The Scar - China Mieville [239]
Shekel slipped heavy goggles over his eyes and plunged his head below for as long as their imperfect seal kept out the water. He and Tanner would stare at the shoals of fishes, species they had never seen. Colored and finned intricately, as intense and bizarre as tropical species, here in these more temperate waters. Like scorpion and ratfish, their forms were broken with spindly appendages, and eyes that glowed with unlikely colors.
When Shekel and Tanner hauled themselves out again, Angevine would be waiting, with maybe a bottle of beer or liquor. And even if Tanner and Angevine still spoke to each other a little warily, and realized that they always would, what they shared in Shekel, and the way they had learned to share it, gave them a respectful connection.
It’s kind of a family, Tanner thought.
It was not hard for Bellis to find Uther Doul again. She had only to wait on the deck of the Grand Easterly, knowing he would appear eventually. She was stiff with resentment and incensed by her own hurt. She could not believe how he had dropped her.
As she approached he stared at her, but not with the disgust that she feared. Not with hostility, or with interest, or any kind of connection or recognition. He simply stared.
She drew herself up. She had tied back her hair again, and she knew that the look of stunned pain was ebbing gradually from her face. She still moved stiffly, but nearly two weeks since her flogging she had regained much of herself.
Bellis did not greet Doul. “I want to see Fennec” was all she said.
Doul thought for a second, then inclined his head. “Alright,” he said.
And although this was what she wanted, Bellis hated him for that, because she knew that he allowed it because there was nothing she could do or say to Fennec that could now come in Armada’s way at all. Now that she was not any kind of threat, now that all her cards had been played.
Bellis was quite meaningless now, so she could be indulged.
His magus fin had been taken from him, but it was clear that Garwater was still afraid of Silas Fennec. The corridor along which he was imprisoned was thick with guards. All the doors could be sealed tight: it was below the waterline.
A man and woman sat outside Fennec’s door, fussing over some arcane machine. Bellis felt the dry charge of thaumaturgy against her skin.
Inside, it was a large room, broken by a few portholes through which dark eddies could be seen. Half of the room was sectioned off by iron bars, and beyond them, in a little alcove, hunkered away from the windows and the entrance, Silas Fennec sat on a wooden bench, watching her.
Bellis took in the sight of him. She was caught in a quick kaleidoscope of images of him (their times together, friendly, cold, sexual, surreptitious). Her mouth twisted to see him, and she tasted something very sour.
He was thin, and his clothes were dirty. He met her eyes. She realized, with a sudden shock, that there was a bandage wrapped tight around his right wrist and that his right hand was gone. He saw her notice his injury, and his face twisted before he could control it.
Fennec sighed and stared straight at Bellis.
“What are you doing here?” he asked. He spoke with a drab hostility.
Bellis did not answer. She examined his cell. She saw a heap of unkempt clothes, paper, charcoal, his fat notebook. She studied the bars that kept him from her. They were wrapped around with cables that coiled away and under the door into the room. Fennec watched her trace them back to their source.
“Linked up to those machines out there,” he said to her. He sounded tired. “It’s a dampener. Sniff the air. You can even hear it. Kills the thaumaturgons. No one could do the slightest little hex in here now.” He sniffed and smiled without humor. “It’s in case I’ve got some secret plan. I’ve told