The Scar (18 page)

There was a long silence at that.

“I needed . . . I need someone to work with me. We have no friends in this city. We have no allies. And thousands of miles away, our home’s in danger, and we can’t trust anyone to help us. So it’s up to us to get a message back.”

After he said that there was a pause that became a silence. It dragged out, longer and longer, and became terrible because they both knew it should be filled. They should be coming up with plans.

And both of them tried. Bellis opened her mouth several times, but words dried in her throat.

We’ll hijack one of their boats
, she wanted to say but could not; the idiocy of it choked her.
We’ll sneak out just the two of us in a dinghy; we’ll get through the guard boats and row and sail for home
. She tried to say that, tried to think it without scorn, and almost moaned.
We’ll steal an airship
.
All we need are guns and gas, and coal and water for the engine, and food and drink for a two-thousand-mile journey, and a map, a chart of where in the godsforsaken fucking middle of the fucking entire Swollen Ocean we
are,
for Jabber’s sake
. . .

Nothing, there was nothing, she could say nothing; she could think nothing.

She sat and tried to speak, tried to think of ways she could save New Crobuzon, her city which she treasured with a ferocious,
unromantic love, and which lay under the most baleful threat.
And the moments passed and passed, and Chet and the summer and the grindylow harvest kept coming closer, and she could say nothing.

Bellis imagined bodies like puffy eels, eyes and slablike recurved teeth heading under cold water toward her home.

“Oh dear gods, dear Jabber . . .” she heard herself say. She met Silas’ troubled eyes. “Dear gods, what are we going to
do
?”

Chapter Fourteen

Slow like some vast, bloated creature, Armada passed into warmer water.

The citizens and the yeomanry put aside their heavier clothes. The press-ganged from the
Terpsichoria
were disorientated. The idea that seasons could be escaped, could be outrun physically, was profoundly unsettling.

The seasons were only points of view—matters of perspective. When it was winter in New Crobuzon, it was summer in Bered Kai Nev (so they said), though they shared the days and nights that grew long and short in antiphase. Dawn was dawn all across the world. In the eastern continent, summer days were short.

The birds of Armada’s microclimate increased in number. The small, inbred community of finches and sparrows and pigeons that clung to the city’s skyline wherever it moved were joined by transients: migrators that crossed the Swollen Ocean, following the year’s heat. A few were waylaid from their gigantic flocks by Armada, coming down to rest and drink, and staying.

They circled confused over the wheeled spires of Curhouse, where the Democratic Council met in session after emergency session, fiercely and ineffectually debating Armada’s direction. They agreed that the Lovers’ secret plans could not be good for the city, that they must do something, bickering miserably as their impotence became more and more clear.

Garwater had always been the most powerful riding, and now Garwater had the
Sorghum
, and the Democratic Council of Curhouse could do nothing at all.

(Nevertheless, Curhouse opened tentative communications with the Brucolac.)

The hardest thing for Tanner was not gill-breathing, not moving his arms and legs like a frog or vodyanoi, but staring into the face of the colossal gradient of dark water below him. Attempting to look it full-on and not be cowed.

When he had worn his diving suit, he had been an intruder.
He had challenged the sea, and he had worn armor. Clinging to
the rungs and the guy ropes, hanging on for life, he had known
that the endless space below him that stretched out like a maw
was exactly that: a mouth the size of the world, straining to swallow him.

Now he swam free, descending toward darkness that no longer seemed to hunger for him. Tanner swam lower and lower. At first he seemed close enough to reach up and stroke the toes of the swimmers above him. It gave him a voyeuristic pleasure to see their frantic, paddling little bodies above him. But when he turned his face to the sunless water below him his stomach pitched at its implacable hugeness, and he turned quickly and made back for the light.

Each day he descended further.

He slipped below the level of Armada’s keels and rudders and descending pipeways. The long sentinels of weed that fringed them, that delimited the city’s lowest points, reached out for him, but he slipped past them like a thief. He stared at the deep.

Tanner passed through a rain of baitfish that nibbled at the city’s scraps, and then he was down in clear water, and there was nothing of Armada around him. He was below the city, all the way below it.

He hung still in the water. It was not difficult.

The pressure coddled him, tightly as if in swaddling.

The ships of Armada sprawled almost a mile across the sea, occluding his light. Above him, Bastard John fussed around below the docks like a hornet. In the twilight water around him Tanner saw a thick suspension of particles, life upon tiny life. And beyond the plankton and krill he faintly saw Armada’s seawyrms and its submersibles, a handful of dark shadows around the city’s base.

