The Scar

Chapter Eight

When Bellis looked out of her window the next morning, she saw, over the roofs and chimneys, that the city was moving.

At some time in the night, the hundreds of tugboats that milled constantly around Armada like bees around a hive had harnessed the city. With thick chains they had attached themselves in great numbers to the city’s rim. They spread outward from the city, with their chains taut.

Bellis had become used to the city’s inconsistencies. The sun would rise to the left of her smokestack house one day, to the right the next, as Armada had spun slowly during the night. The sun’s antics were disorienting. Without land visible, there was nothing except the stars by which to gauge position, and Bellis had always found stargazing tedious: she was not someone who could instantly recognize the Tricorn or the Baby or the other constellations. The night sky meant nothing to her.

Today the sun rose almost directly in front of her window. The ships that strained at their chains and tugged at Armada’s mass cut across her field of vision, and she calculated after a moment that they were heading south.

She was awed by that prodigious effort. The city easily dwarfed the proliferation of ships that were pulling at it. It was hard to estimate Armada’s motion, but looking at the water coursing between ships, and the slap of breakers against the edges of the city, Bellis suspected that their passage was cripplingly slow.

Where are we going? she wondered, helplessly.

Bellis felt curiously shamed. It was weeks since she had arrived on Armada, and she realized that she had not wondered about the city’s motion, about its passage across the sea or its itinerary, or how its fleet, out engaged in their piracy, found their way back to a home that moved. She remembered with a sudden shudder Johannes’ attack on her the previous night.

Some of what he had said was true.

So was much of what she herself had said, of course, and she was still angry with him. She did not want to live on Armada, and the thought of seeing out her days on this mesh of moldering tubs made her mouth curl with anger so strong it was like panic. But still.

But still, it was true that she had locked herself off in her unhappiness. She was ignorant of her situation, ignorant of Armada’s history and politics, and she realized that this was dangerous. She did not understand the city’s economies; she did not know where the ships came from that sailed into the Basilio and Urchinspine harbors. She did not know where the city had been or where it was going.

She began to open her mind as she stood in her nightgown, watching the sun pour across the bows of the slowly moving city. She felt her curiosity unfurl.

The Lovers, she thought with distaste. Let’s start there. Godspit, the Lovers. What in the name of Jabber are they?

Shekel took coffee with her on an upper deck of the library.

He was an excited boy. He told her that he was doing something with one person, and something else with another, and that he had had a fight with a third, and that a fourth lived in Dry Fall riding, and she withered beside his casual knowledge of the city. She felt disgraced again, for her ignorance, and she listened carefully to his ramblings.

Shekel told Bellis about Hedrigall the cactacae aeronaut. He told her about the cactus-man’s notorious past as a pirate-merchant for Dreer Samher, and described to her the journeys Hedrigall had made to the monstrous island south of Gnurr Kett, to trade with the mosquito-men.

In turn, Bellis asked him about the ridings, the haunted quarter, the city’s route, the Sorghum rig, Tintinnabulum. She turned up her questions like cards.

“Yeah,” he said slowly. “I know Tinnabol. Him and his mates. Strange coves. Makler, Metzger, Promus, Tinnabol. There’s one called Argentarius, who’s mad, who no one ever sees. I can’t remember the others. Inside the Castor’s all over trophies. Gruesome. Sea trophies. Every wall. Stuffed hammerheads and orca, things with claws and tentacles. Skulls. And harpoons. And helios of the crew standing on the corpses of things I hope I never see.

“They’re hunters. They ain’t been in the city so long. They’re not press-ganged, exactly. There’s loads of stories, rumors about what they’re doing, why they’re here. It’s like they’re waiting for something.”

Bellis could not understand how Shekel knew so much about Tintinnabulum until he grinned and continued.

“Tintinnabulum’s got a… an assistant,” he said. “Her name’s Angevine. She’s an interesting lady.” He grinned again, and Bellis turned away, embarrassed by his fumbling enthusiasm.

There were printing presses in Armada, and authors and editors and translators, and new books and Salt translations of classic texts were brought out. But paper was scarce: print runs were minuscule, and the books were expensive. The ridings of the city relied on Booktown’s Grand Gears Library, and paid premiums to ensure their borrowing rights.

