The Scar

Chapter Thirty-three

The avanc, and Armada behind it, maintained an unchanging, steady speed-always northward. Nothing like as quick as a ship, but faster by many times than the city had ever been able to travel before.

Armadan vessels were returning every day. Their secret mechanisms had shown them their home port’s unprecedented pace, and they were racing across the sea in panic or jubilation to their city with booty of jewels and food and books and earth.

The returned sailors found the city an astounding sight. Surrounded by the fleet of tugs and steamboats that had always pulled it but that now followed it in a huge disparate mass like a second, disintegrating city, loyal and useless, Armada was powering slowly through the sea as if by its own will.

Some of those now-redundant ships were being integrated into the city’s substance, hooked and welded into place, stripped and refitted, built up. Others were converted into pirate vessels, outfitted with armor and guns of a hundred different kinds. They were crossbred, bristling with found ordnance.

The city’s bearing was north-northeast, but there were deviations this way and that, to avoid some storm or rocky island, or some irregularity in the ocean floor that the citizens of Armada could not see.

The pilots on the Grand Easterly were equipped with a rack of pyrotechnic flares in a variety of colors. When the avanc’s course needed correcting, they would fire them in combinations, in prearranged signals. Engineers in the other ridings would respond, firing up the massive winches that would haul back on one or other of the submerged chains.

The avanc responded, uncomplaining and accommodating as a cow. It altered its course (with a flickering of its fins or filaments or paws or gods knew what) in response to the faint tugging. It allowed itself to be led.

In the bottom of the Grand Easterly, the work of the engine room quickly become routine. All day the juddering boilers were fed a thin stream of the rockmilk the Sorghum had drawn up, and they sent a steady pulse of coddling through the chain and the spines and into what approximated the avanc’s cortex.

The huge creature was drugged, drowsy with contentment, mindless as a tadpole.

At first, after the avanc was called, when it became clear that the thaumaturgy, the hunting, had actually worked, that the fabled beast had entered Bas-Lag, Armada’s citizenry were hysterical with excitement.

That first night had been a spontaneous party. The quarto’s-end decorations were brought out again, and the boulevards and plazas across the city were filled with lines of dancing people, men and women, khepri and cactus and scabmettler and others, carrying aloft a variety of papier-mache models of the avanc, as unlikely as they were inconsistent.

Bellis spent the evening in a pub with Carrianne, buoyed up by the revelry despite herself. The next day she was tired and downcast. It was the third Markindi of Flesh Quarto, and Bellis referred to the New Crobuzon calendar she had scribbled down and discovered that it was the fifteenth of Swiven-Badsprit Eve. This realization depressed her. It was not that she thought the baleful influence of the festival would extend this far, but the near coincidence of the avanc’s arrival with that night was discomfiting.

As the days wore on, even with the excitement still fresh, even with the astonishment of waking each day to a sea slapping against a city in motion, Bellis sensed an anxiety growing in Armada. Central to that was the realization that the Lovers of Garwater, who controlled the avanc, were heading north and would not say why.

Discussions about where the avanc would take the city had so far been in general, nebulous terms. Garwater’s representatives had stressed the creature’s speed and power, the ability to escape storms and barren seas, to make for fair weather, where crops would thrive. Many citizens had assumed that the city would head for somewhere warm, where there were few naval powers, where goods and books and soil and other plunder could be taken from the shore with ease. The southern Kudrik, or perhaps the Codex Sea. Somewhere like that.

But as the days went on, the city continued north, without slowing or deviating. Armada was heading somewhere definite at the Lovers’ behest, and nothing was being said.

“We’ll find out soon enough,” was what the loyalists said in the dockside pubs. “They’ve nothing to hide from us.”

But when finally the news sheets and journals, the street speakers and polemicists composed themselves enough to ask the question on everyone’s minds, there was still no answer. After a week, The Flag’s front page consisted of just four huge words: Where Are We Going?

Still there was no answer.

There were those for whom this silence did not matter. What mattered was that Armada was a great power controlling something more astonishing than they could have imagined. The specifics of their journey were of no more concern to them than they ever had been before. “We’ve always left it to them who make the decisions,” some said.

But there had never been really serious decisions before, only the vaguest agreement that the steamers would haul roughly in such-and-such a direction, in the hope that in a year or two-currents, tides, and Torque permitting-the city might reach congenial water. Now, with the avanc, came a new kind of power, and there were some who realized that everything had changed-that there were now real decisions to be made, and that the Lovers were making them.