He struggled to overcome his vertigo; he made it something else. No less awe, but less fear. He took what was like fear in him, and made it humility.

I’m damn small
, he thought, hanging like a mote of dust in still air,
in a sea that’s damn big. But that’s alright. I can do that.

With Angevine he was shy and a little resentful, but he worked hard for Shekel’s sake.

She came to eat with them. Tanner tried to chat with her, but she was withdrawn and hard. For some time they sat and chewed their kelp bread without any sounds. After half an hour, Angevine motioned to Shekel, and he, well-practiced, stood behind her and scooped pieces of coke from the container behind her back into her boiler.

Angevine met Tanner’s gaze without embarrassment.

“Keeping your engines stoked?” he said eventually.

“They aren’t the most efficient,” she replied slowly (in Salt, spurning the Ragamoll that he had used, though it was her native tongue).

Tanner nodded. He remembered the old man in the hold of the
Terpsichoria
. It took a while for him to say more. Tanner was shy of this stern Remade woman.

“What model is your engine?” he said eventually, in Salt. She stared at him in consternation, and he realized with astonishment that she was ignorant of the mechanics of her own Remade body.

“It’s probably an old pre-exchange model,” he continued slowly. “With only one set of pistons and no recombination box. They were never any good.” He stopped there for a while.
Go on
, he thought.
She might say yes, and the lad’d like it
. “If you fancy, I could take a look. Worked with engines all my life. I could . . . I could even . . .” He hesitated at a verb that sounded somehow obscene, discussing a person. “I could even refit you.”

He wandered away from the table, ostensibly for more stew, to avoid listening to Shekel’s embarrassing monologue: gratitude to Tanner and cajoling of the unconvinced Angevine combined. Over the chorus of
go on Ange best mate Tanner you’re my best mate
, Tanner saw that Angevine was unsettled. She was not used to offers like this, unless they meant incurring debts.

It ain’t for you
, Tanner thought fervently, wishing he could tell her.
It’s for the boy.

He moved further away while she and Shekel whispered to each other. He turned his back on them politely, stripped to his longjohns, and slipped into a tin bath full of brine. It soothed him. He soaked with the same sense of luxury that he once would have had for a hot bath, and he hoped that Angevine would understand his motivations.

She was nobody’s fool. After a short time she said with dignity something like
thanks then, Tanner, that might be good
. She said yes, and Tanner found to his mild surprise that he was glad.

Shekel was still excited by the clamor of silent sounds reading had given him, but with familiarity came control. He no longer found himself stopping midway along a corridor and gasping as the
word
bulkhead
or
heads
shouted itself to him from some ship’s sign.

For the first week or so, graffiti had been an intoxication. He had stood in front of walls and ships’ sides and let his eyes crawl across the morass of messages scratched or scrawled or painted on the city’s flanks. Such a diversity of styles: the same letters could be written tens of different ways but always say the same thing. Shekel never stopped enjoying that fact.

Most of what was written was rude or political or scatological.
Dry Fall Fuck Off
, he read. Names in scores. Somebody loves somebody, repeated again and again. Accusations, sexual and otherwise.
Barsum
or
Peter
or
Oliver is a Cunt
or a
Whore
or a
Queer
or whatever else it might be. The writing gave each declaration a different voice.

In the library, his ransacking of the shelves had become less furious, less drunken in its haste and exhilaration, but he still picked books out and laid them down in great numbers, and read them slowly and wrote down words he did not understand.

Sometimes he opened books and found words that had defeated him the first time he had seen them, and that he had then written down and learned. It delighted him. He felt like a fox that had tracked them. That was how it was with
thorough
, and
climber
, and
khepri
. When he encountered them for the second time, they surrendered to him, and he read them without pause.

In the shelves of foreign volumes, Shekel found release. He
was fascinated by their cryptic alphabets and orthographies, their strange pictures for foreign children. He came and rummaged among them when he needed quiet in his head. He could be assured that they would be silent.

Until the day that he picked one up and turned it in his hands, and it spoke to him.

At twilight, something idled out of the deep sea and came toward Armada.

It approached the last day-shift of engineers below the water. They were coming slowly up, clambering hand over hand up the ladders and pitted surfaces of the undercity, wheezing into their helmets, not looking down, not seeing what was coming.

Tanner Sack was sitting with Hedrigall on the edge of the Basilio docks. They dangled their legs like children over the side of a little cog, watching the cranes shift cargo.