The books came mostly from Garwater riding’s piracies. For an unknown number of centuries this most powerful riding in Armada had donated all the books it commandeered to The Clockhouse Spur. No matter who ran Booktown, these donations had ensured its loyalty. Other ridings copied the practice, though perhaps without such stern supervision. They might let their press-ganged keep this or that volume, or would trade some of the rarest volumes they snatched. Not Garwater, which treated book hoarding as a serious crime.

Sometimes Garwater ships would prowl the coastal settlements of Bas-Lag committing wordstorms, and the pirates would rampage from house to house, seizing every book and manuscript they found. All for Booktown, the Clockhouse Spur.

The delivery of all this plunder was ongoing, so Bellis and her colleagues kept busy.

The khepri newcomers in their Mercy Ships, randomly intercepted by Armada, had taken over the Booktown riding in a gentle coup more than a century before. They had been wise enough to realize that despite traditional khepri lack of interest in written texts-their compound eyes made reading somewhat difficult-the riding relied on its library. They had continued its stewardship.

Bellis could not estimate the number of books: there were so many tiny old holds in the ships of the library, so many converted chimneys and bulkheads, stripped cabins, annexes, all stuffed with texts. Many were ancient, countless thousands of them long undisturbed. Armada had been stealing books for many centuries.

The catalogs were only partial. In recent centuries a bureaucracy had arisen whose function was to list the library’s contents, but during some reigns they were more careful than others. Mistakes were always made. A few acquisitions were shelved almost randomly, insufficiently checked. Errors slipped into systems and begot other errors. There were decades’ worth of volumes hidden in the library, in plain view yet invisible. Rumors and legends were rife about their powerful, lost, hidden, or forbidden contents.

When she had first gone into the dark corridors, Bellis had run her fingers along the miles of shelves as she walked. She had pulled a book out at random and, opening it, had stopped short to see the handwritten name in fading ink on the top of the first page. She had tugged out another volume and there was another name, written in calligraphy and ink only a little more recent. The third book was unadorned, but the fourth, again, was marked as the property of another long-dead owner.

Bellis had stood still and read the names again and again, and felt suddenly claustrophobic. She was encased in stolen books, buried in them as if in dirt. The thought of the countless hundreds of thousands of names that surrounded her, vainly scrawled in top right-hand corners-the weight of all that ignored ink, the endless proclamations that this is mine this is mine, every one of them snubbed simply and imperiously-took Bellis’ breath from her chest. The ease with which those little commands were broken.

She felt as if all around her, morose ghosts were milling, unable to accept that the volumes were no longer theirs.

That day, as she sorted through new arrivals, Bellis found one of her own books.

She sat for a long time on the floor with her legs splayed, propped up against the shelves, staring at the copy of Codexes of the Wormseye Scrub. She felt the familiar fraying spine and the slightly embossed “B. Coldwine.” It was her own copy: she recognized its wear. She gazed at it guardedly, as if it were a test she might fail.

The cart did not contain her other work, High Kettai Grammatology, but she did find the Salkrikaltor Cray textbook she had brought to the Terpsichoria.

Our stuff’s finally coming through, she thought.

It affected her like a blow.

This was mine, she thought. This was taken.

What else was from her ship? Was this Doctor Mollificatt’s copy of Future Tenses? she wondered. Widow Cardomium’s Orthography and Hieroglyphs?

She could not be still. She stood and walked, tense, wandering vague and stricken through the library. She passed into the open air and over the bridges that linked the library’s vessels, carrying her book clutched to her, above the water and then back into the darkness by the bookshelves.

“Bellis?”

She looked up, confused. Carrianne stood before her, her mouth twisted slightly in what might be amusement or concern. She looked terribly pale, but she spoke with her usual strong voice.

The book dangled from Bellis’ hands. Her breathing slowed, and she smoothed the crisis from her face, arranging it carefully once more, wondering what to say. Carrianne took her arm and tugged her away.

“Bellis,” she said again, and though she wore an arch smirk there was genuine kindness in her voice. “It’s high time you and I made a little effort to get to know each other. Have you eaten lunch?”

Carrianne dragged her gently through the corridors of the Dancing Wight, on up a half-covered walkway to the Pinchermarn. This is not like me, Bellis thought as she followed, to let myself be tugged along in someone’s wake. This is not like me at all. But she was in a kind of daze, and she gave in to Carrianne’s insistent pulling.

