The Scar

Chapter Seventeen

In these warm waters, the night-lights and the sound of the waves against the city’s flanks were softer, as if the sea was aerated and the light diffuse: brine and illumination became less starkly elemental. Armada nestled in the long, balmy darkness of what was now, unquestionably, a summer.

At night, in pub gardens that abutted Armada’s parklands, its plots, its meadowland left fallow on forecastles and main decks, cicadas sang over the wave noise and the puttering tug motors. Bees and hornets and flies had appeared. They clustered at Bellis’ windows, butting themselves to death.

Armadans were not people of the cold, or of the heat, or of New Crobuzon’s temperate climate. Elsewhere Bellis might apply climatic stereotypes (the stolid cold-dweller, the emotive southerner), but in Armada she could not. On that nomadic city, such factors were irregular, they defied generalization. All that could be said was that for that summer, at that conjuncture of date and place, the city softened.

The streets were full for longer, and the patchwork phonemes of Salt conversations were everywhere. It was looking to be a loud season.

In a hall in the Castor, Tintinnabulum’s ship, a meeting was taking place.

It was not a big room. It strained to contain everyone within it. They sat in uncomfortable formality on stiff chairs around a battered table. Tintinnabulum and his companions, Johannes and his colleagues, biomathematicians and thaumaturges and others, mostly human but not all so.

And the Lovers. Behind them, Uther Doul stood by the door, his arms folded.

Johannes, faltering and excited, had been speaking for some time. At the climax of his story, he paused ostentatiously and slapped Kruach Aum’s book onto the table. And after the pause, at the crescendo of the first wave of gasps, he followed it with Bellis’ translation.

“You can see now,” he said with a trembling voice, “why I called this extraordinary meeting.”

The Lover picked up the two documents and carefully compared them. Johannes watched her in silence. Her mouth curled in concentration, and the scars on her face coiled to contain her expression. On the right side of her chin, he noticed the puckered flesh and scab of a new wound. He looked briefly at her lover beside her and saw a matching wound below his mouth, on the left.

Johannes felt the unease he always did at the sight. No matter how often he saw the Lovers, their proximity brought on a nervousness in him that did not fade. They had an extraordinary presence.

Perhaps it’s authority, Johannes thought. Perhaps that’s what authority is.

“Who here speaks Kettai?” the Lover said.

Opposite her, a llorgiss raised an arm.

“Turgan,” she acknowledged.

“I know some,” it said in its breathy tones, “mostly Base, a little High. But this woman is much more proficient than me. I have looked at the manuscripts, and much of the original was beyond me.”

“Don’t forget,” said Johannes, raising his hand, “Coldwine’s High Kettai Grammatology is a standard reference book. There aren’t that many textbooks for High Kettai…” He shook his head. “Weird, difficult language. But of those that there are, Coldwine’s is one of the best. If she weren’t on board, if Turgan or someone else had to translate this, they’d probably spend most of their time referring to her damn book anyway.”

His hands were jerking in aggressive, choppy movements.

“She’s translated into Ragamoll, obviously,” he said, “but it’s easy enough to render that into Salt. But, look, the translation is not the most exciting thing here. Maybe I’ve not been clear… Aum’s not Kettai. We couldn’t visit a Kettai scientist, obviously. Kohnid’s way off our route, and Armada wouldn’t be safe in those seas… but Kruach Aum’s not from Kohnid. He’s anophelii. Their island’s a thousand miles south. And there’s every chance he’s alive.

It brought them up short.

Johannes nodded slowly. “What we have here,” he continued, “is invaluable. We have a description of the process, the effects, we have confirmation of the area involved-all those things. But unfortunately Aum’s footnotes and calculations are missing-as I said, the text is badly damaged. So what we have is merely the… the lay description. The science is missing.

“We’re heading for a sinkhole some way off the southern coast of Gnurr Kett. Now, I’ve checked with a couple of cactacae ex of Dreer Samher, who used to deal with the anophelii: where we’re going, we’ll only be a couple of hundred miles from the anophelii island.” He paused, aware that he was speaking too quickly in his excitement.

“Obviously,” he went on, more slowly, “we could continue as previously planned. In which case we know roughly where we’re going; we know more or less the kind of power involved in the summoning; we have some idea of the thaumaturgy involved… And we could risk it.

“But we could go to the island. A landing party. Tintinnabulum, some of our scientists, one or other or both of you.” He looked at the Lovers.

