The Scar - China Mieville [223]
And suddenly there were others. Hard-faced figures emerged from boltholes in the wood, all around, and came at him with shocking speed. They bore down on him with guns and weapons outstretched.
“Keep him alive!” shouted Doul.
Silas Fennec felt a tremor from the lascivious tongue of his stone icon, and puissance roared through him. He stepped up—up onto spaces that he would not have seen or been capable of treading a moment before. Fennec twisted as the first Garwater man passed stupidly below him, then he opened his mouth and gasped as his gut spasmed. With a retching growl he spewed up a bolt of green-black glowing bile, a mouthful of thaumaturgically charged plasma that was not quite viscous liquid and not quite energy. It burst from him and landed foursquare in his attacker’s face.
Silas Fennec stepped quickly through ways of seeing, leaving the corridor, rising through the boat, the man on whom he had spat shrieking weakly and clawing himself, and dying.
The yeomanry were everywhere, emerging from doors and clutching at his clothes. They burst from closed spaces like rats or dogs or worms or gods knew what, reaching out for him and swinging their blades. They were quick, chosen for skill and courage: a plague, an infestation, an invasion, hemming him, penning him in, hunting him down.
Jabber and fuck they’re all around me, Fennec thought, and hungrily pressed his mouth again to the statuette. Planes and angles folded around him, reconfiguring in his path and wake, and he twisted and bolted up stairs feeling like a drowning man, reaching for air. He was angry.
The Garwater crew grabbed for him, gripped hold of what they could. You do not fuck with me, he thought, and felt a swell of power. I can do more than fucking run. He turned, snarling, spat and spewed and puked at his attackers, venting the baleful coagulum that collected in him with the statue’s kiss. He rolled his tongue and hawked snotty jets of the stuff at the faces around him.
Where the sputum hit, it corroded normal space like a dimensional acid, and the yeomen cried out in dreadful alien pain as their eyes and bones and flesh folded in on themselves and out of corporeality, dissolving, dissipating, torn away in impossible directions. They lay wounded and wetly screaming, and Silas looked at them without pity as he passed, seeing their faces flayed of reality, bleeding a viscous nothingness that spat and sizzled, their heads and chests punctured with holes into a void. They hemorrhaged into that unspace, a deadening vacuity spreading like gangrene from the edges of their wounds so that their flesh became hard to notice, vague and irrelevant, and then suddenly did not exist.
His attackers rolled and screamed as long as they still had mouths.
Fennec kept running, his heart hammering. He ran and kissed and bent space with his intricate steps, unfolding the planes around him.
Uther Doul followed him grimly, with such tenacity that even confined to conventional space, he stayed on Fennec’s tail.
Doul was relentless.
Fennec burst from the dark confines of the Wordhoard and slammed into the air. He hung poised for a moment, tongue bloody from the statue’s marble teeth.
Fuck you all, he thought fiercely, all his fear running out of him. He plunged his tongue deep into his statue, felt power coruscate him, felt aglow with it like a dark star. Whirling, he skittered through a fringe of torn rigging, moving up by the shadows of wires, bending reality around him, buckling it and sliding along the fold he had created—up, out over the decrepit ship.
A corps of grim yeomanry rose from the hatch below and spread with expert speed across the deck. Uther Doul came with them, and he stared straight into Fennec’s eyes.
“Fennec,” he said, and raised his sword.
Silas Fennec looked down at him, grinned his rage, and answered in a voice that reverberated wrongly, sounding close up to the ear like a threatening whisper. “Uther Doul.”
Fennec was poised fifteen feet above