In the absence of information, rumor flowered. Armada was heading for Gironella’s Dead Sea, where the water was ossified in its wave forms, entombing all the life within. It was heading for the Malmstrom, for the edge of the world. It was heading for a cacotopic stain. It was heading for a land of ghosts, or talking wolves, or men and women whose eyes were jewels or who had teeth like polished coal, or a land of sentient coral, or an empire of fungus, or it was heading somewhere else, maybe.

On the third Bookdi of the quarto, Tintinnabulum and his crew left Armada.

For the best part of a decade, the Castor had been embedded near Garwater’s foremost point, where it met Shaddler riding. Lashed beside the Tolpandy, it had sat for a long time beside an iron-clad warship that had become a shopping district, its greys mottled with commercial coloration, the byways between its derelict guns surrounded by alleys of tin-shack shops.

People had forgotten that the Castor was not a permanent fixture. Bridges had linked it to its surrounds, and chains and ropes and buffers had tethered it. Those links were cut, one by one.

Under a hot sun, the hunters swung machetes and removed themselves from the flesh of Armada, till they were free-floating, a foreign body. Between the Castor and the open sea a pathway was cleared between vessels. Bridges were uncoupled, tethers were broken on a route leading by the barge Badmark into Shaddler, then alongside the Darioch’s Concern with its cheap houses and raucous industry. It continued past the Dearly, a submersible long surface-bound, its interior a theater, and twisted starboard between an ancient trading cog and a big chariot ship, its rein stubs refitted to hold colored lights; then there was an open patch of water and beyond it the Shaddler Sculpture Garden on the Thaladin, the outer edge of Armada.

Beyond that was the sea.

The vessels that lined the pathway were crowded as people leaned over to shout good-bye at the Castor. Yeomanry and Shaddler guards kept the new channel free of traffic. The sea was calm and the avanc’s passage steady.

When the first of the city’s clocks began to strike noon, the Castor’s motors started up, to a great squall of excitement from the crowd. They cheered raucously as the vessel, a little over a hundred feet long, topped by its absurdly tall bell tower, began to putter forward.

The bridges, lines and chains and girders, were reconnected in the vessel’s wake. The Castor slipped like a splinter from the city’s flesh, which reknitted behind it.

In many places the route was only a little wider than the Castor itself, and it bumped against its neighbors, its swaddling of rope and rubber absorbing the impact. It progressed sluggishly, thumping its way toward the open sea. Beside it, the crowds were shouting and waving, as triumphant as if they had freed the hunters after years of imprisonment.

The ship finally slipped past the Thaladin into the ocean, traveling in the same direction as the avanc but outpacing it in order to emerge from the city. In that wide water, the Castor kept its speed up. It skirted around the front edge of Armada, turning to the south, letting the city drift past it as the avanc continued onward. Armada moved on, till the Castor was by the outskirts of The Clockhouse Spur; and then by the open entrance to the Basilio docks, thronging with free boats; and then it was past Jhour, and the Castor’s engine sounded again and it headed away, in among the free vessels that surrounded and followed the city. Tintinnabulum’s boat passed through them, shedding its protective buffers as it went, dropping rubber and tar-soaked cloth overboard, before disappearing toward the southern horizon.

Many people watched the Castor from the Sculpture Garden until it disappeared around Armada’s curve. Among them were Angevine and Shekel, holding hands.

“They did their job,” said Angevine. She was still shocked to find herself out of a job, but she sounded only very slightly regretful. “They finished what they were brought here to do. Why would they have stayed?

“Do you know what he said to me?” she continued to Shekel impatiently, and he could tell that she had had this on her mind. “He said they might’ve been tempted to stay longer, but they didn’t want to go where the Lovers are going.”

Tanner watched the Castor’s progress from below.

He was not perturbed that the city was heading north, or that he did not know where it was going. He found a great pleasure in the realization that the summoning of the avanc was not the end of Garwater’s project. He found it hard to understand those who saw in this some betrayal, who were angry, intimidated by their own ignorance.

But don’t you think it’s wonderful? he felt like saying to them. It ain’t over! There’s more to be done! The Lovers’ve got more up their sleeves. There’s more we can do; there’s bigger things at stake. We can keep at it!

