The Scar (19 page)

Tanner kicked violently away, his legs spasming as he raced toward the clinging diver. As he swam he looked around him and saw, to his horror, that the massive bone-plated fish had gone deep, despite Bastard John’s attempts to goad it, and was doubling back from below, heading straight for Tanner.

With a last kick, Tanner touched the rough metal of the pipe and scrabbled for the diver. Tanner stared at the dinichthys, his heart hammering as the monstrous thing powered toward him. The suckers of his tentacles anchored him to the shaft. He waved the knife in his right hand, praying for Bastard John or the newt-men or the armed divers to reach him. With his left he reached out for the trapped man.

His fumbling hand reached into something warm and soft, something that gave to his fingers in a horrifying way, and Tanner snatched his hand back. He glanced up for a second at the man beside him.

He looked into a faceplate full of water, and a wide-eyed white face, eyes protuberant, mouth distended and still. The leather in the center of the suit had been gouged away, and the man’s stomach was torn from him. Entrails waved in the water like anemones.

Tanner moaned and snapped away, sensing the dinichthys below him, kicking out fearfully, slashing ineffectually at nothing as with a sudden vicious tide the ridges and scales swept past him, tons of muscle flexing, the sound of bone on bone jarring through the water. The pipe shuddered as the corpse was snatched from it. The snub-skulled hunter zigzagged away through the inverted forest of Armada’s keels, the dead man dangling in its jaws.

Bastard John and the Bask menfish followed it, unable to match its effortless pace. In shock, Tanner kicked toward them pointlessly, the memory of the monstrous fish’s presence slowing him and making him cold. He was vaguely aware that he should surface, should keep himself warm and drink sweetened tea, that he felt sick and very frightened.

The dinichthys was heading down now, into the realms of crushing pressures its pursuers could not hope to survive. Tanner watched it go, moving slowly, trying not to breathe in any dissipating blood. He was alone now.

He dragged himself through water like tar, up past unfamiliar undersides, disoriented and lost. He could still see the dead man’s face and slick bowels. And as he found his bearings, as he twisted and saw the mobile ships in Basilio docks and the sprinkled crumblike boats of Winterstraw Market, he looked up and saw in the cold lancing shadow of the boat above him one of the huge, vague shapes that dangled from the city’s undersides, that was obscured by charms and carefully guarded, that he was forbidden to see. He saw that it was linked to others, and he drifted higher, unchallenged now the shark that had guarded it was dead, and the shape was clearer, and suddenly he was close, he was only a few yards from it, and he had penetrated the murk and the obfuscatory hexes, and he could see it clearly now, and he knew what it was.

The next day, Bellis was treated to lurid descriptions of the monster’s attack from several of her colleagues.

“Gods and fuck above,” said Carrianne to her, appalled. “Can you imagine? Sliced in pieces by that bastard?” Her descriptions became more grotesque and unpleasant.

Bellis did not give Carrianne her attention. She was thinking about what Silas had told her. She approached it as she did most things—coolly, trying to grasp it intellectually. She searched for books on The Gengris and the grindylow, but found very little that was not children’s myths or absurd speculation. She found it hard—impossibly hard, almost—to grasp the scale of danger to New Crobuzon. All the years of her life the city had squatted around her, massive and variegated and permanent. The idea that it could be threatened was almost inconceivable.

But, then, the grindylow were inconceivable, too.

Bellis found herself truly alarmed by Silas’ descriptions and his obvious fear. With a kind of morbid extravagance, Bellis had tried to imagine New Crobuzon after an invasion. Ruined and broken. It started as a game, a sort of dare, where she filled her mind with horrifying images. But then they flickered through her unstoppably, as if projected by a magic lantern, and they appalled her.

She saw the rivers congealed with bodies, and shimmering
as grindylow passed beneath. She saw petal-ash spewing from
the burnt-out Fuchsia House; shattered rubble in Gargoyle Park; the Glasshouse cracked open like an egg and stacked with cactus corpses. She imagined Perdido Street Station itself in collapse, its train lines twisted and splayed, its façade torn off, forcing its intricate architectural byways into the light.

