The Scar

Chapter Thirty-six

North, slow and inexorable. They were pulled on, days becoming weeks. The city waited. No one knew what would happen, but there was no way this steady gait could continue without incident. Armada became tense.

Bellis waited for word of Fench’s pamphlet. She was patient, envisaging him in the belly of the city, deep in some ship, collating information, controlling his informants.

Some nights, drawn by queasy fascination and shocked at herself, Bellis made her own way into the Grand Easterly’s lower decks and huddled in the room below the Lovers’. In their spat and breathless love talk she heard a new tension.

“Soon,” Bellis heard one Lover hiss, and “Fuck yes, soon,” a whimpered response.

There were differences between their little cries, Bellis could now discern. The Lover seemed more intense, more committed. It was she who seemed impatient, hungry for resolution, it was she who whispered soon most often; she was the more engaged with the project. Her lover was engaged with her. He fawned and murmured in the wake of her words.

Time stretched out. Bellis became more and more frustrated with Uther Doul.

With the city’s passage north, it had passed quickly out of the storms and the heat and into a more temperate zone, warm and breezy like New Crobuzon’s summer.

Five days after Bellis and Silas met in The Pashakan, there was a commotion above Armada’s skyline, in the dirigible Arrogance.

While Bellis stood with Uther Doul on the Grand Easterly, looking over to the fringe of Croom Park, Hedrigall was on deck duty, working with others near the great ropes that tethered the Arrogance to the aft of the ship.

“Mail drop,” he yelled, and the crews quickly cleared the area around the rope. A weighted satchel plummeted its length, landing with a bang on the cushioning of rags.

Hedrigall’s motions, when he pulled open the sack, were routine, and Bellis began to look away. But when the cactus-man unfurled the message within, his demeanor changed so violently that her eyes snapped back. Hedrigall ran toward Bellis and Doul with such astonishing speed that she thought for a second he was about to attack them. She stiffened as his great muscular body slammed down the boards of the deck.

Hedrigall held out the lookout’s message in a rigid arm.

“Warships,” he said to Doul. “Ironclads. A New Crobuzon flotilla. Thirty-five miles off, incoming. Be here within two hours.” He paused, and his green lips moved without sound, until finally he spoke with a tone of absolute incredulity.

“We’re under attack.”

At first, people were bewildered, disbelieving of their orders. Great masses of men and women gathered in every riding, on every flagship, fingering weapons and pulling on pieces of armor, surly and confused.

“But it don’t make any sense, Doul, sir,” one woman on the Grand Easterly argued. “It’s almost four thousand miles from New Crobuzon. Why’d they come so far? And how come the nauscopists didn’t see anything? They would’ve noticed yesterday. And anyway, how’re the Crobuzoners supposed to have found us-?”

Doul interrupted her, shouting loud enough to shock everyone in earshot into silence.

“We do not ask how,” he bellowed. “We do not ask why. Time enough after the killing. For now we have only time to fight, like fucking dogs, like sharks in frenzy. We fight or the city dies.”

Doul stilled all argument. People set their faces and prepared for war. And in every head the question How have they done this? was remembered, and put aside for later.

The city’s five warships steered westward a handful of miles, presenting themselves like a curving wall between Armada and the approaching force.

Around and between them steamed Armada’s smaller ironclads, squat vessels swathed in grey gunmetal, windowless, bristling with stubby cannons. They were joined by those of the city’s pirate vessels that had been in dock. Their crews set their teeth and tried not to contemplate their suicidal bravery-they were armed and armored to defeat merchant vessels, not naval gunners. Few of them, they realized, would come home.

There was no division between the ridings. Crews loyal to every ruler tacked and stoked and armed themselves, side by side.

The lookouts in the Arrogance sent down more messages as they saw the Crobuzoner ships more clearly. Uther Doul read them out to the Lovers.

“They must be here for their fucking rig,” he said quietly, so that only the two of them could hear. “Whatever it’s about, they outgun us. We’ve got more vessels, but half of ours are just wooden freebooters. They’ve seven warships, and many more scouts than us. They must have sent nearly half their fleet.”

Tanner Sack and the menfish of Bask; Bastard John; cray; the shadowy submersibles. Armada’s underwater troops waited, suspended, the great chains moving slowly away from them. Armada was moving on, the avanc now slowed to a crawl so that the troops could regain the city, after the fight.

Nearby, a small group of cray huddled in tight communion on one of their submerged rafts. Witch-conveners, summoning their beasts.

When Tanner had faced the dinichthys, he had hurled himself unthinkingly into the water. He had not had time then to contemplate his fear. But it was almost another hour before the warships from his old home would arrive to destroy his new one. The purpose and intelligence that directed their propellers was much more terrifying than the imbecilic malice in the bonefish’s eyes.

