The Scar

Chapter Forty-five

When day broke, the Brucolac found the strength to scream.

The sun bleached him. He closed his eyes and shook his head pointlessly, trying to get his eyes out of the light. His skin began to welt, as if some punishing chymical had been poured on him. His grave-pale face reddened, blistering, suppurating in the daylight.

He flopped with ugly motion, like a sea-thing beached. His strength leached from him, and he emitted little gasps of pain.

The sun might not kill him for some time, strong as he was: but it disabled him, and more than anything it hurt mercilessly. Two hours after dawn he was too groggy to make a sound. His spittle and venom drooled from him, denaturing.

The sunlight scalded the flesh of his slaughtered cadre, too. As the day crawled on, the tens of frozen bodies became blebbed and misshapen. At dusk, they were swept together and tipped into the sea.

Darkness came like unguent to the Brucolac. The pain began very slowly to bleed from him, and he cracked open his rheum- and pus-locked eyes. His body began to repair, but the sun’s depredations were severe, and it was not till nearly midnight that he found the strength to speak.

His ruined croaking was ignored. He was not tended; he was not fed. Cramp and pain ossified his limbs. Throughout the night he bayed for help or mercy; he tried to issue threats. But his words broke down into a despairing animal wail as the hours sluggishly passed and he saw the darkness diluting in the east.

He had only started to heal. His wounds were still raw when the sun reached out and probed them with its sadistic fingers as, like a cog in some remorseless engine, the day came round again.

The clean-up began quietly. Crews entered the cooling Hoddling and gauged the damage, trying to see how much could be salvaged.

Whole rooms and corridors had been reshaped by the heat, their edges made fluid. There were many bodies: some pristine, some variously disturbed.

Across Garwater, and in the fringes of its neighboring ridings, the conflict was manifest in broken glass and bullet holes, and bloodstains in the city’s gutters. What rubble there was was swept up and taken to foundries and factories, to be broken down or resmelted.

Garwater loyalists patrolled the streets. Bask and Curhouse ridings were quiet. Their rulers had known nothing of the revolt, and they had waited, paralyzed, watching it, carefully gauging the forces, ready to join against a defeated Garwater. But the vampir had been defeated. Their rulers kept themselves low, cowed by the Lovers. Quiescent.

The general of Shaddler was dead, killed by the vampir who had held him hostage, acting in their panic when they heard their ruler was captured. They had been killed in turn, at great cost to the scabmettlers. The walls of Barrow Hall were disfigured with great streaking sculptures in dark red, where scabmettler blood had spattered.

No one knew exactly how many vampir had made up the Brucolac’s cadre, and no one was exactly sure how many had been killed. Without question, some had survived. Defeated, they must have gone underground, become nondescript new citizens. Squatting in ruins, lodging in flophouses. Invisible.

They would have to be careful when they fed. They would have to be selective, and restrained, and quite brutal-they could leave no prey alive. Because when they were found-and they would be found, the Garwater crews swore implacably-they would be killed.

The fear of them was gone.

And meanwhile the arch traitor, the Brucolac himself, was stretched out on his metal cross, slowly scorching and starving to death.

The avanc had picked up its stupid, ponderous progress. But it remained slow, and its pace was not so steady. It swam, and dragged the city, and sped up and slowed, and never achieved the speed it had previously reached.

As the hours and days passed, the navigators became convinced that its wounds, sustained in mysterious circumstances known only to a small clutch of Armadans, were not healing. It was bleeding, weakening, still.

No revenge was taken against the citizens of Dry Fall, whom the Lovers announced curtly to be innocent of their ruler’s guilt. There was even amnesty for those who had rioted. It was a chaotic time, the Lovers ruled, and no one had known what was happening; there was confusion. This was a time to bring the city together, they said, and blame was not appropriate.

Still, the patrols of Garwater’s yeomanry and armed citizens were kept largest and best-armed in Dry Fall. The Dry Fallen watched them resentfully, staring from doorways, hiding bruises and wounds sustained that night, not trusting the Lovers’ mercy.

