The Scar

Chapter Ten

There were very few clouds that morning. The sky was hard and empty.

Tanner Sack was not going to the docks. He walked afore, through the industrial hulks that surrounded his home. He took a route toward the little tangle of dockside vessels punctuated with pubs and scored with alleys. He had his sea legs, his hips shifting unconsciously with each tilt of the pavements.

He was surrounded by bricks and tarred beams. The sounds of the factory ships and the rig Sorghum ebbed behind him, losing him in the twists of the city. His tentacles swung, and moved very gently. They were wrapped in soothing brine-soaked bandages.

Last night, for the third time in succession, Shekel had not come home.

He was with Angevine again.

Tanner thought about Shekel and the woman, still a little shamed by his own jealousy. Jealous of Shekel or of Angevine-it was a knot of resentment too tangled for him to untie. He tried not to feel deserted, which he knew was not fair. He determined that he would look out for the boy no matter what, would keep a home for him for whenever he came back, would let him go with as much grace as Tanner could muster.

He was just sad that it had come so fast.

Tanner could see the masts of Grand Easterly dominating the skyline to star’d. Aerostats sailed like submersibles through the city’s rigging. He descended to Winterstraw Market and made his way over its little vessels accosted by vendors and jostled by early shoppers.

The water was very close to him here, just below his feet. It slopped all around him in the grooves between the boats that made up the bazaar, awash with rubbish. The smell and sound of it were strong.

He closed his eyes momentarily and imagined himself hovering in the cool saltwater. Descending, feeling the pressure increase as the sea cosseted him. His tentacles grasping at passing fish. Making sense of the mysteries of the city’s underside: the obscure dark shapes in the distance, the gardens of pulp and rockweed and algae.

Tanner felt his resolve waxing, and he walked more quickly.

In The Clockhouse Spur riding he almost became lost in the unfamiliar environs. He referred carefully to his hand-scrawled map. Tanner made his way along winding walkways stretched out over low boats, and across ornately reconfigured caravels, to the Duneroller, a fat old gunship. An unstable-looking tower tottered at the ship’s rear, tethered by guy ropes to the rigging.

This was a quiet quarter. Even the water coursing between these boats seemed subdued. This was a neighborhood of back-alley thaumaturges and apothecaries, the scientists of Booktown.

In the office at the top of the tower, Tanner looked out from the imperfectly cut window. He could see across the restless shipscape to the horizon that pitched gently, swung up and down in the window frame as the Duneroller listed with the sea.

There was no word in Salt for Remaking. Serious augmentation or change was not common. Major work-to ameliorate the effects of the New Crobuzon punishment factories or, rarely, for some more proactive purpose-relied on a handful of practitioners. Self-taught biothaumaturges, specialist doctors, and chirurgeons and-rumor held-a few exiles from New Crobuzon whose expertise had been gleaned years before in the punitive service of the state.

For these serious changes, the word was taken from the Ragamoll. It was that Ragamoll word that filled Tanner’s mouth.

He brought his eyes back to the man behind the desk, patiently waiting.

“I need you to help me,” Tanner said, faltering. “I want to be Remade.”

Tanner had thought about it for a long time.

His coming to terms with the sea felt like a long, drawn-out birth. Every day he spent more time below, and the water felt better against him. His new limbs had adapted completely, were as strong and almost as prehensile as his arms and hands.

He had seen with envy how Bastard John the dolphin policed his watch, passing through the brine with unique motion (as he swept in to punish some slacking worker with a brutal butting); and had watched as cray from their half-sunk ships (suspended at the point of being lost, pickled in time) or the unclear menfish from Bask riding launched themselves into the water, uncontained by harnessing or chains.

When he left the sea, Tanner felt his tentacles hang heavy and uncomfortable. But when he was below, in his harness, his leather and brass, he felt tethered and constrained. He wanted to swim free, across and up into the light and even, yes, even down, into the cold and silent darkness.

