The Scar (New Crobuzon, #2)

by China Miéville

Gimgewry, the failed merchant, a man crippled with the understanding of his own inadequacy,

He struggled to overcome his vertigo; he made it something else. No less awe, but less fear. He took what was like fear in him, and made it humility. I’m damn small, he thought, hanging like a mote of dust in still air, in a sea that’s damn big. But that’s alright. I can do that.

Shekel was still excited by the clamor of silent sounds reading had given him, but with familiarity came control. He no longer found himself stopping midway along a corridor and gasping as the word bulkhead or heads shouted itself to him from some ship’s sign. For the first week or so, graffiti had been an intoxication. He had stood in front of walls and ships’ sides and let his eyes crawl across the morass of messages scratched or scrawled or painted on the city’s flanks. Such a diversity of styles: the same letters could be written tens of different ways but always say the same thing. Shekel never stopped enjoying that fact.

The intruders watch with eyes like oil.

“When they tell you that I came from the world of the dead, you’re at the end of a chain of whispers. Each link has an imperfect join with those around it, and meaning leaches out between them.”