The Scar - China Mieville [225]
“He’s ours,” whispered Doul to the Brucolac, hefting the figurine.
There were yeomen dying in incomprehensible agony across the deck. Their comrades hefted Fennec without any shade of pity, grabbing him roughly, ignoring his screams.
The citizens at the outer edges of Dry Fall and Thee-And-Thine shivered to hear the sounds from the haunted quarter, and made warding signs.
“That’s like nothing I’ve heard before,” they whispered, or similar words, as the screams rang out thinly in the night. “That’s no ghast or ghul . . . That’s something new, that’s got no business in there.”
They could tell it was a man.
Chapter Forty
Uther Doul sat on the bed in Bellis’ cell. The room was still sparse, though the surfaces were now piled with a few accoutrements he had had brought from her rooms: her notebooks, a few clothes.
He watched her as she turned the grindylow statue in her hands. She ran her fingers over it carefully, curiously, feeling the intricacies of its carving. She stared at its twisted face, and into its mouth.
“Be careful,” Doul advised her as she touched her nail to one of its teeth. “It’s dangerous.”
“This is . . . the cause of it all?” said Bellis.
Doul nodded. “He carried it with him. He used it to kill several men. He folded space with it, performed thaumaturgy I’d never seen. That must be how he got into the compass factory.”
Bellis nodded. She understood that Doul was talking about the means by which Fennec had allowed New Crobuzon to find Armada. Some secret engine, some mechanism.
“It must be safe now,” Doul went on. “The lodestone must have been on their Morning Walker.”
Probably, thought Bellis. A device that tracked Armada. You’d better hope it’s not languishing on one of those ironclads, drifting all sunbaked and pocked, stinking by now with its dead crew, where maybe it could be found one day. She turned the statue over again and studied it closely.
“From what we can tell . . .” Doul continued slowly, “from what we’ve got out of Fennec, this statue is not the main thing. Just as the point of a gun isn’t the gun but the bullet, so with this: it’s not the statue itself that has the puissance. That’s just a conduit. This,” he said, “is the source of the power.”
Doul tickled the tough, thin strip of flesh embedded in the statue’s back.
“This is the fin of some ancestor, some assassin-priest, some thaumaturge, some magus. Housed in stone, in a shape that mimics its original form. This is a grindylow relic,” said Doul, “the remnant of some . . . saint. That’s what stinks of power.
“That’s what Fennec told us,” he said, and Bellis could imagine the techniques by which Fennec had been made to answer those questions.
“This is what’s behind it all,” said Bellis, and Doul nodded.
“It did amazing things. It allowed Fennec to do amazing things. But even so, I think he’d only just begun to understand it. I think New Crobuzon must have reason to believe that this . . . this charmed debris has far more power than Fennec had learnt to use.” He looked Bellis in the eye. “I don’t think New Crobuzon would come so far, try so hard, for anything less than the most powerful forces.”
Bellis looked reverentially at the object in her hands.
“We have our hands,” Doul said quietly, “on something extraordinary. We have found a very great thing. Gods know what it might allow us to do.”
This is the cause of it all, she thought. This is what Fennec stole. He even told me he’d stolen something from The Gengris. This is what he told New Crobuzon he had—didn’t try to pass it on to them, of course. They’d never have come looking for him if he’d given it to them. This is what he dangled in front of them, from across the world, said “Save me and this is yours,” and made them come.
This is what New Crobuzon crossed the world and waged war for. It set everything in motion. For this (unknowingly) I led Armada to the mosquito island. To send some lying message to New Crobuzon, I gave Armada the avanc instead of throwing Aum’s fucking