The Scar

Chapter Nine

Shekel came to Bellis and asked her to teach him to read.

He knew the shapes of the Ragamoll alphabet, he told her, and had a tentative sense of which sound each letter made, but they remained esoteric. He had never tried to link them and make them words.

Shekel seemed subdued, as if his thoughts were outside the corridors of the library boats. He was slower than usual to smile. He did not talk about Tanner Sack, or about Angevine, whose name had peppered his conversations recently. He wanted only to know if Bellis would help him read.

She spent more than two hours, after her shift, going through the alphabet with him. He knew the names of the letters, but his sense of them was abstract. Bellis had him write his name, and he did, scratchy and inexpert, pausing halfway into the second letter and skipping ahead to the fourth, then going back and filling in lost spaces.

He knew his written name, but only as strokes of a pen.

Bellis told him that the letters were instructions, orders, usually to make the sound that started their own name. She wrote her own first name, separating each letter from its neighbors by an inch or more. Then she had him obey the orders they gave him.

She waited while he faltered through the buh and eh and luh luh ih suh. Then she brought the letters closer together and had him obey them-still slowly-again. And once more.

Finally she closed the characters up into a word and told him to repeat his exercise quickly, to do what the letters told him (“Look at them, so close together”) in one quick run.

Buh eh luh luh ih suh.

(Confused by the double lingua-alveolar, as she had expected.)

He tried once more, and halfway through he stopped and began to smile at the word. He gave her a look so full of delight that it brought her up short. He said her name.

After she had showed him the rudiments of punctuation she had an idea. She walked with him through ships’ bowels, past sections on science and humanities where scholars read hunkered beside oil lamps and little windows, then out between buildings in the drooling rain, over the bridge to the Corrosive Memory. It was a galleon at the outer edge of Grand Gears Library. It contained children’s books.

There were very few readers on the children’s deck. The shelves that surrounded them bristled with garish colors. Bellis ran her fingers along their spines as she walked, and Shekel gazed at them with a deep curiosity. They stopped at the very back of the ship, studded with portholes and listing quite sharply away from them, covered by an incline of books.

“Look,” Bellis said. “Can you see?” She indicated the brass label. “Rag. A. Moll. Ragamoll. These are books in our language. Most of them’ll come from New Crobuzon.”

She plucked a couple and opened them. She froze for a fraction of a second, too quickly for Shekel to notice. Handwritten names peered up at her from the inside front pages, but these were scrawled in crayon, in infants’ hands.

Bellis turned the pages quickly. The first book was for the very young, large and carefully hand-colored, full of pictures in the simplistic Ars Facilis style that had been in vogue sixty years previously. It was the story of an egg that went to battle against a man made of spoons, and won, to become mayor of the world.

The second was for older children. It was a history of New Crobuzon. Bellis stopped short, seeing the etched pictures of the Ribs and the Spike and Perdido Street Station. She skim-read quickly, curling her face in amused contempt at the grotesquely misleading history. The accounts of the Money Circle and the Week of Dust and, most shamefully, the Pirate Wars all suggested, in childish and disingenuous language, that New Crobuzon was a stronghold of liberty that thrived despite almost insuperable and unfair odds.

Shekel was watching her, fascinated.

“Try this one,” she said, and held out to him The Courageous Egg. He took it reverentially. “It’s for young children,” she said. “Don’t get worried about the story; it’s much too silly for you. It means nothing. But I want to know if you can work out what’s happening, if you can understand what goes on, by working through the words like I showed you. Follow the letters’ orders, say the words. There are bound to be some in there that you can’t understand. When you come to them, write them down, and bring the list to me.”

Shekel looked up at her sharply. “Write them down?” he said.

She saw inside him. He still related to the words as if they were outside entities: subtle teases that he was finally beginning to understand, just a little. But he had not yet conceived of being able to encode them into his own secrets. He had not realized that by learning to read he had learned to write.

Bellis found a pencil and a half-used piece of paper in her pocket and handed them to him.

“Just copy the words that you don’t understand, the letters in order exactly like they are in the book. Bring them to me,” she said.

He eyed her, and another of those beatific smiles shot across him.

