The Scar

Chapter Forty-one

While Armada moved north through dull air-temperate fronts so still that the weather seemed to be waiting for something-and while that expectancy communicated itself to the citizens, Bellis lay in sticky fever.

There were two days when she did not think at all. She burned up in temperatures severe enough to worry her nurses as she shied away from delirious visions, frightened into screaming fits she would never remember. The avanc pulled with its steady gait, not fast but faster by far than the city had ever traveled before. The shapes of waves changed with the currents.

(Tanner Sack is hardier than Bellis. He is released into the care of Shekel, who is crying for worry of him, who grabs him and hugs him with a bawl of relieved misery to see Tanner’s broken shuffle. Tanner shrieks as Shekel’s hands grip his lacerated back, and their two voices mingle before Shekel leads Tanner on to where Angevine is waiting.

“What they do to you?” Shekel moans repeatedly. “Why?” And Tanner shushes him and stutters that there were reasons, and that they’ll not talk about it, that it’s over now.

These are momentous days. There are great decisions taken. There are mass meetings to discuss the war and the city’s history, and the avanc and the weather and the future.

Bellis knows nothing of any of this.)

Days later, Bellis Coldwine sat up, her fever almost gone. She ate and drank for herself, spilling a great deal from her violently shaking fingers. When she moved, she bit down against the pain. She did not know that all the guards in the corridor were very used to her screams.

She roused herself the day after that, moving as slow and tentative as someone terribly aged. She half tied up her hair and draped a long, shapeless shirt over herself.

Her door was not locked. She was not a prisoner anymore. She had not been for a week.

There were guards in the corridor, in that deep prison wing of the Grand Easterly, and she called one over to her and tried to meet his eye.

“I will go home now,” she said, and felt like crying when she heard her own voice.

To Bellis’ shock, it was Uther Doul who helped her home.

The Chromolith was only two ships port of the Grand Easterly, but Doul took her by aircab. She sat away from him in the gondola, horrified to feel her fear of him-which had disappeared over the months, replaced by other emotions-returning. He studied her without visible pity.

He had not sentenced her, of course. But every time her mind returned to that extended, bloody, murderous, torturous hour a week previously, with cut-up images of pain, her own screaming, she saw Uther as what he was, an agent of Armada, the power that had done this to her. The man who wielded the whip had been irrelevant.

When she entered her rooms, Doul followed her, carrying her possessions. She ignored him. Moving carefully, she found a mirror.

It was as if the violence that had been done to her back had spread and ravaged her face. She looked drained of blood. The lines and crow’s-feet that had been slowly marking her for more than ten years had become like gashes, like the wounds cut into the faces of the Lovers. Bellis fingered her cheeks and eyes in horror.

One of her teeth was cracked open, and pieces came away as she pulled at it. That was where she had bit down on the wooden gag they had given her.

She moved, and the cloth shifted against the scabs on her torn-up back, and she hissed in pain.

Doul stood behind her, his presence like an imperfection in the glass. She wanted him to leave, but she could not bear to address him. Bellis hobbled around her room on fever-weak legs. She could feel the gauze sticking to her back, where her injuries had wept.

The pain in her back was unpleasant and constant, but it did not vary much. Bellis treated it like white noise, ignoring it until it became a kind of aching nothing to her. She stood on her doorstep and looked all around her, at the airships and birds, the light wind mindlessly knocking Armada’s walls. There was industry, men and women working furiously, as there had been on the first day, when she had drawn the curtains of Chromolith Smokestacks and seen her new city.

Something was new, she realized slowly. The air was different, the way the city rode the currents… the sea itself. The ships surrounding Armada no longer meandered on their own routes from horizon to horizon: the mass of vessels (still marked by war) were in tight formation behind the city, as if afraid of losing it.

There was something different about the sea.

She turned to stare at Doul.

“You’re free,” he said, not without gentleness, “and superfluous. Kruach Aum hasn’t needed you for a long time. You’ll need to heal. For the city’s sake, any information about your accidental role in the war has been suppressed. I’m sure the library would take you back…”

“What’s happened?” said Bellis in the plaintive croak her beating and sickness had left her. “Something’s different about… everything. What’s happened?”

