The Scar

Chapter Forty-two

Where for the longest time there had been a shadow, the sky was clear.

The Arrogance was gone.

A rope stub lay on the deck where the airship had been tethered to the Grand Easterly. It had been severed, and the aerostat had flown free.

“Hedrigall,” Bellis heard from all around her. She stood amid the crowd that had gathered, gaping at the hole in the skyscape. The yeomanry had made brief attempts to keep onlookers back, but had given up in the face of their numbers.

Bellis could move more freely now. She still recoiled at pressure on her back, but there was no more bleeding. Some of the smaller scabs were beginning to peel at the edges. She shifted slightly at the edge of the crowds.

“Hedrigall-and he was alone.” Everyone was saying it.

As Armada slipped farther into the Hidden Ocean, its vessels had more and more difficulty keeping up with it. They trailed behind it like anxious ducklings, and several tethered to the edges of the city switched off their motors and were borne on by the avanc.

The second day after Bellis’ shocking, revelatory discussion with Carrianne, the remaining ships and submersibles in Armada’s orbit had turned back. They could no longer fight the Hidden Ocean. They gathered into a nervous convoy, tacking with the fractious winds, then steamed back to the south. They stayed together for protection, and to drag each other on, back to the Swollen Ocean, with its safer, comprehensible waters, where they would wait.

The city would return for them, within a month, or two at most.

And after that? If Armada had not returned? Well, they were to consider themselves free. That dispensation was given like an afterthought, and its implications were not discussed.

From her window, Bellis had watched the retreat of Armada’s vessels. Others were left behind, now chained like limpets to the city’s flank, or in the Basilio and Urchinspine harbors. They eddied apprehensively, surrounded by the vessels making up wharfs and quays, but they were trapped. They had waited too long to sail away, and they could only bob pointlessly, tied up as if loading or unloading, and wait.

Armadans had never seen their city without its nimbus of ships. They had crowded to the city’s margins to gaze out at the sea. The emptiness had subdued them. But even those acres of vacant water were not so disturbing as the missing airship.

No one had seen anything; no one had heard a sound. The Arrogance had crept away in secret. To Garwater it was a stunning loss.

How was it possible? people asked. The dirigible itself was crippled, and Hedrigall was known to be absolutely loyal.

“He had doubts,” Tanner told Shekel and Angevine. “He told me. He was loyal, ain’t no doubt, but he never thought this avanc business was best for the city. I suppose the Scar thing was even worse, but he weren’t winning any arguments.”

Tanner was horrified by Hedrigall’s flight. It wounded him. But he talked his thoughts out loud, trying hard to see things as his enigmatic friend had seen them. Must’ve felt trapped, Tanner thought. All the years he lived here, to suddenly see the place doing things in a new way. He don’t belong in Dreer Samher no more, and if he thought that he didn’t belong here neither… what must that’ve done?

He imagined Hedrigall fixing the Arrogance’s broken motors in some of the spare hours he spent aboard it on his own. Everyone knew that Hedrigall was a loner who spent a deal more time in the Arrogance than he needed to. Had he untwisted the girders in the Arrogance’s fins? Tested the pistons that had not moved for decades?

How long you been planning this, Hedrigall? thought Tanner Sack.

Couldn’t he have had an argument? Did he feel so strongly? Did he feel that there was no point even fighting for his home? Did he doubt that that’s what it was any longer?

Where you now, man?

Tanner imagined that big ungainly aerostat heading south, Hedrigall alone at its wheel.

I bet he’s crying.

It was suicide of sorts. Hedrigall couldn’t have amassed enough fuel to reach land, not anywhere. If he reached Armada’s waiting fleet, they’d want to know what had happened and why he’d left the city, so he’d avoid them.

The winds would take him over the empty sea. The gasbags were very strong; they might keep him buoyant for years. How much food did you store, man? Tanner wondered.

An image came to his mind, of the Arrogance adrift for years, four or five hundred feet above the water, with Hedrigall’s corpse rotting slowly in the captain’s cabin. A windblown sepulchre.

Or maybe he could stay alive. Maybe he would unroll a great, absurdly long fishing line from the Arrogance’s bay doors. Tanner imagined it cascading through the air like a spring unwinding, till its baited hook reached the water. By choice the cactacae were vegetarians, but they could survive on fish or flesh if they had to.