Like smoke from the riots’ fires, something had spread over the city that night, and it remained: a traumatizing uncertainty, a rancor. And even many of those who had fought hard to repulse the Brucolac were touched by it.

Blood, violence, and fear-they seemed the legacy of the Lovers’ projects. After centuries of peace, Armada had been twice to war in less than thirty days-once with itself. Armada’s intricacies of diplomacy had collapsed under the Lovers’ fervor, the networks of obligations and interests splitting, tearing the city apart.

The Lovers were subordinating everything to their search for the abstract power of the Scar. This was a break with Armada’s mercantile venality: that kind of intrepidity, that kind of voyage, was governed by an other, older logic. The citizens of Armada were pirates, and as their understanding of the Lovers’ project grew, so did their alienation. The Lovers were not proposing thievery or usury, nor even a tactic for survival. This was something very different.

While Armada was riding high, while its power was growing and feat after incredible feat was performed, the Lovers had buoyed up the citizens with their rhetoric and zeal.

When the Sorghum had been stolen, it was the greatest military feat of Armada’s recent history, and everyone could see that it gave the city power, that their ships and engines were better fueled. When the avanc had been raised, the Lovers had spoken of the ancient chains; of fulfilling Armada’s secret, historic mission; of the swift sailing from port to port that was now a possibility; of the quick, worldwide search for booty.

But now all that was shown to be deceit. The purpose instead was this opaque quest. And though there were still thousands of Armadans excited by what they undertook, there were thousands more who no longer cared, and a growing number who felt duped.

And with the avanc so weak-everyone could tell-even the real purpose of all this, the search for the Scar, might come to nothing. If the avanc kept slowing, who knew what might happen?

In the aftermath of the Brucolac’s mutiny, and the deaths and broken trust that came out of it, morale in Armada was low and worsening. The loyal Garwater patrols felt the growing hostility, the shapeless anger-even in Garwater.

Hundreds of Armadans were dead. Torn open, caught in crossfires, bitten and paralyzed and drained by the vampir, crushed by collapsing architecture, burned in fires, beaten to death. It was far fewer than had been killed in the battle against New Crobuzon, but the trauma of these deaths was vastly larger. This had been a civil war; these people had been killed by their own. People were numbed and blasted by it.

There were those who had seen glimpses of the grindylow and who realized that there was no way the Brucolac could ever have stopped the avanc moving, and no way he could have warped reality with those thaumaturgic blasts. But in the whole of Armada, only a handful knew the truth of the deal that had been struck. For the most part people made vague, curt references to weird vampir magic and did not press discussion further.

The grindylow had come and gone, and of those few who had seen them, almost no one knew what they had been. Their presence remained inexplicable and overshadowed by the civil war.

Hundreds of Armadans were dead, killed by their own.

Kruach Aum was dead. Bellis did not mourn him-he had unsettled her with his sociopathic calm and his brain like a difference engine-but she felt a sense of pathos at his murder.

Escapee from a prison island locked down by its own history. Stepping out into the strangest city of Bas-Lag, used as ruthlessly as he had previously been used by the Kettai authorities, killed investigating the creature he had helped conjure. What a weird, etiolated life.

Johannes Tearfly was dead. It was a surprise to Bellis how that affected her. She was truly sad, truly sorry that he was gone. She remembered him with a catch in her throat. The manner of his death was unthinkable-so fearful it must have been, so dark and cold, so claustrophobic, so far below the world. She remembered him preparing to descend, all excitement and fascination. It had been impressive, for a coward.

Shekel was dead.

That shattered her.

In the day after the mutiny, when her legs had strengthened enough to walk, she had wandered random and dumb through the battle sites.

There was nothing to stop her shuffling through scenes of war, past the cadavers, trailing blood on her shoes.

On one of the trawlers by the ruined Hoddling, in the shadow of a wooden warehouse that belled over gory cobblestones, Bellis found Tanner Sack. She saw him bent double, by a wall. Beside him was Angevine, the Remade woman, tears cutting the filth on her face.

Bellis realized then, but she could not stop herself running forward with her hands over her mouth, wincing at Tanner Sack’s grief. As she had known it would be, the thing on his lap was Shekel’s corpse. Eviscerated. He looked dumbstruck, astonished at his own state.

