The Scar

Chapter Twenty-seven

Dockday 9th Soluary 1780/Ninth Markindi Hawkbill

Quarto 6/317. Trident

He speaks to me again.

Uther Doul has decided that we will be-what? Friends? Companions? Discussants?

Since we left the island, the crew have been bustling, and the rest of us have sat quiet and watched and waited. I have been numb. Ever since Tanner Sack returned last night-wet and salt-stained and terrified by his short time under the open sky-I have been unable to settle. I shift in my seat and think about that precious letter, that ugly tin necklace-a priceless proof-and the long journey that awaits them. Tanner Sack has told me that Sengka agreed to ferry them. It is a long way, an arduous journey. I hope he does not change his mind. I pray that Silas has offered enticement enough.

Tanner Sack and I avoid each other’s eyes. We shift past each other in the Trident’s luxurious gondola, and we are stiff with guilt. I do not know him or he me: that is our consensus.

I have spent my hours watching Kruach Aum.

It is affecting to see him. It is moving.

He is shaking with fascination and excitement. His eyes are stretched wide, and his puckered sphincter-mouth is dilating and contracting with his breath. He moves-not quite running, but if it is a walk it is an undignified and frantic one-from window to window, staring at the engines that power the vessel, going to the pilot’s control booth at the front, to the privies, to the berths, and up into the great cathedral of the balloon itself, filled with the gasbags.

Aum can communicate with no one but me, and I expected him to hanker for my services. But, no, I have nothing to do. He is content to watch. I need only sit here and watch him, trotting past me this way and that like a child.

He has spent his lifetime on that rock. He is gorging on what is around him now.

Doul approached me. As before (that first time) he sat opposite me, his arms gently crossed, his eyes impassive. He spoke in his lovely voice.

This time I felt congested with terror-as if he had seen what I did with Tanner Sack-but I could face him with the calm he would expect.

I remain convinced that we understand each other, Doul and I. That this is what underlies the connection I feel, and I have used this conviction. He sees me (I am sure) struggling to control the fear I feel in seeing him, and he respects me for not giving in to nervousness at facing the legendary Uther Doul…

Of course my nervousness is that he will discover that I am a traitor. But that does not occur to him.

We watched Aum, without words for a long time. Eventually, Doul spoke. (I am never the one to break silence.)

“Now that we have him,” he said, “I can’t see anything that could stop the invocation. Armada will soon enter a new period.”

“What of the ridings that are unhappy about this?” I asked.

“Certainly there are some who have concerns,” he said, “but imagine it. Currently the city crawls. With the avanc at our control… harnessed to a beast like that, there’s nothing we couldn’t do. We could cross the world in a tiny fraction of the time it takes us now.” He paused and moved his eyes briefly. “We could go to places currently denied us,” he said, his voice lowering.

There it was again: a hint at some motive undisclosed.

Silas and I have only learnt half the story. There is more to this project than the conjuring of the avanc. Having thought myself to have uncovered Armada’s secrets, I dislike this sudden sense of ignorance. I dislike it strongly.

“To the lands of the dead, maybe?” I said slowly. “To the shadeworld and back?”

I spoke as if idly, citing the rumors I had heard about him. To bait him into correcting me. I want to know the truth about the project, and I want to know the truth about him.

Doul astonished me then. I had expected perhaps some elliptical hint, some vague suggestions as to his origin. He gave me much more than that.

It must be part of his own project, the creation of some kind of link between us (I cannot yet work out what kind) but for whatever reason, he gave me much more.

“It’s a chain of whispers,” he said. He leaned in and spoke quietly, ensuring that our conversation was private.

“When they tell you that I came from the world of the dead, you’re at the end of a chain of whispers. Each link has an imperfect join with those around it, and meaning leaches out between them.”

If these were not his exact words they are like them. He speaks like this, in monologues that sound scripted. My silence was not begrudging-it was an audience’s.

“At my end of the chain is the truth,” he continued. He took my hand suddenly and shockingly and placed my two fingers on the slow pulse in his wrist. “I was born in your lifetime. More than three millennia after the Contumancy-do they still credit me with that? There’s no coming back from the world of the dead.” Beat beat beat went the pulse, languid like some cold-blooded lizard.