There Hedrigall could sit, on the edge of the hatch, his legs swinging like a child’s, reeling in fish. Rubbery bodies flapping on the journey up, air-drowned and long dead when they reached him. He could live for years, blown around the world. Slipping into the roundstream winds that circled the Swollen Ocean, growing old and obstreperous on his unchanging diet, his skin wrinkling and his thorns turning grey. Alone, going mad. Talking to the portraits and heliotypes on the Arrogance’s walls.

Till one day some chance might push him out of that great belt of wind, and his craft might eddy out into free air and be carried south or north or gods knew where, until one day, maybe, he might come into sight of land.

Drifting over mountains. Throwing down the anchor, snagging a tree and descending. Touching the ground again.

Is it such a bad fucking plan, Hedrigall, to search for the Scar?

Hedrigall was a traitor, Tanner supposed. He’d done a bunk; he’d stolen Armada’s crow’s nest and lied to his rulers and friends. He’d been too cowardly to have the argument. He was a renegade, and Tanner knew that as a loyal Garwater man, he should condemn him. But he could not.

Good luck, mate, he thought after some moments, hesitantly raising his hand and nodding. I can’t not wish you luck.

Garwater’s champions felt Hedrigall’s absence like a rebuke.

He was known to have been loyal, and he left in the wake of his passing more disturbed discussion, more uncertainty and condemnation of the Lovers’ project than had so far existed.

Miles below the sea, the avanc continued its journey. It had slowed only a little on entering the new waters.

Tanner Sack swam and bathed his ravaged back in the sea. There were few divers below and few swimmers above, in these days. They had been scared away, terrified that they might be swept away on some unforeseeable current, borne off to some deadpool in the Hidden Ocean.

Tanner found nothing wrong. He and the menfish and Bastard John flitted from place to place, around and between those enormous chains angling down. They swam quickly, careful not to let the city leave them behind, but there seemed to be no new hazards in the water. The chaos inhered at a larger scale-for the great intruders like ships and submersibles. Even the seawyrms had not been able to continue pulling their now misbehaving chariot ships, and they had swum back with the fleet, back out of the Empty Ocean.

It was peaceful now, with fewer people and fewer things to distract Tanner. Much of Armada’s activity had ceased.

Of course the farmers still cared for their crops and flocks, above water and below, and harvested them when they could. There were still a thousand little jobs of repair and maintenance. The internal workings of the city continued, as they had to: bakers, moneylenders, cooks, and apothecaries put out their signs and took in money. But Armada was a city that had looked outward, to piracy and trade. The industries around the docks, the loading and unloading and counting and refitting and outfitting, were all in stasis now.

So Tanner did not dive daily to work on cracks or breaks or faults or anything like that. He swam for himself, and for his back, and felt the salt bring his skin back to life.

“Come in, Shek,” he said.

He was aware of the tension that was spreading through Armada, the uncertainty, as if Hedrigall had spilled a poison behind him as he left. Tanner wanted to offer Shekel a place where it could dissipate.

There were reasons for people’s growing fears. Tanner had heard strange rumors. Three times now he had heard that some man or woman, some yeoman or Garwater engineer, had disappeared, their house and things left untouched (food half-eaten, in one story). Some said they, too, had fled, and others claimed that these were the depradations of spirits from the Hidden Ocean.

When he was in the water, Tanner’s sense that things were wrong, dangerous, or uncertain dissipated with the currents. He offered Shekel the same respite. He persuaded the boy to swim with him. The pools between Armada’s vessels were almost empty now. Shekel was excited to be one of those brave enough to go in. The great flitches of the ships moved above and around them sedately: they would not be left behind. Shekel struggled with his aggressive, ugly paddle, and Tanner tried to show him better strokes and realized that he did not know any suitable for those who had to breathe air.

Shekel slipped heavy goggles over his eyes and plunged his head below for as long as their imperfect seal kept out the water. He and Tanner would stare at the shoals of fishes, species they had never seen. Colored and finned intricately, as intense and bizarre as tropical species, here in these more temperate waters. Like scorpion and ratfish, their forms were broken with spindly appendages, and eyes that glowed with unlikely colors.

