The Scar

Chapter Six

There were lamps under the water. Green, grey, cold white, and amber globes of cray design, tracing the undersides of the city.

Light prickled on suspended particles. It came not only from the thousand knots of illumination but from corridors of early sunlight that angled down, picking out passages from the waves to the deep water. Fish and kree circled them and passed through them dumbly.

From below, the city was an archipelago of shadows.

It was irregular and sprawling and hugely complex. It displaced currents. Jags of keel contradicted each other in all directions. Anchor chains trailed like hair, snapped and forgotten. From its orifices billowed refuse; fecal matter and particulate, and oil eddying uneasily and rising in small slicks. A constant drool of trash fouled the water and was swallowed by it.

Below the city there were a few hundred yards of rapidly thinning light, then miles of dark water.

The underside of Armada was crisscrossed with life.

Fish eddied through its architecture. Fleeting newtlike figures moved with intellect and purpose between boltholes. There were wire mesh cages tucked into hollows and dangling from chains, crowded with fat cod and tunny. Cray dwellings like coral tumors.

Beyond the edges of the city, and below it at the far reaches of light, huge half-tame seawyrms corkscrewed and fed. Submersibles droned-rigid shadows. A dolphin made constant vigilant rounds. A moving ecology and politics were tethered to the city’s calcified base.

The sea around it resonated with noise made physical: staccato clicks and the vibrations of pounding metal, the swallowed sound of watery friction as currents rubbed against each other. Barks that dissipated when they reached the air.

Among those that gripped and dangled underneath the city were scores of men and women. They fumbled in dragged-out time, clumsy beside the elegant fronds and sponges.

The water was cold, and the topsiders wore rubberized leather suits and massive helmets of copper and tempered glass, tethered to the surface by tubes of air. They hung on ladders and guy ropes, poised precariously over an unthinkable space.

Stuck tight inside their helmets, they were cut off from sound, and each of them moved ponderously alongside their fellows, quite alone. They clambered like lice across a pipe that poked into the dim sea like an inverted chimney. It was a thriving patchwork of algae and shells in extraordinary shades. Weeds and stinging filigree smothered it like ivy and dangled out and down, fingering the plankton.

There was a diver whose chest was bare, from which two long tentacles extruded, waving in the current, but also according to their own faint inclinations.

It was Tanner Sack.

Pumping its tail, the dolphin plunged up past the edges of the city, out and up toward the light. He burst through decreasing water pressure and out into the air, jackknifing, suspended in spray, fixing the city with a cunning eye.

Below again, he curled back through striae of water. Huge shapes were dimly visible some way off, unclear through water and a shimmering of thaumaturgy. Patrolled by tethered sharks, they were not to be investigated. The eye could not focus on them.

There were no divers upon them.

Bellis came out of sleep to the sound of voices.

It was weeks since she had arrived in Armada.

Every morning was the same. Waking and sitting up, waiting, looking around her little room with an incredulity, a shuddering disbelief that would not stop. It welled up even stronger than the longing with which she missed New Crobuzon.

How did I get here? The question was constant in her.

She opened her curtains, gripped her windowsill, and stood staring out over the city.

When they had arrived, on the first day, they had stood huddled with their belongings on the Terpsichoria’s deck, surrounded by guards, and by women and men with checklists and paperwork. The faces of the pirates were hard, made cruel by weather. Through her fear, Bellis watched carefully, and could make no sense of them. They were disparate, a mixture of ethnicities and cultures. Their skins were all different colors. Some were scarified in abstract designs; some wore batik robes. They looked as if they shared nothing except their grim demeanor.

When they stiffened suddenly into a kind of attention, Bellis knew their superiors had arrived. Two men and a woman were standing by the ship’s rail. The murderer-the grey-armored leader of the raiding party-stepped up to join them. His clothes and sword were now quite clean.

The younger man and the woman stepped forward to the swordsman. When Bellis saw them she could only stare.

The man wore a dark grey suit; the woman a simple blue dress. They were tall and held themselves with immense authority. The man had a trim mustache and an easy arrogance. The woman’s features were heavy and irregular, but the flesh of her mouth was sensual, the cruel cast of her eyes compelling.

What had made Bellis stare at them both with fascination and distaste, what commanded her attention, were the scars.

Curling down the outside of the woman’s face, from the corner of her left eye to the corner of her mouth. Fine and uninterrupted. Another, thicker and shorter and more jagged, swept from the right side of her nose across her cheek and curled up as if to cup her eye. And others, contoured to her face. They disfigured her ocher skin with esthetic precision.

Flickering her eyes from the woman to the man, Bellis had felt something curdle inside her. What fucking unhealthiness is this? she had thought uneasily.

