The Scar - China Mieville [266]
Shamed, she took them, and nodded thanks to him.
“One more thing,” Tanner said. “We bury him tomorrow.” His voice skipped only a moment on the word bury. “In Croom Park.”
“How . . . ?” Bellis began, surprised. Armadans gave their dead sea burials. Tanner gesticulated the question away.
“Shek weren’t a . . . a sea animal at heart,” he said carefully. “He was a city boy more than anything, and I suppose there are traditions I thought I’d left . . . I want to know where he is. When they told me I couldn’t do it, I told them to try and stop me.”
“Tanner Sack,” she said as he turned to go, “why Croom Park?”
“You told him about it one time,” he said. “And he went to see for himself and he loved it. I think it reminded him of Rudewood.”
Bellis cried when he had gone, could not stop herself. She told herself furiously that it was for the last time.
It was a brief service, clumsy and poignant. A mongrel of theology, gods of New Crobuzon and Armada asked humbly to look after Shekel’s soul.
No one was sure what gods, if any, Shekel had respected.
Bellis brought flowers, stolen from the colorful beds elsewhere in the park.
The city was dragged on, east-northeast, decelerating very gradually as the avanc slowed. No one knew how badly it was wounded. They would not risk sending another crew down.
In the days after the war, and especially after Shekel’s funeral, Bellis felt unable to focus. She spent much of her time with Carrianne, who was as subdued as she, and who refused even to discuss where the city was going. It was hard to concentrate on the journey, and impossible to imagine what would happen when they arrived.
If the Garwater scholars were correct, the city was drawing close. Perhaps two weeks, perhaps one; that was what was whispered. A few days more until Armada reached the wound in this empty sea; and then the hidden engines and arcane science would be let loose, and all the possibilities that swarmed around the Scar would be mined.
The air was tense with expectancy, with fear.
When Bellis opened her eyes in the morning, sometimes she felt that the aether bristled, as if forces she did not understand coursed around her. Strange rumors began to spread.
First it was the gamblers, the cardsharps in the late-night games at Thee-And-Thine. There were stories of hands changing in the instant they were raised, the colored costumes of the suits shimmering like kaleidoscopes, dimly glimpsed for the tiniest moment, freezing into a configuration after they had been dealt.
There were stories of intrusive spirits, browners or kelkin, fleeting invisibly through the city, moving things. Objects put down were discovered again inches from their place—in places where they might have been left, but had not been. Things that were dropped broke and then were not broken, and perhaps had not been dropped but waited on the side.
The Scar, Bellis thought with dull wonder. It’s bleeding.
The sea and sky became very suddenly dangerous. Rain clouds appeared and raged and very suddenly went again, not quite hitting the city, skirting it. The avanc dragged Armada through violent patches, where the waves were suddenly choppy and high, in a tightly circumscribed area, with gentle waters clearly visible to either side.
Tanner no longer swam, but only dipped himself daily. He was afraid to immerse himself for long. The sounds and lights from beneath the water were strong enough now that even those on the city above could hear and see them—ejections from unseen things.
Sometimes clots of the sentient weed passed by Armada, and sometimes there were other shapes on the waves—they moved and could not easily be identified, that looked at once organic, random, and made.
Still the Brucolac floundered and did not die. The deck below him was stained with his emissions.
Walking the decks and