The Scar - China Mieville [263]
While Armada was riding high, while its power was growing and feat after incredible feat was performed, the Lovers had buoyed up the citizens with their rhetoric and zeal.
When the Sorghum had been stolen, it was the greatest military feat of Armada’s recent history, and everyone could see that it gave the city power, that their ships and engines were better fueled. When the avanc had been raised, the Lovers had spoken of the ancient chains; of fulfilling Armada’s secret, historic mission; of the swift sailing from port to port that was now a possibility; of the quick, worldwide search for booty.
But now all that was shown to be deceit. The purpose instead was this opaque quest. And though there were still thousands of Armadans excited by what they undertook, there were thousands more who no longer cared, and a growing number who felt duped.
And with the avanc so weak—everyone could tell—even the real purpose of all this, the search for the Scar, might come to nothing. If the avanc kept slowing, who knew what might happen?
In the aftermath of the Brucolac’s mutiny, and the deaths and broken trust that came out of it, morale in Armada was low and worsening. The loyal Garwater patrols felt the growing hostility, the shapeless anger—even in Garwater.
Hundreds of Armadans were dead. Torn open, caught in crossfires, bitten and paralyzed and drained by the vampir, crushed by collapsing architecture, burned in fires, beaten to death. It was far fewer than had been killed in the battle against New Crobuzon, but the trauma of these deaths was vastly larger. This had been a civil war; these people had been killed by their own. People were numbed and blasted by it.
There were those who had seen glimpses of the grindylow and who realized that there was no way the Brucolac could ever have stopped the avanc moving, and no way he could have warped reality with those thaumaturgic blasts. But in the whole of Armada, only a handful knew the truth of the deal that had been struck. For the most part people made vague, curt references to weird vampir magic and did not press discussion further.
The grindylow had come and gone, and of those few who had seen them, almost no one knew what they had been. Their presence remained inexplicable and overshadowed by the civil war.
Hundreds of Armadans were dead, killed by their own.
Krüach Aum was dead. Bellis did not mourn him—he had unsettled her with his sociopathic calm and his brain like a difference engine—but she felt a sense of pathos at his murder.
Escapee from a prison island locked down by its own history. Stepping out into the strangest city of Bas-Lag, used as ruthlessly as he had previously been used by the Kettai authorities, killed investigating the creature he had helped conjure. What a weird, etiolated life.
Johannes Tearfly was dead. It was a surprise to Bellis how that affected her. She was truly sad, truly sorry that he was gone. She remembered him with a catch in her throat. The manner of his death was unthinkable—so fearful it must have been, so dark and cold, so claustrophobic, so far below the world. She remembered him preparing to descend, all excitement and fascination. It had been impressive, for a coward.
Shekel was dead.
That shattered her.
In the day after the mutiny, when her legs had strengthened enough to walk, she had wandered random and dumb through the battle sites.
There was nothing to stop her shuffling through scenes of war, past the cadavers, trailing blood on her shoes.
On one of the trawlers by the ruined Hoddling, in the shadow of a wooden warehouse that belled over gory cobblestones, Bellis found Tanner Sack. She saw him bent double, by a wall. Beside him was Angevine, the Remade woman, tears cutting the filth on her face.
Bellis realized then, but