The Scar

Chapter Forty-four

The sun was gone, but the water was still warm. It was very still. Below its surface the constellation of cray lightglobes picked out Armada’s underside.

Tanner and Shekel swam between the Hoddling and the Dober, the ossified whale, in a runnel of water forty feet wide. They were cosseted from the city’s sounds, only the debris of which floated down to their heads, bobbing on the surface like seals’.

“We’ll not go too close,” warned Tanner. “It could be dangerous. We’re staying on this side of the ship.”

Shekel wanted to dive the few feet he dared, and see through his goggles the line running down to the bathyscaphos. Tanner’s descriptions of the avanc’s chains had always held him transfixed, but they were invisible to him except as faint dark shapes even if he held his courage and swam below the lowest ships in the city. He wanted to see such a cord stretching from the air into the darkness. He wanted to be faced by the scale of it.

“I doubt you’ll see it,” warned Tanner, watching the boy’s enthusiastic, inefficient strokes. “But we’ll see how close we can get, alright?”

The sea lapped at Tanner. He unstretched in it, unrolled his extra limbs. He dived below into the rapidly darkening water and felt himself framed by the cool cray lights.

Tanner breathed water and swam a few feet below Shekel, watching his progress. He thought he could feel something vibrating in the water. He had grown sensitive to the sea’s little shudders. Must be the cable, he thought, still letting the sub down. That’s what it must be.

Three hundred feet from them, the bulky girdered legs of the Sorghum rose from the water. The sun had set behind the rig, and the plaited metal of its struts and derricks were dark stitches in the sky.

“We’ll not get too close,” warned Tanner again, but Shekel was not listening.

“Look!” he crowed, and pointed for Tanner, losing his momentum and sinking momentarily, coming up laughing, pointing again toward the far end of the Hoddling. They could see the thick wire, taut and rigid, descending into the water.

“Keep away, Shek,” warned Tanner. “No closer now.”

The cable penetrated the water like a needle.

“Shekel.” Tanner spoke decisively, and the boy turned, spluttering. “That’s enough. Let’s see what we can see while there’s still a bit of light.”

Tanner reached Shekel and sank below him, staring up as the boy pulled the goggles over his eyes, took a lungful of air, and kicked down, holding Tanner’s hand.

The outlines of the city rose, ominous like storm clouds. Tanner was counting down in his head, allowing Shekel twenty seconds of stored air. Tanner peered through the Hidden Ocean’s dusk, still watching for the shaft of the cable.

When he veered up and hauled the boy into the air, Shekel was smiling.

“It’s fucking brilliant, Tanner,” he said, and coughed, swallowing seawater. “Do it again!”

Tanner took him deeper. Seconds moved slowly, and Shekel showed no discomfort.

They were ten feet below, by the crusted slope of the Hoddling. Some shank of moonlight splashed down, and Shekel pointed. Forty, fifty feet away, the submersible’s cable was momentarily clear.

Tanner nodded, but turned his head to the blackness congealed below the factory ship. He had heard a sound.

Time to rise, he thought, and turned back to Shekel. He touched Shekel and pointed up, reaching out with his hands. Shekel grinned, parting his lips and showing his teeth, even as air slipped from his mouth.

There was a sudden spurting rush of water, and something sinuate and very quick punched in and out of Tanner’s vision. It was gone and there and gone like a fish flashing in to feed. Tanner blinked, stunned. Shekel still stared at him, his face collapsing into perturbation. The boy frowned and opened his mouth as if to speak, and in a great belching roar released all his air.

Tanner spasmed with shock and reached out, and saw that something followed the racing bubbles from Shekel’s mouth, billowing up darkly. For a moment Tanner thought it was vomit, but it was blood.

Still staring with an expression of confusion, Shekel began to sink. Tanner grappled with him, hauling him up with his tentacles, kicking out for the surface, his mind filled up with a shattering sound. And blood smoked up ferociously not only from Shekel’s mouth but from the massive wound on his back.

It seemed so far to the surface.

There was only one word in Tanner’s mind. No no no no no no no no no no no no.

He shrieked it without sound, his suckered polyp arms gripping Shekel’s skin, pulling him fitfully toward the air, and indistinct shapes gusted around Tanner, in and out of shadows, baleful and predatory as barracuda, jackknifing and twisting away, there and gone, moving with an effortless piscine ease that made him feel clumsy and heavy, fumbling with his boy, fleeing the sea. He was an intruder, disturbed and making an escape, cowed by real sea-things. His reconfigured body was suddenly a terrible joke, and he cried and floundered with his burden, struggling in water suddenly quite alien to him.

When he broke the surface he was screaming. Shekel’s face came up in front of him, twitching, leaking brine and gore from his mouth, emitting little sounds.

“Help me!” screamed Tanner Sack, “Help me!” But no one could hear, and he clamped his ridiculous suckered limbs to the side of the Hoddling and tried to drag himself from the water.

“Help me!”

“Something’s wrong! Something’s wrong!”

For hours, the laborers on the Hoddling’s deck had tended the great steam pumps that sent air to the Ctenophore, and prepared themselves to haul it back. One by one they had slipped into a kind of torpor. They had noticed nothing at all until the cactus-woman greasing the safety wire began to bellow.

“Something’s fucking wrong!” she yelled, and they came running, panicked by her voice.

They watched the wire, their hearts slamming. The great wheel-almost empty now, its harness almost all played out-was shaking violently, juddering against the deck, trembling the screws that held it down. The cable began to shriek, tearing its way past the guard-piece.