The minutes were very slow. Tanner thought about Shekel, at home where Tanner had ordered him to stay. Waiting with Angevine: both being armed, no doubt, by the yeomanry left behind. But he ain’t yet sixteen, thought Tanner desperately. He wanted very much to be back there with them, with Shekel and his lady. Tanner hefted his huge harpoon and thought about the fighting that was coming, and he pissed suddenly in his fear. His urine warmed him briefly, then dissipated with the current.

Everywhere, throughout Armada and across all the free-floating ships preparing to defend it, there were weapons.

The city’s armories and arsenals were unlocked, and the military technologies of thousands of years and hundreds of cultures were brought out and wiped clean: cannons, harpoons, and flintlocks; swords and crossbows and longbows and rivebows; and more esoteric weapons: stingboxes, baan, yarritusks.

Across the city, dirigibles of all sizes were rising slowly above the rooftops and rigging, like sections of architecture broken free. Over the horizon to the west, smoke could be seen from the Crobuzoner engines.

There was a huge scrum on the deck of the Grand Easterly as all the lieutenants, officers, captains, and rulers of all the ridings jostled to hear Uther Doul, the soldier, give them orders. Bellis stood motionless nearby, ignored by everyone around her, and listened.

“Their gunboats outnumber ours,” he said tersely, “but look around.” He pointed out at the morass of steamers and tugs that had until recently spent their days pulling Armada across the ocean, and that now circled it in aimless freedom. “Tell the crews manning those vessels to turn them by gods into gunboats.

“Word’s been sent to the Brucolac and his cadre: they’ll be informed as soon as they wake. Send some fast boats or airships to the edge of Dry Fall, to wait for them.

“We don’t know the Crobuzoners’ strength underwater,” Doul continued. “Submariners, you’ll have to judge when to attack. But they’ll have no airships. The likes of that are our only real strength.” He indicated the Trident bobbing from the Grand Easterly’s tail. It was being loaded with gunpowder and fat bombs. “Send them in first and fast. Don’t hold back.

“And listen-concentrate on the warships. The ironclads and scouts will hurt us, but we can withstand their firepower. Those warships… they could sink the city.” A rill of horror ran over the deck. “They’re carrying the fuel reserves: the Crobuzoner fleet is depending on those warships to get home.”

With a stunned jolt, Bellis realized what was happening. Her mind slipped like a broken gear, ignoring the rest of Doul’s instructions and grinding over and over the same pattern of thought. A ship from home a ship from home…

With sudden, desperate eagerness, she gazed out at the faint shading of smoke in the west. How do I reach them? she thought, disbelieving, exultant, and giddy.

The Crobuzoner ships finally came close enough to be seen: a long line of smoke-spewing black metal.

“They’re running up flags,” said Hedrigall from the top of the superstructure at the Grand Easterly’s stern. He was staring through the ship’s huge fixed telescope. “Sending us a message while they get good and close. Look: the name of their flagship and…” He hesitated. “They want to parley?”

Doul had dressed for war. His grey armor was studded with straps and with holstered flintlocks-on each hip, each shoulder, each thigh, in the center of his chest. About his body, the handles of daggers and throwing knives protruded from their scabbards. He looked, Bellis realized with a shiver, as he had when he came aboard the Terpsichoria.

She did not care; she was not interested anymore. She looked away and back toward the Crobuzoner ships, in agonies of excitement.

Doul took the telescope.

“ ‘Captain Princip Cecasan of the N.C.S. Morning Walker,’ ” he read slowly, and shook his head slowly as he scanned the pennants. “ ‘Parley requested regarding New Crobuzon hostage.’ ”

For one stunned instant, Bellis thought it was a reference to her. But even as her face spasmed with astonished joy, she realized how absurd that was (and something deep in her mind waited to inform her of another explanation). She turned and looked at the faces of Uther Doul, Hedrigall, the Lovers, and all the gathered captains.

She shivered to see them. Not a single one, she realized, had reacted to the Morning Walker’s offer to talk with anything but hard contempt.

In the face of that collective emotion, that absolute antagonism, the certainty of those before her that New Crobuzon was a power to be distrusted, fought against, destroyed, her own joy ebbed away. She remembered what she had read of the Pirate Wars, and New Crobuzon’s attack on Suroch. She remembered, suddenly, her conversations with Johannes and with Tanner Sack. She remembered Tanner’s rage at the thought of being found by Crobuzoner ships.

Bellis remembered her own terrified flight from New Crobuzon. I crossed the sea because I was afraid for my life, she thought. Seeing the militia everywhere I looked. Afraid of the agents of the government. Agents like the sailors in those ships.

It was not just the pirates-New Crobuzon’s maritime rivals-and not just the fRemade who had reason to fear the oncoming ships, Bellis realized. All her certainty left her. She, too, should be afraid.

