The Scar (47 page)

The Crobuzoners are forcing the Armadans back.

Around the base of Bellis’ squat platform, now, is the New Crobuzon navy. She is paralyzed. Part of her wants to run to them, but she waits. She does not know how this will turn. She does not know what she will do.

Once again, someone is on the platform with her. That feeling comes and goes.

With a drab and bloody inexorability, the New Crobuzon troops encroach across the
Grand Easterly
’s deck.

Uniformed men approach Uther Doul from aft, port, and star’d. He is waiting. Armadans are falling around him, pushed back, felled by flintlock bullets and a cascade of blades.

Bellis is watching Uther Doul when finally, suddenly, sur-rounded now by fast-encroaching enemies, by pistols and rifles and curving sabers, he moves.

He calls out: a long bark that is savage but musical, that takes shape and becomes his own name.

“
Doul
,” he cries, repeating it, drawing it out like a huntsman’s call. “
Dooooouuuuul!
”

And he is answered. Armadans around the deck take up the call as they fight, and his name echoes across the ship. And as the Crobuzoners try to encircle him, try to pen him in with their weapons, Uther Doul finally attacks.

Suddenly he holds a pistol in each hand, drawn from his hip holsters, and they are raised and firing in quite different directions, each one bursting open the face of a man. Their bullets spent, he hurls the guns away from him as he twists (the men around him looking quite still), and they spin through the air at speed and smash into one man’s chest and another’s throat, and Doul has two more flintlocks in his hands, and is firing again simultaneously (and only now do his first two victims finish falling), sending two more men away in ugly cartwheels, one dead, one dying, and he is turning and the guns are missiles again, clubbing a man unconscious.

Every motion Doul makes is perfect: flawless and straight-lined. There is no excess; there are no curves.

The men around him are beginning to scream, but they are pushed on by the force of their fellows behind. They move sluggishly toward Doul, who is in the air, his legs bent under him, turning amid a pattering of bullets. He fires with new guns and hurls them away into the faces of more enemies, then lets his feet touch down again. He has a last pistol in his hand and is moving it from face to cringing face, firing, leaping, and throwing it aside, kicking out with bent legs, a stampfighting move, breaking a cactus-man’s nose and pushing him back into the bodies of his Crobuzoner comrades.

Bellis watches, breathing hard, unmoving. Everywhere else the fighting is ugly: contingent and chaotic and stupid. She is aghast that Doul can make it beautiful.

He is still again for a moment as the Crobuzoner troops regroup and surround him. He is hemmed in. Then Doul’s ceramic blade flashes like polished bone.

His first strike is precise, a thrust too fast to see that pushes into a throat and flicks out again in a spray of sap, drowning a cactus-man in his own life. And then Uther Doul is tightly encircled and he cries out his own name again, quite unafraid, and his stance changes, and he reaches across his body, releasing the pent-up motor on his belt, turning on the Possible Sword.

There is a crack like static, and a hum in the air. Bellis cannot see Doul’s right arm clearly. It seems to shimmer, to vibrate. It is unstuck in time.

Doul moves (
dancing
) and turns to face the mass of his attackers. His left arm flails backward with loose, simian grace, and with shocking speed he raises his weapon arm.

His sword blossoms.

It is fecund, it is brimming, it sheds echoes. Doul has a thousand right arms, slicing in a thousand directions. His body moves, and like a stunningly complex tree, his sword arms spread through the air, solid and ghostly.

Some of them can hardly be seen; some are quite opaque. All move with Doul’s speed; all carry his blade. They overlap and move through each other—and bite where they land. He cuts left to right and right to left, and down and up, and he stabs and parries and slashes savagely, all at once. A hundred blades block every attack that his enemies make, and countless more retaliate brutally.

The men before him are carved and lacerated with a palimpsest of monstrous wounds. Doul strikes, and blood and screams welter up from around him in unbelievable gouts. The New Crobuzon sailors are frozen. For a second, they watch their comrades fall in bloody death. And Uther Doul moves again.

