The Scar - China Mieville [272]
“It was thick as a thigh, attached to the aerostat thirty feet from me, swinging like a python. I had six chakris. Three of them I sent wide, way wide. The fourth connected, but not cleanly—cut half the rope’s width. The fifth went wide, and I only had one more chance.
“But even though my aim felt good, and I’d steadied my hands, I missed.
“And I knew that I was dead. I dropped my rivebow, my fingers all thick and stupid, and I clung to the bars at the edge of the hatchway. I could only watch. I could feel the wind buffeting me, up through the doors, and I watched the rope fray too slowly to save me.
“The roofs, the slates, the towers, the aircabs, the flags, the monkeys all frantic with fear they didn’t understand, the citizens running stupid from one place to the next as if anywhere would be spared.
“I watched them all through my telescope. I wonder what it was like, under the sea. I wonder how the cray and the menfish and Bastard John were acting. Maybe they’re still alive, who knows? Maybe they could swim free. Maybe they quit the city as it went on toward its end.
“The Sorghum rig and Croom Park and the Grand Easterly and me were first to reach the edge.
“The wind changed for a moment, and the Arrogance drifted out over the cliff of water, and looked down into the chasm.
“Time was very slow as the Arrogance passed above the Scar. Just handfuls of seconds, but they lasted a long time.”
“I crossed past the rim of the sea and looked down, over my knees dangling from the hatch, at the edges of the water. They were vertiginous.
“The sun angled down through the surface of the sea, filtered and refracted by the waves, and passed out again through the vertical face. I could see fishes bigger than me nosing up to the edge where it met the air, a hundred feet below the surface. Light bathed into it. There must be a whole ecology around the edges of the Scar. Even two, three miles down, where the pressure’s merciless, the water there’s sunlit.
“That sheer face of water, colors and eddies moving in strata, extended down miles. Perspective defeated me.
“And then mud. I could see it: a thick, sandwiched band of mud, black, at the bottom of the sea. And then rock. Rock extending down for so many miles that it dwarfed the layer of water. Red and black and grey rock, split wide, clean-edged. And many miles down a glow that moved and burned, showing dimly through the air. Magma. Rivers of molten stone, geothermal tides.
“And then? Below that?
“Then the void.”
Hedrigall’s voice was hollow and appalled.
“It must have been seconds I saw it,” he said, “but I remember every layer, like colors of sand drooled into a bottle. It defeated the eye. It was too big to see.
“Armada paused, poised for seconds on the edge of that abyss, and the avanc gave a final push forward.
“I saw it first through the water. I saw it four miles down, a little way above the dark sea bottom. I saw a shape appear in the deeps, unclear through the sea, suddenly nearer, its outline visible, as it powered itself forward. Until with a sound like a cataclysm it began to breach. To push itself through the brine cliff.
“A mile of flesh.
“Its head was through, water splintering, shattering around it, cataracts thousands of yards long booming and splitting, drops of water the size of houses spinning and disintegrating, falling voidward, into the Scar.
“I could see the first of its chains, colossal, bursting through the water in a four-mile straight tear, splitting the sea between the avanc and the city above. Other chains came through after it, so that the sea wall was scored with parallel vertical rips, like a claw wound.
“The avanc’s body continued through, indescribable, fins and spines, cilia, and as it came through into the air gravity took it, and it began to pitch forward. The chains tightened on the city, and the edges of Armada reached the edge and were pulled on, over.
“The avanc gave out a sound that burst all the glass around me.
“I saw the submarine hulks on which the Sorghum rested welling up toward the flat cliff face