The Scar

Chapter Thirty-four

Since it had been stolen, the Sorghum had drilled for many weeks, and there were now great stores of oil and rockmilk in Garwater’s reserves. But Armada was hungry, almost as voracious for fuel as New Crobuzon.

Before Garwater had the Sorghum, Armada’s boats had got by only with careful husbanding of what resources they stole. Now their demand increased with the available supply. Even the ships allied to Dry Fall and Bask took the oil that Garwater provided.

The rockmilk was more precious by far, and rarer. In guarded storerooms in the Grand Easterly the heavy liquid slopped in rows of jars. The rooms were secured and earthed by careful geo-thaumaturgic processes, to dispel any dangerous emanations. The engine that sent the lulling pulses into the avanc’s brain was powered on the stuff, and the thaumaturges and technicians who ran it kept a careful eye on their reserves of fuel. They knew exactly how much they needed.

Tanner and Shekel and Angevine studied the air over the Sorghum’s cold derrick and saw there was no effluent.

They sat together in a beer tent on the Dober, under a sprawl of tarpaulin-covered poles. The Dober would not support more solid buildings. It was the body of a blue whale, disemboweled, its top half removed, its carcass preserved by some long-forgotten process. It was quite hard and inflexible, though its floor was disturbingly organic: the remnants of blood vessels and viscera varnished as solid as glass underfoot.

Tanner and Shekel were frequent visitors here. Its beer tent was good. They sat facing the whale’s frozen flukes, which jutted from the water as if about to slap its surface and swim free. The Sorghum was directly in their line of sight, framed by the pointed edges of the whale’s tale. The enormous, ugly presence lolled silently.

Angevine was quiet. Shekel was solicitous, making sure her glass was full, murmuring to her quietly. She was still somewhat shocked. Everything had changed for her since Tintinnabulum left, and she had not yet adapted.

(Tanner had no doubts that she would be alright. Gods knew he did not begrudge her a few days’ befuddlement. Tanner just hoped Shekel himself was alright. He was glad the lad was spending a little time with him.)

What will I do? thought Angevine. She kept thinking that she would go along to see what Tinnabol had for her… and then of course she remembered that he was gone. It was not that she missed him. He had been courteous and pleasant to her, but there had been no closeness. He had been her boss, and he had given her orders that she had obeyed.

But even that was an overstatement. He had not really been her boss. Her boss was Garwater-the Lovers. It was Garwater money that paid her wages, Garwater that had commissioned her, in the first days after her arrival, to serve the strange, muscular, white-haired hunter. And having disembarked from a ship taking her away to slavery, from a city where her Remaking had stripped her of rights, made her work a duty, to be told that she would be paid as if she were any other citizen had stunned her. It was that which had bought her loyalty.

And now Tintinnabulum was gone, and she was not sure what she would do.

It was hard, having taken pride in work, to be reminded that it did not matter what she did, so long as she labored, for money. Eight years of her history had sailed with Tintinnabulum and his hunters.

It was just a job, she told herself. Jobs change. Time to move on.

“Where are we going?” Bellis asked Uther Doul.

She had finally given in and asked him.

As she had expected, he did not answer her. He looked up at her question, then down again without a word.

They were in Croom Park, in an evening darkness stained with the colors and the strong smell of flowers. Somewhere nearby, an inbred nightingale sounded its attenuated song.

I want to know, Doul, Bellis felt like saying. There are ghosts clinging to me, and I want to know if the wind wherever we’re going will blow them away. I want to know which way my life is likely to turn. Where are we going?

She did not say any of that. Instead they walked.

A path was visible in the moonlight. It was rough, formed by footsteps rather than design. It wound up the steep slope of bushes and trees that rose above them, broken here and there by the remnants of architecture-railings and stairways, their shapes visible like optical illusions below the garden’s surface.

They climbed the incline onto the raised, tree-shadowed plateau that had once been the poop deck. It looked down over the ships of Curhouse, lit up with their traditional green-and-white lanterns. Bellis and Uther Doul stood in the darkness below the trees. The park moved sedately beneath them.

