The Scar (24 page)

Bellis was shocked. She had known that there would be interrogation, investigation, but she had not expected this: to be questioned by
him
.
I translated the book
, she thought.
I get special treatment
.

The Lover closed the door behind him.

“It was built more than two and a half centuries ago, at the end of the Full Years,” he continued. He spoke to her in Ragamoll, with only a slight accent. He sat, indicated to her to do the same. “In fact, it’s been claimed that the
Grand Easterly
’s building itself brought the Full Years to an end. Obviously,” he said, deadpan, “that is ridiculous. But it’s a useful symbolic coincidence. Decline was setting in at the end of the 1400s, and what more potent symbol of the failure of science than this ship? In a scramble to prove that New Crobuzon was still in its golden age, they come up with this thing.

“It’s a very poor design, you know. Trying to combine the paddle power of those stupid huge wheels, on her flanks, with a screw propeller.” He shook his head, not taking his eyes from Bellis. “You can’t power something of this size with paddles. So they just loomed there like tumors, ruining the ship’s line, acting as brakes. Which meant the screw didn’t work very well, either, and you couldn’t sail it. Isn’t it ironic?

“But there’s one thing that they did right. They set out to build the biggest vessel ever seen. They had to launch the thing sideways, in the estuary by Iron Bay. And for a few years it limped around. Awesome but . . . ungainly. They tried to use it during the Second Pirate Wars, but it lumbered like a massively armed rhinoceros while the Suroch and Jheshull ships danced around it.

“Then, they’ll tell you, it sank. Of course, it didn’t. We took it.

“They were wonderful years for Armada, the Pirate Wars. All that carnage; ships disappearing every day; missing cargos; sailors and soldiers fed up with fighting and dying, eager to escape. We stole ships and technology and people. We grew and grew.

“We took the
Grand Easterly
because we could. That was when Garwater took control, which it has never lost. This ship is our heart. Our factory, our palace. It was a dreadful steamer, but it is a superlative fortress. That was the last . . . great age for Armada.”

There was silence for a long time.

“Until now,” he said, and smiled at her. And the interrogation began.

When it was all finished, and she emerged mole-eyed into the afternoon, she found it hard to recall his questions exactly.

He had asked her a great deal about the translation. Had she found it hard? Was there anything that had not made sense? Could she also speak High Kettai, or merely read it? And on and on.

There had been questions designed to gauge her state of mind, her relationship to the city. She had spoken carefully: it was a tentative line between the truth and lies. She did not try to hide all of her distrust, her distaste at what had been done to her, her resentment. But she battened it down, somewhat: contained it, made it safe.

She tried not to seem to try.

There was no one to meet her outside, of course, and that gladdened her, obscurely. She crossed the steep bridges that descended from the
Grand Easterly
to the lower ships beside it.

She made her way home through some of the most intricate byways and alleys. Passing under brick arches that dripped with Armada’s constant salt damp; by groups of children playing variants of the shove-stiver and catch-as-can she remembered from the streets at home, as if there were a deep grammar of street games shared across the world; beside small cafés in the shadow of raised forecastles, where their parents played their own games, backgammon and chatarang.

Gulls arced and shat. The backstreets pitched and shifted with the surface of the sea.

Bellis relished her solitude. She knew that if Silas had been with her, the sense of complicity would have been cloying.

They had not had sex for a long time. It had only ever happened twice.

After those times, they had shared her bed and thrown off their clothes in front of each other without shyness or hesitation. But neither, it seemed, was moved to fuck. It was as if having used sex to connect and open to each other, the channel was in place and the act was superfluous.

It was not that she had no desires. The last two or three nights they had been together, she had waited for him to sleep, then masturbated quietly. She often kept her thoughts from him, sharing only what they needed to make their plans.

Bellis was not inordinately fond of Silas, she realized with mild surprise.

She was grateful to him; she found him interesting and impressive, though not so charming as he thought himself. They held something between them: extraordinary secrets, plans that could not be allowed to fail. They were comrades in this. She did not mind him sharing her bed; she might even tup him again, she thought with an inadvertent smirk. But they were not close.

Given what they had shared, this seemed a little bizarre, but she acknowledged it.

The next morning, before six, when the sky was still dark, men and women gathered in a fleet of dirigibles on the deck of the
Grand Easterly
. Between them they hauled bundles of raggedly printed leaflets. They lugged them into the aerostat carriages, argued over routes, and consulted maps. They divided Armada into quadrants.

The daylight was filling up the city as they lifted off sedately.

