The Scar - China Mieville [262]
He had only started to heal. His wounds were still raw when the sun reached out and probed them with its sadistic fingers as, like a cog in some remorseless engine, the day came round again.
The clean-up began quietly. Crews entered the cooling Hoddling and gauged the damage, trying to see how much could be salvaged.
Whole rooms and corridors had been reshaped by the heat, their edges made fluid. There were many bodies: some pristine, some variously disturbed.
Across Garwater, and in the fringes of its neighboring ridings, the conflict was manifest in broken glass and bullet holes, and bloodstains in the city’s gutters. What rubble there was was swept up and taken to foundries and factories, to be broken down or resmelted.
Garwater loyalists patrolled the streets. Bask and Curhouse ridings were quiet. Their rulers had known nothing of the revolt, and they had waited, paralyzed, watching it, carefully gauging the forces, ready to join against a defeated Garwater. But the vampir had been defeated. Their rulers kept themselves low, cowed by the Lovers. Quiescent.
The general of Shaddler was dead, killed by the vampir who had held him hostage, acting in their panic when they heard their ruler was captured. They had been killed in turn, at great cost to the scabmettlers. The walls of Barrow Hall were disfigured with great streaking sculptures in dark red, where scabmettler blood had spattered.
No one knew exactly how many vampir had made up the Brucolac’s cadre, and no one was exactly sure how many had been killed. Without question, some had survived. Defeated, they must have gone underground, become nondescript new citizens. Squatting in ruins, lodging in flophouses. Invisible.
They would have to be careful when they fed. They would have to be selective, and restrained, and quite brutal—they could leave no prey alive. Because when they were found—and they would be found, the Garwater crews swore implacably—they would be killed.
The fear of them was gone.
And meanwhile the arch traitor, the Brucolac himself, was stretched out on his metal cross, slowly scorching and starving to death.
The avanc had picked up its stupid, ponderous progress. But it remained slow, and its pace was not so steady. It swam, and dragged the city, and sped up and slowed, and never achieved the speed it had previously reached.
As the hours and days passed, the navigators became convinced that its wounds, sustained in mysterious circumstances known only to a small clutch of Armadans, were not healing. It was bleeding, weakening, still.
No revenge was taken against the citizens of Dry Fall, whom the Lovers announced curtly to be innocent of their ruler’s guilt. There was even amnesty for those who had rioted. It was a chaotic time, the Lovers ruled, and no one had known what was happening; there was confusion. This was a time to bring the city together, they said, and blame was not appropriate.
Still, the patrols of Garwater’s yeomanry and armed citizens were kept largest and best-armed in Dry Fall. The Dry Fallen watched them resentfully, staring from doorways, hiding bruises and wounds sustained that night, not trusting the Lovers’ mercy.
Like smoke from the riots’ fires, something had spread over the city that night, and it remained: a traumatizing uncertainty, a rancor. And even many of those who had fought hard to repulse the Brucolac were touched by it.
Blood, violence, and fear—they seemed the legacy of the Lovers’ projects. After centuries of peace, Armada had been twice to war in less than thirty days—once with itself. Armada’s intricacies of diplomacy had collapsed under the Lovers’ fervor, the networks of obligations and interests splitting, tearing the city apart.
The Lovers were subordinating everything to their search for the abstract power of the Scar. This was a break with Armada’s mercantile venality: that kind of intrepidity,