The Scar

Chapter Thirty-one

During the days, Shekel was free.

Like most of the young bravos who hung out around the Basilio docks, he made his living as he had in New Crobuzon-running errands, delivering messages and goods, keeping his eyes and ears open, for whatever handful of change his momentary employer chose to give him. His Salt was game and comprehensible, if not fluent.

A little more than half of his evenings he spent with Angevine. She berthed in Tintinnabulum’s Castor, below its belfry. She often returned very late at night, since Tintinnabulum spent long hours in the meetings with his colleagues, and with Kruach Aum and Bellis and the Lovers, and Angevine fetched books or materials for him, from the library or from his hidden laboratory at the back of his ship. She would return tired, and Shekel would soothe her with supper and inexpert massages.

Angevine did not speak much about the avanc project, but Shekel could easily sense her tension and excitement.

Other evenings he spent at what he still thought of as his own home, which he shared with Tanner Sack.

Tanner was not always there-like Angevine, the project was keeping him at work long and difficult hours. But when he was present, he spoke more about what he was doing. He described to Shekel the extraordinary look of the bridle, stretching out in the clear water, the schools of bright tropical fish circulating through its links, which were scaling already with the plants and tenacious shellfish; picked out at night with cold lights. All the hours of work, of welding and testing and suggesting, acting as designer, foreman, and builder, left Tanner exhausted and very happy.

Shekel kept the rooms clean and warm. When he was not cooking for Angevine, he cooked for Tanner.

He was troubled.

Two nights previously, on Luddi, Shekel had woken suddenly a little after midnight, in his old rooms on the factory ship. He had sat up and stayed quiet and unmoving.

He had looked around the room, in the pale half-shadow shed by lights and stars outside: at the table and chairs, the bucket, the plates and pans, at Tanner’s empty bed. (working late again). Even swaddled in shadows, there was nowhere for anyone to hide, and Shekel could see that he was alone.

And yet he had felt as if he was not.

Shekel lit a candle. There were no unusual sounds or lights or shadows, but he kept thinking that he had just a moment before heard or seen something-again and again, as if his memories were outpacing him, reminding him of something that had not yet happened.

He went back to sleep eventually, and woke the next morning with only a vague sense of the foreboding he had felt. But the next night, the same sense of intrusion came with dusk, long before he had gone to bed. He stood-with a concentrated, silly stillness-looking about him vaguely. Had those clothes been moved? That book? Those plates?

Shekel’s attention switched rapidly from one object, one drawer or collection or pile of things, and the next, his eyes moving across them, exactly as if he were watching someone move through the room, touching or rummaging in each place in turn. He grew angry and afraid at once.

He wanted to flee, but loyalty to Tanner kept him in those rooms. It made him light the lamps and sing loudly, and cook expansively and quickly until Tanner returned-mercifully, before the late evening, when the sounds outside faded away.

To Shekel’s relief and surprise, when he broached the subject of his strange intuitions, Tanner reacted with interest and seriousness.

He looked around the little room and muttered carefully. “It’s a peculiar time, lad.” Exhausted as he was, he raised himself and followed the route that Shekel described around the room. He picked up the items he passed, carefully checking them. He hummed and rubbed his chin.

“I can’t see a sign of nothing, Shekel,” he admitted. His eyes did not relax. “It’s a peculiar time. There’s all manner of types trying all manner of things at the moment-there’s lies and rumors, and Jabber knows what. Thus far, those who’ve problems with Garwater and the project ain’t spoken of it too loud-that’ll come later, I shouldn’t doubt. But maybe there’s some who’re trying other ways of undermining things. It ain’t as if I’m a bigwig in this, Shekel, lad, but I’m known to have gone to the island, and I’m known to be helping build the bridle. It might be someone’s made their way in here to try to… I don’t know… undermine things. To look for something to strengthen their side. As if I’m stupid enough to keep any plans here.

“People are tense. Things are moving too quick. It’s like it ain’t in anyone’s control.” He looked around him once more, then caught Shekel’s eye.

“I’m tempted to say let ’em come. If you’re right, then so long as they take nothing and leave us alone, then fuck ’em. I ain’t scared.” He grinned with bravado, and Shekel smiled back.

“All the same,” Shekel said quietly. “All the same.”

When he spoke to Angevine about his experience the next day, she echoed Tanner Sack almost exactly.

