The Scar - China Mieville [224]
They raised their weapons. Fennec shimmered, and bullets passed through where he had been—through bristling air—and spat as they disappeared. He opened his mouth, and gobs of that corrosive spit-puke flew out of him like shrapnel from a shell.
They burst across the deck and into the faces of his attackers, and there was a percussion of shrieks. The men scattered in panic.
Fennec kept his eyes on Doul.
Doul leaped out of the path of the spittle with brutal economy, his face taut, still watching Fennec. Fennec flickered and was lower, was ghosting over the deck crooning his delight, leaving a slick of caustic drool. Any man came close to him and he spat, and they backed off, or died. He tracked Uther Doul.
“Take me, then,” whispered Fennec with drunk bravado. His throat was raw with the uncanny spit, but he felt he could do anything, burn a hole in the universe. He felt uncontainable. Doul retreated before the puissant, bristling figure, leaping, moving with terse anger, gritting his teeth against Fennec’s voice, which still muttered up close to his ear. “Come on . . .”
Then through the light and dark and the heaviness of wood, through the slap of water like little fists around him, the lights of Armada only a few yards away, Fennec heard a voice behind him.
“Siiiiiilassssss.”
Like the strike of a monstrous snake.
With his heart spasming Fennec turned, and through agitated space he saw the Brucolac—bestial, glowing, hate cast in bone. Leaping up out of darkness, his vast tongue uncoiled. Hurtling for him.
Fennec screamed and tried to kiss his grotesque again, but the Brucolac reached him and punched out, straight-fingered, lancing his hand into Fennec’s throat.
The strike sent Fennec caroming to the deck, supine, fighting to breathe. The Brucolac fell with him, his eyes burning. Still Fennec tried to bring the figurine toward his face, and with a kind of contemptuous ease, the Brucolac snatched Fennec’s free hand and held it effortlessly. He raised his foot (with humbling speed) and brought it down on Fennec’s right wrist, stamping savagely, pushing it into the deck and shattering it.
Fennec screamed in a high, silly vibrato as his ruined fingers spasmed. The statue spun across the wood.
He lay on the splinters and howled, blood leaking from his mouth and nose, and from a wrist torn apart. Fennec screamed in agony and terror and paddled his legs uselessly, trying to get away. He was fully corporeal again, broken and pathetically there. Uther Doul appeared, leaning into his field of vision.
As he floundered, Fennec’s shirt tore and flapped open, baring his chest.
It was mottled, clammy, and discolored in great patches of dirt-green and white. It glowed unhealthily like dead flesh. Here and there were ragged flanges, extrusions like catfish whiskers, like fins.
Doul and the Brucolac took in his alterations.
“Look at you . . .” murmured Uther Doul.
“Is that what it was all about?” hissed the Brucolac, looking at the statue Doul held.
Fennec continued to scream, snottily. The stone doll stared inscrutably at Uther Doul, winking at him, its open eye limpid and cold. It hugged itself with its unclear limbs cut from freezing stone, green-grey or black by turns. It gurned at him with its horrible round mouth, showing its teeth. Doul fingered the flap of skin that was folded down the statue’s back.
“That is a puissant thing,” the Brucolac said to Fennec, who shivered as shock set in. “How many Armadans has it killed?”
“Bring him,” said Doul to his unwounded men. They came forward, pausing nervously when the Brucolac did not move.
He had interfered despite Doul’s orders, and perhaps had saved his life, but Doul denied him any rueful or apologetic