The Scar - China Mieville [60]
“I don’t like it here. I resent being kidnapped. I can understand why some of the other press-ganged from Terpsichoria don’t mind . . .” She said that as a grudging sop to the guilt that Johannes had inculcated in her, and she knew uncomfortably that it was grossly insufficient, that it denigrated the freedom that had been granted to the Terpsichoria’s human cargo. “But I will not live out my life here. I’m going home to New Crobuzon.”
She spoke with a hard certainty she did not quite feel.
“Not me,” he said. “I mean, I like coming back, and living it up after some trip or other—dinners in Chnum, that sort of thing—but I couldn’t live there. Though I understand why you’d like it. I’ve seen a lot of cities, and never anything to compare. But whenever I’ve been there more than a couple of weeks, I start to feel claustrophobic. Hemmed in by the dirt and the begging and the people . . . and the cant they spout in Parliament.
“Even when I’m uptown, you know? BilSantum Plaza or Flag Hill or Chnum—still I feel like I’m trapped in Dog Fenn or Badside. I just can’t ignore them. I have to get out. And as for the bastards that run the place . . .”
Bellis was interested in his unabashed disloyalty. He was in the pay of the damn New Crobuzon government, after all, and even through the slight fog of wine, Bellis was coldly conscious that it was they, his bosses, who had caused her to flee.
But Fennec showed no commitment to them at all. He badmouthed the Crobuzoner authorities with bohemian good humor.
“They’re snakes,” he went on. “Rudgutter and all the others, I wouldn’t trust them as far as I could piss them. Dammit, I’ll take their money. If they want to pay me to tell them things I’d be happy to tell them anyway, am I going to say no? But they’re no friends of mine. I can’t sit easy in their city.”
“So is all this . . .” Bellis spoke carefully, trying to gauge him. “Is this not a hardship, then, being here? If you’ve no great love for New Crobuzon—“
“No.” He interrupted her with a hard manner quite unlike the amiable arrogance he had so far displayed. “That is not what I said. I’m a New Crobuzon man, Bellis. I want somewhere to come home to . . . even if I leave it again. I’m not rootless; I’m not some vague wanderer. I’m a businessman, a merchant, with a base and a house in East Gidd and friends and contacts, and New Crobuzon is always where I return to. Here . . . I’m a prisoner.
“This isn’t the kind of exploring that I have in mind. I’m damned if I’m staying here.”
And hearing that, Bellis opened another bottle of wine and poured him some more.
“What were you doing in Salkrikaltor?” she asked. “More business?”
Fennec shook his head. “I got picked up,” he said. “Salkrikaltor patrols sometimes deploy hundreds of miles away from the city, checking the kraals. One of their craft picked me up in the outskirts of the Basilisk Channel. I was heading south in a crippled ammonite-sub, leaking and very slow. The cray in the shallows east of the Sols told them about this dubious-looking tub limping round the edge of their village.” He shrugged. “I was damn well livid to get picked up, but I think they did me a favor. I doubt I’d have made it home. By the time I met any cray who could understand me, we were all the way out in Salkrikaltor City.”
“Where’d you come from?” said Bellis. “Jhesshul Islands?”
Fennec shook his head and observed her, without speaking, for several seconds.
“Nothing like that,” he said. “I crossed over from the other side of the mountains. I was in the Cold Claw Sea. In The Gengris.”
Bellis looked up sharply, ready to laugh or sniff dismissively, but she saw Fennec’s face. He nodded slowly.
“The Gengris,” he said again, and she looked away, astonished.
More than a thousand miles west of New Crobuzon was a huge lake, four hundred miles across—Cold Claw Loch. From its northern tip jutted Cold Claw Sound, a corridor of freshwater