The Scar

Chapter Thirty-nine

Here we drift, near the northern rim of the Swollen Ocean, and only-what?-a thousand, two thousand miles to the west, the northwest, is the Cunning Sea. And nestled in the crooks of its coast, on the shoreline of an unmapped continent, is the colony of Nova Esperium.

Is it the small, bright, glittering city of which I have seen pictures? I have seen heliotypes of its towers, and its grain silos, and the forests that surround it, and the unique animals of its environs: framed and posed, sepia, hand-colored. There’s a new chance for everyone in Nova Esperium. Even the Remade, the indentured, the laborers, can earn freedom.

(Not that that is true.)

I have pictured myself looking down at the settlement from the slopes of the mountains I can see in those pictures (washed out by distance, out of focus). Learning the languages of the natives, picking over the bones of old books that we might find in the ruins.

It is ten miles from New Crobuzon to the estuary, to the edge of Iron Bay.

I keep finding myself in that place, in my memories, beyond the city, poised between the land and the sea.

I have lost my seasons. I left when autumn became winter, and that is the last strong sense I have of time. Since then the heat and cool and cold and heat again have been chaotic, ill-mannered, random, to me.

Perhaps it is autumn again in Nova Esperium.

In New Crobuzon, it is spring.

I have knowledge that I cannot use, on a journey I cannot control, the aims of which I do not share or understand, and I am longing for a home I fled, and for a place I have never seen.

There are birds beyond these walls, sounding to each other, violent and stupid, wrestling with the wind, and with my eyes closed I can pretend to watch them; I can pretend to be on any ship, anywhere in the world.

But I open my eyes (I must), and I am still here, in this Senate chamber again, standing beside Tanner Sack, and my head is lowered, and I am in chains.

A few feet in front of Bellis and Tanner, Uther Doul was concluding his address to the city’s rulers: the Lovers, Dynich, the new Curhouse Council, and all the others. It was after dark. The Brucolac was also attending. He was the only ruler not marked by the war-all the others bore scars or blasted expressions. The rulers listened to Uther Doul. Now and then they glanced at the prisoners.

Bellis watched them watching her and saw the anger in their eyes. Tanner Sack could not look up. He was wrapped very tight in misery and shame.

“We’re agreed,” said Uther Doul. “We must move quickly. We can assume that what we’ve been told is correct. We must bring Silas Fennec in, immediately. And we can also assume that if he hasn’t yet worked out that we’re hunting him, he will do so soon.”

“But how did he fucking do it?” shouted King Friedrich. “I mean, I understand about this fucking package, this fucking message…” He glared at Bellis and Tanner. “But how did Fennec get hold of a fucking lodestone? The compass factory, for fuck’s sake… it’s guarded tighter than my fucking treasury. How did he get in?”

“That we don’t yet know,” said Uther Doul, “and it is one of the very first things we’ll ask him. As far as possible, we have to keep this business quiet. As Simon Fench, Fennec… is… not without supporters,” Doul went on. The Lovers did not look at each other. “We shouldn’t risk… angering any citizens. We need to move now. Does anyone know how we might start?”

Dynich coughed and raised his hand. “I have heard rumors,” he began hesitantly, “that Fench operates out of certain drinking holes-”

“King, let me speak,” the Brucolac interrupted in his scraped-up voice. Everyone looked at him in surprise. The vampir seemed unusually hesitant. He sighed and unrolled his flickering tongue, then continued.

“It’s no secret that Dry Fall riding has strong differences with the rulers of Garwater over the summoning of the avanc, and the city’s trajectory-which is still undisclosed,” he added with a brief flash of anger. “However-” His tan eyes took in the room like a challenge. “-I hope it would never be alleged that the Brucolac, or any of my cadre, are less than absolutely loyal to this city. It’s a matter of deep regret to us that we weren’t able to fight for Armada in the war that’s just passed.

“I know,” he went on quickly, “that my citizens fought. We have our share of the dead-but not me and mine. And we feel that. We owe you a debt.

“I know where Silas Fennec is.”

There was a quick chorus of gasps.

“How do you know?” said the Lover. “How long have you known?”

“Not long,” said the Brucolac. He met her eyes, but he did not look proud. “We found out where Simon Fench rested his head and printed his works. But you know…” he said with sudden fervor. “You know that we had no idea of his plans. We would never have allowed this.”

The implication was obvious. He had allowed “Simon Fench” to spread his influence, to print his dissident literature and unleash damaging rumors, so long as he had thought the victim of that activity would be Garwater rather than the city as a whole. He had not known about the Crobuzoner fleet that Fennec had called. Like Tanner and Bellis, he found himself implicated in what had happened.