Bellis imagined the ancient, massive Ribs that arced over the city snapped, their curves interrupted in a cascade of bone-dust.

It chilled her. But there was nothing she could do. No one here, no one in power in this city, could possibly care. She and Silas were alone, and until they understood what was happening in Armada, until they knew where they were going, Bellis could not think of any way she could get away.

Bellis heard the door open and looked up from her piles of books. Shekel stood at the threshold, holding something in his hands. She was about to greet him, but paused at the sight of his face.

He wore an expression of great seriousness and uncertainty, as if not sure whether he had done something wrong.

“I’ve got something to show you,” he said slowly. “You know I write down all the words I can’t work out at first. And then when I find them again in other books, I know them. Well . . .” He looked at the book he was holding. “Well, I found one of them yesterday. And the book’s not in Ragamoll, and the word’s not a . . . not a verb or a noun or whatever.” He stressed the technical words she had taught him: not with pride, but to make a point.

He handed the little book to her. “It’s a name.”

Bellis examined it. Sunk into the cover and picked out in stained metal leaf was the author’s name.

Krüach Aum
.

The work that Tintinnabulum was looking for, one central to the Lovers’ project. Shekel had found it.

He had picked it off the children’s shelves. As Bellis sat and flicked through its pages, she saw that it was no wonder it had been misshelved. It was full of pictures in a primitive style: executed in thick, simple lines with childish perspective, so that proportions were unclear, and a man might be nearly the size of a tower next to him. Each recto page was text, each verso a picture, so that the whole short book had the feel of an illustrated fable.

Whoever had shelved it had obviously looked at it briefly without understanding it, and put it, without examination, with other picture books—children’s books. It had not been recorded. It had lain undisturbed for years.

Shekel was talking to Bellis, but she did not hear him clearly:
don’t know what to do
, he was saying awkwardly,
thought you could help, the one Tintinnabulum was looking for, did the best thing.
Adrenaline and tremulous excitement were filling her as she studied the volume. There was no title. She turned to the first page, and her heartbeat quickened in her throat as she realized that she
had been right about Aum’s name. The book was in High Kettai.

It was the arcane, classical language of Gnurr Kett, the island nation thousands of miles south of New Crobuzon, at the edge of the Swollen Ocean, where the warm water became the Black Sandbar Sea. It was a strange, very difficult tongue that used the Ragamoll script but derived from quite another root. Base Kettai, the everyday language, was much easier, but the relationship between the two was attenuated and ancient. Fluency in one gave only the slightest understanding of the other. High Kettai, even in Gnurr Kett itself, was the preserve of the cantors and a few intellectuals.

Bellis had studied it. Fascinated by its structures of embedded verbs, it was High Kettai that Bellis had made the subject of her first book. It was fifteen years since she had published
High Kettai Grammatology,
but even rusty as she was, looking at the opening chapter of the book, the meaning came slowly to her.

“I would lie if I told you that I write this without pride,”
Bellis read silently, and looked up, trying to calm herself, almost afraid to go on.

She turned the pages rapidly, looking at the pictures. A man in a tower by the sea. The man on the shore, the skeletons of great engines littering the sand. The man making calculations by the sun, and by the shadows of strange trees. She turned to the fourth picture and caught her breath. A rill of goosebumps came and went over her.

In the fourth picture, the man stood again on the shore—his blank, stylized eyes the only features on his face, rendered by the artist as placid as a cow’s—and above the sea, swarming toward an approaching boat, was a cloud of dark figures. The picture was vague, but Bellis could see thin arms and legs dangling, and a blur of wings.

It made her uneasy.

She scanned, trying to remember the language. There was something very odd about this book. It felt very different from all the other High Kettai works Bellis had seen. Something incongruous was in the tone, quite at odds with the poetry that characterized the old Gnurr Kett canon.

“He would have sought help from outsiders,”
she hesitantly made out,
“but all others shun our island, fearful of our hungry women.”

Bellis looked up.
Jabber knows
, she thought,
what I’ve got my hands on
.

