The Scar - China Mieville [51]
“Shaddler’s the scabmettlers’. Bask. Thee-And-Thine.” Carrianne was counting off the ridings on her fingers. “Jhour. Curhouse, The Democratic Council. That brave redoubt. And Dry Fall,” she concluded. “Where I live.”
“Why did you leave New Crobuzon, Bellis?” she said unexpectedly. “You don’t seem to me the colonist type.”
Bellis looked down. “I had to leave,” she said. “Trouble.”
“With the law?”
“Something happened . . .” She sighed. “I did nothing, nothing at all.” She could not keep the bitterness out of her voice. “A few months ago there was a sickness in the city. And . . . there were rumors that someone I knew was involved. The militia were working their way through everyone he’d known, everyone he’d had involvement with. It was obvious they’d come for me, eventually. I never wanted to leave.” She spoke carefully. “It was no choice.”
The lunch, the company, even the small talk Bellis normally despised, had all calmed her. As they rose to leave, she asked Carrianne if she was feeling well.
“I noticed in the library . . .” she said. “I hope you don’t mind me saying, but I was thinking you look rather pale.”
Carrianne smiled archly. “That’s the first time you’ve asked after me, Bellis,” she said. “You want to watch that. I might start thinking you give a brass eye about me.” The amiable taunt stung. “I’m fine. It’s just that I was taxed last night.”
Bellis waited, sifting through the information she had already assimilated, to see if Carrianne’s statement would make sudden sense. It did not.
“I don’t understand,” she said, exhausted by incomprehension.
“Bellis, I live in Dry Fall riding,” said Carrianne. “Sometimes we’re taxed, understand? Bellis, you know our ruler’s the Brucolac, don’t you? You’ve heard about him?”
“I’ve heard of him . . .”
“The Brucolac. He’s oupyr. Loango. Katalkana.” With each esoteric word, Carrianne held Bellis’ eyes and saw that she was not understood. “Haemophage, Bellis. Ab-dead.
“Vampir.”
* * *
Surrounded as she had been for weeks by a cloud of rumors and hints like insistent midges, Bellis had learned at least a little about most of the ridings. All the weird little femto-states clamped together in unhealthy congregation, resenting each other and maneuvering for position.
But somehow the most important, the most striking or unbelievable or appalling things, she had missed. At the end of the day, she thought of that moment when she had been made to see how ignorant she was: when Carrianne had explained her pallor and Bellis had realized how far from home she was.
She was pleased that she had done little more than blanch at Carrianne’s explanation. Something had hardened in her when she heard the word vampir—the same word in Ragamoll and Salt. Carrianne had, at that moment, taught her that there was nowhere further for her to go. She could be no further from her home.
In Armada they talked a language she could understand. She recognized the ships, even altered and rebuilt as they were. They had money and government. The differences of calendar and terminology she could learn. The found and scavenged architecture was bizarre but comprehensible. But this was a city where vampir did not need to hide and predate furtively, but could walk in the nights openly, and could rule.
Bellis realized then that all her cultural markers were obsolete. She was sick of her ignorance.
At the Sciences card catalog Bellis’ fingers fluttered through the entries, speeding through the alphabet until she found Johannes Tearfly’s name. There was more than one copy of several of his books.
If the Lovers who run my life wanted to get hold of you so badly, Johannes, she thought to herself as she scribbled the classmarks of his works, then I’m going to get inside their minds. Let’s see what they’re so excited about.
One of the books was on loan, but copies of the others were available. As an employee of the library, Bellis had borrowing rights.
It was very cold as she made her way home past the crowds, under jabbering Armada monkeys in the rigging, over