There was only one thing he could do. He had considered asking the docks to subsidize him, as they surely would, gaining an infinitely more efficient worker to do their bidding. But as the days went on and his resolution grew, he had dispensed with that plan, and had begun to hoard his eyes and flags.

That morning, with Shekel away and the clear sky blowing salt air into him, he realized, suddenly, that this was truly and completely what he wanted to do. And with a great happiness he understood that it was not because he was ashamed that he would not ask for money, nor because he was proud, but only because the process and the decision were, completely and uniquely and without confusion, his own.

When he was not with Angevine (times that stayed in his head like dreams), Shekel was in the library, moving through the towers of children’s books.

He had made his way through The Courageous Egg. The first time it had taken him hours. He had gone back over it again and again, picking up his pace as much as he could, copying the words that he couldn’t at first read and making the sounds slowly out loud, in order, until meaning wrestled its way through the separated shapes.

It was hard and unnatural at first, but the process began to come more easily. He reread the book constantly, more and more quickly, not interested by the story, but ravenous for the unprecedented sensation of meaning coming up at him from the page, from behind the letters like an escapee. It almost made him queasy, almost made him feel like spewing, it was so intense and unnerving. He turned the technique to other words.

He was surrounded by them: signs visible on the commercial street beyond the windows, signs throughout the library and across the city and on brass plaques in his hometown, in New Crobuzon, a silent clamor, and he knew that there was no way he would ever be deaf to all those words again.

Shekel finished The Courageous Egg and was full of rage.

How come I wasn’t told? he thought, searing. What fucker was it kept this from me?

When Shekel came looking for Bellis in her little office off the Reading Room, his manner surprised her.

She was very tired from Fennec’s visit the night before, but she made a little effort and focused on Shekel, asked him about his reading. To her own surprise, she found the fervor with which he answered her moving.

“How’s Angevine?” she asked, and Shekel tried to speak but could not. Bellis eyed him.

She had expected adolescent bragging and hyperbole, but Shekel was visibly crippled by emotions he had not learned to feel. She felt an unexpected gust of affection for him.

“I’m a bit worried about Tanner,” he said slowly. “He’s my best mate, and I think he’s feeling a bit… deserted. I don’t want to piss him off, you know? He’s my best mate.” And he began to tell her about his friend Tanner Sack and, in doing so, let her know, shyly, about how things stood with him and Angevine.

She smiled inwardly at that-an adult tactic, and he had performed it well.

He told her about their home on the factory ship. He told her about the big shapes that Tanner had half-seen under the water. He began to recite the words on boxes and books that lay around the room. He said them out loud and scribbled them on sheafs of paper, breaking them into syllables, treating each word with equal, analytical disinterest, participle or verb or noun or proper name.

As they strained to move a box of botanical pamphlets, the door to the office opened and an elderly man entered with a Remade woman. Shekel started, and moved toward the newcomers.

“Ange-” he started, but the woman (rolling forward on a stuttering pewter contraption where her legs should be) shook her head swiftly and folded her arms. The white-haired man waited for Angevine and Shekel’s wordless interaction to conclude. As Bellis watched him warily she realized that he was the one who had welcomed Johannes on board. Tintinnabulum.

He was brawny and held himself tall despite his age. His ancient bearded face, framed with stringy white hair to below his shoulders, looked transplanted onto a younger body. He turned his eyes to Bellis.

“Shekel,” said Bellis quietly, “would you mind leaving for a few moments?” But Tintinnabulum interrupted her.

“There’s no need for that,” he said. His voice seemed very distant: dignified and melancholy. He switched to good, accented Ragamoll. “You’re a New Crobuzoner, aren’t you?” She did not respond, and he nodded gently as if she had. “I’m speaking to all the librarians-particularly those like you, cataloging new acquisitions.”

What do you know about me? Bellis thought carefully. What has Johannes told you? Or does he protect me, despite our argument?