He calls his name, he turns, he leaps and coils above them, kicking and spinning, always moving, and everywhere he faces he lashes out with the Possible Sword. He is surrounded, shrouded, hidden by nigh-swords, his grey armor half visible through a translucent wall of his own attacks. He is like a spirit, a god of revenge, a murderous bladed wind. He moves past the men who have boarded his ship and sends up a mist of their blood, leaving them dying, limbs and body parts skittering over the deck. His armor is red.

Bellis sees his face for one instant. It is ruined with a feral snarl.

The Crobuzoner men die in great numbers and fire their weapons like children.

With one stroke and countless wounds, Doul tears open a thaumaturge who is trying to slow him, and the woman’s puissance makes her blood boil as it dissipates; and he fells a huge cactus-man who raises a shield that deflects many hundreds of Doul’s attacks but cannot protect him from them all; and he murders a fire-throwing sailor whose tank of pyrotic gas splits open and bursts, igniting even as his face is cut apart. Countless cuts with every stroke.

“Gods,” Bellis whispers to herself, unhearing. “Jabber
protect
us . . .” She is awed.

Uther Doul lets the Possible Sword run for less than half a minute.

When he thumbs it off, and is suddenly absolutely still, and turns to the remaining Crobuzoner sailors, his face is calm. The cold, still solidity of his right arm is shocking. He looks like some monster, some gore-ghost. He breathes deeply—wet, slick, dripping with other men’s blood.

Uther Doul calls his own name, breathless, savagely triumphant.

Unseen in Bellis’ shadow, the man moves the statue down from his lips.

He is horrified. He is utterly aghast.
I didn’t know
, he thinks, frantic.
I didn’t know it could be like that . . .

The man has watched his liberators board and has seen them slowly break through those who opposed them, winning the
Grand Easterly
, taking charge of the vessel, of Armada’s heart . . . And now he has seen them withered and bloodied and destroyed in seconds, at the hands of Uther Doul.

He looks out frantically at the frigates wedged between the
Sorghum
and the city, and he tongues the statue again and feels it spit power into him. He debates racing over the side of this superstructure, over the corpses below, and onto the New Crobuzon ships.

“It’s me!” he might call. “I’m here! I’m the reason you’re here! Let’s go, let’s run, let’s get out of here!”

He can’t take all of them
, the man thinks, his courage returning as he stares at the red-drenched figure of Uther Doul below.
Even with that godsdamned sword, there are too many, and the Armadan ships are being wiped out. Eventually more Crobuzoner troops will get here, and then we can leave.
The man turns and looks out, to where the dreadnoughts are pounding the remnants of the Armadan fleet.

But even as he readies himself again to leave, he sees something.

The legions of tugs and steamers that have surrounded Armada like a corona, hauling it for decades, and that have now been left redundant by the avanc, are beginning to pull away from the city’s orbit and head for the Crobuzoner fleet.

They have been refitted by frantic crews over the last few hours: built up with guns; stuffed full of black powder and explosives, with harpoons and phlogistic cells and batteries and jags welded, bolted, soldered, and screwed into temporary place. None of them is a battleship: none is any match for an ironclad. But there are so many of them.

Even as they approach, a volley from the
Morning Walker
destroys one with a contemptuous blast. But there are many, many more behind it.

Unseen, the man’s face falters, frozen.
I didn’t think . . .
he stutters to himself, silently.
I didn’t think of them.

He has told his government everything—he warned them of the nauscopists, so that the Crobuzoner meteoromancers could hide their fleet’s approach; of the airships, so that golems were prepared; and of how many ships they would have to face. The Crobuzoner forces have been calculated to defeat the Armadan navy, which this man has researched and communicated to them. But he did not think to count those useless, age-pocked tugs and steamers, trawlers and tramps. He did not imagine them reckless and stuffed with explosives. He had not pictured them driving across the sea, into the path of an ironclad or a dreadnought, as they do now, firing their pathetic guns like pugnacious children. He did not imagine their crews abandoning them when they were mere yards away, hurling themselves from the sterns of the smoke-spewing ships and onto rafts and lifeboats and watching as their abandoned vessels ram the flanks of the Crobuzoner ships, breaching their inches of iron and igniting, exploding.

