The Scar

Chapter Forty-six

“We’d been more than a month in the Hidden Ocean, and the sea was in chaos. We couldn’t plot a course, we couldn’t keep north at the top of our compasses, we couldn’t navigate. Every day I’d stare out from the Arrogance, looking for sign of the Scar, the Fractured Land, anything at all. And there was nothing.

“You kept us moving.

“You insisted; you fired us up. You told us what we’d do when we reached the Scar. What powers it would give you, give us. You told us that we would all have power.

“I’ll not pretend there was no dissent. As we went on, people were more and more… fearful. And they began to whisper that maybe the Brucolac had been right to mutiny. That maybe there wasn’t so much wrong with the way the city was before.

“They came to you… we came to you and asked you to turn back. Said we were happy with how things had been. That we didn’t need this, that too much had gone wrong already, and that we were fearful there was worse to come. Some of us had been having terrible dreams. The city was… so tense. Like a cat, fur all sparking and jagged.

“We asked you to turn us back. Before it was too late. We were afraid.

“I don’t know how you did it, but you kept… for just enough time, you kept us… I’ll not say happy; I’ll not say willing. You kept us obedient; and we waited, and let you take us further in, fearful as we were.”

“If it had been another week, I don’t think we would have put up with any more. I think we would have turned back, and then you all wouldn’t have died.

“But it wasn’t like that, was it? It was too late.

“At six in the morning, on the ninth Playdi of Flesh, from the cabin of the Arrogance I saw something, forty miles ahead, at the edge of the horizon. A disturbance in the air, very faint, very frightening. And there was something else.

“The horizon was too close.

“An hour, five miles later, I knew we were definitely approaching something. And the horizon was still too close, and getting closer.

“I sent messages down below. And I could see them all preparing. I could look down and see the mass of ships all pushed together-all colors, all different shapes. I could see the crews setting up the cranes on the city’s edge, and firing up engines and gods knew what else. Getting ready with all the sciences they’d been preparing. Little aerostats belting from one end of the city to another. Way below me.

“I was watching where the sea and sky met. I didn’t believe it for the longest time; I kept thinking I must have it wrong and that any moment I’d see it right, make sense of it, but I didn’t. And finally I couldn’t deny what I saw.

“The horizon was only twenty miles away. I could see it clear, jagging across the face of the sea. The Scar.

“It was like seeing a god.

“You’d told us almost nothing, when you described it.

“It was a big wound in reality, broken open by the Ghosthead, you told us, thick with seams of what might be, all the possible ways. A big wound in reality, you said, and I thought you were speaking… like poetry.

“When the Ghosthead touched down in that continent, the force of it split the world right open, broke a fissure right through Bas-Lag. A split. Jagging in from the world’s rim for more than two thousand miles, splintering the continent.

“That’s the Scar. That crack. Teeming with the ways things weren’t and aren’t but could be.

“We were only a few miles away.

“It was a crevice in the sea.

“It was uneven, listing across us as we approached it, so the horizon seemed tilted. And because it was irregular, not guillotined but cracked, jutting a bit this way and the other, serrating back on itself here and there, there were places I could see over the edges. I could see the sides of the split. They were sheer.

“The ocean was choppy, a strong current heading north even though the wind went south. All the waves washed up past the city, carrying it along, and where they reached the edge of the Scar it was a wall, a clear wall. The water right-angled sharp and plunged down, vertical and split-smooth perfect as glass. Dark, moving water, pressing up against nothing and holding fast. And then…

“Empty air.

“A precipice.

“And way, way beyond it, scores of miles, a hundred miles away, only just visible on the other side of that empty gulf, there was a matching face. Hazy with distance. The other side of the crack.

“In between, that emptiness that I could still feel kicking out all manner of puissance. Welling out of the fucking lesion. The Scar.”

“I can’t hardly imagine what it must have been like on the city. They must have been able to see it. Was there panic? Were you excited?”