At the exit, Bellis realized with a gust of surprise that she was still carrying her copy of Codexes of the Wormseye Scrub. She had been clutching it so tight her hands looked bloodless.

Her heart sped up as she realized that under Carrianne’s protection, she could walk straight past the guard, could hold the book close, out of sight, could leave the library with her contraband.

But the closer she got to the door, the more she hesitated, the less she understood her motives, the more she was suddenly terrified of capture, until with a sudden long sigh she deposited the monograph in the carrel beside the desk. Carrianne watched her inscrutably. In the light beyond the door, Bellis looked back at her deserted volume and felt a surge of something, some tremulous emotion.

Whether it was triumph or defeat she could not tell.

The Psire was the largest ship in the Clockhouse Spur, a big steamer of archaic design refitted for industry and cheap housing. Stubby concrete blocks loomed on its rear deck, all fouled with birdlime. Strings of washing linked windows where humans and khepris leaned out and talked. Bellis descended a rope ladder behind Carrianne, toward the sea, through the smell of salt and damp to a galley in the Psire’s shadow.

Below the galley’s deck was the restaurant, full of noisy lunchtime diners. The waiters were khepri and human, and even a couple of rusted constructs. They strode the narrow walkway between two rows of benches, depositing bowls of gruel and plates of black bread, salads, and cheeses.

Carrianne ordered for them, then turned to Bellis with a look of sincere concern.

“So,” she said. “What’s happening with you?”

Bellis looked up at her, and for a dreadful second she thought she would cry. The feeling went quickly, and she set her face. She looked away from Carrianne, at the other human customers, the khepri and cactacae. A couple of tables from her were two llorgiss, their trifurcated bodies seeming to face every way at once. Behind her was some glistening amphibious thing from Bask riding, some species she could not even begin to recognize.

She felt the restaurant move as the waves lapped at it.

“I know what I’m seeing, you know,” said Carrianne. “I was press-ganged, too.”

Bellis looked up sharply. “When?” she said.

“Nearly twenty years ago,” said Carrianne, looking through the windows at Basilio Harbor and the industrious tugs beyond, still hauling the city. She said something slowly and deliberately in a language Bellis almost recognized. The analytical part of her linguist’s brain began to collate, to catalog the distinctive staccato fricatives, but Carrianne forestalled her.

“It’s something we used to say, in the old country, to people feeling unhappy. Something stupid and trite like, ‘It could be worse.’ Literally it means ‘You still have eyes and your spectacles aren’t yet broken.’ ” She leaned in and smiled. “But I won’t be hurt if you don’t take any comfort from it. I’m further from my first home than you are, Crobuzoner. More than two thousand miles further. I’m from the Firewater Straits.”

She laughed at Bellis’ raised eyebrow, the incredulous look.

“From an island called Geshen, controlled by the Witchocracy.” She tasted her dwarf Armadan chicken. “The Witchocracy, more ponderously known as Shud zar Myrion zar Koni.” She waved her hands mock-mysteriously. “City of Ratjinn, Hive of the Jet Sorrow-and suchlike. I know what you New Crobuzoners say about it. Very little of which is true.”

“How were you taken?” said Bellis.

“Twice,” said Carrianne. “I was stolen and stolen again. We were sailing our whim-trawler for Kohnid in Gnurr Kett. That’s a long, hard journey. I was seventeen. I won the lottery to be figurehead and concubine. I spent the daylight strapped to the bowsprit, scattering orchid petals in front of the ship, spent the night reading the men’s cards and in their beds. That was dull, but I enjoyed the days. Dangling there, singing, sleeping, watching the sea.

“But a Dreer Samher war cog intercepted us. The Samheri were jealous of their trade with Kohnid. They had a monopoly-do they still?” she added suddenly, and Bellis could only shake her head uncertainly, I don’t know.

“Well, they strapped our captain to my place below the bowsprit and scuttled the ship. Most of the men and women they put on lifeboats with a few provisions, and pointed in the direction of the coast. It was a long way away, and I doubt they made it.

“Some of us they kept aboard. There was no ill treatment beyond cuffs and rudeness. I tortured myself stupid wondering what they’d do to me, but then came the second interception. Dry Fall riding needed ships, and sent poachers out. Armada was far south of here then, so Dreer Samher boats were perfect prey.”

“And… and how did you…? Did you find it hard,” said Bellis, “when you came here?”

