The Scar (New Crobuzon, #2)

by China Miéville

Presences something between molluscs and deities squat patiently below eight miles of water.

Tarmuth could not exist a solitary day without the patronage of the capital. They know it and resent it. Their surly independence is an affectation.

I am driven to bedlam by the incessant, moronic slap of waves.

the cadaverous surgeon Dr Mollificatt;

In a horizontal forest of lengthening shadows, the towers and rooftops of Salkrikaltor City broke the waves. They were rendered in concrete, in iron, rock and glass, and in sweeps of hardy cold-water coral. Columns spiralled with walkways, linked by spine-thin bridges. Intricate conical spires a hundred feet high, dark square keeps. A mass of contrary styles. The outlines of the skyline were a child’s exuberant sketch of a reef. Organic towers bulged like tubeworm casts. There were analogues of lace corals, high-rise dwellings which branched into scores of thin rooms; squat many-windowed arenas like gargantuan barrel sponges. Frilled ribbons of architecture like fire-coral.

Buildings laced with bone, colours from greys and rusts to the flamboyant glares of heraldry: a city of esoteric shapes. Its hybridity was stark and uncharming, marred with decay and graffiti. The architecture hunkered and rose and hunkered again with the water, vaguely threatening.

She felt so alien, bowed under culture shock as crippling as migraine,

brachiating

In the dim light of the Grand Gears Library, the signs requesting silence were made absurd by the percussion of rain.

A coldly furious man descended towards them. He was tall and young-looking and built like a dancer, with freckled skin the colour of pale ash. His hair seemed to belong to someone else: it was dark and long and very tightly curled, and hung in unruly locks from his scalp like an unkempt fleece. It jounced and coiled as he descended.

At some time in the night, the hundreds of tugboats that milled constantly around Armada like bees around a hive had harnessed the city. With thick chains they had attached themselves in great numbers to the city’s rim. They spread outwards from the city, with their chains taut. Bellis had become used to the city’s inconsistencies. The sun would rise to the left of her smokestack house one day, to the right the next, as Armada had spun slowly during the night. The sun’s antics were disorienting.

Bellis had stood still and read the names again and again, and felt suddenly claustrophobic. She was encased in stolen books, buried in them as if in dirt. The thought of the countless hundreds of thousands of names that surrounded her, vainly scrawled in top right-hand corners, the weight of all that ignored ink, the endless proclamations that this is mine this is mine, every one of them snubbed simply and imperiously, took Bellis’s breath from her chest. The ease with which those little commands were broken.

Such an intricate concatenation of narratives. Chains of savagery and metamorphosis.

But they have their own … methods, their own sciences and thaumaturgies.

He took what was like fear in him, and made it humility.

The intruders move like ribbons of waste, as if they are nothing, as if they are tugged by random ebbs and tides.

Little filigrees of rumour twist away from them, recurve and tease.

Tintinnabulum knew that Armadan science was a mongrel. It was as piratical as the city’s economy and politics, the product of theft and chance – as various and inconsistent. The engineers and thaumaturges learnt their skills on equipment that was rotted and out of date, and on stolen artefacts of such sophisticated design that they were mostly incomprehensible. It was a patchwork of technologies.

He questioned the angles of the corridor, reconfigured them. The man did not walk and did not swim. He inveigled his way through crevices in possible spaces and passed, without effort and sometimes with, along channels he could now see. When he saw two yeomans and their mastiffs approaching, his way was clear. He was not invisible, nor did he pass into another plane. Instead he moved to the wall and watched its texture, looked at its scale anew, saw the dust-motes close up so that they filled his view, then he slithered behind them, hidden away, and the patrol passed away without noticing him. At the end of the corridor was a right turn. The man squinted at the corner, after the patrol had disappeared, and he managed with a little effort to use it to head left instead.

He hid in front of the guards, too big and close for them to see, out of focus and looming,

Another addition to this letter. It has been some time since I have written. I would apologize if it made any sense. I feel as if I should, somehow – absurdly. As if you read while I write, and fret during the delays. Of course, when you finally get this letter, a day’s silence or a week’s or a year’s will be the same – a line left clear, a row of stars. My months will be collapsed. But I am confused by time.

Bursts of motion in the leaves, at first, nothing more offensive, but then the start of a horrible keening, impossible to pinpoint, as if the air itself is in pain.

