The Scar - China Mieville [89]
She scanned, trying to remember the language. There was something very odd about this book. It felt very different from all the other High Kettai works Bellis had seen. Something incongruous was in the tone, quite at odds with the poetry that characterized the old Gnurr Kett canon.
“He would have sought help from outsiders,” she hesitantly made out, “but all others shun our island, fearful of our hungry women.”
Bellis looked up. Jabber knows, she thought, what I’ve got my hands on.
She thought quickly, trying to work out what she should do. Her hands still turned the pages like a construct’s, and she looked down to see that, midway through the volume, the man was at sea in a little boat. He and his vessel were drawn very small. He was lowering a chain and a massive recurved hook into the sea.
Deep below, in the midst of the spirals that signified the water, were concentric circles, dwarfing his yacht.
The picture held her attention.
She stared at it, and something deep within her moved. She held her breath. And with a wash of realization the picture reconfigured itself like a child’s optical illusion. She saw what it was—she knew what she was looking at—and her stomach pitched so hard that she felt she was falling.
She knew what Garwater’s secret project was. She knew where they were heading. She knew what Johannes was doing.
Shekel was still talking. He had moved on to the dinichthys
attack.
“Tanner was down there,” she heard him say with pride. “Tanner went to help ’em, only he couldn’t get there in time. But I’ll tell you a funny thing. You remember a while ago I told you there’s things under the city, shapes he couldn’t make out? And he weren’t allowed to see? Well, after the bonefish swims off yesterday, poor old Tanner comes up right underneath one, doesn’t he? He gets to see it clearly—he knows what’s under there, now. So guess what it was . . .”
He paused theatrically for Bellis to guess. She still stared at the picture.
“A bridle,” she said, almost inaudible. Shekel’s expression changed to confusion. Suddenly she spoke loudly. “A giant bridle, a bit, reins, a harness bigger than a building.
“Chains, Shekel, the size of boats,” she said. He stared at her and nodded in bewilderment as she concluded. “Tanner saw chains.”
She still did not take her gaze from the picture she held: a little man in a little ship on a sea of frozen waves that overlapped in perfect sequence like fish scales, and below them deeps rendered in crosshatched and tightly spiraled ink, and at the bottom, easily eclipsing the vessel above, a circle in a circle in a circle, vast no matter how vague the perspective, unthinkably big, with darkness at the center. Looking up, looking up at the fisherman hunting his prey.
Sclera, iris, and pupil.
An eye.
Interlude III
Elsewhere
There are intruders in Salkrikaltor. They sit quiet, their eyes taking in the city and the cray, measured and inexorable like plugholes.
They have left a trail of missing farmers and submarine adventurers and wanderers and minor bureaucrats. They have extracted information with coddling tones and thaumaturgy and torture.
The intruders watch with eyes like oil.
They have explored. They have seen the temples and the shark pits and the galleries and arcades, and the cray slums, the architecture of the shallows. As light fails and Salkrikaltor’s globes glow, traffic increases. Young cray dandies fight and posture on the spiraling walkways above (their actions are reflected in the hidden watchers’ eyes).
Hours pass. The streets empty out. The globes dim a little in the hours before dawn.
And there is silence. And dark. And cold.
And the intruders move.
They pass through empty streets, cloaked in darkness.
The intruders move like ribbons of waste, as if they are nothing, as if they are tugged by random ebbs and tides. They trace anemone-scarred backstreets.
Nothing living is in the trench-streets except night fishes, the snails, the crabs that freeze with fear as the intruders approach. They pass beggars in the atomies of buildings. Through