The Scar (49 page)

He stood on the little platform that jutted from the smokestack beyond her door, at the top of the stairs. He had been wounded in the fighting; his face was cut and septic, his left eye puffed closed. His chest was bandaged, the ugly tentacles springing from it wrapped close to him. Tanner was holding a pistol aimed at Bellis’ face. His hand was unwavering.

Bellis stared into it, into the pit at its end. The fat, hateful understanding that she had nurtured came out of her, unstoppable. She knew the truth, and she knew why Tanner Sack was ready to kill her. And with an exhaustion she knew that if he pulled the trigger, if she heard the blast, that in the sliver of a second before the bullet burst her brain, she would not blame him.

Chapter Thirty-eight

“You murderous fucking bitch.”

Bellis gripped the back of her chair, gasping with pain, blinking to clear her eyes. Tanner Sack had hit her once, a hard backhanded slap that had sent her into the wall. The blow seemed to have taken the physical anger out of him and left him with only the strength to speak to her, hatefully. He kept his gun aimed at her head.

“I didn’t know,” said Bellis, “I swear to Jabber I didn’t
know
.” She felt little fear. Mostly, she felt a thick shame and a confusion that slurred her words.

“You fucking evil shit,” said Tanner, not loud. “You fucking bloodsucker, you bitch, you bitch, fuck you . . .”

“I didn’t know,” she said again. The gun did not waver.

He swore at her again, a drawn-out drawl of invective, and she did not interrupt. She let him speak until he was tired. He cursed her for a long time, and then suddenly changed his tack, speaking to her in what was almost a normal tone.

“All them dead. All that blood. I was under the waves, you know that? I was
swimming
in it.” He whispered the words at her. “I was swimming in the fucking blood. Killing men like me. Stupid New Crobuzon boys that might’ve been my mates. And if I’d been took back, if they’d got their way, if they’d done what they wanted, if they’d taken this fucking city, then the killing wouldn’t have stopped. I’d be on my way to the colonies now. A Remade slave.

“My boy,” he said, suddenly hushed. “Shekel. You know Shekel, don’t you?” He stared at her. “He helped you a few times. Him and his lady, Angevine, got caught up in the fighting. Ange can take care of herself, but Shekel? He got himself a rifle, stupid lad. A bullet hit the rail under him, and the splinters tore open his face. It’s a mess. He’ll always be marked—always. And there am I, thinking that if that Crobuzoner had moved his gun an inch—a fucking
inch
—then Shekel’d be gone. He’d be
gone
.”

Bellis could not insulate herself from his desolate tone.

“Like all the others who’ve gone.” Tanner’s voice was drab. “And who killed them, all the dead crews? Who killed ’em? Had to call for help, didn’t you? Did you even think about what might happen? Did you? Did you care? Do you care now?” His words hammered her, and even as she shook her head—
that’s not how it was
—she felt deep shame. “You killed them, you traitor fuck.

“You . . . and me.”

He kept the gun steady, but his face distorted.

“Me,” he said. “Why’d you bring
me
in?” His eyes were bloodshot. “You nearly killed my boy.”

Bellis blinked away her own tears.

“Tanner,” she said, and her voice was throaty. “Tanner,” she said slowly, raising her hands in a helpless gesture. “I swear to you, I swear to you, I
swear
. . . I didn’t know.”

She supposed that he had always had some vestige of doubt, some uncertainty, or he would have simply blown her away. She spoke to him for a long time, stumbling over her words, trying to find ways to express what sounded impossible, utterly untrue, even to her.

All the time she spoke, his gun never left her face. As she told Tanner what she had realized, Bellis stopped speaking, from time to time, as the truth of it sank into her.

The window was visible over Tanner Sack’s shoulder, and she stared through it as she spoke. That was much easier than meeting his eyes. Whenever she glimpsed his face, she burned. The outrage of betrayal, and most of all the shame, scoured her.

“I believed what I told you,” she told him, and remembering the carnage, she winced so hard it hurt. “He lied to me, too.”