“Where are we going?” said Bellis again, and again there was a long time when all they could hear were the boat sounds of the city.

“You told me once,” she continued hesitantly, “about your life in High Cromlech. You told me about when you left. What happened then? Where did you go? What did you do?”

Doul shook his head, almost helplessly. After a time, Bellis gestured at his scabbard.

“Where did you get that sword? What does it mean, its name?” she said.

He drew his bone-white weapon. He held it flat in the air and stared at it, then looked up at Bellis and nodded once again. He seemed pleased.

“It’s a large part of why they trust and fear me as they do: the Possible Sword.” He moved it slowly in a precise, curving sweep. “How I got this sword? At the end of a long search… and a great, a phenomenal amount of research. Everything’s there, in the Imperial Canon, you know. All the information you might need, if you know how to read it.” He watched Bellis calmly. “The work I’ve done. The techniques I’ve learnt.

“The Ghosthead broke open the world, when they arrived. They made the Fractured Land with the force of their landing, and it was more than physical damage.

“They used the break. You’ve heard the refrain about the Ghosthead always ‘digging for their chances’? It’s normally taken to mean that they had an uncanny kind of luck, that they gripped every chance they had, no matter how tenuous.” He smiled slowly.

“Do you really think that would be enough to keep control of a continent?” he said. “A world? To hold absolute power for five hundred years? You think they could do that by keeping a lookout for opportunities? It was much more than that. ‘Digging for chance’ is a clumsy rendition of what the Ghosthead really did. It was an altogether more exact science.

“Possibility mining.”

Uther quoted something like a singer. “ ‘We have scarred this mild world with prospects, wounded it massively, broken it, made our mark on its most remote land and stretching for thousands of leagues across its sea. And what we break we may reshape, and that which fails might still succeed. We have found rich deposits of chance, and we will dig them out.’

“They meant all that literally,” he said. “It wasn’t an abstract crow of triumph. They had scarred, they had broken the world. And, in doing so, they set free forces that they were able to tap. Forces that allowed them to reshape things, to fail and succeed simultaneously-because they mined for possibilities. A cataclysm like that, shattering a world, the rupture left behind: it opens up a rich seam of potentialities.

“And they knew how to pick at the might-have-beens and pull out the best of them, use them to shape the world. For every action, there’s an infinity of outcomes. Countless trillions are possible, many milliards are likely, millions might be considered probable, several occur as possibilities to us as observers-and one comes true.

“But the Ghosthead knew how to tap some of those that might have been. To give them a kind of life. To use them, to push them into the reality that in its very existence denied theirs, which is defined by what happened and by the denial of what did not. Tapped by possibility machines, outcomes that didn’t quite make it to actuality were boosted, and made real.

“If I were to toss a coin, most certain it would land on one side or the other; it’s just possible it might land on its edge. But if I were to make it part of a possibility circuit, I’d turn it into what the Ghosthead would have called a coin of possible falls-a Possible Coin. And if I toss that, things are different.

“One of either heads or tails or just maybe edge will come up as before, and lie there as strong as ever. That’s the fact-coin. And surrounding it, in different degrees of solidity and permanence, depending on how likely they were, are a scattering of its nighs-close possibilities made real. Like ghosts. Some almost as strong as the factual, fading to those that are just barely there. Lying where they would have fallen, heads and tails and a fair few edges. Possibilities, mined and pulled through into the light. Fading as the possibility field shifts.

“This-” He indicated his sword again, seeing Bellis begin to understand. “-is a sword of possible strikes. A Possible Sword. It’s a conductor for a very rare kind of energy. It’s a node in a circuit, a possibility machine. This-” He patted the little pack strapped to his waist. “-is the power: a clockwork engine. These,” the wires stitched into his armor, “draw the power up. And the sword completes the circuit. When I grip it, the engine’s whole.

“If the clockwork is running, my arm and the sword mine possibilities. For every factual attack there are a thousand possibilities, nigh-sword ghosts, and all of them strike down together.”

Doul sheathed the blade and stared up into the trees’ pitch-black canopy.

“Some of the most likely are very nearly real. Some are fainter than mirages, and their power to cut… is faint. There are countless nigh-blades, of all probabilities, all striking together.

