The Scar - China Mieville [38]
He was living by various vague means, sharing a house with a Remade man from the Terpsichoria. Bellis offered Shekel a brass flag to help her with reshelving, which he accepted. Since then he had come several times, done a little work, talking to her about Armada and the scattered remnants of their ship.
She learned a lot from him.
But it was not Shekel who was now approaching her in the narrow corridor, but a nervous, quizzically smiling Johannes Tearfly.
It was with some embarrassment, later, that she remembered herself rising at his arrival (with a cry of pleasure like a gushy child, for gods’ sakes) and throwing her arms around him.
He opened to her, too, smiling with shy warmth. And after a long moment of close greeting, they disengaged and looked at each other.
This was the first chance he’d had to get out, he told her, and she demanded to know what he had been doing. He’d been sent to the library and had taken the chance to seek her out, and again she told him to tell her what he had been damn well doing. When he told her that he could not, that he had to go now, she almost stamped in frustration, but he was telling her wait, wait, that he had more free time now, and that she should just listen a moment.
“If you’re free tomorrow night,” he said, “I’d like to take you to supper. There’s a place in starboard Garwater, on the Raddletongue, called the Unrealized Time. Do you know it?”
“I’ll find it,” she said.
“I could come and collect you,” he began, and she cut him off.
“I’ll find it.”
He smiled at her, with the bemused pleasure she remembered. If you’re free indeed! she thought sardonically. Does he really think . . . Is it possible? She felt suddenly uncertain, almost afraid. Do the others go out every night? Am I alone in exile? Are the Terpsichoria’s passengers carousing every evening in their new home?
As she left the library that evening, Armada’s close quarters and narrow streets oppressed Bellis. But when she raised her eyes and looked beyond the skyline, the Swollen Ocean weighed down on her like granite, and she felt breathless. She could not believe that the mass of water and air beyond Armada did not drown it, disappear it in an instant. She counted her coins and approached a skycab driver refilling his dirigible from a gas depot on Aronnax Lab.
She swayed in the cradle as it buzzed sedately a hundred feet above the highest deck. Bellis could see the edges of the city bobbing randomly, moving very slowly with whatever currents took it. There, the distant wood of the haunted quarter. The arena. The stronghold of the Brucolac.
And in the center of Garwater riding, something extraordinary that Bellis never grew accustomed to seeing—the source of the riding’s strength. Something looming enormously over the shipscape around it: the largest ship in the city, the largest ship that Bellis had ever seen.
Almost nine hundred feet of black iron. Five colossal funnels and six masts stripped of canvas, more than two hundred feet high; and tethered way above them a huge, crippled dirigible. A vast paddle on each side of the ship, like industrial sculptures. The decks seemed almost bare, unbroken by the haphazard building that misshaped other vessels. The Lovers’ stronghold, like a beached titan: the Grand Easterly, lolling austere amid Armada’s baroque.
“I’ve changed my mind,” Bellis said suddenly. “Don’t take me to Chromolith.”
She directed the pilot aft-aft-star’d—the city’s directions all relative to the colossal Grand Easterly itself. As the man gently tugged at his rudder she looked down over the crowds. Air eddied as the aeronaut picked a way through the masts and rigging that jutted up around them in the Armada sky. Around