The Scar (31 page)

It was a melancholy pragmatism. They bore their women no ill will. They coupled with them eagerly enough once in the year, but they ignored them where possible and killed them if necessary.

“She wasn’t trying to feed, you know,” Bellis went on. She kept her voice neutral. “She was full. They’re . . . they’re intelligent. It’s not that they’re mindless. It’s the hunger, he told me. It takes a long, long time for them to starve. They can spend a year without feeding, screaming ravenous for all those weeks: it’s all they can think about. But when they’ve fed, when they’re full—really sated—there’s a day or two, maybe a week, when the hunger abates.
And that’s the time they try to talk.

“He described them coming up from the swamplands, landing in the square and shrieking at the men, trying to make words. But they could never learn language, you see. They were always too hungry. They know what they are.”

Bellis caught Uther Doul’s eye. She was aware, suddenly, that he respected her. “They
know
. Once in a while they can stop themselves, when their bellies are full and their minds clear for a few days or hours, and they know what it is they do, how they live. They’re as intelligent as you or me, but they grow up too distracted by starvation to speak, and then once every few months, for a handful of days they can concentrate, they try to learn.

“But they don’t have the males’ mouthparts, obviously, so they can’t make the same sounds. It’s only the most inexperienced, the youngest, who try to mimic the anophelii men. With their proboscises retracted, their mouths are much more like ours.” She saw that he understood.

“Their voices sound like ours,” she went on softly. “They’ve never heard language they could mimic before. Full as she was, without language but conscious that she was without it, it must have made her quite giddy to hear us all conversing, in sounds that she herself could make. That’s why she came for that man. She was trying to talk to him.”

“It’s a strange sword,” she said a little later.

He hesitated for a tiny moment (the first time, Bellis realized, she had ever seen him uncertain) then drew it with his right hand, held it out for her to see.

Three little buds of metal seemed embedded in the heel of his right hand, connected to the veinlike mass of wires under his sleeve, running down his side to a little pack on his belt. The handle of the sword was padded in leather or skin, but a patch was bare metal, which the nodes in his flesh touched when he held the sword.

The blade was not, as Bellis had supposed, stained metal.

“May I touch it?”

Doul nodded. She tapped the flat of the blade with a fingernail. It sounded dull and unresonant.

“It’s ceramic,” he said. “More like china than iron.”

The edges of the sword did not have the matte sheen of a sharpened blade. They were the same featureless white as the flat (a white stained fractionally yellow, like teeth or ivory).

“It’ll cut deeper than bone,” Doul said quietly in that melodious voice. “This is not a ceramic you’ve seen or used before. It won’t bend or give—it has no flex—but nor is it brittle. And it’s strong.”

“How strong?”

Uther looked at her, and she felt his respect again. Something inside her responded.

“Diamond,” he said. He sheathed his blade (with another exquisite, instantaneous motion).

“Where does it come from?” she said, but he did not answer her. “Is it from the same place as you?” She was surprised by her own persistence and . . . what? Bravery?

She did not feel as if she was being brave. Instead, she felt as if she and Uther Doul understood each other. He turned to her from the doorway and inclined his head in farewell.

“No,” he said. “It would be . . . hard to be less accurate.” For the first time, she saw a smile take him, very quickly.

“Good night,” he said.

Bellis took the solitary moments she had craved, steeped herself in her own company. She breathed deeply. And finally, she allowed herself to wonder about Uther Doul. She wondered why he was speaking to her, tolerating her company, respecting her, it seemed.

She could not read him, but she realized that she felt a faint connection to him, something woven out of shared cynicism, detachment, strength, understanding, and—yes—attraction. She did not know when or why she had stopped fearing him. She had no idea what he was doing.

Chapter Twenty-five

Two days became three, and four, and then a week had passed, every day in the inexact light of that little room. Bellis felt as if her eyes were atrophying, only able to see the earth shades inside the mountain, surrounded by halfhearted, edgeless shadows.