“Bring them up,” someone shouted, and the crews ran to the massive winch. There was a snap and the noise of slipping gears. The pistons punched into each other like boxers. The engine’s cogs bit down and tried to turn, but the cable fought them. It was taut as a treble string.

“Get them out get them out,” someone screamed uselessly, and then with a hideous cracking sound the huge winch rocked backward violently on its stand. The engine smoked and steamed and whined childishly as its guts began to spin freely. Its complex of ratchets and flywheels blurred, revolving so fast they were as dim as apparitions.

“It’s free!” the cactus-woman reported to a hysterical cheer. “It’s coming up.”

But the bathyscaphos was never designed to rise that fast.

The wheel accelerated in ridiculous haste, hauling up the cable at dizzying speed. The gears gave off the dry stink of burning metal and grew red-hot as they whirred.

It had taken three hours to send the Ctenophore to the bottom. The disk of rewound cable increased so quickly they could watch it grow, and they knew it would be no more than minutes before it was all pulled back.

“It’s coming up too fast! Get away!”

A mist of brine boiled where the thigh-thick cable was torn from the sea. It scored through the water. Where it met the Hoddling’s side, it wore a deep groove in the metal, howling in a monsoon of sparks.

Engineers and stevedores scrambled to get away from the machinery, which struggled with its remaining bolts like a terrified man.

Tanner Sack hauled himself onto the Hoddling’s deck, dragging Shekel’s wet, cooling shape behind him.

“Help me!” he screamed again, but still no one heard a word.

(At the edge of Dry Fall, the Brucolac was leaned over the edge of the Uroc, watching the water intently. A domed, toothed head rose before him, framed by ripples, nodded once, and disappeared. The Brucolac turned to his cadre, on the deck behind him.

“It’s time,” he said.)

With a vaulting plume of water, the end of the cable burst from the sea and arced over the spinning winch, heavy metal cordage whipping toward the deck, its end splayed jagged where the submersible had been pulled free.

The Hoddling’s workers watched, aghast.

The frayed end of the wire slammed into the deck with a cataclysmic sound, leaving a long stripe of shattered wood and metal shavings, and the winch kept turning. The end of wire lashed around and under it and flogged the ship again and again.

“Turn it off!” the foreman screamed, but no one could hear him over the punishment, and no one could get close. The motor kept the great wheel spinning, flagellating the Hoddling, until the boiler exploded.

When it did, and showered the factory ship with molten detritus, there was a moment of still and shock. And then the Hoddling lurched again, from more fire and explosions within.

Alarms were sounding across the city.

Yeomanry and armed cactacae from Garwater and Jhour were taking up positions on the vessels around the Hoddling, which glowed and boomed as the great bonfire on its deck spread. Its crews raced, frantic, away from it, over the rope bridges and into the city. The Hoddling was a huge ship, and there was a steady stream of men and women surging up out of its guts, through the smoke and away from its ruins.

Etched in black against the flames, a figure could be seen shambling slowly in a vague path toward a bridge, bent under a burden that lolled and dripped. His mouth was open wide, but what he said could not be heard.

“Do you all know what to do?” whispered the Brucolac, tersely. “Then go.”

Moving too fast for the eye easily to follow, a swarm of figures spread out from the Uroc.

They raced like apes, swinging with easy speed over roofs and rigging, their passage soundless. The unclear garrison fractured into smaller forces.

“Bask and Curhouse won’t help, but they won’t hinder, either,” the Brucolac had told them. “Dynich is young and nervous-he’ll wait and go where the wind blows. Shaddler’s the only other riding with which we have to concern ourselves. And there’s a quick way of taking them out of the equation.”

A small group of the vampir made their uncanny way toward Shaddler, toward the Therianthropus and Barrow Hall, toward the general’s court. The main force loped and leaped aft, stretching their limbs, febrile and excited, heading for Garwater.

Behind them, walking briskly but without any attempt to rush or hide, came the Brucolac.

There was something on the Hoddling. The men and women who escaped and collapsed on the surrounding vessels gasped for breath and shrieked warnings.

Something had burst through the ship’s hull, somewhere in its lowest quarters, and scored a tunnel up through the metal. As the engine had spun and lashed the deck with the stub of the Ctenophore’s cable, things had emerged from the hidden decks, attacking those on the bridge and in the boilers and engine rooms, tearing the ship apart.

Things that were hard to describe-there were reports of chattering teeth like razored slabs, vast corpsy eyes.

The deck of the Grand Easterly was almost empty, only crossed occasionally by some running servant or bureaucrat. The yeomanry guarded its entrance points, where the bridges rose to it from below-they could not allow such chaos to spread to the flagship. The crowds gathered as close as they could get to the violence, on roofs and balconies, towerblocks, thronging the vessels that surrounded the Hoddling. They surged forward like waves. Aerostats came near the gusting updraft from the fire.

Forgotten in her room at the Grand Easterly’s rear, Bellis watched in horror as the crisis took shape.

Johannes is gone, she thought, staring at the shattered ruins of the winch engine.

He was gone-and she had no words for the weird, muted shock and loss she felt.

She looked down on the trawlers that abutted the Hoddling. Their decks thronged with injured, terrified men and women being dragged to safety from the flames.

On one of them, Bellis saw Uther Doul. He shouted, moving sparely, his eyes darting ceaselessly.

The fire on the Hoddling was abating, though the Armadans had not put it out.

Bellis gripped the windowsill. She could see shadows moving through the windows of the factory ship. She could see things within.

