The Scar - China Mieville [88]
Bellis heard the door open and looked up from her piles of books. Shekel stood at the threshold, holding something in his hands. She was about to greet him, but paused at the sight of his face.
He wore an expression of great seriousness and uncertainty, as if not sure whether he had done something wrong.
“I’ve got something to show you,” he said slowly. “You know I write down all the words I can’t work out at first. And then when I find them again in other books, I know them. Well . . .” He looked at the book he was holding. “Well, I found one of them yesterday. And the book’s not in Ragamoll, and the word’s not a . . . not a verb or a noun or whatever.” He stressed the technical words she had taught him: not with pride, but to make a point.
He handed the little book to her. “It’s a name.”
Bellis examined it. Sunk into the cover and picked out in stained metal leaf was the author’s name.
Krüach Aum.
The work that Tintinnabulum was looking for, one central to the Lovers’ project. Shekel had found it.
He had picked it off the children’s shelves. As Bellis sat and flicked through its pages, she saw that it was no wonder it had been misshelved. It was full of pictures in a primitive style: executed in thick, simple lines with childish perspective, so that proportions were unclear, and a man might be nearly the size of a tower next to him. Each recto page was text, each verso a picture, so that the whole short book had the feel of an illustrated fable.
Whoever had shelved it had obviously looked at it briefly without understanding it, and put it, without examination, with other picture books—children’s books. It had not been recorded. It had lain undisturbed for years.
Shekel was talking to Bellis, but she did not hear him clearly: don’t know what to do, he was saying awkwardly, thought you could help, the one Tintinnabulum was looking for, did the best thing. Adrenaline and tremulous excitement were filling her as she studied the volume. There was no title. She turned to the first page, and her heartbeat quickened in her throat as she realized that she
had been right about Aum’s name. The book was in High Kettai.
It was the arcane, classical language of Gnurr Kett, the island nation thousands of miles south of New Crobuzon, at the edge of the Swollen Ocean, where the warm water became the Black Sandbar Sea. It was a strange, very difficult tongue that used the Ragamoll script but derived from quite another root. Base Kettai, the everyday language, was much easier, but the relationship between the two was attenuated and ancient. Fluency in one gave only the slightest understanding of the other. High Kettai, even in Gnurr Kett itself, was the preserve of the cantors and a few intellectuals.
Bellis had studied it. Fascinated by its structures of embedded verbs, it was High Kettai that Bellis had made the subject of her first book. It was fifteen years since she had published High Kettai Grammatology, but even rusty as she was, looking at the opening chapter of the book, the meaning came slowly to her.
“I would lie if I told you that I write this without pride,” Bellis read silently, and looked up, trying to calm herself, almost afraid to go on.
She turned the pages rapidly, looking at the pictures. A man in a tower by the sea. The man on the shore, the skeletons of great engines littering the sand. The man making calculations by the sun, and by the shadows of strange trees. She turned to the fourth picture and caught her breath. A rill of goosebumps came and went over her.
In the fourth picture, the man stood again on the shore—his blank, stylized eyes the only features on his face, rendered by the artist as placid as a cow’s—and above the sea, swarming toward an approaching boat, was a cloud of dark figures. The picture was vague, but Bellis could see thin arms and legs dangling, and a blur of wings.
It made