The Scar

Chapter Seven

It rained remorselessly all the next day, hard grey drops like shards of flint.

The costermongers were quiet; very little business was done. Armada’s bridges were slippery. There were accidents: the drunk or the clumsy slipping into the cold sea.

The city’s monkeys sat subdued under awnings and bickered. They were pests, feral tribes that raced across the floating city, fighting, vying for scraps and territory, brachiating below bridges and careering up rigging. They were not the only animals living wild in the city, but they were the most successful scavengers. They huddled in the cold damp and groomed each other without enthusiasm.

In the dim light of Grand Gears Library, the signs requesting silence were made absurd by the percussion of rain.

The bloodhorns of Shaddler riding sounded mournfully, as they customarily did when it rained hard and the scabmettlers said that the sky was bleeding. Water beaded weirdly on the surface of the Uroc, Dry Fall riding’s flagship. The dark and rotting fabric of the haunted quarter mildewed and glowered. People in the neighboring Thee-And-Thine riding pointed at the deserted quarter’s decrepit skyline and warned, as they always did, that somewhere within, the tallow ghast was moving.

In the first hour after dusk, in the muted edifice of Barrow Hall on the Therianthropus, the heart of Shaddler, a bad-tempered meeting came to an end. The scabmettler guards outside could hear delegations leaving. They fingered their weapons and ran their hands over the crust of their organic armor.

There was a man among them: a few inches shy of six feet and prodigiously muscled, dressed in charcoal-colored leather, a straight sword by his side. He spoke and moved with quiet grace.

He discussed weaponry with the scabmettlers, then had them show him strokes and sweeps from mortu crutt, their fighting science. He let them touch the filigree of wires that wound around his right arm and down the side of his armor into the battery on his belt.

The man was comparing the Stubborn Nail strike of stampfighting with the sadr punch of mortu crutt. He and his sparring partner swept their arms in slow demonstration attacks, when the doors opened at the top of the stairs above them and the guards came to quick attention. The man in grey straightened slowly and walked to the corner of the entresol.

A coldly furious man descended toward them. He was tall and young-looking and built like a dancer, with freckled skin the color of pale ash. His hair seemed to belong to someone else: it was dark and long and very tightly curled, and it hung in unruly locks from his scalp like an unkempt fleece. It jounced and coiled as he descended.

As he passed the scabmettlers he gave a peremptory little bow, which they returned with more ceremony. He stood still before the man in grey. The two men eyed each other with impenetrable expressions.

“Liveman Doul,” said the newcomer eventually, in a whispering voice.

“Deadman Brucolac,” was the reply. Uther Doul gazed at the Brucolac’s broad, handsome face.

“It seems your employers are going ahead with their idiot scheming,” the Brucolac murmured, and then was silent. “I still can’t believe, Uther,” he said finally, “that you approve of this lunacy.”

Uther Doul did not move, did not take his eyes from the other man.

The Brucolac straightened his back and gave a sneer that might have indicated contempt, or a shared confidence, or many other things. “It won’t happen, you know,” he said. “The city won’t allow it. That’s not what this city is for.”

The Brucolac opened his mouth idly, and his great forked tongue flickered out, tasting the air and the ghosts of Uther Doul’s sweat.

There were things that made very little sense to Tanner Sack.

He did not understand how he could bear the cold of the seawater. With his bulky Remade tentacles, he had to descend with his chest uncovered, and the first touch of the water had shocked him. He had almost balked, then had smeared himself with thick grease; but he had acclimatized much faster than made sense. He was still aware of the chill, but it was an abstract knowledge. It did not cripple him.

He did not understand why the brine was healing his tentacles.

Since first they had been implanted at the caprice of a New Crobuzon magister-a punishment supposedly related to his crime according to some patronizing allegorical logic that had never made any sense to him-they had hung like stinking dead limbs. He had cut at them, experimentally, and the layers of nerves implanted in them had fired and he had nearly fainted with pain. But pain was all that had lived in them, so he had wrapped them around himself like rotting pythons and tried to ignore them.