“Tomorrow,” she went on, “I want you to come to me at five o’clock, and I’m going to ask you questions about the story in the book. I’m going to have you read pieces to me.” Shekel stared at her as he took the book, nodded briskly, as if they’d reached some business arrangement in Dog Fenn.

Shekel’s demeanor changed when they left the galleon. He held himself cocky again, and swaggered a little as he walked, and even began to talk to Bellis about his dockside gang. But he gripped The Courageous Egg tight. Bellis checked it out on her own ticket, an act of trust that she performed without thinking and that touched him deeply.

It was cold again that night, and Bellis sat close to her stove.

Cooking and eating were growing to irritate her with their relentless necessity. She performed them joylessly and as quickly as possible, then sat with Tearfly’s books and continued to work through them, making notes. At nine she stopped and brought out her letter.

She wrote.

Blueday 27th of Dust 1779 (although that means nothing here. Here it is 4th Sepredi of Hawkbill Quarto, 6/317),

Chromolith Smokestack.

I will not stop looking for clues. At first, when I read Johannes’ books, I opened them at random and skimmed through at random, and pieced together what I could in snippets, waiting for inspiration. But I have realized that I will not make headway thus.

Johannes’ work, he has told me, is one of the driving forces behind this city. The nature of the scheme of which he is part, which he would not describe but which was important enough for Armada to risk an act of gross piracy against the greatest power in Bas-Lag, must be hidden somewhere in the pages of his books. It was, after all, one of those books that made him irresistible to the Lovers. But I cannot even work out which of his works is the “required reading” he described for this secret project.

So I am reading them carefully, taking each in turn; starting with the preface and working through to the index. Gleaning information. Trying to feel what designs might be in these works.

Of course, I am not a scientist. I have never read books like these before. A great deal of what is in them is opaque to me.

“The acetabulum is a depression on the outer side of the os innominatum just where the ilium and ischium fuse.”

I read such sentences like poesy: ilium, ischium, os innominatum, ecto-cuneiform and cnemial crest, platelets and thrombin, keloid, cicatrix.

The book that I like least so far is Sardula Anatomy. Johannes was gored once by a young sardula, and it must have been at the time that he researched this book. I can imagine the creature pacing back and forth in a cell, subjected to soporific vapors, and lashing out as it feels itself slipping away. And then dead, and transfered into a cold book that peels away Johannes’ passion along with the sardula’s skin. A drab list of bones and veins and sinews.

My favorite of the books comes as a surprise. It is neither Theories of MegaFauna nor Transplane Life, volumes as much philosophy as zoology, which I therefore expected to feel closer to than the others. I found their abstruse ponderings intriguing but vague.

No, the volume that I read most closely, that I felt I understood, that kept me quite entranced, was Predation in Iron Bay Rockpools.

Such an intricate concatenation of narratives. Chains of savagery and metamorphosis. I can see it all. Devil crabs and ragworms. The oyster drill gnawing a murderous peephole in its prey’s armor. The stretched-out slow-time ripping open of a scallop by a famished starfish. A beadlet anemone devouring a young goby with an implosive burst.

It is a vivid little seascape Johannes has conjured for me, of shell-dust and sea urchins and merciless tides.

But it tells me nothing about the city’s plans. Whatever Armada’s rulers have in mind, I will have to look deeper to find. I will keep reading these books. They are the only clues I have. And I will not thus seek to understand Armada so that I can learn to live happily in my rusting chimney. I will understand where we are going, and why, so that I might leave.

There was a sudden knocking on Bellis’ door. She looked up, alarmed. It was nearly eleven o’clock.

She stood slowly and descended the tight spiral staircase in the center of her circular room. Johannes was the only person in Armada who knew where she lived, and she had not spoken to him since their altercation in the restaurant.

Bellis padded slowly toward the door, waited, and the sharp rapping came again. Was he here to apologize? To rage at her again? Did she even want to see him, to reopen the door to that friendship?

She was still angry with him, she realized, and still somewhat ashamed.

There was a third bout of knocking, and Bellis stepped forward, her face set, ready to hear him out and see him off. When she pulled open the door she stopped short, her mouth hanging with astonishment, her curt admonition whispered away from her with her breath.

Standing on her threshold, huddled against the cold and looking up at her warily, was Silas Fennec.

