The Scar - China Mieville [258]
The figurine hit the iron with a massive sound and broke apart.
Shards scattered, and cold drops of something like oil.
Bellis was stunned. She watched the particles settle and felt something in the aether resonate and go out.
In the middle of the floor, surrounded by stone dust and gelatinous residue, was a sliver of flesh. The magus fin, looking like some rotten wrinkled fillet.
The grindylow ignored it, and fluttered their tails, and approached Silas Fennec behind his bars.
“We have found what was stolen from us,” the grindylow whispered. And then it moved with a strange violence, wriggling through air as if the air fought back, and reaching up, it parted the bars as if they were waterweed, pulling them apart so that it seemed they might tear into stringy fronds. But they held; they oozed back and were solid and upright once more, and the grindylow had passed through them to the other side.
It hovered quite still over Silas Fennec, and he flailed in its shadow.
Bellis could not watch Fennec’s degradation, see him so stripped. She could not have imagined that he could be so afraid.
“We have what was taken,” the grindylow murmured, and it pulled back knife-sharp fingers and stabbed them down, and when she did not hear a cry or some wet sound Bellis opened her eyes again and saw that grindylow had rummaged in the rags that lay on the floor like castoff skins, and from them had pulled Silas Fennec’s notebook.
Bellis remembered it well: black-bound and thick, distended with inserted papers. She recalled its reams of nebulous jottings, heliotypes and inexpert sketches, notes, questions, and mementos.
The grindylow turned slowly through the pages. Periodically it would turn and hold up a page to the bars, showing Bellis something that told her nothing.
“The salp vats. The weapon farms. The castle. Our anatomy. A gazetteer of the second city. And see here,” it said with opaque triumph, “coastline maps. The mountains between the ocean and the Cold Claw Sea. Where our placements are. Where there are fissures, where the rock is weakest.” And something moved in Bellis’ mind: the first stirrings of comprehension.
“Would you tell your masters where is best for their excavations, robberman?” it asked. Cradling the stump of his arm, Fennec tried to move further away.
Bellis could see the page the grindylow had opened. She had seen it before, in her room, and in Croom Park, months before. Rough scribbles suggesting engines, red lines of force and striae of rock types crosshatched in ink. The hidden positions of The Gengris on the Cold Claw side; the paradoses and defenses; the traps.
Understanding was uncoiling in Bellis like cold water. She remembered the conversations she had had with Fennec, when they had first grown close. She remembered his stories, the extraordinary tales of his travels. She remembered what he had said.
If you can get across the Cold Claws, if you can reach the islands and the far shores, if you can trek across those miles and miles of punitive geography, to the Shatterjack Mines and Hinter, to those hungry trade partners and those untouched miles of resources, then you are made. But most can’t make it, because the route is so terrible; because you can’t come at it from the south, because The Gengris are in charge of the southern tip of the Cold Claw Sea and won’t let outsiders pass.
But what if you could reach it from the south, directly, Bellis thought, coming straight? Not into some tumbling fucked-up overland caravan shedding its goods and machines and crews like spoor across the mountains and the grasslands, but by ship. What if you could sail from New Crobuzon, safely past The Gengris in safety, and straight up to the north?
“My good gods,” she murmured, and stared at Fennec. “A canal. They’re planning a canal.”
It made such sense. The rock ridge between the freshwater of the Cold Claw Sea and the Swollen Ocean’s brine was only thirty, forty miles wide in places, its ridges wrinkled with valleys. Bellis could picture the work. A prodigious project, true, but what