The Scar - China Mieville [61]
These were the Cold Claws, a conjoined body of water too vast to be anything but an ocean. A massive, freshwater, inland sea ringed by mountains and scrubland and swamps and the few hardy, remote civilizations that Fennec claimed to know.
At its easternmost edge, Cold Claw Sea was separated from the saltwater of the Swollen Ocean by a tiny strip of land: a ribbon of mountainous rock less than thirty miles wide. The sea’s sharp southernmost tip—the point of the talon—was almost directly north of New Crobuzon, more than seven hundred miles away. But the few travelers who made the journey from the city always bore a little west, to reach the waters of Cold Claw Sea two hundred miles or so away from its southern vertex. Because lodged like an impurity in the sea’s jag was an extraordinary, dangerous place, something between an island, a half-sunk city, and a myth. An amphibious badland about which the civilized world knew next to nothing, except that it existed and that it was dangerous.
That place was called The Gengris.
It was said to be the home of the grindylow, aquatic demons or monsters or degenerate crossbred men and women, depending on which story one believed. It was said to be haunted.
The grindylow, or The Gengris (the distinction between race and place was unclear), controlled the south of the Cold Claw Sea with unbreakable power and a cruel, capricious isolationism. Their waters were lethal and uncharted.
And here was Fennec claiming—what?—to have lived there?
“It isn’t true that there are no outsiders there,” he was saying, and Bellis quieted her mind enough to listen. “There are even a few native human, born and bred in The Gengris . . .” His mouth twisted. “And bred is the word, though I’m not sure human is, anymore. It suits them fine that everyone thinks it’s . . . like a little piece of hell there in the water, that it’s beyond any kind of pale. But, shit, they deal with traders like everyone else. There’re a few vodyanoi, a couple of humans . . . and others.
“I was there for more than half a year. Oh, it’s dangerous like nowhere else I’ve been, don’t get me wrong. You know if you trade in The Gengris that the rules . . . are very different. That you’ll never learn, never understand them. I’d been there six weeks when my best friend there, a vodyanoi from Jangsach who’d been there for seven years, trading back and forth . . . he was taken away. I never found out what happened to him, or why,” Fennec said flatly. “It might be that he insulted one of the grindylow gods, or it might have been that the catgut he supplied wasn’t thick enough.”
“So why did you do it?”
“Because, if you could last,” he snapped, suddenly excited, “it was so worth it. There was no reason to grindylow trades, no point bartering or trying to second-guess. They ask me for a bushel of salt and glass beads in equal parts—fine. No questions, no queries; I’ll provide it. Mixed fruit? It’s there for them. Cod, sawdust, resin, fungus, I don’t care. Because, by Jabber, when they paid, when they were happy . . .
“It was worth it.”
“But you left.”
“I left.” Fennec sighed. He got up and rummaged around in her cupboard. She did not scold him for it.
“I was there for months, buying, selling, exploring The Gengris and its environs—diving, you understand—and keeping my journal.” He spoke with his back to her, fussing with the kettle. “Then I got word that I’d . . . that I’d transgressed. That the grindylow were angry with me, and that my life was over unless I could get out, fast.”
“What had you done?” said Bellis slowly.
“I have no idea,” he snapped. “No idea at all. Maybe the ball bearings I provided were the wrong kind of metal, or the moon was in the wrong house, or some grindylow magus had died and they blamed me. I don’t know. All I knew was that I had to leave.
“I left a few things that gave them