The Scar - China Mieville [241]
Johannes still worked with a group overseeing the avanc: plotting its speed, estimating the biomass in the area, and the thaumaturgic flows. But it was make-work half the time. When drunk, he would whine about how he had been used up and dispensed with. Bellis and Carrianne would sneer at him behind his drink-fuddled back.
Johannes voiced cautious uncertainties about their trajectory, about their presence in the Hidden Ocean. To find any sign of dissonance, of opposition to the Lovers’ journey, warmed Bellis with surprise. That was part of why she tolerated Johannes’ presence.
He was too cowardly to admit it, but he wished they would turn back, as Bellis did. And as the days passed and Armada slipped further and further into uncharted waters, into the Hidden Ocean, Bellis discovered (with stabs of unexpected hope) that she and Johannes were not alone.
Hedrigall’s desertion was a trauma that did not heal.
Armada moved on into seas that did not obey laws that any oceanologer understood. It could have seemed an adventure or some god-granted destiny to a citizenry still grimly fired up by triumph in war and by the rhetoric of Garwater’s greatest-ever leaders. But then loyal, reliable Hedrigall had run, and that gave a terrible coloration to the city’s journey.
The Arrogance had quickly been replaced. Now another airship hung over the Grand Easterly, watching the horizons. But it was not so large or quite so high. It did not have the Arrogance’s range of vision, and the metaphors thrown off from that fact troubled men and women otherwise loyal.
“What did he see coming?” they muttered. “Hedrigall, what did he see coming?”
The city’s motion was its own dynamic. There were no strong voices arguing to turn back. Even those other rulers who disapproved of the Lovers’ plans had given in, or only spoke their criticisms in camera. But Hedrigall’s dissident ghost stalked the ridings, and the triumph, the excitement with which the journey had started, was gone.
Tanner and Shekel gave new names to the creatures they saw below the water: runrunners and dancing flies and yellowheads.
They watched Armada’s naturalists drifting over the curious new animals, snatching a few in nets, keeping their distance from the big, snub-faced yellowheads, heliotyping them with unwieldy waterproof cameras and phosphoric flares.
Schools of the animals gusted through the pipes and hulls that jutted below like roots. They mixed with more recognizable fish—there were whiting and baitfish even in the Hidden Ocean—eating them or being eaten.
Tanner dived and teased a couple of hand-sized specimens with his tentacles. At the surface, Shekel looked down on Tanner’s scars.
Further and further into that sea.
There were strange sounds at night: the rutting calls of unseen animals with voices like bulls. Some days there was no swimming at all, not by the hardiest or most inquisitive diver, and even the menfish hid themselves in their little city-bottom caverns. These were dangerous waters. Armada passed through the unpredictable edges of boiltides, by the hunting grounds of piasa, living whirlpools that circled the city hungrily but kept their distance.
In moonless dark, lights pulsed below the waters, like the bioluminescence of benthic things magnified many hundreds of times. There were times when the clouds above the sea moved much faster than the wind. One day when the air was dry as elyctricity, shapes appeared off the city’s star’d edge, like tiny islands. They were rafts of unknown weed, great clots of mutant bladderwrack that moved suddenly away from the city under some motive power of their own.
Across the whole of Armada, in every riding, in tumbledown slums and the most elegant townhouses, there was a tension, a neurotic expectancy. People did not sleep well. Bellis blenched when that began, remembering the misery of the nightmares that had racked New Crobuzon and that ultimately had led her here. From one set of ruined nights to another, she thought after several miserable, insomniac hours.
During some of those dark times,