The Scar (New Crobuzon, #2)

by China Miéville

Bellis felt almost stupefied with resentment that her journey was under way.

said, hefting the weapon. “Will you look away, Captain?” There were seconds of silence before Bellis’ stomach pitched and her legs almost buckled as she understood what he meant. Realization hit the captain and others at the same moment. There were gasps as Myzovic’s eyes widened, and his face crawled with anger and terror. The emotions crowded each other out in an ugly battle. His mouth twisted, opened, and closed. “No I will not look away, sir,” he shouted finally, and Bellis’ breath caught at the sound of it, the hysteria and shock that broke his voice. “I will not, damn and fuck you, sir, you fucking coward, sir, you shit …” The man in grey nodded. “As you wish,” he said. He raised the gun and shot Captain Myzovic through the eye. There was a short crack and a burst of blood and bone as the captain spasmed backward, his ruined face snarling and stupid.

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’ breath from her chest. The ease with which those little commands were broken. She felt as if all around her, morose ghosts were milling, unable to accept that the volumes were no longer theirs.

So many ways he was growing, so fast. Loyalty and lust and love weren’t enough for her. It was these frequent glimmerings of the man underneath the childhood he was shucking that swept Angevine with true passion for him, that stained her vague parental warmth with something more hard and base and breathless.

Uther Doul did not seem to live in the same time as anyone else. He seemed like some visitor to a world much more gross and sluggish than his own. Despite the bulk of his body, he moved with such speed that even gravity seemed to operate more quickly for him.

He had readied and recovered himself like a monk, fought like a machine, and seemed to feel it like a predatory beast.

“If the grindylow take New Crobuzon, they wouldn’t enslave us, or kill us, or even eat us all. They wouldn’t do anything so … comprehensible.”

‘The mountain-that-swims, the godwhale, the greatest beast ever to visit our world, the avanc.’ ”

They had not had sex for a long time. It had only ever happened twice. After those times, they had shared her bed and thrown off their clothes in front of each other without shyness or hesitation. But neither, it seemed, was moved to fuck. It was as if having used sex to connect and open to each other, the channel was in place and the act was superfluous.

South, they commanded, and even when their whales began to die, one by one, their colossal bodies falling prey to alien warmwater viruses and collapsing, their skins peeling off grey and rotten, their bodies bloating with gas and bobbing stinking and pustulant to the surface to be torn to pieces by carrion birds till their bones and the remnants of their flesh slid down into darkening water, their masters did not hesitate. South, they said, and followed the trail into tropical seas.

“One day he rowed too far out and the wind took him. A Garwater scout found him and stole his cargo and debated whether or not to kill him, terrified, skinny little fisherboy. In the end they took him back to the city.” His fingers shifted, and he began gently to massage his own hands. “People are made and broken and remade by their circumstances,” he said. “Within three years the boy ruled Garwater.” He smiled.

“I do not know how he reacted, that first time. But that night she stopped being his courtesan and became his equal. They lost their names that night and became the Lovers. And we had two rulers on Garwater—two who ruled with more single-minded purpose than one ever had. And everything is open to them. She taught him that night how to remake rules, how always to go further. She made him like her. She was hungry for transformations.

“But they don’t have the males’ mouthparts, obviously, so they can’t make the same sounds. It’s only the most inexperienced, the youngest, who try to mimic the anophelii men. With their proboscises retracted, their mouths are much more like ours.” She saw that he understood. “Their voices sound like ours,” she went on softly. “They’ve never heard language they could mimic before. Full as she was, without language but conscious that she was without it, it must have made her quite giddy to hear us all conversing, in sounds that she herself could make. That’s why she came for that man. She was trying to talk to him.”

The avanc was a rare visitor to the seas of Bas-Lag. The intricacies of transplanar life were abstruse and uncertain. 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 protozöon, some plankton from a huge brine dimension), a pseudoorganism spontaneously generated in the vents between worlds. No one knew.

Words fluttering across registers, uttered with quick breaths. Mewing, pleading, delighting. Gasps of sexual closeness and pain and other intense emotions. And words coming through the metal.

The landscape below them was all beast.