Bellis watched, sneering inwardly at the Lovers’ ostentatious outrage. As if you’ve never done the same or more, she thought. As if that’s not how all of you bastards operate against each other.

“I’m aware,” hissed the Brucolac, “of how this stands. And I want this bastard brought down as much as any of you do. Which is why it will be a pleasure, as well as a duty, to take him.”

“You don’t take him,” said Uther Doul. “I take him-my men and I.”

The Brucolac turned his yellowing eyes to Doul. “I have certain advantages,” he said slowly. “This mission is important to me.”

“You do not get absolution this way, Deadman,” Doul said coldly. “You chose to let him play his games unimpeded, and this is the result. Now, tell us where he is, and then your interference ends.”

There was silence for several seconds.

“Where is he?” shouted the Lover suddenly. “Where’s he been hiding?”

“That’s another reason it makes sense for my cadre to hunt him,” the Brucolac replied. “He’s in a place many of your troops might refuse to go. Silas Fennec is in the haunted quarter.”

Doul did not flinch. He stared at the vampir. “You do not take him,” he said again. “I am not afraid.”

Bellis listened with shame, and a slow-burning hatred for Fennec. You fuck, she thought with savage satisfaction. Let’s see you lie your way out of this.

Even though he might still be her best hope to get out, she could never allow that fucking pig to lie to her, to use her. That could not go without payback, no matter the cost. She would rather take her chances in Armada, or at the Scar.

You should have fucking told me, Silas, she thought, breathing hard with fury. I wanted-I want-to get away, too. If you’d told me the truth-if you’d been open, if you’d been honest, if you’d not used me-I might have helped you, she thought. We might have done it all together.

But she knew that was not true.

Desperate as she was to get out of this place, she would not have helped him had she known his plans. She would not have been party to that.

With dreadful self-disgust, Bellis realized that Silas had judged her well. His job was to know what he could tell to whom, to know how far those around him would go, and to lie to them accordingly. He had to judge what to tell each of his pawns.

He had been right about her.

Bellis remembered Uther Doul’s rage when she and Tanner had come to him.

He had stared at them as they explained, his face growing stiller and more cold, his eyes darker, as they spoke. Flustered, Bellis and Tanner in turn had tried to explain to him that they had known nothing, that they had both been used.

Tanner had gabbled, and Doul had been impassive, waiting for him to finish and punishing him with silence, saying nothing at all. But then he had turned to Bellis and waited for her explanations. He had unnerved her-he was quite unmoving when she told him that she knew Silas Fennec, Simon Fench. He had not seemed surprised at all by that. He had stood quietly, waiting for more information. But when she told him what she had done, what she had couriered for Fennec, then quite suddenly Doul had exploded with anger.

“No,” he had shouted. “What did he do?”

And when she had murmured something to him-some shamefaced, stuttered assertion that she had had no idea, that she had never dreamed, that she could not have known-he had stared at her very hard, with an expression of cold dislike and cruelty that she had never seen him wear before and that had cut her to her innards.

“Are you sure?” he had said to her, appallingly. “Is that so? No idea? None at all?”

He had birthed a maggot of doubt in her head that grubbed pitilessly through her remorse and misery.

Did I never know? Did I never doubt?

The rulers were arguing about the geography of Armada’s haunted quarter, about the ghuls and the tallow ghast, about how they should set their trap.

Bellis spoke loud enough to interrupt them all. “Senate,” she said. They were silent.

Doul took her in, his eyes absolutely unforgiving. She did not flinch.

“There’s something else that should be remembered,” she said. “I don’t believe that New Crobuzon would cross so many thousands of miles out of love. They wouldn’t risk all those ships, and all that effort, not even for the Sorghum, and certainly not just to bring their man home.

“Silas Fennec has something they want. I don’t know what it is, and I… I swear to you that I would tell you if I knew. I believe… One thing I believe is true, that he told me, is that he spent time in High Cromlech, and most recently in The Gengris. I saw his notebooks, and I believe that.

“He told me that the grindylow had hunted him. And maybe that was true, too. Perhaps because of something he’d taken: something that New Crobuzon would risk crossing the world for, when they found out he had it. Perhaps that’s why they came.

“You’ve all agreed that he’s done things he should never have been able to do: stolen things, broken into impregnable places. Well, perhaps whatever Silas Fennec has-whatever he stole, whatever the Crobuzoners came to fetch-is behind all that. So I suppose I’m saying… remember that, when you track him down, that he might be using something… And be careful.”

