The Scar

Chapter Twenty-eight

After long prevarication, the storm hit.

The tightly coiled mass of air unwound. The night was hot. The rain blasted Armada. Ropes and rigging arced and snapped against the flanks of the ships and buildings. There was thunder and lightning.

This was the first real squall that the city had faced in a long time, but the inhabitants responded with practiced expertise. Airships were quickly grounded, waiting out the weather in yards and under tarpaulins. The Trident, tethered to the Grand Easterly and too big to be covered, could only bob and shift uneasily in the gusts, its massive shadow rolling over the ships and houses below it.

Across the city, all except the very strongest bridges and tethers were unhitched at one end, in case the sea pulled the boats apart fast or far enough to snap their bonds. Traveling across Armada during a storm was impossible.

Channeled into canals between the vessels, Armada’s waters jerked and pitched violently but could not form waves. There were no such constraints on the sea that smashed against the city’s outer vessels. The boats that made the mouths of the Basilio and Urchinspine harbors were drawn together, enclosing and protecting the raiding or trading vessels-Armadan and guest-within. Beyond the city’s bounds, the fleet of fighters and tugs and pirates moved far enough away to avoid being driven into their home port’s walls.

Only those who patrolled the city’s undersides-the submersibles, the menfish, the seawyrms, and Bastard John the dolphin-were more or less untroubled. They sat below the surface and weathered the storm.

After peering from a window in the corridor of the Grand Easterly, Uther Doul looked back at Bellis.

“There’s a worse one than this to come,” he said. At first Bellis had no idea what he was telling her. Then she remembered the story in Kruach Aum’s book: the summoning of the avanc, powered by lightning elementals.

We’re going to call up a hell of a storm, aren’t we? she thought.

Bellis set to teaching Aum an understanding of Salt, as instructed. It troubled her. She was conscious that this was a breach of the fundamental rules of anophelii containment, as maintained by Kohnid and Dreer Samher. And however venal their reasons for policing them, those rules were a protective response to one of the most notorious empires in Bas-Lag’s history. She had to remind herself that Aum was male, and old, and very far from being a threat to anyone.

Aum approached the task with the rigor and logic of a mathematician. Bellis discovered, uneasily, that he had already worked out a surprising amount of vocabulary from the Armadans’ short visit (and she wondered whether they had infected the island with language).

For New Crobuzoners, or Jhesshul or Mandrake Islanders or Shankellites or Perrickish, Salt was an easy language to learn. Kruach Aum, though, knew none of its components. There were no cognates at all-vocabulary or grammar-with High Kettai. Nonetheless, he broke Salt down, made careful lists of declensions and conjugations and grammar. His method was very different from Bellis’, without intuition, without the training of the language trance to make his mind receptive; but still, he made quick progress.

Bellis looked forward eagerly to the time that she would be redundant; when she would not have to sit endlessly scribbling notes in a scientific register she did not understand. She had been released from her job in the library. Now her mornings were taken up with teaching Aum, and her afternoons with translating between Aum and the scientific committee of Garwater. She enjoyed none of it.

During the day she ate with Aum, and during the evenings she sometimes accompanied him throughout the city, with a guard of Garwater yeomanry. What else, she thought, can I do? She escorted him to Croom Park, to the colorful thoroughfares and shopping streets of Garwater and Jhour and Curhouse. She took him to Grand Gears Library.

While she stood and spoke in a low voice to Carrianne, who seemed sincerely delighted to see her again, Kruach Aum wandered from shelf to shelf. When she came to tell him that they must go, he turned to her and she was truly alarmed at his expression-a reverence and joy and agony like religious ecstasy. She pointed out the High Kettai books to him, and he reeled, as if drunk at the sight of all that knowledge in his grasp.

She felt a constant low-level unease at spending her days in the presence of the Garwater authorities: the Lovers, Tintinnabulum and his crew, Uther Doul.

How did it come to this? she wondered.

Bellis had been cut off from the city since the first moment, and she had assiduously kept that wound raw and bloodied. She defined herself by it.

This is not my home, she had said to herself again and again, endless repetitions. And when the chance had come to make some connection with her true home, she had taken it with all its risk. She had not renounced her claim to New Crobuzon. She had discovered a terrible threat to her city, and had (at great risk, with careful planning) worked out a way to save it.

