The Scar (20 page)

—you know something
it says.—
we need to know it too.

They begin their work, whispering questions as they touch and touch the cray translator with unthinkable expertise, and he snaps back his head and screams again.

Again, without a sound.

The intruders continue.

And later.

The wormcast floor of the ocean plunges out of sight and the water opens endlessly and the dark figures (far from home) sit motionless suspended in the dark, and ponder.

The trail has exploded.

Little filigrees of rumor twist away from them, recurve, and tease. The southern ship has disappeared. From the rock edges of the continent, where land rises to separate fresh- from saltwater, they have tracked to the Basilisk Channel, to the up-pointing fingers of Salkrikaltor City, to the ship puttering between the sea and New Crobuzon the river-straddler. But that ship has disappeared, leaving lies and stories eddying behind it.

Mouths from the deep. Ghost pirates. Torque. Hidden storms. The floating city.

Again and again the floating city.

The hunters investigate the rigs that loom from Salkrikaltor’s southern waters: supports like outsize trees, like pachyderms’ legs, crumbling concrete shafts in the seabed, mud oozing up around them as if around toes.

Drills worry at the soft rock, sucking at its juices. The rigs feed in shallows like swamp things.

Men in shells of leather and air descend on chains to tend to the mumbling giants, and the hunters spirit them away with predatory ease. They take away the masks, and the men scrabble futilely and emit their lives in bubbling howls of air. Their captors keep them alive with hexes, with mouth-kisses of oxygen, with massage to slow their hearts, and in caves under the light water the men beg for mercy and, at their captors’ insistence, tell them all manner of stories.

Stories, above all, of the floating city that snatched the
Terpsichoria
away.

Night falls, and the shadows shed by day are smothered.

The unclear figures have all the water of the world to search. The Oceans: the Rime; the Boxash; the Vassilly and Tarribor and Teuchor; the Muted and Swollen. And the Gentleman’s Sea and the Spiral Sea and the Clock and Hidden and others; and all the straits and sounds and channels. And the bays, and the bights.

How can they search it all? How can they start?

They ask the sea.

They strike out for the deep waters.

—where is the floating city?
they ask.

The king of the goblin sharks does not know or care. The corokanth will not tell. The hunters ask elsewhere.—
where is the floating city?

They find monkish intelligences masquerading as cod and congers that claim ignorance and swim away for more contemplation. The hunters ask the salinae, the brine elementals, but cannot make sense of the liquid shrieks of information with which they are
answered.

Rising with the sun and breaching, the hunters bob in waves and think again.

They ask the whales.

—
where is the floating city?
they ask the great stupid krill-swillers, the grey and the humpback and the blue. They straddle them like mountaineers and manipulate the pleasure centers of their heavy brains. They bribe them, funneling tons of plankton in a panicked soup into the whale’s gurning grins.

The hunters make the question a demand.

—
find the floating city,
they say carefully, in concepts simple enough for the whales to understand.

Which they do. The huge animals ponder, their synapses so sluggish the hunters grow impatient (but they know they must wait). Finally, after minutes when the only noise is a sluicing as the whales jaw the water, with a concerted thunder of flukes they break their silence.

They moan across thousands of miles; echo-locating; sounding; sending friendly, stupid messages to each other; doing what they have been told: Looking for Armada.

Part Three

The Compass Factory

Chapter Fifteen

“They’re raising an avanc.”

Silas’ face fluttered with astonishment, with denial, with a gamut of incredulities.

“That can’t be,” he said quietly, shaking his head.

Bellis’ mouth twisted. “Because avancs are legends?” she offered harshly. “Extinct? Stories for children?” She pursed her lips and shook Krüach Aum’s book. “Whoever shelved this, twenty years ago, thought that they were children’s stories, Silas. I can read High Kettai.” Her voice was urgent. “This is not a children’s book.”

The day was waning, and the muttering of the city continued outside. Bellis looked through the window at the light dying in sheets of spectacular colors. She handed Silas the book and spoke again.