There is a smear of dirty colors to the west, and the sun is very low. The crews of the two dirigibles waiting by Dry Fall’s
Uroc
are impatient.

The Brucolac and his vampir cadre will soon be awake and ready to fight.

But something is changing in the sea aft of the city. The Crobuzoner sailors who have boarded the city are staring in horrified astonishment, the Armadans watching with fierce hope.

The tugs and steamers continue to plow toward the oncoming Crobuzoner fleet—driving on toward the battleships, their engines overheating, their wheels locked into position, their throttles wedged full ahead—until, in ones and twos, they impact. Several are blown from the water in fountains of metal and flesh before they can reach any quarry. But there are so many.

When they reach the towering sides of a dreadnought, the prows of the empty tugs and trawlers crumple, buckling backward. And as they compress, their red-hot engines burst, and the oil or gunpowder or dynamite wedged beside the engines ignites. And with ugly, oily flames; with great gouts of smoke and dragged-out explosions that dissipate some of the energy into useless sound; with one-two-threes of smaller detonations in place of one solid blast, the ships explode.

Even such imperfect torpedoes as these begin to hole the Crobuzoner dreadnoughts.

Way behind them, the broken Armada force starts to regroup. The New Crobuzon vessels are being slowed, and slowly ruined, by the onslaught of sacrificed vessels. The Armadan battleships rally their fleet and begin to fire on their stalled enemies.

The sea is full of lifeboats: escapees from the abandoned vessels that shudder their way toward the dreadnoughts. The crews row frantically, striving to avoid other oncoming Armadan ships. Some fail: some are crushed and sunk; some are swamped by the enormous bloody waves, or are caught in the heat of depth charges or are broken up by cannonballs. But many escape into the open sea, back toward Armada, watching their ugly little tugs smack into the invaders and explode.

These unexpected attackers—a ridiculous, wasteful line of defense—have stopped the Crobuzoners, ship after ship immolating itself, melting their target’s iron sides.

The dreadnoughts are stopped.

The
Morning Walker
is sinking.

There is a cheer, a rising yell of astonished triumph, from the aft edge of Armada, where the citizens can see what is happening only a handful of miles out to sea.

The roar is picked up by those who hear the cry of triumph and mimic it; and then by those behind them, and behind them. It sweeps across the city. Within a minute, men and women in the far reaches of Dry Fall and Shaddler and the Clockhouse Spur, on the other side of Armada, are screaming their ecstatic approval, though they are not sure of what.

The Crobuzoner troops stare in total horror. A great crack spreads up the side of the
Morning Walker
. More of the little ships smash into it and explode, even as it begins to buckle, even as its magisterial outline begins to twist; and it starts to angle its massive length down, as if purposefully; and frantic little figures begin to hurl themselves from its sides; and the explosions continue until its stern rises suddenly from the sea and, with a terrible shattering explosion, breaks off, spewing men and metal and coal—tons and tons of coal—into the sea.

The New Crobuzon crews watch as their chance to return home disappears. The Armadans scream their approval again, as the huge shape rolls over in the sea, ponderous and regretful, resenting every movement, and burps up fire as it is dragged below.

The Crobuzoner flagship has gone.

Frantic, its fellow dreadnoughts begin to level volleys too soon at Armada itself, churning the sea and making the city pitch as if it were in a storm. But some of the smaller ironclads are now in range, and their heavy shells shatter masts and tear through the fabric of the city.

A bomb swamps Winterstraw Market, tearing apart a circle of stallholder’s boats. Two shells arc chillingly overhead and break a hole in the side of the
Pinchermarn
, sending hundreds of library books flaming into the water. Ships are sunk, the bridges that tether them on all sides splintering.

Angevine and Shekel comfort each other, hiding from the remnants of the invading Crobuzoners. Shekel is bleeding profusely from his face.

But terrible though these attacks are, only the dreadnoughts could destroy the city, and they are not in range. They are being harried, contained, broken by the onslaught of gunpowder-stuffed tugs. The Armadan vessels keep coming. After a fifth explosion rocks its bows, the
Bane of Suroch
begins to buckle, to crack, to list, to collapse into the water.