The Scar

Interlude IX

Now in this deepest gutter of night where moments lie still like frightened things and we who are about are free of time I go walking.

My city moves. Its outlines shift.

Spires converge and part again and ropes coil like muscles and take the strain as Armada’s skyline breaks, heals, breaks.

Wild animals alive in shadows keep their whimpers quiet, sniff my dead smell and move on (four-footed or two) quick and cowed through a randomly serrated shipscape, along trenches of brick and wood on reshaped decks. The cadavers of vessels incorporated. Backstay stools, coaming, pawls, davits, and catheads encased in salt-aged architecture.

Behind every wall a maritime atomy, a mummy, a sacrifice, like a servant murdered in the temple’s foundations. This is a city of ghosts. Every quarter is haunted. We live like graveworms on our dead ships.

Withered flowers and weeds strain for what poor lamplight in the veins of walls, in ruts of concrete and wood. Life is tenacious, as we who have died know.

Trails of dust, parings of bone and brick, past ragged wounds of bomb-surgery: carbon and rubble, waste-ground punctuation in the city’s dull monologue. Paint, age, all the rubbish of urban chance brands squat towerblocks (on foredecks) and tenements (in the shadows of bowsprits). Flowerpots and wheels like meager tattoos, deliberate defacements. Infinite markings, sculptures accidental and made (the drabness peppered with signs of life and preference, awnings left just so, ribbons on sleeping livestock).

Where glass is, it is burst and scored-intricate with shadows. Lit windows are edged with darkness. Austere and coldly shining.

Moths and night-birds, things that move by the moon make their little sounds. What footsteps there are dissolve and are quickly formless. It is as if there is fog, though there is not. We who walk tonight come out of nowhere and return to it quickly.

Past factories, music halls, churches; over bridges rattling like vertebrae. Armada rides the waves dumb and buoyant like a rust-flecked corpse.

Through the slats of scaffold is the sea. I see myself (shadowed and unclear) and through myself into black water. Into a darkness so profound (random chymical lights like fireflies howbeit) it is an alien communication. It has its own grammar. Unseeing I look to the farmed fish circling autistic in cages, the menfish, the keels pipes crevices inked in, the spaces, the chains splinted with molluscs and algae-slick and the great unseen shape that bears us on, idiotic and futile.

History is formless and oppressive all around me, a nightmare I will make into sense.

A rhythm becomes sensible (extruded from a covert place), gives a shape to this night, gives it time again, and the clocks let out their held breaths.

I make a rooftop way to my moonship. Over torn-up slates and boards and their crossbreeds, through a low nightlit forest of flues steeples watertowers, in ridings not my own. I do not rule here, there is no goretax, it is a day since I have fed and it would take very little to slip along this drainpipe groundward like the drops of calcium that beard it. Very little to find a blood-filled nightwalker and dispose of his her husk but those days are gone, now I am bureaucrat not predator, and it is much better.

It is a long time till dawn but something has passed. We are moving on toward morning. My time is over.

I am on trawlers and houseboats and gone again (fleeting foot-strokes as if uncertain) through Shaddler and its cottages and industry (on for my fat ship). Dry Fall where scored streets are quieter and cushioned in dust.

Where does it come from? Swept hourly by neurotic sea-wind, when does dust touch down?

In some lights (reveries no less than true for that) I see it thick as snowfall and cobwebs clog my passage home. Alone I drown in dust and choke in it, in time’s desiccated exhaust.

I know when things are stirring. I know all the city’s rhythms. Something new is here.

There are tracks on the Uroc’s moon-white decks. Some hand unknown to me has held this rigging.

I watch for the newcomer.

Let us see.

What are you?

In my corridors, toward my berth, you have left your spoor. One, two drops of brine. Smears of something mucal. Scuffed varnish and iron. What are you?

You are hardly hiding from me. You are welcoming me home.

And oh see, here on my threshold you have left me blood.

Drizzled like sugar.

I can hear you behind my door.

My room smells like an estuary. River coagulate and fishgut blood. You rattle for me stranger, like a summons you shake the bones you wear. I have not pulled open any sluices to let the moon illuminate my bedchamber, but light is for the living. These that look upon you are vampir eyes.

And welcome to you.

Three of you to wait for me in a grisly tableau: reclined upon my bed and in front of my window and by me now, closing my door, ushering me respectful into my home.

Look at you.

Look at you shimmering before me great salamander tails folded in layers on my floor, blunt streamlined skulls like viperfish, your teeth protruding like fistfuls of nails, eyes black and big as tarpits, wet skin stretched on muscled bone like sap on knotted wood. See you upright in my room.

And you, recumbent on my covers like a painter’s nude, grinning at me without intent on your piscine face, your neck wrapped all about with charms and bones, beckoning me politely, whose is the face you carry in your hand?

