The Scar

Chapter Thirty-eight

“You murderous fucking bitch.”

Bellis gripped the back of her chair, gasping with pain, blinking to clear her eyes. Tanner Sack had hit her once, a hard backhanded slap that had sent her into the wall. The blow seemed to have taken the physical anger out of him and left him with only the strength to speak to her, hatefully. He kept his gun aimed at her head.

“I didn’t know,” said Bellis, “I swear to Jabber I didn’t know.” She felt little fear. Mostly, she felt a thick shame and a confusion that slurred her words.

“You fucking evil shit,” said Tanner, not loud. “You fucking bloodsucker, you bitch, you bitch, fuck you…”

“I didn’t know,” she said again. The gun did not waver.

He swore at her again, a drawn-out drawl of invective, and she did not interrupt. She let him speak until he was tired. He cursed her for a long time, and then suddenly changed his tack, speaking to her in what was almost a normal tone.

“All them dead. All that blood. I was under the waves, you know that? I was swimming in it.” He whispered the words at her. “I was swimming in the fucking blood. Killing men like me. Stupid New Crobuzon boys that might’ve been my mates. And if I’d been took back, if they’d got their way, if they’d done what they wanted, if they’d taken this fucking city, then the killing wouldn’t have stopped. I’d be on my way to the colonies now. A Remade slave.

“My boy,” he said, suddenly hushed. “Shekel. You know Shekel, don’t you?” He stared at her. “He helped you a few times. Him and his lady, Angevine, got caught up in the fighting. Ange can take care of herself, but Shekel? He got himself a rifle, stupid lad. A bullet hit the rail under him, and the splinters tore open his face. It’s a mess. He’ll always be marked-always. And there am I, thinking that if that Crobuzoner had moved his gun an inch-a fucking inch-then Shekel’d be gone. He’d be gone.”

Bellis could not insulate herself from his desolate tone.

“Like all the others who’ve gone.” Tanner’s voice was drab. “And who killed them, all the dead crews? Who killed ’em? Had to call for help, didn’t you? Did you even think about what might happen? Did you? Did you care? Do you care now?” His words hammered her, and even as she shook her head- that’s not how it was-she felt deep shame. “You killed them, you traitor fuck.

“You… and me.”

He kept the gun steady, but his face distorted.

“Me,” he said. “Why’d you bring me in?” His eyes were bloodshot. “You nearly killed my boy.”

Bellis blinked away her own tears.

“Tanner,” she said, and her voice was throaty. “Tanner,” she said slowly, raising her hands in a helpless gesture. “I swear to you, I swear to you, I swear… I didn’t know.”

She supposed that he had always had some vestige of doubt, some uncertainty, or he would have simply blown her away. She spoke to him for a long time, stumbling over her words, trying to find ways to express what sounded impossible, utterly untrue, even to her.

All the time she spoke, his gun never left her face. As she told Tanner what she had realized, Bellis stopped speaking, from time to time, as the truth of it sank into her.

The window was visible over Tanner Sack’s shoulder, and she stared through it as she spoke. That was much easier than meeting his eyes. Whenever she glimpsed his face, she burned. The outrage of betrayal, and most of all the shame, scoured her.

“I believed what I told you,” she told him, and remembering the carnage, she winced so hard it hurt. “He lied to me, too.”

“I don’t fucking know how they found Armada,” she said, a little time later, still in the face of Tanner’s scorn and livid disbelief. “I don’t know how it works; I don’t know what they did; I don’t know what information or machinery he stole to let it happen. There was something… He must have hidden something; he must have given them something they needed, something to track us, in that message…”

“The one you gave me,” Tanner said, and Bellis hesitated, then nodded.

“The one he gave me, and I gave you,” she said.

“I was convinced,” she said. “Jabber, Tanner, why do you think I was on the Terpsichoria? I was a fucking exile, Tanner.” He kept quiet at that.