I know these stories are for children, I thought. I know you’re no revenant. And you know I know that. Do you just want me touching you?

“Not the world of the dead,” he continued. “But it’s true that I come from a place where the dead walk. I was born and raised in High Cromlech.”

It was all I could do not to cry out. As it was, I am sure my eyes must have spasmed wide.

Ask me six months ago and I would not have been certain that High Cromlech existed. I knew it only as a vague half-imagined place of zombie factories and the aristocratic dead. A place where the ghouls are hungry.

Then Silas tells me that he has been, that he has lived there-and I believe him. But still, his descriptions are more dreamlike than exact. Only the most nebulous and austere visions.

And now I know a second person who is familiar with that place? And not a traveler this time, but a native?

I realized that I was pressing the artery in Doul’s pulse hard. Gently he disengaged from my fingers.

“It’s a misconception,” he said, “to think that High Cromlech is all thanati. The quick are there, too.” (I am listening intently to him now, trying to detect his accent.) “We are a minority, it’s true. And of those born every year, many are farm-bred, kept in cages till they’re of strength, when they can be snuffed and recast as zombies. Others are raised by the aristocracy until they come of age, and are slain and welcomed to dead society. But…”

His voice petered out, and he became introspective for a moment. “But then there’s Liveside. The ghetto. That’s where the true quick live. My mother was prosperous. We lived at the better end.

“There are jobs that only the living can do. Some are manual, too dangerous to risk giving to zombies-they’re expensive to animate, but one can always breed more of the quick.” His voice was deadpan. “And for those lucky enough, for the cream-the livemen and livewives, the quick gentry-there are the taboo jobs that the thanati won’t touch, at which a quick can make a decent living.

“My mother made enough that she chose to put herself down, so that she could have herself embalmed and revivified by the necrurgeon. Not high caste, but she became thanati. Everyone knew when Livewife Doul became Deadwife Doul. But I was not there. I had left.”

I do not know why he told me all this.

“I grew up,” he said, “surrounded by the dead. It’s not true that they are all silent, but many are, and none are loud. Where I grew up, we used to run, the boys and girls of Liveside, pugnacious through the streets past the mindless zombies and a few desperate vampir, and the thanati proper, the gentry, the liches with sewn-shut mouths, with beautiful clothes and skin like preserved leather. More than anything I remember the quiet.

“I wasn’t treated badly. My mother was respected, and I was a good boy. We were treated with nothing more overtly unpleasant than a kind of sympathetic sneer. I became involved with cults and criminals and heresies. But not deep, and not for long. There are two things that the quick are more adept at than the thanati. One is noise. The other is speed. I turned my back on the first, but not the second.”

After it became clear that his pause had become a silence, I spoke.

“Where did you learn to fight?” I said.

“I was a child when I left High Cromlech,” he said. “I didn’t think so at the time, but I was. Slipping onto the funicular railway-out, away.”

He would not tell me anything more than that. Between that time and his arrival at Armada there must have been more than a decade. He would not tell me what happened then. But that, it is obvious, is when he learnt his unfathomable skills.

Doul was quieting, and I felt his willingness to talk ebb away. I did not want that. After weeks of isolation, I wanted to keep him talking. I made a clumsy attempt, something like a witticism. I must have sounded arch and flippant.

“And when you left, you fought the Ghosthead Empire and won-what do they call it?-the Mighty Blade?” I indicated his plain ceramic sword.

His face was quite impassive for a moment, and then a sudden beautiful smile illuminated him for a second. He looks like a boy when he smiles.

“That’s another chain of meaning,” he said, “half of which has been lost. The Ghosthead are long gone, but there are remnants of the Empire all over Bas-Lag. And it is true that my sword is a Ghosthead artifact.”

I struggled through the meanings that he might be implying. My sword is an application of Ghosthead techniques, I thought, and then, My sword is based on Ghosthead designs, but I realized to look at him that he meant exactly what he said.

I must have looked shocked. He nodded briskly.

“My sword is over three thousand years old,” he said.

It is impossible. I have seen it. It is a plain, slightly weathered, and age-stained piece of clayware. If it is fifty years old I would be astonished.