And somehow in that very action, in the very act of reaching out to New Crobuzon across the sea, she had tied herself closely in to Armada, and to its rulers.

How did it come to this?

It made her laugh humorlessly. She had done what was best for her true home, and as a result she spent her days working for the governors of her prison, helping them gain the power to take her anywhere they wanted.

How did it come to this?

And where is Silas?

Every day, Tanner thought about what he had done on the anophelii island.

It was not something he felt comfortable considering. He was not sure what his emotions were. He probed the memory of what he had done, as if it were a wound, and discovered a reserve of pride inside him. I saved New Crobuzon, he thought, not quite believing it.

Tanner thought carefully about the few people he had left behind there. The drinking partners, the friends and girlfriends: Zara and Pietr and Fezhenechs and Dolly-Ann… He thought of them with a sort of abstracted fondness, as if they were characters in a book of whom he had grown affectionate.

Do they think of me? he thought. Do they miss me?

He had left them behind. He had been so long in that stinking prison in Iron Bay, and in that drab place in the Terpsichoria, and then his life had been so suddenly and extraordinarily renewed, that New Crobuzon had attenuated as a memory in him.

But still there was a wellspring of feeling for it, a recognition that the city had shaped him. He would not have seen it destroyed. He could not think of the men and women he had known there, murdered. So-it bewildered him to consider it-he had given them a valedictory gift that they would never know they had received. New Crobuzon had been saved. He had saved it.

The awareness of that gnawed at him. It troubled him and made him sheepishly proud. It was such a huge thing he had done, something to change the tide of history. He imagined the city preparing for war, never knowing who had saved it. It was such a big thing, and here he was remembering it with a little arch of his eyebrows, not sure how much mind to pay it, as if it were a detail.

It wasn’t a betrayal of Armada, not really. No one was hurt; it was just a little thing to them-a quick night’s absence. He had taken a few hours to slip away and save New Crobuzon. And he was glad of it. It made him happy to think of what he’d done. Despite the magisters and the punishment factories.

He had saved it. Now tell it good-bye.

The avanc was a rare visitor to the seas of Bas-Lag. The intricacies of transplanar life were abstruse and uncertain. Neither Tanner Sack nor any of his colleagues knew whether the creature that breached in Bas-Lag was a partial or a total manifestation, a confusion of scale (some protozoon, some plankton from a huge brine dimension), a pseudoorganism spontaneously generated in the vents between worlds. No one knew.

All they knew was what Bellis Coldwine told them, as she read the intricate scribbles of Kruach Aum.

The anophelius was clearly stunned by his new environment, but it did not affect his ability to focus, to provide answers to their questions. Every day Aum gave his new workmates enough information for their purposes.

He drew designs for them, designs for the harness (bigger than a battleship), the bit, and the reins. Even though the engineers did not understand exactly what of the avanc would go where, what flesh exactly would be trapped by what clasp, they took Aum’s word that the mechanisms would work.

The science, the plans, were moving at a stunning pace. The engineers and scientists had to remind themselves of how far they had come, how fast, and how they continued to move. It was obvious to all of them that without Aum they could not have succeeded, despite what they might once have thought. It was only working with him that they came to see how much they needed him.

They incorporated engines burning in sealed containers at the yoke’s joints, triple-exchange boilers and complex pulley systems to regulate movement, all suspended in the freezing darkness of the deep sea, at the end of the miles of colossal chain links suspended below the city.

And what if they went wrong? Garwater’s ancient bathypelagicrafts would have to be refitted.

There was an extraordinary amount to be done.

Tanner almost rubbed his hands with happiness.

Armada had taken only a morning to recover after the storm: clearing broken slates and wood away from decks; reattaching bridges; counting and mourning the few missing or drowned, those who had been trapped outside during the deluge.

And when that was done, Garwater turned, with more of the incredible speed, to manufacturing what it needed for its historic project.

There were five of the ancient, hidden chains under Armada. Tanner Sack and the teams traced them, plotted their end points. All industrial capacity in Garwater, and what little there was in Booktown and Shaddler and Thee-And-Thine, was turned over to the direct control of Tintinnabulum and the project committee. The work of building began.

