The Scar by China Miéville Read Free Book Online Page A

this letter. We are approaching Salkrikaltor, where I will have my chance to seal it and leave it, to be picked up by any New Crobuzon ship passing. It will reach you, this long farewell, only a few weeks late. Which is not so very bad. I hope it finds you well.
    I hope that you miss me as I miss you. I do not know what I will do without this means to connect me with you. It will be a year or more before you hear from me again, before another ship steams or sails into the harbor at Nova Esperium, and think of me then! My hair long and braided with mud, no doubt, abjuring clothes, marked with sigils like some savage shaman! If I still remember how to write, I will write to you then, and tell you of my time, and ask what it is like in my city. And perhaps you will have written to me, and you will tell me that all is safe, and that I can come home.
    The passengers debated excitedly over what they had seen the previous night. Bellis scorned them. The
Terpsichoria
passed through the Candlemaw Straits and into the calmer water of Salkrikaltor. First the lush island of Gnomon Tor loomed into view, and then, before five in the afternoon, Salkrikaltor City came over the horizon.
    The sun was very low and the light was thick. The shoreline of Gnomon Tor rose green and massive a few miles north. 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 spiraled 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 analogs of lace corals—high-rise dwellings that branched into scores of thin rooms—and squat many-windowed arenas like gargantuan barrel sponges. Frilled ribbons of architecture like fire coral.
    The towers of the submerged city rose a hundred feet above the waves, their shapes uninterrupted. Huge doorways gaped at sea level. Green scum marks marked the height of a tide that would cover them.
    There were newer buildings. Ovoid mansions carved from stone and ribbed with iron, suspended above the water on struts that jutted from the submerged roofscape. Floating platforms topped with terraces of square brick houses—like those of New Crobuzon—perched preposterously in the sea.
    There were thousands of cray, and a fair number of humans, on the walkways and bridges at water level, and way above. Scores of flat-bottomed barges and boats puttered between the towers.
    Oceangoing ships were docked at the town’s outskirts, tied up to pillars in the sea. Cogs and junks and clippers, and here and there a steamship. The
Terpsichoria
approached.
    “Look there,” someone said to Bellis, and pointed downward—the water was absolutely clear. Even in the waning light Bellis could see the wide streets of Salkrikaltor suburbs far below. They were outlined with cold-looking streetlights. The buildings stopped at least fifty feet from the surface, to ensure clearance for the ships that passed above them.
    On the walkways linking the submarine spires Bellis could see yet more citizens, more cray. They scuttled and swam quickly, moving with much more facility than their compatriots above them in the air.
    It was an extraordinary place. When they had docked, Bellis watched enviously as the
Terpsichoria
’s boats were lowered. Most of the crew and all the passengers lined up eagerly before the ladders. They grinned and bickered excitedly, casting their eyes toward the city.
    It was dusk now. Salkrikaltor’s towers were silhouettes; their lit windows reflected in the black water. There were faint sounds on the air: music, shouts, grinding machinery, waves.
    “Be back aboard by two in the morning,” yelled a sublieutenant. “Stick to the human quarters and whatever else you