“They’re armed enough to level a city,” Doul said to the assembled captains. “And they tell us they want to bargain?”

There was no one in the crowd who needed convincing. They listened silently.

“They’ll destroy us, if they have any chance at all. And they can find us, gods know how, across half the world. If we don’t take them now, they can come back again and again.” He shook his head and slowly spoke a last sentence, to a cheer that was more tense than rousing. “Send them down.”

The commanders were gone, carried to their vessels by aerocabs. Those rulers who would fight had been taken to their ships or dirigibles; those too frail or cowardly had been returned to their flagships in the city. Only Doul, Bellis, and the Lovers remained on the raised platform-and Bellis was ignored.

The Lovers were to fight in separate arenas: he from the warship Cho Harbor, she from the airship Nanter. They were taking their leave of each other. They kissed, tonguing deeply and murmuring the ecstatic sounds that Bellis recognized from her eavesdropping. They muttered to each other, telling each other they would be together again very soon, and Bellis realized that there was nothing touching about their parting, nothing tragic. They did not kiss as if it was their last chance, but hungrily and lasciviously, eager for more. They felt no fear; they seemed to feel no regret: they seemed to long to part, so that they might come together again.

She watched them with the disgusted fascination she always felt. Their scars twitched like little snakes as their faces moved against each other.

The Crobuzoner ships were less than ten miles away.

“Some of them will get through, Uther,” said the Lover, turning to Doul. “We can afford to lose ships, aerostats, submersibles, citizens. We can’t afford to lose the city, and we need you here to protect it. As our… last line.

“And Doul,” she said finally, “we can’t afford to lose you. We need you, Doul. You know what to do. When we get to the Scar.”

Bellis did not know if the Lover had forgotten that she was present, to have spoken so openly, or if she no longer cared.

The last dirigible had gone, taking the Lovers to their stations. The avanc had been reined in, and the city had slowed. Doul and Bellis were alone. Below them, women and men armed themselves on the broad deck of the Grand Easterly.

Doul did not look at Bellis or speak to her. He stared out past the Sorghum. Less than five miles now separated the Armadan navy and the wedge of snub-nosed Crobuzon battleships. The distance was reducing.

Eventually Doul turned to Bellis. His jaw was clenched, his eyes open a little too wide. He handed Bellis a flintlock. She waited for him to tell her to get below, or to stay out of the way, but he did not. They stood together and watched the battleships closing.

The man kisses his statue, and strolls unseen behind Bellis and Uther Doul.

His heart is beating quickly. He is packed and ready. He is carrying everything he owns in his pockets and hands. The man is disappointed but not surprised that Armada did not agree to parley. This way will be slower-though perhaps, he acknowledges, ultimately no more bloody.

So close, so close. He can almost step onto the deck of the Morning Walker. But not quite. It has a few miles yet to come. They’ll send a boat for me, he thinks, and prepares to receive them. I told them where I’d be.

Uther Doul is speaking to Bellis now, motioning to the frantic throng below. He is taking his leave of her; he is leaving her behind on the raised roof, descending to be with his troops, and she is watching him, hefting the gun, keeping her eyes on Doul as he descends.

The man knows that those who are coming, his compatriots, will have no trouble finding him. His descriptions were clear. There is no mistaking the Grand Easterly.

Separated by three miles of sea, the two navies faced each other. The Armadans in a mongrel mass of vessels in all colors and designs, sails and smoke billowing above countless decks. Opposite them, the Morning Walker and its sister-ships approached in formation, grey and darkwood blistered with large-bore guns.

A swarm of dirigibles approached the Crobuzoner ships: warflots and scouts and aerocabs weighed down with rifles and barrels of black powder. The air was still, and they made quick progress. At the front of the motley air force was the Trident, surrounded by smaller vessels, and aeronauts in single-pilot harnesses, swaying below their small balloons.

The Armadan captains knew that they had the weaker guns. Their ships were more than two miles from the enemy when the New Crobuzon ships began to fire.

Sound and heat burst over the sea. A fringe of explosions and boiling waves advanced way out in front of the Morning Walker like outriders. The Armadan guns were primed and stoked, but remained silent. There was nothing their crews could do but urge their vessels forward through the onslaught, to bring their enemies into their own shorter range. There were more than a thousand yards of fire to cross until they could retaliate, and they slipped into the one-sided battle with grim bravado, and time changed.

Metal and metal meet, and black powder ignites, and oil combusts and flesh bursts and burns.

Below the water Tanner rocks violently, stunned by ripples of pressure. He hemorrhages, blood gouting from his gills.

Above him, Armadan ships are shadows on illuminated water. Their formations are breaking down into chaos. Some of them are eddying in confusion, and (Jabber) breaking apart (Jabber help us), breaking in two or three, slipping closer, growing bigger as they descend toward him slow as nightfall, so slow he’s imagining it, but then around him the menfish scatter and (Godspitshitno) broken slabs of metal are plummeting like comets with trails of grease oil dirt shrapnel blood.

