The Scar

Chapter Twenty

Short, uncomfortably hot days and interminable sweaty nights. Daylight lasted longer as the weeks progressed, but still early every evening the light had gone and the stretched-out, sticky summer night drained the city of strength.

There were half-hearted fights at the junctions of ridings. Bravos from Garwater out drinking might end up in the same bar as a group of Dry Fallers. At first there would be nothing but a few surly murmurs: the Garwater lads might mutter about leech lovers or daemon’s bum-boys. The Dry Fall mob would make a loud joke or two about perverts at the helm, and laugh too much at bad puns about cutting.

A few drinks or sniffs or puffs later and the punches would be thrown, but somehow the antagonists’ energies rarely seemed entirely in the fray. They did what they expected of themselves-little more than that.

By midnight the streets were clearing out, and by two or three they were mostly empty.

The drone from the surrounding ships never dimmed. There were factories and workshops in various industrial districts, perched stinking and smoke-bawling on the arse-ends of old ships, which did not stop. The nightwatch moved through the city’s shadows, each riding’s in its own colors.

Armada was not like New Crobuzon. Here there was not a whole alternative economy of rubbish and squalor and survival: the basements of empty buildings did not harbor a mass of beggars and homeless. There were no dumps to plunder: the city’s rubbish was stripped of everything that could be reused, and the remainder was jettisoned into the sea with the city’s corpses, spoor dissolving as it sank.

There were slums draped across the sloops and frigates, found housing moldering in the brine air and heat, sweating matter onto their inhabitants. The cactacae laborers of Jhour stood, sleeping, tight-packed in cheap flophouses. But the New Crobuzon pressganged could see the difference. Poverty here was less likely to kill. Fights were more likely to be fueled by booze than desperation. A roof was likely to be found, even if it drizzled plaster. There were no vagrants huddled in angles of architecture to watch late-night walkers.

So in the dead hours, as a man made his way toward the Grand Easterly, he was unseen.

He walked without hurry along Garwater’s less salubrious byways. Needle Street and Blodmead Street and the Wattlandaub Maze on the Surge Instigant; the Cable’s Weft, a barquentine decaying into fungus-mottled camouflage; and on to the submersible Plengant. He picked his way past the trapdoors cut into its top, stayed in shadow close to the blistering periscope tower.

Behind him, its tower unlit among the spires and masts, he could see the derrick of the Sorghum.

The flat flank of the Grand Easterly swept up beside the Plengant like the side of a canyon. From deep within it, behind its metal skin, there were the vibrations of unceasing industry. There were trees on the surface of the submersible, gripping the iron with roots like knotted toes. The man walked in their shadow and heard the quick skin-sounds of bats above him.

There were thirty or forty feet of sea between the submarine and the cliff face of the steamship. The man saw the lights and shadows of late-night dirigibles in the sky, weak shifting rays spilling over the Grand Easterly’s guardrail from the torches of the yeomanry patrolling the deck.

Opposite him was the enormous sweeping curve of the Grand Easterly’s starboard sponson, the cover to the paddlewheel. From the bottom of its bell-shaped covering, the slats of a great wheel within emerged like ankles from a skirt.

The man emerged from the shade of the sickly trees. He removed his shoes, tying them to his belt. When no one came, and there were no sounds, he walked to the curving edge of the Plengant and slid suddenly into the cool water, with only a faint sound. It was only a short swim to the flank of the Grand Easterly, and into the shadows below the sponson.

Where, brine-soaked and dogged, the man hauled himself up the slats of the sixty-foot paddle, into the darkness. He was as quiet as he could be in the echoes. He climbed to the side of the wheel’s huge crankshaft and to a service hatchway, long forgotten, that he had known was there.

It took minutes of effort to break the scab of age, but the man finally managed to open it, to make his way along the crawl space into an enormous, silent engine room abandoned a long time ago to the dust.

He crept past the thirty-ton cylinders and huge, ignored engines. The chamber was a maze of walkways and monolithic pistons, thickets of gears and flywheels as tangled as a forest.

Neither dust nor light stirred. It was as if time had been bled dry and given up. The man picked the lock of the door, then stood motionless, holding the handle. He remembered the layout of the ship. He knew where he was heading-past the guards.

