The Scar (42 page)

And now the
Tetneghi Dustheart
crawls toward the Gross Tar. The galleon’s ostentatious gold and sweeping curves are dulled by brutal spring weather that shocks the cactacae, their garish southern esthetic absurd beside the dark browns and blacks and muddy greens and faint blossom colors of the islands they pass.

They are weather-beaten, dilapidated. The crew are impatient. Sengka fingers the sealed pouch.

There is not long now. They are close to the bay and the river, the bricks and bridges. There are more and more rocks in the waters around them. The channel is shallowing. The coast is very close.

Captain Sengka looks closely at the New Crobuzon seal on the little cargo he is delivering. He hefts it in his big hands: the leather, the box bound in wax; the offer of a reward that New Crobuzon will honor; the letter of alarm, its melodramatic warning of war in obscure, absurd, quite meaningless code; the stubby, worthless little necklace that justifies the jewelry box; and beneath that box’s velvet padding, sealed in its false bottom, cossetted in sawdust, a heavy disk the size of a large watch, and a long dispatch in tiny calligraphy.

Procurator Fennec’s secret gift to New Crobuzon, and his real message.

Interlude VIII

Elsewhere

There has been some stunning irruption into the world. The sea tastes of something new.

What is this?

None of the hunters knows.

What was that shattering that sudden shift the opening up the intrusion the trespass the arrival? What is it that has come?

None of the hunters knows. They can only tell that the sea has changed.

Signs are everywhere. The currents are tentative, shifting direction minutely, as if there is some new obstacle in their path that they do not know how to avoid. The salinae scream and gibber, desperate to communicate what they know.

Even such a massive new presence as this is a tiny change, on a world scale. Almost infinitely small. But the hunters are sensitive to water at a level smaller than atoms, and they know that something has happened.

The new thing has its own unique spoor, but it is a trail of particles and dung and taste that do not operate according to the physics of Bas-Lag. Gravity, random motion, physical existence do not work quite as they should around the intruder. The hunters can taste it, but not track it.

Yet they do not stop trying. Because it is obvious that this is the work of the floating city, and that if they can find the slow, huge thing, they find their quarry.

Time moves quickly.

There are bubbles of water, fresh and brine. They are breathed out by siblings many miles away, they rise, maintaining their integrity even surrounded by the stuff of their own substance, slip through little thaumaturgic vents and are displaced, continuing their upward motion without interruption, vast distances from where they started. They burst by the hunters’ ears, bearing messages from home. Rumors and stories spoken as water. From the groac’h and magi in The Gengris, from the spies in Iron Bay.

We hear things,
says one voice.

The hunters commune, and pour out their energy, tremulous and effortful, using their foci, the preserved relics of their dead. Their leaders whisper in response, and the hunters’ own speech bubbles cross the distance back again, home.

Something new has entered the sea,
they say.

And when the conversation is done, the magi, quiet in the darkness very far below the surface of the Swollen Ocean, three thousand miles from their home, blink and shake their heads, and the sound that has reached them from across the world dissipates with the water that carries it.

Boats are coming
, they tell their hunters.
Many. Quickly. From Iron Bay. Hunting, too. Searching, like us. Crossing the sea. Our sisters and brothers are with them, clinging like remora, singing to us. We can find them easily.

The boats. The boats seek the same thing we do. They know where they are going. They have machines to find it.

We track them, and they will track for us.

The hunters grin with their very long teeth and emit the barking gasps of water that are their laughter, folding their limbs away into streamlined shapes and setting out for the north, in the direction they have been given, aiming for where New Crobuzon’s flotilla will be. So they will intercept it, and join their other troops, and at last find their quarry.

Part Six

Morning Walker

Chapter Thirty-three

The avanc, and Armada behind it, maintained an unchanging, steady speed—always northward. Nothing like as quick as a ship, but faster by many times than the city had ever been able to travel before.

Armadan vessels were returning every day. Their secret mechanisms had shown them their home port’s unprecedented pace, and they were racing across the sea in panic or jubilation to their city with booty of jewels and food and books and earth.

The returned sailors found the city an astounding sight. Surrounded by the fleet of tugs and steamboats that had always pulled it but that now followed it in a huge disparate mass like a second, disintegrating city, loyal and useless, Armada was powering slowly through the sea as if by its own will.

Some of those now-redundant ships were being integrated into the city’s substance, hooked and welded into place, stripped and refitted, built up. Others were converted into pirate vessels, outfitted with armor and guns of a hundred different kinds. They were crossbred, bristling with found ordnance.

The city’s bearing was north-northeast, but there were deviations this way and that, to avoid some storm or rocky island, or some irregularity in the ocean floor that the citizens of Armada could not see.

The pilots on the
Grand Easterly
were equipped with a rack of pyrotechnic flares in a variety of colors. When the avanc’s course needed correcting, they would fire them in combinations, in prearranged signals. Engineers in the other ridings would respond, firing up the massive winches that would haul back on one or other of the submerged chains.

The avanc responded, uncomplaining and accommodating as a cow. It altered its course (
with a flickering of its fins or filaments or paws or gods knew what
) in response to the faint tugging. It allowed itself to be led.

