The Scar (45 page)

“I will take this fucking city by force, if I must.”

And his ab-dead cadre hissed and muttered their agreement.

Chapter Thirty-six

North, slow and inexorable. They were pulled on, days becoming weeks. The city waited. No one knew what would happen, but there was no way this steady gait could continue without incident. Armada became tense.

Bellis waited for word of Fench’s pamphlet. She was patient, envisaging him in the belly of the city, deep in some ship, collating information, controlling his informants.

Some nights, drawn by queasy fascination and shocked at herself, Bellis made her own way into the
Grand Easterly
’s lower decks and huddled in the room below the Lovers’. In their spat and breathless love talk she heard a new tension.

“Soon,” Bellis heard one Lover hiss, and “Fuck yes, soon,” a whimpered response.

There were differences between their little cries, Bellis could now discern. The Lover seemed more intense, more committed. It was she who seemed impatient, hungry for resolution, it was she who whispered
soon
most often; she was the more engaged with the project. Her lover was engaged with her. He fawned and murmured in the wake of her words.

Time stretched out. Bellis became more and more frustrated with Uther Doul.

With the city’s passage north, it had passed quickly out of the storms and the heat and into a more temperate zone, warm and breezy like New Crobuzon’s summer.

Five days after Bellis and Silas met in The Pashakan, there was a commotion above Armada’s skyline, in the dirigible
Arrogance
.

While Bellis stood with Uther Doul on the
Grand Easterly
, looking over to the fringe of Croom Park, Hedrigall was on deck duty, working with others near the great ropes that tethered the
Arrogance
to the aft of the ship.

“Mail drop,” he yelled, and the crews quickly cleared the area around the rope. A weighted satchel plummeted its length, landing with a bang on the cushioning of rags.

Hedrigall’s motions, when he pulled open the sack, were routine, and Bellis began to look away. But when the cactus-man unfurled the message within, his demeanor changed so violently that her eyes snapped back. Hedrigall ran toward Bellis and Doul with such astonishing speed that she thought for a second he was about to attack them. She stiffened as his great muscular body slammed down the boards of the deck.

Hedrigall held out the lookout’s message in a rigid arm.

“Warships,” he said to Doul. “Ironclads. A New Crobuzon flotilla. Thirty-five miles off, incoming. Be here within two hours.” He paused, and his green lips moved without sound, until finally he spoke with a tone of absolute incredulity.

“We’re under attack.”

At first, people were bewildered, disbelieving of their orders. Great masses of men and women gathered in every riding, on every flagship, fingering weapons and pulling on pieces of armor, surly and confused.

“But it don’t make any sense, Doul, sir,” one woman on the
Grand Easterly
argued. “It’s almost
four thousand miles
from New Crobuzon. Why’d they come so far? And how come the nauscopists didn’t see anything? They would’ve noticed yesterday. And anyway, how’re the Crobuzoners supposed to have found us—?”

Doul interrupted her, shouting loud enough to shock everyone in earshot into silence.

“
We do not ask how,
” he bellowed. “
We do not ask why. Time enough after the killing. For now we have only time to fight, like fucking dogs, like sharks in frenzy. We fight or the city dies.
”

Doul stilled all argument. People set their faces and prepared for war. And in every head the question
How have they done this?
was remembered, and put aside for later.

The city’s five warships steered westward a handful of miles, presenting themselves like a curving wall between Armada and the approaching force.

Around and between them steamed Armada’s smaller ironclads, squat vessels swathed in grey gunmetal, windowless, bristling with stubby cannons. They were joined by those of the city’s pirate vessels that had been in dock. Their crews set their teeth and tried not to contemplate their suicidal bravery—they were armed and armored to defeat merchant vessels, not naval gunners. Few of them, they realized, would come home.

There was no division between the ridings. Crews loyal to every ruler tacked and stoked and armed themselves, side by side.

The lookouts in the
Arrogance
sent down more messages as they saw the Crobuzoner ships more clearly. Uther Doul read them out to the Lovers.