It was in the nature of the man’s profession that he knew a few hexes: passes to send dogs to sleep; words that made him sticky to shadows; hedge-magic and trickery. But he doubted very much that it would protect him here.

With a sigh, the man reached for the cloth-wrapped package tied to his belt. He felt a gust of foreboding.

And a trembling excitement.

As he unwrapped the heavy thing, he reflected nervously that if he really understood how to use it, the stiff lock of the service hatch and the unpleasant night swim could probably have been dispelled like breath. He was still a fumbling ignorant.

He picked the last of the stiff cloth away and held up a carving.

It was larger than his fist, cut out of a slick stone that looked black or grey or green. It was ugly. It curled around itself like a fetus, etched with lines and coils that suggested fins or tentacles or folds of skin. The work was expert but unpleasant, seemingly designed to make the eye recoil. The statue watched the man with its one open eye, a perfect black half-sphere above a round mouth ringed in little teeth like a lamprey’s. It gaped at him with a darkness in its throat.

Twisting down the little figurine’s back, curving tightly back and forth in layers, sandwiching its folds together, was a flap of thin, dark skin. A sliver of tissue. A fin.

It was embedded into the fabric of the stone. The man ran his finger along its length. His face wrinkled in distaste, but he knew what he had to do.

He placed his lips close to the statue’s head and began to whisper in a hissing language. The sibilants echoed faintly in the big room, threading through the still machinery.

The man recited puissant doggerel to the statue and caressed it in prescribed patterns. His fingers began to numb as something leached from him.

Finally, he swallowed and turned the statue so that its face regarded him. He brought it close, hesitated, and turning his head slightly in a ghastly parody of passion, he began to kiss its mouth.

He opened his own lips and pushed his tongue into the statue’s craw. He felt the cold thorns of its teeth, and he probed further. The figurine’s mouth was cavernous, and the man’s tongue seemed to reach into the center of the little piece. It was very cold to his mouth. He had to steel himself not to gag on its taste, musty and salt and piscine.

And as the man wriggled his tongue in the stone throat, something kissed him back.

He had expected it-hoped for it, relied on it. But still it came with a jolt of nausea and shock. A little flickering something tonguing his own tongue. Cold and wet and unpleasantly organic, as if a fat maggot lurked at the statue’s core.

The taste intensified. The man felt his gorge rise and his stomach spasm, but he kept his bile down. The statue lapped at him with stupid lasciviousness, and he steeled himself to its affections. He had asked a boon of it, and it graced him with a kiss.

He felt saliva flow from him and, abominably, back into him from the statue. His tongue numbed at its slippery touch, and the coldness faded back toward his teeth. Seconds passed, and he could hardly feel his mouth. The man felt tingling like a drug pass through his body, from the back of his throat down.

The statue stopped kissing him; the little tongue was withdrawn.

He pulled his own tongue out too fast and tore it on the obsidian teeth. He did not feel that, did not realize until he saw the blood drip onto his hand.

Carefully he rewrapped the statue, then stood and waited for its kiss to course through him. The man’s perception trembled, rippled. He smiled unsteadily and opened the door.

He could see musty oil portraits and heliotypes retreating in perspective on either side. He could sense a patrol of yeomen with dogs approaching him.

He grinned. He raised his arms, reached out and up, and pitched slowly forward, falling as if his knees had been shot out. He could taste his own blood, and the saltfish-rot of the statue. His tongue was filling his mouth, and he never hit the ground.

He moved in a new way.

He saw with the statue’s sight, which it had bestowed on him with a kiss, and he slipped and oozed through spaces as the statue dreamed of moving. He questioned the angles of the corridor, reconfigured them.

The man did not walk and did not swim. He inveigled his way through crevices in possible spaces and passed, without effort and sometimes with, along channels he could now see. When he saw two yeomen and their mastiffs approaching, his way was clear.

He was not invisible, nor did he pass into another plane. Instead he moved to the wall and watched its texture, looked at its scale anew, saw the dust motes close up so that they filled his view; then he slithered behind them, hidden away, and the patrol passed away without noticing him.

At the end of the corridor was a right turn. The man squinted at the corner after the patrol had disappeared, and he managed with a little effort to use it to head left instead.