“I have here…” Tintinnabulum held out a sheet of paper. “I have here a list of authors whose books we’re most interested in tracing. These are writers of great use to us in our work. We’re requesting your help. We have some works by some of these writers, and we’re eager to find whatever else we can. Others are said to have written specific volumes for which we’re searching. About others we know only rumors. You’ll find three of them have works in the catalog-those books we already know about, but we’re interested in any others.

“It might be that one or other of these names surfaces in the next batch of books that arrives. Or it may be that the library has stocked their work for centuries, and they’re lost on the shelves. We’ve searched the relevant sections carefully-biology, philosophy, thaumaturgy, oceanology-and have found nothing. But we could have made mistakes. We would like you to keep a watch for us, on every new book you take in, on forgotten ones you find behind shelves, any time you catalog unlisted volumes. Two of these, those that aren’t from New Crobuzon, are old.”

Bellis took the list and looked at it, expecting it to be very long. But, typed very neatly, in the dead center of the sheet, there were only four names. None of them meant anything to her.

“Those are the core of our list,” Tintinnabulum said. “There are others-there’s a much longer version that will be posted at the desks-but those four are the ones we’d ask you to commit to memory, to search for… assiduously.”

Marcus Halprin. That was a New Crobuzon name. Angevine was motioning at Shekel surreptitiously as she and Tintinnabulum moved slowly toward the door.

Uhl-Hagd-Shajjer (transliteration), Bellis read, and beside it the original: a set of cursive pictograms she recognized as the lunar calligraphy of Khadoh.

Beneath that was the third name, A. M. Fetchpaw-New Crobuzon again.

“Halprin and Fetchpaw are relatively recent writers,” said Tintinnabulum from the doorway. “The other two are older, we think-probably a century or so. We’ll leave you to your work, Miss Coldwine. If you should find anything that we want, anything by any of these writers not listed in the catalogs, please come to my vessel. It’s by the for’ard tip of Garwater, the Castor. I can assure you that anyone able to help us will be rewarded.”

What do you know about me? thought Bellis anxiously as the door closed.

She sighed and looked at the paper again. Shekel looked over her shoulder and began, hesitantly, to say the names on the paper out loud.

Kruach Aum, Bellis read finally, ignoring Shekel’s slow progress through the syllables. How exotic, she thought sardonically, looking at the script, an archaic variant of Ragamoll. Johannes mentioned you. That’s a Kettai name.

Halprin and Fetchpaw each had books listed in the catalogs. Fetchpaw’s were volumes one and two of Against Benchamburg: A Radical Theory of Water. Halprin’s were Maritime Ecologies and The Biophysics of Brine.

Uhl-Hagd-Shajjer had a large number of works listed, Khadohi books apparently averaging little more than forty pages each. Bellis was familiar enough with the moon-writing alphabet to make out how the titles sounded, but she had no idea what they meant.

Of Kruach Aum there was nothing.

Bellis watched Shekel teaching himself to read, rifling through the sheets on which he had written difficult words, scribbling additions to them as he said their sounds, copying words from the papers around him, from files, from the list of names that Tintinnabulum had left her. It was as if the boy had once known how to read, and was now remembering.

At five o’clock he sat with her and went through The Courageous Egg. Shekel answered her questions about the egg’s adventures with a care that skirted the comic. She pronounced the words he did not know, syllable by slow syllable, guiding him through the confusions of silent or irregular letters. He told her he already had another book ready for her, that he had read in the library itself that day.

That night, for the first time, Bellis wrote in her letter about Silas Fennec. She mocked his pseudonym, but admitted that his company, his cocky edge, had been a relief after days of being alone. She continued to work her way through Johannes’ Essays on Beasts. She wondered whether Fennec would come by again, and when he did not, she went to bed in an irritated burst of boredom.

She dreamed, not for the first time, of the river journey to Iron Bay.

Tanner dreamed of being Remade.

He found himself back in the punishment factory in New Crobuzon, where his extra limbs had been grafted to him in searing, drugged minutes of pain and humiliation. Once again the air clamored with industrial noises and screams, and he lay strapped to damp, stained wood, but this time the man bending over him was not a masked biothaumaturge, but the Armadan chirurgeon.