In the night, she would make the same short run across the open air (looking up eagerly to see naked light and colors, even the scorched colors of that sky). The mosquito whine of the women came at her sometimes, to her abject terror, and sometimes it did not. But always she huddled in the shelter of the cactus warrior or scabmettler who protected her.

Sometimes she could hear the scuffling and muttering of the she-anophelii outside the long window shafts. The mosquito-women were appalling, and strong, and their hunger was a force of almost elemental power. They would kill any bloodwalkers who landed, might drain an entire ship in a day and then lie bloated on the beach. For all that, there was something indelibly pathetic about the women of this ghetto island.

Bellis did not know what chain of circumstances had allowed the Malarial Queendom to exist, but they were unthinkable to her. It was impossible to imagine these shrieking creatures on other shores, their petty terrorism despoiling half a continent.

The food was as monotonous as the setting. Bellis’ tongue was quite numb to the fish-and-grass taste, and she chewed stolidly on whatever rust-nourished sealife the cactacae caught in the bay, whatever edible weed they uprooted.

The Samheri officers tolerated them uneasily, but did not trust them. Captain Sengka continued to curse the cactus Armadans in rapid Sunglari as turncoats and renegades.

With each morning’s fevered calculations, the scientists became more and more excited. The stacks of their notes and calculations grew massive. The ember that distinguished Krüach Aum from his compatriots—which Bellis thought of as true curiosity—waxed.

Bellis struggled but did not fail. She was translating now without even trying to understand what she said, just passing on what was said as if she were an analytical engine breaking down and reconstituting formulae. She knew that to the men and women hunched over the table, debating with Aum, she was more or less invisible.

She focused on voices as if they were music: the measured sonority of Tintinnabulum, the staccato excitement of Faber, the seesawing oboe tones of the bio-philosopher whose name Bellis could never remember.

Aum was tireless. Bellis felt faintly dismayed by exhaustion when she sat with Tanner Sack and the other engineers in the afternoon, but Aum continued without apparent difficulty, shifting his attention from the conceptual problems and philosophy of the avancs to practical issues of bait, and control, and capture of something the size of an island. And when the failing light and general fatigue forced the day’s work to end, it was never Aum who suggested it.

Bellis could not fail to realize that research problems were being overcome, one by one. It had not taken long for Aum to rewrite his data appendix, and then for the Armadans to point out errors and miscalculations, holes in his research. The excitement of the scientists was palpable; they were almost drunk on it. It was a problem—a project—of unthinkable scale, and yet one by one, the problems, the objections and obstacles, were being overcome.

They were teetering on the edge of something extraordinary. The fact of its possibility was utterly giddying.

Bellis did not fraternize with the Armadans, but she could not spend her days without speaking to them. “There you go. Get that down you,” one might say, handing her a bowl of dull stew, and to refuse a word of thanks would have been a quite unnecessary violence.

Occasionally in the evenings—amid the Armadans’ dice and singsongs, which entranced the sough-voiced anophelii—she found herself on the edge of conversations.

The only one she knew by name was Tanner Sack. The fact that she had traveled above him on the
Terpsichoria
, free while he had been incarcerated, had poisoned any chance of trust between them, she supposed, though she had the sense that he was an open man. He was one of those who would make a little attempt to include her when he spoke. Bellis now came closer than she had ever been to Armadan society. She was allowed to listen to stories.

Most were about secrets. She heard about the chains that dangled below Armada: ancient, hidden for tens of decades; years’ worth of work, and many ships’ worth of metal. “Long before the Lovers made up their minds what to do with them,” the teller of one story said, “this was tried before.”

Uther Doul was prey to the storytellers, too.