“We’d need Bellis to translate,” he went on. “The cactacae who’ve been there can’t help us: when they traded it was all hand signs and head shaking, apparently, but obviously some of the anophelii speak High Kettai. We’d need guards-and engineers, because we’re going to have to start thinking about containment for the avanc. And… we find Aum.”

He sat back, aware that it was not one iota as simple as he had presented it, but still he felt excited.

“In the very worst case,” he said, “Aum’s dead. In which case we’ve lost nothing. Perhaps there’ll be others there, who remember him, who can help us.”

“That’s not the worst case,” said Uther Doul. The atmosphere shifted: all whispering stopped, and everyone in the room faced him-except the Lovers, who listened gravely without turning.

“You’re talking,” Doul continued softly, in his singer’s voice, “as if this is just a place, like other places. It’s not. You have no idea what you’re saying. Do you understand what you’ve discovered? What Aum’s race means? This is the island of the mosquito-people. The worst case is that the anophelii women come upon us on the beach and suck us dry, leaving our husks to rot. The worst case is that we are all instantly butchered.”

There was a silence.

“Not me,” someone said. Johannes gave a half smile. It was Breyatt, a cactacae mathematician. Johannes tried to catch his eye. Well scored, he thought.

The Lovers were nodding.

“Your point is taken, Uther,” said the Lover. He stroked his small mustache. “But let’s not… exaggerate. There are ways around the problem, as this gentleman points out…”

“This gentleman is cactus,” said Doul. “For those of us with blood the problem remains.”

“Nevertheless-” The Lover spoke with authority. “-I think it would be foolish to suggest that there’s no way this can be done. That’s not how we proceed. We start by working out what’s to our advantage, what is the best plan… Then we work our way around problems. If it seems that our best chance of success lies on this island, then that’s where we’ll go.”

Doul did not move. He looked impassive. There was nothing in his demeanor to suggest that he had been overruled.

“Godsdammit!” Johannes barked in frustration, and everyone turned to him. He was shocked at his own outburst, but he continued without losing momentum. “Of course there are problems and difficulties,” he said passionately, “of course it’ll take organization, it’ll take work and effort and… and maybe we’ll need protecting, and we can bring cactacae fighters with us, or constructs, or I don’t damn well know what… But what’s going on here? Are you all in the same room as me?”

He picked up Aum’s book and held it reverentially like a sacred sutra.

“We have the book. We have a translator. This is the testimony of one who knows how to raise an avanc. This changes everything… Does it matter where he lives? So his home is inhospitable.” He stared at the Lovers. “Is there anywhere we wouldn’t go for this? Surely we can’t even consider not going.”

When they broke up, the Lovers spoke noncommittally. But everything was different now, and Johannes knew he was not alone in knowing that.

“It may be time to announce our intentions,” the Lover said as they gathered their notes.

The room was full of people trained into a culture of secrecy. Her suggestion shocked them. But, Johannes realized, it made sense.

“We knew we’d have to be open about this some time,” she continued. Her lover nodded.

There were scientists from Jhour and Shaddler and The Clockhouse Spur taking part in the attempt to raise the avanc, and the rulers of those ridings had been consulted out of courtesy. But the inner circle was all Garwater: those who once had not been, the Lovers had, in a breach of tradition, persuaded to defect. Information about the project was tightly circumscribed.

But a plan of such magnitude could not be hidden forever.

“We have the Sorghum,” said the Lover, “so we decide where we all go. But what will the rest of the city think while they sit stranded in some patch of sea waiting for our landing party to return? What are they going to think when we reach the sinkhole, raise the damned avanc? Their rulers won’t talk: our allies take our lead, and our enemies don’t want this in the open. They’re afraid of which way their people will turn.

“Perhaps,” she concluded slowly, “it’s time to bring the citizens to our side. Enthuse them…”

She looked at her partner. As always, they seemed to be communicating silently.

“We need lists,” the Lover said, “of everyone who should go to the island. We must look at new arrivals-there may be expertise we’ve missed. And we need security details for all candidates. And we have to represent all ridings.” He smiled, his scars tracing the contours of his face, and picked up Bellis’ translation.

When Johannes reached the door, the Lovers called his name.

“Come with us,” said the Lover, and Johannes’ stomach yawed uneasily.

Oh Jabber, he thought. What now? I’ve had enough of your company.

“Come and talk to us,” the Lover continued, and waited while his partner finished for him.

“We want to talk to you about this woman, Coldwine,” she said.

Past midnight, Bellis was woken by a repeated banging on her door. She looked up, thinking it must be Silas, until she saw him lying motionless and awake beside her.

