The Scar - China Mieville [39]
The sun was gone, and the city sparkled. Bellis felt a gust of melancholy as she passed light-strung rigging close enough to grasp. She saw her destination, the Boulevard St. Carcheri on the steamer Glomar’s Heart, a shabby-opulent promenade of gently colored streetlamps, knotted rustwood trees, and stucco façades. As the gondola began to descend, she kept her eyes on the shabbier, darker shape beyond the parkland.
Across four hundred feet of water glinting with impurities rose a tower of intertwined girders as high as the dirigibles, gushing with flame. A massive concrete body on legs like four splintering pillars emerging from the dirtied sea. Dark cranes moving without visible purpose.
It was a monstrous thing, awe-inspiring and ugly and foreboding. Bellis sat back in her descending aerostat and kept her eye on the Sorghum, New Crobuzon’s stolen rig.
Chapter Seven
It rained remorselessly all the next day, hard grey drops like shards of flint.
The costermongers were quiet; very little business was done. Armada’s bridges were slippery. There were accidents: the drunk or the clumsy slipping into the cold sea.
The city’s monkeys sat subdued under awnings and bickered. They were pests, feral tribes that raced across the floating city, fighting, vying for scraps and territory, brachiating below bridges and careering up rigging. They were not the only animals living wild in the city, but they were the most successful scavengers. They huddled in the cold damp and groomed each other without enthusiasm.
In the dim light of Grand Gears Library, the signs requesting silence were made absurd by the percussion of rain.
The bloodhorns of Shaddler riding sounded mournfully, as they customarily did when it rained hard and the scabmettlers said that the sky was bleeding. Water beaded weirdly on the surface of the Uroc, Dry Fall riding’s flagship. The dark and rotting fabric of the haunted quarter mildewed and glowered. People in the neighboring Thee-And-Thine riding pointed at the deserted quarter’s decrepit skyline and warned, as they always did, that somewhere within, the tallow ghast was moving.
In the first hour after dusk, in the muted edifice of Barrow Hall on the Therianthropus, the heart of Shaddler, a bad-tempered meeting came to an end. The scabmettler guards outside could hear delegations leaving. They fingered their weapons and ran their hands over the crust of their organic armor.
There was a man among them: a few inches shy of six feet and prodigiously muscled, dressed in charcoal-colored leather, a straight sword by his side. He spoke and moved with quiet grace.
He discussed weaponry with the scabmettlers, then had them show him strokes and sweeps from mortu crutt, their fighting science. He let them touch the filigree of wires that wound around his right arm and down the side of his armor into the battery on his belt.
The man was comparing the Stubborn Nail strike of stampfighting with the sadr punch of mortu crutt. He and his sparring partner swept their arms in slow demonstration attacks, when the doors opened at the top of the stairs above them and the guards came to quick attention. The man in grey straightened slowly and walked to the corner of the entresol.
A coldly furious man descended toward them. He was tall and young-looking and built like a dancer, with freckled skin the color of pale ash. His hair seemed to belong to someone else: it was dark and long and very tightly curled, and it hung in unruly locks from his scalp like an unkempt fleece. It jounced and coiled as he descended.
As he passed the scabmettlers he gave a peremptory little bow, which they returned with more ceremony. He stood still before the man in grey. The two men eyed each other with impenetrable expressions.
“Liveman Doul,” said the newcomer eventually, in a whispering voice.
“Deadman Brucolac,” was the reply. Uther Doul gazed at the Brucolac’s broad, handsome face.
“It seems