The Scar - China Mieville [261]
There were no jets of weird energy emitted from behind its walls. There were no deep-sea monstrosities guarding it like a moat. There were men and women on its decks, moving without urgency, but with exhaustion and despondency.
She saw the waves nodding against the sides of the city, and with a sensitivity that had grown inside her without her knowing it, Bellis became aware that Armada was moving again.
Very slowly, as yet no faster than it had when the masses of tugs had hauled it. But it was being borne forward again. The avanc was moving, the pain of its wound receding.
The grindylow had gone.
(And Silas is alive.)
Walking forward, clutching the rail, Bellis headed toward the Grand Easterly’s great prow, and as she rounded a low set of cabins, she heard sounds. There were people ahead of her.
She gazed out over Garwater and Dry Fall and Jhour and Booktown. The sounds of the fighting were subdued. She could no longer hear the great massed movement of crowds, the constant drum of gunshots. Only a few ragged shouts and isolated attacks.
The war was dying. The mutiny was over.
She heard no declamations of revolt or stability; there was nothing around her that might hint at which side had won. And yet somehow when she rounded the last wall and witnessed the scene on the Grand Easterly’s foredeck, she felt no surprise.
Around the edges of the deck stood grim-faced men and women of all races, carved and bloodied. They carried their weapons drawn.
Before them lay a mass of corpses. Many were shattered, their chests torn open and burned dry or emptied out. Most had been decapitated; heads littered the charnel ground randomly, all gaping, fanged, and snake-tongued.
The vampir. Tens of them. Beaten. Executed and dispatched. Overpowered when the tide turned, when their mysterious allies had disappeared and the spontaneous small riots supporting them had petered out in confusion. It was a doomed adventure without the people of their own riding behind them, without a movement of revolt. Eventually the Garwater fighters had lost their fear, and terrorism could not win once the real terror went.
There was a weak movement above her. Looking up at the foremost of the Grand Easterly’s masts, Bellis widened her eyes in shock. And she thought, Oh . . . so that was when it was over.
That was when the Dry Fall cadre lost. After that, they couldn’t win. With that macabre pennant swinging there, the fear they spread must have faded like an echo.
Ten feet up, lashed cruciform to a crossbar, his heels and hands tied tightly with great thick skeins of rope, his snarls pathetic, tongue lolling like a dead animal’s, the blood that discolored his teeth and lips his own, was the Brucolac.
Chapter Forty-five
When day broke, the Brucolac found the strength to scream.
The sun bleached him. He closed his eyes and shook his head pointlessly, trying to get his eyes out of the light. His skin began to welt, as if some punishing chymical had been poured on him. His grave-pale face reddened, blistering, suppurating in the daylight.
He flopped with ugly motion, like a sea-thing beached. His strength leached from him, and he emitted little gasps of pain.
The sun might not kill him for some time, strong as he was: but it disabled him, and more than anything it hurt mercilessly. Two hours after dawn he was too groggy to make a sound. His spittle and venom drooled from him, denaturing.
The sunlight scalded the flesh of his slaughtered cadre, too. As the day crawled on, the tens of frozen bodies became blebbed and misshapen. At dusk, they were swept together and tipped into the sea.
Darkness came like unguent to the Brucolac. The pain began very slowly to bleed from him, and he cracked open his rheum- and pus-locked eyes. His body began to repair, but the sun’s depredations were severe, and it was not till nearly midnight that he found the strength to speak.
His ruined croaking was ignored. He was not tended; he was not fed. Cramp and pain ossified his limbs. Throughout