When Shekel and Tanner hauled themselves out again, Angevine would be waiting, with maybe a bottle of beer or liquor. And even if Tanner and Angevine still spoke to each other a little warily, and realized that they always would, what they shared in Shekel, and the way they had learned to share it, gave them a respectful connection.

It’s kind of a family, Tanner thought.

It was not hard for Bellis to find Uther Doul again. She had only to wait on the deck of the Grand Easterly, knowing he would appear eventually. She was stiff with resentment and incensed by her own hurt. She could not believe how he had dropped her.

As she approached he stared at her, but not with the disgust that she feared. Not with hostility, or with interest, or any kind of connection or recognition. He simply stared.

She drew herself up. She had tied back her hair again, and she knew that the look of stunned pain was ebbing gradually from her face. She still moved stiffly, but nearly two weeks since her flogging she had regained much of herself.

Bellis did not greet Doul. “I want to see Fennec” was all she said.

Doul thought for a second, then inclined his head. “Alright,” he said.

And although this was what she wanted, Bellis hated him for that, because she knew that he allowed it because there was nothing she could do or say to Fennec that could now come in Armada’s way at all. Now that she was not any kind of threat, now that all her cards had been played.

Bellis was quite meaningless now, so she could be indulged.

His magus fin had been taken from him, but it was clear that Garwater was still afraid of Silas Fennec. The corridor along which he was imprisoned was thick with guards. All the doors could be sealed tight: it was below the waterline.

A man and woman sat outside Fennec’s door, fussing over some arcane machine. Bellis felt the dry charge of thaumaturgy against her skin.

Inside, it was a large room, broken by a few portholes through which dark eddies could be seen. Half of the room was sectioned off by iron bars, and beyond them, in a little alcove, hunkered away from the windows and the entrance, Silas Fennec sat on a wooden bench, watching her.

Bellis took in the sight of him. She was caught in a quick kaleidoscope of images of him (their times together, friendly, cold, sexual, surreptitious). Her mouth twisted to see him, and she tasted something very sour.

He was thin, and his clothes were dirty. He met her eyes. She realized, with a sudden shock, that there was a bandage wrapped tight around his right wrist and that his right hand was gone. He saw her notice his injury, and his face twisted before he could control it.

Fennec sighed and stared straight at Bellis.

“What are you doing here?” he asked. He spoke with a drab hostility.

Bellis did not answer. She examined his cell. She saw a heap of unkempt clothes, paper, charcoal, his fat notebook. She studied the bars that kept him from her. They were wrapped around with cables that coiled away and under the door into the room. Fennec watched her trace them back to their source.

“Linked up to those machines out there,” he said to her. He sounded tired. “It’s a dampener. Sniff the air. You can even hear it. Kills the thaumaturgons. No one could do the slightest little hex in here now.” He sniffed and smiled without humor. “It’s in case I’ve got some secret plan. I’ve told them I can only do about three little charms, and none of them would get me out of here anyway but… Guess what? They don’t believe me.”

Bellis glimpsed weird flesh under his shirt. It looked necrotic, speckled with amphibian markings. It pulsed, and Fennec pulled his shirt closed.

Her eyes widening, Bellis turned her back on him and paced.

“Don’t,” Fennec said to her suddenly. He sounded almost kind.

“What the fuck do you mean?” she said, and was pleased to hear her voice was cold.

He looked at her with an infuriating, knowing look.

“Don’t do this,” he said. “Don’t come here; don’t ask me; don’t do this. What are you here for, Bellis? You’re not here to rail at me-that’s not your style. You’re not going to crow. They caught me; so what? They fucking caught you, too. How’s the back?”

That so stunned her that for a moment she could not breathe. She blinked rapidly, bringing him back into focus. He watched her without any particular cruelty or maliciousness in his face.

“You’re not going to learn anything from me, Bellis,” he said, his voice unchanging. “You’re not going to get anything out of this. This won’t be catharsis, and you won’t feel better when you leave. Yes, do you understand? Yes, I lied to you; I used you. And a lot of other people. I did it without thinking twice. I’d do it again. I wanted to go home. If you’d been there and it was easy, I’d have taken you with me, but if you weren’t, I wouldn’t. Bellis…” He leaned forward on his bench and rubbed his wrist stump. “Bellis, you have nothing to confront me with.” He shook his head slowly, utterly unabashed by her.