“I was running,” Bellis went on. “I was running. And damn, I don’t like it here, this isn’t my place… But I was running. I wouldn’t call those bastards; I wouldn’t trust them. I was on the run because I was scared for my fucking neck.” He looked at her curiously. “And anyway…” She hesitated to say more, fearing that she would sound ingratiating, though she wanted to tell him the truth.

“Anyway…” she continued, keeping her voice calm. “Anyway, I wouldn’t have done that. I’d not do that to… to you, to any of you. I’m not a fucking magister, Tanner. I’d not wish their justice on any of you.”

He gazed back at her, his face like stone.

What decided him, she realized later, what led him to believe her, was not her sadness or her shame. He did not trust those, and she did not blame him. What convinced him that she was telling the truth, that she had been as duped as him, was her rage.

For a long, wordless, miserable time, Bellis felt herself trembling, and her fists clenched bone-hard and white.

“You fucker,” she heard herself say, and shook her head.

Tanner could tell she was not speaking to him. She was thinking of Silas Fennec.

“He told me lies,” she spat suddenly to Tanner, surprising herself, “after lie after lie… so that he could use me.”

He used me, she thought, like he used everyone else. I watched him at work; I knew what he did, how he used people, but…

But I didn’t think he was doing it with me.

“He humiliated you,” Tanner said. “Thought you were special, did you?” he sneered. “Thought you could see through him? Thought you was in it together?”

She stared at him, white-hot with rage and self-disgust at being gulled by Silas like some stupid naive, like his puppets, like everyone else. Me more than all the poor fools reading Simon Fench’s pamphlets; me more than every poor stupid fuck acting as his contact. She was sick at the contempt, the ease, with which he had lied to her.

“You piece of shit,” she muttered. “I’ll fucking destroy you.”

Tanner sneered at her again, and she knew how pathetic she sounded.

“Do you think any of what he said was true?” Tanner Sack asked her.

They sat together, stiff and uncertain. Tanner still held the gun, but loosely. They had not become coconspirators. He looked at her with dislike and anger. Even if he believed that she had not set out to harm Armada, she was not his comrade. She was still the one who had persuaded him to be message-boy. It was she who had implicated him in the butchery.

Bellis shook her head in slow dudgeon.

“Do I think New Crobuzon is under attack?” she said disgustedly. “Do I think the most powerful city-state in the world is being threatened by malevolent fish? That two thousand years of history is about to end, and that only I can save my home? No, Tanner Sack, I don’t. I think he wanted to get a message home, and that was all. I think that manipulative fuck played me like a fiddle. Like he plays everyone.” He’s an assassin, a spy; he’s an agent, she thought. He’s exactly what I was running from. And still, lonely and credulous like some fucking lost fool, I believed him.

Why would they come for him? she thought suddenly. Why would they cross four thousand miles just to rescue one man? It wasn’t for him, and I don’t think it was for the Sorghum.

“There’s more to this…” she said slowly, and tried to form thoughts. “There’s more to this than we can see.”

They wouldn’t come this far, risk this much, just for him, no matter how good an agent he is. He has something, she realized. He has something they want.

“So what are we going to do?”

It was growing light. The city’s birds were sounding. Bellis’ head ached; she was terribly tired.

She ignored Tanner’s question for a moment. As she looked out of the window, she could see the sky paling and the silhouettes of rigging and architecture etched in black. It was very still. She could see the waves against the city’s sides, could make out Armada’s faint northern passage. The air was cool.

Bellis wanted one more moment in this time, one more suspended second, when she could breathe, before she spoke, and answered Tanner, and set in motion a clumsy, claustrophobic endgame.

She knew the answer to his question, but she did not want to give it. She did not look at him. She knew he would ask again. Silas Fennec was still free in the city, having seen his attempted rescue fail, and there was only one thing that could be done. She knew that Tanner knew it, that he was testing her, that there was only one possible answer to his question and that if she failed to give it, he might still shoot her dead.

“What are we going to do?” he said again. She looked up at him, weary. “You know that.” She laughed unpleasantly. “We have to tell the truth.

“We have to tell Uther Doul.”