She had to walk through her memories of him. She hated it. She hated the sadness. She hated the misery, the astonishment she felt when she thought of him dead. Bellis had liked the boy a great deal.

More than anything she hated the guilt. She was awash in it. She had used him. Without ill-feeling, of course, but still she had used him. She was aware in a hateful, inchoate way that had it not been for things she had done, Shekel would be alive. Had she not taken the book from him and used it; had she only thrown the fucking thing away.

Aum was dead, Johannes was dead, Shekel was dead.

(Silas Fennec is alive.)

Much later, Bellis found Carrianne wandering stunned through the streets around her house. She had hidden throughout the night, with her door locked, and had emerged to discover herself a citizen of a non-riding.

She could not believe the Brucolac had tried to take control, and she could not believe that he had been captured. She was as confused as a child, watching events she did not understand.

Bellis could not tell Carrianne anything about what she herself had done and seen in the bottom of the Grand Easterly. All she told her was that Shekel had died.

They went together to see the Lovers speak.

It was two days since the mutiny, and Garwater’s rulers called a public rally on the Grand Easterly’s deck. At first Carrianne said she would not go. She had heard what had been done to the Brucolac, and she said she would not see him like that. It was a violence he did not deserve. Whatever he had done, she insisted, he did not deserve that.

But finally it was not hard for Bellis to persuade her. Carrianne had to come-she had to hear. The Lovers knew what was at stake; the Lovers knew what was happening in their city. This was their attempt to regain control.

The foredeck was very full: men and women massed in ranks, bruised and wounded, every one haggard and unsmiling, waiting.

Above them all, the Brucolac gibbered and whined thinly in the sun. His skin was burn-scarred and stained as a map.

When Carrianne saw him she cried out in disgust and unhappiness, and she turned her head away and told Bellis tersely that she would leave. But after a minute she glanced back at him. She could not take seriously the notion that the emaciated, festering figure drooling and champing slack jaws was the Brucolac. She could look up at the jabbering husk with nothing but pity.

The Lovers stood on a platform and addressed the crowd, with Uther Doul beside them. They looked careworn and terribly tired, and the assembled citizens stared up at them with a weird spirit of respect and challenge.

So, they said in their stares. Tell us. Convince us all over again. Tell us that this is worth it.

And they did an impressive job. Bellis listened and watched the mood soften.

The Lovers were clever. They did not start with bombast, or claims of power and prowess that they had repelled the threat from traitors.

“Many of those who are dead,” the Lover began, “many who our fighters killed… were loyal. They were good people doing what they were sure was right for our city.” And in that way, respectfully and mindful of the tragedy, he continued.

They spoke in turns, imploring those who were gathered not to lose heart now. “We are very close,” the Lover said, and an edge of excitement crept into her voice. Very close to powers that could never have been imagined before. Very close to making Armada truly great, a dynamo powered by potentiality, able to do anything-able to do contradictory things at once.

“Mutiny is not the way,” said the Lover. “If this project is not all of ours, it cannot go ahead.” You brought us here, she told the crowd. This is your doing, and it is great work.

This was not any time for division, the Lovers said, and unity meant unity in purpose, and the purpose of the moment was to find the Scar.

There would be rewards. It would be so fantastically, incredibly worthwhile.

The rhetoric grew stronger as their overlapping speech progressed. From the eulogies to the dead, the crowd’s children were invoked-skillfully, with promises about what their young lives, their city could be like, after it had mined possibilities from the Scar.

It was a good speech, sensitive and sincere. The Lovers’ fascination with the Scar was affecting. And when the speech was done the crowd’s respect, though subdued, was distinct and meant. The mood had lifted, a very little. The Lovers had won a reprieve-the argument was not finished.

All they have to do is keep the naysayers talking, thought Bellis. We can’t be so far from the Scar now. If they’re right, if it exists, we must be going to get there soon.

Standing a little behind the Lovers, Uther Doul met her eye. She realized for the first time what she had done the night of the mutiny, what she had risked. She had broken into his room and stolen an alien artifact, then delivered it to the marauders. But she was simply too tired of fear to feel it now.