Carrianne looked at her for a while.

“Some of the cactacae,” she said, “never adjusted. They refused, or tried to escape, or attacked their guards. I suppose they were killed. Me and my companions…?” She shrugged. “We’d been rescued, so it was very different.

“But, yes, it was hard, and I was miserable, and I missed my brother, and all of that. But, you see, I made a choice. I chose to live, to survive.

“After a time some of my shipmates moved out of Dry Fall. One lives in Shaddler, another in Thee-And-Thine. But mostly we stayed in the riding that took us in.” She ate for a little while, then looked up again. “It can be done, you know. You will make this place your home.”

She meant it reassuringly. She was being kind. But to Bellis it sounded like a threat.

Carrianne was talking to her about the ridings.

“Garwater you know,” Carrianne said, her voice deadpan. “The Lovers. The scarred Lovers. Fucked-up bastards. The Clockhouse Spur you know.”

The intellectuals’ quarter, thought Bellis, like Brock Marsh in New Crobuzon.

“Shaddler’s the scabmettlers’. Bask. Thee-And-Thine.” Carrianne was counting off the ridings on her fingers. “Jhour. Curhouse, The Democratic Council. That brave redoubt. And Dry Fall,” she concluded. “Where I live.”

“Why did you leave New Crobuzon, Bellis?” she said unexpectedly. “You don’t seem to me the colonist type.”

Bellis looked down. “I had to leave,” she said. “Trouble.”

“With the law?”

“Something happened…” She sighed. “I did nothing, nothing at all.” She could not keep the bitterness out of her voice. “A few months ago there was a sickness in the city. And… there were rumors that someone I knew was involved. The militia were working their way through everyone he’d known, everyone he’d had involvement with. It was obvious they’d come for me, eventually. I never wanted to leave.” She spoke carefully. “It was no choice.”

The lunch, the company, even the small talk Bellis normally despised, had all calmed her. As they rose to leave, she asked Carrianne if she was feeling well.

“I noticed in the library…” she said. “I hope you don’t mind me saying, but I was thinking you look rather pale.”

Carrianne smiled archly. “That’s the first time you’ve asked after me, Bellis,” she said. “You want to watch that. I might start thinking you give a brass eye about me.” The amiable taunt stung. “I’m fine. It’s just that I was taxed last night.”

Bellis waited, sifting through the information she had already assimilated, to see if Carrianne’s statement would make sudden sense. It did not.

“I don’t understand,” she said, exhausted by incomprehension.

“Bellis, I live in Dry Fall riding,” said Carrianne. “Sometimes we’re taxed, understand? Bellis, you know our ruler’s the Brucolac, don’t you? You’ve heard about him?”

“I’ve heard of him…”

“The Brucolac. He’s oupyr. Loango. Katalkana.” With each esoteric word, Carrianne held Bellis’ eyes and saw that she was not understood. “Haemophage, Bellis. Ab-dead.

“Vampir.”

Surrounded as she had been for weeks by a cloud of rumors and hints like insistent midges, Bellis had learned at least a little about most of the ridings. All the weird little femto-states clamped together in unhealthy congregation, resenting each other and maneuvering for position.

But somehow the most important, the most striking or unbelievable or appalling things, she had missed. At the end of the day, she thought of that moment when she had been made to see how ignorant she was: when Carrianne had explained her pallor and Bellis had realized how far from home she was.

She was pleased that she had done little more than blanch at Carrianne’s explanation. Something had hardened in her when she heard the word vampir-the same word in Ragamoll and Salt. Carrianne had, at that moment, taught her that there was nowhere further for her to go. She could be no further from her home.

In Armada they talked a language she could understand. She recognized the ships, even altered and rebuilt as they were. They had money and government. The differences of calendar and terminology she could learn. The found and scavenged architecture was bizarre but comprehensible. But this was a city where vampir did not need to hide and predate furtively, but could walk in the nights openly, and could rule.

Bellis realized then that all her cultural markers were obsolete. She was sick of her ignorance.

At the Sciences card catalog Bellis’ fingers fluttered through the entries, speeding through the alphabet until she found Johannes Tearfly’s name. There was more than one copy of several of his books.

If the Lovers who run my life wanted to get hold of you so badly, Johannes, she thought to herself as she scribbled the classmarks of his works, then I’m going to get inside their minds. Let’s see what they’re so excited about.