“And the name…” He gave me another of those smiles. “Another misunderstanding. I found this sword after a very long search, after mastering a dead science. The men call it Might blade. Not mighty.” He spoke slowly. “It might; it might not. Might not meaning potency, but potentiality. It is a bastardization of its true name. There was a time there were many weapons like this,” he said. “Now, it is, I think, the only one left.

“It is a Possible Sword.”

Even on the return journey, the scientists were making plans. They did not underestimate what they had yet to do. There was harder work ahead of them.

The Trident was not traveling in the opposite direction to the one by which it had come: Armada had moved and, by those arcane means Bellis did not understand, they were heading inexorably for it.

The dirigible began to speed up, gusted by grey clouds and bullets of rain. Bellis peered from the stateroom windows, out over the turmoil of the sea and the dark air at the edge of the sky.

A storm was coming.

They outpaced the worst of the bad weather. Within its own borders the storm was violent, but it did not move fast. It was tearing itself apart from the inside. The Trident ran at its edges, pelted by a periphery of rain, racing its shadow.

When she saw the broken mass of Armada breach the horizon and sprawl across the water below her, Bellis marveled at its scale. It looked like spillage, a slick of ruined and refitted boats, untidy across the waves, shapeless, its edges random and unchanging. The fringe of tugs and steamers that had hauled it for thousands of miles had been untethered while the city was still, and they puttered around it in great numbers, ferrying goods. Bellis thought again of the vast quantities of fuel that they must consume. It was no wonder that the pirate ships of Armada were voracious.

On seeing it, Bellis felt a great wash of emotion that she could not identify at all.

At the city’s outside edge, she saw the Terpsichoria. And with its spire flaming, its effluent warping the air, Bellis could see the complex outlines of the Sorghum rig. There was a bustle of vessels in the sea around its legs. It was drilling again, sucking oil and rockmilk out of the pressurized veins in which they had flowed for centuries. Armada had come to where there was a seam. The Sorghum was storing fuel for the almighty thaumaturgy to come.

They came in over Garwater’s aft-star’d, picking their way carefully over masts. Below them a mass of shapes followed the Trident curiously, tracking it in its shadow: aerocabs and single balloonists, odd ungainly looking airships.

The Trident docked at the Grand Easterly, at the same height as the crippled Arrogance. Bellis could see people staring from surrounding ships and little aircraft, but the Grand Easterly was sealed off. Its deck was almost empty. A small contingent of yeomanry was waiting for them, and at their head, his face alight, was the Lover.

Bellis saw a new cut on his face, a healing scab. It started at the left corner of his lips and curled below his chin. It was the mirror image of the one that Bellis had heard the Lover inflicting on herself.

When the Lovers saw each other, there was a long moment of silence, and then they crossed the distance and held each other. They gripped and tugged at each other. Their touches were passionate and intense, and went on for a minute or more. They did not look like caresses: the Lovers looked as if they were fighting in slowed-down time. The sight of them disturbed Bellis immeasurably.

Eventually they broke. Bellis was close enough to hear them hissing to each other. The Lover was slapping her man, clawing him across his neck and face, harder and harder. When she touched his new cut, her hands were suddenly as gentle as if he were a baby.

“Just as we said,” the Lover whispered, touching her own wound, “at the moment we agreed. Did you feel me? Did you? I swear I felt you, I fucking felt you-every inch, every drop of blood.”

The paneled room was filled with old oil portraits of engineers and politicians Bellis did not recognize-New Crobuzoners left to molder meaningless on the walls of their stolen craft. Around a huge horseshoe table sat the Armadan Senate; and gathered before them were Tintinnabulum, the leaders of the Trident’s scientific and engineering parties, and Kruach Aum. Beside the stunned-looking anophelius sat Bellis.

The Armadan Senate had not met for eight years. But the ridings’ rulers had been waiting for the return of the Trident to put this defining moment in Armadan history to the vote. Due process would be seen to be done.

Each riding in Armada had one Senate vote. Some ridings were represented by one person, some by a small gang. Bellis ran her eyes slowly along the long table, taking in all of the rulers. They were not hard to identify.

Braginod, the cactus queen of Jhour, with her advisors.

Booktown was represented by a triumvirate of khepri who leaned in together and conversed in motions and chymical spray translated by their human servant. Their names were unknown: they were figureheads from the changing cabal that ran the riding.

