The Scar - China Mieville [220]
The implication was obvious. He had allowed “Simon Fench” to spread his influence, to print his dissident literature and unleash damaging rumors, so long as he had thought the victim of that activity would be Garwater rather than the city as a whole. He had not known about the Crobuzoner fleet that Fennec had called. Like Tanner and Bellis, he found himself implicated in what had happened.
Bellis watched, sneering inwardly at the Lovers’ ostentatious outrage. As if you’ve never done the same or more, she thought. As if that’s not how all of you bastards operate against each other.
“I’m aware,” hissed the Brucolac, “of how this stands. And I want this bastard brought down as much as any of you do. Which is why it will be a pleasure, as well as a duty, to take him.”
“You don’t take him,” said Uther Doul. “I take him—my men and I.”
The Brucolac turned his yellowing eyes to Doul. “I have certain advantages,” he said slowly. “This mission is important to me.”
“You do not get absolution this way, Deadman,” Doul said coldly. “You chose to let him play his games unimpeded, and this is the result. Now, tell us where he is, and then your interference ends.”
There was silence for several seconds.
“Where is he?” shouted the Lover suddenly. “Where’s he been hiding?”
“That’s another reason it makes sense for my cadre to hunt him,” the Brucolac replied. “He’s in a place many of your troops might refuse to go. Silas Fennec is in the haunted quarter.”
Doul did not flinch. He stared at the vampir. “You do not take him,” he said again. “I am not afraid.”
Bellis listened with shame, and a slow-burning hatred for Fennec. You fuck, she thought with savage satisfaction. Let’s see you lie your way out of this.
Even though he might still be her best hope to get out, she could never allow that fucking pig to lie to her, to use her. That could not go without payback, no matter the cost. She would rather take her chances in Armada, or at the Scar.
You should have fucking told me, Silas, she thought, breathing hard with fury. I wanted—I want—to get away, too. If you’d told me the truth—if you’d been open, if you’d been honest, if you’d not used me—I might have helped you, she thought. We might have done it all together.
But she knew that was not true.
Desperate as she was to get out of this place, she would not have helped him had she known his plans. She would not have been party to that.
With dreadful self-disgust, Bellis realized that Silas had judged her well. His job was to know what he could tell to whom, to know how far those around him would go, and to lie to them accordingly. He had to judge what to tell each of his pawns.
He had been right about her.
Bellis remembered Uther Doul’s rage when she and Tanner had come to him.
He had stared at them as they explained, his face growing stiller and more cold, his eyes darker, as they spoke. Flustered, Bellis and Tanner in turn had tried to explain to him that they had known nothing, that they had both been used.
Tanner had gabbled, and Doul had been impassive, waiting for him to finish and punishing him with silence, saying nothing at all. But then he had turned to Bellis and waited for her explanations. He had unnerved her—he was quite unmoving when she told him that she knew Silas Fennec, Simon Fench. He had not seemed surprised at all by that. He had stood quietly, waiting for more information. But when she told him what she had done, what she had couriered for Fennec, then quite suddenly Doul had exploded with anger.
“No,” he had shouted. “What did he do?”
And when she had murmured something to him—some shamefaced, stuttered assertion that she had had no idea, that she had never dreamed, that she could not have known—he had stared at her very hard, with an expression of cold dislike and cruelty that she had never seen him wear before and that had cut her to her innards.
“Are you sure?” he had said to her, appallingly. “Is that so? No idea? None at all?”
He had birthed a maggot of doubt in her