Of course the Lovers did not answer.

“I knew what the plan was. In sight of the Scar we’d stop at five miles’ distance. And from there a dirigible would set out, and see if it could cross just that short distance to the Scar. And I was the lookout. Any sign of danger, I was to fire my flares, hang out my flags, call the airship back in.

“I don’t know what danger you thought we might face. You had no idea. I don’t think you knew what the Scar was. What did you think might happen? Did you think it might be crawling with Possible Beasts? Things that might have evolved but didn’t, patrolling?

“It was nothing like that.

“The scale of it. The scale of that fucking thing. It was humbling.

“The city didn’t slow,” he said.

He was silent then, for several seconds. He had spoken his last sentence in the same hypnotic monotone he had been using for a long time, and it took Bellis a few heartbeats to realize what it meant.

Her heart spasmed and began to hammer.

“It didn’t slow,” Hedrigall said. “The avanc wasn’t slowing down at all. The avanc was speeding up.

“We were ten miles away, then we were five miles away, and then four, and the city didn’t stop, and didn’t slow down.

“The world was foreshortened… The horizon was only a few thousand yards away, and it was growing closer, and Armada was accelerating.

“I began to panic then.” There was no emotion in Hedrigall’s voice, as if he had bled dry of it in the sea. “I began to fire off my flares, trying to warn you of what you must have known.

“Probably… probably there was panic then,” he said. “I wouldn’t know; I couldn’t see. Maybe you were all mesmerized, glass-eyed and stupid. But I bet not. I bet there was panic, as the end of the world crept up. With my flares bursting over you, ignored.

“Three miles, two.

“I was unmoving for a long time. Frozen.

“The southerly wind was strong, so the Arrogance was lowering, stretching back away from the Scar as if it was afraid, as afraid as me. That woke me.

“Who knows what happened? Maybe you knew, before you died. I wasn’t there.

“Maybe it was the avanc. Maybe after weeks of obedience it broke free of the impulses being fed into it. Maybe some spine that was supposed to plug into its brain snapped off, and the beast woke, confused and snared, and it tugged to try to free itself, careering on.

“Maybe the rockmilk engines failed. Maybe some possibility spilt out from the Scar, a possibility that the engines didn’t work. Gods know what happened.

“When I looked down I saw flotillas of little boats being dropped over the sides of the city, and tiny frantic crews hauling at oars and throwing up sails to get away. But the sea fought them, and I saw their sails bellying in all directions. The lifeboats, the yachts, the little skiffs began to eddy in those waters and curl around the city, overtaking it northward, even as they fought to go the other way. But the currents and the waves pulled them on like they were hungry.

“It was only minutes before the first of them reached the Scar. I watched that little dinghy spinning toward the edge, and saw specks that must have been the people inside it jumping out into the sea, and then the stern of the boat tipped suddenly and went over and was gone. Into that airy emptiness.

“There was a trail of them, little boats peppering the sea between the city and the Scar, sliding north toward it. And dirigibles, too. A flock of them, trying to get airborne. Men and women were weighing them down, trying to get aboard, clinging to ropes to drag themselves in. All overloaded, they hauled themselves over the city’s edge and flopped into the sea, where the current took them and they spun like dead whales, shedding their crews, heading for the Scar.

“Armada began to spin, slowly. The horizon lurched and angled as the city coiled clockwise in the water.

“We were half a mile away now and my mind went all cold and I suddenly knew what I had to do. I ran to the Arrogance’s bay and looked down through the hatches. I took up my rivebow and steadied myself on the edge of the bay doors and fired at the rope that held me tethered.

“It was thick as a thigh, attached to the aerostat thirty feet from me, swinging like a python. I had six chakris. Three of them I sent wide, way wide. The fourth connected, but not cleanly-cut half the rope’s width. The fifth went wide, and I only had one more chance.