When the talk was done, and as the crowd dissipated, Doul crossed the deck and stood still before Bellis, without sign of rancor or friendship.

“What happened?” he said softly. “It was you, in my room. You took it. I found the shards, at the bottom of the jail. The magus fin was there, rotting. I burned it. So that wasn’t what they wanted, after all?”

Bellis shook her head.

“They came,” she said, “but not for that. I thought it was, which is why… I’m sorry about your door. I was trying to get rid of them. They said they’d leave when they had what was taken from them. But that wasn’t what they wanted. It was they who… Fennec…”

Doul nodded.

“He’s alive,” Bellis whispered, wondering whether that was still true.

Doul’s eyes flashed wide for a moment.

Bellis waited. She wondered with tired nervousness what he would do. There were many things he could punish her for. She had lost Armada the grindylow figurine, for nothing at all. Needlessly. Or was there a trace of the old closeness in him?

But there seemed nothing but a flatness, a resignation in his manner, and Bellis was not surprised when finally he nodded and turned from her, walked back across the deck. She felt deflated, watching him. What do the Lovers think of that? she wondered. She could not imagine the Lovers giving up the magus fin without some rage. Don’t they care?

Do they even know? she thought suddenly. And if they know it’s gone, do they know it was me?

That night, Tanner Sack came to her door. She was astonished.

He stood on her doorstep, staring at her with eyes so bloodshot, in skin so grey, he looked like a junkie. He stared at her with dislike for several silent seconds, then pushed a sheaf of papers at her.

“Take these,” he said. They were used and reused scraps on which she recognized Shekel’s enthusiastic script. Lists of words he had found, that he had seen and wanted to remember, to cross-reference, to look for in the storybooks he pillaged.

“You taught the boy to read,” Tanner said, “and he loved that.” He kept his eyes on hers and his face expressionless. “You might want to keep some of these, to remember him by.”

Bellis was shocked and embarrassed. She was not constructed that way. It was absolutely against her instincts to accumulate mawkish, morbid remembrances of the dead. Not even when her mother or father had died, and certainly not at the death of this child she had barely known, no matter how she felt his loss.

She almost refused the papers. She almost framed some cant about not deserving them-as if one could deserve these ragged scraps!-but two things stopped her.

One was guilt. Don’t run from it, you coward, she thought. She would not allow herself to escape it. Her personal taste in death, she told herself, was not the issue-how convenient it would be for that to let her reject these evidences. And besides her guilt was her respect for Tanner Sack.

He stood there, holding out these things that must be precious to him, offering them to someone who had caused him so much pain. And not because they shared some spurious community of grief. He offered the papers to her because he was a good man, and he imagined that she had lost Shekel, too.

Shamed, she took them, and nodded thanks to him.

“One more thing,” Tanner said. “We bury him tomorrow.” His voice skipped only a moment on the word bury. “In Croom Park.”

“How…?” Bellis began, surprised. Armadans gave their dead sea burials. Tanner gesticulated the question away.

“Shek weren’t a… a sea animal at heart,” he said carefully. “He was a city boy more than anything, and I suppose there are traditions I thought I’d left… I want to know where he is. When they told me I couldn’t do it, I told them to try and stop me.”

“Tanner Sack,” she said as he turned to go, “why Croom Park?”

“You told him about it one time,” he said. “And he went to see for himself and he loved it. I think it reminded him of Rudewood.”

Bellis cried when he had gone, could not stop herself. She told herself furiously that it was for the last time.

It was a brief service, clumsy and poignant. A mongrel of theology, gods of New Crobuzon and Armada asked humbly to look after Shekel’s soul.

No one was sure what gods, if any, Shekel had respected.

Bellis brought flowers, stolen from the colorful beds elsewhere in the park.

The city was dragged on, east-northeast, decelerating very gradually as the avanc slowed. No one knew how badly it was wounded. They would not risk sending another crew down.

In the days after the war, and especially after Shekel’s funeral, Bellis felt unable to focus. She spent much of her time with Carrianne, who was as subdued as she, and who refused even to discuss where the city was going. It was hard to concentrate on the journey, and impossible to imagine what would happen when they arrived.