The fall of broken ships howls past him spewing bubbles and bodies and disappears into the dark.

From the airships, the carnage is distant and muted: little puffs and booms, and the black-crusted glow of oil fires, and ships that are there and then are not. The Armadan fleet continues like a pack of stupid blind dogs through that merciless onslaught, diminishing as it goes, until at last its guns can reach the Crobuzoner fleet.

Seen through hundreds of feet of air, the war is like a diorama. It seems a reconstruction. It does not look real.

The screaming cannot be heard over the explosions.

Blood sluices over the sides of Armadan ships. Metal bursts and tears, and the ships are suddenly serrated, murderous to their own sailors. The Armadan gunners fire, and their shells arc in fiery parabolas into their enemies. But those thousand yards have been merciless, and the Armadan fleet is already half broken.

The sea has become charnel. The water is littered with bodies. They move with the swells and currents, in a macabre dance. They emit clouds of blood like squid ink. They are transformed by the sea: entrails fan like coral; torn swathes of skin become fins. They are broken by jags of bone.

Tanner is very slow and cold. As he rises he passes a woman who still moves, too weak to swim up but not quite dead. He turns to her with soundless horror and hauls her skyward, but her movements become the juddering of dead nerves before they reach the air. And as Tanner lets her go he sees that there is more movement all around him, that there are men and women drowning as far as he can see, that he cannot help them, that they are too weak to live. He sees their ghastly desperate motions everywhere he looks, and he feels suddenly removed, conscious not of men and women, khepri and cactacae and scabmettler and hotchi, but only of countless, mindlessly repetitive motions, winding slowly down, as if he stares into a vat of rainwater at slowly dying insects.

He reaches the surface in a moment of calm, a chance stillness in the carnage, in the middle of what was the Armadan fleet. Around him vessels are breaking up with ugly noises. They are floundering, retching smoke and fire, hissing as they slip into the cool water, sucking their dying crews with them.

Tanner struggles. He is unable to think in words. The shells begin once again to pound the water around him, to make it into a bloody broth of metal and the dead.

The air sparks. Elyctro-thaumaturgic quarrels burst from the Crobuzoner vessels; arbalests hurl vats of strong acid. But now, even broken as they are, the remnants of the Armadan fleet fight back.

They fire shells the size of men, which smack into the Crobuzoner dreadnoughts and open in ragged metal flowers. Wooden warships sail into range, weaving between enemies, and their cannons sound, denting slabs of armor, breaking through smokestacks, and snapping the moorings of guns.

The Trident and its airborne flotilla have reached the sky over the Crobuzoner fleet. They begin a sporadic deluge of missiles: gunpowder bombs; oil skins that burst open as they fall, raining sticky fire; weighted darts and knives. Aeronauts snipe at Crobuzoner captains and gunners. The heat from the explosions rocks the dirigibles and knocks them off-course.

Still the Armadan ships approach. They fire and come closer and explode and capsize and burst into flames and still come closer, their crews doggedly driving them toward the dreadnoughts.

A mass of dark bodies rises.

Crobuzoner thaumaturges, channeling puissance from batteries and their own bodies, have animated flocks of golems: clumsy constructions of wire and leather and clay, inelegant and rough-hewn, with claws like umbrella’s innards and clear glass eyes. Their ugly wings beat frantically to bring them skyward. They are strong as monkeys, mindless and tenacious.

They grip the ankles of the Armadan aeronauts and scrabble up their bodies, ripping open their flesh and tearing their balloons apart, sending them bleeding into the decks below.

Golems rise like smoke from the Crobuzoner fleet and slam themselves into the steering cabins and windows of the Armadan airships, blinding them, shattering their glass, slicing the fabric of their gasbags. Many fall, their bodies broken by gunfire and swords and gravity, collapsing into their lifeless inanimate components on their way down; but scores stay airborne, harrying the Armadan air fleet.

The air above the battle seems as thick as the sea. It is viscous and sluggish with the discharge from guns and fire-throwers and catapults; with sinking dirigibles bleeding dry of gas; with hunting golems and blood-mist and gouts of soot.

There is a terrible slowness, a solemn care behind every motion. Every cut, every crushing blow, every bullet boring into eye and bone, every belch of fire and bursting vessel seems planned.

It is a sordid pretense.

Through the murk Tanner can see the undersides of the enemy’s boats, and surrounding them a hundred shapes: darting spiral vessels, single-person subs in the shells of giant nautili. The Armadan submarines scatter the little craft, ram the iron flanks of the dreadnoughts, rear up like whales.