He spent more and more hours under the surface, emerging to spend his time alone, or occasionally with Shekel, who was growing more closemouthed as the days passed.

Tanner grew closer to Hedrigall. Ironically, Hedrigall was a voice of opposition to the city’s northerly trajectory, and to the Lovers’ silence. But Tanner knew that Hedrigall’s loyalty to Garwater was as strong as his own, that there was nothing snide in his disquiet. Hedrigall was an intelligent and careful critic who did not deride Tanner’s loyalty as blind or unthinking, who understood the trust and commitment Tanner placed in the Lovers, and who treated Tanner’s defense of them seriously.

“You know they’re my bosses, Tanner,” he had said, “and you know that I ain’t got any soft feelings for my so-called home. Dreer fucking Samher means shit to me. But… this is too much, Tanner, man-this silence. Things were working, Tanner. We didn’t have to do all this. They should tell us what’s happening. Without that, they lose our trust; they lose their legitimacy. And godsdammit, mate, that’s what they depend on. There’s only two of them, Croom knows how many thousands of us. This ain’t good for Garwater.”

These sentiments made Tanner uneasy.

He was happiest below the water. The submerged life of the riding continued as before: the clouds of fish, Bastard John, the leather-and-metal-clad divers at the end of their guy ropes, the flickering menfish of Bask, the cray, the shadows of submersibles like stubby whales beyond the city. The sunken supports of the Sorghum, its girder-legs poking from them. Tanner Sack himself, swimming from job to job, mouthing instructions or advice to his colleagues, taking orders and giving them.

But nothing was the same; everything was utterly different. Because at the edges of all that banal activity, framing the mass of keels and undersides like the points of a pentacle, the five great chains angled in a steep slope down and forward into the pitch, tethering the avanc miles below.

Tanner’s days were harder than before. He kept swimming all the time, simply to keep up with Armada. He often found himself grabbing hold of jutting pillars, barnacle-crusted timbers, to allow himself to be towed. At the end of the day, when he hauled himself out of the water and returned to his rooms, he was utterly exhausted.

Thoughts of New Crobuzon clouded his mind more and more. He wondered if the message he had delivered had got through. He hoped it had, very much. He could not think about his erstwhile home ruined by war.

The temperature did not waver. Each day was sweaty and bleached by light. When there were clouds they were fraught, stormy and elyctric.

The Lovers, the anophelius Aum, Uther Doul, and a cabal of others retreated into the Grand Easterly to work on their new secret project. The wider circle of scientists was cut loose, to wander disconsolate and aggrieved.

Bellis’ job was over. During the working hours, for want of other friends, she began tentatively to speak again with Johannes. He too was cast-off, like her. The avanc was caught-his role was over.

Johannes was still wary of her. They would wander the swaying streets of Armada, stopping at pavement cafes and little gardens, while pirate children played around them. They both still received stipends and could live easily from day to day, but their hours were endless and purposeless now. There was nothing ahead of them except other days, and Johannes was angry. He felt deserted.

For the first time Bellis could remember, he began to mention New Crobuzon regularly.

“What month is it at home?” he asked.

“Swiven,” Bellis replied, chastising herself silently for not appearing to have to work it out.

“Winter’s over,” he said, “back there. Back in New Crobuzon.” He nodded toward the west. “Spring now,” he said quietly.

Spring. And here am I, thought Bellis, who had winter stolen from me. She remembered the river journey to Iron Bay.

“Do you suppose they know by now that we never arrived?” he said quietly.

“Nova Esperium must do,” said Bellis. “Or at least they assume we’re very severely delayed. Then they’ll wait for the next New Crobuzon boat, probably in another six months’ time, to send them word. So they won’t know for sure back home for a long time.”

They sat and drank their thin city-grown coffee.

“I wonder what’s been happening there,” Johannes said eventually.

They did not say much to each other, but the air was pregnant with their quiet.

Things are speeding up, Bellis said to herself, not quite understanding her own thought. She did not think of New Crobuzon as Johannes seemed to: when she imagined it, it was preserved as if in glass, quite unmoving. She did not think of it now. Perhaps she was afraid to.

She was nearly alone in knowing what might have happened, what wars might be being fought on the banks of the Tar and the Canker. It was bewildering to think that if the city was saved it was down to her. Or that it might not, in fact, have been saved.

