The Scar (33 page)

For long moments she was the only thing that moved.

Uther Doul was still, waiting for her, his sword held vertically on his right. And then suddenly, when the anophelius was so close that Bellis thought she could smell her, so that her proboscis seemed to be touching Doul’s flesh, his arm was suddenly stretched across his body, the sword still vertical and immobile but on the other side of him, and the mosquito-woman’s head and left forearm were tumbling free and bloody across the dry earth as her body crashed to the ground beyond him. Thick, sluggish gore streaked Doul’s blade, and the corpse and the dust.

Doul had moved again, and was turning, leaping up, reaching with his hands as if he were plucking a fruit, spitting the second she-anophelius (
which Bellis had not even seen
) as she flew over his head, and then twisting, pulling her out of the air on the end of his blade and flicking her to the ground, where she lay screaming and drooling and still trying to reach him.

He dispatched her quickly, to Bellis’ appalled relief.

And then the sky was quiet, and Doul had turned again to Sengka and was wiping his blade.

“This is the last you’ll hear of me, or any of us, Captain Sengka,” he assured the cactus-man, who stared at him with more fear than hatred now, and whose eyes took in the bloody corpses of those two mosquito-women, each stronger than a man. “Go now. This can end here.”

Then again the hateful sound of the she-anophelii, and Bellis almost cried out at the thought of more carnage. The humming grew closer, and Sengka’s eyes grew wide. He stood for a moment longer, looking quickly around him for the ravenous she-anophelii, a part of him still hoping that they might kill Doul, but knowing that they would not.

Doul did not move, no matter that the sound grew closer.

“Sun
shit
!” Sengka shouted, and turned away, defeated, waving his hands to bring his men with him. They walked quickly away.

Bellis knew that they wanted to get away before any more of the she-anophelii attacked and were killed. Not because they cared for the terrible woman-things, but because the sight of Doul’s mastery was appalling to them.

Uther Doul waited until the three cactus-people had disappeared. Only then did he turn, calmly, resheathing his sword, and walk back to the room.

The sound of wings was very close by that time, but mercifully, they were a little too slow, and they did not reach him. Bellis heard the screaming wings dissipate as the mosquito-women scattered.

Doul reentered the room, and the shout of his name went up again, proud and insistent like a battle cry. And he acknowledged it this time, bowed his head and raised his arms to the height of his shoulders, his palms outstretched. He stood immobile, lowering his eyes, as if adrift on the sound.

And it was night again, the last night, and Bellis was in her room, on her bed of dusty straw, Silas’ package in her hands.

Tanner Sack did not sleep. He was too wired from the excitement of the day, the fights. He was caught up in astonishment at what he now knew, what he had learned from Krüach Aum. Only tiny fragments of a much larger theory, but his new knowledge, the scale of the commission expected of him, was dizzying. Too dizzying to let him sleep.

And, besides, he was waiting for something.

It came between one and two in the morning. The curtain to the women’s room was drawn back, very gently, and Bellis Coldwine crept across the room.

Tanner twisted his mouth in a hard smile. He had no idea what it was that she had been doing the previous night, but it was obvious that pissing had not been on her mind. He gave a half smile, half wince as he thought of his little cruelty, forcing her into such a performance. He had felt somewhat guilty afterward, though the thought of the prim, tight Miss Coldwine squeezing out a few drops for his benefit had kept him grinning all the next day.

He had known then that her business, whatever it was, was unfinished, and that she would come back.

Tanner watched her. She did not know he was awake. He could see her standing by the door in her white underdress, peering through the window. She was holding something. It would be that leather packet she had tried not to draw his attention to the previous night.

He felt curiosity about her actions, and a spark of cruelty, some redirected revenge for his mistreatment on the
Terpsichoria
settling on Bellis. Those feelings had stopped him from informing Doul or the Lover of her actions.

Bellis stood and looked, then hunkered down and rummaged silently in her package, and stood and looked again and bent and stood and so on. Her hand hovered ineffectually around the bolt.

Tanner Sack stood and walked soundlessly toward her; she was too engrossed with her indecision to notice him. He stood a few feet behind her, watching her, irritated and amused by her irresolution, until he had had enough and he spoke.