Tanner is out, suddenly, in the open water, among the darting Bask menfish who have let him into their ranks. He has reached out with his long tentacles and gripped the chitinous shell of one of the little nautilus subs. He faces the little glass porthole, and he can see the man inside stare out aghast, thinking he has gone mad to see this savagely wailing face, this New Crobuzon face, in the water, mouthing curses at him in his own language, raising a stubby weapon level to his face and firing.

The bolt bursts the glass and drives on into the New Crobuzon sailor’s face, its reinforced jag splintering his cheekbone and the base of his skull and pinning his head to the back of his tiny craft. Tanner Sack stares at the man he has killed, no, who is not yet dead, whose mouth spasms with agony and terror as the sea vomits into his ruptured sub and drowns him.

Tanner kicks backward, shaking violently, watching the man die, watching the nautilus fill with water and begin to spin and descend.

The dead and torn-apart are scattered across all the ships and across the sea as if they are scraps of burned paper distributed randomly by fire.

Tanner Sack hunts men.

Around him, vessels plummet. He is surrounded by dying men from what was once his home. They bleed and scream bubbles. They are too far down to reach the surface. None of them will breathe again.

Tanner spews suddenly, the sick forcing his throat open and billowing out from him. He feels nauseous, unstuck in time, drunk or dreaming, as if this is not real but a memory, already, even as it happens.

(Below him pass dark curious things that he thinks are his allies the menfish, and then knows immediately are not.

They are gone, and Tanner does not have the time, the luxury, to wonder what they were.)

The fighting progresses in spastic jerks. A clockwork ship from Booktown is torn open, and it sheds its gears and its massive coiled springs and the ruined bodies of khepri. The waters around Jhour vessels move oily with sap from slaughtered cactacae. Where scabmettlers are torn apart by bombs, the clouds of their blood harden as they burst, into a shrapnel of scabs. Hotchi are crushed between hulls.

The beasts summoned by the Armadan cray witches slam their fletches into Crobuzoner ships and tip the crews into the water, to snatch them up with sudden scissoring jaws. But there are too many to control, and they become a danger to their own witch-masters.

In the smog, Armadan shells find Armadan decks, and New Crobuzon javelins and bullets burst through the flesh of their own troops.

At different times, all across the battle, women and men look up and see the sky, the sun, through red clouds, through water, through films of their own and others’ blood. Some lie where they have fallen, dying, knowing that the sun is the last light they will see.

The sun is low. Dusk is perhaps an hour away.

Two of Armada’s great war steamers are destroyed. Another is badly damaged, its rear guns twisted like palsied limbs. Scores of its pirate ships and its smaller fighters are gone.

Of the New Crobuzon dreadnoughts, only the Darioch’s Kiss is ruined. Others are torn, but they are fighting on.

The Crobuzoner fleet is winning. A wedge of their scouts, ironclads, and submersibles have broken through Armadan ranks and are bearing down on the city itself, a few miles beyond. Bellis watches them approach through the huge telescope on the Grand Easterly.

The Grand Easterly is the redoubt, the heart of the city.

“We stand,” Uther Doul is shouting to those around him, to the snipers in the rigging.

No one has suggested anything else. No one has suggested that they goad the avanc and escape.

The Crobuzoner ships endure the barrage from the guns on the Sorghum (and do not return fire, Bellis notices, do not risk damaging the rig itself). They are close enough now that their structures can be seen: their bridges, their turrets and railings and their guns, and the crews who prepare, check weapons, gesticulate, and get into formations. Cordite billows over the deck, and Bellis’ eyes water. The small-arms fire has begun.

This is an organized raid. The invaders do not land ragged across the aft edge of the city: they maintain formation, an arrowhead, and steam directly into the bay of boats around the Sorghum. The Crobuzoners are intently making their way toward the Grand Easterly.

Bellis backs away from the railing. The deck below her raised roof boils with Armadans ready to fight. She realizes that she is trapped on this platform by a flood of armed bodies, that it is too late to run.

Part of her wants to yell in greeting-in desperate welcome-when the Crobuzoners arrive. But she knows that they have no interest in taking her home, that it is irrelevant to them if she lives or dies. She is desperately uncertain, realizing that she does not know which side she wants to win this confrontation.

As she steps back, Bellis feels suddenly as if she has walked into somebody, that she has felt a disturbance in the air, heard someone retreat from her with a quick step. She twists quickly to see, panic punching her, but there is no one. She is alone above the fray.

She looks down into the seething, armed men and women and finds herself staring at Uther Doul. He is perfectly still.

Flintlocks firing, the Crobuzoner navy boards Armada. At the point where the two forces meet, there is the most savage bloodletting. The Armadan cactacae are at the front, and the Crobuzoners are faced by a line of their massive, thorned bodies. The cactacae split men with great strokes from their war cleavers.

