The Scar - China Mieville [40]
Uther Doul did not move, did not take his eyes from the other man.
The Brucolac straightened his back and gave a sneer that might have indicated contempt, or a shared confidence, or many other things. “It won’t happen, you know,” he said. “The city won’t allow it. That’s not what this city is for.”
The Brucolac opened his mouth idly, and his great forked tongue flickered out, tasting the air and the ghosts of Uther Doul’s sweat.
There were things that made very little sense to Tanner Sack.
He did not understand how he could bear the cold of the seawater. With his bulky Remade tentacles, he had to descend with his chest uncovered, and the first touch of the water had shocked him. He had almost balked, then had smeared himself with thick grease; but he had acclimatized much faster than made sense. He was still aware of the chill, but it was an abstract knowledge. It did not cripple him.
He did not understand why the brine was healing his tentacles.
Since first they had been implanted at the caprice of a New Crobuzon magister—a punishment supposedly related to his crime according to some patronizing allegorical logic that had never made any sense to him—they had hung like stinking dead limbs. He had cut at them, experimentally, and the layers of nerves implanted in them had fired and he had nearly fainted with pain. But pain was all that had lived in them, so he had wrapped them around himself like rotting pythons and tried to ignore them.
But immersed in the saltwater, they had begun to move.
Their multitude of small infections had faded, and they were now cool to the touch. After three dives, to his grinding shock, the tentacles had started to move independently of the water.
He was healing.
After a few weeks of diving, new sensations passed through them, and their sucker pads flexed gently and attached themselves on surfaces nearby. Tanner was learning to move them by choice.
In the confused first days when the captives had first arrived, Tanner had wandered through the ridings and listened bewildered as merchants and foremen offered him work in a language he was learning very quickly to understand.
When he verified that he was an engineer, the liaison officer for the Garwater Dock Authority had eyed him greedily, and had asked him in child’s Salt and pantomime hand gestures whether he would learn to be a diver. It was easier to train an engineer to dive than to teach a diver the skills that Tanner had accumulated.
It was hard work learning to breathe the air pumped down from above without panicking in the hot little helmet, how to move without overcompensating and sending himself spinning. But he had learned to luxuriate in the slowed-down time, the eddying clarity of water seen through glass.
He did similar work now to that he had always done—patching and repairing, rebuilding, fumbling with tools by great engines—only now, well below the stevedores and the cranes, it was performed in the crush of water, watched by fishes and eels, buffeted by currents born miles away.
“I told you that Coldarse is working in the library, didn’t I?”
“You did, lad,” Tanner said. He and Shekel were eating below an awning at the docks while the deluge continued around them.
Shekel had arrived at the docks with a little group of raggedy-arsed youngsters between twelve and sixteen years old. All the others, from what Tanner could tell, were city-born; and that they had let a press-ganged join them, one who still struggled to express himself in Salt, was evidence of Shekel’s adaptability.
They had left Shekel alone to share his food with Tanner.
“I like that library,” he said. “I like going there, and not just because of the ice woman, neither.”
“There’s a lot worse you could do than settle into some reading, lad,” said Tanner. “We’ve finished Crawfoot’s Chronicles; you could find some other stories. You could read them to me, for a