“Got to go again, have you?” he whispered sardonically, and Bellis spun around to face him, and he saw with shock and shame that she was crying.

His mean little smile disappeared instantly.

Tears were pouring from Bellis Coldwine’s eyes, but she did not utter a sob. She was breathing hard, and each deep breath shook and threatened to break, but she was quite silent. Her expression was fierce and controlled, her eyes intense and bloodshot. She looked like something cornered.

Furiously, she wiped her eyes and nose.

Tanner tried to speak, but her glare shook him, and it was only with an effort that he could utter words. “Now, there, now,” he whispered. “I didn’t mean anything by that . . .”

“
What
. . . do you
want
?” she whispered.

Chastened but not cowed, Tanner looked down at the package in her hands.

“What’s the matter with you, then?” he said. “What’s that? Trying to stow away, are you? Hoping the Samheri’ll take you home?” As he spoke he felt his anger growing again, until he had to struggle to control it. “Want to tell Mayor Rudgutter how badly you was treated on the pirate ship, is that it, miss? Let them know about Armada so’s they can try to hunt us down, and gather me and the likes of me and put us back in the fucking shit below the decks? Slaves for the colonies?”

Bellis was staring at him in a dignified, tearful rage. There was a long pause, and below the skin of her still, set face, Tanner saw her make a resolution.

“Read it,”
she hissed suddenly. She slapped a long letter into his hands and slumped against the door.

“ ‘Status seven’?” he muttered. “What the fuck is a Code Arrowhead?” Bellis said nothing. She had stopped crying. She stared at him, sullen as a child (
but now there is something in the back of her eyes, some hope
).

Tanner continued, hacking his way through the thickets of code and finding trails of sense, places where meaning became suddenly and shockingly clear.

“ ‘Arrival of kissing magi’?” he whispered incredulously. “ ‘Canker to be clotted by wormtroopers’? ‘Algae-bombs’? What the fuck is this? This is about some fucking invasion! What the fuck
is this
?” Bellis watched him.

“This,” she echoed him remorselessly, “is about some fucking invasion.”

She kept him in a cruel silence for several seconds and then told him.

He leaned back, gripping the paper, staring sightlessly at its seal, running his fingers through the chain on Silas’ tag.

“You’re right about me, you know,” said Bellis. They whispered, to keep the woman in the other room from waking. Bellis’ voice sounded dead. “You are right,” she repeated. “Armada is not my place. I can see you. You think, ‘I wouldn’t trust that uptown bitch.’ ”

Tanner shook his head, trying to disagree, but she would not let him.

“You’re right. I’m not trustworthy. I want to go home, Tanner Sack. And if I could open a door and walk through and be in Brock Marsh, or Salacus Fields, or Mafaton or Ludmead or anywhere in New Crobuzon, then by
Jabber
I would walk through it.”

Tanner almost winced at her intensity.

“But I can’t,” she went on. “And yes, there was a time when I imagined rescue. I imagined the navy sailing in to whisk me home. But there are two things in the way of that.

“I want to go home, Sack. But . . .” She hesitated and slumped a little. “But there were others on the
Terpsichoria
without that urge. And I know what it would mean . . . for you, and for the others . . . for all the Crobuzoner Remade . . . to be . . . ‘rescued.’ ” She turned her eyes to him in an unflinching stare. “And you can believe me or not, as you like, but that’s not something I want. I have no illusions about New Crobuzon, about the transportation. You know nothing about my circumstances, Tanner Sack. You don’t know anything about what forced me onto that fucking loathsome ship.

“No matter how I want to return home,” she said, “I know that what’s best for me isn’t so for you, and I’d not willingly be party to that. And that’s true,” she said suddenly, as if in surprise, as if to herself. “I lost that argument. I concede. That is true.”

She hesitated, then looked up at him.

“And even if you think I’m full of nothing but lies, Mr. Sack, there’s always the second factor:
There is nothing I can do.
I can’t stow away with the Samheri; I can’t give directions to the New Crobuzon navy. I’m stuck with Armada. I’m damn well
stuck
with it.”