“Might be there’s something in it,” she said slowly. “It’s a strange time, you know. People are excited, and some are scared. I doubt that unseen intruders’ll be the strangest thing we have to face over the next weeks, lover. With the factories working overtime for the bridle, people are grumbling. There’s no time or engineers to fix up machines elsewhere, no engine parts or metalwork being built. ‘With all the power from that rig,’ people are saying, ‘when’ll we see it put to our use? How much does the damn avanc need, anyway?’

“Well, it needs a lot, Shekel. A damn lot, now and always.” She met his eye and took his hand. “And the rumblings that you can hear now-in Bask and Curhouse and Dry Fall, most especially, but all over-are bound to grow. When people get to understand that there’s other things more important to put the oil and rockmilk to than all their schemes.”

She spoke absently, recalling conversations that she had overheard between Tintinnabulum and others, and Shekel could do little more than nod.

“They’re appearing already, the troublemakers,” she mused. “Vordakine in Curhouse, Sallow in Bask. The mysterious Simon Fench. Pamphlets, graffiti, whispers. And good people have their doubts, too. I heard that Hedrigall, who’s loyal to his wooden bones, even knows this Fench, drinks with him sometimes. People’ll get fired up if the avanc is called-something so wonderful as that, it’ll excite them. But that won’t be the end, Shekel, believe me.”

In the blazing heat of Armada’s accidental, equatorial summer, Croom Park blossomed.

When last Bellis had visited it, it had been all-over green: wet, and lush, and sap-stinking. Now the green was overlaid with spring and summer colors: a mulch of hurried blossom underfoot, and here and there still frosting the tips of trees. The first bright summer flowers vied with vivid weeds, dogwood, and daffodils. The woods rustled with small life.

Bellis came to the park not with Silas, but with Johannes Tearfly, and she was wryly amused that she felt as if she were being somehow unfaithful.

She walked her favorite route, along what had once been a corridor between ship’s cabins and was now an ivy-smothered canyon. The walls were studded with passion flowers, broken windows just visible beneath a mesh of roots. Where the old cabin-hills sank into the grassy surface and the pathway opened out into the sun, there was a fringe of pungent honeysuckle purring with bees.

This is a good moment, thought Bellis carefully as she walked, Johannes shy and wondering behind her. But you’ll have to spoil it in a moment, Johannes-you’ll have to speak.

And after some more minutes of flowers and grass, when the only sound was the vibrato of warm insects, he did.

They talked for a long time about the work below the city.

“I’ve been down in a submersible a couple of times,” Johannes told her. “It’s extraordinary, Bellis. The speed with which they’re constructing it-it’s truly amazing.”

“Well, I’ve seen the rate they’ve decommissioned the Terpsichoria, among others,” she said. “I can just imagine.”

Johannes was wary of her, still, but he was eager to feel the connection they had once had. She could feel him reaching to her, explaining away to himself any curtness she might display.

“You’ve not told me much about the island,” he said.

Bellis sighed. “It was hard,” she said. “I don’t relish discussing it.” But she gave him a little more than that: told him of the excruciating heat, the constant fear, the gurning curiosity of the he-anophelii and the murderous hunger of their mates.

He tried to gauge her. She wondered whether he thought he was shrewd and subtle.

“They took Aum away, yesterday,” she continued, and he turned to her, startled. “I’ve been teaching him Salt for a couple of weeks, that’s all. He learns at a rate that frightens me. He takes notes on everything I say-he’s already amassed enough for a textbook. But, still, I didn’t think he was capable of conversing without my help-not yet. But yesterday afternoon, when we’d concluded with Tintinnabulum and the engineers’ committee, they took him away and told me I wasn’t needed for a while.

“Perhaps their opinion of his Salt is higher than mine. Or perhaps one of their other High Kettai experts has practiced enough to come in useful.” This she said with a superior sneer, and Johannes laughed briefly. “They’ve been telling me for some time that I’m to bring him to fluency in Salt at the very earliest possible time; that he’ll be needed for projects that don’t concern me. They’re trying to get rid of me.”

She turned to Johannes and held his gaze. They were alone in a clearing, ringed by trees and briars, stunted spring roses.

“My usefulness is ending, and I’m delighted, because I’m so godsdamned tired. But Aum’s is only just starting, it appears. And it wasn’t any of the usual group who took him away. It was Uther Doul, and it was men and women I’d never seen. I don’t know what that’s all about. Seems to me that calling the avanc is not the end of it.”

Johannes turned away from her and fingered the flowers.