The uncertainty, she thought, the silence, the potentiality of what might have happened, what might be happening… it should crush me. But it did not. Instead, Bellis felt as if she were waiting.

She spent that evening with Uther Doul.

They would drink together perhaps one night in three. Or they might walk through the city, directionless, or they might return to his room, or sometimes to hers.

He never touched her. Bellis was exhausted by his reticence. He would spend minutes without speaking, only to embark on some mythic-sounding story or other in response to some vague statement or question. His wonderful voice would subdue her then, and she would forget her frustration until his story ended.

Uther Doul clearly drew something from his time with her, but still she could not be sure what. She was not intimidated by him anymore, even carrying her secrets. For all his deadly skills, his brilliance in branches of obscure theology and science, she thought she saw in him someone more lost and confused than she, someone removed from all societies, uncertain of norms and interaction, retreated behind cold control. It made her feel safe in his presence.

She was drawn to him, powerfully. She wanted him: his power and his grim self-control, his beautiful voice. His cool intelligence, the obvious fact that he liked her. The sense that she would be more in control than he, should anything happen between them, and not just because she was older. She would not coquette, but she engineered enough of a dynamic that he must know.

But he never touched her. Bellis was unsettled by that.

It made little sense. His behavior clearly spelled out battened-down, incompetent desire, but there was something else as well. His manner was like some chymical compound, most of the ingredients of which she could identify instantly. There was, though, some mysterious component she could not make sense of, that modified everything that made him. And when Bellis became flushed with lust or loneliness for Doul, when she would otherwise have set matters in motion between them, she held back, flustered by his secret. She was not certain her advances would be reciprocated. And she would not risk that rejection.

Bellis’ desire for sex with him became almost petulant-added to her physical attraction she felt a desire to clarify matters. What is he doing? she thought, time and again.

She had heard nothing from Silas Fennec for many days.

His toes touching the cold foot-wide barrel jutting from an ancient gunboat, his head staring down from higher than the Grand Easterly’s mainmast, the man stands still and gazes and the scud of waves beside the boats makes him feel as if he is falling.

He is stronger with every day that passes. More puissant, more controlled and controlling, more exact in his machinations.

His kisses grow more languorous.

The man holds the statue in his hand, and he caresses the flap of fin-tissue with his fingertips. His mouth is still bloody and salty from the last tonguing kiss.

He moves about the city in the impossible ways that the statue has granted him. Space and physical forces loosen their weft to him when his mouth and tongue tingle from the cold salt press of the stone. The man steps forward and straddles the water between vessels, unseen, and steps forward again and hides in the shadow of a yeoman’s shoe.

Here and there and back again. He travels the city, tracing the rumors and information that he has set in motion. He watches his own influence spread like antibiotic in diseased flesh.

It is all true. Everything he says is true. The discord he leaves behind him in the trail of whisper and pamphlet and paper is a correct reaction.

The man slips under the water. The sea opens to him, and he drifts down past the huge links of chain, toward the unthinkable beast of burden that stretches its limbs in the deepest reaches. When he needs breath he pulls the statue to him, the little grotesquerie hunched and glowing in the night sea with faint biotic light, the toothed osculum a puncture-hole of dark, the open eye wide and mocking, tar-black, and he kisses it deeply and feels its flickering tongue-thing with the disgust that he can never banish.

And the statue breathes air into him.

Or it bends space again and lets him lift his chin-yards deep as he is-and break the water with his face and gasp a lungful.

The man moves through the water without his limbs shifting position, the statue’s filigree of once-living fin moving, as if that is what propels him. He weaves in and around the five great chains, moving downward until he becomes frightened by the dark and cold and silence (even powerful and puissant as he is) and he rises again to walk in the secret compartments of the city.

All the ridings are open to him. He enters all the flagships with ease and without hesitation, except one. He visits the Grand Easterly and the Therianthropus in Shaddler, and Thee-And-Thine’s Salt Godling and all the others-except for the Uroc.

He is afraid of the Brucolac. Even flushed with his statue’s kiss as he is, he will not risk facing the vampir. The moonship is out of bounds to him-that is a promise he has made himself, and that he keeps.

The man practices the other things the statue has taught him while he licks at its mouth. It allows him more than travel and infiltration.

It is true what they say about the haunted quarter: it is inhabited. But those presences in the old ships see what he is doing, and they do not trouble him.

The statue protects him. He feels like its lover. It keeps him safe.