The Scar (17 page)

He stoked the fire that drove his bulky analytical engine, and fed it program cards, gathering data. Finally, he wheeled into place alongside the gurney a tank containing a sedated cod, and linked the motionless fish to Tanner’s body by a cryptic and unwieldy construction of valves, gutta-percha tubes, and wires.

Homeomorphic chymicals sluiced dilute in brine across the cod’s gills, and then through the ragged wounds that would be Tanner’s. Wires linked the two of them. The chirurgeon muttered hexes as he operated the juddering apparatus—he was rusty with bio-thaumaturgy, but methodical and careful—and kneaded Tanner’s bleeding neck. Water began to drool through the holes and over the opened-up skin.

For most of the night, the scene was replayed, the surgery swaying gently with the water below. The chirurgeon slept a little, periodically checking Tanner’s progress, and that of the slowly dying cod suspended in a matrix of thaumaturgic strands that dragged out its demise. He applied pressure when it was needed, changed the settings of finely calibrated gauges, added chymicals to the sluicing water.

In those hours, Tanner dreamed of choking (while he opened and closed his eyes, unknowing).

When the sun came up, the chirurgeon uncoupled Tanner and the fish from his machinery (the cod dying instantly, its body shrunken and wrinkled). He closed up the flaps of skin in Tanner’s neck, slimy with gelatinous gore. He smoothed them down, his fingers tingling with puissance as the gashes sealed.

Without Tanner waking—still drugged as he was, there was no danger of that—the chirurgeon placed a mask over Tanner’s mouth, sealed his nose with his fingers, and began to pump brine gently into him. For several seconds there was no reaction. Then Tanner coughed and gagged violently, spattering water. The chirurgeon stood poised, ready to release Tanner’s nose.

And then Tanner calmed. All without waking, his epiglottis flexed and his windpipe constricted, keeping the saltwater from entering his lungs. The chirurgeon smiled as water began to seep from Tanner’s new gills.

It came sluggishly at first, bringing with it blood and dirt and scab matter. And then the water ran clean and the gills began
to flex, regulating it, and it pulsed across the floor in measured draughts.

Tanner Sack was breathing water.

He woke later, too vague to understand what had happened, but infected by the chirurgeon’s enthusiasm. His throat hurt terribly, so he slept again.

That was by far the hardest thing done.

The chirurgeon peeled back Tanner’s eyelids and bound to him clear nictitating membranes taken and modified from a caiman bred in one of the city’s farms. He injected Tanner with particulate life-forms that thrived in him harmlessly and interacted with his body, making his sweat a touch more oleaginous, to warm him and slide him through water. He grafted in a little ridge of muscle at the base of Tanner’s nostrils, and little nubs of cartilage, so that he could flex them closed.

Finally, the chirurgeon performed by far the easiest, if the most visible, alteration. Between Tanner’s fingers and his thumb, he stretched a membrane, a web of rubbery skin that he pinched into position, tethering it in Tanner’s epidermis. He removed Tanner’s toes and replaced them with the fingers from a cadaver, sewing and sealing them onto Tanner’s foot until he looked simian; then he changed the resemblance from ape to frog as he stretched more webbing between those once-more living digits.

He bathed Tanner, washed him in seawater. Kept him clean and cool, and watched his tentacles writhe in his sleep.

And on the fourth day Tanner woke, properly and completely. Untied, free to move, his mind empty of chymicals.

He sat up, slowly.

His body hurt; it raged in fact. It assaulted him in waves that beat with his heart. His neck, his feet, his eyes, dammit. He saw his new toes and looked away for a moment, a memory of the old horror of the punishment factory come back for a second, till he battened it down and looked again (
More pus
, he thought, with a shade of humor).

He clenched his new hands. He blinked slowly and saw something translucent slip across his vision before his eyelid came down. He breathed deep into water-bruised lungs and coughed, and it hurt, as the chirurgeon had warned it would.

Tanner, despite the pain and the weakness and the hunger and nervousness, began to smile.

The chirurgeon came in as Tanner grinned and grinned, and grunted to himself, and rubbed himself gently.

“Mr. Sack,” he said, and Tanner turned to him and held out his shaking arms as if to grab him, trying to shake his hand. Tanner’s tentacles flexed as well, trying to reach out in echo through the too-thin air. The chirurgeon smiled.

