The Scar - China Mieville [243]
“I think it must be,” he agreed slowly. “Krüach’s confident that we can fix whatever’s wrong. But I’m not sure we know enough to cure it.”
The air above the Hidden Ocean was desiccated and suddenly hot. The city’s crops became brittle.
All the ridings withdrew into themselves, and the ridiculous semblance of normality that Armada had recently affected began to break down. There was little work done. The pirate-citizens waited, motionless in their homes beneath a punitive sky. The city was bleached and vague. Marooned. Lolling like a lifeboat, almost immobile.
Its wake grew daily more faint as the avanc slowed.
A slow-burning panic began to spread. Meetings were called. For the first time, they were not organized by the rulers, but by popular committees operating across the ridings. And if at first they were made up almost totally of men and women from Curhouse and Dry Fall, the minorities from Jhour and Booktown and Garwater grew each day. They discussed what was happening, urgently, seeking answers no one was able to give them.
A nightmare image was recurring in people’s heads: Armada, adrift, without motive power, in the barren waters of the Hidden Ocean. Or tethered by the motionless avanc, an anchor of unimaginable weight.
The city’s speed was still decreasing.
(Much later, Bellis realized that the day when the avanc’s condition became shockingly clear, the day that so many people died, was in Crobuzoner terms the first of Melluary—a Fishday. That fact made her cough with a desolate approximation of laughter, when she realized it later when the killing was over.)
It was midmorning when the impurities appeared in the sea.
At first, those who saw them thought they were more aggregates of the semisentient weed, but it became quickly obvious that they were something else. They were lighter, and lower in the water—sprawling patches of color, liquescent at the edges.
The blemishes appeared miles off, in the city’s path. As they came gradually closer, word spread, and crowds gathered in Shaddler’s Sculpture Garden, at Armada’s fore, to watch whatever it was approach.
It was a mass of some viscous liquid, thick as dense mud. Where waves reached its outer edges they reduced to ugly ripples that crawled weakly across the surface of the substance and were swallowed up.
The stuff was the pallid yellow-white of a caveworm.
Bellis swallowed, feeling sick with anxiety, and then realized very suddenly as the wind shifted that it was not anxiety at all. It was the stench.
A rolling mass of smell oozed over them. The citizens blenched and puked. Bellis and Carrianne staggered and stared at each other, paling, managing not to spew even amid a chorus of retching. The wobbling white mass stank of the worst, most septic rot, air-starved flesh gone putrid.
“Jabber preserve us!” gasped Bellis. Above her head Armada’s carrion birds wheeled, coiling excitedly like some living cloud toward the rank stuff, then arcing suddenly away as they grew close, as if its degree of corruption defied even them.
The city reached the outer edges of the reeking substance. There were great swathes of it ahead, a bobbing purulent mass.
Most of those who had gathered to watch had run back to their houses to burn incense. Bellis and Carrianne remained, watching Johannes and his colleagues at the edge of the park. With perfume-soaked rags around their faces, Garwater’s investigators leaned over the rail, trolling a bucket on a rope into the substance. They hauled it up and began to examine it.
Then recoiled from it, violently.
When Johannes saw Bellis and Carrianne, he ran over to them and tore off his mask. He was white and trembling, his skin reflective with sweat.
“It’s pus,” he said, and pointed to the sea with an unsteady finger. “It’s a slick of pus.”
Chapter Forty-three
The avanc is sick.
Trying to continue its mindless motion at the rockmilk engine’s command, it slows and slows. It is—what? Bleeding, wounded? Fevered? Chafed sore by the alien reality around it? Too mute or stupid or obedient to feel