He was adorned with identical, but mirrored marks. A long curved cicatrix down the right side of his face, a shorter flourishing cut below his left eye. As if he were the woman’s distorted reflection.

As Bellis watched the wounded pair, aghast, the woman spoke.

“You will have realized by now,” she said in good Ragamoll, projecting her soft voice so that everyone could hear, “that Armada is not like other cities.”

Is that a welcome? Bellis had thought. Was that all that the traumatized and bewildered survivors of the Terpsichoria were to be offered?

The woman had continued.

She told them about the city.

Sometimes she was silent, and without a pause the man would speak. They were almost like twins, finishing each other’s sentences.

It had been hard to listen to what they were telling her. Bellis was agog at the feelings she saw pass between the scarred man and woman every time they glanced at each other. Above all a hunger. Bellis had felt unstuck in time: as if she were dreaming this arrival.

Later, she would realize that she had absorbed much of what had been said, that it had passed into her and been processed at some level below consciousness. It came out as she began to live in Armada, against her will.

At the time, all she had been aware of was the couple’s shared intensity, and the stunned excitement that greeted the woman’s final sentence.

The words had reached Bellis full seconds after they were spoken, as if her skull were some thick medium through which sound traveled sluggishly.

There was a massed gasp and a whoop and then a swell of incredulous cheering, a huge breaking wave of joy from the hundreds of exhausted Remade prisoners who stood shivering and stinking. It rose and rose, at first tentative and then rapidly delirious with triumph.

“Human, cactacae, hotchi, cray… Remade,” the woman had said. “In Armada you are all sailors and citizens. In Armada you are not distinguished. Here you are free. And equal.”

There, finally, was a welcome. And the Remade accepted it with loud and tearful thanks.

Bellis had been herded away with her random companions, out into the city where the men and women of the city’s trades were waiting with contracts and hard, eager looks. And as she shuffled out of the room, she looked back at the group of leaders and saw with astonishment that someone had joined them.

Johannes Tearfly was looking down, totally bewildered, at the hand that the scarred man proffered-not snubbing it, but as if he could not think what he was supposed to do with it. The elderly man who had stood with the murderer and the scarred couple stepped forward, stroking his bright white beard, and greeted Johannes loudly by name.

That was all Bellis had seen or heard before she was taken away. Off the ship, out into Armada, into her new city.

A flotilla of dwellings. A city built on old boat bones.

Everywhere battered clothes shook and dried in the constant wind. They ruffled in Armada’s alleyways, by tall brickwork, steeples, masts, and chimneys and ancient rigging. Bellis looked from her window across the vista of reconfigured masts and bowsprits, a cityscape of beakheads and forecastles. Across many hundreds of ships lashed together, spread over almost a square mile of sea, and the city built on them.

Countless naval architectures: Stripped longships; scorpion galleys; luggers and brigantines; massive steamers hundreds of feet long down to canoes no larger than a man. There were alien vessels: ur-ketches, a barge carved from the ossified body of a whale. Tangled in ropes and moving wooden walkways, hundreds of vessels facing all directions rode the swells.

The city was loud. Tethered dogs, the shouts of costermongers, the drone of engines, hammers and lathes, and stones being broken. Klaxons from workshops. Laughter and shouting, all in the variant of Salt, the mongrel sailors’ tongue, that was the language of Armada. And below those city sounds the throaty noise of boats. Complaining wood and the snaps of leather and rope, the percussion of ship on ship.

Armada moved constantly, its bridges swinging side to side, its towers heeling. The city shifted on the water.

The vessels had been reclaimed, from the inside out. What had once been berths and bulkheads had become houses; there were workshops in old gundecks. But the city had not been bounded by the ships’ existing skins. It reshaped them. They were built up, topped with structure; styles and materials shoved together from a hundred histories and esthetics into a compound architecture.

Centuries-old pagodas tottered on the decks of ancient oarships, and cement monoliths rose like extra smokestacks on paddlers stolen from southern seas. The streets between the buildings were tight. They passed over the converted vessels on bridges, between mazes and plazas and what might have been mansions. Parklands crawled across clippers, above armories in deeply hidden decks. Decktop houses were cracked and strained from the boats’ constant motion.

Bellis could see the awnings of Winterstraw Market: hundreds of jolly boats and flat-bottomed canal runners, none more than twenty feet long, filling the spaces between grander vessels. The little boats bumped each other constantly, tethered together with chains and crusted knotwork. The stallholders were opening up, garlanding their little shop boats with ribbons and signs and hanging up their wares. Early shoppers descended to the market from surrounding ships by steep rope bridges, stepping expertly from boat to boat.

