"China Mieville - The Scar" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mieville China)

few feet of warm, mineral-rich water into a cold which would kill them.

The landscape below the surface is one of mountains and canyons and forests, shifting dunes, ice
caverns and graveyards. The water is dense with matter. Islands float impossibly in the deeps, caught on
charmed tides. Some are the size of coffins, little slivers of flint and granite that refuse to sink. Others
are gnarled rocks half a mile long, suspended thousands of feet down, moving on slow, arcane streams.
There are communities on these unsinking lands: there are hidden kingdoms.

There is heroism and brute warfare on the ocean floor, unnoticed by land-dwellers. There are gods and
catastrophes.

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 The Scar




Intruding vessels pass between the sea and the air. Their shadows fleck the bottom where it is high
enough for light to reach. The trading ships and cogs, the whaling boats pass over the rot of other craft.
SailorsтАЩ bodies fertilize the water. Scavenger fish feed on eyes and lips. There are jags in the coral
architecture where masts and anchors have been reclaimed. Lost ships are mourned or forgotten, and
the living floor of the sea takes them and hides them with barnacles, gives them as caves to morays and
ratfish and cray outcastes; and other more savage things.

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.

They decay on their long journey down. Nothing will hit the black sand at the bottom of the world but
algae-covered bones.


At the edges of the shelves of rock where cold, light water gives way to a creeping darkness, a he-cray
scrambles. He sees prey, clicks and rattles deep in his throat while he slips the hood from his hunting
squid and releases it.

It bolts from him, diving for the shoal of fat mackerel that boil and re-form like a cloud twenty feet
above. Its foot-long tentacles open and whip closed again. The squid returns to its master, dragging a
dying fish, and the school reknits behind it.

The cray slices the head and tail from the mackerel and slips the carcass into a net bag at his belt. The
bloody head he gives his squid to gnaw.

The upper body of the cray, the soft, unarmored section, is sensitive to minute shifts of tide and
temperature. He feels a prickling against his sallow skin as complex washes of water meet and interact.
With an abrupt spasm the mackerel-cloud congeals and disappears over the crusted reef.

The cray raises his arm and calls his squid closer to him, soothes it gently. He fingers his harpoon.

He is standing on a granite ridge, where seaweed and ferns move against him, caressing his long
underbelly. To his right, swells of porous stone rise above him. To the left the slope falls away fast into