“They must be here for their fucking rig,” he said quietly, so that only the two of them could hear. “Whatever it’s about, they outgun us. We’ve got more vessels, but half of ours are just wooden freebooters. They’ve seven warships, and many more scouts than us. They must have sent nearly half their fleet.”

Tanner Sack and the menfish of Bask; Bastard John; cray; the shadowy submersibles. Armada’s underwater troops waited, suspended, the great chains moving slowly away from them. Armada was moving on, the avanc now slowed to a crawl so that the troops could regain the city, after the fight.

Nearby, a small group of cray huddled in tight communion on one of their submerged rafts. Witch-conveners, summoning their beasts.

When Tanner had faced the dinichthys, he had hurled himself unthinkingly into the water. He had not had time then to contemplate his fear. But it was almost another hour before the warships from his old home would arrive to destroy his new one. The purpose and intelligence that directed their propellers was much more terrifying than the imbecilic malice in the bonefish’s eyes.

The minutes were very slow. Tanner thought about Shekel, at home where Tanner had ordered him to stay. Waiting with Angevine: both being armed, no doubt, by the yeomanry left behind.
But he ain’t yet sixteen
, thought Tanner desperately. He wanted very much to be back there with them, with Shekel and his lady. Tanner hefted his huge harpoon and thought about the fighting that was coming, and he pissed suddenly in his fear. His urine warmed him briefly, then dissipated with the current.

Everywhere, throughout Armada and across all the free-floating ships preparing to defend it, there were weapons.

The city’s armories and arsenals were unlocked, and the military technologies of thousands of years and hundreds of cultures were brought out and wiped clean: cannons, harpoons, and flintlocks; swords and crossbows and longbows and rivebows; and more esoteric weapons: stingboxes, baan, yarritusks.

Across the city, dirigibles of all sizes were rising slowly above the rooftops and rigging, like sections of architecture broken free. Over the horizon to the west, smoke could be seen from the Crobuzoner engines.

There was a huge scrum on the deck of the
Grand Easterly
as all the lieutenants, officers, captains, and rulers of all the ridings jostled to hear Uther Doul, the soldier, give them orders. Bellis stood motionless nearby, ignored by everyone around her, and listened.

“Their gunboats outnumber ours,” he said tersely, “but look around.” He pointed out at the morass of steamers and tugs that had until recently spent their days pulling Armada across the ocean, and that now circled it in aimless freedom. “Tell the crews manning those vessels to turn them by gods
into
gunboats.

“Word’s been sent to the Brucolac and his cadre: they’ll be informed as soon as they wake. Send some fast boats or airships to the edge of Dry Fall, to wait for them.

“We don’t know the Crobuzoners’ strength underwater,” Doul continued. “Submariners, you’ll have to judge when to attack. But they’ll have no airships. The likes of that are our only real strength.” He indicated the
Trident
bobbing from the
Grand Easterly
’s tail. It was being loaded with gunpowder and fat bombs. “Send them in first and fast. Don’t hold back.

“And listen—concentrate on the warships. The ironclads and scouts will hurt us, but we can withstand their firepower. Those warships . . . they could sink the city.” A rill of horror ran over the deck. “They’re carrying the fuel reserves: the Crobuzoner fleet is depending on those warships to get home.”

With a stunned jolt, Bellis realized what was happening. Her mind slipped like a broken gear, ignoring the rest of Doul’s instructions and grinding over and over the same pattern of thought.
A ship from
home
a ship from
home . . .

With sudden, desperate eagerness, she gazed out at the faint shading of smoke in the west.
How do I reach them?
she thought, disbelieving, exultant, and giddy.

The Crobuzoner ships finally came close enough to be seen: a long line of smoke-spewing black metal.

“They’re running up flags,” said Hedrigall from the top of the superstructure at the
Grand Easterly
’s stern. He was staring through the ship’s huge fixed telescope. “Sending us a message while they get good and close. Look: the name of their flagship and . . .” He hesitated. “They want to
parley
?”

Doul had dressed for war. His grey armor was studded with straps and with holstered flintlocks—on each hip, each shoulder, each thigh, in the center of his chest. About his body, the handles of daggers and throwing knives protruded from their scabbards. He looked, Bellis realized with a shiver, as he had when he came aboard the
Terpsichoria
.