He passed like that through the Grand Easterly, remembering the maps he had seen. When patrols came he turned the architecture against them by a variety of means and slipped quickly past them. Where he was trapped behind them at the wrong end of a long passage, he might pass them by looking askance and stretching out his arm, gripping hold of the far wall and pulling himself quickly around its corner. He turned so that doors were below him, plummeting, with gravity, the length of corridors for speed.

Giddy, queasy with a kind of motion sickness brought on by his new movements, the man went quickly and inexorably aft, toward the rear and bottom of the ship.

Toward the compass factory.

Its security was tight. Guards with flintlocks surrounded it. The man had to squeeze carefully and slowly through layers of slant and perspective to reach the door. He hid in front of the guards, too big and close for them to see, out of focus and looming, and he bent over them and peered into the keyhole, at the intricate gears that dwarfed him.

He conquered them and was inside.

The room was deserted. Desks and benches were laid out in rows. There were machines, their drive belts and motors still.

At some places were copper and brass housings like large fob watches. At others were slivers of glass and equipment to grind them. There were intricately carved hands, chains and engraving needles, tightly wound springs. And hundreds of thousands of gears. Ranging in size from small to minuscule, like atom-sized relations of the wheels in the engine room. They were scattered everywhere, like grooved coins or fish scales or dust.

It was an artisanal factory. Each station was worked by an expert, a craftsperson of exquisite skill, passing his or her part-finished work to the next. The intruder knew how specialized each job was, what rare minerals had to be incorporated, the precision of the thaumaturgy necessary. Each of the finished articles was worth many times its weight in gold.

And there they were, in a locked cabinet like a jeweler’s, behind a desk at the back of the long room. The compasses themselves.

It took several minutes of careful effort for the man to open the case. The statue’s gifts were still strong in him, and he adapted well to his new perception; but still, it took a long time.

Each of the pieces was different. His hand trembling, he drew out one of the smallest: a simple, stark model, its edges picked out in polished wood. He clicked it open. Its bone face was marked with several concentric dials, some numbered, some etched with obscure sigils. Spinning loosely around the center was a single black hand.

On the compass’s back was a production number. The man noted it carefully and began the most important part of this mission. He searched for all records of this compass’s existence: in the book of records behind the display cabinet, on the list made by the metalworker who had finished the casing, in parts lists of incorrect and replacement fittings.

The man was thorough, and after half an hour he had found every mention. He laid them out in front of him and checked whether the timing worked.

The piece had been completed a year and a half ago, and it had not yet been assigned to any ship. The man smiled cautiously.

He found pens and ink, and examined the main record book more closely. Forgery was easy to him. He began to add, very carefully, to his compass’s details. In the column “Assigned To,” the man added a date, a year ago (rapidly calculating the Armadan quartos), and the name Magda’s Threat.

If anyone should, for any reason, look for information on compass model CTM4E, they would now find it. They would discover that it had been installed a year previously on the poor Magda’s Threat, a ship that had gone down months ago, with all hands and cargo, without a trace, in waters a thousand miles away.

When he had replaced everything, the man had just one task left.

He opened the compass, brooding on the intricacies of its metaclockwork entrails, stolen and adapted from a khepri design centuries before. On the tiny shaving of stone he knew was embedded at its core, bound in with homeotropic thaumaturgy. Its hand swing vaguely on its axis.

With ten quick twists the man wound it up.

He held it to his ear and heard its faint, almost inaudible ticking. He watched its face. Its dials spasmed and snapped into new positions.

The hand spun wildly, then set hard, pointing afore, back toward the center of the Grand Easterly.

It was not a conventional compass, of course. The hand was not pointing north.

This hand was pointing to a chunk of rock that was hemmed in by thaumaturgy, encased in glass, bolted under iron, depending on which rumor one believed. It had fallen from the sky, it was from the heart of the sun, it was from hell.

For the years until its clockwork ran down, the compass would point precisely toward the city’s lodestone, the godrock buried somewhere in the core of the Grand Easterly.

The man wrapped the compass very tight in oiled cloth and then in leather, and buttoned it into his pocket.

It must be almost dawn. The man was exhausted. He was finding it hard to see the room and its angles and planes, its walls and materials and dimensionality, other than as he usually did. He sighed, and his heart sank. He was losing the statue’s powers, but he had yet to get out of there.

And so, moistening his lips, flexing his tongue, surrounded by armed officers who would kill him for even knowing about the factory, the man began to unwrap his statue again.