The Scar (46 page)

His heart is beating quickly. He is packed and ready. He is carrying everything he owns in his pockets and hands. The man is disappointed but not surprised that Armada did not agree to parley. This way will be slower—though perhaps, he acknowledges, ultimately no more bloody.

So close, so close. He can almost step onto the deck of the
Morning Walker
. But not quite. It has a few miles yet to come.
They’ll send a boat for me
, he thinks, and prepares to receive them.
I told them where I’d be.

Uther Doul is speaking to Bellis now, motioning to the frantic throng below. He is taking his leave of her; he is leaving her behind on the raised roof, descending to be with his troops, and she is watching him, hefting the gun, keeping her eyes on Doul as he descends.

The man knows that those who are coming, his compatriots, will have no trouble finding him. His descriptions were clear. There is no mistaking the
Grand Easterly.

Separated by three miles of sea, the two navies faced each other. The Armadans in a mongrel mass of vessels in all colors and designs, sails and smoke billowing above countless decks. Opposite them, the
Morning Walker
and its sister-ships approached in formation, grey and darkwood blistered with large-bore guns.

A swarm of dirigibles approached the Crobuzoner ships: warflots and scouts and aerocabs weighed down with rifles and barrels of black powder. The air was still, and they made quick progress. At the front of the motley air force was the
Trident
, surrounded by smaller vessels, and aeronauts in single-pilot harnesses, swaying below their small balloons.

The Armadan captains knew that they had the weaker guns. Their ships were more than two miles from the enemy when the New Crobuzon ships began to fire.

Sound and heat burst over the sea. A fringe of explosions and boiling waves advanced way out in front of the
Morning Walker
like outriders. The Armadan guns were primed and stoked, but remained silent. There was nothing their crews could do but urge their vessels forward through the onslaught, to bring their enemies into their own shorter range. There were more than a thousand yards of fire to cross until they could retaliate, and they slipped into the one-sided battle with grim bravado, and time changed.

Metal and metal meet, and black powder ignites, and oil combusts and flesh bursts and burns.

Below the water Tanner rocks violently, stunned by ripples of pressure. He hemorrhages, blood gouting from his gills.

Above him, Armadan ships are shadows on illuminated water. Their formations are breaking down into chaos. Some of them are eddying in confusion, and (
Jabber
) breaking apart (
Jabber help us
), breaking in two or three, slipping closer, growing bigger as they descend toward him slow as nightfall, so slow he’s imagining it, but then around him the menfish scatter and (
Godspitshitno
) broken slabs of metal are plummeting like comets with trails of grease oil dirt shrapnel blood.

The fall of broken ships howls past him spewing bubbles and bodies and disappears into the dark.

From the airships, the carnage is distant and muted: little puffs and booms, and the black-crusted glow of oil fires, and ships that are there and then are not. The Armadan fleet continues like a pack of stupid blind dogs through that merciless onslaught, diminishing as it goes, until at last its guns can reach the Crobuzoner fleet.

Seen through hundreds of feet of air, the war is like a diorama. It seems a reconstruction. It does not look real.

The screaming cannot be heard over the explosions.

Blood sluices over the sides of Armadan ships. Metal bursts and tears, and the ships are suddenly serrated, murderous to their own sailors. The Armadan gunners fire, and their shells arc in fiery parabolas into their enemies. But those thousand yards have been merciless, and the Armadan fleet is already half broken.

The sea has become charnel. The water is littered with bodies. They move with the swells and currents, in a macabre dance. They emit clouds of blood like squid ink. They are transformed by the sea: entrails fan like coral; torn swathes of skin become fins. They are broken by jags of bone.

Tanner is very slow and cold. As he rises he passes a woman who still moves, too weak to swim up but not quite dead. He turns to her with soundless horror and hauls her skyward, but her movements become the juddering of dead nerves before they reach the air. And as Tanner lets her go he sees that there is more movement all around him, that there are men and women drowning as far as he can see, that he cannot help them, that they are too weak to live. He sees their ghastly desperate motions everywhere he looks, and he feels suddenly removed, conscious not of men and women, khepri and cactacae and scabmettler and hotchi, but only of countless, mindlessly repetitive motions, winding slowly down, as if he stares into a vat of rainwater at slowly dying insects.