“I’ve been doing little else for two days. I’ve been haunting the library like a damned eidolon, reading Aum’s book.” Silas was turning the pages one by one, carefully, his eyes scanning the text as if he could understand it, which Bellis knew he could not.

“It’s in High Kettai,” she said, “but it’s not from Gnurr Kett, and it’s not old. Krüach Aum is anophelii.”

Silas looked up, aghast. There was a very long silence.

“Believe me,” said Bellis. She felt, and sounded, drained. “I know how it sounds. I’ve spent the last two days trying to find out everything I can.

“I thought they were dead, too, but they’re only dying, Silas. They’ve been dying for more than two thousand years. When the Malarial Queendom collapsed they were eradicated in Shoteka, in Rohagi, in most of the Shards. But they managed to survive . . . They’ve clung on to a little hold on some shithole of a rock south of Gnurr Kett. And believe it or not, even after the Queendom, there are people who trade with them.” She nodded grimly. “They have some arrangement with Dreer Samher or Gnurr Kett or both, or something. I can’t work it out.

“And they write books, it seems.” She pointed at the volume. “Gods only knows why it’s in High Kettai. Maybe that’s what they speak now—they’d be the only people in the world who do. I don’t know, Godsdammit, Silas. Maybe it’s all crap,” she snapped with sudden irritation. “Maybe that damn thing’s a forgery or a lie or, yes, a children’s story. But I’ve been told by Tintinnabulum to look for anything by Krüach Aum, so do you think the subject matter of this damn book is just coincidence?”

“What does it say?” he asked.

Bellis took the book from him and slowly translated the first lines.

“ ‘I would lie if I told you that I write this without pride. I am full of it like food, because I have . . . found a story to tell, of what had not been done since the Ghosthead Empire and was achieved once more, a thousand years ago. One of our ancestors, after our queens collapsed and we came here to hide . . . With . . . devices and thaumaturgy . . . he went out over the water . . . to a dark
place . . . and he sent hexes into the mouth of the water and after twenty-one days of heat and thirst and hunger he . . . drew out a great and mysterious thing.’ ” She looked up at Silas and concluded, “ ‘The mountain-that-swims, the godwhale, the greatest beast ever to visit our world, the avanc.’ ”

She closed the book softly.

“He called up an avanc, Silas.”

“What happened?” he said. “You’ve read it, what
happened
?”

Bellis sighed. “It doesn’t say how or where, but Aum found a bunch of old manuscripts, an old story. And he’s put them together and made sense of them, and retold them. The story of an anophelius, who’s never named. Centuries ago. There are ten pages about his preparations. The man fasts; he researches; he stares out to sea a lot; he gathers the things he needs: barrels, liquor, old machines that have been moldering on the beach. He goes out to sea. Alone. Trying to keep control of a yacht way too big for one man, but no one would come with him. He’s looking for a particular place, some kind of . . . deep, deep shaft, a hole in the ocean’s floor. That’s where he’s hunting. That’s where he casts. That’s where he wants the avanc to . . . come through, from where they normally live.

“Then we get twenty very dull pages about the privations of the sea. Hungry, thirsty, tired, wet, hot . . . That sort of thing. He knows he’s in the right place. He’s sure his hook is . . . extending into somewhere else. Bleeding through the world. But he can’t attract the avanc. There’s no worm that big.

“Then on the third day, when he’s totally exhausted, and his ship’s being moved around by weird currents, the sky darkens. There’s an elyctric storm coming. And he decides it’s not enough to be in the right place—he needs power to snare the thing. He’s being pounded by hail and rain, and the sea’s going berserk. The boat’s plowing through huge waves, banging like it’s going to shatter.”

Silas was listening to her with eyes wide, and Bellis had a sudden ridiculous image of herself as a teacher telling the children a story.

“As the middle of the storm gets nearer and nearer, he yanks a load of wire to the top of the mainmast, coiling it round the rigging, and links it up to some kind of generator. Then . . .”