Beside the market was a corbita smeared with ivy and climbing flowers. Low dwellings were built onto it and beautifully carved. Its masts had not been felled, but were wound with greenery that made them look like ancient trees. There was a submersible that had not dived for decades. A ridge of thin houses extended around its periscope like a dorsal fin. The two vessels were joined by rippling wooden bridges that passed above the market.

A steamship was become a residential block, its hull broken with new windows, a children’s climbing frame on its deck. A boxy paddleboat housed mushroom farms. A chariot ship, its bridle polished decoratively, was covered with brick terraces that filled the curves of its naval foundations. Chains of smoke rose from its chimneys.

Buildings laced with bone, colors from greys and rusts to the flamboyant glares of heraldry: a city of esoteric shapes. Its hybridity was stark and uncharming, marred with decay and graffiti. The architecture hunkered and rose and hunkered again with the water, vaguely threatening.

There were slums and mansions in the bodies of tramp merchant ships, and built tottering across sloops. There were churches and sanatoria and deserted houses, all licked by constant damp, contoured with salt-steeped in the sounds of waves and the fresh-rot smell of the sea.

The ships were tethered together in a weave of chains and hinged girders. Every vessel was a pontoon in a web of rope bridges. Boats coiled toward each other in seawalls of embedded ships, surrounding free-floating vessels. Basilio Harbor, where Armada’s navy and visitors could tie up, repair or unload, sheltered from storms.

The largest ships meandered instead around the edges of the city, beyond the tugs and steamers tethered to Armada’s sides. Out in the open water were fleets of fishing boats, the city’s warships, the chariot ships and whim trawlers and others. These were Armada’s pirate navy, heading out across the world, coming in to dock with cargoes plundered from enemies or the sea.

And beyond all that, beyond the city sky that thronged with birds and other shapes, beyond all the vessels was the sea.

The open sea. Waves like insects in incessant motion.

Stunning and empty.

Bellis was protected by those who had caught her, she was made to understand. She was a resident of Garwater riding, ruled by the man and woman with the scars. They had promised work and a berth for all those they had taken, and it had happened quickly. Agents had met the terrified, confused new arrivals, calling out the names on their lists, checking the skills and details of the newcomers, brusquely explaining in pidgin Salt what work they offered.

It had taken Bellis some minutes to understand, and more to believe, that she was being offered work in a library.

She had signed the proffered papers. The officers and sailors from the Terpsichoria were being led forcibly away for “assessment” and “reeducation,” and Bellis had felt in no mood to be difficult. She had scratched her name, tight with resentment. Call this a damned contract? she felt like shouting. There’s no choice here, and everybody knows it. But she had signed.

The organization, the mumming of legality, confused her.

These were pirates. This was a pirate city, ruled by cruel mercantilism, existing in the pores of the world, snatching new citizens from their ships, a floating freetown for buying and selling stolen goods, where might made right. The evidence of this was everywhere: in the severity of the citizens, the weapons they wore openly, in the stocks and whipping posts she saw on the Garhouse vessels. Armada, she thought, must be ordered by maritime discipline, the lash.

But the ship-city was not the base brutocracy that Bellis had expected. There were other logics at work. There were typed contracts, offices administrating the new arrivals. And officials of some kind: an executive, administrative caste, just as in New Crobuzon.

Alongside Armada’s club law, or supporting it, or an integument around it, was bureaucratic rule. This was not a ship, but a city. She had entered another country as complex and organized as her own.

The officials had taken her to the Chromolith, a long-decaying paddleship, and berthed her in two little round rooms joined by a spiral staircase, built in what had been the vessel’s big chimney. Somewhere far below her, in the ship’s guts, was an engine that had once vented its soot through what was now her home. It had gone cold long before she was born.

The room was hers, they told her, but she must pay for it, weekly, at the Garwater Settlement Office. They had given her an advance on her wages, a handful of notes and change-“ten eyes to a flag, ten flags to a finial.” The currency was rough-cut and crudely printed. The colors of the ink varied from note to note.

And then they had told her, in rudimentary Ragamoll, that she would never leave Armada, and they had left her there alone.

She had waited, but that was all. She was alone in the city, and it was a prison.

Eventually hunger had driven her down to buy greasy street-food from a vendor who jabbered at her in Salt too quick for her easily to understand. She had walked the streets, astonished that she was not accosted. She felt so alien, bowed under culture shock as crippling as migraine, surrounded by the women and men in lush, ragged dress, the street children, the cactacae and khepri, hotchi, llorgiss, massive gessin and vu-murt, and others. Cray lived below the city and walked topside in the day, sluggish on their armored legs.