But immersed in the saltwater, they had begun to move.

Their multitude of small infections had faded, and they were now cool to the touch. After three dives, to his grinding shock, the tentacles had started to move independently of the water.

He was healing.

After a few weeks of diving, new sensations passed through them, and their sucker pads flexed gently and attached themselves on surfaces nearby. Tanner was learning to move them by choice.

In the confused first days when the captives had first arrived, Tanner had wandered through the ridings and listened bewildered as merchants and foremen offered him work in a language he was learning very quickly to understand.

When he verified that he was an engineer, the liaison officer for the Garwater Dock Authority had eyed him greedily, and had asked him in child’s Salt and pantomime hand gestures whether he would learn to be a diver. It was easier to train an engineer to dive than to teach a diver the skills that Tanner had accumulated.

It was hard work learning to breathe the air pumped down from above without panicking in the hot little helmet, how to move without overcompensating and sending himself spinning. But he had learned to luxuriate in the slowed-down time, the eddying clarity of water seen through glass.

He did similar work now to that he had always done-patching and repairing, rebuilding, fumbling with tools by great engines-only now, well below the stevedores and the cranes, it was performed in the crush of water, watched by fishes and eels, buffeted by currents born miles away.

“I told you that Coldarse is working in the library, didn’t I?”

“You did, lad,” Tanner said. He and Shekel were eating below an awning at the docks while the deluge continued around them.

Shekel had arrived at the docks with a little group of raggedy-arsed youngsters between twelve and sixteen years old. All the others, from what Tanner could tell, were city-born; and that they had let a press-ganged join them, one who still struggled to express himself in Salt, was evidence of Shekel’s adaptability.

They had left Shekel alone to share his food with Tanner.

“I like that library,” he said. “I like going there, and not just because of the ice woman, neither.”

“There’s a lot worse you could do than settle into some reading, lad,” said Tanner. “We’ve finished Crawfoot’s Chronicles; you could find some other stories. You could read them to me, for a change. How’re your letters?”

“I can make them out,” said Shekel vaguely.

“Well, there you go then. You go and have a word with Miss Coldy, and get her to recommend some reading for you.”

They ate silently for a while, watching a group of the Armada cray come up from their hivewreck below.

“What’s it like under there?” Shekel said at last.

“Cold,” said Tanner. “And dark. Dark but… luminous. Massive. You’re just surrounded by massiveness. There are shapes you can only just see, huge dark shapes. Subs and whatnot-and sometimes you think you see others. Can’t make them out properly, and they’re guarded, so’s you can’t get too close.

“I’ve watched cray under their wrecks. Seawyrms that saddle up sometimes to the chariot ships. The menfish, like newts, from Bask riding. Can’t hardly see them, the way they move. Bastard John, the dolphin. He’s the Lovers’ security chief below, and a colder, more vicious sod you could not imagine.

“And then there’s a few… Remade.” His voice eddied into silence.

“It’s weird, isn’t it?” said Shekel, watching Tanner closely. “I can’t get used to…” He said nothing more.

Neither could get used to it. A place where the Remade were equal. Where a Remade might be a foreman or a manager instead of the lowest laborer.

Shekel saw Tanner rub his tentacles. “How are they?” he asked, and Tanner grinned and concentrated, and one of the rubbery things contracted a little and began to drag itself like a moribund snake toward Shekel’s bread. The boy clapped appreciatively.

At the edge of the jetty where the cray were surfacing, a tall cactus-man stood, his bare chest pocked with fibrous vegetable scars. A massive rivebow was strapped across his back.

“D’you know him?” said Tanner. “His name’s Hedrigall.”

“That don’t sound like a cactacae name,” said Shekel, and Tanner shook his head.

“He’s no New Crobuzon cactus,” he explained, “nor even a Shankell one. He’s a press-ganged, like us. Came to the city more than twenty years ago. He’s from Dreer Samher. Near enough two thousand miles from New Crobuzon.