“Congratulations, Mr. Sack,” he said. “The procedures were successful. You are now amphibian.”

And at that—they couldn’t help themselves and didn’t try—both he and Tanner Sack laughed uproariously, even though it hurt Tanner’s chest, and even though the chirurgeon wasn’t certain what was funny.

When he got home, after hauling himself gingerly through the valleys of Booktown and Garwater, he found Shekel waiting in rooms that had never been so clean.

“Ah now, lad,” he said, shy of him. “That’s great what you’ve done, ain’t it?”

Shekel tried to grab him in welcome, but Tanner was too sore and held him back good-naturedly. They talked quietly into the evening. Tanner asked carefully after Angevine. Shekel told Tanner that his reading was improving, and that nothing much had happened, but that it was warmer now, could Tanner feel it?

He could. They crawled south at an almost geologically slow pace, but the tugs and steamers had been dragging them continuously for two weeks now. They were perhaps five hundred miles south of where they had been—they had traveled so far, with a motion so slow it was unnoticed—and the winter was waning as they approached the band of temperate sea and air.

Tanner showed Shekel the additions, the changes to his body, and Shekel winced at their oddness and inflammations, but was fascinated. Tanner told him all the things the chirurgeon had explained.

“You’ll be tender, Mr. Sack,” he had said. “And even when you’re well, I want to warn you: some of the cuts I’ve made, some of the wounds, they may heal hard. They might scar. In that case, I want you not to be downhearted or disappointed. Scars are not injuries, Tanner Sack. A scar is a healing. After injury, a scar is what makes you whole.”

“A fortnight, lad,” Tanner said, “before I’m back at work, he reckons. If I practice and all.”

But Tanner had an advantage the doctor had not considered: he had never learned to swim. He did not have to adjust a flailing, inefficient, slapping paddle into the sinuous motion of a sea dweller.

He sat by the dockside while his workmates greeted him. They were surprised, solicitous, and friendly. Bastard John the dolphin broke surface nearby, glaring at Tanner with his liquid, piggy eyes and emitting what were doubtless insults in his imbecilic cetacean chittering. But Tanner was not cowed that morning. He received his colleagues like a king, thanking them for their concern.

At the border of Garwater and Jhour ridings, there was a space in the fabric of the city, between vessels: a patch of sea that might have housed a modest ship formed a swimming area. Only a very few of the Armadan pirates could swim, and in such temperatures, few would try. There were only a handful of humans swimming in that patch of open sea, brave or masochistic.

Under the water, slowly, nervous of his new buoyancy and freedom, over hours that day and the next and next, Tanner spread his arms and hands, opening out the webs of skin and capturing the water, pushing himself forward in inexpert bursts. He kicked out in something like a breaststroke, those still-sore toes flexing, painful and powerful. The little presences he could not see or feel beneath his skin pulsed infinitesimal glands and lubricated his sweat.

He opened his eyes and learned to close only his inner eyelids—an extraordinary sensation. He learned to see in the water, unconstrained by any unwieldy helmet, any iron and brass and glass. Not peering through a porthole, but looking out freely, peripheral vision and all.

Slowest and most frightening of all, alone—who could possibly teach him?—Tanner learned to breathe.

The first inrush of water into his mouth closed his windpipe reflexively, and his tongue clamped back and his throat tightened and blocked the route to his stomach, and the seawater scored its way through his tender new pathways, opening him up. He tasted salt so totally it became quickly insensible. He felt rills of water pass through him, through his neck, his gills, and
Godspit and shit and all
he thought, because he felt no need to breathe.

He had filled his lungs before descending, out of habit, but aerated he was too buoyant. Slowly, in a kind of luxuriant panic, he exhaled through his nose and let his air disappear above him.

And felt nothing. No dizziness or pain or fear. Oxygen still reached his blood, and his heart kept pumping.

Above him, the pasty little bodies of his fellow citizens floundered across the surface of the water, tethered to the air they breathed. Tanner spun beneath them, clumsy still but learning, corkscrewing, looking above and below—up into the light and bodies and the massive sprawling interlocking shape of the city, down into the boundless blue dark.