“There’s no martial form I’ve not studied. I’m proficient with most of the weapons I’ve ever encountered, and I can fight without any weapons at all. But what most people don’t know is that I’ve trained with this sword twice. I’ve mastered two kinds of technique.

“This engine… It’s not tight. And it can’t just be wound again, either-there’s more to it than that.

“So I have to husband what seconds I have. When I fight, I rarely switch on the Possible Sword. For the most part, I fight with it as a dumb, purely factual weapon: a diamond-hard blade with edges finer than honed metal. And I wield it precisely. Every strike I make is exact, and lands where I wish it to land. It’s what I trained for so many years to do.”

Bellis could hear no pride in his voice.

“But when the situation’s severe, when odds are very bad, when a display’s needed, or I’m in danger… then I switch on the motor for a few seconds. And in that situation, precision is the one thing I cannot afford.”

He was silent as a gust of warm wind shook the trees, making them sound as if they shivered at his words.

“A headsman knows where his blade must land. With every nuance of skill, he aims for the neck. He narrows the possibilities. If he were to use a Possible Sword, the vast bulk of the nighs would exist within an inch of the factual strike. The rub is this: the better the headsman, the more precise his strike, the more constrained potentiality, the more wasted the Possible Sword. But, obviously, put a weapon like this in the hands of an amateur, it’s as lethal to him or her as to any quarry-the possibilities that’ll manifest include self-harm, unbalancing, dropping the weapon, and so on. A middle way is needed.

“When I attack with a dumb weapon, I’m an executioner. My blade lands in the space I decide, and not to either side. That’s how I learned to fight; it would be a stupid waste of power to use the Possible Sword so. So when I finally found it, after a very long time of searching, I had to learn swordsmanship again. A very different art: skill without precision.

“Fighting with a Possible Sword, you must never constrain possibilities. I must be an opportunist, not a planner-fighting from the heart, not the mind. Moving suddenly, surprising myself as well as the opponent. Sudden, labile, and formless. So that each strike could be a thousand others, and each of those nigh-swords is strong. That’s how to fight with a Possible Sword.

“So I am two swordsmen.”

When his lovely voice ebbed away, Bellis was aware again of the surrounds of the park, the warm darkness and the noise of roosting birds.

“What’s known about possibility mining,” he said, “I know. That’s how I knew of the sword.”

Uther Doul was stirring things in Bellis’ mind. In New Crobuzon, during her time when the scientist Isaac was her lover, Bellis had observed his obsessions, and had learned certain things.

He had been of chaotic and heretical inclinations. Many of his projects came to nothing. She had watched him chase ideas. And during the months they had spent together, the one that she had seen him worry at with the greatest tenacity was the investigation of what he called crisis energy. It was theoretical physics and thaumaturgy of astonishing complexity. But what she had taken from Isaac’s frantic, off-color explanations was his conviction that underlying the facticity of the world, in all its seeming fastness, was an instability, a crisis pushing things to change from the tensions within them.

She had always found it an idea that accorded with her own instincts. She drew obscure comfort from the sense that things, even while as they were, were always in crisis, always pulled to become their opposite.

In the possibility mining that Uther Doul had just described Bellis saw a radical undermining of crisis theory. Crisis, Isaac had once told her, was manifest in the tendency of the real to become what it was not. If what was and what was not were allowed to coexist, the very tension-the crisis at the center of existence-must dissipate. Where was that crisis energy in the real becoming what it was not, if what it was not was right there alongside what it was?

That was nothing but a vague, pluralist reality. Bellis disliked the notion, intensely. She even felt, bizarrely, some kind of weird residual loyalty to Isaac pushing her to disapprove of it.

“When I first came here,” Doul went on, “I was very tired. Tired of making decisions. I wanted to be loyal. I wanted a wage. I’d learnt and sought and found whatever I’d wanted. I had my sword, I had knowledge, I’d seen places… I wanted to rest. To be a henchman, a paid soldier.

“But the Lovers, when they saw my sword, and the books I brought with me, they were… fascinated.

