The Scar - China Mieville [282]
Neither have you.
I’ve been spending time with your Angevine. I’ll be lying if I tell you we’re best friends. We’re a bit shy, you might say. But we see each other, and talk about you, mostly.
We were lied to, and we had enough, and they were risking our necks, dammit, so we made them turn back.
It doesn’t go away, that you’re gone.
I don’t live here anymore. I live nowhere. This place killed you.
I don’t know what it was, the things in that water. I know that what we fought in the water that night was no vampir. No one talks about them. No one knows what they were. Only that they helped to try to turn us.
Bastard John saw them. I see it in his little piggy eyes. But he says nothing.
It was me who turned the city. Those things, the things that took you, the vampir man who fought beside them, they failed.
I did the job for them. Turned us round.
I don’t know if that’s funny. I only know I don’t want to live here anymore, and I can’t go.
I’m a sea-thing now. It’s a bad joke. We both know what real sea-things are, how they move, how fast. Not like me, heavy clumsily stolen fins flapping, slimy sweating, Remade.
And I’m scared, now. I put myself in the sea I sweat. Now every little blenny looks like one of the things that took you.
But I can’t live in the air now. I ain’t got that option no more.
What’ll I do? I can’t go back to New Crobuzon, and if I could I’d rot, without brine.
I’ll make myself swim. It’ll get easier again. I’ll get it done.
They can’t hold me. I can leave. Maybe we’ll go near some coast one day, and there I’ll slip away. There I’ll go and live alone in the shallows so I can see rock under me, where trees and scree meet in the water. I can live there alone. I’ve had enough of it, I tell you.
I ain’t got nothing. I’ve got nothing.
In time, in time they tell me, I’ll not feel so bad. I don’t want time to heal me. There’s a reason I’m like this.
I want time to set me ugly and knotted with loss of you, marking me. I won’t smooth you away.
I can’t say good-bye.
Dustday 2nd Tathis, 1780. Armada.
The avanc is slowing again, one final time.
It is still wounded from the grindylow’s abuse. Whatever they did to it has not healed, not scarred, but remains raw and unpleasant. We pass from time to time by messes of its pus again.
Its heart, I think, is winding down.
We all know that the avanc is dying.
Perhaps it is looking for its home. Perhaps it is trying to find its way back to the universe of lightless brine from where we fished it. And all the time it grows ill, and weak, its blood thickening, decaying and clotting, its great flukes moving more slowly.
Never mind. We are very close to the edge of the Hidden Ocean. We will emerge soon—any day, perhaps within hours—and there the Armadan fleet will be waiting. The avanc will live till then.
The day is close, though, when the city will come to a final stop.
We will be stranded, attached to an organic anchor, millions of tons of corpse rotting on the floor of the abyss.
Five chains, five links to sever. For each link, two cuts. Each link many feet thick, and thaumaturgically tempered. It will take some time, but eventually, one by one, the miles of metal will fall free.
What a catastrophe that will be, to the bottom dwellers—like divine anger. Tons of metal falling, accelerating, through four, five miles, eventually to slam into the ooze at the sea’s bottom, cutting through to the rock below. Landing across the poor avanc’s corpse, perhaps, bursting it open, its miles of intestines littering the dark mud.
Perhaps in time whole ecosystems will evolve around that unprecedented richness.
We will be gone.
We will have reached the fleet, and they will reattach themselves, and Armada will be as it was. There will be less vessels to drag it, of course, after the carnage of the Crobuzoner War, but the city will have shed countless thousands of tons of chain. It will balance.
Armada will be as it was.
Back across the Swollen Ocean, back toward the richest shipping lanes, back toward the ports and traders. The Armadan