“But even though my aim felt good, and I’d steadied my hands, I missed.

“And I knew that I was dead. I dropped my rivebow, my fingers all thick and stupid, and I clung to the bars at the edge of the hatchway. I could only watch. I could feel the wind buffeting me, up through the doors, and I watched the rope fray too slowly to save me.

“The roofs, the slates, the towers, the aircabs, the flags, the monkeys all frantic with fear they didn’t understand, the citizens running stupid from one place to the next as if anywhere would be spared.

“I watched them all through my telescope. I wonder what it was like, under the sea. I wonder how the cray and the menfish and Bastard John were acting. Maybe they’re still alive, who knows? Maybe they could swim free. Maybe they quit the city as it went on toward its end.

“The Sorghum rig and Croom Park and the Grand Easterly and me were first to reach the edge.

“The wind changed for a moment, and the Arrogance drifted out over the cliff of water, and looked down into the chasm.

“Time was very slow as the Arrogance passed above the Scar. Just handfuls of seconds, but they lasted a long time.”

“I crossed past the rim of the sea and looked down, over my knees dangling from the hatch, at the edges of the water. They were vertiginous.

“The sun angled down through the surface of the sea, filtered and refracted by the waves, and passed out again through the vertical face. I could see fishes bigger than me nosing up to the edge where it met the air, a hundred feet below the surface. Light bathed into it. There must be a whole ecology around the edges of the Scar. Even two, three miles down, where the pressure’s merciless, the water there’s sunlit.

“That sheer face of water, colors and eddies moving in strata, extended down miles. Perspective defeated me.

“And then mud. I could see it: a thick, sandwiched band of mud, black, at the bottom of the sea. And then rock. Rock extending down for so many miles that it dwarfed the layer of water. Red and black and grey rock, split wide, clean-edged. And many miles down a glow that moved and burned, showing dimly through the air. Magma. Rivers of molten stone, geothermal tides.

“And then? Below that?

“Then the void.”

Hedrigall’s voice was hollow and appalled.

“It must have been seconds I saw it,” he said, “but I remember every layer, like colors of sand drooled into a bottle. It defeated the eye. It was too big to see.

“Armada paused, poised for seconds on the edge of that abyss, and the avanc gave a final push forward.

“I saw it first through the water. I saw it four miles down, a little way above the dark sea bottom. I saw a shape appear in the deeps, unclear through the sea, suddenly nearer, its outline visible, as it powered itself forward. Until with a sound like a cataclysm it began to breach. To push itself through the brine cliff.

“A mile of flesh.

“Its head was through, water splintering, shattering around it, cataracts thousands of yards long booming and splitting, drops of water the size of houses spinning and disintegrating, falling voidward, into the Scar.

“I could see the first of its chains, colossal, bursting through the water in a four-mile straight tear, splitting the sea between the avanc and the city above. Other chains came through after it, so that the sea wall was scored with parallel vertical rips, like a claw wound.

“The avanc’s body continued through, indescribable, fins and spines, cilia, and as it came through into the air gravity took it, and it began to pitch forward. The chains tightened on the city, and the edges of Armada reached the edge and were pulled on, over.

“The avanc gave out a sound that burst all the glass around me.

“I saw the submarine hulks on which the Sorghum rested welling up toward the flat cliff face of water and then burst through, and all around them, hundreds of feet away on either side, the aft of Garwater and Bask and Curhouse reached the end of the sea, and jutted out, and trembled, and fell.

“There are so many ships in Armada.

“Steamers reached the edge flat-on, and rolled terribly and ponderously over, houses and towers spilling from them like crumbs, a rain of masonry and bodies, hundreds of bodies, pitched kicking and convulsing into the air and down, down many miles. Past all the inner layers of the world.

“I wasn’t even praying. I had no will. I could only watch.

