The Scar - China Mieville [218]
“He humiliated you,” Tanner said. “Thought you were special, did you?” he sneered. “Thought you could see through him? Thought you was in it together?”
She stared at him, white-hot with rage and self-disgust at being gulled by Silas like some stupid naÏve, like his puppets, like everyone else. Me more than all the poor fools reading Simon Fench’s pamphlets; me more than every poor stupid fuck acting as his contact. She was sick at the contempt, the ease, with which he had lied to her.
“You piece of shit,” she muttered. “I’ll fucking destroy you.”
Tanner sneered at her again, and she knew how pathetic she sounded.
“Do you think any of what he said was true?” Tanner Sack asked her.
They sat together, stiff and uncertain. Tanner still held the gun, but loosely. They had not become coconspirators. He looked at her with dislike and anger. Even if he believed that she had not set out to harm Armada, she was not his comrade. She was still the one who had persuaded him to be message-boy. It was she who had implicated him in the butchery.
Bellis shook her head in slow dudgeon.
“Do I think New Crobuzon is under attack?” she said disgustedly. “Do I think the most powerful city-state in the world is being threatened by malevolent fish? That two thousand years of history is about to end, and that only I can save my home? No, Tanner Sack, I don’t. I think he wanted to get a message home, and that was all. I think that manipulative fuck played me like a fiddle. Like he plays everyone.” He’s an assassin, a spy; he’s an agent, she thought. He’s exactly what I was running from. And still, lonely and credulous like some fucking lost fool, I believed him.
Why would they come for him? she thought suddenly. Why would they cross four thousand miles just to rescue one man? It wasn’t for him, and I don’t think it was for the Sorghum.
“There’s more to this . . .” she said slowly, and tried to form thoughts. “There’s more to this than we can see.”
They wouldn’t come this far, risk this much, just for him, no matter how good an agent he is. He has something, she realized. He has something they want.
“So what are we going to do?”
It was growing light. The city’s birds were sounding. Bellis’ head ached; she was terribly tired.
She ignored Tanner’s question for a moment. As she looked out of the window, she could see the sky paling and the silhouettes of rigging and architecture etched in black. It was very still. She could see the waves against the city’s sides, could make out Armada’s faint northern passage. The air was cool.
Bellis wanted one more moment in this time, one more suspended second, when she could breathe, before she spoke, and answered Tanner, and set in motion a clumsy, claustrophobic endgame.
She knew the answer to his question, but she did not want to give it. She did not look at him. She knew he would ask again. Silas Fennec was still free in the city, having seen his attempted rescue fail, and there was only one thing that could be done. She knew that Tanner knew it, that he was testing her, that there was only one possible answer to his question and that if she failed to give it, he might still shoot her dead.
“What are we going to do?” he said again. She looked up at him, weary. “You know that.” She laughed unpleasantly. “We have to tell the truth.
“We have to tell Uther Doul.”
Chapter Thirty-nine
Here we drift, near the northern rim of the Swollen Ocean, and only—what?—a thousand, two thousand miles to the west, the northwest, is the Cunning Sea. And nestled in the crooks of its coast, on the shoreline of an unmapped continent, is the colony of Nova Esperium.
Is it the small, bright, glittering city of which I have seen pictures? I have seen heliotypes of its towers, and its grain silos, and the forests that surround it, and the unique animals of its environs: framed and posed, sepia, hand-colored. There’s a new chance for everyone in Nova Esperium. Even the Remade, the indentured, the laborers, can earn freedom.
(Not that that is true.)
I have pictured myself