It was Johannes. She tugged her hair out of her face and blinked at him on her doorstep.

“I think they’re going to go ahead,” he said. Bellis gasped.

“Listen, Bellis. They were… well, intrigued by you. What they’ve heard has suggested that… well, that you’re not their material. Nothing bad, you know?” He was eager to mollify her. “Nothing, you know, dangerous… but not exactly sympathetic. Like a lot of press-ganged: best left aboard at all costs. It’s normally years before incomers get letters of pass.”

Was that all it was? thought Bellis slowly. The misery and loneliness, the aching for New Crobuzon that made her feel something had been torn from her-was it just an everyday symptom, shared by a thousand like her? Was it so banal?

“But… well I told them all the things you’d said to me,” Johannes said, and smiled. “And I can’t promise anything, but… I think you’d be the best person, and I told them that.”

Silas seemed to be sleeping when she returned to bed, but something in the shallowness of his breath told her he was not. She leaned over him as if about to kiss him hard, her lips found his ear, and she whispered, “It’s working.”

They came for her the next morning.

It was after Silas had left, heading for Armada’s underworld to perform his opaque, illegal activities. To the work that kept him under the city’s skin, that made him too dangerous even to attempt passage to the anophelii island.

Two of the Garwater yeomanry, pistols slung easy in their belts, steered Bellis to an aerostat cab. It was not far from Chromolith to the Grand Easterly. The mass of the enormous steamer stretched out above the city. Its six colossal masts, its chimneys, its bare decks unadorned by houses or towers.

The sky was full of aerostats: Scores of little cabs studding the air like bees around a hive; outlandish vessels built for freight, transporting heavy goods between the ridings; the peculiar little single-rider balloons with their pendulous occupants. A little way out were warflots, elliptical flying guns. And above them all the massive, crippled Arrogance.

They wound over the skyscape of Armada, lower than Bellis was used to, rising and sinking with the topography of roofs and rigging. Warrens of brick like New Crobuzon slums passed below. Built on the cramped space of deck tops, they looked precarious: their outer walls too close to the water, the alleyways that riddled them impossibly thin.

Beyond the haze above the Gigue, whose fore was an industrial district of foundries and chymical plants, the Grand Easterly was approaching.

Bellis was uncertain. She had never been inside the Grand Easterly before.

Its architecture was austere: darkwood panels, lithographs and heliotypes, stained glass. A little age-blistered, but well kept, its innards were a tangle of passageways and staterooms. Bellis was left to wait in a small chamber. The door was locked on her.

She went to the iron-fringed window and looked down over Armada’s random ships. In the distance she could see the green of Croom Park, spread like disease across the bodies of several ships. The room she was in was higher by far than any of the surrounding vessels, the side of the ship falling away below. At eye level she saw dirigibles and a mass of thin masts.

“This is a New Crobuzon ship, you know.”

Even as she turned, Bellis recognized the voice. It was the scarred man, the Lover, standing in the doorway, alone.

Bellis was shocked. She had known that there would be interrogation, investigation, but she had not expected this: to be questioned by him. I translated the book, she thought. I get special treatment.

The Lover closed the door behind him.

“It was built more than two and a half centuries ago, at the end of the Full Years,” he continued. He spoke to her in Ragamoll, with only a slight accent. He sat, indicated to her to do the same. “In fact, it’s been claimed that the Grand Easterly’s building itself brought the Full Years to an end. Obviously,” he said, deadpan, “that is ridiculous. But it’s a useful symbolic coincidence. Decline was setting in at the end of the 1400s, and what more potent symbol of the failure of science than this ship? In a scramble to prove that New Crobuzon was still in its golden age, they come up with this thing.

“It’s a very poor design, you know. Trying to combine the paddle power of those stupid huge wheels, on her flanks, with a screw propeller.” He shook his head, not taking his eyes from Bellis. “You can’t power something of this size with paddles. So they just loomed there like tumors, ruining the ship’s line, acting as brakes. Which meant the screw didn’t work very well, either, and you couldn’t sail it. Isn’t it ironic?

“But there’s one thing that they did right. They set out to build the biggest vessel ever seen. They had to launch the thing sideways, in the estuary by Iron Bay. And for a few years it limped around. Awesome but… ungainly. They tried to use it during the Second Pirate Wars, but it lumbered like a massively armed rhinoceros while the Suroch and Jheshull ships danced around it.

“Then, they’ll tell you, it sank. Of course, it didn’t. We took it.

