The Scar

Tanner Sack

It’s been bloody mad here. You’d never believe what I’ve been doing.

We ain’t heading for the Scar no more. We’re heading back for waters way back the way we came. We’re going back to how things were.

Strange. I put it like that, but I never knew this place when it wasn’t hankering for the Hidden Ocean. Neither did you. Everything that happened, it was all geared up to getting us out there. I’ve never lived here when it was just a pirate port.

Neither have you.

I’ve been spending time with your Angevine. I’ll be lying if I tell you we’re best friends. We’re a bit shy, you might say. But we see each other, and talk about you, mostly.

We were lied to, and we had enough, and they were risking our necks, dammit, so we made them turn back.

It doesn’t go away, that you’re gone.

I don’t live here anymore. I live nowhere. This place killed you.

I don’t know what it was, the things in that water. I know that what we fought in the water that night was no vampir. No one talks about them. No one knows what they were. Only that they helped to try to turn us.

Bastard John saw them. I see it in his little piggy eyes. But he says nothing.

It was me who turned the city. Those things, the things that took you, the vampir man who fought beside them, they failed.

I did the job for them. Turned us round.

I don’t know if that’s funny. I only know I don’t want to live here anymore, and I can’t go.

I’m a sea-thing now. It’s a bad joke. We both know what real sea-things are, how they move, how fast. Not like me, heavy clumsily stolen fins flapping, slimy sweating, Remade.

And I’m scared, now. I put myself in the sea I sweat. Now every little blenny looks like one of the things that took you.

But I can’t live in the air now. I ain’t got that option no more.

What’ll I do? I can’t go back to New Crobuzon, and if I could I’d rot, without brine.

I’ll make myself swim. It’ll get easier again. I’ll get it done.

They can’t hold me. I can leave. Maybe we’ll go near some coast one day, and there I’ll slip away. There I’ll go and live alone in the shallows so I can see rock under me, where trees and scree meet in the water. I can live there alone. I’ve had enough of it, I tell you.

I ain’t got nothing. I’ve got nothing.

In time, in time they tell me, I’ll not feel so bad. I don’t want time to heal me. There’s a reason I’m like this.

I want time to set me ugly and knotted with loss of you, marking me. I won’t smooth you away.

I can’t say good-bye.

Dustday 2nd Tathis, 1780. Armada.

The avanc is slowing again, one final time.

It is still wounded from the grindylow’s abuse. Whatever they did to it has not healed, not scarred, but remains raw and unpleasant. We pass from time to time by messes of its pus again.

Its heart, I think, is winding down.

We all know that the avanc is dying.

Perhaps it is looking for its home. Perhaps it is trying to find its way back to the universe of lightless brine from where we fished it. And all the time it grows ill, and weak, its blood thickening, decaying and clotting, its great flukes moving more slowly.

Never mind. We are very close to the edge of the Hidden Ocean. We will emerge soon-any day, perhaps within hours-and there the Armadan fleet will be waiting. The avanc will live till then.

The day is close, though, when the city will come to a final stop.

We will be stranded, attached to an organic anchor, millions of tons of corpse rotting on the floor of the abyss.

Five chains, five links to sever. For each link, two cuts. Each link many feet thick, and thaumaturgically tempered. It will take some time, but eventually, one by one, the miles of metal will fall free.

What a catastrophe that will be, to the bottom dwellers-like divine anger. Tons of metal falling, accelerating, through four, five miles, eventually to slam into the ooze at the sea’s bottom, cutting through to the rock below. Landing across the poor avanc’s corpse, perhaps, bursting it open, its miles of intestines littering the dark mud.

Perhaps in time whole ecosystems will evolve around that unprecedented richness.

We will be gone.

We will have reached the fleet, and they will reattach themselves, and Armada will be as it was. There will be less vessels to drag it, of course, after the carnage of the Crobuzoner War, but the city will have shed countless thousands of tons of chain. It will balance.

Armada will be as it was.

Back across the Swollen Ocean, back toward the richest shipping lanes, back toward the ports and traders. The Armadan pirates who have waited for months, tracking the city with strange devices, will find it again. We will go back toward the Gentleman’s Sea, the Hebdomad, Gnurr Kett, the Basilisk Channel.

Back toward New Crobuzon.

It has been a month since the woman left, whose name I did not know. Things have changed.

It did not take long for the mutineers to relinquish control. They had no program, no party. They were only ever a disparate group who found out they had been lied to, who did not want to die. They snatched power in an anarchic and momentary coup, and gave it up easily.