He reaches the surface in a moment of calm, a chance stillness in the carnage, in the middle of what was the Armadan fleet. Around him vessels are breaking up with ugly noises. They are floundering, retching smoke and fire, hissing as they slip into the cool water, sucking their dying crews with them.

Tanner struggles. He is unable to think in words. The shells begin once again to pound the water around him, to make it into a bloody broth of metal and the dead.

The air sparks. Elyctro-thaumaturgic quarrels burst from the Crobuzoner vessels; arbalests hurl vats of strong acid. But now, even broken as they are, the remnants of the Armadan fleet fight back.

They fire shells the size of men, which smack into the Crobuzoner dreadnoughts and open in ragged metal flowers. Wooden warships sail into range, weaving between enemies, and their cannons sound, denting slabs of armor, breaking through smokestacks, and snapping the moorings of guns.

The
Trident
and its airborne flotilla have reached the sky over the Crobuzoner fleet. They begin a sporadic deluge of missiles: gunpowder bombs; oil skins that burst open as they fall, raining sticky fire; weighted darts and knives. Aeronauts snipe at Crobuzoner captains and gunners. The heat from the explosions rocks the dirigibles and knocks them off-course.

Still the Armadan ships approach. They fire and come closer and explode and capsize and burst into flames and still come closer, their crews doggedly driving them toward the dreadnoughts.

A mass of dark bodies rises.

Crobuzoner thaumaturges, channeling puissance from batteries and their own bodies, have animated flocks of golems: clumsy constructions of wire and leather and clay, inelegant and rough-hewn, with claws like umbrella’s innards and clear glass eyes. Their ugly wings beat frantically to bring them skyward. They are strong as monkeys, mindless and tenacious.

They grip the ankles of the Armadan aeronauts and scrabble up their bodies, ripping open their flesh and tearing their balloons apart, sending them bleeding into the decks below.

Golems rise like smoke from the Crobuzoner fleet and slam themselves into the steering cabins and windows of the Armadan airships, blinding them, shattering their glass, slicing the fabric of their gasbags. Many fall, their bodies broken by gunfire and swords and gravity, collapsing into their lifeless inanimate components on their way down; but scores stay airborne, harrying the Armadan air fleet.

The air above the battle seems as thick as the sea. It is viscous and sluggish with the discharge from guns and fire-throwers and catapults; with sinking dirigibles bleeding dry of gas; with hunting golems and blood-mist and gouts of soot.

There is a terrible slowness, a solemn care behind every motion. Every cut, every crushing blow, every bullet boring into eye and bone, every belch of fire and bursting vessel seems planned.

It is a sordid pretense.

Through the murk Tanner can see the undersides of the enemy’s boats, and surrounding them a hundred shapes: darting spiral vessels, single-person subs in the shells of giant nautili. The Armadan submarines scatter the little craft, ram the iron flanks of the dreadnoughts, rear up like whales.

Tanner is out, suddenly, in the open water, among the darting Bask menfish who have let him into their ranks. He has reached out with his long tentacles and gripped the chitinous shell of one of the little nautilus subs. He faces the little glass porthole, and he can see the man inside stare out aghast, thinking he has gone mad to see this savagely wailing face, this New Crobuzon face, in the water, mouthing curses at him in his own language, raising a stubby weapon level to his face and firing.

The bolt bursts the glass and drives on into the New Crobuzon sailor’s face, its reinforced jag splintering his cheekbone and the base of his skull and pinning his head to the back of his tiny craft. Tanner Sack stares at the man he has killed, no, who is not yet dead, whose mouth spasms with agony and terror as the sea vomits into his ruptured sub and drowns him.

Tanner kicks backward, shaking violently, watching the man die, watching the nautilus fill with water and begin to spin and descend.

The dead and torn-apart are scattered across all the ships and across the sea as if they are scraps of burned paper distributed randomly by fire.

Tanner Sack hunts men.