They sat in silence for a little while, drinking the wine Fennec had brought.

“You’ve done well, Miss Coldwine,” he said eventually, looking appreciatively around the battered metal cylinder that was her room. “A lot of us newcomers are in much less attractive places.” She raised one eyebrow at him, but he nodded again. “I promise you it’s true. Have you not seen?”

Of course she had not.

“Where are you living?” she asked.

“Near Thee-And-Thine riding,” he said, “in the base of a clipper. No windows.” He shrugged. “Are these yours?” He pointed to the books on her bed.

“No,” she said, and tidied them quickly away. “They only let me keep my notebook. Even books I’d damn well written, they took away.”

“Same for me,” he said. “All I’ve got left is my journal. It’s the log of years of traveling. I’d have been heartbroken to lose it.” He smiled.

“What do they have you doing?” Bellis asked, and Fennec shrugged again.

“I managed to avoid all that,” he said. “I’m doing what I want to do. You work in the library, don’t you?”

“How?” she said sharply. “How did you keep them off your back? How do you manage to live?”

He watched her for a while without answering.

“I got three or four offers-like you, I imagine. I told the first that I’d accepted the second, the second that I’d said yes to the third, and so on. They don’t care. As for how I live, well… It’s easier than you think to make yourself indispensable, Miss Coldwine. Providing services, offering whatever it is people will pay for. Information mostly…” His voice petered out.

Bellis was bewildered by his candor, suggesting conspiracies and underworlds around her.

“You know…” he said suddenly, “I’m grateful to you, Miss Coldwine. Sincerely grateful.”

Bellis waited.

“You were there in Salkrikaltor City, Miss Coldwine. You saw the conversation between the late Captain Myzovic and myself. You must have wondered what exactly was on that letter that had the captain so unhappy, that turned you back, but you remained quiet. I’m sure you realized that things could have become… very hard for me when we were hijacked by Armada, but you said nothing. And I’m grateful.

“You did say nothing?” he added with an anxiety he could not quite hide. “As I say, I’m very grateful.”

“When we last spoke, on the Terpsichoria,” Bellis said, “you told me it was vital you get back to New Crobuzon immediately. Well, what now?”

He shook his head uncomfortably.

“Hyperbole and… and bullshit,” he said. He glanced up, but she showed no disapproval of his language. “I get into habits of exaggeration.” He waved his hand to dispel the issue. There was an uncomfortable pause.

“So you can express yourself in Salt?” Bellis asked. “For this work you do, presumably you have to, Mr. Fennec.”

“I have had many years to perfect Salt,” he said in the language, swift and expert, with an unfeigned smile, and continued in Ragamoll. “And… Well, I’m not going by that name here. If you’d indulge me, I’m known here as Simon Fench.”

“So where did you learn Salt, Mr. Fench?” she said. “You mentioned your travels…”

“Dammit.” He looked amused and embarrassed. “You make the name sound like a hex. You can call me what you like, Miss Coldwine, in these rooms, but outside, I beg your indulgence. Rin Lor. I learnt Salt in Rin Lor, and the outer edge of the Pirate Islands.”

“What were you doing there?”

“The same thing,” he said, “that I do everywhere. I buy and I sell. I trade.”

“I’m thirty-eight years old,” he said after they had drunk some more and Bellis had fussed with the stove. “I’ve been a trader since before I was twenty. I’m a New Crobuzon man, don’t get me wrong. Born and brought up in the shadow of the Ribs. But I doubt I’ve spent five hundred days in that city in the last twenty years.”

“What do you trade?”

“Whatever.” He shrugged. “Furs, wine, engines, livestock, books, labor. Whatever. Liquor for pelts in the tundra north of Jangsach, pelts for secrets in Hinter, secrets and artworks for labor and spices in High Cromlech…”

His voice drifted away as Bellis caught his eye.

“No one knows where High Cromlech is,” she said, but he shook his head.

“Some of us do,” he said quietly. “Now, I mean. Some of us do now. Oh it’s a damn hard journey, granted. From New Crobuzon you can’t go north through the ruins of Suroch, and south adds hundreds of miles through Vadaunk or the cacotopic stain. So it’s Penitent’s Pass to Wormseye Scrub, round Gibbing Water, skirt Kar Torrer Kingdom and over Cold Claw Sound…” His voice faded and Bellis hung on, eager to hear where next.