“They were wonderful years for Armada, the Pirate Wars. All that carnage; ships disappearing every day; missing cargos; sailors and soldiers fed up with fighting and dying, eager to escape. We stole ships and technology and people. We grew and grew.

“We took the Grand Easterly because we could. That was when Garwater took control, which it has never lost. This ship is our heart. Our factory, our palace. It was a dreadful steamer, but it is a superlative fortress. That was the last… great age for Armada.”

There was silence for a long time.

“Until now,” he said, and smiled at her. And the interrogation began.

When it was all finished, and she emerged mole-eyed into the afternoon, she found it hard to recall his questions exactly.

He had asked her a great deal about the translation. Had she found it hard? Was there anything that had not made sense? Could she also speak High Kettai, or merely read it? And on and on.

There had been questions designed to gauge her state of mind, her relationship to the city. She had spoken carefully: it was a tentative line between the truth and lies. She did not try to hide all of her distrust, her distaste at what had been done to her, her resentment. But she battened it down, somewhat: contained it, made it safe.

She tried not to seem to try.

There was no one to meet her outside, of course, and that gladdened her, obscurely. She crossed the steep bridges that descended from the Grand Easterly to the lower ships beside it.

She made her way home through some of the most intricate byways and alleys. Passing under brick arches that dripped with Armada’s constant salt damp; by groups of children playing variants of the shove-stiver and catch-as-can she remembered from the streets at home, as if there were a deep grammar of street games shared across the world; beside small cafes in the shadow of raised forecastles, where their parents played their own games, backgammon and chatarang.

Gulls arced and shat. The backstreets pitched and shifted with the surface of the sea.

Bellis relished her solitude. She knew that if Silas had been with her, the sense of complicity would have been cloying.

They had not had sex for a long time. It had only ever happened twice.

After those times, they had shared her bed and thrown off their clothes in front of each other without shyness or hesitation. But neither, it seemed, was moved to fuck. It was as if having used sex to connect and open to each other, the channel was in place and the act was superfluous.

It was not that she had no desires. The last two or three nights they had been together, she had waited for him to sleep, then masturbated quietly. She often kept her thoughts from him, sharing only what they needed to make their plans.

Bellis was not inordinately fond of Silas, she realized with mild surprise.

She was grateful to him; she found him interesting and impressive, though not so charming as he thought himself. They held something between them: extraordinary secrets, plans that could not be allowed to fail. They were comrades in this. She did not mind him sharing her bed; she might even tup him again, she thought with an inadvertent smirk. But they were not close.

Given what they had shared, this seemed a little bizarre, but she acknowledged it.

The next morning, before six, when the sky was still dark, men and women gathered in a fleet of dirigibles on the deck of the Grand Easterly. Between them they hauled bundles of raggedly printed leaflets. They lugged them into the aerostat carriages, argued over routes, and consulted maps. They divided Armada into quadrants.

The daylight was filling up the city as they lifted off sedately.

Costermongers, factory workers, yeomanry, and a thousand others looked up from the brick and wood warrens around the Grand Easterly: from Winterstraw Market’s intricate concatenation of vessels, from towers in Booktown and Jhour and Thee-And-Thine, peering over the city’s rigging. They saw the first wave of dirigibles lift off and spread out over the city’s chambers, out across the ridings. And at strategic points in the airflow, tacking against the wind, the aerostats began to shed paper.

Like confetti, like the blossom already straining to grow on Armada’s hardy trees, the leaflets coiled out and down in great billows. The air sounded with them-a susurrus of paper sliding against paper-and with the gulls and city sparrows that cut away from them in confusion. Armadans looked up, shielding their eyes against the rising sun, and saw the scudding clouds and clear warm blue, and descending below them the snips of paper skittering through the air.

Some fell into chimneys. Hundreds more touched the water. They funneled into the trenches between vessels and settled on the sea. They bobbed on the waves, becoming saturated, their ink spreading to become unreadable, nibbled by fishes, till the brine clogged their fibers and they sank. Below the surface there was a snow of disintegrating paper. But many thousands landed on the decks of Armada’s ships.

Again and again the dirigibles circled the city’s airspace, passing over each of the ridings, finding pathways between the tallest towers and masts, scattering their leaflets. Curious and delighted, people picked them out of the air. In a city where paper was expensive, this extravagance was extraordinary.

Word spread fast. When Bellis descended to the deck of the Chromolith, onto a layer of leaflets rustling like dead skin, all around her there were arguments. People stood in the doorways of their shops and houses, shouting to each other or muttering or laughing, waving the leaflets in inky hands.

