The Scar

Chapter Thirty-five

“How the fuck did you find me?” Silas Fennec was clearly troubled.

“You speak like I’m some ingenue,” whispered Bellis. “What, you think you’re invisible? You think I’m incapable?”

She was dissembling: tracking Fennec had been mostly luck. She had been listening out for word of Simon Fench for days. Since her conversation with Doul, she had redoubled her efforts.

Eventually it had not been she who had tracked him at all, but Carrianne. In response to Bellis’ continuing requests for help, her friend had told her, with her usual sly cheerfulness, that she had heard that the mysterious Mr. Fench had been seen at The Pashakan. It was a pub built belowdecks in the Yevgeny, a hundred-foot sloop in Thee-And-Thine.

Bellis had not ventured much into King Friedrich’s riding since her trip to the glad’ circus. She made her way toward its raucous byways with concealed trepidation.

She had passed along the streets of the Sudden Understanding, the many-masted clipper that formed part of the edge of Urchinspine Docks and that linked Dry Fall and Thee-And-Thine ridings. The enormous vessel was one of the few in Armada that did not rest clearly in the control of one or the other ruler. The main bulk of its body was Dry Fall, but toward its forecastle, responsibility and control blurred with Thee-And-Thine. The streets became more boisterous and untidy.

Bellis had picked her way through rubbish where the feral monkeys bickered with cats and dogs, through the tumbling streets, and into what was indisputably Thee-And-Thine.

This was the most ill-kempt of Armada’s ridings. Its buildings were mostly wood, and many were moldering or salt- and water-stained. It was not that the area was poor-there were plenty of riches, in the gold and silver and jet visible through the windows of some houses, in the vivid silks and satins that were worn by some of its inhabitants, in the quality of goods available. But in a place where everything was for sale, certain goods-such as the right to maintain the architecture and the streets-were not attractive buys.

Slums and factories and shabby opulence bobbed sedately side by side. Finally, Bellis had passed the Salt Godling, Friedrich’s flagship, and had walked into the Yevgeny’s creaking, smelly innards, unclearly torchlit, to The Pashakan.

On her third visit, Silas was there. Bellis was angry at his surly surprise to see her.

“Will you listen to me?” she hissed at him. “I know where we’re going.”

He looked up, sharply, and caught her eye.

She laughed suddenly and unpleasantly. “Do you have deja vu, Silas?” she said. “Jabber knows I do. Understand that I do not relish this relationship. I seem to find myself doing this with disturbing regularity: telling you that I know a secret, giving it to you to pass on, to make plans with, to do something with. I do not enjoy that. This is the last fucking time, you understand me?” She meant it, absolutely. No matter what might happen, she would not deal with Silas Fennec like this again. There was nothing, less than nothing, between them anymore.

“But whether I like it or not,” she went on, “I have little choice here. I need your help. The only way anything can be done about this is if… the word is spread, if more people know. And though no one listens to Bellis Coldwine, it seems that a growing minority are prepared to listen to the troublemaker Simon Fench.”

“Where are we going, Bellis?” Fennec asked.

She told him.

“I wondered why you were fraternizing with that fucking lunatic Doul. Does he know you know?” Fennec seemed stunned.

“I think so,” she said. “It’s hard to tell. It was as if… He obviously wasn’t supposed to tell me. But maybe he was so… caught up in it, he couldn’t resist. So instead of coming out with it, which would be disloyal, he told me just enough.

“All the time I’d thought he was accompanying the Lovers and Aum and the scientists into those secret meetings because he’s their bodyguard. But it wasn’t that-he’s an expert on this thing, on possibility mining. He knows everything about it, because of once researching that sword of his.

“This is what they’ve been working on. The Lovers want to get to the Scar; they want to tap possibilities, Silas.” Her voice remained cool, though she did not feel it. “Like the Ghosthead Empire, do you understand?”

“That’s why the avanc,” he breathed, and Bellis nodded.

“That’s why. It’s just a means to an end. The Lovers must have been… entranced when they saw his sword, when he first came to the city. They heard his stories of the Fractured Land, and the Scar-all the secrets he knows-and it was nothing but a dream, then. But then they think of Tintinnabulum and his crew, who could be enticed. This is the ultimate big game, after all.” She stared out of the little window at a sea that churned slowly by as the avanc progressed.