She was shaking with hatred. He had been right not to tell her the truth about what he was doing. She would never have helped him then, even desperate as she was to get home.

“There’s nothing special about you, Bellis: you were one of many. I treated you no differently from anyone else. I thought of you no more and no less. The only difference between you and any of the others is that you’re here now. And you think there’s some point to you being here. That you had to… what? Have it out?” Silas Fennec, procurator for New Crobuzon, shook his head, pitying.

“There is no it, Bellis,” he said. “Go away.” He lay down and gazed at the ceiling. “Go away. I wanted to get home, and you were useful. You know what I did, and you know why. There’s no mystery, no resolution to be had.

“Go away.”

Bellis stayed a few seconds longer, but managed to leave before speaking again. She had said only six words. She felt her stomach churn with a strong feeling to which she could not put a name.

They won’t kill him, she thought bleakly. They won’t even punish him. He’s not even been flogged. He’s too valuable, too scary. They think he can teach them things, that they can get information out of him. Maybe they can.

As she left, she could not help realizing that Fennec was right about at least one thing.

She felt no better at all.

Bellis was surprised to discover Johannes remaining in her life. There had been a time when he had seemed disgusted with her, not concerned ever to see her again.

She still found him spineless. Even when her own loyalty to New Crobuzon was such an odd, unsystematic thing, she could not help thinking of Johannes as a kind of turncoat. The speed of his accommodation with Armada disgusted her.

But now there was something plaintive in him. His rediscovered eagerness to be her friend was a little pathetic. And though Bellis spent what time she could with Carrianne, whose irreverence and affection were genuine pleasures, and though Carrianne did not much like Johannes, there were times when Bellis let him stay a while. She felt pity for him.

With the avanc caught, trapped, and tethered, and with Tintinnabulum’s crew gone, Johannes’ job was done. Now, after all Johannes’ work, Kruach Aum was working with the Lovers’ thaumaturges and Uther Doul, ushered into the new inner circle to discover the secrets of possibility mining. Johannes had realized, Bellis supposed, that there were very many years ahead of him as a captive in the city.

Johannes still worked with a group overseeing the avanc: plotting its speed, estimating the biomass in the area, and the thaumaturgic flows. But it was make-work half the time. When drunk, he would whine about how he had been used up and dispensed with. Bellis and Carrianne would sneer at him behind his drink-fuddled back.

Johannes voiced cautious uncertainties about their trajectory, about their presence in the Hidden Ocean. To find any sign of dissonance, of opposition to the Lovers’ journey, warmed Bellis with surprise. That was part of why she tolerated Johannes’ presence.

He was too cowardly to admit it, but he wished they would turn back, as Bellis did. And as the days passed and Armada slipped further and further into uncharted waters, into the Hidden Ocean, Bellis discovered (with stabs of unexpected hope) that she and Johannes were not alone.

Hedrigall’s desertion was a trauma that did not heal.

Armada moved on into seas that did not obey laws that any oceanologer understood. It could have seemed an adventure or some god-granted destiny to a citizenry still grimly fired up by triumph in war and by the rhetoric of Garwater’s greatest-ever leaders. But then loyal, reliable Hedrigall had run, and that gave a terrible coloration to the city’s journey.

The Arrogance had quickly been replaced. Now another airship hung over the Grand Easterly, watching the horizons. But it was not so large or quite so high. It did not have the Arrogance’s range of vision, and the metaphors thrown off from that fact troubled men and women otherwise loyal.

“What did he see coming?” they muttered. “Hedrigall, what did he see coming?”

The city’s motion was its own dynamic. There were no strong voices arguing to turn back. Even those other rulers who disapproved of the Lovers’ plans had given in, or only spoke their criticisms in camera. But Hedrigall’s dissident ghost stalked the ridings, and the triumph, the excitement with which the journey had started, was gone.

Tanner and Shekel gave new names to the creatures they saw below the water: runrunners and dancing flies and yellowheads.

They watched Armada’s naturalists drifting over the curious new animals, snatching a few in nets, keeping their distance from the big, snub-faced yellowheads, heliotyping them with unwieldy waterproof cameras and phosphoric flares.