Armed pirates were arriving from all over the city. They took up positions, checking their weaponry and massing by the bridges leading to the Hoddling.

Something streaked from the factory ship’s smoke-fouled bridge: a jet of disturbance that buckled the air as it lanced out. It struck the wooden mast of a schooner just beyond the Hoddling.

Agitated particles coiled around the mast and soaked into it, and then Bellis let out an astonished sound. The mast was melting as if it were wax, the great pillar of wood bending like a snake, its substance oozing over itself as it spat and drooled downward, spitting in and out of existence, leaving an effervescence in the air-a blistered reality through which Bellis caught glimpses of a void. Folds of denaturing wood slid like toxic sludge over the crowded deck.

Uther Doul was pointing with his sword, directing a group of cactacae to bring their rivebows to bear on the Hoddling’s windows, when a chorus of cries rose away from the factory ship, out of Bellis’ sight. She saw the men and women below shift their attention, watched an expression of horror and astonishment pass through them like a virus.

Something was approaching from the city’s fore, bearing down on the assembled pirates-something Bellis could not yet see. She saw the armed groups splinter, some turning to face the new threat with terror scrawled all over them. Bellis ran from the room, heading up to the deck to see.

The Grand Easterly was all confusion. The bridges were still guarded by nervous patrols, unclear on their orders, desperately watching the storm of arrows and cannonfire that assaulted the Hoddling. Pirates were leaving the Grand Easterly, running to join their comrades.

Bellis ran to the edge of the deck, past the bridge, hiding in the darkness beside its raised quarters. She was at the level of Armada’s roofs. She tried to make out what was happening in the city.

Firepower was beating down on the Hoddling, and on whatever it contained. The hidden enemy sent out more of their bizarre and murderous thaumaturgic strikes, like fireworks, dissolving the substance of the surrounding vessels and the attacking Armadans. But beyond the nearby vessels, Bellis could see an indistinct second front spreading into the city. She could see undisciplined, chaotic attacks, could hear the irregular staccato of gunfire.

The new attackers grew closer to the tight tangle of boats below her, where most of Garwater’s yeomanry had been waiting to retake the Hoddling. She could see, suddenly, who had launched the second assault, from within the city. The Garwater forces were suddenly hemmed in and stormed by Dry Fall’s vampir.

Bellis peered around, her hand held tight to her mouth, breathing hard. She did not understand what she was seeing-some collapse of trust, some revenge? Mutiny, at the Brucolac’s hand.

She could not keep the vampir in her eyes. They moved like nightmares. Congregating and atomizing and re-forming, moving with feral speed.

They would swing down with terrifying grace in some cul-de-sac where only five or six or seven armed fighters at a time could attack them, and would dispatch the defenders with appalling ferocity, punching horn-hard nails through throats, savaging with their predatory teeth until their chins were sopped with blood, salivating and growling with bloodlust. And then they were gone, bounding over the collapsing bodies and onto some other concrete block or bridge or gun tower or ruin. Rustling like lizards they would disappear from sight.

Bellis could not tell how many there were. Wherever she looked, there seemed to be fighting, but she could only ever see Garwater’s troops clearly.

Uther Doul, she realized, had turned his attention to the vampir. She saw him shoving people out of his way and sprinting back onto the Grand Easterly’s deck, to stare down onto the zones of battle. He spun and screamed orders, directed reinforcements toward the various combats. Then he hurled himself toward the rear of an ancient war trimaran by the Grand Easterly’s side, lumpen with brick housing, where through a thicket of ragged washing Bellis glimpsed a brutal melee.

It was only two hundred feet from her, and she could still see Doul. She could watch him sliding down the steeply angled bridge, thumbing on the Possible Sword, which shimmered and became a thousand ghost-swords as he ran. She watched him disappear behind a billowing sheet, as if it had swallowed him up. The sheet gusted and cracked with the wind, and beyond it there were a series of sudden noises.

The stark white linen was streaked from behind with red.

It fluttered twice, as if wounded, and then was torn down as a staggering body collapsed into it and gripped it in death, staining it bloodier and twisting it into a makeshift shroud, revealing the scene behind. Doul stood among a mass of wounded, who were cheering and kicking the swaddled vampir corpse.

Their triumph was brief. Thaumaturgic energy spat like hot fat across from the Hoddling, and the wood and metal around the men and women began to buckle and ooze. Uther Doul pointed with his red-dripping sword, sending the exhausted fighters running from the boat.

The vampir they left behind was not the only one to fall. Bellis could not see much of the fighting-her view was interrupted by cobbled streets and building sites and cranes and avenues of stumpy trees. But she thought she could see, here and there, other vampir succumbing. They were terrifyingly fast and strong, and they left a trail of punctured bodies, bleeding and dead, but they were vastly outnumbered.

They used the architecture and the shadows as their allies, but they could not avoid every one of the deluge of bullets and sword strokes that followed them. And though those wounds might not kill them as they would an ordinary woman or man, they hurt and slowed them down. And inevitably there were places where a gang of terrified pirates closed in on one of the buckling, snarling figures and hacked the head from its shoulders, or savaged it so remorselessly that they destroyed its bones and innards beyond even the preternatural vampir capacity for self-repair.

Alone, the vampir might eventually have been contained, but too many of Garwater’s fighters were engaged with the unseen enemy on the Hoddling.

Small, low boats had been launched, forty-footers with cannons and fire-throwers on their decks. They raced across the little bay toward the factory ship, to cover it from its open sides, to surround it.

But in the water around the Hoddling, shapes were rising.