“So who’s Silas Fennec?” he said. “And what is this?” He waved the letter.

“Fennec is a Crobuzoner agent, no less marooned than me. Only with information,” she said coldly. “Information about a fucking invasion.”

“You want it to fall?” she demanded. “Godspit, I understand you’ve no love for the place. Why in Jabber’s name should you have? But do you really want New Crobuzon to
fall
?” Her voice was suddenly very hard. “Have you no friends left there? No family? There’s nothing left in the whole fucking city you’d preserve? You wouldn’t mind it falling to The Gengris?”

A little to the south of Wynion Street, in Pelorus Fields, was a tiny market. It appeared in a mews behind a warehouse on Shundays and Dustdays. It was too small to have a name.

It was a shoe market. Secondhand, new, stolen, imperfect, and perfect. Clogs, slippers, boots, and others.

For some years it had been Tanner’s favorite place in New Crobuzon. Not that he bought any more shoes than anyone else, but he enjoyed walking the short length of the mews, past the tables of leather and canvas, listening to the shouts of the vendors.

There were several small cafés on that little street, and he had known the proprietors and the regulars well. When he had no work and a little money, he might spend hours in the ivy-covered Boland’s Coffees, arguing and idling with Boland and Yvan Curlough and Sluchnedsher the vodyanoi, taking pity on mad Spiral Jacobs and buying him a drink.

Tanner had spent many days there, in a haze of smoke and tea and coffee, watching the shoes and the hours ebb away through Boland’s imperfect windows. He could live without those days, for Jabber’s sake. It wasn’t as if they were a drug. It wasn’t as if he lay awake missing them at night.

But they were what he thought of, instantly, when Bellis asked him if he cared whether the city fell.

Of course the thought of New Crobuzon and all those people he knew (whom he had not thought of for some time), and all the places he had been, all broken and destroyed and drowned by the grindylow (figures who existed only in a nightmare, shadow form in his head), of course that appalled him. Of course he would not wish for that.

But the immediacy of his own reaction astonished him. There was nothing intellectual, nothing thought out about it. He looked through the window into that sweltering hot island night and remembered looking through those other windows, of thick and mottled glass, onto the shoe market.

“Why didn’t you tell the Lovers? Whyn’t you think they’d help try to get a message to the city?”

Bellis shucked her shoulders in a false, silent laugh.

“Do you really think,” she said slowly, “that they would care? Do you think they’d put themselves out? Send a boat, maybe? Pay for a message? You think they’d risk uncovering themselves? You think they’d go to all that effort, just to save a city that would destroy them if it had the slightest chance?”

“You’re wrong,” he said, uncertain. “There’s enough Crobuzoners among the press-ganged who’d care.”

“Nobody
knows
,” she hissed. “Only Fennec and I know, and if we spread the word, they’ll discredit us, write us off as troublemakers, dump us at sea, burn the message. Godsdammit, what if you’re wrong?” She stared at him until he shifted in her gaze. “You think they’ll care? You think they won’t let New Crobuzon drown? If we told them and you were wrong, it would be over—our only chance gone. Do you see what’s at stake? You want to risk it? Really?”

With a hollowness in his throat, Tanner realized that what she said made sense.

“And that is why I’m sitting here crying like a cretin,” she spat. “Because getting this message, and this proof, and this bribe to the Samheri is the only chance we have to save New Crobuzon. Do you see? To
save
it. And I’ve been standing here, frozen, because I can’t think of a way to get to the beach. Because I’m terrified of those woman-things out there. I do
not
want to die, and dawn is coming, and I can’t go out there, and I have to. And it’s more than a mile to the beach.” She looked at him carefully, and then away. “I don’t know what to do.”

They could hear the cactacae guard walking through the moonlit township, from house to house. Tanner and Bellis sat facing each other, leaning against the walls, their eyes fixed.

Tanner looked again at the letter he held. There was the seal. He held out his hands, and Bellis gave him the rest of her little bundle. She kept her face composed. He read the letter to the Samheri pirates. The reward was generous, he thought, but hardly excessive if it meant saving New Crobuzon.

Saving it, keeping it safe from harm.

He went through each letter again, line by line. Armada was not mentioned.