If the Garwater scholars were correct, the city was drawing close. Perhaps two weeks, perhaps one; that was what was whispered. A few days more until Armada reached the wound in this empty sea; and then the hidden engines and arcane science would be let loose, and all the possibilities that swarmed around the Scar would be mined.

The air was tense with expectancy, with fear.

When Bellis opened her eyes in the morning, sometimes she felt that the aether bristled, as if forces she did not understand coursed around her. Strange rumors began to spread.

First it was the gamblers, the cardsharps in the late-night games at Thee-And-Thine. There were stories of hands changing in the instant they were raised, the colored costumes of the suits shimmering like kaleidoscopes, dimly glimpsed for the tiniest moment, freezing into a configuration after they had been dealt.

There were stories of intrusive spirits, browners or kelkin, fleeting invisibly through the city, moving things. Objects put down were discovered again inches from their place-in places where they might have been left, but had not been. Things that were dropped broke and then were not broken, and perhaps had not been dropped but waited on the side.

The Scar, Bellis thought with dull wonder. It’s bleeding.

The sea and sky became very suddenly dangerous. Rain clouds appeared and raged and very suddenly went again, not quite hitting the city, skirting it. The avanc dragged Armada through violent patches, where the waves were suddenly choppy and high, in a tightly circumscribed area, with gentle waters clearly visible to either side.

Tanner no longer swam, but only dipped himself daily. He was afraid to immerse himself for long. The sounds and lights from beneath the water were strong enough now that even those on the city above could hear and see them-ejections from unseen things.

Sometimes clots of the sentient weed passed by Armada, and sometimes there were other shapes on the waves-they moved and could not easily be identified, that looked at once organic, random, and made.

Still the Brucolac floundered and did not die. The deck below him was stained with his emissions.

Walking the decks and corridors of the Grand Easterly, over the quiet city noise Bellis heard faint and cryptic music. It was hard to trace, evanescing across frequencies, audible at random moments and places. She strained and made it out in snatches. It was ugly and uncanny: a web of halftones and minor chords, mutating rhythms. A dirge overlaid with plucked strings. On the second night she heard it, she was sure that it came from Uther Doul’s room.

The flotsam, the strange currents in the sea, and odd events in Armada grew more frequent and powerful as the avanc plowed on. When, on the fifth morning after the mutiny, something was seen bobbing within two miles of the city, no one was surprised. But when telescopes were turned to it, a great screaming cacophony of excitement began. The lookouts on the Grand Easterly barked for people’s attention and ran madly from room to room, looking for the Lovers.

Word swept the city with startling rapidity through every riding, and a great rush of citizens congregated in Jhour’s aft edge. A small aerostat set out overhead, over the treacherous currents, toward the speck that eddied closer and closer to the city. Those in the crowd were gazing out at it, sharing their telescopes and jabbering in incredulity as its outlines became clear.

Clinging to a ragged raft of wood and ocher canvas, staring up exhaustedly at his home, was Hedrigall the cactus-man, the renegade.

“Bring him here!” “What the fuck happened?” “Where’d you go, Hed? Where’ve you been?” “Bring him the hell here!”

As soon as it was obvious that the airship that had gone to fetch him was returning to the Grand Easterly, there were angry cries. Wedges of people tried to run from whatever vessel they were on, through the obstructed streets, to intercept the dirigible. Crowds collided chaotically.

Bellis had been watching from her window, her heart hammering with foreboding. She joined the rush toward the flagship, impelled by motivations she did not fully understand. Bellis reached the foredeck of the steamer before the airship had come low enough for anyone within to disembark. A crowd of loyalists were waiting, surrounding Uther Doul and the Lovers.

Bellis joined the growing crowd, who jostled and pushed at the yeomanry, trying to see the returned man.

“Hedrigall!” they shouted. “What the fuck happened?”

There was a roar as he stepped down, gaunt and exhausted, but he was quickly enveloped in armed men. The little group began to approach the doorways to the lower decks, with Doul and the Lovers at its head.