“And the Lovers already knew about the chains. Armada tried to capture an avanc before. That was a long time ago, and they don’t give a cuss for tradition. But when Doul came, it was different. Before he came, calling the avanc would’ve been… a stupid, grandiose, pointless gesture. But now? Everyone knows no ship can cross the Empty Ocean. But what fucking force in Bas-Lag could stop an avanc? All of a sudden, there’s a way to get to this Scar that Doul’s told them all about, the thing that the Ghosthead left behind.”

The scale of the project was staggering. The realization that all the misery and money and terrible effort that the Lovers had gone to to secure the avanc, the realization that that was only the first part of their plan, was incredible.

“All this,” breathed Silas, and Bellis nodded.

“All of it,” she said. “The rig, the Terpsichoria, Johannes, the anophelii island, the chains, the fulmen, the fucking avanc… all of it. This is what it’s about.”

“Naked power.” Silas mouthed it as if the words were dirty. “I assumed the avanc was to do with the piracy. That’s what they implied: that it would make them more efficient thieves, for Jabber’s sake! That at least would have made some kind of sense. But this…” He looked incredulous. “You can tell they’re press-ganged, the Lovers; no fucking serious pirate would pursue this idiocy.”

“They’re dangerous,” said Bellis simply. “They’re fanatics. I’ve no idea if they can really cross the Empty Ocean, but godspit! I do not want to find out. I… I’ve heard them, Silas, when they’re alone.” He looked at her piercingly, but did not ask her how. “I know what they’re like. I’m not letting people like that-visionaries, gods help us-command me to the other end of the world, to a place that may not even exist, and that if it does is the most deadly place in Bas-Lag. We’d be traveling further and farther from New Crobuzon. And I’ve still not given up on getting back there.”

Bellis realized she was shaking at the thought of leaving her home so far behind. And if Uther and the others were right? If they survived the crossing?

A multitude of possibilities. The thought chilled her. She found it utterly threatening, existentially undermining. It made her feel so completely contingent that it offended and frightened her.

Like some waterhole in the veldt, she thought unclearly, where the weak and the strong and predatory drink together in a truce: the gazelle, the wildebeest, the mafadet, and the lion. All the possibilities lined up together in fucking harmony, and the winner, the strongest, the fact, the real, letting the others that have failed live, letting them all live. Pacifist and pathetic.

“That’s why they’re not telling,” she said. “They know people won’t stand for it.”

“They’re afraid,” Silas murmured.

“The Lovers are strong,” said Bellis, “but they couldn’t face all the other ridings. And, more to the point, they couldn’t face their own people.”

“Revolt,” breathed Silas, and Bellis smiled without humor.

“Mutiny,” she said. “They’re afraid of mutiny. And that’s why we need Simon Fench.”

Silas nodded slowly; then there was a long silence.

“He’s got to spread the word,” he said eventually. “Pamphlets, rumors, and all. That’s what he does best; I can make sure he does that.”

“I’m sorry, Bellis,” Silas said when she stood to go. “I’ve not been a great friend. I’ve been so… Things have been busy, and difficult. I was rude when I saw you, and I’m sorry.”

Observing him, Bellis felt dislike-as well, paradoxically, as the last faint stirrings of what had once been affection. Like a shred of memory.

“Silas,” she said, smiling coldly, “we owe each other nothing. And we’re not friends. But we have a shared interest in the Lovers’ failing. And I can’t stop it, and it’s just possible that you might be able to. I expect you to try, and to tell me what’s happening, and that’s all. That’s all the communication I expect from you. I don’t want you to contact me as a friend.”

Silas Fennec remained in The Pashakan for a long time after Bellis left. He read through some inky pamphlets and newspapers, watching the sky darken. The days were noticeably longer now, and he thought about summer in New Crobuzon.

He waited there a long time: this was where people determined enough to find him were directed. But he drank and read alone. One woman, dressed in rags, looked up at his back curiously as he left the room-that was all the notice that was paid him.

Fennec wound home through the circuitous routes and byways of Thee-And-Thine to the oily iron ship Drudgery. It was in a quiet part of town. Beside it loomed a big old factory ship-Armada’s asylum.