“He comes from the land of the dead,” someone said once, conspiratorially. “Old Doul was born more’n three thousand years ago. It was him started the Contumancy. He was born a slave in the Ghosthead Empire, and he stole that sword, Mightblade, and fought free, and destroyed the empire. He died. But a warrior like him, greatest fighter there’s ever been, he’s the only man was able to fight his way out of the shadeworld, back to the living.”

Those listening made good-humored, derisory noises. They did not believe it, of course, but then they did not know what to believe about Uther Doul.

Doul himself spent his days quietly. The main person whose company he sought, the only one who came anything close to a friend, seemed to be Hedrigall. The cactus aeronaut and the human warrior often talked quietly at the edge of the room. They muttered in quick undertones, as if they were ashamed of friendship.

There was only one other person with whom Uther Doul was prepared to spend time, and to whom he talked, and that was Bellis.

It had not taken her long to realize that the apparently chance meetings, the brief pleasantries, were not coincidental. In an elliptical and tentative way, he was trying to make friends with her.

Bellis could not make sense of him, and she did not try to second-guess him. She trusted herself to cope. Though a sense of danger always remained, part of her enjoyed the encounters—the formal air, the slightest sense of flirtation. It was hardly coquetry. She did not compromise her dignity with simpering suggestiveness. But she was drawn to him, and she scolded herself for that.

Bellis thought of Silas. Not with any sense of guilt or betrayal—the idea of that made her pout in disdain. But she remembered the time he had taken her to the glad’ fight, specifically to see Uther Doul.
That’s what’s trying to stop us leaving
, he had told her, and she could not afford to forget it.
Why
, she asked herself,
would you risk spending time with Doul?

Deep in her bag, she felt the weight of the box Silas had given her. She was acutely aware that she had a job to do on this island (
one she must plan soon
). It placed her very directly against Doul.

Bellis realized why she let their conversations continue. It was rare that she felt herself in the company of someone with as much or more control over his own reactions to the world, and its reception of them, as she had. Uther Doul was one. That was why they respected each other. To speak simply, without smiling, to someone else with the same manner; to know that of her would have intimidated most people but did not fluster him, and that the same was true the other way round: that was rare, and a pleasure.

Bellis felt that they should be looking out over a city, at night. They should be on a balcony. They should be wandering through backstreets, their hands in their pockets.

Instead they were in a small room that jutted off the central hall. They stood near one of the window slits, and Bellis was desperately sick of the colors of rock. She stared at the little patch of night-lit black hungrily.

“Do you understand it all?” Bellis asked.

Doul moved his head ambiguously. “Enough,” he said slowly, “to know that they’re close. I have very different expertise. My research will come after this. Your job will change soon. You’ll be asked to start teaching him Salt.”

Bellis blinked, and Doul nodded.

“It’s a breach of Samheri and Kohnid laws, but we’re not bringing new knowledge to the island. Aum will come with us.”

Of course
, thought Bellis.

“So . . .” Doul continued. “So we return.” His wonderful voice was low. “With our prize. It’s a monumental project, what we’re attempting. Armada’s been stationed at a seam of oil and rockmilk since we left. Drilling, storing what’s needed for the invocation. We’ll make for the sinkholes. And then we use our fuel and our bait and the shackles we’ll build, and so on, and we . . . hook ourselves an avanc.” It sounded so bathetic. There was a long silence after that.

“And then,” said Doul very softly, “our work begins.”

Bellis did not speak.

I knew you were playing games with me
, she thought coolly.

What work begins?

It did not surprise her. It was no great shock to realize that the avanc was only the start of the Lovers’ project, that there was more going on, that there was some grand scheme behind all this effort, an agenda to which virtually no one—certainly not she—was party.

Except that now, in one way, she was.

She did not understand why Doul was telling her. His motives were impenetrable. All Bellis knew was that she was being used. She did not even resent it, she realized—she would expect no less.

The following morning, the sun came up on the body of one of the human engineers. His skeleton was constricted by his newly tight skin: his arms were curled tight around his chest, and his hands were claws; his spine was arced as if with great age.