“Only now realizing that, Bellis?” he said quietly. “Of course you’re right. There’s more to come. Given the scale of what we’re attempting with the avanc, it’s difficult to imagine, but it seems that perhaps that’s just a… prelude to whatever’s really going on. And what that is, I don’t know. It’s been decided it should not involve me.

“You know,” he said, “it was just luck, really, that I ever got my commission here.”

Luck? thought Bellis, incredulous.

“Of those in the know,” he continued, “who’d seen the old chains, there’ve been some arguing for decades that Armada should try to call the avanc. But the Lovers ignored them, had no interest in it for years-that’s what I heard.

“It changed when Uther Doul came to the city, came to work for them. I don’t know what he did or said to them, but all of a sudden the avanc project was revived. Something he told them meant those old plans got dusted off, for the first time since those chains were built-and no one knows how long ago that was, or what happened.

“And after all that, it’s just over for me. They’ve moved on to other things.”

Jealous, realized Bellis. Spurned, deserted, and pissed off. Johannes’ work-and Johannes himself-was invaluable to conjure up the avanc, but whatever came after that did not require him.

Gently, subtly, Bellis probed his wound. Moment by moment, interspersing her investigation with meaningless minutiae.

In his anger, Johannes was willing to talk seriously about the doubts that had been raised over the Lovers’ plans.

They strolled through the wooded boat, past reclaimed funnels and bulkheads, while Bellis fed Johannes’ resentment in a coy and sly interrogation, learning things piece by piece.

Once she started listening, Bellis heard the same names, the same rumors, everywhere. The veneer of loyalty that had been painted over Armada was thin. Anxieties and controversies were now as clearly traceable through it as woodgrain through varnish.

She was startled to realize that it was not only the worthies of Bask and Curhouse who were linked to such dissident voices. Some of Garwater’s longest-loyal servants were doubters, linked to the renegades.

The Lovers’ consensus, she realized, was not stable. And, as she half expected, the name that recurred most often, that came up again and again as a focus for this discontent, was Simon Fench.

Bellis began to search for him.

She asked all the people she knew after Simon Fench. Carrianne shrugged, but said she would keep her ears open. Johannes looked askance and said nothing. Shekel, at one of their infrequent meetings, nodded. “Ange mentioned him,” he said. Feigning faint interest, Bellis asked Shekel to find out more.

Her query was tossed around on street corners, among the youths who hung over ship railings, firing catapults at the city’s monkeys, or sat in pubs, playing dice and arm wrestling. Each had their own friends, their own contacts, men and women who might slip them coins and food and favors in exchange for whatever trivial services the boys and girls might perform. Bellis’ question passed through them, through the drinking halls of Garwater and Shaddler and Booktown and Thee-And-Thine.

In New Crobuzon, what was not regulated was illicit. In Armada, things were different. It was, after all, a pirate city. What did not directly threaten the city did not concern its authorities. Bellis’ message, like other secrets, did not have to strive to be covert, as it might back home to avoid the militia. Instead, it sped through this wrangling city with ease and speed, leaving a little trail for those who knew how to look.

“You wanted me.”

Silas was standing by Bellis’ bed. She had not yet undressed. She was sitting with her knees up, reading a book by gaslight. A moment before, she had been alone.

More thaumaturgy, Silas? she thought.

It was the evening of the tenth Scabdi of Hawkbill, the last day of the quarto-a festival. The streets were loud; people were drunk, shouting and laughing. The ships and streets were draped with colored bunting. The air was full of fireworks and confetti (and still the work went on below the water).

“I do,” she said.

“You want to be careful. You don’t want to advertise yourself as dealing with dissidents.”

Bellis laughed. “Jabber and fuck, Silas. You should see the list of your-or Mr. Fench’s-supposed friends. They include bigger fish than me, by far. Is it true you drink with Hedrigall?” He did not reply. “So I don’t think anyone’s going to care about me.”

They eyed each other quietly. How many times have we done this? Bellis thought hopelessly. Communed secretively-over tea, in my room, at night, to discuss what we do and don’t know…?

“They’re planning something,” she said, and her own conspiratorial tone almost reduced her to bitter laughter. “The avanc’s not the end of it. Aum’s learning Salt in double-quick time, and they’ve taken him off to some new secret project. Even some of the scientists involved are feeling cut out. There’s a core-Tintinnabulum, the Lovers, Aum-and this time Uther Doul’s part of it. They’re planning something.”

Silas nodded. It was obvious that he already knew.

“So?” Bellis demanded. “What is it?”