“Bridges and tethers snapped. Trawlers came apart as they fell. Barges and lifeboats, and tugs and wooden warships. Splintering. Bursting, exploding, on fire as boilers spun and red-hot coals spewed through them. Ships six hundred feet long and centuries old cartwheeled as they went down.

“The Grand Easterly’s aft was over the Scar now, jutting out into the air.

“Armada spilt over the lip of the ocean and broke down into a random, plummeting constellation of parts, the live and the dead falling through an avalanche of bricks and masts. I could hear nothing except the splintering water and the avanc’s cry.

“Three hundred feet of the Grand Easterly was jutting over the void now, and all around it much smaller ships spewed into the ravine. And suddenly its weight told, and I heard a cracking like some god’s bone breaking, and the rear third of the ship, to which I was tethered, split and hinged down, hauling me with it, clinging with my arms locked around a girder, down, into the Scar.

“You wonder how you’re going to die, don’t you? Bravely, screaming, unaware, or what? Well, I met my death in a stupor, my mouth hanging like a fucking fool, as a steamer’s arse pulled me down.

“The edge of water rose up past me as I plummeted past the Scar’s lip, below the surface level of the sea.

“For a second I could see through water to the keels of ships that were above me, watch them plow on to their destruction. I was rushing down, and the rest of the Grand Easterly and every ship of the city was collapsing toward me.

“Once or twice, for moments, I saw dirigibles. Little cabs, men in harnesses, who’d managed to leap from the decks of their vessels as they went over, and were caught in the slipstream fighting to haul their balloons skyward. They were crushed and killed, again and again. A falling hull or shards of towerblocks would smash them out of the air.

“The Arrogance was accelerating down. I closed my eyes and tried to die.

“And then, four miles below me, the avanc moved.

“It must have been in agony, its body bursting and hemorrhaging in the air, folding over and bending double as it came out of the water wall. Half a mile of its back was through into the Scar, now. Maybe it was spasming in pain. It pushed itself very suddenly out, bursting right out of the sea, into the Scar, and down.

“It cried out again as the whole of its fucking bulk emerged, and its thrust shoved it down faster than gravity would have taken it. The avanc lurched; its chains went suddenly taut and tugged the rest of the city over the edge. The aft of the Grand Easterly was wrenched down, too, and the Arrogance was snatched so suddenly that the tattering rope that held it snapped.

“It snapped.

“My eyes flew open as the aerostat hurtled skyward, up past the falling city, up and out of the shadow of that wall of ocean, pelted by metal and sharp-split wood, out of the Scar, into the sky.

“I roared out of that crevice and careered into the sky. My arms were locked tight, holding me into place. I was going to live.

“Below me, the last of Armada slipped into the Scar. Winterstraw Market in a rain of little vessels. The Uroc, the Therianthropus, the asylum, the old sawdust boats of the haunted quarter-all become nothing. Tipping up, in sheets of spray, and going over, till the surface of the Hidden Ocean was left undisturbed.

“As I rose, I looked down directly into the Scar and saw an interference, a haze like dust, as Armada fell, and far below that the avanc, spinning as it went, wrapping itself in twenty miles of chain, moving pathetically, trying to swim out of that endless fall. Even it looked small and dwindling.

“Eventually I fell back, exhausted and stunned to be alive, and when I looked down again I could see nothing at all.”

Hedrigall’s voice ebbed away. He spoke again after several seconds of quiet.

“I went higher than I’ve ever been before. High enough to look down and see the Scar as it really is. A crack, that’s all. A crack in the world.

“I don’t know if any other aeronauts got free. But I was more than a mile up, and I saw nothing.

“The wind that high was strong, gusted me south for hours. It took me away from there. Out of that murderous place in the water, where all the currents lead to the Scar. The Arrogance was leaking. Split and burnt by debris. I was coming down.

“I sawed myself some hide from the dirigible, lashed it to wood from the cabin. Made myself a raft, knowing what was coming. I waited by the bay doors till we were scudding low and fast, and I threw out the raft and leapt after it.