In the bottom of the
Grand Easterly
, the work of the engine room quickly become routine. All day the juddering boilers were fed a thin stream of the rockmilk the
Sorghum
had drawn up, and they sent a steady pulse of coddling through the chain and the spines and into what approximated the avanc’s cortex.

The huge creature was drugged, drowsy with contentment, mindless as a tadpole.

At first, after the avanc was called, when it became clear that the thaumaturgy, the hunting, had actually worked, that the fabled beast had entered Bas-Lag, Armada’s citizenry were hysterical with excitement.

That first night had been a spontaneous party. The quarto’s-end decorations were brought out again, and the boulevards and plazas across the city were filled with lines of dancing people, men and women, khepri and cactus and scabmettler and others, carrying aloft a variety of papier-mâché models of the avanc, as unlikely as they were inconsistent.

Bellis spent the evening in a pub with Carrianne, buoyed up by the revelry despite herself. The next day she was tired and downcast. It was the third Markindi of Flesh Quarto, and Bellis referred to the New Crobuzon calendar she had scribbled down and discovered that it was the fifteenth of Swiven—Badsprit Eve. This realization depressed her. It was not that she thought the baleful influence of the festival would extend this far, but the near coincidence of the avanc’s arrival with that night was discomfiting.

As the days wore on, even with the excitement still fresh, even with the astonishment of waking each day to a sea slapping against a city in motion, Bellis sensed an anxiety growing in Armada. Central to that was the realization that the Lovers of Garwater, who controlled the avanc, were heading north and would not say why.

Discussions about where the avanc would take the city had so far been in general, nebulous terms. Garwater’s representatives had stressed the creature’s speed and power, the ability to escape storms and barren seas, to make for fair weather, where crops would thrive. Many citizens had assumed that the city would head for somewhere warm, where there were few naval powers, where goods and books and soil and other plunder could be taken from the shore with ease. The southern Kudrik, or perhaps the Codex Sea. Somewhere like that.

But as the days went on, the city continued north, without slowing or deviating. Armada was heading somewhere definite at the Lovers’ behest, and nothing was being said.

“We’ll find out soon enough,” was what the loyalists said in the dockside pubs. “They’ve nothing to hide from us.”

But when finally the news sheets and journals, the street speakers and polemicists composed themselves enough to ask the question on everyone’s minds, there was still no answer. After a week,
The Flag
’s front page consisted of just four huge words: Where Are We Going?

Still there was no answer.

There were those for whom this silence did not matter. What mattered was that Armada was a great power controlling something more astonishing than they could have imagined. The specifics of their journey were of no more concern to them than they ever had been before. “We’ve always left it to them who make the decisions,” some said.

But there had never been really serious decisions before, only the vaguest agreement that the steamers would haul roughly in such-and-such a direction, in the hope that in a year or two—currents, tides, and Torque permitting—the city might reach congenial water. Now, with the avanc, came a new kind of power, and there were some who realized that everything had changed—that there were now real decisions to be made, and that the Lovers were making them.

In the absence of information, rumor flowered. Armada was heading for Gironella’s Dead Sea, where the water was ossified in its wave forms, entombing all the life within. It was heading for the Malmstrom, for the edge of the world. It was heading for a cacotopic stain. It was heading for a land of ghosts, or talking wolves, or men and women whose eyes were jewels or who had teeth like polished coal, or a land of sentient coral, or an empire of fungus, or it was heading somewhere else, maybe.

On the third Bookdi of the quarto, Tintinnabulum and his crew left Armada.

For the best part of a decade, the
Castor
had been embedded near Garwater’s foremost point, where it met Shaddler riding. Lashed beside the
Tolpandy
, it had sat for a long time beside an iron-clad warship that had become a shopping district, its greys mottled with commercial coloration, the byways between its derelict guns surrounded by alleys of tin-shack shops.

People had forgotten that the
Castor
was not a permanent fixture. Bridges had linked it to its surrounds, and chains and ropes and buffers had tethered it. Those links were cut, one by one.

Under a hot sun, the hunters swung machetes and removed themselves from the flesh of Armada, till they were free-floating, a foreign body. Between the
Castor
and the open sea a pathway was cleared between vessels. Bridges were uncoupled, tethers were broken on a route leading by the barge
Badmark
into Shaddler, then alongside the
Darioch’s Concern
with its cheap houses and raucous industry. It continued past the
Dearly
, a submersible long surface-bound, its interior a theater, and twisted starboard between an ancient trading cog and a big chariot ship, its rein stubs refitted to hold colored lights; then there was an open patch of water and beyond it the Shaddler Sculpture Garden on the
Thaladin
, the outer edge of Armada.

Beyond that was the sea.

The vessels that lined the pathway were crowded as people leaned over to shout good-bye at the
Castor
. Yeomanry and Shaddler guards kept the new channel free of traffic. The sea was calm and the avanc’s passage steady.

When the first of the city’s clocks began to strike noon, the
Castor
’s motors started up, to a great squall of excitement from the crowd. They cheered raucously as the vessel, a little over a hundred feet long, topped by its absurdly tall bell tower, began to putter forward.

