The Scar (New Crobuzon, #2)

by China Miéville

In the deepest places, where physical norms collapse under the crushing water, bodies still fall softly through the dark, days after their vessels have capsized.

The transport never stops. New Crobuzon is insatiable.

These were pirates. This was a pirate city, ruled by cruel mercantilism, existing in the pores of the world, snatching new citizens from their ships, a floating free-town for buying and selling stolen goods, where might made right. The evidence of this was everywhere: in the severity of the citizens, the weapons they wore openly, in the stocks and whipping-posts she saw on the Garwater vessels. Armada, she thought, must be ordered by maritime discipline, the lash.

Cooking and eating were growing to irritate her with their relentless necessity. She performed them joylessly and as quickly as possible, then sat with Tearfly’s books and continued to work through them, making notes.

Now he swam free, descending towards darkness that no longer seemed to hunger for him. Tanner swam lower and lower. At first he seemed close enough to reach up and stroke the toes of the swimmers above him. It gave him a voyeuristic pleasure to see their frantic, paddling little bodies above him. But when he turned his face to the sunless water below him his stomach pitched at its implacable hugeness, and he turned quickly and made back for the light. Each day he descended further.

They have extracted information with coddling tones and thaumaturgy and torture.

‘Gods and fuck,’ he growled in his graveyard whisper. The councillors were silent instantly, and aghast. He stood and spread out his arms. ‘I have been listening to you for hours,’ he hissed, ‘spewing your trite horseshit. Platitudes and desperation. You are ineffectual.’ He made the word sound like a soul-blasting curse. ‘You are failures. You are pointless. Get out of my boat.’

It was like some insect just emerged from chrysalis: still too weak to fly, but now clearly become what it would be.

‘On the boss’s island, the men go to sea and leave their wives and lovers on the land, and no amount of custom or tradition can chain legs closed. A man who loves a woman with a fierce enough passion – or says he does, or thinks he does – aches when he leaves her. He knows intimately how strong, how powerful her charms are. He himself succumbed to them, after all. So he must lessen them.

‘They know. Once in a while they can stop themselves, when their bellies are full and their minds clear for a few days or hours, and they know what it is they do, how they live. They’re as intelligent as you or me, but they grow up too distracted by starvation to speak, and then once every few months, for a handful of days they can concentrate, they try to learn.

‘We are a minority, it’s true. And of those born every year, many are farm-bred, kept in cages till they’re of strength, when they can be snuffed and recast as zombies. Others are raised by the aristocracy until they come of age, and are slain and welcomed to dead society. But …’

Colonies of barnacles and limpets had scabbed the chains over generations, and as the links ripped free of the ships’ undersides, they sent clouds of dying shellfish into the abyss.

The bacillus that induced photophobic haemophagy – the vampir strain – was capricious, and weak, carried solely in spit and quick to denature and collapse. Only if a vampir’s victim did not die, and if the bite had been direct, mouth to skin so that some of the ab-dead’s spittle entered what was left of their prey’s blood, was there a small chance that the survivor might be infected. And if they survived the fevers and the delirium, they would awaken one night, having died and been renewed, ab-dead, with a raging hunger. Their bodies reconfigured, stronger and quicker by many times. Unageing, able to survive most injury. And unable to bear the sun.

The landscape below them was all beast.

The truth terrified them: in those anarchic hours there was no one giving orders, there was no chain of command, no order, no hierarchy, nothing but a rugged, contingent democracy thrown together by the Armadans as they needed it. The bureaucrats could not accept this, and they saw leaders in Tanner Sack and Hedrigall. But those two were participants, nothing more: one enthusiastic, the other looking bewildered, dragged about on shoulders like a mascot.