Bellis sighed. “I couldn’t really follow what happened then. He does some thaumaturgy or other. I think he was trying to conjure fulmen, elyctric elementals, or sacrifice them or something, but it’s not clear. Well . . .” She shrugged. “Whether he succeeds or not, whether it’s an elemental answering him or just the result of winding copper wire up a hundred-foot mast in the middle of a thunderstorm, lightning strikes the conductor.”

She held open the relevant illustration: the boat in silhouette, outlined in white, with a rather squat, geometrically rendered lightning bolt stuck like a saw into the top of the mast.

“There’s a massive burst of energy through the engines. The thaumaturgic controls he’s rigged up to try to bait and control the avanc suddenly spasm with supercharged puissance, then burn
out instantly. And his boat lurches, and the cranes and winches tethering his hook bend suddenly, and there’s a rushing from underneath.

“He hooked an avanc, says Aum. And it rose.”

Bellis fell quiet. She turned the pages and read Aum’s words to herself.

The ocean vibrated with a scream five miles down, and the water rose and shuddered and was unsteady as it was displaced, vastly, and the waves died as the tides were supplanted by a great onrush from below and the water tossed the boat like a mote, and the horizon disappeared as the avanc surfaced.

That was all. No description of the creature. The verso page that should have held an illustration was left blank.

“He sees it,” she said quietly. “When he sees the size of it he realizes that he’d only snagged it with his hooks and hexes. He’d thought he’d reel it in like an angler . . . Impossible. The avanc breaks the chains, effortlessly. And then it sinks again, and the sea’s empty. And he’s all alone, and he has to get himself all the way home.”

Bellis could picture it, and it moved her. She imagined the broken figure, sodden with brine and in the middle of a still-terrible storm, crawling to his feet, stumbling across the deck of his ill-prepared ship. Setting dying motors in motion, limping back across the sea hungry and exhausted, and above all alone.

“Do you think it’s the truth?” said Silas.

Bellis opened the book to its last section and held it out for him to see. The pages were crammed with strange-looking mathematic notations.

“The last twenty pages are taken up with equations, thaumaturgic notes, references to his colleagues. Aum calls it a data
appendix. It’s almost impossible to translate. I don’t understand it—it’s high theory, crypto-algebra and the like. But it’s incredibly carefully done. If it’s a fake it’s needlessly complex. What he’s done . . . Aum has checked the details—of the dates, the techniques, the thaumaturgies, and the science . . . He’s worked out how it was done. These last pages . . . They’re an exposition, a scientific treatise, explaining how you’d go about it. How you’d raise an avanc.

“Silas, this book was written and printed in the last Kettai Vullfinch Year. That was twenty-three years ago. Which incidentally means that Tintinnabulum and his cohorts have it wrong—he thought Aum was writing in the last century. It was printed in Kohnid in Gnurr Kett, part of the imprint Shivering Wisdom. There aren’t too many Kettai works in this library, as you’d expect. And of those there are, the vast bulk are in Base Kettai. But there are a few High Kettai, and I’ve looked at them all. Shivering Wisdom publish in High Kettai: philosophy and science and ancient texts, gnostic mechonomy and the like.

“Shivering Wisdom obviously think this is on the level, Silas. If it’s a fraud, it’s taken in a scientific publishing house—as well, dammit, as the best fucking minds on Armada.

“What else are the Lovers’ scientists reading, Silas? My friend Johannes’ book
Theories of MegaFauna
. Another of his, about transplane life. Radical theories about the nature of water, books on maritime ecology. And they’re going crazy to find this little book here, probably because Tintinnabulum and his hunters have seen a few references to it, and they can’t damn well find it. Jabber’s sake, what do you think that’s all about?

“Silas, I’ve read this thing.” She made him meet her eyes. “This is for real. This is a book on how to raise an avanc. And how to control it. The anophelius Aum writes about . . . the avanc broke loose from him easy.” She leaned forward.