“And then finally, only then, curled in my little raft, I let myself remember what I’d seen.

“I was all alone with those memories for two days. I thought I’d die.

“I thought for a moment that maybe if I could stay alive for long enough, the currents might take me and shove me out into the Swollen Ocean, where our other ships are waiting. But I’m not a fool. I knew there was no chance of that.

“And then… this.”

For the first time in his extraordinary story, Hedrigall sounded as if he would break down again.

“What is this? What is this?” The hysteria in his voice grew louder. “I thought I was dying. I thought you were a dying man’s dream. I saw you die…” He whispered it. “I saw you die. What are you? What city is this? What’s happening to me?”

Hedrigall became dangerous then, shouting, feverish, and terrified. The Lovers tried to soothe him, but it was some time before his rantings became subdued and he fell into a stupefied sleep.

A long silence followed-a long, stretched-out quiet-and Bellis felt herself back in her own skin again as the spell of Hedrigall’s story slowly faded. Her skin was elyctric; she bristled with tension. She felt all drunk on awe from his telling.

“What,” hissed the Lover coldly, his voice fraught, “has happened?”

“It’s the Scar,” Tanner whispered to Bellis. “I know what it is. This close to the Scar, it’s leaking. And that Hed up there…” He paused and shook his head, his face haggard and bleached with wonder. Bellis knew what he would say.

“That ain’t the real Hedrigall,” said Tanner, “not the factual one, not the one from… from here. Our Hedrigall ran away. That Hedrigall’s leaked out… from another possibility. He’s from one where he stayed on, and where we traveled that bit faster, got to the Scar earlier. He’s what happened… what will happen.

“Oh my Jabber, oh dear Jabber and shit.”

Above them, the Lovers and Uther Doul were arguing. Someone-Bellis had not heard who-had said the same thing as Tanner. The Lover was reacting violently.

“Dung!” she spat. “Fucking dung! It doesn’t work that way; that’s not what happens. Out of the whole sea, you think we’d happen to find him, even if he had leaked through? This is a fucking setup. That’s Hedrigall, alright. It’s our Hedrigall, and he never left. This is a setup to turn us back. He is not effluvium from the Scar.”

She was furious. She let no one else speak. She raged at Uther Doul, and even at the Lover, to Bellis’ amazement; he was asking her to calm down, to just think… So close to what she sought, the Lover felt it threatened, and she was thundering.

“I’ll tell you what,” she said. “This is shit, and we will keep this lying bastard locked up until we get the truth from him. We say he’s recovering; we wait; we find out what really happened. We don’t accept this crap he’s spouted to us.”

“Is she mad?” hissed Tanner Sack to Bellis. “What’s she talking about?”

“This is obviously designed to create panic,” the Lover continued. “This is a plan to ruin everything. He’s in fucking league with gods knows who, and we can’t let them win. Uther, take him away. Brief the guards-and pick them well; pick those you’re certain of. Brief the guards about the lies he might shout to them.

“We will stop this, right here,” she said, hard. “We’ll not let this seditious shit succeed. This goes no further. We bury this story, right now, right here, and we go on. Agreed?”

Perhaps the Lover and Uther Doul nodded to her. Bellis heard nothing.

She had turned her face to Tanner at those last words. She watched him listen to his ruler-to whom he had committed himself absolutely, declared himself utterly loyal-announce her plans to deceive everyone in the city. To keep secret everything she had heard. And to drive on to the Scar.

Bellis watched a cold, a dead and frightening cast come over Tanner’s face as he listened. The muscles of his jaw clenched, and Bellis knew that he was thinking of Shekel.

Was he remembering how he’d said and thought that this-what had happened to them, being found-was a blessing? Bellis did not know. But something had set in Tanner’s face, and he looked at her with murderous eyes.

“She,” he hissed to her, “will bury nothing.”