“I tell you what, Shekel, he’s got some stories. You don’t need books to get tales off him.

“He was a trader-pirate before he got captured and joined the city here, and he’s seen just about all the things that live in the sea. He can cut your hair with that rivebow; he’s that good a shot. He’s seen keragorae and mosquito-men and unplaced, and whatever else you like. And gods, he knows how to tell you about ’em. In Dreer Samher, they’ve fablers who tell stories for a calling. Hed was one. He can make his voice hypnagogic if he wants, keep you totally drunk on it. All while he tells you stories.”

The cactus-man was standing very still, letting the rain pelt his skin.

“And now he’s an aeronaut,” Tanner said. “He’s been piloting Grand Easterly’s airships-scouts and warflots-for years. He’s one of the Lovers’ most important men, and a fine bloke he is. He spends most of his time now up in the Arrogance.”

Tanner and Shekel looked behind them, and up. More than a thousand feet above the deck of the Grand Easterly the Arrogance was tethered. It was a big, crippled aerostat, with twisted tail fins and an engine that had not moved in years. Attached by hundreds of yards of tar-stiffened rope, winched to the great ship below it, it served as the city’s crow’s nest.

“He likes it up there, Hedrigall,” said Tanner. “Told me he just wants things quiet, these days.”

“Tanner,” said Shekel slowly, “what do you reckon to the Lovers? I mean, you work for them: you’ve heard them talk; you know what they’re like. What d’you think of them? Why d’you do what they say?”

Tanner knew, as he spoke, that Shekel would not fully understand him. But it was such an important question that he turned and looked very carefully at the boy he shared his rooms with (on the port end of an old iron hulk). The boy who had been his jailer and his audience and his friend and was becoming something different, something like family.

“I was going to be a slave in the colonies, Shekel,” he said quietly. “The Lovers of Grand Easterly took me in and gave me a job that pays money and told me they didn’t give a cup of piss that I was Remade. The Lovers gave me my life, Shekel, and a city and a home. I tell you that whatever they fucking want to do is alfuckingright by me. New Crobuzon can kiss my arse, lad. I’m an Armada man, a Garwater man. I’m learning my Salt. I’m loyal.”

Shekel stared at him. Tanner was a slow-talking, quiet man, and Shekel had never seen that intensity from him before.

He was very impressed.

It continued raining. All across Armada, the passengers from the Terpsichoria who had been let out tried to live.

On gaudy yawls and barquentines, they were arguing, buying and selling and stealing, learning Salt, some weeping, poring over maps of the city, calculating the distance from New Crobuzon or Nova Esperium. They mourned their old lives, staring at heliotypes of friends and lovers at home.

In a reeducation jail between Garwater and Shaddler were scores of sailors from the Terpsichoria. Some were shouting at their guard-counselors, who were trying to soothe them, all the time gauging whether this man or that could overcome his ties, whether his link to New Crobuzon would attenuate, whether he could be won over to Armada.

And if not, deciding what was to be done with them.

Bellis arrived at the Unrealized Time with her makeup and hair rain-battered. She stood bedraggled in the doorway while a waiter greeted her, and she stared at him, astonished at this treatment. As if he were a real waiter, she found herself thinking, in a real restaurant in a real city.

The Raddletongue was a big and ancient vessel. It was so crusted with buildings, so recrafted and interfered with, that it was impossible to tell what kind of ship it had once been. It had been part of the Armada for centuries. The ship’s forecastle was covered with ruins: old temples in white stone, much of their substance scattered and pounded to dust. The remnants were smothered in ivy, and nettles that did not keep the city’s children away.

There were strange shapes in the Raddletongue’s streets, lumps of obscure sea-salvaged stuff left in corners as if forgotten.

The restaurant was small and warm and half-full, paneled in darkwood. Its windows looked out over a fringe of ketches and canoes to Urchinspine Docks, Armada’s second harbor.

Bellis saw with a stab of emotion that from the restaurant’s ceiling hung little strings of paper lanterns. The last place she had seen that had been in the Clock and Cockerel, in Salacus Fields in New Crobuzon.