There was a long, unbending silence after she spoke.

“She’s right,” someone said.

“And what of her?” said a pugnacious youth from the Curhouse Council. “Do you-do we-believe them? That they knew nothing? That they were just trying to save their own city?”

“This is my city,” shouted Tanner Sack suddenly, to shocked silence.

Uther Doul looked at Tanner, whose head slumped slowly back down.

“We deal with them later,” Doul said. “They’ll be incarcerated for now, until we bring in Silas Fennec. Then we can question him, and we can judge.”

It was Uther Doul himself who led Tanner and Bellis to their cells.

He took them from the meeting room into the warren of tunnels that riddled the Grand Easterly. Through the darkwood paneled corridors, past ancient heliotypes of New Crobuzon sailors. Down gaslit tunnels. Where they eventually stopped, there were strange sounds of settling metal and laboring engines.

Doul pushed Tanner (gently) through a door, and Bellis glimpsed a sparse berth within: a bunk, a desk and chair, a window. Doul turned away from Bellis and walked on. He judged correctly that she would follow him: even like this, toward her own imprisonment.

In the cell, the darkness beyond the window was not cloudy night. They were lower than the waterline, and her porthole opened onto the unlit sea. She turned and held onto the door, stopping Doul from pushing it closed.

“Doul,” she said, and looked for any sign of softness, or friendship or attraction or forgiveness, and saw none.

He waited.

“One thing,” she said, meeting his eyes resolutely. “Tanner Sack… he’s a bigger victim here than anyone. He’d do nothing to endanger Armada. He’s in hell; he’s broken. If you’re going to punish anyone…” She drew shaky breath. “I’m trying to say, if you’re interested in justice, you’ll… not punish him, at least. Whatever else you decide. He’s the most loyal Armadan-the most loyal Garwater man-I know.”

Uther Doul stared at her for a long time. He twisted his head slowly to one side, as if curious.

“Goodness, Miss Coldwine,” he said eventually, his voice level: softer, more beautiful than ever. “By the gods. What a display of bravery, self-sacrifice. To take onto yourself the largest share of blame, to altruistically beg mercy for another. Had I suspected you of base motivations and manipulations-of deliberately and cynically or uncaringly bringing war to my city-had I been considering treating you severely for your actions, I believe I would have to rethink now, in the light of this, your obvious… selfless… nobility.”

Bellis had looked up sharply as he began to speak, but her eyes widened as he continued. His level voice became sour as he mocked her.

She burned, utterly dismayed. Shamed, and alone again.

“Oh,” she breathed. She could not speak.

Uther Doul turned the key and left Bellis alone to watch the fishes that swarmed stupidly to whatever light spilled from her window.

There was no such thing as silence in Armada. In the quietest part of the longest night, without a soul on any side, the city was full of noises.

The wind and water played it incessantly. Armada rode on swells, and compacted, and spread its substance wide and brought it tight again. The rigging whispered. Masts and smokestacks shifted uncomfortably. Vessels knocked together for hour upon hour, like bones, like someone infinitely stupid and patient at the door of an empty house.

The city came closest to true silence in its empty haunted quarter. The tapping and grating and slopping of water seemed more hollow there. But in that place there were other, more obscure sounds that frightened those who heard them, and kept intruders away.

A slow crackling, like a tower of kindling collapsing. The rhythmic thudding of something mechanical piercing wood. A faint crooning like a mistuned flute.

The haunted quarter lolled among its odd noises, and moldered and swelled faintly with years of water, and continued its long, drawn-out collapse. No one knew what was hidden there in its age-blistered boats.

The Wordhoard was the largest vessel in the haunted quarter. An ancient ship more than four hundred feet long, carved in ocher wood, once deep-stained with intense colors, all blasted now by age and salt air. It was littered with the debris of five masts and a profusion of derricks and stays and yards. The staves and poles lay across the deck like crosshatching. They were losing their shapes, rotting and worm-eaten into nothing.

It was almost midnight. Sounds came from Dry Fall and Thee-And-Thine ridings: drinking and everything that went with it; mechanical noises of reconstruction from the building sites created by the war. There were still bridges linking the ridings to the haunted quarter, old and unused, put in place unknown numbers of years ago and tenaciously refusing to become dust.

From a rude little barge at the edge of Thee-And-Thine, a man crept across water to the derelict vessels beyond. He walked without fear through a shipscape of decay: mildew, and rust corrosive as frostbite. There was only starlight to see by, but he knew his way.

