselves into the steering cabins and windows of the Armadan airships, blinding them, shattering their glass, slicing the fabric of their gasbags. Many fall, their bodies broken by gunfire and swords and gravity, collapsing into their lifeless inanimate components on their way down; but scores stay airborne, harrying the Armadan air fleet.
The air above the battle seems as thick as the sea. It is viscous and sluggish with the discharge from guns and fire-throwers and catapults; with sinking dirigibles bleeding dry of gas; with hunting golems and blood-mist and gouts of soot.
There is a terrible slowness, a solemn care behind every motion. Every cut, every crushing blow, every bullet boring into eye and bone, every belch of fire and bursting vessel seems planned.
It is a sordid pretense.
Through the murk Tanner can see the undersides of the enemy’s boats, and surrounding them a hundred shapes: darting spiral vessels, single-person subs in the shells of giant nautili. The Armadan submarines scatter the little craft, ram the iron flanks of the dreadnoughts, rear up like whales.
Tanner is out, suddenly, in the open water, among the darting Bask menfish who have let him into their ranks. He has reached out with his long tentacles and gripped the chitinous shell of one of the little nautilus subs. He faces the little glass porthole, and he can see the man inside stare out aghast, thinking he has gone mad to see this savagely wailing face, this New Crobuzon face, in the water, mouthing curses at him in his own language, raising a stubby weapon level to his face and firing.
The bolt bursts the glass and drives on into the New Crobuzon sailor’s face, its reinforced jag splintering his cheekbone and the base of his skull and pinning his head to the back of his tiny craft. Tanner Sack stares at the man he has killed, no, who is not yet dead, whose mouth spasms with agony and terror as the sea vomits into his ruptured sub and drowns him.
Tanner kicks backward, shaking violently, watching the man die, watching the nautilus fill with water and begin to spin and descend.
The dead and torn-apart are scattered across all the ships and across the sea as if they are scraps of burned paper distributed randomly by fire.
Tanner Sack hunts men.
Around him, vessels plummet. He is surrounded by dying men from what was once his home. They bleed and scream bubbles. They are too far down to reach the surface. None of them will breathe again.
Tanner spews suddenly, the sick forcing his throat open and billowing out from him. He feels nauseous, unstuck in time, drunk or dreaming, as if this is not real but a memory, already, even as it happens.
(Below him pass dark curious things that he thinks are his allies the menfish, and then knows immediately are not.
They are gone, and Tanner does not have the time, the luxury, to wonder what they were.)
The fighting progresses in spastic jerks. A clockwork ship from Booktown is torn open, and it sheds its gears and its massive