The Scar - China Mieville [94]
necessary—the scientist they needed, a rig to fuel the hexes—and now they were heading toward their quarry, their experts working in tight and ceaseless concert to complete their calculations, to solve the enigma of the summoning, even as they traveled.
And immediately Silas and Bellis saw this, as soon as they realized that they had achieved their aim, that they knew the Lovers’ plan, that they could work out where the city was heading, they began to talk frantically about how they could use that knowledge to escape.
What are we doing? thought Bellis in the silence. Another night we’re sitting in my stupid little round chimney room, saying oh gods oh gods to ourselves and each other, because we’ve picked off one layer of mystery and underneath is yet more shit, yet more trouble, that we can do nothing about. She felt like moaning with exhaustion. I don’t want to wonder what I’m going to do anymore, she thought. I want to just do something.
She drummed her fingers across the book’s script. A script that she and few others could read.
Looking at that arcane language, a vague, unpleasant suspicion ached in her. She felt as she had that night in the restaurant, when Johannes had told her that the Lovers used his books.
The constant grinding of the flotilla of tugs and others that dragged the city had become background noise. But, unnoticed and forgotten, they continued. There was not a moment of night or day that Armada did not inch south. The effort was prodigious and the pace glacial, slower than a human could crawl.
But days passed at that torturous rate, and the city did move. People shed coats and woolen trousers. The days were still short, but without fuss or proclamation, Armada had passed into a temperate zone of the sea. And it continued to move toward warmer water.
Armada’s plants—crops of wheat and barley, decktop grasslands, weed regiments reclaiming old stone and metal—felt the change. Scavenging constantly for heat, they drew sustenance from the random change of season and began rapidly to grow, to bud. The smells of the parklands became richer; the green began to be broken by hardy little flowers.
Every day there were more birds overhead. The pirate ships sailed over new and colorful fish in the warm waters. In Armada’s multitude of little temples, services welcomed the latest of the city’s irregular, contingent springs.
Tanner had seen the chains, and having done so, it did not take him very long to realize what was planned for the city.
Of course he could not know the details. But he remembered what he had seen, even through the shock and cold that had been settling on him as he rose through the water. He had come up
below one of the forbidden ships and at the heart of an obscuring glamour, the scale of what he observed had at first confused him, but then it had resolved itself and he had realized it was a chain link, fifty feet long.
The Grand Easterly stretched out overhead like an ominous cloud. The metal was riveted to its underside with ancient bolts bigger than a man. Through the centuries of growth that encased the ship’s hull, Tanner realized that another link connected to the first, flush against the steamer’s hull. Beyond that, the weed growth and the charmed water had obscured his vision.
There were great chains below the city. And, knowing that, it did not take him very long to guess what was planned. With an almost rueful surprise, Tanner Sack realized that he now knew the secret that had seemed always to hover at the edge of conversation in the docks. The source of unease and winks and shared glances, the unspoken project that shaped all their efforts.
We’re going to raise something from the sea, he thought calmly. Some beastie? Are we going to tether some sea serpents or kraken or Jabber knows what and . . . what then? Could it pull Armada? Like a seawyrm does a chariot ship?
That makes sense enough, he thought, awed by the scale of the thing, whatever it was, but not afraid nor disapproving.
Why