The sea was illuminated by the glow from the fires and the firepower, and through a few feet of brine Bellis could make out the outlines of the things below: bloated bodies wobbling like sacks of rotten meat; malignant little pig eyes; degenerate fin stubs. Splitting them wide open, mouths mounted with irregular footlong teeth of translucent cartilage.

They breached fleetingly. What in Jabber’s name are they? thought Bellis, dizzily. How can the Brucolac control those? What’s he done? The men who approached them fired volleys of missiles at them, and the things disappeared again.

But when the little boats came close and the men within leaned out to take aim again, there was a quick organic twitching and they were in the sea, in stunned shock, and with an inrush of water and a quick glare of teeth, they were taken down.

Armada was tearing itself apart. Bellis heard gunshots and saw a flickering of flames where Dry Fall met Garwater. A human mob was approaching, and there were running fights between them and the Garwater sailors. It was not now the city against the vampir alone-as news of the rebellion spread, those who opposed the Lovers’ plans had come out to fight. Hotchi slammed their spines against men; cactacae hurled their great bulks against each other in ugly combat.

There was no structure to the fighting. The city was burning. Dirigibles moved overhead in ungainly panic. Above it all towered the Grand Easterly. Its dark iron was still silent and empty, still deserted.

Bellis became sluggishly aware that this was bizarre. She stared at the trireme below her. The rope bridge that had linked it to the Grand Easterly had been severed, and so, she realized, had the one beyond it.

Bellis flattened herself carefully against the wall, inched forward, and peered out of the darkest shadows onto the main deck. She saw three dim figures moving with vampir speed, hacking at the chains and knots that attached the bridges to the ship. They split one and sent it swinging into the sea, its far end slapping the flank of the vessel to which it was attached, and then they flitted to the next and began again.

Bellis’s stomach lurched. The vampir were cutting her off, confining her on the ship with them. She pressed against the wall and could not move, as if a film of ice held her.

On an old trawler, below mildewing eaves, Uther Doul put his blade through a man’s face. He turned away from the split, screaming thing he had made and raised his voice over the sounds of violence.

“Where,” he bellowed, “is the fucking Brucolac?”

And as he spoke, he was facing the Grand Easterly. He paused for a second at his own words and looked up at the steamer’s rail, toward its invisible deck and its miles of corridors, where he had left the Lovers in emergency session with their scientific advisors, and his eyes widened.

“Godsdammit!” he shouted, and began to run.

Bellis could hear a voice.

It came from very close to her, just around the corner from where she stood frozen, by the doors to the raised section. She held her breath, her heart quite cold with fear.

“Do you understand?” she heard. The voice spoke tersely, hoarse and guttural. The Brucolac. “He’ll be somewhere in that section-I don’t know exactly where, but I’ve no doubt that you can find him.”

“We understand.” Bellis closed her eyes at that awful second voice. It sounded as if the whispered words were chance echoes in parting slime. “We will find him,” it continued, “and take back what was stolen, and then we will leave, and the avanc will move freely again.”

“Well, I’ll be quick then,” the Brucolac said. “There’s two people I still have to kill.”

Footsteps receded. Bellis risked opening her eyes and moving her head a tiny way, and she saw the Brucolac stalking calmly and at speed toward the raised section of superstructure below which were the Grand Easterly’s meeting rooms.

Bellis heard the door open, and quick wet sounds brushing the threshold as the intruders entered.

Understanding and amazement hit her so hard she reeled. She knew in a sudden gust of insight what those newcomers were, and what-and whom-they were seeking.

So far…? she thought, giddy. So far? But she had no doubt.

Holding her breath so that her terrified hyperventilation would not betray her, Bellis looked around the corner. There was no one in sight.

She tried desperately to think of what to do. She heard a rushing sound and a series of terrible screams from the ships below. She could not help but give a quiet cry when she saw what the intruders’ thaumaturgy had done, what was now happening to the men and women of Armada. She shook her head and moaned, stupefied by the blood and disfigured corpses she saw.

Another burst of energy crossed the air from the Hoddling, and a vivid anger settled very suddenly in Bellis’ guts, making her tremble. Her fear remained, but this new rage was much stronger.

It was directed at Silas Fennec.

You fucking bastard! she thought. You fucking stupid selfish swine! Look what you’ve done! Look what you’ve brought here! She watched the carnage, her own hands bloodless.

I have to stop this.

And then she knew how.

She knew what had been stolen, and she knew where it was.

As the vampir sawed at the age-fused rope of the last of the Grand Easterly’s bridges, a sword-wielding figure hurled himself up the slats. The vampir stepped back in surprise and fumbled for their weapons.

Uther Doul reached the deck. The vampir closest to him brought out her flintlock and turned it on him, flickering her tongue and snarling, her fangs extending like a snake’s. Doul beheaded her with a kind of contempt.

Her two fellows watched the tattoo of her heels on the wood. Doul walked toward them without hesitation, and they ran.

“Where,” Uther Doul bellowed after them, “is the Brucolac?”

Crying out with every stroke, Bellis battered at the handle and lock with the candlestick she had grabbed, swinging it with all her strength. She wedged it into the crack and levered. The wood splintered and dented, but the door was thick and well made, and it was several loud minutes before the lock gave way. Bellis bayed in triumph as the door swung open, bleeding wood chips.

She threw open Doul’s cupboards and rummaged under his bed, kicking at floorboards, searching for the statue. It was not in the weapons rack, or by the weird instrument he had said was a Ghosthead artifact. Minutes passed and kept her in agonies as she imagined the bloodshed that must be continuing outside.