Chapter Thirteen

Silas and Bellis spent two nights together.

During the days, Bellis shelved, helped Shekel to read and told him about Croom Park, sometimes ate with Carrianne. Then she returned to Silas. They talked some, but he left her quite ignorant of how he passed his hours. She had a sense that he was full of secret ideas. They fucked several times.

After the second night, Silas disappeared. Bellis was glad. She had been neglecting Johannes’ books, and she now returned to their unfamiliar science.

Silas was gone for three days.

Bellis explored.

She ventured finally into the farthest parts of the city. She saw the burn temples of Bask riding, and its triptych statues spread across the fabric of several boats. In Thee-And-Thine (which was not as rough or as frightening as she had been led to believe, was little more than an exaggerated, pugnacious marketplace) she saw the Armada asylum, a massive edifice that loomed from a steamer, cruelly placed, it seemed to Bellis, right next to the haunted quarter.

There was a little outcropping of Garwater boats like a buffer between Curhouse and Bask, separated off from the main body of their riding by some historical caprice. There, Bellis found the Lyceum, its workshops and classrooms staggering precipitously down the sides of a ship, layered like a mountainside town.

Armada had all the institutions of any city on land, devoted
to learning and politics and religion, only perhaps in a harder form. And if the city’s scholars were tougher than their landside equivalents, and looked more like rogues and pirates than doctors, it did not invalidate their expertise. There were different constabularies in each riding, from the uniformed proctors of Bask to Garwater’s loosely defined yeomanry who were marked out only by their sashes—a badge as much of loyalty as office. Each riding’s law was different. There was a species of court and disputation in Curhouse, while the lax, violent, piratical discipline of Garwater was doled out with the whip.

Armada was a profane and secular city, and its unkempt churches were treated as irreverently as its bakers. There were temples to the deified Croom; to the moon and her daughters, to thank them for the tides; to sea gods.

If she ever became lost, Bellis needed only to find her way out from backstreets or alleys, look up through all the aerostats moored to masts, and find the
Arrogance
, looming stately over the glowering
Grand Easterly
. It was her beacon, and by it she steered her
way home.

In the midst of the city there were rafts—wooden floats extending scores of yards to each side. Houses perched ludicrously on them. There were needle-thin submarines bobbing tethered between barquentines, and chariot ships filled with hotchi burrows. Tumbledown buildings smothered decks or perched precarious across the backs of tens of tiny vessels in the cheap neighborhoods. There were playhouses and prisons and deserted hulks.

When she raised her eyes to the horizon, Bellis could see disturbances out to sea: churning water, wakes without obvious cause. Wind- and weather-born, usually, but sometimes she might glimpse a pod of porpoises, or a plesiaur or seawyrm neck, or the back of something big and fast that she could not identify. The life beyond the city, and all around it.

Bellis watched the city’s fishing boats return in the evenings. Sometimes pirate ships would appear and be welcomed back into the harbors of Basilio or Urchinspine, the motors of Armada’s economy finding their way, uncannily, home.

Armada was full of figureheads. They poked up in unlikely places, ornate and ignored like the carved door knockers on New Crobuzon houses. At the end of a terrace, walking between rows of close brick dwellings, Bellis might come face-to-face with a splendid corroded woman, her breastplate moldering, her painted gaze flaked and vague. Hanging in the air like a spirit, below the bowsprit of her ship, which jutted across its neighbor’s deck and pointed into the alley.

They were all around. Otters, drakows, fish, warriors, and women. Above all women. Bellis hated the blank-eyed, curvaceous figures, wobbling up and down moronically with the swell, haunting the city like banal ghosts.

In her room, she finished
Essays on Beasts
and remained uncomprehending of Armada’s secret project.

She wondered where Silas was, and what he was doing. She was not upset or angry at his absence, but she was curious and a little frustrated. He was, after all, the closest thing she had to an ally.

He returned on the evening of the fifth of Lunuary.

Bellis let him enter. She did not touch him, nor he her.

He was tired and subdued. His hair was mussed, his clothes dusty. He sat back in a chair and covered his hands with his eyes, murmuring something inaudible, some greeting. Bellis made him tea. She waited for him to speak, and when after a while he did not, she returned to her book and her cigarillo.