She had to shake her head to clear it of a biting melancholy. At a table in the corner, Johannes was getting to his feet, waving to her.

They sat quietly for a while. Johannes seemed shy, and Bellis found herself resentful that it had been so long since she had heard from him, and suspecting that she was not being fair she retreated into silence.

Bellis saw with amazement that the red wine on the table was a vintage Galaggi, a House Predicus 1768. She looked up at Johannes with eyes wide. With her mouth set shut she looked disapproving.

“I thought we might celebrate,” he said. “I mean, at seeing each other again.”

The wine was excellent.

“Why’ve they just left me… us… to get on with it? Or to rot?” Bellis demanded. She picked at her concoction of fish and bitter ship-grown leaves. “I’d have thought… I’d have thought it illadvised to pluck a few hundred people from their lives, then let them loose in… this…”

“They’ve not done that,” Johannes said. “How many of the other Terpsichoria passengers have you seen? How many of the crew? Don’t you remember the interviews, the questions, when we first arrived? They were tests,” he said gently. “They were estimating who was safe, and who not. If they think you’re too troublesome, or too… tied to New Crobuzon…” His voice petered away.

“Then what?” demanded Bellis. “Like the captain…?”

“No no no,” said Johannes quickly. “I think that they… work on you. Try to persuade you. I mean, you know about press-ganging. There are plenty of sailors in the New Crobuzon navy who were doing nothing more nautical than carousing in a tavern the night they were ‘recruited.’ It doesn’t stop most of them working as sailors once they’re taken.”

“For a while,” said Bellis.

“Yes. I’m not saying it’s exactly the same. That’s the big difference: once you join Armada you don’t… leave.”

“I’ve been told that a thousand times,” Bellis said slowly. “But what about Armada’s fleet? What about the cray underneath? You think they can’t get away? Anyway, if that were true, if people never did have a chance to leave, no one but the city-born would be prepared to live here.”

“Obviously,” Johannes said. “The city’s freebooters are on sail for months, maybe years at a time till they make their way back to Armada. And they’ll dock at other ports during those journeys, and I’m sure some of their crew must have disappeared. There must be ex-Armadans scattered here and there.

“But the fact is, those crews are chosen: partly for their loyalty, and partly for the fact that if they do run, it won’t matter. They’re almost all city-born, for a start: it’s a rare press-ganged who’s given a letter of pass. The likes of you and me, we couldn’t hope to get on a vessel like that. Armada is where most of us press-ganged’ll see things out.

“But dammit, think who gets taken, Bellis. Some sailors, sure, some ‘rival’ pirates, a few merchants. But the ships the Armadans encounter-you think they all get taken? Most of the press-ganged vessels are… well, ships like the Terpsichoria. Slavers. Or colony ships full of transported Remade. Or jail ships. Or ships carrying prisoners of war.

“Most of the Remade on the Terpsichoria realized long ago that they’d never be going home. Twenty years, my eye-it’s a life sentence, and a death sentence, and they know it. And here they are now, with work and money and respect… Is it any wonder they accept it? As far as I know there are only seven Remade from the Terpsichoria being treated for rejection, and two of those already suffer dementia.”

And how the fuck, wondered Bellis, how in the name of Jabber do you know that?

“What about the likes of you and me?” Johannes continued. “All of us… we already knew we’d be away from home-away from New Crobuzon-for five years at the very, very least, and probably more. Look at the motley group we were. I’d say very few of the other passengers had unbreakable ties with the city. People arriving here are unsettled, sure; and surprised, confused, alarmed. But not destroyed. Isn’t it a ‘new life’ that they promise Nova Esperium colonists? Wasn’t that what most of us sought?”

Most, perhaps, thought Bellis. But not all. And if it’s satisfaction with this place they look for before they let us live free here, then gods know-I know-they can make mistakes of judgment.