Costermongers, factory workers, yeomanry, and a thousand others looked up from the brick and wood warrens around the
Grand Easterly
: from Winterstraw Market’s intricate concatenation of vessels, from towers in Booktown and Jhour and Thee-And-Thine, peering over the city’s rigging. They saw the first wave of dirigibles lift off and spread out over the city’s chambers, out across the ridings. And at strategic points in the airflow, tacking against the wind, the aerostats began to shed paper.

Like confetti, like the blossom already straining to grow on
Armada’s hardy trees, the leaflets coiled out and down in great
billows. The air sounded with them—a susurrus of paper sliding against paper—and with the gulls and city sparrows that cut away from them in confusion. Armadans looked up, shielding their
eyes against the rising sun, and saw the scudding clouds and clear warm blue, and descending below them the snips of paper skittering through the air.

Some fell into chimneys. Hundreds more touched the water. They funneled into the trenches between vessels and settled on
the sea. They bobbed on the waves, becoming saturated, their ink spreading to become unreadable, nibbled by fishes, till the brine clogged their fibers and they sank. Below the surface there was a snow of disintegrating paper. But many thousands landed on the decks of Armada’s ships.

Again and again the dirigibles circled the city’s airspace, passing over each of the ridings, finding pathways between the tallest towers and masts, scattering their leaflets. Curious and delighted, people picked them out of the air. In a city where paper was expensive, this extravagance was extraordinary.

Word spread fast. When Bellis descended to the deck of the
Chromolith
, onto a layer of leaflets rustling like dead skin, all around her there were arguments. People stood in the doorways of their shops and houses, shouting to each other or muttering or laughing, waving the leaflets in inky hands.

Bellis looked up and saw one of the last of the aerostats to port, moving away from her out over Jhour, another fluttering cloud descending behind it. She picked up one of the papers gusting at her feet.

Armadan citizens
, she read,
after long and careful study, something can be achieved that would have astounded our grandparents. A new day is soon to dawn. We are to change our city’s movements forever.

She scanned the page quickly, racing through the propagandist explanation, and her eyes moved slower over the key word, picked out in bold.

Avanc
. . .

Bellis felt a thrill of confused emotion.
I did this
, she thought with weird pride.
I set this in motion
.

“It is choice work,” said Tintinnabulum thoughtfully.

He was hunkered down in front of Angevine, thrusting his face and hands into the engines in her metal underparts. She leaned her flesh body back, impassive and patient.

For some days, Tintinnabulum had been conscious of a change in his servant, a difference in the clattering of her engines. She moved more quickly and exactly, turning in tight arcs and stopping without a wheezing slowdown. She found it easier to negotiate Armada’s swaying bridges. An edge of anxiety in her was gone—her constant scavenging, her scrabbling for discarded coal and wood, had stopped.

“What has happened to your engine, Angevine?” he had asked her. And smiling with immense, shy pleasure, she had shown him.

He rummaged in her tubework, burning his hands stoically on her boiler, examining her reconfigured metal viscera.

Tintinnabulum knew that Armadan science was a mongrel. It was as piratical as the city’s economy and politics, the product of theft and chance—as various and inconsistent. The engineers and thaumaturges learned their skills on equipment that was rotted and out of date, and on stolen artifacts of such sophisticated de-sign that they were mostly incomprehensible. It was a patchwork of technologies.

“This man,” he murmured, up to his elbow in Angevine’s motor, fingering a three-way switch at the back of her chassis, “this man may be just a jobbing engineer, but . . . this is the choicest work. Not many aboard Armada could make this. Why did he do it?” he asked her.

She could only respond vaguely to that.

“Is he trustworthy?” Tintinnabulum said.

Tintinnabulum and his crew were not Armadan-born, but their commitment to Garwater was unquestionable. Stories were told about how they had joined Armada—the Lovers had tracked them by esoteric means, persuaded them to work in the city for unknown wages. For them, the ropes and chains linking the fabric of Garwater had been parted. The riding had opened itself, let Tintinnabulum enter and embed himself in the very heart of the city, which had resealed behind him.

That morning, Angevine too had picked up one of the slew of leaflets that suddenly clogged up Armada’s alleys, and had learned the purpose of the Garwater project. It had excited her, but had not, she realized, come as a particular surprise. She had been present on the edge of official discussions for a long time, had seen the literature left lying on Tintinnabulum’s desk, had caught glimpses of scribbled diagrams and half-finished calculations. As soon as she discovered what it was that Garwater was attempting, she felt that she had always known. After all, did she not work for Tintinnabulum? And what was he but a hunter?

