The Scar - China Mieville [209]
Around the base of Bellis’ squat platform, now, is the New Crobuzon navy. She is paralyzed. Part of her wants to run to them, but she waits. She does not know how this will turn. She does not know what she will do.
Once again, someone is on the platform with her. That feeling comes and goes.
With a drab and bloody inexorability, the New Crobuzon troops encroach across the Grand Easterly’s deck.
Uniformed men approach Uther Doul from aft, port, and star’d. He is waiting. Armadans are falling around him, pushed back, felled by flintlock bullets and a cascade of blades.
Bellis is watching Uther Doul when finally, suddenly, sur-rounded now by fast-encroaching enemies, by pistols and rifles and curving sabers, he moves.
He calls out: a long bark that is savage but musical, that takes shape and becomes his own name.
“Doul,” he cries, repeating it, drawing it out like a huntsman’s call. “Dooooouuuuul!”
And he is answered. Armadans around the deck take up the call as they fight, and his name echoes across the ship. And as the Crobuzoners try to encircle him, try to pen him in with their weapons, Uther Doul finally attacks.
Suddenly he holds a pistol in each hand, drawn from his hip holsters, and they are raised and firing in quite different directions, each one bursting open the face of a man. Their bullets spent, he hurls the guns away from him as he twists (the men around him looking quite still), and they spin through the air at speed and smash into one man’s chest and another’s throat, and Doul has two more flintlocks in his hands, and is firing again simultaneously (and only now do his first two victims finish falling), sending two more men away in ugly cartwheels, one dead, one dying, and he is turning and the guns are missiles again, clubbing a man unconscious.
Every motion Doul makes is perfect: flawless and straight-lined. There is no excess; there are no curves.
The men around him are beginning to scream, but they are pushed on by the force of their fellows behind. They move sluggishly toward Doul, who is in the air, his legs bent under him, turning amid a pattering of bullets. He fires with new guns and hurls them away into the faces of more enemies, then lets his feet touch down again. He has a last pistol in his hand and is moving it from face to cringing face, firing, leaping, and throwing it aside, kicking out with bent legs, a stampfighting move, breaking a cactus-man’s nose and pushing him back into the bodies of his Crobuzoner comrades.
Bellis watches, breathing hard, unmoving. Everywhere else the fighting is ugly: contingent and chaotic and stupid. She is aghast that Doul can make it beautiful.
He is still again for a moment as the Crobuzoner troops regroup and surround him. He is hemmed in. Then Doul’s ceramic blade flashes like polished bone.
His first strike is precise, a thrust too fast to see that pushes into a throat and flicks out again in a spray of sap, drowning a cactus-man in his own life. And then Uther Doul is tightly encircled and he cries out his own name again, quite unafraid, and his stance changes, and he reaches across his body, releasing the pent-up motor on his belt, turning on the Possible Sword.
There is a crack like static, and a hum in the air. Bellis cannot see Doul’s right arm clearly. It seems to shimmer, to vibrate. It is unstuck in time.
Doul moves (dancing) and turns to face the mass of his attackers. His left arm flails backward with loose, simian grace, and with shocking speed he raises his weapon arm.
His sword blossoms.
It is fecund, it is brimming, it sheds echoes. Doul has a thousand right arms, slicing in a thousand directions. His body moves, and like a stunningly complex tree, his sword arms spread through the air, solid and ghostly.
Some of them can hardly be seen; some are quite opaque. All move with Doul’s speed; all carry his blade. They overlap and move through each other—and bite where they land. He cuts left to right and right to left, and down and up, and he stabs and parries and slashes savagely, all at once.