In the cavity below his ribs, his skin clung to the rubbery piping of his drained intestines. His eyes were half-shriveled like drying fruit, baking in the sun. The gums in his open mouth were almost as white as his teeth.

Surrounded by crooning mosquito-men, Hedrigall turned him over (
the body rocking on its curved spine like a wooden horse
) and found the fat hole between his ribs where the she-anophelius had punctured him.

The Armadans had become complacent. The death dismayed them.

“Stupid fucker,” Bellis heard Tanner Sack mutter. “What was he fucking doing?” She watched him turn from the window. He did not want to see Hedrigall bending down and with a gruff tenderness picking up the pathetic remains, cradling the skin-and-bone man and walking out of the village, to bury him.

But even that tragedy could not dampen the agitation in the air. Even in that shock and grief, Bellis could feel an excitement among the scientists. Even those who had known the engineer felt their sadness vie with a very different feeling.

“Look at this!” hissed Théobal, a pirate and a theoretical oceanologer. He waved a thick document, pages sewn together at one end. “We’ve damn well got it! This is the math we need, the thaumaturgy, the biology.”

Bellis looked at the papers with a vague astonishment.
All of that came through me
, she thought.

When Aum entered, they had Bellis write,
We need you to help us. Will you leave this place and learn our language and help us call this avanc from the sea? Will you come with us?

And though it was almost impossible to read that sphincter-mouthed face, Bellis was sure that she saw fear and joy in Aum’s eyes.

He said yes, of course.

The news passed quickly around the village, and the he-anophelii came in great numbers to croon with Aum and hiss their feelings. Their happiness? Bellis wondered. Their jealousy? Grief?

Some of them looked at the Armadan party with something akin to hunger, she thought. Their abstraction from the world was tenuous, and could be broken, as Aum appeared to have broken his.

“We leave in two days,” said the Lover, and there was a rush of blood from Bellis’ chest so quick it hurt her. She had completely neglected her commission. New Crobuzon relied on her. She felt despondency take her and begin to pull her down.
This will not happen
, she thought quickly.
It is not too late.

The crew were delighted at the thought of leaving, of escaping this cloying air and those voracious women. Bellis, however, was desperate for more time, for a few more days. She thought again of that dried-up corpse, but not for very long. She was terrified of despairing.

That night as the scabmettlers and cactacae escorted their vulnerable comrades to their beds, she sat alone, massaging her hand, breathing deep, trying fearfully to work out some plan, some way to get to the Dreer Samher ship. For brief moments she considered deserting. Demanding Captain Sengka’s mercy and staying on board. Or stowing away. Anything to see New Crobuzon again. But she knew she could not. As soon as she was missed, the Lover would order the Dreer Samher ships searched, and the Samheri would not refuse them. And then she would be caught, and her package would be undelivered, and New Crobuzon would be in terrible danger.

And besides, she cautiously let herself remember, she still had no way of reaching the Samheri ship.

Bellis heard a faint sound from one of the adjoining rooms. She came closer to the closed door.

It was the Lover’s voice. She could not hear the words, but the firm, hard voice was unmistakable. She sounded as if she was singing gently, like a mother to her child. Hushed and very intense, there was something in those sounds that made Bellis shiver and close her eyes. She was listening to a concentration of emotion that almost made her head swim.

Bellis leaned against the wall and heard emotions that were not hers. She could not tell if they affirmed love, or the most draining kind of obsession. But still she waited, her eyes on the door, parasitic like the mosquito-women, steeping herself in stolen feelings.

And after some minutes, when the sounds were done and Bellis had moved away, the Lover emerged. Her heavy features were calm. She saw Bellis watching her, and met her eyes without shame or pugnacity. Blood was leaking sluggish as molasses from a new wound in the Lover’s face, a long split in the skin from the right corner of her lip, under her chin and down toward the hollow of her neck.