“I doubt,” Johannes said quietly, “they’re so naive as to just leave us to roam unchecked. I’d be surprised if they didn’t keep careful note of us. I suspect we don’t go unwatched. But what could we do, anyway? This is a city, not a dinghy we can commandeer or scuttle.

“It’s only the crew who’d represent any kind of real problem. Many have families waiting for them. Those are the ones who’d likely refuse to accept that this is their new home.”

Only the crew? thought Bellis, a bad taste in her throat.

“So what happens to them? Like the captain?” she said in a dead voice. “Like Cumbershum?”

Johannes flinched. “I… I’ve been told it’s… it’s only the captains and first officers of any ships encountered… That they simply have too much to lose, that they’re particularly tied to their home port…”

There was something fawning and apologetic in his face. With a waxing alienation, Bellis realized that she was alone.

She had come here tonight thinking that she might be able to talk to Johannes about New Crobuzon, that he would share her unhappiness, that she could touch the bloodied part of her mind and talk about the people and streets she missed so hard.

Perhaps that they might broach the subject that had burrowed through her thoughts for weeks: escape.

But Johannes was acclimatizing. He spoke in a carefully neutral register, as if what he said was just reportage. But he was trying to come to terms with the city’s rulers. He had found something in Armada that made him prepared to consider it home.

What did they do to achieve this? she thought. What is he doing?

“Who else have you heard about?” she said after a cold silence.

“Mollificatt, I’m very sorry to say, was one of those who succumbed when we first arrived,” he said, looking genuinely sad. The mongrel and changing population of Armada made it a carrier of countless diseases. The city-born were hardy, but every batch of press-ganged was afflicted with fevers and murrains on its first arrival, and several of their number inevitably died. “I’ve heard rumors that our newcomer, Mr. Fennec, is working somewhere in Garwater, or Thee-And-Thine riding. Sister Meriope…” he said suddenly, his eyes widening. He shook his head. “Sister Meriope is… She is being held for her own safety. She threatens herself with violence constantly. Bellis,” he whispered, “she is with child.”

Bellis rolled her eyes.

I can’t listen to this, thought Bellis, saying just enough to be in the conversation. She felt alone. Tawdry secrets and cliches. What next? she thought with contempt as Johannes rambled on through the passenger list and the officers of the Terpsichoria. Some trusty sailor actually a woman disguised to go to sea? Love and buggery among the ranks?

There was something pathetic about Johannes that night, and she had never thought so before.

“How do you know all this, Johannes?” said Bellis carefully, at last. “Where’ve you been? What are you actually doing?”

Johannes cleared his throat and stared into his glass for a long time.

“Bellis…” he said. Around him, the soft clatter of the restaurant seemed very loud. “Bellis… can I tell you in confidence?” Johannes sighed, then looked up at her.

“I’m working for the Lovers,” he said. “And I don’t mean I work in Garwater riding. I work directly for them. They have a team of researchers, working on a quite…” He shook his head and began to smile with delight. “A quite extraordinary project. An extraordinary opportunity. And they invited me to join them-because of my previous work.

“Their team had read some of my research, and they decided that I’d be… that they wanted me to work with them.” He was overjoyed, she realized. He was like a child, almost exactly like a child.

“There are thaumaturges, oceanologers, marine biologists. That man-the man who defeated the Terpsichoria, Uther Doul-he’s part of the team. He’s central, in fact. He’s a philosopher. There are different projects all being pursued. Projects on cryptogeography and probability theory, as well as… as the investigation I’m working on. The man in charge of that is fascinating. He was with the Lovers when we arrived: a tall old man with a beard.”

“I remember him,” said Bellis. “He welcomed you.”

A look somewhere between contrition and excitement overtook Johannes.

“He did,” he said. “That’s Tintinnabulum. A hunter, an outsider, employed by the city. He lives on the Castor with seven other men, where Garwater meets Shaddler and Booktown. A small ship with a belfry…

“We’re doing such fascinating work,” he said suddenly, and seeing his pure pleasure Bellis could see how Armada had won him. “The equipment’s old and unreliable-the analytical engines are ancient-but the work’s so much more radical. I’ve months of research to catch up on-I’m learning Salt. This work… it means reading the most varied things.”