“And there are the Shatterjacks,” he said softly. “And High Cromlech.”

He took a long drink of wine.

“They’re nervous of outsiders. Live ones. But gods know we were a sorry-looking bunch. We’d been on the road for months, lost fourteen men. We went by dirigible, barge, llama, and pterabird, and miles and miles on foot. I lived there for months. I brought back a lot of… amazing things to New Crobuzon. I’ve seen things even stranger than this city, I tell you.”

Bellis could say nothing. She was wrestling with what he said. Some of the places he mentioned were virtually mythological. The idea that he might have visited them-lived in them, for Jabber’s sake-was extraordinary, but she did not think he was lying.

“Most people who try to get there die,” he said in a matter-of-fact tone. “But if you can do it, if you can get to the Cold Claws, especially the far shores… well, you’re made. You’ve access to the Shatterjack Mines, the grasslands north of Hinter, Yanni Seckilli Island in the Cold Claw Sea-and they’re eager for business, I tell you. I spent forty days there, and the only real trade they have is with the savages from the north, who turn up in coracles once a year, carrying stuff like biltong. Of which there’s only so much you can eat.” He grinned. “But their main problem is that The Gengris cuts them off from the south, doesn’t let outsiders pass that way. Anyone who can get past that from the south, they treat like a lost brother.

“If you make it, you have access to all manner of information, places, goods, and services that no one else has. That’s why I’ve… an arrangement with Parliament. That’s why that pass, giving me powers to commandeer vessels, in certain circumstances; giving me certain rights. I’m in a position to provide information to the city that they can’t get from anywhere else.”

He was a spy.

“When Seemly crossed the Swollen Ocean and found Bered Kai Nev six and a half centuries ago,” he said, “what do you think he carried in his holds? The Fervent Mantis was a big ship, Bellis…” He paused-she had not invited him to use her first name. But she made no sign of disapproval, and he continued. “It carried booze and silk and swords and gold. Seemly was looking to trade. That’s what unlocked the eastern continent. All the explorers you’ve heard of-Seemly, Donleon, Brubenn, probably Libintos and bloody Jabber, too-they were traders.” He spoke with childish gusto.

“It’s people like me who bring back the maps and the information. We can offer insights like no one else. We can trade them with the government-that’s my commission. There’s no such thing as exploration or science-there’s only trade. It was merchants who traveled to Suroch, who brought back the maps Dagman Beyn used in the Pirate Wars.”

He saw Bellis’ expression and registered that this particular story did not cast him and his fellows in the best light.

“Bad example,” he muttered, and Bellis could not help but laugh at his contrition.

“I won’t live here,” Bellis said. It was near two in the morning, and she was watching the stars through the window. They dragged with excruciating slowness across the pane as Armada was tugged gradually around.

“I don’t like it here. I resent being kidnapped. I can understand why some of the other press-ganged from Terpsichoria don’t mind…” She said that as a grudging sop to the guilt that Johannes had inculcated in her, and she knew uncomfortably that it was grossly insufficient, that it denigrated the freedom that had been granted to the Terpsichoria’s human cargo. “But I will not live out my life here. I’m going home to New Crobuzon.”

She spoke with a hard certainty she did not quite feel.

“Not me,” he said. “I mean, I like coming back, and living it up after some trip or other-dinners in Chnum, that sort of thing-but I couldn’t live there. Though I understand why you’d like it. I’ve seen a lot of cities, and never anything to compare. But whenever I’ve been there more than a couple of weeks, I start to feel claustrophobic. Hemmed in by the dirt and the begging and the people… and the cant they spout in Parliament.

“Even when I’m uptown, you know? BilSantum Plaza or Flag Hill or Chnum-still I feel like I’m trapped in Dog Fenn or Badside. I just can’t ignore them. I have to get out. And as for the bastards that run the place…”

Bellis was interested in his unabashed disloyalty. He was in the pay of the damn New Crobuzon government, after all, and even through the slight fog of wine, Bellis was coldly conscious that it was they, his bosses, who had caused her to flee.