“I don’t fucking know how they found Armada,” she said, a little time later, still in the face of Tanner’s scorn and livid disbelief. “I don’t know how it works; I don’t know what they did; I don’t know what information or machinery he stole to let it happen. There was something . . . He must have hidden something; he must have given them something they needed, something to track us, in that message . . .”

“The one you gave
me
,” Tanner said, and Bellis hesitated, then nodded.

“The one he gave me, and I gave you,” she said.

“I was convinced,” she said. “Jabber, Tanner, why do you think I was on the
Terpsichoria
? I was a fucking exile, Tanner.” He kept quiet at that.

“I was running,” Bellis went on. “I was
running
. And damn, I don’t like it here, this isn’t my place . . . But I was running. I wouldn’t call those bastards; I wouldn’t trust them. I was on the run because I was scared for my fucking neck.” He looked at her curiously. “And anyway . . .” She hesitated to say more, fearing that she would sound ingratiating, though she wanted to tell him the truth.

“Anyway . . .” she continued, keeping her voice calm. “Anyway, I wouldn’t have done that. I’d not do that to . . . to you, to any of you. I’m not a fucking magister, Tanner. I’d not wish their justice on any of you.”

He gazed back at her, his face like stone.

What decided him, she realized later, what led him to believe her, was not her sadness or her shame. He did not trust those, and she did not blame him. What convinced him that she was telling the truth, that she had been as duped as him, was her rage.

For a long, wordless, miserable time, Bellis felt herself trembling, and her fists clenched bone-hard and white.

“You fucker,” she heard herself say, and shook her head.

Tanner could tell she was not speaking to him. She was thinking of Silas Fennec.

“He told me lies,” she spat suddenly to Tanner, surprising herself, “after lie after
lie
. . . so that he could use me.”

He used me,
she thought,
like he used everyone else. I watched him at work; I knew what he did, how he used people, but . . .

But I didn’t think he was doing it with me
.

“He humiliated you,” Tanner said. “Thought you were special, did you?” he sneered. “Thought you could see through him? Thought you was in it together?”

She stared at him, white-hot with rage and self-disgust at being gulled by Silas like some stupid naÏve, like his puppets, like everyone else.
Me more than all the poor fools reading Simon Fench’s pamphlets; me more than every poor stupid fuck acting as his contact.
She was sick at the contempt, the ease, with which he had lied to her.

“You piece of shit,” she muttered. “I’ll fucking destroy you.”

Tanner sneered at her again, and she knew how pathetic she sounded.

“Do you think any of what he said was true?” Tanner Sack asked her.

They sat together, stiff and uncertain. Tanner still held the gun, but loosely. They had not become coconspirators. He looked at her with dislike and anger. Even if he believed that she had not set out to harm Armada, she was not his comrade. She was still the one who had persuaded him to be message-boy. It was she who had implicated him in the butchery.

Bellis shook her head in slow dudgeon.

“Do I think New Crobuzon is under attack?” she said disgustedly. “Do I think the most powerful city-state in the world is being threatened by malevolent fish? That two thousand years of history is about to end, and that only I can save my home?
No,
Tanner Sack, I don’t. I think he wanted to get a message home, and that was all. I think that manipulative fuck played me like a fiddle. Like he plays everyone.”
He’s an assassin, a spy; he’s an agent,
she thought.
He’s exactly what I was running from. And still, lonely and credulous like some fucking lost fool, I believed him.

Why would they come for him?
she thought suddenly.
Why would they cross four thousand miles just to rescue one man? It wasn’t for him, and I don’t think it was for the
Sorghum
.

“
There’s more to this . . .” she said slowly, and tried to form thoughts. “There’s more to this than we can see.”

They wouldn’t come this far, risk this much, just for him, no matter how good an agent he is. He
has
something,
she realized.
He has something they want
.

“So what are we going to do?”

It was growing light. The city’s birds were sounding. Bellis’ head ached; she was terribly tired.

She ignored Tanner’s question for a moment. As she looked out of the window, she could see the sky paling and the silhouettes of rigging and architecture etched in black. It was very still. She could see the waves against the city’s sides, could make out Armada’s faint northern passage. The air was cool.