She did not care; she was not interested anymore. She looked away and back toward the Crobuzoner ships, in agonies of excitement.

Doul took the telescope.

“ ‘Captain Princip Cecasan of the N.C.S.
Morning Walker
,’ ” he read slowly, and shook his head slowly as he scanned the pennants. “ ‘Parley requested regarding New Crobuzon hostage.’ ”

For one stunned instant, Bellis thought it was a reference to her. But even as her face spasmed with astonished joy, she realized how absurd that was (
and something deep in her mind waited to inform her of another explanation
). She turned and looked at the faces of Uther Doul, Hedrigall, the Lovers, and all the gathered captains.

She shivered to see them. Not a single one, she realized, had reacted to the
Morning Walker
’s offer to talk with anything but hard contempt.

In the face of that collective emotion, that absolute antagonism, the certainty of those before her that New Crobuzon was a power to be distrusted, fought against, destroyed, her own joy ebbed away. She remembered what she had read of the Pirate Wars, and New Crobuzon’s attack on Suroch. She remembered, suddenly, her conversations with Johannes and with Tanner Sack. She remembered Tanner’s rage at the thought of being found by Crobuzoner ships.

Bellis remembered her own terrified flight from New Crobuzon.
I crossed the sea because I was afraid for my life,
she thought.
Seeing the militia everywhere I looked. Afraid of the agents of the government. Agents like the sailors in those ships
.

It was not just the pirates—New Crobuzon’s maritime rivals—and not just the fRemade who had reason to fear the oncoming ships, Bellis realized. All her certainty left her. She, too, should be afraid.

“They’re armed enough to level a city,” Doul said to the assembled captains. “And they tell us they want to
bargain
?”

There was no one in the crowd who needed convincing. They listened silently.

“They’ll destroy us, if they have any chance at all. And they can
find
us, gods know how, across half the world. If we don’t take them now, they can come
back
again and again.” He shook his head and slowly spoke a last sentence, to a cheer that was more tense than rousing. “Send them down.”

The commanders were gone, carried to their vessels by aerocabs. Those rulers who would fight had been taken to their ships or dirigibles; those too frail or cowardly had been returned to their flagships in the city. Only Doul, Bellis, and the Lovers remained on the raised platform—and Bellis was ignored.

The Lovers were to fight in separate arenas: he from the warship
Cho Harbor
, she from the airship
Nanter
. They were taking their leave of each other. They kissed, tonguing deeply and murmuring the ecstatic sounds that Bellis recognized from her eavesdropping. They muttered to each other, telling each other they would be together again very soon, and Bellis realized that there was nothing touching about their parting, nothing tragic. They did not kiss as if it was their last chance, but hungrily and lasciviously, eager for more. They felt no fear; they seemed to feel no regret: they seemed to long to part, so that they might come together again.

She watched them with the disgusted fascination she always felt. Their scars twitched like little snakes as their faces moved against each other.

The Crobuzoner ships were less than ten miles away.

“Some of them will get through, Uther,” said the Lover, turning to Doul. “We can afford to lose ships, aerostats, submersibles, citizens. We can’t afford to lose the city, and we need you here to protect it. As our . . . last line.

“And Doul,” she said finally, “we can’t afford to lose you. We need you, Doul. You know what to do. When we get to the Scar.”

Bellis did not know if the Lover had forgotten that she was present, to have spoken so openly, or if she no longer cared.

The last dirigible had gone, taking the Lovers to their stations. The avanc had been reined in, and the city had slowed. Doul and Bellis were alone. Below them, women and men armed themselves on the broad deck of the
Grand Easterly
.

Doul did not look at Bellis or speak to her. He stared out past the
Sorghum
. Less than five miles now separated the Armadan navy and the wedge of snub-nosed Crobuzon battleships. The distance was reducing.

Eventually Doul turned to Bellis. His jaw was clenched, his eyes open a little too wide. He handed Bellis a flintlock. She waited for him to tell her to get below, or to stay out of the way, but he did not. They stood together and watched the battleships closing.

The man kisses his statue, and strolls unseen behind Bellis and Uther Doul.