He waited at home in one of the nondescript concrete blocks built beside the Drudgery’s funnel, directly in the asylum’s shadow. At eleven o’clock there was a knock at his door: his contact had arrived. For the first time in many days, they had something serious and important to talk about. Fennec walked slowly to answer the door, and his gait, his expressions, his demeanor shifted fractionally.

By the time he opened the door, he had become Simon Fench.

Waiting on his doorstep was a big, aging cactus-man, looking nervously about him.

“Hedrigall,” said Fennec quietly, in what was not quite his own voice. “I’ve been waiting for you. We must talk.”

In the jagged and obscure architecture of the moonship Uroc, the vampir were gathering.

The Brucolac had called a conclave of his ab-dead lieutenants, his cadre. As the light shifted from drab dusk to night, they settled as lightly and soundlessly on the moonship as leafs.

All the citizens of Dry Fall knew that their vampir were always watching. They wore no uniform; their identities were not known.

The bacillus that induced photophobic haemophagy-the vampir strain-was capricious, and weak, carried solely in spit and quick to denature and collapse. Only if a vampir’s victim did not die, and if the bite had been direct, mouth to skin so that some of the ab-dead’s spittle entered their prey’s bloodstream, was there a small chance that the survivor might be infected. And if they survived the fevers and the delirium, they would awaken one night, having died and been renewed, ab-dead, with a raging hunger, their bodies reconfigured, stronger and quicker by many times. Unaging, able to survive most injury. And unable to bear the sun.

Every one of the Dry Fall’s cadre had been carefully chosen by the Brucolac. The goretax was decanted before drinking, to avoid inadvertent infection. Those from whom the Brucolac drank directly were his most trusted servants, his closest supporters, to whom he gave the honor of a chance at ab-death.

There had been occasional betrayals, of course, in the past. His chosen ones had turned against him, giddy with power. There had been unauthorized infection and attempts on his ab-life. The Brucolac had quashed them all, sadly and effortlessly.

His lieutenants surrounded him now, in the Uroc’s great hall. Scores of them, freed from the necessity of disguise, allowing their serpentine tongues to unroll luxuriously, tasting the air with relish. Men and women and androgynous youths.

At the front, almost beside the Brucolac, stood the ragged woman who had watched Fennec in The Pashakan. Every one of the vampir stared at their master with wide, light-enhancing eyes.

After a very long silence, the Brucolac spoke. His voice was quiet. Had those in the room been human, they would not have heard him.

“Kin,” he said, “you know why we’re here. I’ve told you all where we are heading, where the Lovers would have us go. Our opposition to their plans is well known. But we’re in a minority; we’re not trusted; we couldn’t mobilize the city behind us. We can’t usefully speak; our hands are tied.

“However, things may be changing. The Lovers are banking on momentum, so that by the time their aim becomes plain, it’ll be too late to oppose it. And by that time, they hope, people will become willing abductees.” The Brucolac sneered, and licked the air with his great tongue.

“Now, it appears, word may be about to get out. A fascinating conversation was overheard tonight. Simon Fench knows where we’re going.” He nodded at the woman in rags. “Doul’s Crobuzoner dollymop, of all people, has worked out what’s happening, and she’s told Mr. Fench-or Fennec, or whatever he calls himself. We know where he lives, do we not?” The woman nodded.

“Fench is planning to put out one of his inflammatory pamphlets. We’d try to intervene if we could, to help him, but he’s a solo operator, and if he discovered that we’d identified him, he’d shun us and disappear. We don’t want to risk interfering with his efforts. We can hope,” the Brucolac stressed, “that he’s able to get this done soon, and that it’ll cause a crisis for Garwater. After all, we’ve not yet reached the Empty Ocean.

“But.” He made the word cold and hard, and his lieutenants were rapt.

“But we must make preparations, in case Fench fails. Kin…” He prodded at the air as he spoke in his guttural whisper. “Kin, this is not a fight we will lose. We hope that Fench succeeds. But in case he does not, we must be ready to put another plan in motion.

“I will take this fucking city by force, if I must.”

And his ab-dead cadre hissed and muttered their agreement.