At the fore of an iron trawler, the great winches were split, and they splayed their mechanical innards as if they had been butchered. The man picked a way through the greased carnage and crossed onto the Wordhoard. Its long deck reared out before him, listing a little off true.

(It was held below by the vast chain, fitted long ago, that stretched down into the water and held the avanc in place.)

The man descended into the darkness at the haunted vessel’s core. He was not quiet. He knew that if he was heard, he would be thought a phantom.

He moved through half-lit corridors, their contours outlined with thaumaturgy or phosphorescent mold.

The man slowed and looked around him, his face creasing in hard concern, his fingers tightening on the statue he held. When he reached age-slimed steps leading down, he stopped, resting his free hand on the banister. He held his breath and turned his head slowly around him, staring hard into every dark place, listening.

Something was whispering.

That was a sound the man had never heard before, even on these ghost-infested decks.

The man turned. He gazed into the pitch-black at the end of the passageway as if it were a battle of wills, as if he tried to stare down the darkness, until eventually he won, and it gave up what it had been hiding.

“Silas.”

A man stepped out of the shadow.

Instantly Silas Fennec brought up the statue in his hand and slammed his tongue deep into its gorge. The figure was running at him, covering the distance in the darkness, a sword extended.

And suddenly there were others. Hard-faced figures emerged from boltholes in the wood, all around, and came at him with shocking speed. They bore down on him with guns and weapons outstretched.

“Keep him alive!” shouted Doul.

Silas Fennec felt a tremor from the lascivious tongue of his stone icon, and puissance roared through him. He stepped up-up onto spaces that he would not have seen or been capable of treading a moment before. Fennec twisted as the first Garwater man passed stupidly below him, then he opened his mouth and gasped as his gut spasmed. With a retching growl he spewed up a bolt of green-black glowing bile, a mouthful of thaumaturgically charged plasma that was not quite viscous liquid and not quite energy. It burst from him and landed foursquare in his attacker’s face.

Silas Fennec stepped quickly through ways of seeing, leaving the corridor, rising through the boat, the man on whom he had spat shrieking weakly and clawing himself, and dying.

The yeomanry were everywhere, emerging from doors and clutching at his clothes. They burst from closed spaces like rats or dogs or worms or gods knew what, reaching out for him and swinging their blades. They were quick, chosen for skill and courage: a plague, an infestation, an invasion, hemming him, penning him in, hunting him down.

Jabber and fuck they’re all around me, Fennec thought, and hungrily pressed his mouth again to the statuette. Planes and angles folded around him, reconfiguring in his path and wake, and he twisted and bolted up stairs feeling like a drowning man, reaching for air. He was angry.

The Garwater crew grabbed for him, gripped hold of what they could. You do not fuck with me, he thought, and felt a swell of power. I can do more than fucking run. He turned, snarling, spat and spewed and puked at his attackers, venting the baleful coagulum that collected in him with the statue’s kiss. He rolled his tongue and hawked snotty jets of the stuff at the faces around him.

Where the sputum hit, it corroded normal space like a dimensional acid, and the yeomen cried out in dreadful alien pain as their eyes and bones and flesh folded in on themselves and out of corporeality, dissolving, dissipating, torn away in impossible directions. They lay wounded and wetly screaming, and Silas looked at them without pity as he passed, seeing their faces flayed of reality, bleeding a viscous nothingness that spat and sizzled, their heads and chests punctured with holes into a void. They hemorrhaged into that unspace, a deadening vacuity spreading like gangrene from the edges of their wounds so that their flesh became hard to notice, vague and irrelevant, and then suddenly did not exist.

His attackers rolled and screamed as long as they still had mouths.

Fennec kept running, his heart hammering. He ran and kissed and bent space with his intricate steps, unfolding the planes around him.

Uther Doul followed him grimly, with such tenacity that even confined to conventional space, he stayed on Fennec’s tail.

Doul was relentless.

Fennec burst from the dark confines of the Wordhoard and slammed into the air. He hung poised for a moment, tongue bloody from the statue’s marble teeth.

Fuck you all, he thought fiercely, all his fear running out of him. He plunged his tongue deep into his statue, felt power coruscate him, felt aglow with it like a dark star. Whirling, he skittered through a fringe of torn rigging, moving up by the shadows of wires, bending reality around him, buckling it and sliding along the fold he had created-up, out over the decrepit ship.

A corps of grim yeomanry rose from the hatch below and spread with expert speed across the deck. Uther Doul came with them, and he stared straight into Fennec’s eyes.

“Fennec,” he said, and raised his sword.