But there are cactus-people on the New Crobuzon side, too; and men firing rivebows with weighted, spinning chakris that smash like axe blades into the vegetable-muscles and bones of the cactacae, severing limbs and cutting fibrous skulls; and there are thaumaturges on the invading vessels who link hands and send bolts of darkly glowing unlight into the Armadan mass.

The Crobuzoners are forcing the Armadans back.

Around the base of Bellis’ squat platform, now, is the New Crobuzon navy. She is paralyzed. Part of her wants to run to them, but she waits. She does not know how this will turn. She does not know what she will do.

Once again, someone is on the platform with her. That feeling comes and goes.

With a drab and bloody inexorability, the New Crobuzon troops encroach across the Grand Easterly’s deck.

Uniformed men approach Uther Doul from aft, port, and star’d. He is waiting. Armadans are falling around him, pushed back, felled by flintlock bullets and a cascade of blades.

Bellis is watching Uther Doul when finally, suddenly, surrounded now by fast-encroaching enemies, by pistols and rifles and curving sabers, he moves.

He calls out: a long bark that is savage but musical, that takes shape and becomes his own name.

“Doul,” he cries, repeating it, drawing it out like a huntsman’s call. “Dooooouuuuul!”

And he is answered. Armadans around the deck take up the call as they fight, and his name echoes across the ship. And as the Crobuzoners try to encircle him, try to pen him in with their weapons, Uther Doul finally attacks.

Suddenly he holds a pistol in each hand, drawn from his hip holsters, and they are raised and firing in quite different directions, each one bursting open the face of a man. Their bullets spent, he hurls the guns away from him as he twists (the men around him looking quite still), and they spin through the air at speed and smash into one man’s chest and another’s throat, and Doul has two more flintlocks in his hands, and is firing again simultaneously (and only now do his first two victims finish falling), sending two more men away in ugly cartwheels, one dead, one dying, and he is turning and the guns are missiles again, clubbing a man unconscious.

Every motion Doul makes is perfect: flawless and straight-lined. There is no excess; there are no curves.

The men around him are beginning to scream, but they are pushed on by the force of their fellows behind. They move sluggishly toward Doul, who is in the air, his legs bent under him, turning amid a pattering of bullets. He fires with new guns and hurls them away into the faces of more enemies, then lets his feet touch down again. He has a last pistol in his hand and is moving it from face to cringing face, firing, leaping, and throwing it aside, kicking out with bent legs, a stampfighting move, breaking a cactus-man’s nose and pushing him back into the bodies of his Crobuzoner comrades.

Bellis watches, breathing hard, unmoving. Everywhere else the fighting is ugly: contingent and chaotic and stupid. She is aghast that Doul can make it beautiful.

He is still again for a moment as the Crobuzoner troops regroup and surround him. He is hemmed in. Then Doul’s ceramic blade flashes like polished bone.

His first strike is precise, a thrust too fast to see that pushes into a throat and flicks out again in a spray of sap, drowning a cactus-man in his own life. And then Uther Doul is tightly encircled and he cries out his own name again, quite unafraid, and his stance changes, and he reaches across his body, releasing the pent-up motor on his belt, turning on the Possible Sword.

There is a crack like static, and a hum in the air. Bellis cannot see Doul’s right arm clearly. It seems to shimmer, to vibrate. It is unstuck in time.

Doul moves (dancing) and turns to face the mass of his attackers. His left arm flails backward with loose, simian grace, and with shocking speed he raises his weapon arm.

His sword blossoms.

It is fecund, it is brimming, it sheds echoes. Doul has a thousand right arms, slicing in a thousand directions. His body moves, and like a stunningly complex tree, his sword arms spread through the air, solid and ghostly.

Some of them can hardly be seen; some are quite opaque. All move with Doul’s speed; all carry his blade. They overlap and move through each other-and bite where they land. He cuts left to right and right to left, and down and up, and he stabs and parries and slashes savagely, all at once. A hundred blades block every attack that his enemies make, and countless more retaliate brutally.

The men before him are carved and lacerated with a palimpsest of monstrous wounds. Doul strikes, and blood and screams welter up from around him in unbelievable gouts. The New Crobuzon sailors are frozen. For a second, they watch their comrades fall in bloody death. And Uther Doul moves again.

He calls his name, he turns, he leaps and coils above them, kicking and spinning, always moving, and everywhere he faces he lashes out with the Possible Sword. He is surrounded, shrouded, hidden by nigh-swords, his grey armor half visible through a translucent wall of his own attacks. He is like a spirit, a god of revenge, a murderous bladed wind. He moves past the men who have boarded his ship and sends up a mist of their blood, leaving them dying, limbs and body parts skittering over the deck. His armor is red.

Bellis sees his face for one instant. It is ruined with a feral snarl.

The Crobuzoner men die in great numbers and fire their weapons like children.