The streets were narrow little ridges between the houses crammed on decks. Bellis grew used to the city’s yawing, the skyline that shifted and jostled. She was surrounded by catcalls and conversations in Salt.

It was easy for her to learn: its vocabulary was obvious, stolen as it was from other languages, and its syntax was easy. She had to use it-she could not avoid buying food, asking for directions or clarification, speaking to other Armadans-and when she did her accent marked her out as a newcomer, not city-born.

For the most part those she spoke to were patient with her, even crudely good-humored, forgiving her surliness. Perhaps they expected her to relax as she made Armada her home.

She did not.

That morning, as Bellis stepped out of the Chromolith smokestack, the question How did I get here? broke through into her mind again.

She was out in the street in the city of ships, in the sun, enclosed in a press of her kidnappers. Men and women, tough-faced humans and other races, even a few constructs were all around her, bartering, working, jabbering in Salt. Bellis walked on through Armada, a prisoner.

She was heading for The Clockhouse Spur. This riding abutted Garwater, and was more commonly known as Booktown, or the khepri quarter.

It was a little more than a thousand feet from Chromolith Towers to the Grand Gears Library. The walk there took her over at least six vessels.

The sky was full of craft. Gondolas swayed beneath dirigibles, ferrying passengers across the angling architecture, descending between close-quartered housing and letting down rope ladders, cruising past much larger airships that hauled goods and machinery. Those were chaotic. Some were congealed from lashed-together gasbags, extruding cabins and engines randomly, like chance accretions of material. Masts were mooring posts, sprouting aerostats of various shapes, like plump, mutant fruit.

From Chromolith Bellis crossed a steep little bridge to the schooner Jarvee, crowded with little kiosks selling tobacco and sweets. She passed up onto the barquentine Lynx Sejant, its deck full of silk merchants selling offcuts from Armada’s piracy. Right, past a broken llorgiss sea pillar bobbing like some malevolent fishing lure, and Bellis crossed Taffeta Bridge.

She was now on the Severe, a massive clipper, the edge of Booktown riding, where the khepri ruled. Beside carts pulled by Armada’s sickly inbred ox and horses, Bellis passed a team of three khepri guard-sisters.

There were similar trios in Kinken and Creekside, New Crobuzon’s khepri ghettos. It had astonished Bellis the first time she had seen them here. The khepri in Armada, like those in New Crobuzon, must be descendants of refugees from the Mercy Ships, worshipping what was left, what they remembered, of the Bered Kai Nev pantheon. They held traditional weapons. Their lithe humanoid women’s bodies were weatherbeaten, their heads like giant scarabs iridescent in the cold sun.

With so many mute khepri residents, the streets of Booktown were quieter than those of Garwater. Instead, the air was slightly spiced with residue from the chymical mists that were part of khepri communication. It was their equivalent of a boisterous hubbub.

Punctuating the alleyways and squares were khepri-spit sculptures, like those in New Crobuzon’s Plaza of Statues. Figures from myth, abstract forms, sea creatures executed in the opalescent material the khepri metabolized through their headscarabs. The colors were muted, as if colorberries were less plentiful here, or of worse quality.

On an avenue on the Compound Dust, a khepri clockwork ship-a Mercy Ship that had fled the Ravening-Bellis slowed, fascinated by its cogs and architecture. Insects and husks blew fitfully into her path from the gusting deck-field of a farm ship aft, and the distant bleating of livestock sounded through slats in its lower decks.

Then on to the fat factory ship the Aronnax Lab, past metallurgy workshops and refineries, into Krome Plaza, where a great suspended platform reached out across the water onto the deck of the Pinchermarn, the aftmost of the vessels that made up Grand Gears Library.

“Relax… no one cares that you’re late, you know,” said Carrianne, one of the human staff, as Bellis hurried past. “You’re new, you’re press-ganged, so you might as well milk it.” Bellis heard her laughing, but did not respond.

The corridors and converted mess halls were crammed with bookshelves and guttering oil lanterns. Scholars of all races pursed their lips, if they had them, and looked up wistfully in Bellis’ wake. The reading rooms were large and quiet. Their windows were filmed in dust and desiccated insects, and seemed to age the light falling across the communal tables and the volumes in scores of languages. Stifled coughs sounded like apologies as Bellis entered the acquisitions department. Books tottered on cabinets and trolleys and in loose towers on the floor.

She was there for hours, coding methodically. Stacking books written in scripts she could not read, recording the details of the other volumes onto cards. Filing them alphabetically-the Salt alphabet was a slightly variant form of the Ragamoll script-according to author, title, language, themes, and subjects.