Silas Fennec looked down at him, grinned his rage, and answered in a voice that reverberated wrongly, sounding close up to the ear like a threatening whisper. “Uther Doul.”

Fennec was poised fifteen feet above the deck, in a corona of warping aether. Reality rippled around him. He hung unclear, his outlines oscillating between states. He moved with a slow and predatory marine grace, blurring in and out of visibility. Blood drooled from his mouth and torn tongue. He turned like a pike in the air, held suspended by the power of his statue’s kiss, staring at the men below him.

They raised their weapons. Fennec shimmered, and bullets passed through where he had been-through bristling air-and spat as they disappeared. He opened his mouth, and gobs of that corrosive spit-puke flew out of him like shrapnel from a shell.

They burst across the deck and into the faces of his attackers, and there was a percussion of shrieks. The men scattered in panic.

Fennec kept his eyes on Doul.

Doul leaped out of the path of the spittle with brutal economy, his face taut, still watching Fennec. Fennec flickered and was lower, was ghosting over the deck crooning his delight, leaving a slick of caustic drool. Any man came close to him and he spat, and they backed off, or died. He tracked Uther Doul.

“Take me, then,” whispered Fennec with drunk bravado. His throat was raw with the uncanny spit, but he felt he could do anything, burn a hole in the universe. He felt uncontainable. Doul retreated before the puissant, bristling figure, leaping, moving with terse anger, gritting his teeth against Fennec’s voice, which still muttered up close to his ear. “Come on…”

Then through the light and dark and the heaviness of wood, through the slap of water like little fists around him, the lights of Armada only a few yards away, Fennec heard a voice behind him.

“Siiiiiilassssss.”

Like the strike of a monstrous snake.

With his heart spasming Fennec turned, and through agitated space he saw the Brucolac-bestial, glowing, hate cast in bone. Leaping up out of darkness, his vast tongue uncoiled. Hurtling for him.

Fennec screamed and tried to kiss his grotesque again, but the Brucolac reached him and punched out, straight-fingered, lancing his hand into Fennec’s throat.

The strike sent Fennec caroming to the deck, supine, fighting to breathe. The Brucolac fell with him, his eyes burning. Still Fennec tried to bring the figurine toward his face, and with a kind of contemptuous ease, the Brucolac snatched Fennec’s free hand and held it effortlessly. He raised his foot (with humbling speed) and brought it down on Fennec’s right wrist, stamping savagely, pushing it into the deck and shattering it.

Fennec screamed in a high, silly vibrato as his ruined fingers spasmed. The statue spun across the wood.

He lay on the splinters and howled, blood leaking from his mouth and nose, and from a wrist torn apart. Fennec screamed in agony and terror and paddled his legs uselessly, trying to get away. He was fully corporeal again, broken and pathetically there. Uther Doul appeared, leaning into his field of vision.

As he floundered, Fennec’s shirt tore and flapped open, baring his chest.

It was mottled, clammy, and discolored in great patches of dirt-green and white. It glowed unhealthily like dead flesh. Here and there were ragged flanges, extrusions like catfish whiskers, like fins.

Doul and the Brucolac took in his alterations.

“Look at you…” murmured Uther Doul.

“Is that what it was all about?” hissed the Brucolac, looking at the statue Doul held.

Fennec continued to scream, snottily. The stone doll stared inscrutably at Uther Doul, winking at him, its open eye limpid and cold. It hugged itself with its unclear limbs cut from freezing stone, green-grey or black by turns. It gurned at him with its horrible round mouth, showing its teeth. Doul fingered the flap of skin that was folded down the statue’s back.

“That is a puissant thing,” the Brucolac said to Fennec, who shivered as shock set in. “How many Armadans has it killed?”

“Bring him,” said Doul to his unwounded men. They came forward, pausing nervously when the Brucolac did not move.

He had interfered despite Doul’s orders, and perhaps had saved his life, but Doul denied him any rueful or apologetic thanks. He simply stared at the Brucolac coldly until, defeated, the vampir moved back.

“He’s ours,” whispered Doul to the Brucolac, hefting the figurine.

There were yeomen dying in incomprehensible agony across the deck. Their comrades hefted Fennec without any shade of pity, grabbing him roughly, ignoring his screams.

The citizens at the outer edges of Dry Fall and Thee-And-Thine shivered to hear the sounds from the haunted quarter, and made warding signs.

“That’s like nothing I’ve heard before,” they whispered, or similar words, as the screams rang out thinly in the night. “That’s no ghast or ghul… That’s something new, that’s got no business in there.”

They could tell it was a man.