Hedrigall was hinting at something. He spoke to Tanner obliquely. He hedged and implied, and Tanner understood that this was about the secret project, the unspoken thing that so many of his workmates shared. Without a scrap of that knowledge, Tanner could not make sense of what Hedrigall was saying. He could tell only that his friend was unhappy, and fearful of something.

A little way away they could see the corps of engineers emerge streaming from the water, climbing the ladders to rafts and weather-beaten steamers where juddering engines and colleagues and constructs pumped air for them.

The water in that little corner of the harbor began abruptly to bubble as if at a boil. Tanner touched Hedrigall’s forearm to quiet him, and stood, craning his neck.

There was a commotion at the water’s edge. Several workers rushed over and began to haul in the divers. More men surfaced, breaking the water in little bursts and scrabbling desperately at their helmets and at the ladders, fighting to get into the air. A furrow in the water swelled and broke the surface as Bastard John breached. He thrashed his tail wildly until it looked as if he stood unsteadily on the surface of the sea, and chattered like a monkey.

One man, hanging from a ladder, hunched out of the green water, finally threw off his helmet, and shrieked for help.

“Bonefish!” he screamed. “There are men down there!”

All around them people looked out of windows in alarm, left their work, and ran to the water, leaning out over the little trawlers bobbing in the middle of the harbor, pointing into the water and shouting to those on the docksides.

Tanner’s heart froze as billows of red coiled to the surface.

“Your knife!” he shouted to Hedrigall. “Give me your fucking knife!” He threw off his shirt and ran, without hesitating.

He leaped, his tentacles unwrapping from him, Hedrigall bellowing something unheard behind him. Then his long, webbed toes broke the surface, and with a burst of cold, he was in the water, and then under it.

Tanner blinked frantically, sliding his inner eyelid into place and peering down. In the middle distance, obscured by the sea, the shadows of submersibles prowled clumsily under the city.

He could see the last of the men clambering desperately toward the light, appallingly slow and clumsy in their suits. He saw places where great patches of blood discolored the water. A chunk of cartilage was drifting down through a haze of flesh, where one of Armada’s guard sharks had been torn apart.

Tanner kicked down, swimming fast. Some way off, at the base of a huge sunken pipe, sixty or more feet down, he saw a man clinging, immobilized by fear. And under him in the shadowy water, flickering this way and that like a flame, was a dark body.

Tanner balked, appalled. The thing was massive.

Above him, he heard the flattened reports of bodies hitting
the water. Armed men were descending, lowered from cranes, standing in harnesses, bristling with harpoons and spears, but they moved slowly, edging down by inches, at the mercy of the engines above them.

Bastard John streaked past Tanner, startling him, and from hidden corners of the city’s underside, Tanner saw the silent menfish of Bask riding slip through the water toward the predator below.

Emboldened, he kicked and plunged down again.

His mind rushed. He knew that attacks by big predators occurred sometimes—red sharks, wolfish, hooksquid, and others smashing into the fish cages and attacking the workers—but he had never experienced one. He had never seen a dinichthys, a bonefish.

He hefted Hedrigall’s knife.

With sudden disgust Tanner realized that he was passing through a cloud of blood-fouled water, and he could taste it in his mouth and across his gills. His stomach lurched as he saw, sinking slowly beside him, the ragged remnants of a diving suit with indistinct shreds waving within it.

And then he reached the bottom of the pipe, a few bodies’ lengths from the bleeding, motionless diver, and the creature beneath rose up to meet him.

He heard the pounding of water and felt an onrush of pressure, and looked down and screamed silently into the brine.

A great blunt-faced fish was rushing up toward him. Its head was encased in skull-armor, smooth and round like a cannonball, split by massive jaws in which Tanner saw not teeth, but two razor-ridges of bone chewing at the water, scraps of flesh fluttering from them. Its body was long and tapered, without contours or a fanning tail; its dorsal fin was low and streamlined, merging with its tailbone like some fat-bodied eel.

It was more than thirty feet long. It came at him, its mouth big enough to bite him in half without effort, its tiny little eyes stupid and malevolent behind their protective ridge.

Tanner howled with idiot bravery, brandishing his little knife.

Bastard John streaked across Tanner’s view, coming up behind the dinichthys, and butted it hard in the eye. The huge predator swerved with frightening speed and grace and snapped at the dolphin. The slabs of bone in its mouth crunched together and grated.

It veered violently and shot after Bastard John. With rushes of displaced water, little ivory lances streaked past as the newt-people fired their strange weapons at the dinichthys. It ignored them and bore down on the dolphin.