But Fennec showed no commitment to them at all. He badmouthed the Crobuzoner authorities with bohemian good humor.

“They’re snakes,” he went on. “Rudgutter and all the others, I wouldn’t trust them as far as I could piss them. Dammit, I’ll take their money. If they want to pay me to tell them things I’d be happy to tell them anyway, am I going to say no? But they’re no friends of mine. I can’t sit easy in their city.”

“So is all this…” Bellis spoke carefully, trying to gauge him. “Is this not a hardship, then, being here? If you’ve no great love for New Crobuzon-”

“No.” He interrupted her with a hard manner quite unlike the amiable arrogance he had so far displayed. “That is not what I said. I’m a New Crobuzon man, Bellis. I want somewhere to come home to… even if I leave it again. I’m not rootless; I’m not some vague wanderer. I’m a businessman, a merchant, with a base and a house in East Gidd and friends and contacts, and New Crobuzon is always where I return to. Here… I’m a prisoner.

“This isn’t the kind of exploring that I have in mind. I’m damned if I’m staying here.”

And hearing that, Bellis opened another bottle of wine and poured him some more.

“What were you doing in Salkrikaltor?” she asked. “More business?”

Fennec shook his head. “I got picked up,” he said. “Salkrikaltor patrols sometimes deploy hundreds of miles away from the city, checking the kraals. One of their craft picked me up in the outskirts of the Basilisk Channel. I was heading south in a crippled ammonite-sub, leaking and very slow. The cray in the shallows east of the Sols told them about this dubious-looking tub limping round the edge of their village.” He shrugged. “I was damn well livid to get picked up, but I think they did me a favor. I doubt I’d have made it home. By the time I met any cray who could understand me, we were all the way out in Salkrikaltor City.”

“Where’d you come from?” said Bellis. “Jhesshul Islands?”

Fennec shook his head and observed her, without speaking, for several seconds.

“Nothing like that,” he said. “I crossed over from the other side of the mountains. I was in the Cold Claw Sea. In The Gengris.”

Bellis looked up sharply, ready to laugh or sniff dismissively, but she saw Fennec’s face. He nodded slowly.

“The Gengris,” he said again, and she looked away, astonished.

More than a thousand miles west of New Crobuzon was a huge lake, four hundred miles across-Cold Claw Loch. From its northern tip jutted Cold Claw Sound, a corridor of freshwater a hundred miles wide and eight hundred long. At its northern end the sound expanded massively and suddenly, stretching back eastward almost the width of the continent, narrowing like a talon, became the jaggedly curving Cold Claw Sea.

These were the Cold Claws, a conjoined body of water too vast to be anything but an ocean. A massive, freshwater, inland sea ringed by mountains and scrubland and swamps and the few hardy, remote civilizations that Fennec claimed to know.

At its easternmost edge, Cold Claw Sea was separated from the saltwater of the Swollen Ocean by a tiny strip of land: a ribbon of mountainous rock less than thirty miles wide. The sea’s sharp southernmost tip-the point of the talon-was almost directly north of New Crobuzon, more than seven hundred miles away. But the few travelers who made the journey from the city always bore a little west, to reach the waters of Cold Claw Sea two hundred miles or so away from its southern vertex. Because lodged like an impurity in the sea’s jag was an extraordinary, dangerous place, something between an island, a half-sunk city, and a myth. An amphibious badland about which the civilized world knew next to nothing, except that it existed and that it was dangerous.

That place was called The Gengris.

It was said to be the home of the grindylow, aquatic demons or monsters or degenerate crossbred men and women, depending on which story one believed. It was said to be haunted.

The grindylow, or The Gengris (the distinction between race and place was unclear), controlled the south of the Cold Claw Sea with unbreakable power and a cruel, capricious isolationism. Their waters were lethal and uncharted.

And here was Fennec claiming-what?-to have lived there?

“It isn’t true that there are no outsiders there,” he was saying, and Bellis quieted her mind enough to listen. “There are even a few native human, born and bred in The Gengris…” His mouth twisted. “And bred is the word, though I’m not sure human is, anymore. It suits them fine that everyone thinks it’s… like a little piece of hell there in the water, that it’s beyond any kind of pale. But, shit, they deal with traders like everyone else. There’re a few vodyanoi, a couple of humans… and others.