His room was full of evidence. Books—the only ones that she knew of outside the library—etchings, carved tusks, broken harpoons. Bones and horns and hides. In the years she had worked for him, Tintinnabulum and his crew of seven had lent their expertise to Garwater. Horned sharks and whales and ceti, bonefish, shellarc—he had snared and harpooned and caught them all, for food, for protection, for sport.

Sometimes, when the eight were meeting, Angevine would put her ear flat against the wood and press hard, but she could only ever hear the occasional snatch of sound. Enough to learn tantalizing things.

The ship’s madman, Argentarius, whom no one ever saw, she would hear railing and screaming to them, telling them he was afraid. Some prey of theirs had done this to him long ago, Angevine came to understand. It had galvanized his comrades. They were stamping their authority on the deep sea, thumbing their noses at that terrible realm.

When she had heard them speak of hunting, it was the largest game that enthused them: the leviathan and lahamu, the cuttlegod.

Why not the avanc?

None of it was any surprise, really, Angevine thought.

“Is he trustworthy?” Tintinnabulum repeated.

“He is,” Angevine said. “He’s a good man. He’s grateful for
being spared the colonies; he’s angry with New Crobuzon. He’s
had himself Remade, the better to dive, the better to work in the docks—he’s a sea creature now. He’s loyal as any Garwater born, I’d say.”

Tintinnabulum raised himself and shut Angevine’s boiler. His mouth pursed thoughtfully. On his desk he found a long, handwritten list of names.

“What’s he called?” he said.

He nodded, leaned over, and carefully added
Tanner Sack
.

Chapter Eighteen

Rumor and word of mouth were even stronger forces in Armada than in New Crobuzon, but Armada was not without a more organized media than that. There were criers, most yelling the semiofficial line of one or other of the ridings. A few news sheets and periodicals were available, printed on dreadful-quality, ink-saturated sheets that were constantly recycled.

Most were irregular, available when writers and printers could be bothered or find the resources. Many were free; most were thin: one or two folded sheets crammed with print.

Armada’s halls were full of plays and music, coarse and very popular, so the publications were full of reviews. Some contained titillation and scandal mongering, but to Bellis they were depressingly parochial. Disputes about allocation of seized goods, or over which riding was responsible for which haul, were generally the most provocative and controversial topics they carried. And those were just the news sheets she could make sense of.

In the hybrid culture of Armada, as many different traditions of journal were represented as existed in the world of Bas-Lag, alongside unique forms born on the pirate city.
More Often Than Not
was a weekly that reported only on the city’s deaths, in verse.
Juhangirr’s Concern
, published in Thee-And-Thine riding, was wordless, telling what stories it considered important (according to criteria quite opaque to Bellis) in sequences of crude pictures.

Occasionally, Bellis would read
The Flag
or
Council’s Call
,
both published out of Curhouse.
The Flag
was probably the best news-gathering organ in the city.
Council’s Call
was a political publication, carrying arguments between proponents of the various ridings’ governmental systems: Curhouse’s democracy, Jhour’s solar queendom, the “absolutist benevolence” of Garwater, the Brucolac’s protectorate, and so on.

Both the publications, for all their vaunted toleration of dissent, were more or less loyal to Curhouse’s Democratic Council. It was therefore no great surprise to Bellis, who had started to understand the tussles of Armadan politics, when
The Flag
and
Council’s Call
began to raise doubts about conjuring the avanc.

They were circumspect at first.

“The Summoning would be a triumph of science,” read the editorial in
The Flag
, “but there are questions. More motive power for the city can only be good, but what will be the cost?”

It was not long before their objections became more strident.

But with Armada still in the swell of thrill from Garwater’s extraordinary declaration, voices of caution and outright rejection were a small minority. In the pubs—even those of Curhouse and Dry Fall—there was massive excitement. The scale of the undertaking, the promised capturing of an
avanc
, for gods’ sakes, was giddying.

Still, through a few journals, through pamphlets and posters, sceptics voiced their ignored opposition.

Recruitment began.

A special meeting was convened at the Basilio docks. Tanner Sack rubbed his tentacles and waited. Eventually the yeoman-sergeant stepped forward.

“I’ve a list here,” he shouted, “of engineers and others who’ve been requested for special duty by the Lovers.” The whispers and murmurs swelled briefly, then subsided. No one was in any doubt as to what the special duty was.