Bellis found the statue suddenly, wrapped in its cloth at the bottom of a cylinder in which Doul stored arrows and javelins. With a sudden reverential fear, she cradled the heavy thing as she ran through the Grand Easterly’s empty corridors, finding her bearings, remembering where she herself had been held in jail, searching for the secure wing of the old ship, looking very much as if she held a baby.

The Lovers were gathered in a meeting room with those few of their advisors they could find. The fighting was not yet an hour old.

The Lover was yelling uselessly at the frightened scientists, telling them that Aum and Tearfly were dead, and that there was something tearing their city apart, and that they had to know what it was, to fight it, when the door flew open, its bolt disintegrating.

In the shocked silence, everyone in the room turned to face the Brucolac.

He stood in the doorway, breathing heavily, his jaw stretched wide and his teeth wicked. He tasted the air with his serpent’s tongue and cast his yellow eyes over the assembled. Then he swept his arm quickly, encompassing everyone in the room except the Lovers.

“Leave,” he whispered.

The exodus took only a few seconds, and the Lovers and the Brucolac were left alone.

They watched the vampir, not fearful but wary, as he stalked toward them.

“This ends,” he whispered, “now.”

Without speaking, the Lovers moved slowly apart, making themselves two targets. Each had drawn their pistols; neither spoke. The Brucolac made sure neither could get past him to the door.

“I don’t want to rule,” he said, and there seemed to be a quite genuine note of despair in his voice, “but this ends. This isn’t a plan; it’s fucking lunacy. I won’t let you destroy this city.” He drew back his lips, and he hunkered down to leap. The Lovers hefted their weapons, knowing that it was pointless. They stole a glance at each other but looked quickly back at the Brucolac, who was ready to take them.

“Stand down.”

It was Uther Doul. He stood in the doorway, his sword glinting bone-white in his hand.

The Brucolac did not turn around. His eyes did not leave the Lovers.

“I know one thing about you, Uther,” he said, “one thing at least. Armada’s your home, and you need it. And I know that for all your stiff-faced shit about loyalty”-his voice became very hard for a second-“the city’s the one thing you won’t betray. And you know that they will destroy it.”

He waited, as if for a response.

“Stand down,” was all Doul said.

“If the fucking Scar exists,” whispered the Brucolac, still without turning, “and if they get us there and by some gods-fucked miracle we survive, then they’ll still destroy us. We are not an expeditionary force; we are not on some fucking quest. This is a city, Uther. We live; we buy; we sell; we steal; we trade. We are a port. This is not about adventures.” He turned and faced Uther Doul with his eyes caustic. “You know that. That’s why you came here, dammit, Uther. Because you were sick of adventures.

“Let’s have some rationality… We don’t need the fucking beast. We don’t need to haul arse across the world-we never have. The point’s not that some fucker centuries ago built those chains; the point is that they were left empty. And if we survive this lunacy, as long as we’re tethered to the bastard avanc these two will take us on another fucking voyage, and another, until we all die.

“That’s not our logic, Doul; that’s not how Armada works. That’s not why we came here. I will not let them end this.”

“Brucolac,” Doul said, “you do not make this choice.”

Slowly, the vampir’s eyes widened, and hard lines broke his face.

“Gods… You know I’m right, Uther, don’t you? I can fucking see it on you. So what are you doing?” he hissed. “What do you have planned?”

“Deadman,” Doul spoke softly. “You will stand down.”

“You think so, Liveman Doul?” the Brucolac whispered. His voice was coarse with swallowed rage. Long strings of slaver stretched down from his extended teeth. The bones in his hands cracked as he closed his fists. “You think so? You’re a fine soldier, Liveman Doul. I’ve seen you fight. I’ve fought beside you… But I’m more than three centuries old, Doul. You take on a couple of my cadre, and you think you can face me? I killed my way to this city before you were born. I won my riding in war and fire. I’ve butchered things no liveman has even seen.

“I am the Brucolac, and your sword won’t save you. You think you can face me?”

The corridors of the Grand Easterly were absolutely empty. Bellis wound through the passageways, down stairways toward the jailhouse, her footsteps coming back to her in echo.

Even the hallway where Fennec was imprisoned was deserted, its guards summoned to defend Garwater like all the others. That was the bargain, Bellis understood suddenly. That was the deal. These empty corridors were what the Brucolac had delivered to the intruders.

Only the two thaumaturges outside Fennec’s cell had been left, and they were dead. Blood was still slicking across the floor as Bellis approached the corpses. The man had been attempting some hex, and little arcs of energy spat and dissipated like static from his fingers, which spasmed as his nerves died. The woman was next to him, splayed and opened.

Bellis was clumsy with fear, which welled up like vomit in her. She hovered outside the cell, standing in the blood, her hand poised to open the door, held back by terror. She battled with herself, utterly unsure of what to do.

Just throw it in there, a part of her said. Just leave it by the door, just run, just get out. And at that second there was a scream from inside the room, a dreadful panicked noise all full of terror. Bellis echoed it, crying out in horror, and she threw open the door and stepped in.

“It’s here!” she screamed, ripping the cloth from the hideous statue and holding it like an offering. “Stop! I’ve got it here. Stop! Take it; you can take it and go!”

At the far side of the room, separated from her by the bars, Silas Fennec was crawling backward, screaming again, driving himself into a corner of his cell. He did not even look at her. He was scrabbling like a child, gazing in a stupefaction of terror at what had come for him.

With a horrible slowness, turning her head through thick air, Bellis followed his line of vision, and with a spasm of cold shock that made her stumble, she saw the grindylow.