Bellis looked up and saw one of the last of the aerostats to port, moving away from her out over Jhour, another fluttering cloud descending behind it. She picked up one of the papers gusting at her feet.

Armadan citizens, she read, after long and careful study, something can be achieved that would have astounded our grandparents. A new day is soon to dawn. We are to change our city’s movements forever.

She scanned the page quickly, racing through the propagandist explanation, and her eyes moved slower over the key word, picked out in bold.

Avanc…

Bellis felt a thrill of confused emotion. I did this, she thought with weird pride. I set this in motion.

“It is choice work,” said Tintinnabulum thoughtfully.

He was hunkered down in front of Angevine, thrusting his face and hands into the engines in her metal underparts. She leaned her flesh body back, impassive and patient.

For some days, Tintinnabulum had been conscious of a change in his servant, a difference in the clattering of her engines. She moved more quickly and exactly, turning in tight arcs and stopping without a wheezing slowdown. She found it easier to negotiate Armada’s swaying bridges. An edge of anxiety in her was gone-her constant scavenging, her scrabbling for discarded coal and wood, had stopped.

“What has happened to your engine, Angevine?” he had asked her. And smiling with immense, shy pleasure, she had shown him.

He rummaged in her tubework, burning his hands stoically on her boiler, examining her reconfigured metal viscera.

Tintinnabulum knew that Armadan science was a mongrel. It was as piratical as the city’s economy and politics, the product of theft and chance-as various and inconsistent. The engineers and thaumaturges learned their skills on equipment that was rotted and out of date, and on stolen artifacts of such sophisticated design that they were mostly incomprehensible. It was a patchwork of technologies.

“This man,” he murmured, up to his elbow in Angevine’s motor, fingering a three-way switch at the back of her chassis, “this man may be just a jobbing engineer, but… this is the choicest work. Not many aboard Armada could make this. Why did he do it?” he asked her.

She could only respond vaguely to that.

“Is he trustworthy?” Tintinnabulum said.

Tintinnabulum and his crew were not Armadan-born, but their commitment to Garwater was unquestionable. Stories were told about how they had joined Armada-the Lovers had tracked them by esoteric means, persuaded them to work in the city for unknown wages. For them, the ropes and chains linking the fabric of Garwater had been parted. The riding had opened itself, let Tintinnabulum enter and embed himself in the very heart of the city, which had resealed behind him.

That morning, Angevine too had picked up one of the slew of leaflets that suddenly clogged up Armada’s alleys, and had learned the purpose of the Garwater project. It had excited her, but had not, she realized, come as a particular surprise. She had been present on the edge of official discussions for a long time, had seen the literature left lying on Tintinnabulum’s desk, had caught glimpses of scribbled diagrams and half-finished calculations. As soon as she discovered what it was that Garwater was attempting, she felt that she had always known. After all, did she not work for Tintinnabulum? And what was he but a hunter?

His room was full of evidence. Books-the only ones that she knew of outside the library-etchings, carved tusks, broken harpoons. Bones and horns and hides. In the years she had worked for him, Tintinnabulum and his crew of seven had lent their expertise to Garwater. Horned sharks and whales and ceti, bonefish, shellarc-he had snared and harpooned and caught them all, for food, for protection, for sport.

Sometimes, when the eight were meeting, Angevine would put her ear flat against the wood and press hard, but she could only ever hear the occasional snatch of sound. Enough to learn tantalizing things.

The ship’s madman, Argentarius, whom no one ever saw, she would hear railing and screaming to them, telling them he was afraid. Some prey of theirs had done this to him long ago, Angevine came to understand. It had galvanized his comrades. They were stamping their authority on the deep sea, thumbing their noses at that terrible realm.

When she had heard them speak of hunting, it was the largest game that enthused them: the leviathan and lahamu, the cuttlegod.

Why not the avanc?

None of it was any surprise, really, Angevine thought.

“Is he trustworthy?” Tintinnabulum repeated.

“He is,” Angevine said. “He’s a good man. He’s grateful for being spared the colonies; he’s angry with New Crobuzon. He’s had himself Remade, the better to dive, the better to work in the docks-he’s a sea creature now. He’s loyal as any Garwater born, I’d say.”

Tintinnabulum raised himself and shut Angevine’s boiler. His mouth pursed thoughtfully. On his desk he found a long, handwritten list of names.

“What’s he called?” he said.

He nodded, leaned over, and carefully added Tanner Sack.