She had made several more pages of notes before he spoke.

“Bellis. Bellis.” He rubbed his eyes and looked up at her. “I have to tell you something. I have to tell you the truth. I’ve kept things from you.”

She nodded, turning to face him. His eyes were closed.

“Let’s . . . take stock,” he said slowly. “The city’s heading south. The
Sorghum
. . . Do you know what the
Sorghum
’s for? The
Sorghum
, and the other rigs that I gather the
Terpsichoria
took you past, suck fuel from under the sea.”

He spread his hands wide, indicating massiveness. “There are fields of oil and rockmilk and mercus under the earth, Bellis. You’ve seen the screwbores they use to plumb for the stuff on land. Well, geo-empaths and the like have found vast deposits under the rock, lying under the sea.

“There’s oil under southern Salkrikaltor. That’s why the
Manikin
and the
Trashstar
and
Sorghum
have been perched out there for more than three decades. The supports of the
Manikin
and
Trashstar
go down four hundred feet and sit on the bottom. But the
Sorghum
. . . The
Sorghum
’s different.” He spoke with a morbid relish. “Someone in Armada knew what they were doing, I tell you. The
Sorghum
sits on two iron hulls—submersibles. The
Sorghum
’s not tethered. The
Sorghum
’s a deepwater rig. The
Sorghum
can travel.

“You can just keep adding sections to its drill shaft, and it can go down Jabber fucking knows how far. Miles down. You can’t find oil and so on everywhere. That’s why we were stationary for so long. Armada was sitting over a field of something or other the
Sorghum
could get at, and we couldn’t move off until it had stored up for wherever it’s going.”

How do you know all this?
thought Bellis.
What’s this truth you have to tell me?

“I don’t think it’s just oil,” Silas continued. “I’ve been watching the flame over the rig, Bellis. I think they’ve been drawing up rockmilk.”

Rockmilk.
Lactus saxi
. Viscous and heavy as magma, but bone cold. And dense with thaumaturgons, the charged particles. Worth several times its considerable weight in gold, or diamonds, or oil or blood.

“Ships don’t use fucking rockmilk to fire their engines,” Silas said. “Whatever they’ve stockpiled for, it’s not just to keep their vessels trim. Look at what’s happening. We’re heading south, to deeper, warmer seas. I’ll bet you a finial we’re skirting close to ridges beneath, where there are deposits, a route that lets the
Sorghum
drill. And when we get wherever we’re going, your friend Johannes and his new employers are going to use . . . what, several
tons
of rockmilk and Jabber knows how much oil to do . . . something. By which time . . .” He paused, and held her gaze. “By which time it’ll be too late.”

Tell me
, Bellis thought, and Silas was nodding as if he had heard her.

“When we met on the
Terpsichoria
, I was in something of a state, I remember. I told you I had to return to New Crobuzon immediately. You reminded me of that yourself, recently. And I told you that I’d been lying. But I wasn’t. What I said on
Terpsichoria
was true: I have to return. Dammit, you probably realized all this.”

Bellis said nothing.

“I didn’t know how to . . . I didn’t know if I could trust you, if you’d care,” he continued. “I’m sorry I wasn’t honest with you, but I didn’t know how far I could go. But dammit, Bellis, I trust you now. And I need your help.

“It’s true, what I told you, that sometimes the grindylow turn against some poor sod for no reason anyone can figure. That people disappear at their whim. The grindylows’ whim, the deeplings.” But it’s not true, what I said then, about that happening to me. I know exactly why the grindylow wanted to kill me.

“If they chose, the grindylow could swim upriver to the top of the Bezheks, where all the rivers join together, and they could cross into the Canker. Be swept downriver on the other side of the mountains, all the way to New Crobuzon.

“Others could cross into the ocean through the tunnels, come at the city by sea. They’re euryhalinic, the grindylow, happy in freshwater or brine. They could make their way to Iron Bay. To the Gross Tar, and New Crobuzon. All it would take for the grindylow to get to the city is determination. And I know they have that.”

Bellis had never seen Silas so tense.

“When I was there, there were rumors. Some big plan was in the offing. One of my clients, a magus, a kind of thug-priest, its name came up again and again. I started to keep my eyes and ears open. That’s why they want to kill me. I found something out.