Schools of the animals gusted through the pipes and hulls that jutted below like roots. They mixed with more recognizable fish-there were whiting and baitfish even in the Hidden Ocean-eating them or being eaten.

Tanner dived and teased a couple of hand-sized specimens with his tentacles. At the surface, Shekel looked down on Tanner’s scars.

Further and further into that sea.

There were strange sounds at night: the rutting calls of unseen animals with voices like bulls. Some days there was no swimming at all, not by the hardiest or most inquisitive diver, and even the menfish hid themselves in their little city-bottom caverns. These were dangerous waters. Armada passed through the unpredictable edges of boiltides, by the hunting grounds of piasa, living whirlpools that circled the city hungrily but kept their distance.

In moonless dark, lights pulsed below the waters, like the bioluminescence of benthic things magnified many hundreds of times. There were times when the clouds above the sea moved much faster than the wind. One day when the air was dry as elyctricity, shapes appeared off the city’s star’d edge, like tiny islands. They were rafts of unknown weed, great clots of mutant bladderwrack that moved suddenly away from the city under some motive power of their own.

Across the whole of Armada, in every riding, in tumbledown slums and the most elegant townhouses, there was a tension, a neurotic expectancy. People did not sleep well. Bellis blenched when that began, remembering the misery of the nightmares that had racked New Crobuzon and that ultimately had led her here. From one set of ruined nights to another, she thought after several miserable, insomniac hours.

During some of those dark times, Bellis walked to the Grand Easterly to watch the city’s journey through mysterious, faintly moving seas. She would stare out at the remorseless miles of water until, cowed by the scale of it, she fled into the corridors of the great ship, moved by a compulsion she did not understand.

She would wind through its warren of empty passages, into the forgotten zone of the steamer, to the little cubbyhole that Doul had shown her. And there she would perch, uncomfortable and disturbed, eavesdropping on the fucking and the bedroom talk of the Lovers.

It was a habit that revolted her, but she could not shake off the sly sense of power it gave her. My little rebellion, my little escape-someone’s listening, and you don’t know, she would think, and hear the Lovers mutter wetly to each other and grapple with an abandon that still appalled her.

They never gave her any revelations. They never spoke of anything important. They only rolled and lay together, and murmured their fetishistic connection. The Lover sounded more and more febrile with every night, her voice growing harder, and the Lover debased himself to her, eager to dissolve into her.

I do not want to be here, Bellis thought, fervently and repeatedly. She spoke it aloud, finally, to Carrianne one night, knowing that her friend would not agree.

“I do not want to be here.” Bellis swilled the wine in her glass. “Now there’s nightmares, and what comes next are fugues. I’ve seen it before. And we can’t be heading anywhere that’s any good-and what can happen then? Either we die… or the Lovers get control of the most… terrible, terrible power. Would you really trust them, Carrianne?” she demanded drunkenly. “That cut-up fuck and his psychopath woman? You’d trust them with power like that? I do not want to be here.”

“I know, Bellis,” Carrianne said, searching for words. “But I want to see what’s out there. I think this is something amazing, you understand? Whether or not the Lovers get hold of… whatever’s there. And no, I don’t really trust them. I’m Dry Fall, remember? But I’ll tell you what… Since Hedrigall did a runner, I think there’s a lot of people who are starting to agree with you.”

And Bellis nodded in sudden surprise, and raised her glass in a toast. Carrianne responded sardonically.

She’s right, thought Bellis suddenly. Godsdammit, she’s fucking right. Something’s changing.

The avanc began to slow.

Perhaps ten days after Armada entered the Hidden Ocean, people began to notice.

At first it was Bastard John, the menfish and the cray, Tanner Sack and the other few upsiders who still swam. It was growing easier for them to keep up with the city. At the end of a few hours’ immersion, skittering below the city’s barnacle-scaled underside, their muscles burned less than they would have expected. They were not traveling so far, so fast.

It was not long before the air-breathing citizens noticed. Without land, in cryptic seas, it was not so easy to chart the distances the city was traveling. But there were methods.

Something was happening to the mile-long creature hidden in the deep. Something had changed. The avanc was slowing down.