One of the books was on loan, but copies of the others were available. As an employee of the library, Bellis had borrowing rights.

It was very cold as she made her way home past the crowds, under jabbering Armada monkeys in the rigging, over the swaying walkways and decks and raised streets of the city, over the waves that slopped between vessels. The sky was raucous with catcalls. In her bag, Bellis carried Predation in Iron Bay Rockpools; Sardula Anatomy; Essays on Beasts; Theories of Megafauna; and Transplane Life as a Problem for the Naturalist-all by Johannes Tearfly.

She sat up late curled close to her stove, while freezing clouds diffused the moonlight outside. She read by lamplight, skipping from book to book.

At one in the morning she looked out over the dark shipscape.

The halo of boats that ringed the city still dragged it onward.

She thought of all the Armadan boats at sea, the agents of its piracy, taxing the ships and communities they passed. Ranging for months across thousands of miles, until, laden down with booty, and even as their city moved, they made their way back by arcane methods.

The city’s nauscopists watched the sky, and knew from its minute variations when vessels were approaching, so the tugs could haul Armada away and out of sight. Sometimes the evasion failed, and foreign ships were intercepted, welcomed in to trade, or hunted down. By secret science, the authorities always knew when incoming vessels were Armada’s own, and welcomed them home.

Even so late there were still sounds of industry from some quarters, cutting through the beat of waves and animals’ night calls. Between the layers of rope and wood that overlaid her view like scratches on a heliotype, Bellis could see to the little bay of boats at the aft end of Armada, where the rig Sorghum wallowed. For weeks, fire and thaumaturgic wash had billowed up from the tip of its stack. Every night the stars had been effaced around it in a drab, dun light.

No more. The clouds above the Sorghum were dark. The flame was out.

For the first time since she had arrived in Armada, Bellis dug through her belongings and brought out her neglected letter. She faltered as she sat there by the stove, the paper folded in front of her, a fountain pen poised. And then, irritated with her own hesitation, she began to write.

Even as Armada made its slow way south toward warmer waters, for a few days the weather turned hard cold. Winds blew frost in from the north. The trees and ivy, the slim gardens that adorned the decks of boats, became brittle and blackened.

Just before the chill hit, Bellis saw whales off the city’s port edge, playing with apparent pleasure. After a few minutes they came suddenly much closer to Armada, slammed the water with their huge tails, and were gone. The cold came quickly after that.

There was no winter in the city, no summer or spring, no seasons at all; there was only weather. For Armada it was a function not of time, but place. While New Crobuzon hunkered under snowstorms at the end of the year, Armadans might be basking in the Hearth Sea; or they might be bunked below while crews in thick coats tugged them slowly to anchor in the Muted Ocean, at temperatures that would have made New Crobuzon seem mild.

Armada tramped the oceans of Bas-Lag in patterns dictated by piracy, trade, agriculture, security, and other more opaque dynamics, and took what weather came.

The city’s irregular climate was hard on plant life. The flora of Armada survived by thaumaturgy, luck and chance, as well as stock. Centuries of husbandry had produced strains that grew fast and hardy, and could thrive in a wide range of temperatures. There were irregular crops throughout the year.

Farmlands were draped across decks and under artificial lights. There were mushroom plantations in dank old holds, and loud, stinking berths full of generations of wiry inbred animals. Fields of kelp and edible bladderwracks grew on rafts suspended below the city, alongside mesh-cages full of crustaceans and food-fish.

As days passed, Salt came to Tanner more easily, and he began to spend more time with his workmates. They would carouse in the pubs and gambling halls on the aft edge of Basilio Harbor. Shekel came too, sometimes, happy in the company of the men, but more often he took himself off, alone, to the Castor.

Tanner knew that he went to see the woman Angevine, whom Tanner had not met, a servant or bodyguard for Captain Tintinnabulum. Shekel had told him about her, in faltering adolescent terms, and Tanner had started off amused and indulgent. Nostalgic for himself at that age.

Shekel spent more and more time with the strange studious hunters who lived on the Castor. Once, Tanner came looking for him.

Belowdecks, Tanner had passed into a clean, dark corridor of cabins, each with a name stamped upon it: Modist, he had read, and Faber, and Argentarius. The berths of Tintinnabulum’s companions.

Shekel was in the mess, with Angevine.

