The Scar - China Mieville [230]
I make a rooftop way to my moonship. Over torn-up slates and boards and their crossbreeds, through a low nightlit forest of flues steeples watertowers, in ridings not my own. I do not rule here, there is no goretax, it is a day since I have fed and it would take very little to slip along this drainpipe groundward like the drops of calcium that beard it. Very little to find a blood-filled nightwalker and dispose of his her husk but those days are gone, now I am bureaucrat not predator, and it is much better.
It is a long time till dawn but something has passed. We are moving on toward morning. My time is over.
I am on trawlers and houseboats and gone again (fleeting foot-strokes as if uncertain) through Shaddler and its cottages and industry (on for my fat ship). Dry Fall where scored streets are quieter and cushioned in dust.
Where does it come from? Swept hourly by neurotic sea-wind, when does dust touch down?
In some lights (reveries no less than true for that) I see it thick as snowfall and cobwebs clog my passage home. Alone I drown in dust and choke in it, in time’s desiccated exhaust.
I know when things are stirring. I know all the city’s rhythms. Something new is here.
There are tracks on the Uroc’s moon-white decks. Some hand unknown to me has held this rigging.
I watch for the newcomer.
Let us see.
What are you?
In my corridors, toward my berth, you have left your spoor. One, two drops of brine. Smears of something mucal. Scuffed varnish and iron. What are you?
You are hardly hiding from me. You are welcoming me home.
And oh see, here on my threshold you have left me blood.
Drizzled like sugar.
I can hear you behind my door.
My room smells like an estuary. River coagulate and fishgut blood. You rattle for me stranger, like a summons you shake the bones you wear. I have not pulled open any sluices to let the moon illuminate my bedchamber, but light is for the living. These that look upon you are vampir eyes.
And welcome to you.
Three of you to wait for me in a grisly tableau: reclined upon my bed and in front of my window and by me now, closing my door, ushering me respectful into my home.
Look at you.
Look at you shimmering before me great salamander tails folded in layers on my floor, blunt streamlined skulls like viperfish, your teeth protruding like fistfuls of nails, eyes black and big as tarpits, wet skin stretched on muscled bone like sap on knotted wood. See you upright in my room.
And you, recumbent on my covers like a painter’s nude, grinning at me without intent on your piscine face, your neck wrapped all about with charms and bones, beckoning me politely, whose is the face you carry in your hand?
Whose head is that you have taken, to bring blood for me? What woman was she? A guard who found you? Missing in the carnage of the New Crobuzon war, drowned or cut apart, was it you who split her neck to take that misshapen trophy? It is a frayed-enough edge, a bloody and fibrous laceration.
The tan-haired woman stares at me from your fist.
Look at you!
You drop her dead flesh and rise like something I have never seen.
—Seigneur Brucolac, you tell me in a voice colder than mine.—We must talk.
I don’t mind. I will talk to you. I know who you are. I think I have expected you.
And as the hours unfold toward the morning oh what conspiracies oh what secrets we uncover.
You have come late, riverthing. Waterman. You have come late from the Cold Claw Sea, searching these salt currents for what was taken from you. Nothing you say to me with that spastically moving blood-flecked jaw is clear. Like the riverthing you are you flicker toward your meaning and disturb a silt of effluvial words that cloud your intent. But I have dealt with seers poets and Weavers and can track your insinuations.
You have hunted on currents. Cleaved parasitic to the undersides of our attackers and then fluttered free in the squalor of battle and you have plucked bodies from the dead and dying plenty.
And then, what am I to understand? Hiding away you have used them.