“I don’t know,” he said, and she could not tell if she believed him.

“If we can work out what they’ve planned,” she said, “we might still be able to… to get out of here.”

“Sincerely,” he said slowly, “I can’t work out what their plan is. If I find out, I’ll tell you. Of course.”

They studied each other.

“I gather Uther Doul’s courting you,” he continued. He was not trying to be unpleasant, but his smirk was irritating.

“I don’t know what he’s doing,” Bellis said curtly. “Sometimes I think that’s exactly it-he’s courting me-but if so, by gods he’s out of practice. Sometimes I think he has other motives, but I can’t make sense of them.”

Again silence. Outside, a cat began to wail.

“Tell me, Silas,” Bellis said. “This is your world. Is there any kind of serious opposition to their project? Serious, I mean? And if there is, could we use it to get out of here? Can it help us?”

What exactly might I have in mind? she wondered. We’ve sent a message to our home port. We’ve saved it, for Jabber’s sake. There’s nothing else to be done. There are no factions to win over. There’s no one we might persuade to take us home.

Whatever Silas claimed about trying to escape, the way he submerged into Armada’s hinterland, ducked out of sight, became Simon Fench, suspended himself in a web of deals and rumors and favors and threats-these were survival tactics. Silas was adjusting.

There was nothing for Bellis to do. No schemes she could engage in, no secret plans.

She still dreamed of that river between New Crobuzon and Iron Bay.

No, she thought fiercely, uncompromisingly. Whatever the truth, whatever the case, however hopeless the cause-I do not give up on escape.

It had taken her quite some effort to reach this coldly burning pitch of anger, of desire for escape, and to relinquish it now would be unbearable.

And so she kept that No loud in the back of her head, undiluted by doubt.

She woke the next day and leaned from her window into the warm wind, watching the exhausted, hungover crews clear the detritus of last night’s party from the streets and decks. They swept up huge piles of dust and colored paper, costumes and disguises from the masque parties, the debris of drug-taking.

The bilious flames had stopped rolling from the top of the Sorghum’s derrick. The rig had gone cold, its harvest of oil and rockmilk siphoned up and stored. Over the ships’ roofscape, the steamers, the tugs, the squat industrial vessels were moving back toward the city, like iron filings toward a magnet. Bellis watched their crews attach them again to the edge of Armada.

When all the servant ships had attached themselves to the city, they bore off to the southeast, venting black smoke, their gears grinding, devouring huge quantities of stolen coal and anything else that might burn. With appalling slowness, Armada began to move.

Below, in the clear water, the divers continued working. The stripping down of ship after ship continued, their substances delivered to the industrial works. An endless train of dirigibles passed between the vessels’ corpses and the forges.

The sea moved in faint currents around the massive bridle hidden below the waves. Armada’s pace was almost imperceptible: only a mile or two every hour.

But it did not slacken. It was ceaseless. Bellis knew that when it reached the place it sought, when the chains were lowered, when the thaumaturgy was attempted, everything would change. And she heard herself again, No, refusing to acquiesce, refusing to make her home here.

As her days passed, she was needed less and less. Her translation sessions with the engineers were fewer, as the bridle’s crews worked their endless hours and problems of design were reached, one by one, and solved. Bellis felt herself slipping from the core of things.

Except for Doul. He still spoke to her, still gave her wine in his cabin. There was still something shadowy between them, but Bellis could not make it out. And Doul’s conversations were as cryptic as ever, and she took no comfort in them. Once, twice more, he took her again to that little room, the sound box below the Lovers’ chamber. Why she went with him she could not say. It was always at night, always a secret. She heard their gasping declarations, their mews of pain and desire. The emotion still appalled and nauseated her, like something rotting in her stomach.

The second time she had heard them hiss with whatever passed for pleasure in their minds, and the next day, when she entered the meeting room with Aum, the Lovers stared at her with fresh wounds, blood crusting on their foreheads, scored deep in mirror images across their faces.

And Bellis had faltered. She could not bear the thought that she was at the mercy of people hooked on the emotion she had heard.

No.

Even as the weather grew hotter still, day after day till a week and then two had passed, and the bridle was nearly done, and Silas had not come to her, and Doul still made no sense; even as she slipped from the center of power, and her relief that she need not see the Lovers every day was effaced by the fear of her own growing ineffectuality; even as she lost the last semblance of power she had had; even as it became clear that she was trapped, the voice inside Bellis hardened and was absolutely clear.

No.