Within days, the Lover reemerged. He came out of the Grand Easterly and issued orders. People were glad to carry them out. No one has a quarrel with him.

He is lost, though. Everyone knows it. His eyes do not focus, and his orders are vague. Uther Doul whispers to him carefully, and the Lover will nod and issue some meaningful command, Doul’s words through the Lover’s mouth.

Doul will not allow that to continue. He is a mercenary: he works for money; he sells his loyalty. If he must have control, I do not believe he wants it to be so unsubtle. If he rules, he hides it, for the freedom of paid subordinance. I have learnt that, if nothing else.

I do not know what happened to him, to make him flinch from naked power so much.

I have never met a more complicated man, or, I suspect, a more tragic one. His own history planted the ideas that brought us all here, so far from what he himself sought in Armada. It is hard to tell what in him has been intent, and what reaction. I cannot believe that this is satisfactory for him: that he looks at his position, and that of the Lover, and he nods, and says, “This is what I wanted.”

Either he spends his life in control of everything, or in panicked fear. Either he has planned everything to a dizzying degree, or he moves us all desperately from crisis to crisis, not knowing what he wants, showing nothing on his face.

The Lover keeps his dead gaze on the horizon. Although at the end, the woman was despised and feared as a liar, she was never pathetic, and her erstwhile lover has become so. I suspect that he will not survive this. Perhaps one day he will discover that Doul is no longer at his side. Especially now that the Brucolac controls Dry Fall again.

Few actually saw the grindylow, and fewer talk about it. It is only I who cannot forget them.

I have seen the Brucolac at night. He walks free.

He is sun-scarred, and will always be. He is subdued. Carrianne talks of him with an austere kind of affection. His citizens have rallied to him, and most others were fast to forgive him-even those who lost lovers on the night he rebelled. After all, he led his cadre against Garwater because he said we must turn the city around. And he was right, and that has now been done.

There is no war between Dry Fall and Garwater. Doul visits the Brucolac, at night, on the Uroc, Carrianne tells me.

I spend many of my days with Carrianne. She is quiet about her one-time support for the Lovers’ project. For almost a fortnight she did not speak much at all. Perhaps she was ashamed, to have found herself on the side of that woman who was so ready to lie, to lead us to our deaths.

That is the accepted story, apparently. We believe what the returned Hedrigall said. That is what people believe; that is why the city was turned.

Tanner Sack and I-we see each other, from time to time. He has begun to work again, under the city. He never mentions the time I took him to the little room and spurred a rebellion.

Did I do that?

Was this mutiny my doing? This city heading southward again, toward the waters we have passed through before, to the places that mean something to me-was this my doing?

And does that mean that I have won?

Perhaps she made it safely, the woman, and moored herself at the water’s rim, and lowered her equipment into the chasm and extracted all the energies she needed, and is now as powerful as a god.

Perhaps she fell in.

Perhaps there was nothing to fall into.

Hedrigall is ill, delirious from his ordeal, we are told, somewhere in the innards of the Grand Easterly. When I hear that I think: we were not told the truth.

The woman was right. What kind of stupid, idiot coincidence would we have to believe-what chain of unlikeliness-to think that our Hedrigall leaves, and in a nigh-world another stays, and is lost-and found again, in the whole of the sea, by us. We have not been told the truth.

I remember the look Doul gave me.

He looked for me and found me, on the Grand Easterly, and told me with his eyes to come, listen, and finish this. He told me so much with that glance, and left so much unexplained. So much was clear: What he had done. His games, his manipulations.

I picture him, meeting with Hedrigall, the loyal cactus-man frightened and appalled by the Lovers’ plan. Doul, making his suggestions. Hiding Hedrigall somewhere secret and quiet. Slipping out silently as only he could move, cutting the Arrogance free; bringing Hedrigall out again, later, to terrify the populace with his stories of canyons in the sea. So that Doul would have to say nothing. Safe in his loyalty.

Or perhaps it was Fennec who suggested that Hedrigall hide: a plan in case the Crobuzoner rescue failed to turn us back to home waters.

But I saw Doul’s look. If all this was Fennec’s doing, then Doul knew of it, and helped it run.

I think of all the times that Doul told me things, and hinted to me, letting me know where we would go, what we would do. Knowing that I knew Silas Fennec, Simon Fench, knowing that I would spread the word to him. Angry only when I spread the wrong sedition.

Spending time with me, and bringing me close. I came close. Using me as a conduit.