With one stroke and countless wounds, Doul tears open a thaumaturge who is trying to slow him, and the woman’s puissance makes her blood boil as it dissipates; and he fells a huge cactus-man who raises a shield that deflects many hundreds of Doul’s attacks but cannot protect him from them all; and he murders a fire-throwing sailor whose tank of pyrotic gas splits open and bursts, igniting even as his face is cut apart. Countless cuts with every stroke.

“Gods,” Bellis whispers to herself, unhearing. “Jabber protect us…” She is awed.

Uther Doul lets the Possible Sword run for less than half a minute.

When he thumbs it off, and is suddenly absolutely still, and turns to the remaining Crobuzoner sailors, his face is calm. The cold, still solidity of his right arm is shocking. He looks like some monster, some gore-ghost. He breathes deeply-wet, slick, dripping with other men’s blood.

Uther Doul calls his own name, breathless, savagely triumphant.

Unseen in Bellis’ shadow, the man moves the statue down from his lips.

He is horrified. He is utterly aghast. I didn’t know, he thinks, frantic. I didn’t know it could be like that…

The man has watched his liberators board and has seen them slowly break through those who opposed them, winning the Grand Easterly, taking charge of the vessel, of Armada’s heart… And now he has seen them withered and bloodied and destroyed in seconds, at the hands of Uther Doul.

He looks out frantically at the frigates wedged between the Sorghum and the city, and he tongues the statue again and feels it spit power into him. He debates racing over the side of this superstructure, over the corpses below, and onto the New Crobuzon ships.

“It’s me!” he might call. “I’m here! I’m the reason you’re here! Let’s go, let’s run, let’s get out of here!”

He can’t take all of them, the man thinks, his courage returning as he stares at the red-drenched figure of Uther Doul below. Even with that godsdamned sword, there are too many, and the Armadan ships are being wiped out. Eventually more Crobuzoner troops will get here, and then we can leave. The man turns and looks out, to where the dreadnoughts are pounding the remnants of the Armadan fleet.

But even as he readies himself again to leave, he sees something.

The legions of tugs and steamers that have surrounded Armada like a corona, hauling it for decades, and that have now been left redundant by the avanc, are beginning to pull away from the city’s orbit and head for the Crobuzoner fleet.

They have been refitted by frantic crews over the last few hours: built up with guns; stuffed full of black powder and explosives, with harpoons and phlogistic cells and batteries and jags welded, bolted, soldered, and screwed into temporary place. None of them is a battleship: none is any match for an ironclad. But there are so many of them.

Even as they approach, a volley from the Morning Walker destroys one with a contemptuous blast. But there are many, many more behind it.

Unseen, the man’s face falters, frozen. I didn’t think… he stutters to himself, silently. I didn’t think of them.

He has told his government everything-he warned them of the nauscopists, so that the Crobuzoner meteoromancers could hide their fleet’s approach; of the airships, so that golems were prepared; and of how many ships they would have to face. The Crobuzoner forces have been calculated to defeat the Armadan navy, which this man has researched and communicated to them. But he did not think to count those useless, age-pocked tugs and steamers, trawlers and tramps. He did not imagine them reckless and stuffed with explosives. He had not pictured them driving across the sea, into the path of an ironclad or a dreadnought, as they do now, firing their pathetic guns like pugnacious children. He did not imagine their crews abandoning them when they were mere yards away, hurling themselves from the sterns of the smoke-spewing ships and onto rafts and lifeboats and watching as their abandoned vessels ram the flanks of the Crobuzoner ships, breaching their inches of iron and igniting, exploding.

There is a smear of dirty colors to the west, and the sun is very low. The crews of the two dirigibles waiting by Dry Fall’s Uroc are impatient.

The Brucolac and his vampir cadre will soon be awake and ready to fight.

But something is changing in the sea aft of the city. The Crobuzoner sailors who have boarded the city are staring in horrified astonishment, the Armadans watching with fierce hope.

The tugs and steamers continue to plow toward the oncoming Crobuzoner fleet-driving on toward the battleships, their engines overheating, their wheels locked into position, their throttles wedged full ahead-until, in ones and twos, they impact. Several are blown from the water in fountains of metal and flesh before they can reach any quarry. But there are so many.

When they reach the towering sides of a dreadnought, the prows of the empty tugs and trawlers crumple, buckling backward. And as they compress, their red-hot engines burst, and the oil or gunpowder or dynamite wedged beside the engines ignites. And with ugly, oily flames; with great gouts of smoke and dragged-out explosions that dissipate some of the energy into useless sound; with one-two-threes of smaller detonations in place of one solid blast, the ships explode.

Even such imperfect torpedoes as these begin to hole the Crobuzoner dreadnoughts.