“Two days ago,” said Doul, “insofar as one can be exact, we passed through something. Everyone can feel it. The fleet…” He pointed at the vessels behind the city. “They’re having a difficult time. There are strange currents. Their engines are untrustworthy.

“We’ve passed out of the Swollen Ocean,” he said, and gazed at her impassively. “We’re in the outskirts of a new sea. This…” The quick thrust of his arm took in the water, horizon to horizon. “This is the Empty, the Hidden Ocean.”

So far from home, thought Bellis, surprising herself with fury. Further and further they’re taking us, me, further and further. They get their way. She heard a ringing inside her like tinnitus. Everything we’ve done-right and wrong-means nothing. They took us here so easily, to this fucked-up empty edge of sea no ship can cross. In we go, and my home is gone.

Even the thought of the Lovers appalled her: their crooning lovesounds; their sick, endless, sharp-edged betrothals. She was in their power. This was where they wanted to go. Bellis had tried to turn them, and failed.

“They got us here, then?” she said to Uther, cold and suddenly unafraid of him again. She jutted her chin. “And I know what happens now-on toward the Scar.”

If he was surprised, he hid it well. He met her eyes, quite expressionless.

So Fennec was too slow with his pamphlets and rumors, she thought. That doesn’t mean it’s over; that doesn’t mean we have to accept this.

When Shekel opened his door to Bellis, he stared at her for a long and silent moment, wildly confused.

He recognized her, but was suddenly convinced that he was wrong. It seemed that this blanched lady with her dark hair all dry and tumbling over her like old grass, her expression suggesting years of pain, could not be Coldwine, must be some ruined vagrant with a similar face.

“Shekel,” she said in a voice that he could not believe was hers, “you have to let me in. I need to speak to Tanner Sack.”

Mute and appalled, he moved aside for her, and she wheezed and entered the shadow.

Tanner Sack turned in his bed, muttering in thick tongues, his eyes rheumy, then bolted up, shedding sheets. He pointed at Bellis.

“Get her the fuck away, Shekel,” he shouted. “Get her the fuck out of here…”

“Listen to me!” Bellis said, her voice urgent and guttural. “Please…”

“I got fuck-all to hear from you, bitch!” Tanner was shaking with fury. Behind Bellis was the puttering of a motor as Angevine trundled toward them.

“You have to hear me,” Bellis growled, trying to shout. “You have friends, man; you can spread the word…” She broke off and twisted with pain as Angevine put a hand on her back. “Do you know where we’re going?” she managed to say. “Do you know why we’re in this sea, where nothing moves like it should?”

She saw Tanner look to Shekel and then to Angevine, and watched them share a look of blank bewilderment.

“Listen,” Bellis shouted as Angevine pushed her out of the door to a final chorus of Tanner’s cursing.

By the time she had walked slowly across the city’s bridges to the library, blood had come through Bellis’ bandages, and her shirt was spotted. She found the bombed quarter of the Pinchermarn, where the librarians were recovering what volumes they could from the wreckage.

“Bellis!” Carrianne was stunned by her.

Bellis was slightly delirious again. “Now you have to listen to me,” she murmured.

And they were outside again, and Carrianne’s arm was around her, protective. Bellis’ back was dreadfully painful, and she was wincing as she said to Carrianne, “Johannes. Tearfly. Carrianne, you have to help me find Johannes Tearfly…”

Carrianne nodded. “I know, Bellis,” she said. “You just told me.”

They were in a room Bellis did not recognize, then another, so tired now that she felt faint. And Carrianne and Bellis were hanging over the city in the dark air, Armada’s lights going out with complex timing. Bellis heard her own voice several times, though it sounded very strange to her.

She felt an ecstatic cold pain, and looked up and was on her own bed, in her chimneytop rooms, and it came to her-more like a leap of imagination than a memory-that Carrianne had lifted the bandage from her back and was smearing unguent on her. Bellis closed her eyes. She could hear something-some soft, repetitive sound.

“Gods. Gods. Gods. Gods.”

It was Carrianne’s voice. Bellis turned her head to one side and through blurred eyes saw her friend’s face over her, staring down, wincing, biting her lip as she rubbed in the cream.