Just as he had in the waking day, the chirurgeon showed him charts of his body, with red markings where work would be done, emendations marked out like corrections on a schoolchild’s copybook.

“Will it hurt me?” Tanner asked, and the punishment factory faded and sleep faded, but the question remained. Will it hurt? he thought as he lay in his newly lonely room.

But when he had gone once more below the water, his longing overcame him again, and he realized that he was less afraid of the pain than of hankering like this forever.

Angevine told Shekel-sternly-how to treat her when she was working.

“Can’t try and talk to me like that, boy,” she told him. “I been working with Tintinnabulum for years. Garwater pays me to look after him, ever since they brought him in. He’s trained me well, and I owe him loyalty. You don’t mess with me when I’m working. D’you understand?”

She spoke to him in Salt now, most of the time, forcing him to learn (she was hard on him, she wanted to bring him into her city without delay). As she turned to go, Shekel stopped her and told her, haltingly, that he did not think he could come to her cabin that night, that he felt he should spend a night with Tanner, who must be feeling a bit low, he said.

“Good of you to think of him,” she said. So many ways he was growing, so fast. Loyalty and lust and love weren’t enough for her. It was these frequent glimmerings of the man underneath the childhood he was shucking that swept Angevine with true passion for him, that stained her vague parental warmth with something more hard and base and breathless.

“Give him an evening,” she said. “Come by mine tomorrow, lover.”

She gave him that last word carefully. He was learning to take such presents with grace.

Shekel spent hours alone in the library, in the shelfscape of wood and vellum, gently rotting leather and paperdust. He kept to the Ragamoll section, surrounded by books that he pulled carefully down and opened around him, text and pictures like flowers on the floor. He slowly took in stories about ducks and poor boys who became kings, and battles against the trow, and the history of New Crobuzon.

He kept notes of every troublesome word whose sounds tried to evade him: Curious, saber, tough, Jhesshul, Kruach. He practiced them constantly.

As he wandered the shelves he kept his books with him, reshelving them at the end of the day not by the classmarks he did not understand, but by invented mnemonics that told him this one belonged between the big red and the small blue spines, and this one at the end, beside the volume with the picture of an airship.

There was one terrible panicked moment. He picked a book from the wall, and the shapes inside, all the letters, were friends to him; but as he settled before them and began to mouth and mutter them, waiting for them to sound as words in his head, they were all gibberish. He grew frantic very quickly, fearing that he had lost what it was he had gained.

But then he realized that he had taken a book from a shelf just to one side of the Ragamoll section; that it shared the alphabet that was now his, but pieced it together into a different language. Shekel was dumbstruck at the realization that these glyphs he had conquered could do the same job for so many peoples who could not understand each other at all. He grinned as he thought about it. He was glad to share.

He opened more foreign volumes, making or trying to make the noises that the letters spelled and laughing at how strange they sounded. He looked carefully at the pictures and cross-referenced them again. Tentatively he concluded that in this language, this particular clutch of letters meant boat, and this other set moon.

Shekel moved off slowly, making his way further from the Ragamoll section, picking up random works and gaping at their impenetrable stories, moving down the long corridors of children’s books until he reached new shelving and opened a book whose script was like nothing he knew. He laughed, delighted at its strange curves.

He moved off further and found yet another alphabet. And a little way off there was another.

For hours he found intrigue and astonishment by exploring the non-Ragamoll shelves. He found in those meaningless words and illegible alphabets not only an awe at the world, but the remnants of the fetishism to which he had been subjected before, when all books had existed for him as these did now, only as mute objects with mass and dimension and color, but without content.

Though it was not quite the same. It was not the same to see these alien pages and know that they would have meaning to some foreign child, as The Courageous Egg and The History of New Crobuzon and The Wasp in a Wig now surrendered meaning to him.

He gazed at the books in Base and High Kettai and Sunglari and Lubbock and Khadohi with a kind of fascinated nostalgia for his own illiteracy, without for a fraction of a moment missing it.