“Tell us!” The shouts were insistent and turning ugly. “He’s one of us; bring him back.” The guards were nervous, drawing their flintlocks as the Armadans pressed in on them. Bellis saw Angevine and Tanner Sack at the front of the crowd.

Hedrigall’s head was visible, bowed and sun-bleached, his spines withered and snapped. He looked around him at the congregated citizens, staring and reaching out for him, calling solicitous, and he drew back his head and began to howl.

“How are you all here?” he bellowed. “You’re dead. I saw every one of you die…”

There was a shocked silence, and then a cacophony. The throng began to push in again. The yeomanry shoved them back. The masses grew hushed and menacing.

Bellis watched Uther Doul draw the Lovers aside and whisper to them sharply, then indicate the door. The Lover nodded, then stepped forward with his hands outstretched.

“Armadans,” he shouted, “for gods’ sakes wait.” He sounded sincerely angry. Behind him, Hedrigall began to shout again, as if in a fever, You’re dead, you’re all dead, and he was bundled back toward the door, the yeomen hissing as his thorns pierced their skins. “None of us know what’s happened here,” the Lover said. “But look at him, by Croom. He’s a wreck; he’s ill. We’re taking him below, to our own berth, away from everything, for him to rest, to recover.”

Blazing with displeasure, he moved back, toward where Hedrigall lolled in yeomen’s arms and Uther Doul swept his eyes quick and hard over the crowd.

“It ain’t right,” someone suddenly shouted, forcing his way forward. It was Tanner Sack. “Hed!” he called. “He’s my mate, and Jabber knows what you’re going to do to him.”

There were shouts of agreement around him, but the crowd’s momentum was draining away, and though there were some curses, no one tried to follow and intercept Hedrigall or the Lovers. There was too much uncertainty.

Bellis realized that Uther Doul had found her in the crowd, and was watching her carefully.

“It ain’t right,” yelled Tanner, veins protruding with rage as the party entered the doors and the guards moved in behind them. Uther Doul still did not move his eyes. Bellis could not help but meet them, uncomfortable in his gaze. “He’s my mate,” said Tanner. “It’s my right. It’s my right to hear what he has to say…”

And as he spoke, at that moment, something extraordinary happened.

Bellis still met Doul’s unshaking stare, and as Tanner claimed his right to hear Hedrigall, Doul’s eyes spasmed and opened wide with an almost sexual intensity. Bellis watched, stunned, as his head inclined a fraction of an inch, as if in invitation, or agreement.

He gazed at her even as his party entered the corridors, walking backward to join them, holding her attention, raising his eyebrows a tiny bit, suggestive, as he disappeared.

Oh my gods.

Bellis felt as if she had been punched hard in her solar plexus.

A great revelatory wave washed over her: a stunned appreciation, an insinuation of the layers and layers and layers of manipulation in which she was caught, frozen, maneuvered and exploited, used and supported and betrayed.

She still understood virtually nothing of what was happening around her, what was being done, what had been planned, and what was contingent.

But some things she knew, humbly and suddenly.

Her own place. So much, so many plans, so much effort had been expended to bring her to this place at this instant, to hear the words that she had heard. Everything came together here and now; everything coalesced and became clear.

And in her astonishment and awe, and in her humiliation, and despite her anger, feeling herself danced undignified as a marionette to her allotted mark, Bellis bowed her head and readied herself, knowing she had one more job to do, to effect a change she wanted, and knowing she would not spite herself for revenge, and that she would do it.

“Tanner,” she said to him as he raged and cursed, arguing furiously, shouting against the majority, at those who told him he was overreacting, that the Lovers knew what they were doing.

He paused and stared at her in angry bemusement. She beckoned him.

“Tanner,” she said, unheard by any but him. “I agree with you, Tanner,” she whispered. “I think you have every right to hear what Hedrigall might say, down there in the Lovers’ berth.

“Come with me.”

It was not hard to find a way through empty hallways in the Grand Easterly. The loyal guards were stationed at points by which someone might make their way to the Lovers’ quarters, down in the boat’s low reaches. But only those corridors, and that was not where Bellis and Tanner were heading.