Tanner had been shocked.

Angevine was in her thirties, he estimated, and she was Remade.

Shekel had not told him that.

Just below her thighs, Angevine’s legs ended. She jutted like some strange figurehead from the front of a little steam-driven cart, a heavy contraption with caterpillar treads, filled with coke and wood.

She could not be city-born, Tanner had realized. That kind of Remaking was too harsh, too capricious and inefficient and cruel to have been effected for anything other than punishment.

He thought well of her for putting up with the lad’s bothering. Then he saw how intensely she spoke to Shekel, how she leaned in to him (at a bizarre angle, anchored by the heavy vehicle below her), how she held his eyes. And Tanner had stopped, shocked again.

Tanner left Shekel to his Angevine. He did not ask what was happening. Shekel, forced into a sudden new conjuncture of feelings, behaved like a hybrid of child and man, now boastful and preening, now subdued and caught up with intense emotions. In what little information he gave out, Tanner learned that Angevine had been press-ganged ten years ago. Like the Terpsichoria, her ship had been stolen on its way to Nova Esperium. She, too, was from New Crobuzon.

When Shekel came home to the little rooms on the portmost edge of an old factory ship, Tanner was jealous, and then contrite. He determined to keep ahold of Shekel as best as he could, but to let him go as he needed.

Tanner tried to fill a vacuum by making friends. He spent more time with his workmates. There was a strong camaraderie among the dockworkers. He took part in their lewd jokes and games.

They opened to him, brought him in by telling tales.

As a newcomer he was an excuse for them to trot out stories and rumors they had all heard a mass of times before. One of them would mention dead seas, or boiltides, or the moray king, and would turn to Tanner. You’ve probably not heard of the dead seas, Tanner, he or she would say. Let me tell you…

Tanner Sack heard the weirdest stories of the Bas-Lag seas, and the legends of the pirate city and Garwater itself. He heard of the monstrous storms that Armada had survived; the reason for the scars on the Lovers’ faces; how Uther Doul had cracked the possibility code and found his puissant sword.

He joined in celebrations for this or that happy occurrence-a marriage, a birth, luck at cards. And somber things too. When a dockside accident took off half a cactus-woman’s hand with a jag of glass, Tanner gave what eyes and flags he could spare to the whip-round. Another time, the riding was plunged into depression by the news that a Garwater ship, the Magda’s Threat, had gone down near the Firewater Straits. Tanner shared the loss, and his sadness was not feigned.

But although he liked his workmates, and the taverns and convivials were a pleasant way of spending evenings-and one that improved his Salt in great gouts-there was a constant odd ambience of half-acknowledged secrecy. He could not make sense of it.

There were certain mysteries that the work of the underwater engineers threw up. What manner of things were those shadows he sometimes glimpsed, behind the tightly tethered guard sharks, unclear through what must be adumbrating glamours? What were the purposes of the repairs that he and his colleagues daily carried out? What was it that the Sorghum, the stolen rig that they tended carefully, sucked up from the base of the sea, thousands of feet below? Tanner had followed its fat, segmented pipe down with his eyes many times, growing giddy as it dwindled.

What was the nature of this project that was hinted at in nods and cryptic remarks? The plan that underpinned all their efforts? That no one would talk openly about, but that many seemed to know a little of, and a few pretended by omission, or hint, to understand?

Something big and important lay behind Garwater’s industry, and Tanner Sack did not yet know what it was. He suspected that none of his fellows did, either, but still he felt excluded from some community: one based on lies, cant, and bullshit.

Stories occasionally reached him about the other Terpsichoria passengers or crew or prisoners.

Shekel had told him about Coldwine in the library. The man Johannes Tearfly he had seen himself, visiting the docks with a secretive group, all notepads and murmured discussion. A part of Tanner had thought tartly that it didn’t take long for ranks to reestablish themselves, that while he worked his arse off below, the gentleman watched and ticked his little charts and fumbled with his waistcoat.

Hedrigall, the impassive cactus-man who piloted the Arrogance, told Tanner about a man called Fench, also from the Terpsichoria, who was visiting the docks quite often (Do you know him? Hedrigall had asked, and Tanner had shaken his head: it was too dull to explain that he had known no one above the decks). Fench was a good man, Hedrigall said, whom you could talk to, who seemed already to know everyone on the ship, who spoke on knowledgeable terms about people like King Friedrich and the Brucolac.