Almost at the far end of the table was a monk-robed man: the Bask contingent. Beside him sat an unkempt man of sixty or so. Bellis recognized him from posters-he was trader-king Friedrich of Thee-And-Thine. Beside him was another man, his face grey and scarred: the general of Shaddler.

The largest assembly by far was from the Curhouse. A sizable portion of the entire Democratic Council seemed to have attended-men and women of a gaggle of races, squeezed into a tight little circle abutting the main table like a cog on a gear. They whispered constantly among themselves and watched the Garwater representatives with visible hostility.

There they were, on the far right of the table: the Lovers. Watching, not speaking. Sitting beside each other quietly, their faces mirror images of violence.

And opposite them, his eyes on them with a far more careful, a far more intelligent gaze than the defensive animosity of the Curhouse Councilors, was a pale man Bellis had never seen, dressed in dark and simple clothes. His nose was broad and his lips very full. His coiled hair was all that was unruly about him. His eyes were extraordinary. Dark and intensely clear. Mesmeric.

With a little shiver, Bellis realized that he was the leader of Dry Fall riding, the greatest rival to the Lovers. He was the reason that the meeting took place after sundown. He was the vampir-the Brucolac.

It was obvious that this meeting was a formality and that the positions of the protagonists had already been decided over a long time. The arguments and discussions were stilted, the unspoken allegiances and enmities all half visible. Bellis spoke when she was addressed, offering her brief opinion on some matter of language.

There were five ridings in favor of the Lovers’ schemes. Booktown seemed genuinely enthused by the Garwater plan; Jhour and Shaddler were in its pay and would do whatever was asked of them. Friedrich of Thee-And-Thine sold his vote to the Lovers, unashamedly, knowing that they could outpay any other riding.

Only Bask and Curhouse, who acted together, and the Brucolac of Dry Fall, who stood alone, opposed the Lovers. It was five to three. The plan could go ahead immediately.

“We weren’t informed,” said Vordakine of the Curhouse Council, a hard-faced woman who excoriated the Lovers for their dishonesty. She was trying desperately to sway Friedrich, or the khepri of Booktown. “We weren’t told of Garwater’s intentions when its raiders returned towing the Crobuzoner rig Sorghum. At that time the talk was all of increased energy and power, elyctric generation and cheap oil. Rockmilk was never mentioned then. And now it appears that all that cheap power had already been allocated to this avanc project. Who’s to say what they have in mind when the avanc is secured?”

For the first time, the Brucolac sat up. He kept his eyes on the Lovers’ party-specifically, Bellis realized, on Doul.

“Well that is the rub,” he said unexpectedly. His voice was harsh and sounded torn from his throat. “That is the question.” His long, forked tongue flickered. Bellis opened her eyes wide. “What is in mind? What could one do with an avanc? Where could one go?”

Trader-king Friedrich shifted and spat. Vordakine appealed to him, reminding him of commitments and past favors about which Bellis knew nothing. He looked away. She could not change his mind. Friedrich glanced at the Lovers, and they smiled at him, and nodded simultaneously.

We will buy you, they said with that motion, and if Curhouse and Bask or anyone else wishes to oppose us, we will simply offer more than them. Name your price.

Across the room, those opposed to the avanc’s invocation looked old and tired.

The rig, the book, Kruach Aum himself-the Lovers’ plans were always, Bellis realized, bound to go ahead.

In the night outside the windows, the storm was still visible miles away, blooming briefly with lightning. Surrounded by representatives of powers she was only just beginning to understand, translating for a man of a race she had thought long-dead, Bellis felt bleak and alone.

She was one of the last to leave the room. As she reached the door, Bellis looked up at Uther Doul, who was blocking it, and realized that he was not looking at her at all. He was gazing across the room, his eyes and mouth as still as glass, meeting the eyes of the Brucolac.

The Lovers had gone. All the other representatives had gone. Only Uther Doul and the vampir were left, and between them Bellis.

She was desperate to leave, but Doul’s feet were planted as if he were about to fight. She could not push past him, and she was afraid to speak. The Brucolac stood with his unkempt hair wild and his moist lips parted, that ghastly snake tongue fluttering in the air. Bellis was trapped, motionless, between them. They ignored her completely.