Around him, vessels plummet. He is surrounded by dying men from what was once his home. They bleed and scream bubbles. They are too far down to reach the surface. None of them will breathe again.

Tanner spews suddenly, the sick forcing his throat open and billowing out from him. He feels nauseous, unstuck in time, drunk or dreaming, as if this is not real but a memory, already, even as it happens.

(Below him pass dark curious things that he thinks are his allies the menfish, and then knows immediately are not.

They are gone, and Tanner does not have the time, the luxury, to wonder what they were.)

The fighting progresses in spastic jerks. A clockwork ship from Booktown is torn open, and it sheds its gears and its massive coiled springs and the ruined bodies of khepri. The waters around Jhour vessels move oily with sap from slaughtered cactacae. Where scabmettlers are torn apart by bombs, the clouds of their blood harden as they burst, into a shrapnel of scabs. Hotchi are crushed between hulls.

The beasts summoned by the Armadan cray witches slam their fletches into Crobuzoner ships and tip the crews into the water, to snatch them up with sudden scissoring jaws. But there are too many to control, and they become a danger to their own witch-masters.

In the smog, Armadan shells find Armadan decks, and New Crobuzon javelins and bullets burst through the flesh of their own troops.

At different times, all across the battle, women and men look up and see the sky, the sun, through red clouds, through water, through films of their own and others’ blood. Some lie where they have fallen, dying, knowing that the sun is the last light they will see.

The sun is low. Dusk is perhaps an hour away.

Two of Armada’s great war steamers are destroyed. Another is badly damaged, its rear guns twisted like palsied limbs. Scores of its pirate ships and its smaller fighters are gone.

Of the New Crobuzon dreadnoughts, only the
Darioch’s Kiss
is ruined. Others are torn, but they are fighting on.

The Crobuzoner fleet is winning. A wedge of their scouts, ironclads, and submersibles have broken through Armadan ranks and are bearing down on the city itself, a few miles beyond. Bellis watches them approach through the huge telescope on the
Grand Easterly
.

The
Grand Easterly
is the redoubt, the heart of the city.

“We stand,” Uther Doul is shouting to those around him, to the snipers in the rigging.

No one has suggested anything else. No one has suggested that they goad the avanc and escape.

The Crobuzoner ships endure the barrage from the guns on the
Sorghum
(
and do not return fire, Bellis notices, do not risk damaging the rig itself
). They are close enough now that their structures can be seen: their bridges, their turrets and railings and their guns, and the crews who prepare, check weapons, gesticulate, and get into formations. Cordite billows over the deck, and Bellis’ eyes water. The small-arms fire has begun.

This is an organized raid. The invaders do not land ragged across the aft edge of the city: they maintain formation, an arrowhead, and steam directly into the bay of boats around the
Sorghum
. The Crobuzoners are intently making their way toward the
Grand Easterly
.

Bellis backs away from the railing. The deck below her raised roof boils with Armadans ready to fight. She realizes that she is trapped on this platform by a flood of armed bodies, that it is too late to run.

Part of her wants to yell in greeting—in desperate welcome—when the Crobuzoners arrive. But she knows that they have no interest in taking her home, that it is irrelevant to them if she lives or dies. She is desperately uncertain, realizing that she does not know which side she wants to win this confrontation.

As she steps back, Bellis feels suddenly as if she has walked into somebody, that she has felt a disturbance in the air, heard someone retreat from her with a quick step. She twists quickly to see, panic punching her, but there is no one. She is alone above the fray.

She looks down into the seething, armed men and women and finds herself staring at Uther Doul. He is perfectly still.

Flintlocks firing, the Crobuzoner navy boards Armada. At the point where the two forces meet, there is the most savage bloodletting. The Armadan cactacae are at the front, and the Crobuzoners are faced by a line of their massive, thorned bodies. The cactacae split men with great strokes from their war cleavers.

But there are cactus-people on the New Crobuzon side, too; and men firing rivebows with weighted, spinning chakris that smash like axe blades into the vegetable-muscles and bones of the cactacae, severing limbs and cutting fibrous skulls; and there are thaumaturges on the invading vessels who link hands and send bolts of darkly glowing unlight into the Armadan mass.