There were three. They were staring at her.

They jutted prognathous jaws, their bulging teeth frozen in meaningless grimaces, massive eyes absolutely dark and unblinking. Their arms and chests were humanoid, tightly ridged with muscles and stretched skin, grey-green and black, shiny as if with mucus. And narrowing at the waist, the grindylow bodies extended like enormous eels into flat tails several times longer than their torsos.

The grindylow swam in the air. They flickered, sending quick S-curves down the lengths of their extended tails, rippling them liquidly. They moved their arms in a random dance, like submerged swimmers controlling their buoyancy, clenching and unclenching their webbed claws.

They were absolutely quiet. Even with their hideous faces turned to her, Bellis was wooed by their languid, constant, silent motion. Their bodies were level with hers as their tails eddied in the air, suspending them above the floor.

One of them was adorned with a mass of necklaces in stone and bone. It was streaked with human blood.

Oh gods and Jabber look at you, thought Bellis in a kind of frantic croon. Look at you. You’ve come so fucking far…

The grindylow waited.

“Here…” Bellis’ voice was spastic with fear. She held out the statuette to them, gripping it carefully, scared that it would slip from her violently shaking hands. “I have it for you here,” she whispered. “I brought it. So you can leave now. You can go.”

Cold and quiet as abyssal fish, the grindylow merely watched her, flicking their tails.

“Please take it,” she said. “Please, I brought what was stolen from you. Take it, and… you can leave. Back to The Gengris.” Leave us alone, she prayed. Leave us be. The statue was heavy in her outstretched hands.

With a swift flash of his tail, the necklaced grindylow swam closer to her through the air, close enough to touch.

Bellis flinched violently as Silas Fennec screamed at her, “Bellis get out!”

The grindylow twisted its head toward her, quizzical, the blood that fouled it running in all directions across its skin, against gravity. With a languid yawn it opened its jaws.

Bellis flinched, let out a cry.

But from within its throat came a deep, breathy cough. Beadlets of blood from its teeth spattered the statue that Bellis held. Then another cough, and another, in careful rhythm: uh… uh… uh.

The grindylow was laughing.

A horrible, incompetent parody of human laughter.

The grindylow stared at her, unblinking, as she lowered her quivering hands. It clenched its teeth with a stone sound, then opened them again, and with its mouth held open and still, its throat flexed with the precision of human lips, it spoke.

“You think this?” the voice whispered, without nuance or intonation. “You woman think this is what was taken? For this you woman think we cross a world?

“We siblings cross from the dark cold of the lake, from pabulum towers and the vats, the algae palace, from The Gengris. We track this place across two four eight many thousands miles, many thousands. Tired and hungry and very angry. Many months. We siblings sit and wait under your place, and hunt, and at last find word, always looking for this man. This robberman, thief. For this?”

The grindylow began to ebb back and forth in front of Bellis, watching her, still pointing at the figurine.

“For this you think we came? This stone thing? Our magus fin? Like primitives you think we abase before gods carved in rock? For hocus-pocus in trinkets?”

The grindylow snatched out, and Bellis gasped and pulled back her hand, letting go of the statue as if it were hot, and the grindylow caught it before it had begun to fall. It hefted the rock figure, holding it up to its face. It stroked its cheek with the filigree of skin.

“There is essence here, but still, for this?” The throat gasped. “You think we are children, we siblings, to cross the world for a puissant toy?”

With a long, exaggerated, slowed-down motion, the grindylow swung its arm in a great arc, curling the figurine through the air with a dramatic, petulant movement, releasing it. It must have been traveling very fast, but Bellis could see it clearly as it spun toward the bars, its arms tucked tight around a coiled-up tail, exquisitely and unpleasantly rendered, its gross mouth puckered and ready, its one eye glinting at her with cold humor.

The figurine hit the iron with a massive sound and broke apart.

Shards scattered, and cold drops of something like oil.

Bellis was stunned. She watched the particles settle and felt something in the aether resonate and go out.

In the middle of the floor, surrounded by stone dust and gelatinous residue, was a sliver of flesh. The magus fin, looking like some rotten wrinkled fillet.

The grindylow ignored it, and fluttered their tails, and approached Silas Fennec behind his bars.

“We have found what was stolen from us,” the grindylow whispered. And then it moved with a strange violence, wriggling through air as if the air fought back, and reaching up, it parted the bars as if they were waterweed, pulling them apart so that it seemed they might tear into stringy fronds. But they held; they oozed back and were solid and upright once more, and the grindylow had passed through them to the other side.

It hovered quite still over Silas Fennec, and he flailed in its shadow.

Bellis could not watch Fennec’s degradation, see him so stripped. She could not have imagined that he could be so afraid.

“We have what was taken,” the grindylow murmured, and it pulled back knife-sharp fingers and stabbed them down, and when she did not hear a cry or some wet sound Bellis opened her eyes again and saw that grindylow had rummaged in the rags that lay on the floor like castoff skins, and from them had pulled Silas Fennec’s notebook.

Bellis remembered it well: black-bound and thick, distended with inserted papers. She recalled its reams of nebulous jottings, heliotypes and inexpert sketches, notes, questions, and mementos.

The grindylow turned slowly through the pages. Periodically it would turn and hold up a page to the bars, showing Bellis something that told her nothing.

“The salp vats. The weapon farms. The castle. Our anatomy. A gazetteer of the second city. And see here,” it said with opaque triumph, “coastline maps. The mountains between the ocean and the Cold Claw Sea. Where our placements are. Where there are fissures, where the rock is weakest.” And something moved in Bellis’ mind: the first stirrings of comprehension.

