The Scar - China Mieville [96]
When Angevine had seen it, her mouth and face had stiffened with anger. But as the minutes went on, and she swayed with the sense of steam, her expression had changed. And as she had left, while Shekel waited for her in the doorway, Angevine had rolled to Tanner and spoken to him quietly.
“Never mind about the scratch, eh?” she had said. “You’ve done a great job, Tanner. And that mark . . . Well, it’s part of rebuilding, eh? Part of the new.” She had smiled at him quickly and had left without looking back.
“Oh, you’re welcome, for Jabber’s sake,” murmured Tanner out loud at the memory, pleased and embarrassed. He sat back in his bath. “For the lad, really. It’s for the lad’s sake.”
There were only ten ships of any size in the haunted quarter of Armada, tucked away at the city’s fore-port corner, bordering Dry Fall and King Friedrich’s Thee-And-Thine.
The subjects of Friedrich’s violent mercantile rule for the most part ignored the eerie ships next to their riding, concentrating on their bazaars and glad’ circuses and moneylenders. In Dry Fall, however, the baleful influence of the haunted quarter crept over the little fringe of sea and stained the Brucolac’s riding. Where Dry Fall neighbored the deserted ships, its own vessels were subdued and unpleasant.
Perhaps it was the presence of the Brucolac and his cadre of vampir lieutenants in Dry Fall itself that sharpened the inhabitants’ senses to the dead and ab-dead. Perhaps that was why unlike those in Thee-And-Thine, the citizens of Dry Fall riding could not forget the presence of the fearful haunted quarter beside them.
Uncanny noises emanated from it: mutterings that carried on the wind; the faint grind of motors; things grating against other things. Some claimed that the sounds were illusory, the product of wind and the bizarre architecture of the ancient ships. Very few believed that. Sometimes a foolhardy group—invariably the recently press-ganged—would enter the hulks, to emerge some hours later closed-mouthed and pale and refusing to speak. And on occasion, of course, they did not return.
Attempts to sever the ten ships from the fabric of the city, to scuttle them and scour the haunted quarter from Armada’s map, were reputed to have been tried and to have failed in alarming ways. Most citizens were superstitious about that quiet place: frightened as they were of it, they would have argued strongly against any attempts to remove it.
Birds would not settle in the haunted ships. Their skyline of old masts and mast stumps, their moldering bituminous carcasses and ragged sails were stark and deserted.
The border of Dry Fall and the haunted quarter was where one went to be undisturbed.
Two men stood in the night’s cool drizzle. They were alone on the deck of a clipper.
In front of them, thirty feet away, was a long, slim vessel, some ancient galley that creaked in Armada’s incessant wind and motion, empty and unlit. The bridges that linked it to the clipper were rotting and blocked with chains. It was the foremost ship of the haunted quarter.
From way behind the men rose the noises of the city center, the irregular shopping arcades that wound across the bodies of several vessels, the playhouses and dance halls. The clipper itself was silent. A row of tent houses on its deck was mostly uninhabited. Those few who lived there had realized who stood on the clipper’s deck, and were staying very carefully out of sight.
“I’m bewildered,” said the Brucolac quietly, not looking at
his companion. His quiet, hoarse voice was only just audible.
Wind and rain pushed his shaggy hair back from his face as he looked out past the galley at the black sea. “Explain it to me.” He turned and raised his eyebrows, in a look of mild consternation, at Uther Doul.
With no bodyguards, no yeomanry or bystanders to see this interaction, the glowering tension that characterized the two men’s public confrontations was absent. Their body language was only a little