Several recently press-ganged metal ships were designated scrap. Piece by piece, they were taken apart. Thousands of men and women swarmed over them: the regular dock work was relegated to skeleton crews, and huge day rates were offered to the city’s casual workers. The iron exoskeletons of warships, the girders and innards of steamers, the enormous tempered metal masts, were stripped. The vessels were peeled and disemboweled, and all the tons of metal were shipped by barge and airlifted by convoys of dirigibles to the factories.

The avanc’s harness would sport girders and screws still marked with the scars of previous service. In foundries, iron too ruined to be reshaped was melted down.

Armada was not a city with a grand tradition of thaumaturgy. But there were competent metallo-thaumaturgists among the pirates, and gangs of them entered the factories. They worked closely with the engineers, mixing arcane compounds in great vats to strengthen and lighten and bind the metal. At last, some of Garwater’s stores of rockmilk were used. The liquid was brought in vials, vastly heavy and dense. When it was unstoppered it gave off disorienting vapors like spice and oil. It moiled behind the glass, a cold mother-of-pearl.

The metallo-thaumaturges would add measured drops of it as they mouthed incantations and passed their hands over the melting metal in puissant currents, charging it and sealing it.

And after rolling out the metal and hammering and more arcane procedures, the components of the avanc’s bridle began to be dragged by submersibles into place below the city. An army of divers worked on them with chymical welders that sputtered colorfully in the water, and wielded hammers and wrenches with water-slowed motions.

It was an incredible, sudden industry.

The chains were anchored in the bases of five ships. The Psire of Booktown; Jhour’s Saskital; the big steamer Tailor’s Moan, the capital ship of Bask; the Wordhoard in the haunted riding; and Garwater’s Grand Easterly. From the keels and sloping flanks of each of these old, massive ships curved an arc of iron the size of some great church doorway, bolted on and veiled thaumaturgically. And from each of those stretched links the size of boats.

The guard sharks were let free. It seemed impossible that the chains had ever been hidden. The rumors spread-about what had been done before and what might happen now. It was said that Bask riding had tried to sever the chain below their vessel, to scupper Garwater’s plans, but that it had been too strong, too massive, too protected by puissant charms.

In a big, windowless chamber at the bottom of the Grand Easterly, a new engine was being built. The redundant boilers and their tangle of head-height pipes were stripped away, like clearing a rusty forest. When the ghosts of engines were gone, two great stamped-flat discs of iron were visible, embedded in the floor. Waist-high and many yards around, encrusted with age and grease. They were the ends of the chain attached to the ship, pushed through its hull, then hammered and flattened to attach them tight, centuries ago. The first time this had been tried.

Someone planned this before, Tanner Sack thought. He was stunned by the hours of work, the thaumaturgy that had been tried, the industry, the planning, the effort that had been made, generations ago, and then deliberately forgotten.

Between these two chain stubs, Tanner Sack and his colleagues began to build an extraordinary engine. They worked to specifications calculated over long hours by Kruach Aum.

Tanner examined the plans carefully. The motor they constructed did not work to any rules that he understood. It would be huge: it would fill the room with pounding hammers and ratchets, powered by some source that he did not fathom.

He worked from the base of what would be the piston-pounding boilers, upward. He started with the stumps of giant chain, drilling into them and embedding them with molten alloys, into which he plunged wrist-thick wires in rubber and tar. They passed through transformers the size of his leg, ribbed columns of white clay, and on to thickets of cables and insulators and difference engines.

This was the pacific engine, by which complex energies would be transmitted along the Grand Easterly chain, into that great bridle and whatever it contained, miles below the surface. A goad. Bait and whip.

The sea was clear. Divers thronged the huge underwater construction site. Components were lowered from the cranes of factory ships. The massive harness was taking shape at the end of the huge chains, still tethered scant scores of feet below the surface, its scale troubling to the eye, its outlines exotic and unfathomable, surrounded by the vividly colored fish of this sea, and by submarines and cray craftsmen and suited workers and Tanner Sack all moving with the slow fluidity of the submerged.

Sometimes there was a vibration through the water. The legs of the rig Sorghum disappeared into the cylindrical iron floats that supported it below the surface like suspended ships. The shaft of its drill plunged straight down, dim through the tons and tons of water, disappearing, to puncture the seafloor like a mosquito and feed.