He grinned at her with incredulous pride. “For my project, there are certain key texts. One of them’s mine. Can you believe that? Isn’t that extraordinary? They’re from all over the world. From New Crobuzon, Khadoh. And there are mystery books that we can’t find. They’re in Ragamoll and Salt and moonscript… One of the most important’s said to be in High Kettai. We’ve made a list of them from references in the books we do have. Gods know how they’ve got such a fantastic library here, Bellis. Half these books I could never find at home-”

“They stole it, Johannes,” she said, and silenced him. “That’s how they’ve got it. Every damned volume in Grand Gears Library is stolen. From ships, from the towns they plunder on the coast. From people like me, Johannes. My books that I wrote that have been stolen from me. That’s where they get their books.”

Something cold was settling in Bellis’ gut.

“Tell me,” she began, and stopped. She drank some wine, breathed deep, and started again. “Tell me, Johannes, that is somewhat remarkable, isn’t it? That out of an entire ocean-an entire fucking ocean-that out of that whole empty sea they should pluck the one ship that was carrying their intellectual hero…”

And again she saw in his eye that uncomfortable cocktail of apology and elation.

“Yes,” he said carefully. “That’s the thing, Bellis. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”

She suddenly knew what he was going to say, a certainty that nauseated and repelled her, but she liked him still, she really did, and she so wanted to be wrong that she did not stand to go; she waited to be corrected, knowing that she would not be.

“It wasn’t coincidence, Bellis,” she heard him saying. “It wasn’t. They have an agent in Salkrikaltor. They receive colonial passenger lists. They knew we were coming. They knew I was coming.”

The paper lanterns swung as the door opened and closed. There was pretty laughter from a nearby table. The smell of stuffed meat cosseted them.

“That was why they took our ship. They came for me,” said Johannes softly, and Bellis closed her eyes, defeated.

“Oh, Johannes,” she said unsteadily.

“Bellis,” he said, alarmed, reaching out, but she cut him off with a curt gesture. What, do you think I’m going to cry? she thought furiously.

“Johannes, let me tell you there is a world of difference between a five-year, a ten-year sentence-and life.” She could not look at him. “It may be that for you, for Meriope, for the Cardomiums, for I don’t know who else, Nova Esperium meant a new life. Not for me.

“Not for me. For me it was an escape, a necessary and a temporary escape. I was born in Chnum, Johannes. Educated in Mafaton. Was proposed to in Brock Marsh. Broke up in Salacus Fields. New Crobuzon is my home; it will always be my home.”

Johannes looked at her with mounting unease.

“I have no interest in the colonies. In Nova fucking Esperium. None. I don’t want to live with a group of venal inadequates, failed spivs, disgraced nuns, bureaucrats too incompetent or weak to make it back home, resentful terrified natives… Godspit, Johannes, I’ve no interest in the sea. Freezing, sickening, filthy, repetitive, stinking…

“I’ve no interest in this city. I do not want to live in a curio, Johannes. This is a sideshow! This is something to scare the children! ‘The Floating Pirate City’! I don’t want it! I don’t want to live in this great bobbing parasite, like some fucking pondskater sucking its victims dry. This isn’t a city, Johannes; it’s a parochial little village less than a mile wide, and I do not want it.

“I was always going to return to New Crobuzon. I would never wish to see out my days outside it. It’s dirty and cruel and difficult and dangerous-particularly for me, particularly now-but it’s my home. Nowhere else in the world has the culture, the industry, the population, the thaumaturgy, the languages, the art, the books, the politics, the history… New Crobuzon,” she said slowly, “is the greatest city in Bas-Lag.”

And coming from her, from someone without any illusions about New Crobuzon’s brutality, or squalor, or repression, the declamation was far more powerful than if it came from any Parliamentarian.

“And you’re telling me,” she said finally, “that I’ve been exiled from my city-for life-because of you?”