I am agog with how much he knew, and watched. I wish I could know when it started-whether I have been used for many, many months, or only in the final days. I do not know how much of what Doul does is strategy, and how much is recoil. Certainly he has known far, far more than I had thought.

I am left uncertain of how much I was used.

There is another possibility. It disturbs me.

I have heard again and again, from many people, many times, that this Hedrigall is not quite the same as ours. His manner is different, his voice more hesitant. His face, they say, is more-or perhaps less-scarred. He is a refugee from another world. People believe that.

It is possible. It is possible that he told us the truth.

But even so, it could not be luck alone. I saw Doul: he was waiting for this Hedrigall, and for me. So it cannot be chance that this Hedrigall came. There is another explanation.

Maybe it was Doul’s doing. I heard music. Maybe this was Doul, playing possibilities, making a concerto of likelihood and unlikelihood.

Did he play his perhapsadian at night, as we approached the Scar, as the possible worlds around us grew more intrusive? Finding the one where Hedrigall survived, pulling him out of it, pulling him here to be found?

Such a tenuous chain: that I would be there with someone who would be believed, that Doul could find me with his eyes. So many chances: Doul must be the luckiest man in Bas-Lag. Or he planned the unplannable. Preparing me for that moment.

Could he play possibilities like a virtuoso, making sure the one that occurred was the one that had me there, beside Tanner, watching and listening as Hedrigall arrived, ready?

And what if fact-Bellis would not be there at that time? Did he bring out another? Bring out me? The one who would be in the right place at the right time, for his plans?

Am I a nigh-Bellis?

And if I am, what happened to the other? The fact?

Did he kill her? Is her body floating somewhere, rotting and eaten? Am I a replacement? Pulled through into existence to replace a dead woman-to be where Doul needed her to be?

All that so that he could turn the city around, and never come forward. Was this the only way? He would do all this to have his way, and to seem to have no will at all.

I will never be certain of what happened, of exactly how and how much, amid all the chaos and the blood and fighting, I was used.

That I was used, I have no doubt.

Doul has no interest in me now.

All the time we were together, he was playing me, making me his agent to turn the city around, so that it was not him that did it. A loyal mercenary, making the city merely pirate again.

Now that I have done what I was required to do, I am less than nothing to him.

It is strange to find yourself a game piece. I am humbled by him, but I am too old to be wounded by betrayal.

Still, twice now I have tried to see him, to understand what it was he did. Twice I have knocked and had him open the door to me, and stare at me unspeaking as if I am a stranger. And both times my words have gone sour in my mouth.

There is no “it,” I remember Silas Fennec scolding me.

It is probably the best advice.

Right now, there are a small handful of possibilities that can explain what happened. Any of them might be true. And if Doul were to claim innocence of all of them, I would have less to make sense with, less than I have now. I would have to contemplate the possibility that there was no plan-that there is nothing to be explained.

Why would I risk that? Why in the world would I relinquish what understandings I have?

Tanner Sack came to my rooms. Angevine waited for him below on the Chromolith’s deck. Her treads could not take my stairs.

I am sure that they are a comfort to each other. But what I heard between them was uncertain and careful, and I think they will move apart. Sharing loss, I suspect, will not be enough.

Tanner brought me a heliotype he had found: of Shekel, holding two books, grinning outside the library. Tanner has decided that everything to do with Shekel and books is mine. I am embarrassed. I don’t know how to tell him to stop.

After he left, I looked at the sepia scrap he had left me. It was not a good print. Vague suggestions of architecture and biology burnt onto the paper, scarring it. Wounding it and healing it in a new configuration. Scars are memory.

I carry my memories of Armada on my back.

I took the dressings off some weeks ago, and with angled mirrors I have seen what Garwater has written on me. It is a breathtakingly ugly message, in a brutal script.

Contours ridge my back, lines stretched horizontal across it, roughly parallel, where the whip landed. They seem to emerge from one side of my back, break my skin, and descend on the other.

Like sutures. They stitch the past to me.

I look at them with wonder. It is as if they are nothing to do with me. Armada is sewn fast onto my back, and I know that I will carry it with me everywhere.

So many truths have been kept from me. This violent, pointless voyage has been sopping with blood. I feel thick and sick with it. And that is all: contingent and brutal without meaning. There is nothing to be learnt here. No ecstatic forgetting. There is no redemption in the sea.

Carrying it on my back, I will take Armada home with me.

Home.