The bridges, lines and chains and girders, were reconnected in the vessel’s wake. The
Castor
slipped like a splinter from the city’s flesh, which reknitted behind it.

In many places the route was only a little wider than the
Castor
itself, and it bumped against its neighbors, its swaddling of rope and rubber absorbing the impact. It progressed sluggishly, thumping its way toward the open sea. Beside it, the crowds were shouting and waving, as triumphant as if they had freed the hunters after years of imprisonment.

The ship finally slipped past the
Thaladin
into the ocean, traveling in the same direction as the avanc but outpacing it in order to emerge from the city. In that wide water, the
Castor
kept its speed up. It skirted around the front edge of Armada, turning to the south, letting the city drift past it as the avanc continued onward. Armada moved on, till the
Castor
was by the outskirts of The Clockhouse Spur; and then by the open entrance to the Basilio docks, thronging with free boats; and then it was past Jhour, and the
Castor
’s engine sounded again and it headed away, in among the free vessels that surrounded and followed the city. Tintinnabulum’s boat passed through them, shedding its protective buffers as it went, dropping rubber and tar-soaked cloth overboard, before disappearing toward the southern horizon.

Many people watched the
Castor
from the Sculpture Garden until it disappeared around Armada’s curve. Among them were Angevine and Shekel, holding hands.

“They did their job,” said Angevine. She was still shocked to find herself out of a job, but she sounded only very slightly regretful. “They finished what they were brought here to do. Why would they have stayed?

“Do you know what he said to me?” she continued to Shekel impatiently, and he could tell that she had had this on her mind. “He said they might’ve been tempted to stay longer, but they didn’t want to go where the Lovers are going.”

Tanner watched the
Castor
’s progress from below.

He was not perturbed that the city was heading north, or that he did not know where it was going. He found a great pleasure in the realization that the summoning of the avanc was not the end of Garwater’s project. He found it hard to understand those who saw in this some betrayal, who were angry, intimidated by their own ignorance.

But don’t you think it’s wonderful?
he felt like saying to them.
It ain’t over! There’s more to be done! The Lovers’ve got more up their sleeves. There’s more we can do; there’s bigger things at stake. We can keep at it!

He spent more and more hours under the surface, emerging to spend his time alone, or occasionally with Shekel, who was growing more closemouthed as the days passed.

Tanner grew closer to Hedrigall. Ironically, Hedrigall was a voice of opposition to the city’s northerly trajectory, and to the Lovers’ silence. But Tanner knew that Hedrigall’s loyalty to Garwater was as strong as his own, that there was nothing snide in his disquiet. Hedrigall was an intelligent and careful critic who did not deride Tanner’s loyalty as blind or unthinking, who understood the trust and commitment Tanner placed in the Lovers, and who treated Tanner’s defense of them seriously.

“You know they’re my bosses, Tanner,” he had said, “and you know that I ain’t got any soft feelings for my so-called home. Dreer fucking Samher means shit to me. But . . . this is too much, Tanner, man—this silence. Things were working, Tanner. We didn’t have to do all this. They should tell us what’s happening. Without that, they lose our trust; they lose their legitimacy. And godsdammit, mate, that’s what they depend on. There’s only two of them, Croom knows how many thousands of us. This ain’t good for Garwater.”

These sentiments made Tanner uneasy.

He was happiest below the water. The submerged life of the riding continued as before: the clouds of fish, Bastard John, the leather-and-metal-clad divers at the end of their guy ropes, the flickering menfish of Bask, the cray, the shadows of submersibles like stubby whales beyond the city. The sunken supports of the
Sorghum
, its girder-legs poking from them. Tanner Sack himself, swimming from job to job, mouthing instructions or advice to his colleagues, taking orders and giving them.

But nothing was the same; everything was utterly different. Because at the edges of all that banal activity, framing the mass of keels and undersides like the points of a pentacle, the five great chains angled in a steep slope down and forward into the pitch, tethering the avanc miles below.

Tanner’s days were harder than before. He kept swimming all the time, simply to keep up with Armada. He often found himself grabbing hold of jutting pillars, barnacle-crusted timbers, to allow himself to be towed. At the end of the day, when he hauled himself out of the water and returned to his rooms, he was utterly exhausted.

Thoughts of New Crobuzon clouded his mind more and more. He wondered if the message he had delivered had got through. He hoped it had, very much. He could not think about his erstwhile home ruined by war.

The temperature did not waver. Each day was sweaty and bleached by light. When there were clouds they were fraught, stormy and elyctric.

The Lovers, the anophelius Aum, Uther Doul, and a cabal of others retreated into the
Grand Easterly
to work on their new secret project. The wider circle of scientists was cut loose, to wander disconsolate and aggrieved.

Bellis’ job was over. During the working hours, for want of other friends, she began tentatively to speak again with Johannes. He too was cast-off, like her. The avanc was caught—his role was over.

Johannes was still wary of her. They would wander the swaying streets of Armada, stopping at pavement cafés and little gardens, while pirate children played around them. They both still received stipends and could live easily from day to day, but their hours were endless and purposeless now. There was nothing ahead of them except other days, and Johannes was angry. He felt deserted.