“Would you tell your masters where is best for their excavations, robberman?” it asked. Cradling the stump of his arm, Fennec tried to move further away.

Bellis could see the page the grindylow had opened. She had seen it before, in her room, and in Croom Park, months before. Rough scribbles suggesting engines, red lines of force and striae of rock types crosshatched in ink. The hidden positions of The Gengris on the Cold Claw side; the paradoses and defenses; the traps.

Understanding was uncoiling in Bellis like cold water. She remembered the conversations she had had with Fennec, when they had first grown close. She remembered his stories, the extraordinary tales of his travels. She remembered what he had said.

If you can get across the Cold Claws, if you can reach the islands and the far shores, if you can trek across those miles and miles of punitive geography, to the Shatterjack Mines and Hinter, to those hungry trade partners and those untouched miles of resources, then you are made. But most can’t make it, because the route is so terrible; because you can’t come at it from the south, because The Gengris are in charge of the southern tip of the Cold Claw Sea and won’t let outsiders pass.

But what if you could reach it from the south, directly, Bellis thought, coming straight? Not into some tumbling fucked-up overland caravan shedding its goods and machines and crews like spoor across the mountains and the grasslands, but by ship. What if you could sail from New Crobuzon, safely past The Gengris in safety, and straight up to the north?

“My good gods,” she murmured, and stared at Fennec. “A canal. They’re planning a canal.”

It made such sense. The rock ridge between the freshwater of the Cold Claw Sea and the Swollen Ocean’s brine was only thirty, forty miles wide in places, its ridges wrinkled with valleys. Bellis could picture the work. A prodigious project, true, but what a prize.

Ships sail north from Iron Bay, skirting the harsh coastline of Lubbock Scrub and the Bezheks, then out to sea to avoid the ruins and residuum of Torque by Suroch, skirting the straits between the Pirate Islands and the mainland; and then a week’s sailing north of New Crobuzon, the flint spines that shield the Cold Claw Sea would rise to port, to the west.

But no longer impenetrable. Breached.

A wide runnel scored at the bottom of a strath. Tall ships and steamers passing sedately between overhangs and scree landscapes.

And there would be locks. Huge locks segmenting the canal, raising the brackish water in stages, massive wooden doors and careful engineering, bringing the ships closer to the Cold Claws, step by ponderous step. They would ascend the strata of the canal while the ocean barnacles clinging to their hull grew weak and died as the water lost its salt.

Until-what?

Out.

The rock monoliths part before the ships, and the canal bleeds into the deep waters of the freshwater sea: the Cold Claw Sea.

Perhaps Fennec’s papers, his researches, planned for a passage that emerged north of The Gengris and its wider borders. Perhaps the traders and industrialists and soldiers of New Crobuzon could ignore the grindylow, sail blithely past them to the pickings beyond, leaving them raging, pathetic and ignored, in their little corner to the south.

But surely that was not enough. Fennec’s book contained too many details, assiduously and covertly collected, of grindylow strategies, weapons, and plans. Perhaps any such incursion by New Crobuzon would necessitate war, and Fennec had gathered the information to ensure that his paymasters would win it.

A constellation of places that were so far little more than myth would open to New Crobuzon. With trade, colonies, and all that they entailed. Bellis remembered the stories she had heard about Nova Esperium, the riches and the brutality.

Whatever happened, the grindylow monopoly on terror in the Cold Claw Sea would be broken. New Crobuzon’s canal would open up a free market in power-control of which only New Crobuzon could possibly win.

Bellis shook her head, astonished. This hadn’t been some dramatic, romantic escapade. Fennec’s theft had been planned carefully, an analysis of costs and difficulties carried out by an expert. And how much more sense this made of the grindylow. They were not like the vengeful bugaboos of the stories she had read to Shekel, chasing a symbol. Their motivations were clear. They were protecting the source of all their power, their interests, and existence.

“The statue was just a trinket, wasn’t it?” Bellis said, and even in his fear Fennec met her eyes, for a second. “A bonus just for you? That wasn’t why New Crobuzon sent you there, or why the grindylow came.

“You were doing a feasibility study…”

He could have sent it home. He could have hidden his papers in the message he had given Bellis, to courier for him like a fool, but then, of course, his masters would not have come to rescue him. So he had held on to his research, knowing what it was worth, knowing that for those scrawls New Crobuzon would send its navy across the world.

But they had failed to recover him, or his precious notes. There would be no canal, thought Bellis, watching the grindylow. Not now.

Fennec was jabbering. For a moment Bellis thought he was having a fit and venting random sounds, but she realized that he was speaking in some attenuated, human version of the grindylow tongue. He leaned back against the wall for strength and held forth with controlled panic. Pleading, Bellis supposed, for his life.

But the grindylow had what they wanted, and he had nothing to offer them.

The figure eddying before him in the cell raised its claws. It spoke, slowly and loudly, in its own language, and Silas Fennec let out a shriek.

Bellis felt the air beside her twitch, disturbed, as the other two grindylow wriggled their bodies, sending a ripple from their shoulders through their taut bellies and down their elongated tails. They moved with that same marine suddenness to the bars. Their leader moved his hands in brute arcana till the iron became flaccid again, and they squeezed through.

Fennec began to shriek louder as the three grindylow surrounded him.

With a horrible sense of nausea, Bellis was certain that she was about to see him butchered, and she heard herself protest weakly. No more, she thought.