What’s wrong? Bellis tried to say, for a second thinking her friend had been hurt; but then she realized, of course, what was wrong, and could not help whimpering a little for herself.

The next time she opened her eyes, Carrianne and Johannes were both there, drinking her tea, talking awkwardly as they sat by her bed.

It was night. Bellis’ head had cleared.

Johannes started when he saw her move.

“Bellis, Bellis,” said Carrianne gently. “Gods’ sake, girl… what did you do?”

Carrianne was horrified. Bellis was deeply grateful for her ministrations, but she would not explain her wounds.

“She doesn’t want to talk to us about it,” Johannes said nervously. He seemed genuinely concerned, but uneasy. “I mean, you can see… she’s been on the wrong side of… She’s probably lucky to even be here.”

“Godsdamm it, Bellis,” Carrianne said, furious. “Who gives a fuck about them.” The wave of her arm took in authority. “Tell us, what did they do you for?”

Bellis could not help smiling. He’s right, though, she thought, lifting her bleary eyes to Johannes. Pusillanimous coward that he is, and magnificent and brave and loyal to me (gods know why) as you are, Carrianne, he’s right about this. You should stay out of this. Like it or not, I’ll help you do that. I owe you.

“You found him then?” she managed to say.

“Carrianne’s been amazingly assiduous,” Johannes said. “She got a message to me.”

Bellis straightened a little in her bed and set her face against the movement of her broken skin.

“I need to talk to you,” she said, her voice getting stronger. She shook her head slowly. “I’ve been… The last week… I’ve been alone. And, and everything’s been changing around us. You must have seen it. But I know what it is; I know what’s going on.”

She closed her eyes and was silent for many seconds.

“You know where we are?” she said finally. “You know what waters we’ve entered?”

Carrianne and Johannes looked at each other, then back at her.

“The Hidden Ocean,” said Carrianne, her voice guarded. Bellis managed to give a little smile.

“That’s right,” she said. Damn you all, she thought. I don’t need that treacherous fucker Fennec. I will make this happen myself. “And do you know where we’re heading?” She paused again, and in the silence, Johannes spoke.

“The Scar,” he said, and Bellis’ words withered in her throat. She stared at him, saw him watch her with concern and confusion and look to Carrianne, who nodded.

“The… Scar,” Bellis heard herself say, all hesitant and stupid. Not a revelation but an absurd echo.

They had broken her. They had won. There was nothing left in her, nothing at all.

When Johannes left, Bellis and Carrianne sat up late, talking. Carrianne told her everything.

What a week, Bellis kept thinking with absurd understatement. What a week to miss.

The Lovers had announced it.

It could not be kept from the pilots and captains and nauscopists of Armada that the water and the air were changing. There was no disguising the sudden crosscurrents, the hidden streams that ran below the surface, counter to the waves. Compasses had begun to veer maniacally, losing north for minutes at a time. The winds were utterly unpredictable. The horizon’s distance varied. Armada’s fleet had begun to struggle.

The avanc, of course, was quite unconcerned by these forces. It plowed its undeviating course far below, with the city in its wake.

There had been a plethora of rumors, but there were enough experienced, well-read sailors in the city that the truth was impossible to hide. The avanc, directed by the Garwater pilots, was pulling Armada into the Hidden Ocean. About which, it seemed, all the stories were true.

And then, four days previously, on Flesh Quarto’s sixth Khandi, the Lovers had held a series of mass meetings across Garwater and its allied ridings.

“He’s a fucking fine speaker, the Lover,” Carrianne said. “I heard him in Booktown. ‘When I came here I was nothing,’ he said, ‘and I began to make me, and that was finished by my Lover, who made me and made herself and made this city,’ his voice all trembling. ‘And haven’t we brought Armada power?’ And people loved it. Because, you know, he has. These have been good years, great harvests and booty. And the Sorghum-you weren’t here for that, were you? You weren’t here when they took that.” Carrianne smiled and shook her head appreciatively.

“He’s made us a power, there’s no denying it. And then the fucking avanc…”

“I thought you were loyal to Dry Fall,” said Bellis, and Carrianne nodded hard.