“Still content, Uther?” the Brucolac said. His voice never rose above an unpleasant whisper.

Uther Doul did not respond. The Brucolac coldly mummed laughter.

“Don’t think this is ended, Uther,” he said. “We both knew the outcome of this charade. This is not where things are decided.”

“Deadman Brucolac,” said Doul, “your concerns about this project have been noted. Noted, and disregarded. Now if you will excuse me, I have to escort Kruach Aum and his translator to their quarters.” Doul did not take his eyes from the vampir’s pale face.

“Did you notice, Uther,” said the Brucolac urbanely, “that the other little squabblers have finally realized that something is up?” He walked slowly toward Uther Doul. Bellis was frozen. She wanted very badly to leave this room now. For years she had wrapped herself in layers of focus and cold control. There were few emotions she could not master in herself.

It appalled her to realize that the Brucolac was terrifying her. It was as if his voice modulated exactly with her fear.

The room was dark, the gaslights out and the few candles guttering. She could see nothing but his tall figure, moving as easy as a dancer (as easy as Uther Doul), approaching.

Doul was silent. He did not move.

“You heard Vordakine ask what was to happen next. I told you she was the best of them. They’re finally working it out, Uther,” the Brucolac whispered. “When will you tell them, Uther? When do they get to hear the plan?

“Do you really think,” he continued with sudden still ferocity, “that you could face me? Do you think you can defeat me? Do you think your project can continue without my consent? Do you know… what I am?”

He spoke rapidly then in a language of coughing swallows, as if the dialect itself resented every sound it allowed to escape.

The speech of High Cromlech.

Whatever he said, it opened Uther Doul’s eyes wide for several moments. Then he, too, advanced.

“Oh yes, Brucolac,” Doul said. His voice was as hard and edged as flint. He gazed over Bellis as if she were not there, straight at the vampir. “I know exactly what you are. I, more than anyone, know exactly what you are.”

The men stood a few paces apart, unmoving, with Bellis between them like a reluctant referee.

“I give you the courtesy of the gentry’s title, Deadman,” hissed Doul. “But you’re no more gentry than me. You’re ab-dead, not thanati. You forget yourself, Brucolac. You forget there’s another place where your kind are given leave to live openly. Where your refugees flee. You forget that where the dead rule and protect the quick, there’s nothing to fear from you. You forget that there are vampir in High Cromlech.” He pointed at the Brucolac.

“They live beyond the quick ghetto. In hovels. In the shantytown.” He smiled. “And every night, after the sun’s descended, they can crawl safely out from their shacks and shuffle into the town. Stick figures in rags, leaning against the walls. Exhausted and starving, hands outstretched. Begging.” His voice was soft and vicious. “Begging for the quick to take pity on them. And every so often one of us will acquiesce, and out of pity and contempt, embarrassed by our soft philanthropy, we’ll stand in the eaves of a building and offer up our wrists. And you and your kind will open them, all frantic with hunger and fawning with gratitude, and take a few eager swigs, till we decide you’ve had enough and take back our hands while you weep and beg for more, and maybe spew because you’ve gone without a hit so long your stomach can’t handle what it craves, and we leave you lying in the dirt, blissed by your little fix.

“In High Cromlech we know exactly what you are, Brucolac.” He smiled again.

“Junkies. That some of us indulge and some of us hate and all of us, quick and dead, pity.

“So do not,” he spat suddenly, “try to intimidate me. Because, yes, Brucolac, I know exactly what you are.”

No one said any more. The two men faced each other, immobile. Only the Brucolac’s tongue moved, tasting the air.

And then he was gone.

Bellis blinked and looked around her at a trail of displaced air, where dust motes roiled and languidly followed the Brucolac’s sudden fleeting passage. She held her head. What has he done to me? she thought. How does he do that? Hypnosis? Godsdammit, he’s quicker than Doul…

Uther Doul was looking at her, she sluggishly realized, as her heart slowed and her breathing became normal.

“Come with me,” he said to her, his voice as bland and featureless as if nothing had happened, as if she had not witnessed anything. “You must help Kruach Aum.”

As she left the room, trying not to stumble, trembling as she was, Bellis thought about what the Brucolac had said.

Where are we going? she wondered as she followed Uther Doul.

What is the plan?