“But he was one man. Armada’s a city. He scavenged steam engines: Armada has whole industrial
districts
. There are giant chains under the city—did you know that? What do you think they plan on doing with them? And Armada has the
Sorghum
.” She let that sink in and saw his eyes change fractionally. “This city has hundreds of gallons of fucking rockmilk, Silas, and the means to get hundreds more. Jabber knows what thaumaturgy they can fuel with that shit.

“The Lovers think they can succeed where Aum’s man failed,” she said simply. “They’re heading for the sinkhole, to call up an avanc. They’re going to harness it to the city. And they’re going to control it.”

“Who else knows about the book?” said Silas, and Bellis shook her head.

“No one knows,” she said. “Only the boy, Shekel. He has no idea what it is, what it means.”

You did the right thing bringing this to me,
Bellis had said.
I’ll see what this is all about and pass it right on to Tintinnabulum as soon as I’ve seen if it’s of any use.

She remembered Shekel’s disquiet, his fear. He visited Tintinnabulum’s
Castor
often, to be with Angevine. Bellis knew, with a quick stab of pity, that he had not taken the book there directly himself because he was afraid that he had made a mistake. His reading was still inexpert, and faced with something of such apparent importance, his confidence had left him. He had stared at the combination of letters spelling
Krüach
, and had looked at the name he had copied from Tintinnabulum’s paper, and had seen that they were the same, but still, but still.

But still he was not quite sure. He did not want to make a fool of himself, or waste people’s time. He had taken it to Bellis, his friend and teacher, to check, to make sure. And ruthlessly, she had taken it from him, knowing that it gave her power.

The Lovers were bringing them south to a fissure in the seabed from where the avanc might rise. They had collected what was
necessary—the scientist they needed, a rig to fuel the hexes—and now they were heading toward their quarry, their experts working in tight and ceaseless concert to complete their calculations, to solve the enigma of the summoning, even as they traveled.

And immediately Silas and Bellis saw this, as soon as they realized that they had achieved their aim, that they knew the Lovers’ plan, that they could work out where the city was heading, they began to talk frantically about how they could use that knowledge to escape.

What are we doing?
thought Bellis in the silence.
Another night we’re sitting in my stupid little round chimney room, saying
oh gods oh gods
to ourselves and each other, because we’ve picked off one layer of mystery and underneath is yet more shit, yet more trouble, that we can do nothing about.
She felt like moaning with exhaustion.
I don’t want to wonder what I’m going to do anymore
, she thought.
I want to just do something
.

She drummed her fingers across the book’s script. A script that she and few others could read.

Looking at that arcane language, a vague, unpleasant suspicion ached in her. She felt as she had that night in the restaurant, when Johannes had told her that the Lovers used his books.

The constant grinding of the flotilla of tugs and others that dragged the city had become background noise. But, unnoticed and forgotten, they continued. There was not a moment of night or day that Armada did not inch south. The effort was prodigious and the pace glacial, slower than a human could crawl.

But days passed at that torturous rate, and the city did move. People shed coats and woolen trousers. The days were still short, but without fuss or proclamation, Armada had passed into a temperate zone of the sea. And it continued to move toward warmer water.

Armada’s plants—crops of wheat and barley, decktop grasslands, weed regiments reclaiming old stone and metal—felt the change. Scavenging constantly for heat, they drew sustenance from the random change of season and began rapidly to grow, to bud. The smells of the parklands became richer; the green began to be broken by hardy little flowers.

Every day there were more birds overhead. The pirate ships sailed over new and colorful fish in the warm waters. In Armada’s multitude of little temples, services welcomed the latest of the city’s irregular, contingent springs.

Tanner had seen the chains, and having done so, it did not take him very long to realize what was planned for the city.

Of course he could not know the details. But he remembered what he had seen, even through the shock and cold that had been settling on him as he rose through the water. He had come up
below one of the forbidden ships and at the heart of an obscuring glamour, the scale of what he observed had at first confused him, but then it had resolved itself and he had realized it was a chain link, fifty feet long.