A little before she was due to break for her lunch Bellis heard footsteps. It must be Shekel, she thought. He was the only person from the Terpsichoria she saw or spoke to. She smiled at the thought of it: herself consorting with the cabin boy. He had come swaggering in to find her, almost a fortnight previously, all adolescent nerve, excited at their capture and new situation. (Someone had told him about “a scary lofty lady in black with blue lips” working in the library, he explained to her. He grinned when he said that, and she had looked away to avoid smiling back.)

He was living by various vague means, sharing a house with a Remade man from the Terpsichoria. Bellis offered Shekel a brass flag to help her with reshelving, which he accepted. Since then he had come several times, done a little work, talking to her about Armada and the scattered remnants of their ship.

She learned a lot from him.

But it was not Shekel who was now approaching her in the narrow corridor, but a nervous, quizzically smiling Johannes Tearfly.

It was with some embarrassment, later, that she remembered herself rising at his arrival (with a cry of pleasure like a gushy child, for gods’ sakes) and throwing her arms around him.

He opened to her, too, smiling with shy warmth. And after a long moment of close greeting, they disengaged and looked at each other.

This was the first chance he’d had to get out, he told her, and she demanded to know what he had been doing. He’d been sent to the library and had taken the chance to seek her out, and again she told him to tell her what he had been damn well doing. When he told her that he could not, that he had to go now, she almost stamped in frustration, but he was telling her wait, wait, that he had more free time now, and that she should just listen a moment.

“If you’re free tomorrow night,” he said, “I’d like to take you to supper. There’s a place in starboard Garwater, on the Raddletongue, called the Unrealized Time. Do you know it?”

“I’ll find it,” she said.

“I could come and collect you,” he began, and she cut him off.

“I’ll find it.”

He smiled at her, with the bemused pleasure she remembered. If you’re free indeed! she thought sardonically. Does he really think… Is it possible? She felt suddenly uncertain, almost afraid. Do the others go out every night? Am I alone in exile? Are the Terpsichoria’s passengers carousing every evening in their new home?

As she left the library that evening, Armada’s close quarters and narrow streets oppressed Bellis. But when she raised her eyes and looked beyond the skyline, the Swollen Ocean weighed down on her like granite, and she felt breathless. She could not believe that the mass of water and air beyond Armada did not drown it, disappear it in an instant. She counted her coins and approached a skycab driver refilling his dirigible from a gas depot on Aronnax Lab.

She swayed in the cradle as it buzzed sedately a hundred feet above the highest deck. Bellis could see the edges of the city bobbing randomly, moving very slowly with whatever currents took it. There, the distant wood of the haunted quarter. The arena. The stronghold of the Brucolac.

And in the center of Garwater riding, something extraordinary that Bellis never grew accustomed to seeing-the source of the riding’s strength. Something looming enormously over the shipscape around it: the largest ship in the city, the largest ship that Bellis had ever seen.

Almost nine hundred feet of black iron. Five colossal funnels and six masts stripped of canvas, more than two hundred feet high; and tethered way above them a huge, crippled dirigible. A vast paddle on each side of the ship, like industrial sculptures. The decks seemed almost bare, unbroken by the haphazard building that misshaped other vessels. The Lovers’ stronghold, like a beached titan: the Grand Easterly, lolling austere amid Armada’s baroque.

“I’ve changed my mind,” Bellis said suddenly. “Don’t take me to Chromolith.”

She directed the pilot aft-aft-star’d-the city’s directions all relative to the colossal Grand Easterly itself. As the man gently tugged at his rudder she looked down over the crowds. Air eddied as the aeronaut picked a way through the masts and rigging that jutted up around them in the Armada sky. Around the towers Bellis saw the city birds: gulls and pigeons and parakeets. They brooded on roofs and in decktop aeries, alongside other presences.

The sun was gone, and the city sparkled. Bellis felt a gust of melancholy as she passed light-strung rigging close enough to grasp. She saw her destination, the Boulevard St. Carcheri on the steamer Glomar’s Heart, a shabby-opulent promenade of gently colored streetlamps, knotted rustwood trees, and stucco facades. As the gondola began to descend, she kept her eyes on the shabbier, darker shape beyond the parkland.

Across four hundred feet of water glinting with impurities rose a tower of intertwined girders as high as the dirigibles, gushing with flame. A massive concrete body on legs like four splintering pillars emerging from the dirtied sea. Dark cranes moving without visible purpose.

It was a monstrous thing, awe-inspiring and ugly and foreboding. Bellis sat back in her descending aerostat and kept her eye on the Sorghum, New Crobuzon’s stolen rig.