There was a distracted air to Hedrigall when he talked about these things, which reminded Tanner of Tintinnabulum. Hedrigall was one of those who always seemed to know something about something that he would not discuss. It would have felt to Tanner a breach of their embryonic friendship to ask him outright.

Tanner took to walking the city at night.

He would wander, surrounded by the sounds of water and ships, the sea smell in him. Under the moon and her glowing daughters, diffused through faint cloud, Tanner walked steadily around the edge of the bay containing the now-silent Sorghum. He trod past a cray dwelling: a suspended, half-sunk clipper, its prow and bows jutting like an iceberg. He walked up the covered bridge to the rear of the enormous Grand Easterly, his head down as he passed the few other insomniacs and night workers.

By rope bridge to the starboard side of Garwater. An illuminated dirigible skidded slowly overhead, and a klaxon sounded nearby while a steamhammer pounded (some late shift), and the sound for a moment was so reminiscent of New Crobuzon that he felt a strong, nameless emotion.

Tanner lost himself in a maze of old ships and bricks.

In the water below he thought he saw fleeting and random patches of light: the anxiety of bioluminescent plankton. The city’s snarls seemed to be answered sometimes, miles away, by something big and very distant and alive.

He wound in the direction of Curhouse and Urchinspine Harbor. Below him was surf, to either side decaying brickwork damp with mildew and salt-stained. High walls and windows, many broken, and alleyways between main streets, winding between old bulkheads and cowls. Rubbish on deserted dhows. Balustrades and taffrails buffeted in the cold wind by the ragged remnants of posters; politics and entertainment advertised in garish colors rendered from squid and shellfish and stolen ink.

Cats padded past him.

The city shifted and corrected, and the tireless fleet of steamships beyond Armada’s bounds plowed on, chains outstretched, hauling their home.

Tanner stood in the quiet, looking up at old towers, the silhouettes of slates, chimneys, factory roofs, and trees. Across a little stretch of water, broken by a hamlet of houseboats, lights glimmered in the cabins of boats from shores about which Tanner Sack knew nothing. Others were watching the night.

(-Have you fucked before? she said, and Shekel could not help but remember things he did not much want to. The Remade women in the dark stinking of Terpsichoria who took his fumbling prick inside them for more portions of bread. Those whom the sailors held down whether they would or not (all the men catcalled him to join them) and whom twice he had lain on (once only pretending to finish before slinking away discomforted by her shrieks and) once entering for true and spending inside her, tightly struggling and crying as she was. And before them girls in the back alleys of Smog Bend, and boys (like him) showing their privates, their transactions something between barter and sex and bullying and play. Shekel opened his mouth to answer and the truths struggled, and she saw and interrupted him (it was a mercy she did him) and said-No not for games or money and not when you took it or gave it by force but when you fucked one who wanted you and who you wanted like real people like equals. And of course when she said that of course the answer was no, and he gave it, grateful to her for making this his first time (an undeserved gift that he took humble and eager).

He watched her take off her blouse and his breath came very short at the sight of all that woman’s flesh and at the eagerness in her own eyes. He felt the radiant heat of her boiler (which she could never let die she told him, which ate and ate fuel incessantly, old and broken and unreasonably greedy) and saw the dark pewter of her harness where it met the pasty flesh of her upper thighs like a tide. His own clothes were off him in easy layers and he stood shivering and thin and scrawny, prick bobbing erect and adolescent, heart and passion filling him so that it was hard to swallow.

She was Remade she was (Remade scum), he knew it, he saw it, and still he felt incessantly what was inside him, and he felt a great scab of habit and prejudice split from him, part from his skin where his homeland had inscribed him deep.

Heal me, he thought, not understanding what he thought, hoping for a reconfiguration. There was a caustic pain as he peeled off a clot of old life and exposed himself open and unsure to her, to new air. Breathing fast again. His feelings welled out and bled together (their festering ceased) and they began to resolve, to heal in a new form, to scar.

– My Remade girl, he said wondering, and she forgave him that, instantly, because she knew he would not think it again.

It was not easy, with the stubs of her legs pinioned in metal, in a tight V, parted only slightly, with only two inches of the inside of her thighs below her cunt in flesh. She could not open to him or lie back, and it was not easy.

But they persevered, and succeeded.)