Whose head is that you have taken, to bring blood for me? What woman was she? A guard who found you? Missing in the carnage of the New Crobuzon war, drowned or cut apart, was it you who split her neck to take that misshapen trophy? It is a frayed-enough edge, a bloody and fibrous laceration.

The tan-haired woman stares at me from your fist.

Look at you!

You drop her dead flesh and rise like something I have never seen.

– Seigneur Brucolac, you tell me in a voice colder than mine.-We must talk.

I don’t mind. I will talk to you. I know who you are. I think I have expected you.

And as the hours unfold toward the morning oh what conspiracies oh what secrets we uncover.

You have come late, riverthing. Waterman. You have come late from the Cold Claw Sea, searching these salt currents for what was taken from you. Nothing you say to me with that spastically moving blood-flecked jaw is clear. Like the riverthing you are you flicker toward your meaning and disturb a silt of effluvial words that cloud your intent. But I have dealt with seers poets and Weavers and can track your insinuations.

You have hunted on currents. Cleaved parasitic to the undersides of our attackers and then fluttered free in the squalor of battle and you have plucked bodies from the dead and dying plenty.

And then, what am I to understand? Hiding away you have used them. You have kept some alive, fed them air and questioned them (questioned them after they have died, is that? have I that right?). Learning from them (terrified on the outskirts of death they have babbled everything to you, immobile in water, trapped under their homes).

Only days here and like the subtlest spies you have learnt most everything about this place.

That is why (what is that you say?) that is why you have come to me.

One took something from your towers a world away, something precious and unique that you would have back. One has escaped you for scores of miles, for the length of continents, onto this place, to my city. And it has taken you a long a very long time but that one was a benighted fool to think you would let him run.

You tracked him. You have found his home.

But there have been commotions through the floors above you as you lie and wait and prepare and ask questions of whomever you can snatch from Armada’s decks. And cunning predatory and without fear as you may be there are too many above you, there is no way you can scour the whole city. Step from the water and you are unhidden, and hunted.

You cannot find your quarry. He has disappeared. And he will not surrender what you have come for, not willingly, not without terror. And if you were to ask for help of those who run the city and they were not to take your side, you have played up all your counters, and you could not oppose them if they turned on you. You are not so many. You cannot wage war. You cannot search for the one who has fled you.

Not without help.

Why have you come to me?

Deepling why have you come to me?

You come here kill my citizens and face me the Brucolac brazen like a blackmailer. How do you know I will not destroy you?

I understand.

Oh you are fine, you are a prodigious spy. I am in awe of you and of what you have learnt in only these few days and nights. Let me-here-bow my head to you.

Is there anything you have not learnt? Not understood?

You have come to me because you know that I am angry.

You know what the Lovers have called up. Perhaps you even know where we are going.

You know that I do not accept this. That I am the only force that stands against them.

Perhaps you know that I consider mutiny.

Have you heard my name, again and again? I am sure that is what has happened. You know that I am the most powerful person here who is hankering for something, who is angry, who wishes things were not as they are.

You know that I can be bought.

What is it you propose, hakenmann?

There are actions none but you could perform that might tip a balance. That might create new circumstances. Change forces, force changes. Create facts.

Perhaps this journey, this idiot pilgrimage, might be halted.

Oh yes, if you did that. If you could stop our progress.

Only you can help me, you tell me in your intricate ways. Only you can stop this mad journey. What then is up to me?

Even I, perhaps, could not fight my way through the gangs and gangs of guards who patrol their engines, their rockmilk spurs. I do not know what must be done. But there is another way-something else, some force-to bring us to a slow, and stop. You can halt the beast.

If you could do that.

And in return? (See? you tell me, strange pride flashing like scales, you know all about this barter by which we live.)

In return? I will help you find that hidden one who has run from you.

Perhaps you do not know what it is to laugh. Certainly you do not know why I laugh so hard so long.

You cannot know.

Whom I have held and bloodied. What I have seen him wield. You cannot know that loyal to Armada and without alternative I have put aside my anger at the Lovers and let them take him, shamed as I was, implicated in the carnage he brought us. He is no ordinary thief, this war criminal, and they hold him in limbo till we can sentence him right. When our lunatic journey ceases.

You have come just a little late.

Not too late, however. What’s done is not too late to undo.

I know where they hold him.

You cannot know that what you offer me would any other time make me kill you. You cannot know that tonight is different, that I am tired of the dangerous idiocy into which my city is being led. That if mutiny is needed to turn us back, then I will do what I must to bring it about.

This is not an ordinary time, deepling. You come to me in a time of war.

You need a blind? A decoy while you search? Something to attract attention?

I have just the thing.

Hush. Let me tell you how it will be. What you will do, what I will do. I will help you find him, and this is what you will do for me. And I will tell you where your quarry is.

Now shall we plan?

Don’t stop.

We must finish this. See, there? We have the minutes we need to finish this.

The sky is not yet light.