But the grindylow reached out and gripped him, and he screamed and battered at them, but they plucked at him easily with their intricate cruel fingers and, linking together in an unsettling, ill-defined morass, the three deepwater creatures locked him into a tangle of limbs, and began to rise.

They were suspended above the floor. Fennec’s shrieks were muting. His feet did not touch the ground. He was being borne up, across the little cell, swaddled in limbs and thick eel tails.

The grindylow magus gripped the notebook hard in one hand, and with the other he reached out, for a moment releasing his grip on his companions and his captive, and gesticulated at the largest porthole that broke the wall of the little prison. She heard the bones around his neck rattle balefully.

As if it were liquid, as if it were a still pool into which someone had slipped a stone, the glass in the porthole rippled, and Bellis realized what the grindylow was doing as the glass began to vein. She pulled herself from her daze-a torpor of disgust and shock and fear-and slipped in blood as she scrambled for the door.

She heard Fennec cry out once, and then a moist exhalation and the sound of wetness as the magus clamped his massive mouth over Fennec’s, lacerating his face with sharp teeth but breathing air into him as the hexed glass burst like a boil and the sea blasted into the room.

In seconds the room was inches deep, and the cannoning water did not slow. Bellis’ fingers were numb as she pulled at the door handle, the water pushing against the hatch. She hauled it open and turned for half a second at the threshold, her skirt wrapping her wetly, cold water bleeding torrentially past her feet into the corridor and chilling her.

The grindylow floated, poised, in this gush of ocean. Fennec’s hands extruded from their tight-cloyed mass, clenching and unclenching. As the water level grew higher beneath them, with stunning speed the grindylow triumvirate moved together in the air, congealing tightly, impossibly tightly, until with a perfectly timed spasm of their tails they jetted for the porthole, passing through it without pause, and on, and out, taking Fennec away, carrying what was stolen from them-information, secrets-into the sea.

As Bellis spun the lock on the door, sealing off that ruptured room, the corridor around her swilled with water. It swept in a thin layer back and forth, illustrating all the Grand Easterly’s movements.

She leaned back, sat back, her thighs and arse splashing down, feeling nothing as a wave of trembling took her over. She did not weep, but as the adrenaline dissipated through her body, she let out the most bestial croaking cries, absolutely without control, retching as all the pent-up fear in her spewed out.

She sat like that for a long time.

Somewhere out in the night, in the cold and the dark of deep water, was Silas Fennec. Borne away. For interrogation or unthinkable punishment. Alive.

It took Bellis a long time to retrace her steps, up out of the Grand Easterly’s jailhouse cellars. She moved doggedly, her long salt-wet skirt abrading her skin. Assiduously, she thought of nothing. She had never been so tired, or cold.

When finally she emerged into the night air, below the gently swinging old rigging and the enormous iron masts, she felt a drab surprise that everything was still as it had been, that everything was still there.

She was alone. The sound of shouts and fire could still be heard, but were very distant to her now.

Breathing hard and walking slowly, Bellis made her way to the boat’s edge and leaned her head against the rail, pushing it against her cheek, closing her eyes. When she looked up, she realized that she was watching the Hoddling. The outlines of the fat ship came into slow focus. Its fires had gone out.

There were no jets of weird energy emitted from behind its walls. There were no deep-sea monstrosities guarding it like a moat. There were men and women on its decks, moving without urgency, but with exhaustion and despondency.

She saw the waves nodding against the sides of the city, and with a sensitivity that had grown inside her without her knowing it, Bellis became aware that Armada was moving again.

Very slowly, as yet no faster than it had when the masses of tugs had hauled it. But it was being borne forward again. The avanc was moving, the pain of its wound receding.

The grindylow had gone.

(And Silas is alive.)

Walking forward, clutching the rail, Bellis headed toward the Grand Easterly’s great prow, and as she rounded a low set of cabins, she heard sounds. There were people ahead of her.

She gazed out over Garwater and Dry Fall and Jhour and Booktown. The sounds of the fighting were subdued. She could no longer hear the great massed movement of crowds, the constant drum of gunshots. Only a few ragged shouts and isolated attacks.

The war was dying. The mutiny was over.

She heard no declamations of revolt or stability; there was nothing around her that might hint at which side had won. And yet somehow when she rounded the last wall and witnessed the scene on the Grand Easterly’s foredeck, she felt no surprise.

Around the edges of the deck stood grim-faced men and women of all races, carved and bloodied. They carried their weapons drawn.

Before them lay a mass of corpses. Many were shattered, their chests torn open and burned dry or emptied out. Most had been decapitated; heads littered the charnel ground randomly, all gaping, fanged, and snake-tongued.

The vampir. Tens of them. Beaten. Executed and dispatched. Overpowered when the tide turned, when their mysterious allies had disappeared and the spontaneous small riots supporting them had petered out in confusion. It was a doomed adventure without the people of their own riding behind them, without a movement of revolt. Eventually the Garwater fighters had lost their fear, and terrorism could not win once the real terror went.

There was a weak movement above her. Looking up at the foremost of the Grand Easterly’s masts, Bellis widened her eyes in shock. And she thought, Oh… so that was when it was over.

That was when the Dry Fall cadre lost. After that, they couldn’t win. With that macabre pennant swinging there, the fear they spread must have faded like an echo.

Ten feet up, lashed cruciform to a crossbar, his heels and hands tied tightly with great thick skeins of rope, his snarls pathetic, tongue lolling like a dead animal’s, the blood that discolored his teeth and lips his own, was the Brucolac.