The second time Doul found me at his door, he must have seen something in my face. He nodded once and then spoke.

He said: “Enough is enough. We will take you back.”

Back again.

I was stunned. I bowed my head, nodded, and thanked him.

He gave me that. And not for any residue of what he once pretended was between us.

He is rewarding me. He is paying me.

For the jobs I have done. Since he has used me.

Doul passed messages to Fennec through me, for Fennec to give the city. But Fennec did the wrong thing, and the Lovers outmaneuvered us all by telling the truth. So Doul found other uses for me.

And now he will take me home. Not for warmth or out of justice. He is offering me a wage.

I will accept.

He is not stupid. He knows that nothing I could do in New Crobuzon could undermine or threaten Armada in any way. I would not be listened to if I tried to tell Parliament, and why would I do that, renegade that I am?

Eventually there will be a ship charged to rob the Basilisk Channel. And I will be on it. I will be taken on some tiny boat, perhaps, dropped in that ugly port Qe Banssa that I saw from the Terpsichoria’s deck. And I will wait there until a New Crobuzon ship appears, heading home for Iron Bay and the Gross Tar, and the city.

Uther Doul will not deny me that. It costs him nothing.

It is many months since we left Iron Bay. By the time we are dragged back again, it will be much more than a year. I will take another name.

The Terpsichoria is lost. There is no reason for the city to chase Bellis Coldwine anymore. And even if some interfering swine back in New Crobuzon were to remember, were to recognize me and pass information on to some uniformed bastard, I have had enough of running. And I cannot find it in me to believe they will. That part of my life is over. This is a new time.

After all that has happened-after all my frantic, fruitless efforts to escape-I find that quite unwittingly I have done what was necessary for me to go home, carrying the memories of Armada stitched to my flesh.

I am surprised to find myself writing this letter to you again. Once I told Uther Doul the truth about it, I felt that it was closed to me.

Hearing myself admit it, I felt like a lonely child. Was there anything more pathetic than these scraps of paper that I was so eager to post, not even having decided yet to whom they would go?

I put them away, then.

But this is a new chapter. The city is going back in time, readying itself to start again with its simple piracy in the rich shores near my home. Everything has changed, and I find myself trembling, excited, biding my time, eager to finish this letter.

It does not embarrass me. I am opened up by it.

This is a Possible Letter. Until the last second, when I write your name beside that word “Dear,” all those sheets and months ago, this is a Possible Letter, pregnant with potentiality. I am very powerful right now. I am all ready to mine the possibilities, make one of them fact.

I have not been the best friend to you, and I need you to forgive me that. I think back to my friends in New Crobuzon, and I wonder which of them you are to be.

And if I want this letter to be a remembrance, to be something with which to say good-bye instead of hello again, then you will be Carrianne. You are my dear friend, if that is so, and the fact that I did not know you when I started to write you this letter means nothing. This is a Possible Letter, after all.

Whoever you are, I have not been the best friend to you, and I am sorry.

Now we approach the fleet that is ranged just beyond the waters of the Hidden Ocean, like a phalanx of anxious guards, and I write this letter to you, to tell you everything that has happened to me. And as I tell you, I come to understand that I have been manipulated, used at every step of the way, that even when I was not a translator, I passed on others’ messages. I find myself detached from such knowledge.

It is not that I do not care. Not that I am not angry at being used, or, gods and Jabber help me, for the awful, brute times I was used to bring about.

But even when I spoke for others (wittingly or not), I was doing things for myself. I have been present throughout all this, my own fact. And besides, as I sit here, ten thousand miles from New Crobuzon, on the other side of foreign seas, I know that we are heading slowly home. And though sadness and the guilt are stitched indelibly to me with my scars, two things are clear.

The first is that everything has changed. I cannot be used anymore. Those days are over. I know too much. What I do now, I do for me. And I feel, for all that has happened, as if it is now, only now in these days, that my journey is beginning. I feel as if this-even all this-has been a prologue.

The other is that all my anxiety to send this letter off, to get it to someone-to you-to cut a little mark upon New Crobuzon, all that neurotic eagerness has blown away. The desperation I had, in Tarmuth, in Salkrikaltor, to post this, to decide at the last minute who you were and send it, so that I might be noted, all that frantic fear is gone.

It has become nothing. It is not necessary anymore.

I am coming home. I will amass much more to tell you on the return journey, which will be long, but will end. I do not need this letter delivered. Whoever I decide you are, dear friend, I will give it to you myself.

I will deliver it by hand.