The Scar - China Mieville [233]
She moved, and the cloth shifted against the scabs on her torn-up back, and she hissed in pain.
Doul stood behind her, his presence like an imperfection in the glass. She wanted him to leave, but she could not bear to address him. Bellis hobbled around her room on fever-weak legs. She could feel the gauze sticking to her back, where her injuries had wept.
The pain in her back was unpleasant and constant, but it did not vary much. Bellis treated it like white noise, ignoring it until it became a kind of aching nothing to her. She stood on her doorstep and looked all around her, at the airships and birds, the light wind mindlessly knocking Armada’s walls. There was industry, men and women working furiously, as there had been on the first day, when she had drawn the curtains of Chromolith Smokestacks and seen her new city.
Something was new, she realized slowly. The air was different, the way the city rode the currents . . . the sea itself. The ships surrounding Armada no longer meandered on their own routes from horizon to horizon: the mass of vessels (still marked by war) were in tight formation behind the city, as if afraid of losing it.
There was something different about the sea.
She turned to stare at Doul.
“You’re free,” he said, not without gentleness, “and superfluous. Krüach Aum hasn’t needed you for a long time. You’ll need to heal. For the city’s sake, any information about your accidental role in the war has been suppressed. I’m sure the library would take you back . . .”
“What’s happened?” said Bellis in the plaintive croak her beating and sickness had left her. “Something’s different about . . . everything. What’s happened?”
“Two days ago,” said Doul, “insofar as one can be exact, we passed through something. Everyone can feel it. The fleet . . .” He pointed at the vessels behind the city. “They’re having a difficult time. There are strange currents. Their engines are untrustworthy.
“We’ve passed out of the Swollen Ocean,” he said, and gazed at her impassively. “We’re in the outskirts of a new sea. This . . .” The quick thrust of his arm took in the water, horizon to horizon. “This is the Empty, the Hidden Ocean.”
So far from home, thought Bellis, surprising herself with fury. Further and further they’re taking us, me, further and further. They get their way. She heard a ringing inside her like tinnitus. Everything we’ve done—right and wrong—means nothing. They took us here so easily, to this fucked-up empty edge of sea no ship can cross. In we go, and my home is gone.
Even the thought of the Lovers appalled her: their crooning lovesounds; their sick, endless, sharp-edged betrothals. She was in their power. This was where they wanted to go. Bellis had tried to turn them, and failed.
“They got us here, then?” she said to Uther, cold and suddenly unafraid of him again. She jutted her chin. “And I know what happens now—on toward the Scar.”
If he was surprised, he hid it well. He met her eyes, quite expressionless.
So Fennec was too slow with his pamphlets and rumors, she thought. That doesn’t mean it’s over; that doesn’t mean we have to accept this.
When Shekel opened his door to Bellis, he stared at her for a long and silent moment, wildly confused.
He recognized her, but was suddenly convinced that he was wrong. It seemed that this blanched lady with her dark hair all dry and tumbling over her like old grass, her expression suggesting years of pain, could not be Coldwine, must be some ruined vagrant with a similar face.
“Shekel,” she said in a voice that he could not believe was hers, “you have to let me in. I need to speak to Tanner Sack.”
Mute and appalled, he moved aside for her, and she wheezed and entered the shadow.
Tanner Sack turned in his bed, muttering in thick tongues, his eyes rheumy, then bolted up, shedding sheets. He pointed at Bellis.
“Get her the fuck away, Shekel,” he shouted. “Get her the fuck out of here . . .”
“Listen to me!” Bellis said, her voice urgent and guttural. “Please . . .”
“I got fuck-all to hear from you, bitch!” Tanner was shaking