As each name was read out, there was audible excitement from its bearer and those nearby. Those named came as no surprise to Tanner. He recognized the best of his colleagues: the fastest workers, the most skillful engineers who had most recently been in contact with cutting-edge technology. Several were relatively recently press-ganged—a disproportion came from New Crobuzon, and more than a handful were Remade from the
Terpsichoria
itself.

He only realized that he himself had been called as he felt his back pounded by some enthusiastic mate. A tension that he had not known was built up inside him broke, and he relaxed. He realized that he had been waiting for this. He deserved this.

There were others already assembled at the
Grand Easterly
, workers from the industrial districts, from foundries and laboratories. There were interviews. Metallurgists were separated from engineers and from chymical workers. They were quizzed, their expertise judged. Persuasion was used, but not coercion. At the first (unclear) mention of the anophelii, the first hint of the nature of the island, several men and women refused to be part of the project. Tanner was troubled.
But there’s no way you’ll say no to this
, he admitted to himself,
come what may
.

After dark, when the tests and questions were completed, Tanner and the others were taken to one of the
Grand Easterly
’s staterooms. The chamber was huge and exquisite, picked out in brass and black wood. There were about thirty people left.
We’ve been whittled down
, Tanner thought.

What noises there were died immediately when the Lovers entered. As on that very first day, they were flanked by Tintinnabulum and Uther Doul.

What will you tell me this time?
thought Tanner slowly.
More wonders? More changes?

When the Lovers spoke, they told the full story of the island, and their plans, and everyone in the room was committed.

Tanner leaned back against a wall and listened. He tried to cultivate scepticism—the plans were so absurd, there were so many ways they could fail!—but he found that he could not. He listened, his heart rate increasing, as the Lovers and Tintinnabulum told him and his new companions how they would go to the home
of the mosquito people, how they would search for a scientist
who might not still be alive, and consult and build machines for containing the most extraordinary creature ever to swim in Bas-Lag’s seas.

Elsewhere, the hidden side of the campaign against the Summoning was convening.

At the heart of Dry Fall riding was the
Uroc
. It was a huge old vessel, fat and glowering, five hundred feet long and more than a hundred wide at the middle of its main deck. Its dimensions, silhouette, and specifications were unique. No one in Armada was certain how old it was, or from where it originally came.

There were rumors, in fact, that the
Uroc
was as counterfeit as a pinchbeck ring. It was not a clipper or a barque or a chariot ship or any other known design, after all: nothing of its peculiar shape could ever have sailed, was the claim. The
Uroc
had been built in Armada, said the cynics, already hemmed in by its surroundings. It was not a found and reappropriated vessel, they said: it was nothing more than wood and iron mimicking a stilled ship.

Some knew better. There were still a very few in Armada who remembered the
Uroc
’s arrival.

They included the Brucolac, who had been sailing it, alone, at the time.

Every night, when the sun set, he would rouse himself. Safe from daylight’s rays he would climb the
Uroc
’s baroque mast-
towers. He would reach out from the slit windows and caress the tines and scales that draped from the irregular crossbars. With fingertips of suprahuman sensitivity, he could feel the little pulses of power below those slats of thin metal and ceramic and wood, like blood through capillaries. He knew that the
Uroc
could still sail, if need be.

It had been built before his ab-death or his first birth. It had been constructed thousands of miles away, somewhere that no one alive in Armada had ever seen. It had been generations since the floating city had visited that place, and the Brucolac hoped passionately that it would never return.

The
Uroc
was a moonship. It tacked and sailed on gusts of lunar light.

Weird decks jutted like land formations on the vessel’s body. The intricate segments of its multilayered bridge, the chasm that was constructed in the center of its body, the twisted architecture of its portholes and chambers marked it out. Spires broke its wide body, some doubling as masts, some tapering randomly into nothing. Like the
Grand Easterly
, the
Uroc
was not built upon at all,
despite the crowded brick rookeries on the vessels to either side. But where the
Grand Easterly
was kept pristine as a matter of policy, no one had ever suggested building on the moonship. Its topography would not allow it.

By day it looked bleached and sickly. It was not pleasant to see. But as the light failed its surface would shimmer with a subtle nacre, as if it were haunted by ghost-colors. It became awesome then. That was when the Brucolac would walk its decks.

Sometimes he held meetings in its unsettling chambers. He would summon his ab-dead lieutenants to discuss riding business like the goretax, Dry Fall’s tithing.
It is what makes us unique
, he would tell them.
It is what gives us our strength and makes our citizens loyal.