“I was there for more than half a year. Oh, it’s dangerous like nowhere else I’ve been, don’t get me wrong. You know if you trade in The Gengris that the rules… are very different. That you’ll never learn, never understand them. I’d been there six weeks when my best friend there, a vodyanoi from Jangsach who’d been there for seven years, trading back and forth… he was taken away. I never found out what happened to him, or why,” Fennec said flatly. “It might be that he insulted one of the grindylow gods, or it might have been that the catgut he supplied wasn’t thick enough.”

“So why did you do it?”

“Because, if you could last,” he snapped, suddenly excited, “it was so worth it. There was no reason to grindylow trades, no point bartering or trying to second-guess. They ask me for a bushel of salt and glass beads in equal parts-fine. No questions, no queries; I’ll provide it. Mixed fruit? It’s there for them. Cod, sawdust, resin, fungus, I don’t care. Because, by Jabber, when they paid, when they were happy…

“It was worth it.”

“But you left.”

“I left.” Fennec sighed. He got up and rummaged around in her cupboard. She did not scold him for it.

“I was there for months, buying, selling, exploring The Gengris and its environs-diving, you understand-and keeping my journal.” He spoke with his back to her, fussing with the kettle. “Then I got word that I’d… that I’d transgressed. That the grindylow were angry with me, and that my life was over unless I could get out, fast.”

“What had you done?” said Bellis slowly.

“I have no idea,” he snapped. “No idea at all. Maybe the ball bearings I provided were the wrong kind of metal, or the moon was in the wrong house, or some grindylow magus had died and they blamed me. I don’t know. All I knew was that I had to leave.

“I left a few things that gave them a false trail. See… I’d come to know the southern jag of Cold Claw Sea pretty well. They like to keep it secret, but I could find my way around it better than any outsider’s supposed to. There are tunnels. Fissures in the ridge that cuts off Cold Claw Sea from the Swollen Ocean. Through those burrows, out to the coast.”

He paused and looked out into the sky. It was nearly five o’clock. “I was trying to head south once I got into the ocean, but I got dragged out into the edges of the channel. Which is where the cray found me.”

“And you waited for a New Crobuzon ship to take you home,” Bellis said. He nodded. “Ours was going in the wrong direction, so you decided to commandeer it… with the powers vested in your little letter.”

He was lying, or leaving out some important part of the truth. That was trivially obvious, but Bellis did not comment. If he wanted to fill out his story he would do so. She would not pester him.

As she sat back in her chair, her half-drunk tea beside her on the uneven floor, she felt a sudden gush of tiredness, so that all of a sudden she could barely speak. She saw the first sickly light of dawn and knew it was too late to go to bed.

Fennec watched her. He saw her slump with exhaustion. He was more awake than she. He made himself another cup of tea as she let fits of dozing lap at her like little waves. She flirted with dreams.

Fennec began to tell her stories about his time in High Cromlech.

He told her the smells of the city, flint dust and rot and ozone, myrrh and embalming spices. He told her about the pervading quiet, and the duels, and the high-caste men with lips sewn shut. He described the descent of the Bonestrasse, great houses looming to either side on ornate catafalques, the Shatterjacks visible at the thoroughfare’s end, spilling out for miles. He talked on for nearly an hour.

Bellis sat with her eyes open, starting now and then as she remembered that she was awake. And as Fennec’s stories lurched east, across one and a half thousand miles, and he began to tell her about the malachite chapels of The Gengris, she was conscious that there was a growing crop of shouts and clattering from below, that Armada was waking beneath them, and she stood and smoothed her hair and clothes, and told him that he had to leave.

“Bellis,” he said from the stairs. Before, when he had used her first name, it had been in the spurious closeness of nighttime. Hearing him call her Bellis like that, with the sun up and people awake around them, was different. But she said nothing, and that gave him permission to continue.

“Bellis, thank you again. For… protecting me. When you said nothing about the letter.” She watched him tight-faced, and was silent. “I’ll see you again, soon. I hope that’ll be all right.”

And again she said nothing, conscious of the distance daylight had brought between them, and of the many things he was not telling her. But, still, she did not mind if he came again. It had been a long time since she had conversed as she had that night.