Johannes was looking at her, stricken.

“Bellis,” he said slowly, “I don’t know what to say. I can only say that… that I’m sorry. This wasn’t my choice. The Lovers knew I was on the passenger list, and… That’s not the only reason. They need more guns, so they might have taken her anyway, but…”

His voice broke off. “But probably not. Mostly they came for me. But Bellis, please!” He leaned toward her urgently. “It wasn’t my choice. I didn’t make this happen. I had no idea.”

“But you’ve made your peace with it, Johannes,” said Bellis. She stood at last. “You’ve made peace. You’re lucky you’ve found something that makes you happy here, Johannes. I understand that it wasn’t your choice, but I hope you’ll understand that I can’t just sit here as if nothing is wrong, making jolly conversation, when it’s down to you that I’m without a home.

“And don’t call them the fucking Lovers, like it’s a title, like those two perverts are a celestial constellation or something. Look at you all agog at them. They’re like us; they have names. You could have said no, Johannes. You could have refused.”

As she turned to go, he said her name. She had never heard him use such a tone, stony and fierce. It shocked her.

He looked up at her, his hands clenched on the table. “Bellis,” he said, in the same voice. “I’m sorry-I’m truly sorry-that you feel kidnapped. I had no idea. But what is it you object to? Living in a parasitic city? I doubt that. New Crobuzon may be more subtle than Armada day to day, but try telling those in the ruins of Suroch that New Crobuzon’s not a pirate.

“Culture? Science? Art? Bellis, do you even understand where you are? This city is the sum of hundreds of cultures. Every maritime nation has lost vessels to war, press-ganging, desertion. And they are here. They’re what built Armada. This city is the sum of history’s lost ships. There are vagabonds and pariahs and their descendants in this place from cultures that New Crobuzon has never so much as heard of. Do you realize that? Do you understand what that means? Their renegades meet here and overlap like scales, and make something new. Armada’s been plowing the Swollen Ocean for damn near ever, picking up outcasts and escapees from everywhere. Godspit, Bellis, do you know a bloody thing?

“History? There’ve been legends and rumors about this place among all the seafaring nations for centuries; did you know that? Do you know any sailors’ tales? The oldest vessel here is more than a thousand years old. The ships may change, but the city traces its history back to the Flesh-Eater Wars, at least, and some say back to the godsdamned Ghosthead Empire… A village? Nobody knows the population of Armada, but it’s hundreds of thousands at least. Count all the layers and layers of decks; there are probably as many miles of street here as in New Crobuzon.

“No, you see Bellis, I don’t believe you. I don’t think you have any reason for not wanting to live here, any objective reasons for preferring New Crobuzon. I think you simply miss your home. Don’t misunderstand me. You don’t have to offer any explanations. It’s understandable you’d love New Crobuzon. But all you’re actually saying is ‘I don’t like it here; I want to go home.’ ”

For the first time, he looked at her with something akin to dislike.

“And if it comes to weighing up your desire to return against the desires, for example, of the several hundred Terpsichoria Remade who are now allowed to live as something more than animals, then I’m afraid I find your need less than pressing.”

Bellis kept her eyes on him. “If anyone were by chance to tell the authorities,” she said coolly, “that I might be a suitable case for incarceration and reeducation, then I swear to you I would end myself.”

The threat was ridiculous and quite untrue, and she was sure he knew that, but it was as close as she could come to begging him. She knew he had it in his power to cause her serious trouble.

He was a collaborator.

She turned and left him-out into the drizzle that still enveloped Armada. There was so much that she had wanted to say to him, to ask. She had wanted to talk to him about the Sorghum rig, that massive flaming enigma now in a little cove of ships. She wanted to know why the Lovers had stolen it, and what it could do, and what they planned for it. Where are its crews? she wanted to ask. Where is the geo-empath whom no one has seen? And she was sure Johannes knew these things. But there was no way she would speak to him now.

She could not shake his words from her ears. She hoped fervently that her own still troubled him.