“The grindylow don’t do secrecy; they don’t do policing as we do. There was evidence in front of me for weeks, but it took me a long time to recognize it. Mosaics, blueprints, librettos, and such-like. Took me a long time to understand.”

“Tell me what you found,” said Bellis.

“Plans,” he said. “Plans for an invasion.”

“It would be like nothing you can imagine,” he said. “Gods know our history’s littered with betrayal and fucking blood, but . . . ‘Stail, Bellis . . . You’ve never seen The Gengris.” There was a desperation in his voice that Bellis had never heard before. “You’ve never seen the limb-farms. The workshops, the fucking bile workshops. You’ve never heard the
music
.

“If the grindylow take New Crobuzon, they wouldn’t enslave us, or kill us, or even eat us all. They wouldn’t do anything so . . . comprehensible.”

“But why?” said Bellis, finally. “What do they want? Do you think they can do it?”

“I don’t godsdamned know. No one knows a thing about them. I suspect the New Crobuzon government has more plans about what to do if fucking
Tesh
invades than if the grindylow do. We’ve never had any reason to be scared of them. But they have their
own . . . methods, their own sciences and thaumaturgies. Yes,” he said. “I think they have a chance.

“They want New Crobuzon for the same reason every other state or savage on Ragamoll does. It’s the richest, the biggest, the most powerful. Our industries, our resources, our militia—look at everything we have. But unlike Shankell or Dreer Samher or Neovadan or Yoraketche, The Gengris . . . The Gengris has a chance.

“They can come with surprise . . . Poison the water, come into the sewers. Every godsdamn crevice and crack and water tank in the city would be a fucking encampment. They can storm us with weapons we’d never understand, in an endless guerrilla war.

“I’ve seen what the grindylow can do, Bellis.” Silas sounded exhausted. “I’ve seen it, and I’m scared.”

From outside came the far-off sound of monkeys squabbling sleepily.

“That’s why you left,” said Bellis in the quiet that followed.

“That’s why I left. I couldn’t believe what I’d found out. But I dithered . . . I fucking farted time away.” His anger welled up suddenly. “And when I realized that there was no fucking mistake, that this wasn’t a confusion, that they really did intend to unleash some godsforsaken unthinkable apocalypse on my hometown . . . then I left. I stole the sub, and left.”

“Do they know that . . . you know?” she asked.

He shook his head. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I took some stuff with me, so that it looks like I stole and ran.”

Bellis could see that he was tight with tension. She could remember some of the heliotypes she had seen in his notebook. Her heart lurched, and slow alarm crept through her with her blood, like a sickness. Bellis struggled to grasp what he was telling her. It was too big for her; it made no sense. She could not contain it. New Crobuzon . . . How could it be threatened?

“Do you know how long?” she whispered.

“They have to wait till Chet to harvest their weapons,” he said. “So maybe six months. We have to find out what Armada’s planning to do, because we have to know where we’re going, with this fucking rockmilk and all. Because we . . . we have to get a message back to New Crobuzon.”

“Why,” Bellis breathed, “didn’t you tell me before?”

Silas laughed hollowly. “I didn’t know who on this place to trust. I was trying to get away from here myself, trying to find some way home. It took me a long time to believe that . . . that there
wasn’t any. I thought I could just take the message to New Crobuzon myself. What if you didn’t believe me? Or what if you were a spy? What if you told our new fucking rulers—“

“Well, what about that?” Bellis interrupted. “Isn’t it worth thinking about? Maybe they’d help us get a message . . .”

Silas stared at her with nasty incredulity.

“Are you mad?” he said. “You think they’d help us? They don’t give spit what happens to New Crobuzon. They’d most likely welcome its fucking destruction—one less competitor nation on the sea. You think they’d let us ride to the rescue? You think they’d care? The bastards would probably do everything they could to
hold us back
, to let the grindylow do their worst. And, besides, you’ve seen how they treat . . . Crobuzoner officials and agents. They’d search my notes, my papers, and it would come out that I have a commission. That I work for New Crobuzon. Jabber Almighty, Bellis, you saw what they did to the captain. What do you think they’d do to me?”