“So I am, but I’m saying that here… I think the Brucolac may be… wrong about their plans. I mean… it does all fit into place.”

There is a source of power, the Lover had told the crowds, on the edge of the world. An awesome place: a rip through which great waves of puissance pounded reality. One man in Armada has the proof, said the Lover, and knows how to tap that power. But for many years it could not be reached.

There is a beast, the Lover had told them: a stunning kind of thing, an animal that breaches into Bas-Lag and slips away again from time to time. And Armada had called to it certain famous men who could learn how to trap that animal.

The woman who made me, the Lover had thundered, pointing to the Lover, realized that the second fact meant the first could be acted on.

On the far side of the Hidden Ocean, the Lover had said, is the source of that power. But no ship has crossed the Hidden Ocean, they say. Friends-he had spread his arms with triumph, as Carrianne imitated to Bellis-the avanc is no ship.

And so, Bellis realized, the Lover had admitted the truth that he and his had kept from the city for years, the plans that they had already had in place when they employed Tintinnabulum, snatched the Sorghum, traveled to the anophelii island, raised the avanc. He had admitted the truth of those plans, and had done so in such a way that he was not stoned for his manipulation and lies, but was buoyed up by applause.

We can cross the Hidden Ocean, he had shouted to cheers. We can tap the Scar.

“That was when we learnt its name,” Carrianne said.

“But it’s so uncertain,” said Bellis, and Carrianne nodded.

“Of course.”

“The ships, the fleet…”

Carrianne nodded again. “Some are already tethered to the city. And when the others can’t follow us, that’s alright. Our ships have always sailed alone for months at a time, and they always find their way back to us. Those following us now know what’s happening, and those that are away, well, this is nothing new. The city’s always had its own movements. We’re not going to disappear in the Hidden Ocean, Bellis. We’re not here to stay… We’re here to find the Scar, and then leave again.”

“But what the fuck kind of place is this?” said Bellis thinly. “We’ve no idea what’s here, what kind of powers, what creatures, what enemies…”

Carrianne frowned and shook her head. “That’s all true,” she said. “I understand.” She shrugged. “You’re against the idea. Alright, you’re not alone. There’s a vessel leaving in two days, I think, heading back to the Swollen Ocean, crewed by naysayers, to wait for the city’s return. Though…” Her voice petered away. They both realized that Bellis was not one of those who would ever be allowed off-city. “Most of us,” continued Carrianne, “think this is worth doing.”

“Not at all,” Carrianne said quietly, a little later. “I trust the Brucolac, and I’m sure he has reasons for opposing the plans. But I think he’s wrong. I’m excited, Bellis,” she said. “Why shouldn’t we try this? This could be… this could be the most exciting time, the finest hour in our history. We have to try.”

Bellis felt something that at first she did not recognize. Not depression or misery or cynicism, but despair. The feeling of all plans, all options, dying.

I’ve lost, she thought, without melodrama or even anger.

Carrianne was not a brainwashed fool, someone unthinking and buffeted by rhetoric. She had heard the arguments-even partial and partisan as they had undoubtedly been. She must have realized that this venture had been a long time in the planning, and that therefore she and those around her had been deceived.

And still, considering all that, she had decided that the Lovers’ plan was a good one. One that was worthwhile.

That was a sneaky trick, thought Bellis to the Lovers. That was below the belt. I didn’t foresee this.

Lies, schemes, manipulations, bribery, violence, corruption-I expected all that, she thought. But I never expected you simply to have the argument, and to win.

The thought of Fench’s stillborn pamphlet fleeted through her mind, and she moved her shoulders in a dead kind of laugh. The Truth! she imagined. Garwater Drags Armada To THE SCAR!

The truth.

You win, she thought, and let go of hope. I’ll be here till I die. I’ll grow old here, a crabby old lady imprisoned on a boat, and I’ll scratch the scars on my back (dear gods they will be wicked) and mutter and complain. Or perhaps I’ll die with the rest of you, and with you my rulers, in some stupid, terrible accident of the Hidden Ocean.

Either way, I’m yours, if I like it or not. You’ve won.

You are taking me with you. You are taking me to the Scar.