The Scar - China Mieville [222]
Bellis had looked up sharply as he began to speak, but her eyes widened as he continued. His level voice became sour as he mocked her.
She burned, utterly dismayed. Shamed, and alone again.
“Oh,” she breathed. She could not speak.
Uther Doul turned the key and left Bellis alone to watch the fishes that swarmed stupidly to whatever light spilled from her window.
There was no such thing as silence in Armada. In the quietest part of the longest night, without a soul on any side, the city was full of noises.
The wind and water played it incessantly. Armada rode on swells, and compacted, and spread its substance wide and brought it tight again. The rigging whispered. Masts and smokestacks shifted uncomfortably. Vessels knocked together for hour upon hour, like bones, like someone infinitely stupid and patient at the door of an empty house.
The city came closest to true silence in its empty haunted quarter. The tapping and grating and slopping of water seemed more hollow there. But in that place there were other, more obscure sounds that frightened those who heard them, and kept intruders away.
A slow crackling, like a tower of kindling collapsing. The rhythmic thudding of something mechanical piercing wood. A faint crooning like a mistuned flute.
The haunted quarter lolled among its odd noises, and moldered and swelled faintly with years of water, and continued its long, drawn-out collapse. No one knew what was hidden there in its age-blistered boats.
The Wordhoard was the largest vessel in the haunted quarter. An ancient ship more than four hundred feet long, carved in ocher wood, once deep-stained with intense colors, all blasted now by age and salt air. It was littered with the debris of five masts and a profusion of derricks and stays and yards. The staves and poles lay across the deck like crosshatching. They were losing their shapes, rotting and worm-eaten into nothing.
It was almost midnight. Sounds came from Dry Fall and Thee-And-Thine ridings: drinking and everything that went with it; mechanical noises of reconstruction from the building sites created by the war. There were still bridges linking the ridings to the haunted quarter, old and unused, put in place unknown numbers of years ago and tenaciously refusing to become dust.
From a rude little barge at the edge of Thee-And-Thine, a man crept across water to the derelict vessels beyond. He walked without fear through a shipscape of decay: mildew, and rust corrosive as frostbite. There was only starlight to see by, but he knew his way.
At the fore of an iron trawler, the great winches were split, and they splayed their mechanical innards as if they had been butchered. The man picked a way through the greased carnage and crossed onto the Wordhoard. Its long deck reared out before him, listing a little off true.
(It was held below by the vast chain, fitted long ago, that stretched down into the water and held the avanc in place.)
The man descended into the darkness at the haunted vessel’s core. He was not quiet. He knew that if he was heard, he would be thought a phantom.
He moved through half-lit corridors, their contours outlined with thaumaturgy or phosphorescent mold.
The man slowed and looked around him, his face creasing in hard concern, his fingers tightening on the statue he held. When he reached age-slimed steps leading down, he stopped, resting his free hand on the banister. He held his breath and turned his head slowly around him, staring hard into every dark place, listening.
Something was whispering.
That was a sound the man had never heard before, even on these ghost-infested decks.
The man turned. He gazed into the pitch-black at the end of the passageway as if it were a battle of wills, as if he tried to stare down the darkness, until eventually he won, and it gave up what it had been hiding.
“Silas.”
A man stepped out of the shadow.
Instantly Silas Fennec brought up the statue in his hand and slammed his tongue deep into its