The Scar

Interlude VIII

There has been some stunning irruption into the world. The sea tastes of something new.

What is this?

None of the hunters knows.

What was that shattering that sudden shift the opening up the intrusion the trespass the arrival? What is it that has come?

None of the hunters knows. They can only tell that the sea has changed.

Signs are everywhere. The currents are tentative, shifting direction minutely, as if there is some new obstacle in their path that they do not know how to avoid. The salinae scream and gibber, desperate to communicate what they know.

Even such a massive new presence as this is a tiny change, on a world scale. Almost infinitely small. But the hunters are sensitive to water at a level smaller than atoms, and they know that something has happened.

The new thing has its own unique spoor, but it is a trail of particles and dung and taste that do not operate according to the physics of Bas-Lag. Gravity, random motion, physical existence do not work quite as they should around the intruder. The hunters can taste it, but not track it.

Yet they do not stop trying. Because it is obvious that this is the work of the floating city, and that if they can find the slow, huge thing, they find their quarry.

Time moves quickly.

There are bubbles of water, fresh and brine. They are breathed out by siblings many miles away, they rise, maintaining their integrity even surrounded by the stuff of their own substance, slip through little thaumaturgic vents and are displaced, continuing their upward motion without interruption, vast distances from where they started. They burst by the hunters’ ears, bearing messages from home. Rumors and stories spoken as water. From the groac’h and magi in The Gengris, from the spies in Iron Bay.

We hear things, says one voice.

The hunters commune, and pour out their energy, tremulous and effortful, using their foci, the preserved relics of their dead. Their leaders whisper in response, and the hunters’ own speech bubbles cross the distance back again, home.

Something new has entered the sea, they say.

And when the conversation is done, the magi, quiet in the darkness very far below the surface of the Swollen Ocean, three thousand miles from their home, blink and shake their heads, and the sound that has reached them from across the world dissipates with the water that carries it.

Boats are coming, they tell their hunters. Many. Quickly. From Iron Bay. Hunting, too. Searching, like us. Crossing the sea. Our sisters and brothers are with them, clinging like remora, singing to us. We can find them easily.

The boats. The boats seek the same thing we do. They know where they are going. They have machines to find it.

We track them, and they will track for us.

The hunters grin with their very long teeth and emit the barking gasps of water that are their laughter, folding their limbs away into streamlined shapes and setting out for the north, in the direction they have been given, aiming for where New Crobuzon’s flotilla will be. So they will intercept it, and join their other troops, and at last find their quarry.