At first it was hoped that it was a temporary change, that the avanc’s pace would increase again. But the days went on, and still the beast slowed.

With delight and triumph, Johannes found himself suddenly back in favor. His old team was reassembled by the Lovers, to make sense of what was happening.

Bellis was surprised to discover that he still talked to her and Carrianne about his work, now that he had been brought back into the inner circle.

“There can’t be anyone in the city who hasn’t noticed,” he told them one night, exhausted and mystified. “The Lovers are waiting for us to solve it.” He shook his head. “Even Aum can’t fathom it. The rockmilk engine’s still controlling it; the avanc’s still traveling… It’s just slowing.”

“Something in the Hidden Ocean?” suggested Bellis.

Johannes bit his lip. “Doesn’t make sense,” he said. “What in Bas-Lag can fuck with an avanc?”

“It must be sickening,” said Carrianne, and Johannes nodded.

“I think it must be,” he agreed slowly. “Kruach’s confident that we can fix whatever’s wrong. But I’m not sure we know enough to cure it.”

The air above the Hidden Ocean was desiccated and suddenly hot. The city’s crops became brittle.

All the ridings withdrew into themselves, and the ridiculous semblance of normality that Armada had recently affected began to break down. There was little work done. The pirate-citizens waited, motionless in their homes beneath a punitive sky. The city was bleached and vague. Marooned. Lolling like a lifeboat, almost immobile.

Its wake grew daily more faint as the avanc slowed.

A slow-burning panic began to spread. Meetings were called. For the first time, they were not organized by the rulers, but by popular committees operating across the ridings. And if at first they were made up almost totally of men and women from Curhouse and Dry Fall, the minorities from Jhour and Booktown and Garwater grew each day. They discussed what was happening, urgently, seeking answers no one was able to give them.

A nightmare image was recurring in people’s heads: Armada, adrift, without motive power, in the barren waters of the Hidden Ocean. Or tethered by the motionless avanc, an anchor of unimaginable weight.

The city’s speed was still decreasing.

(Much later, Bellis realized that the day when the avanc’s condition became shockingly clear, the day that so many people died, was in Crobuzoner terms the first of Melluary-a Fishday. That fact made her cough with a desolate approximation of laughter, when she realized it later when the killing was over.)

It was midmorning when the impurities appeared in the sea.

At first, those who saw them thought they were more aggregates of the semisentient weed, but it became quickly obvious that they were something else. They were lighter, and lower in the water-sprawling patches of color, liquescent at the edges.

The blemishes appeared miles off, in the city’s path. As they came gradually closer, word spread, and crowds gathered in Shaddler’s Sculpture Garden, at Armada’s fore, to watch whatever it was approach.

It was a mass of some viscous liquid, thick as dense mud. Where waves reached its outer edges they reduced to ugly ripples that crawled weakly across the surface of the substance and were swallowed up.

The stuff was the pallid yellow-white of a caveworm.

Bellis swallowed, feeling sick with anxiety, and then realized very suddenly as the wind shifted that it was not anxiety at all. It was the stench.

A rolling mass of smell oozed over them. The citizens blenched and puked. Bellis and Carrianne staggered and stared at each other, paling, managing not to spew even amid a chorus of retching. The wobbling white mass stank of the worst, most septic rot, air-starved flesh gone putrid.

“Jabber preserve us!” gasped Bellis. Above her head Armada’s carrion birds wheeled, coiling excitedly like some living cloud toward the rank stuff, then arcing suddenly away as they grew close, as if its degree of corruption defied even them.

The city reached the outer edges of the reeking substance. There were great swathes of it ahead, a bobbing purulent mass.

Most of those who had gathered to watch had run back to their houses to burn incense. Bellis and Carrianne remained, watching Johannes and his colleagues at the edge of the park. With perfume-soaked rags around their faces, Garwater’s investigators leaned over the rail, trolling a bucket on a rope into the substance. They hauled it up and began to examine it.

Then recoiled from it, violently.

When Johannes saw Bellis and Carrianne, he ran over to them and tore off his mask. He was white and trembling, his skin reflective with sweat.

“It’s pus,” he said, and pointed to the sea with an unsteady finger. “It’s a slick of pus.”