(Bellis’s heart is slamming. Doul’s actions shatter her. Whether an attack is brutal or muted, the motion itself, its preternatural speed and perfection, makes it seem like an assault on the order of things, as if time and gravity can no more withstand Uther Doul than flesh.)

Spiral Jacobs

The currents here are labyrinthine, a morass of competing flows that dissipate the impurities in convoluted chains, taste-trails that make little sense, little pockets of different dirts. They are hard to follow.

‘And the name …’ He gave me another of those smiles. ‘Another misunderstanding. I found this sword after a very long search, after mastering a dead science. The men call it Mightblade. Not mighty.’ He spoke slowly. ‘It might, it might not. Might not meaning potency, but potentiality. It is a bastardization of its true name. There was a time there were many weapons like this,’ he said. ‘Now, it is, I think, the only one left. ‘It is a Possible Sword.’

Neither Tanner Sack nor any of his colleagues knew whether the creature that breached in Bas-Lag was a partial or a total manifestation, a confusion of scale (some protozoon, some plankton from a huge brine dimension), a pseudo-organism spontaneously generated in the vents between worlds.

The water around him swirls. Thaumaturgic tides wash dissonant up from the hole. There is a sudden spasm of water pressure, and then a very faint sound of pounding reaches Tanner’s ears. Uncertain, he strains to hear. It is a faint, regular beat that he feels in his innards. A ponderous smashing stroke. His stomach pitches. He hears it only for an instant, a quirk of space and thaumaturgy, but he knows what it is, and the knowledge stuns him. It is a heart the size of a cathedral, beating far below him in the dark.

Tapped by possibility machines, outcomes which didn’t quite make it to actuality were boosted, and made real.

Seen through hundreds of feet of air, the war is like a diorama. It seems a reconstruction. It does not look real.

The sea has become charnel. The water is littered with bodies. They move with the swells and currents, in a macabre dance. They emit clouds of blood like squid ink. They are transformed by the sea: entrails fan like coral; torn swathes of skin become fins. They are broken by jags of bone.

Crobuzoner thaumaturges, channelling puissance from batteries and their own bodies, have animated flocks of golems: clumsy constructions of wire and leather and clay, inelegant and rough-hewn, with claws like umbrella’s innards and clear glass eyes. Their ugly wings beat frantically to bring them skyward. They are strong as monkeys, mindless and tenacious.

There is a terrible slowness, a solemn care behind every motion. Every cut, every crushing blow, every bullet boring into eye and bone, every belch of fire and bursting vessel seems planned. It is a sordid pretence.

The Armadan submarines scatter the little craft, ram the iron flanks of the dreadnoughts, rear up like whales.

‘Whoever you speak to,’ she said, ‘whoever you write to, there are things you wouldn’t say, things you’d censor. And the more I wrote … the more I write, the more I need to say, the more I need to be quite, quite open. So I’ll write it all, and I’ll not have to close it down. I can leave that to the end.

Now in this deepest gutter of night where moments lie still like frightened things and we who are about are free of time I go walking.

History is formless and oppressive all around me, a nightmare I will make into sense.

Where does it come from? Swept hourly by neurotic sea-wind, when does dust touch down? In some lights (reveries no less than true for that) I see it thick as snowfall and cobwebs clog my passage home. Alone I drown in dust and choke in it, in time’s desiccated exhaust.

Like the riverthing you are you flicker towards your meaning and disturb a silt of effluvial words that cloud your intent. But I have dealt with seers poets and Weavers and can track your insinuations.

They descended towards a great flat zone of lighter darkness, a ruptured, pebbled field that insinuated itself into visibility.

In time, in time they tell me, I’ll not feel so bad. I don’t want time to heal me. There’s a reason I’m like this. I want time to set me ugly and knotted with loss of you, marking me. I won’t smooth you away. I can’t say goodbye.

Either he spends his life in control of everything, or in panicked fear. Either he has planned everything to a dizzying degree, or he moves us all desperately from crisis to crisis, not knowing what he wants, showing nothing on his face.

me irl

This is a Possible Letter. Until the last second, when I write your name beside that word ‘Dear’, all those sheets and months ago, this is a Possible Letter, pregnant with potentiality. I am very powerful right now. I am all ready to mine the possibilities, make one of them fact.