The Scar - China Mieville [92]
“He called up an avanc, Silas.”
“What happened?” he said. “You’ve read it, what happened?”
Bellis sighed. “It doesn’t say how or where, but Aum found a bunch of old manuscripts, an old story. And he’s put them together and made sense of them, and retold them. The story of an anophelius, who’s never named. Centuries ago. There are ten pages about his preparations. The man fasts; he researches; he stares out to sea a lot; he gathers the things he needs: barrels, liquor, old machines that have been moldering on the beach. He goes out to sea. Alone. Trying to keep control of a yacht way too big for one man, but no one would come with him. He’s looking for a particular place, some kind of . . . deep, deep shaft, a hole in the ocean’s floor. That’s where he’s hunting. That’s where he casts. That’s where he wants the avanc to . . . come through, from where they normally live.
“Then we get twenty very dull pages about the privations of the sea. Hungry, thirsty, tired, wet, hot . . . That sort of thing. He knows he’s in the right place. He’s sure his hook is . . . extending into somewhere else. Bleeding through the world. But he can’t attract the avanc. There’s no worm that big.
“Then on the third day, when he’s totally exhausted, and his ship’s being moved around by weird currents, the sky darkens. There’s an elyctric storm coming. And he decides it’s not enough to be in the right place—he needs power to snare the thing. He’s being pounded by hail and rain, and the sea’s going berserk. The boat’s plowing through huge waves, banging like it’s going to shatter.”
Silas was listening to her with eyes wide, and Bellis had a sudden ridiculous image of herself as a teacher telling the children a story.
“As the middle of the storm gets nearer and nearer, he yanks a load of wire to the top of the mainmast, coiling it round the rigging, and links it up to some kind of generator. Then . . .”
Bellis sighed. “I couldn’t really follow what happened then. He does some thaumaturgy or other. I think he was trying to conjure fulmen, elyctric elementals, or sacrifice them or something, but it’s not clear. Well . . .” She shrugged. “Whether he succeeds or not, whether it’s an elemental answering him or just the result of winding copper wire up a hundred-foot mast in the middle of a thunderstorm, lightning strikes the conductor.”
She held open the relevant illustration: the boat in silhouette, outlined in white, with a rather squat, geometrically rendered lightning bolt stuck like a saw into the top of the mast.
“There’s a massive burst of energy through the engines. The thaumaturgic controls he’s rigged up to try to bait and control the avanc suddenly spasm with supercharged puissance, then burn
out instantly. And his boat lurches, and the cranes and winches tethering his hook bend suddenly, and there’s a rushing from underneath.
“He hooked an avanc, says Aum. And it rose.”
Bellis fell quiet. She turned the pages and read Aum’s words to herself.
The ocean vibrated with a scream five miles down, and the water rose and shuddered and was unsteady as it was displaced, vastly, and the waves died as the tides were supplanted by a great onrush from below and the water tossed the boat like a mote, and the horizon disappeared as the avanc surfaced.
That was all. No description of the creature. The verso page that should have held an illustration was left blank.
“He sees it,” she said quietly. “When he sees the size of it he realizes that he’d only snagged it with his hooks and hexes. He’d thought he’d reel it in like an angler . . . Impossible. The avanc breaks the chains, effortlessly. And then it sinks again, and the sea’s empty. And he’s all alone, and he has to get himself all the way home.”
Bellis could picture it, and it moved her. She imagined the broken figure, sodden with brine and in the middle of a still-terrible storm, crawling to his feet, stumbling across the deck of his ill-prepared ship. Setting dying motors in motion, limping back across the sea hungry and exhausted, and above all alone.
“Do you think it