“Especially the Lover.

“They were fascinated by what I could tell them. By what I’d learnt.

“In a few places in Bas-Lag,” he said, “possibility machines still remain. There are different kinds, to do different things. I’ve studied them all.

“You’ve seen one of them: the perhapsadian, the instrument in my room. It was used to play possibilities. In an aether rich in potentiality, a virtuoso could once play particular facts and nighs into existence-choose certain outcomes. Quite useless now, of course. It’s old and broken-and anyway, we’re not in a possibility seam.

“This sword… you only see an aspect of it. The warrior who once used it and the people it killed, millennia ago, wouldn’t recognize the weapon I carry. When the Ghosthead ruled, they used possibility in architecture, in medicine, in politics and performance and all other spheres. Possible Sonatas, the ghost-notes winking out of existence in echoes above and around the fact-score, changing with every performance. I have been inside the ruins of a Possible Tower…” He shook his head slowly. “That is a sight you do not forget.

“They used the science in fighting, in sport and war. There are passages in the Covertiana describing a bout between Possible Wrestlers, a shifting multitude of limbs flickering in and out of existence with every moment, nigh grappling nigh grappling fact grappling nigh again.

“But all of this, the technique of the mining, was a product of the Ghosthead’s arrival-the detonation of their landing. It was through the rent they left that the possibility seams were tapped. That wound,” he said, his eyes flickering over to Bellis and away, and back again, “that scar, left by the Ghosthead… that’s where the seam is. If the stories are true, it’s on the far side of the world, at the end of the Empty Ocean.

“No ship’s ever crossed that sea. The waters there… they militate against ships. And who’d want to go there? If it exists, it’s thousands of miles away. And there are stories of what lives in the Fractured Land: terrible things, a dreadful ecology. Lightfungus. Dreadcurs. Butterflies with unholy appetites. Even if we could,” he said with strong sincerity, “I’d not want to try to reach the Fractured Land.”

He was staring at Bellis and, under the superb modulations of his voice she sensed a tremulous feeling. She swallowed, trying to concentrate. This is important, now, she told herself. Listen, make sense of this. I don’t know why, but he’s telling me something, he’s letting me know-

And then-

oh good gods above, can that be what he I don’t, Is that possible, that he, surely, have I, have I misunderstood?

Is that what he means?

Her face was set, and she realized she was staring at him, and he her, both mute, staring through the gloom.

Certainly, she thought, giddy, what boat could make it over the ocean to the Fractured Land? Who’d want to go to the Fractured Land? The Land’s not worth it. It’s too far, too dangerous, even for this. Even for this. But what was it he told me, what did they say, how did it go…?

“We have scarred this world, wounded it, made our mark on its remote land… and stretching for thousands of leagues across its sea.”

There’s something in the sea. Nothing to hurt us there, not like the land. No monsters there, no lightfungus or butterflies to threaten the miner-the possibility miner. And what’s in the sea is much closer-the Fractured Land would be at the very edge of the world, but the Ghosthead lays say the sea’s scar stretches for countless miles. In toward the world’s center. Toward us. Closer.

No ship has ever made it across the Empty Ocean… I believe that. I know the stories, the currents and wind that push incomers away. No ships could cross that ocean.

But what could stop an avanc?

Why is he telling me?

Is that where we’re going, Uther? Across the sea? Across the Empty Ocean, to the remnants of that wound, that fracture? It’s not just the land that was broken open-the sea, too. So is that where we’re going? To mine the possibilities in what’s left of that great… cosmic laceration, Uther?

That’s what the Brucolac meant, isn’t it, Uther? That’s what he was talking about.

Why are you telling me? What have I done? What are you doing? Why do you want me to know?

The avanc can take us to see what happened to the wound in the sea. That’s why it was summoned. That’s why Tintinnabulum was employed; and why the Sorghum was stolen for fuel; and why we went to the island and brought back Aum; and why you, Doul, have been working on a secret project, because of your sword, because of your expertise in this science. This is what everything leads to. This is why the avanc was summoned. It can cross the water that Armada would never breach without it.

It can cross that ocean.

It can take us to the Scar.