She thought quickly, trying to work out what she should do. Her hands still turned the pages like a construct’s, and she looked down to see that, midway through the volume, the man was at sea in a little boat. He and his vessel were drawn very small. He was lowering a chain and a massive recurved hook into the sea.

Deep below, in the midst of the spirals that signified the water, were concentric circles, dwarfing his yacht.

The picture held her attention.

She stared at it, and something deep within her moved. She held her breath. And with a wash of realization the picture reconfigured itself like a child’s optical illusion. She saw what it was—she knew what she was looking at—and her stomach pitched so hard that she felt she was falling.

She knew what Garwater’s secret project was. She knew where they were heading. She knew what Johannes was doing.

Shekel was still talking. He had moved on to the dinichthys
attack.

“Tanner was down there,” she heard him say with pride. “Tanner went to help ’em, only he couldn’t get there in time. But I’ll tell you a funny thing. You remember a while ago I told you there’s things under the city, shapes he couldn’t make out? And he weren’t allowed to see? Well, after the bonefish swims off yesterday, poor old Tanner comes up right underneath one, doesn’t he? He gets to see it clearly—he knows what’s under there, now. So guess what it was . . .”

He paused theatrically for Bellis to guess. She still stared at the picture.

“A bridle,” she said, almost inaudible. Shekel’s expression changed to confusion. Suddenly she spoke loudly. “A giant bridle, a bit, reins, a harness bigger than a building.

“Chains, Shekel, the size of boats,” she said. He stared at her and nodded in bewilderment as she concluded. “Tanner saw chains.”

She still did not take her gaze from the picture she held: a little man in a little ship on a sea of frozen waves that overlapped in perfect sequence like fish scales, and below them deeps rendered in crosshatched and tightly spiraled ink, and at the bottom, easily eclipsing the vessel above, a circle in a circle in a circle, vast no matter how vague the perspective, unthinkably big, with darkness at the center. Looking up, looking up at the fisherman hunting his prey.

Sclera, iris, and pupil.

An eye.

Interlude III

Elsewhere

There are intruders in Salkrikaltor. They sit quiet, their eyes taking in the city and the cray, measured and inexorable like plugholes.

They have left a trail of missing farmers and submarine adventurers and wanderers and minor bureaucrats. They have extracted information with coddling tones and thaumaturgy and torture.

The intruders watch with eyes like oil.

They have explored. They have seen the temples and the shark pits and the galleries and arcades, and the cray slums, the architecture of the shallows. As light fails and Salkrikaltor’s globes glow, traffic increases. Young cray dandies fight and posture on the spiraling walkways above (their actions are reflected in the hidden watchers’ eyes).

Hours pass. The streets empty out. The globes dim a little in the hours before dawn.

And there is silence. And dark. And cold.

And the intruders move.

They pass through empty streets, cloaked in darkness.

The intruders move like ribbons of waste, as if they are nothing, as if they are tugged by random ebbs and tides. They trace anemone-scarred backstreets.

Nothing living is in the trench-streets except night fishes, the snails, the crabs that freeze with fear as the intruders approach. They pass beggars in the atomies of buildings. Through a rip in a warehouse poised on the brink of being dust. Out over the lowest level of a water-beaten roofscape like coral, insinuating themselves into shadows that seem too small for them. Quick as morays.

A name was whispered to them in a coil of blood, a clue that they have accepted, and stalked and found.

They rise and look down on the roofscape through the sea.

He sleeps there, his legs folded below him, his torso rocking faintly in the current, his eyes closed—the he-cray they have hunted. The intruders hunker low. They stroke him and touch him and make sounds from within their throats, and his eyes open slowly and he spasms violently in the bonds in which they have spread-eagled him (
as quietly and gently as nannies, not to wake him
), and his mouth strains so wide that it looks as if it will split and bleed. He would be screaming and screaming in cray vibrato if they had not fit him with a collar of bone that skewers painlessly into certain nerves in his neck and back and cuts off his sound.

Little gouts of blood float up from the cray’s throat. The intruders watch him curiously. When finally his frenzy exhausts him, a captor moves with alien grace and speaks.