The Scar: A Bas-Lag Novel 2

by China Miéville

‘So one branch of government was hunting me, while another was processing my application to leave and discussing pay. That’s the advantage of bureaucracy.

Scars are not injuries, Tanner Sack. A scar is a healing. After injury, a scar is what makes you whole.’

They could express themselves perfectly in elegant script, but they had no idea how it would sound. The very concept of High Kettai ‘sounding’ was alien to them. It existed for them only as writing.

The Kettai would not allow anophelii access to any information outside of its control: the centuries-long maintenance of High Kettai as the island’s written language ensured that. And, that way, anophelii science and philosophy was in the hands of the Kohnid elite, who were almost alone in being able to read it.

The mosquito-people had been reduced to captive scholars.

In a big, windowless chamber at the bottom of the Grand Easterly, a new engine was being built. The redundant boilers and their tangle of head-height pipes were stripped away, like clearing a rusty forest. When the ghosts of engines were gone, two great stamped-flat discs of iron were visible, embedded in the floor. Waist high and many yards around, encrusted with age and grease. They were the ends of the chain attached to the ship, pushed through its hull, then hammered and flattened to attach them tight, centuries ago. The first time this had been tried. Someone planned this before, Tanner Sack thought.

Vague suggestions of architecture and biology burnt onto the paper, scarring it. Wounding it and healing it in a new configuration. Scars are memory. I carry my memories of Armada on my back.

Doul passed messages to Fennec through me, for Fennec to give the city. But Fennec did the wrong thing, and the Lovers outmanoeuvred us all, by telling the truth.