Way behind them, the broken Armada force starts to regroup. The New Crobuzon vessels are being slowed, and slowly ruined, by the onslaught of sacrificed vessels. The Armadan battleships rally their fleet and begin to fire on their stalled enemies.

The sea is full of lifeboats: escapees from the abandoned vessels that shudder their way toward the dreadnoughts. The crews row frantically, striving to avoid other oncoming Armadan ships. Some fail: some are crushed and sunk; some are swamped by the enormous bloody waves, or are caught in the heat of depth charges or are broken up by cannonballs. But many escape into the open sea, back toward Armada, watching their ugly little tugs smack into the invaders and explode.

These unexpected attackers-a ridiculous, wasteful line of defense-have stopped the Crobuzoners, ship after ship immolating itself, melting their target’s iron sides.

The dreadnoughts are stopped.

The Morning Walker is sinking.

There is a cheer, a rising yell of astonished triumph, from the aft edge of Armada, where the citizens can see what is happening only a handful of miles out to sea.

The roar is picked up by those who hear the cry of triumph and mimic it; and then by those behind them, and behind them. It sweeps across the city. Within a minute, men and women in the far reaches of Dry Fall and Shaddler and the Clockhouse Spur, on the other side of Armada, are screaming their ecstatic approval, though they are not sure of what.

The Crobuzoner troops stare in total horror. A great crack spreads up the side of the Morning Walker. More of the little ships smash into it and explode, even as it begins to buckle, even as its magisterial outline begins to twist; and it starts to angle its massive length down, as if purposefully; and frantic little figures begin to hurl themselves from its sides; and the explosions continue until its stern rises suddenly from the sea and, with a terrible shattering explosion, breaks off, spewing men and metal and coal-tons and tons of coal-into the sea.

The New Crobuzon crews watch as their chance to return home disappears. The Armadans scream their approval again, as the huge shape rolls over in the sea, ponderous and regretful, resenting every movement, and burps up fire as it is dragged below.

The Crobuzoner flagship has gone.

Frantic, its fellow dreadnoughts begin to level volleys too soon at Armada itself, churning the sea and making the city pitch as if it were in a storm. But some of the smaller ironclads are now in range, and their heavy shells shatter masts and tear through the fabric of the city.

A bomb swamps Winterstraw Market, tearing apart a circle of stallholder’s boats. Two shells arc chillingly overhead and break a hole in the side of the Pinchermarn, sending hundreds of library books flaming into the water. Ships are sunk, the bridges that tether them on all sides splintering.

Angevine and Shekel comfort each other, hiding from the remnants of the invading Crobuzoners. Shekel is bleeding profusely from his face.

But terrible though these attacks are, only the dreadnoughts could destroy the city, and they are not in range. They are being harried, contained, broken by the onslaught of gunpowder-stuffed tugs. The Armadan vessels keep coming. After a fifth explosion rocks its bows, the Bane of Suroch begins to buckle, to crack, to list, to collapse into the water.

Ironclads and scouts mill solicitous and useless around it, drones around a dying queen. Under renewed onslaught from the remnants of the Armadan fleet, but most of all under the unexpected and suicidal attacks of all those refitted steamers, the New Crobuzon dreadnoughts are, one by one, being destroyed.

From the raised deck above the Grand Easterly, the man screams in unheard horror.

The man tenses and kisses his statue with a fervent frenzy, then prepares to leap out and down, folding space a little, and land on that frigate below, which is rumbling and gearing up to leave. But he stops as a terrible realization shakes him.

He watches the last two dreadnoughts quiver under the attacks and fire their vicious guns at their tormentors. And even though those retaliations cost several Armadan vessels, the ugly explosions that rock the dreadnoughts’ flanks continue until the Crobuzoner vessels go down.

The invaders’ coal has been sunk. The man watches, quite numb. There is no point now in him jumping ship or swimming out for his home vessels. Even if the Armadans do not destroy every single ship, even if one or two fast-running ironclads escape, this is the middle of the Swollen Ocean, uncharted waters, almost two thousand miles from the nearest land and twice that far to home. Within a few hundred miles their boilers will grow cold, and the Crobuzoner vessels will be calmed.

They have no sails. They will rot and die.

There is no hope for them.

This rescue has failed. The man is still trapped.

He looks down and realizes with a dull shock that he has slipped back into phase with Bellis’ space. If she turned now, she would see him. He mouths the statue again, numbly, and disappears.

Dusk fell, and finally the Dry Fall dirigibles lifted off, each containing its murderous crew. They sailed low and fast over the last dregs of battle, their vampir passengers ready. Long tongues flickered in the night air as the ab-dead prepared to hurl themselves into any fray.

They were too late. The fight was over.

The airships meandered pointlessly over water fouled with coaldust and twisted metal and acid and oil, and here and there the shimmering residue of rockmilk, and sap, and many gallons of blood.