That night, while Tanner Sack and the others inducted into Garwater’s scheme slept, or reflected on what they would have to do, the Brucolac welcomed visitors aboard the
Uroc
: a delegation from the Curhouse Council, naÏve enough to believe that they traveled and met in secret (the Brucolac had no such illusions: he picked one set of footsteps out of the palimpsest he could hear on the surrounding boats, and idly attributed them to a Garwater spy).

The Curhouse councilors were nervous in the moonship. They followed the Brucolac in a huddle, trying not to show discomfort as they scurried after him. Conscious of his guests’ requirements for light, the Brucolac had lit torches in the corridors. He had chosen not to use gaslights, taking a small malicious pleasure in the ostentation, and in the knowledge that the shadows the torches cast would flutter as unpredictable and predatory as bats in the ship’s narrow passages.

The circular meeting room was set in the ship’s broadest mast-tower, looking out over the deck fifty feet up. It was opulent and unwelcoming, inlaid with jet and pewter and finely worked lead. There were no candles or flames here, but an icy light picked out the interior with scientific clarity: moon- and starlight were gathered on the ship’s masts, amplified, and sent through mirrored shafts like veins to bleed out into the chamber. The strange illumination stripped the scene of any color.

“Gentlemen, ladies,” said the Brucolac in his guttural whisper. He smiled and pulled back his mass of hair; tasted the air with
his long, serpentine tongue; and indicated that his guests should
sit around the darkwood table. He watched them find places—
human, hotchi, llorgiss, and others all watching him warily.

“We have been outmaneuvered,” the Brucolac continued. “I suggest we consider our response.”

Dry Fall seemed much like Garwater. The decks of a hundred skiffs and barges and hulks were lit up against the darkness, and bustled with the sound of pubs and playhouses.

But looming silently over them all was the
Uroc
’s distorted silhouette. It watched over the convivials of Dry Fall without comment or censure or enthusiasm, and they responded, glancing at it now and then with a kind of wary, uneasy pride. They had more freedom and more say than those who lived in Garwater, they reminded themselves; more protection than Thee-And-Thine; more autonomy than Shaddler.

The Dry Fallers knew that many citizens of other ridings regarded the goretax as a price too high, but that was squeamish stupidity. It was the recently press-ganged who were most vociferous about that, Dry Fallers pointed out—superstitious outsiders who had not yet learned Armadan ways.

There were no floggings in Dry Fall, the inhabitants reminded such newcomers. Their goods and entertainments were subsidized for all those who carried a Dry Fall seal. For matters of importance, the Brucolac held meetings where everyone could have a say. He protected them. There was nothing like the anarchic, violent rule that existed elsewhere in the city. Dry Fall was safe, civilized, its streets well maintained. The goretax was a reasonable trade.

They were protective of their riding, and insecure. The
Uroc
was their talisman, and no matter how raucous and chaotic the evening, they would glance occasionally at its skyline as if for reassurance.

That night, like every night, the mast-towers of the
Uroc
blossomed with the unearthly luminescence known as saint’s fire. It afflicted all ships at some time—during an elyctric storm, or when the air was desiccated—but for the moonship it was as certain and regular as tides.

Night birds, bats, and moths flocked to it and danced in its glare. They battered and snapped at each other, and some descended to be waylaid by the other, smaller lights emitted by windows. In the Brucolac’s meeting room, the Curhouse councilors looked up, made nervous by the constant drumming of little wings on the glass.

The meeting was not going well.

The Brucolac was struggling. He sincerely needed to engage with the councilors, and he tried to work with them, to propose strategies, to review possibilities. But he found it hard to rein in his ability to intimidate. It was at the heart of his power and his strategy. He was not Armadan born: the Brucolac had seen scores of cities and nations, in life and in ab-death, and something had been made clear to him: if the quick did not exist in fear, then the vampir would.

They might style themselves merciless night hunters, of course, where they hunkered and hid their identities in cities, emerging
at night to feed, but they slept and fed in fear. The quick would
not tolerate their presence—discovery meant true death. That had
become unacceptable to him. When he had brought haemophagy
to Armada two centuries back, he had come to a city free of the
reflexive, murderous horror for his kind—a place he could live openly.

But the Brucolac had always understood the payoff. He did not fear the quick, so they must fear him. Which he had always found easy to ensure.

And now, when he was sick of intrigue, when he hungered for complicity, when he needed help and this mixed bag of bureaucrats was all he had, the dynamic of terror was too strong to overcome. The Curhouse Council were too afraid to work with him. With every look, every lick of his teeth, every exhalation and slow clenching of his fists, he reminded them of what he was.