She took him down other passageways she had learned very well over the weeks of indulging what she could only think of as her perversion.

They passed storerooms and engines and armories. Walking quickly but openly, not like trespassers, Bellis led Tanner lower and lower, into a dimly lit zone.

She did not know it, but Bellis took Tanner close by the way to the rockmilk engines that were churning and whirring and sparking, driving the avanc on.

And eventually, in a dark and narrow passage where the walls were free of aging wallpaper and heliotypes and etchings, were lined instead with knotted pipework as intricate as veins, Bellis turned to Tanner Sack and gestured him to enter. She stood in the cramped and cosseted environs, turned her head to him, and kept him silent with a raised finger.

They stood without movement for some time, Tanner looking around him, at the ceiling at which Bellis stared, at Bellis herself.

When finally they heard the sound of a door opening and closing, it was so loud and flawless to the ear that Tanner stiffened violently. Bellis had never seen the room above, but she knew its echoes well. She knew where above her were chairs, and tables, and a bed. She followed the four sets of footsteps above with her stare-light, heavier, heavier, and massive and slow-as if she could see through the ceiling-floor the Lover, the Lover, Doul, and Hedrigall.

Tanner followed her example, his eyes widening. He and Bellis could trace the bodies above them. One was by the door; two ranged near the bed, sinking now into chairs; and the fourth, the big one, shuffled back and forth toward the far wall, locking his legs as the cactacae did in sleep or exhaustion, his weight driving down through the wood.

“So,” said Uther Doul, his voice astonishingly clear. “Tell us, Hedrigall.” He was hard. “Tell us why you ran. And how you ended back here again.”

“Oh, gods.” Hedrigall sounded drained and shattered. It was just barely his voice. Tanner shook his head in amazement.

“Gods, dear gods please don’t start that again.” Hedrigall sounded as if he would cry. “I don’t understand you. I’ve never run from Armada in my life. I never would. Who are you?” he screamed suddenly. “What are you? Am I in hell? I saw you die…”

“What’s happened to him?” whispered Tanner, appalled.

“You’re talking fucking dung, Hedrigall, you treacherous shit,” the Lover exclaimed. “Look at me, you dog. You were scared, weren’t you? Too frightened, so you patched up the Arrogance in secret and cut loose. Now, where did you go, and how did you get back here?”

“I’ve never betrayed Armada,” Hedrigall shouted, “and I never would. Croom, look at me… disputing with a dead man! How can you be here? Who are you? I saw all of you die.” He sounded quite mad with grief or shock.

“When, Hedrigall?” It was Doul’s voice, clipped and dangerous. “And where? Where did we die?”

Hedrigall whispered his answer, and something in his voice made Bellis shiver, though she had expected it. She nodded as she heard it.

“The Scar.”

When they had calmed him, Uther Doul and the Lovers conferred quietly, moving away from him.

“… mad…” said the Lover, not quite audible. “Either mad… strange…”

“We have to know.” Doul’s voice. “If he’s not mad he’s a dangerous liar.”

“It makes no sense,” said the Lover furiously. “Who is he lying to? Why?”

“Either he is a liar, or…” said the Lover.

Tanner and Bellis could not tell if she said more, quietly, or if her words petered out.

“How has this happened?”

“We’d been a month, more than a month in the Hidden Ocean.”

Many minutes had passed. Hedrigall had been silent for a long time while the Lovers debated what to do, whispering so low that Bellis and Tanner could not hear them. When suddenly he spoke, it was unbidden, and his voice was low and unchanging, as artless as if he were drugged.

The Lovers and Uther Doul waited.

Hedrigall spoke as if he knew it was expected of him.

He spoke for a long time, and he was not interrupted. He spoke with unnatural grace, with a trained fabler’s eloquence; but there was in his careful monotone a hesitance, and underlying that a trauma that was frightening to sense.

Hedrigall stumbled on his words, and paused suddenly, sporadically, and drew shaking breaths; but he spoke for a long time. His audience-those in the room with him and those below-were absolutely silent and attentive.

“We’d been more than a month in the Hidden Ocean.”