Bellis wanted one more moment in this time, one more suspended second, when she could breathe, before she spoke, and answered Tanner, and set in motion a clumsy, claustrophobic endgame.

She knew the answer to his question, but she did not want to give it. She did not look at him. She knew he would ask again. Silas Fennec was still free in the city, having seen his attempted rescue fail, and there was only one thing that could be done. She knew that Tanner knew it, that he was testing her, that there was only one possible answer to his question and that if she failed to give it, he might still shoot her dead.

“What are we going to do?” he said again. She looked up at him, weary. “You know that.” She laughed unpleasantly. “We have to tell the truth.

“We have to tell Uther Doul.”

Chapter Thirty-nine

Here we drift, near the northern rim of the Swollen Ocean, and only—what?—a thousand, two thousand miles to the west, the northwest, is the Cunning Sea. And nestled in the crooks of its coast, on the shoreline of an unmapped continent, is the colony of Nova Esperium.

Is it the small, bright, glittering city of which I have seen pictures? I have seen heliotypes of its towers, and its grain silos, and the forests that surround it, and the unique animals of its environs: framed and posed, sepia, hand-colored. There’s a new chance for everyone in Nova Esperium. Even the Remade, the indentured, the laborers, can earn freedom.

(Not that that is true.)

I have pictured myself looking down at the settlement from the slopes of the mountains I can see in those pictures (washed out by distance, out of focus). Learning the languages of the natives, picking over the bones of old books that we might find in the ruins.

It is ten miles from New Crobuzon to the estuary, to the edge of Iron Bay.

I keep finding myself in that place, in my memories, beyond the city, poised between the land and the sea.

I have lost my seasons. I left when autumn became winter, and that is the last strong sense I have of time. Since then the heat and cool and cold and heat again have been chaotic, ill-mannered, random, to me.

Perhaps it is autumn again in Nova Esperium.

In New Crobuzon, it is spring.

I have knowledge that I cannot use, on a journey I cannot control, the aims of which I do not share or understand, and I am longing for a home I fled, and for a place I have never seen.

There are birds beyond these walls, sounding to each other, violent and stupid, wrestling with the wind, and with my eyes closed I can pretend to watch them; I can pretend to be on any ship, anywhere in the world.

But I open my eyes (I must), and I am still here, in this Senate chamber again, standing beside Tanner Sack, and my head is lowered, and I am in chains.

A few feet in front of Bellis and Tanner, Uther Doul was concluding his address to the city’s rulers: the Lovers, Dynich, the new Curhouse Council, and all the others. It was after dark. The Brucolac was also attending. He was the only ruler not marked by the war—all the others bore scars or blasted expressions. The rulers listened to Uther Doul. Now and then they glanced at the prisoners.

Bellis watched them watching her and saw the anger in their eyes. Tanner Sack could not look up. He was wrapped very tight in misery and shame.

“We’re agreed,” said Uther Doul. “We must move quickly. We can assume that what we’ve been told is correct. We must bring Silas Fennec in, immediately. And we can also assume that if he hasn’t yet worked out that we’re hunting him, he will do so soon.”

“But how did he fucking do it?” shouted King Friedrich. “I mean, I understand about this fucking
package
, this fucking message . . .” He glared at Bellis and Tanner. “But how did Fennec get hold of a fucking lodestone? The compass factory, for fuck’s sake . . . it’s guarded tighter than my fucking treasury. How did he get in?”

“That we don’t yet know,” said Uther Doul, “and it is one of the very first things we’ll ask him. As far as possible, we have to keep this business quiet. As Simon Fench, Fennec . . . is . . . not without supporters,” Doul went on. The Lovers did not look at each other. “We shouldn’t risk . . . angering any citizens. We need to move now. Does anyone know how we might start?”

Dynich coughed and raised his hand. “I have heard rumors,” he began hesitantly, “that Fench operates out of certain drinking holes—“

“King, let me speak,” the Brucolac interrupted in his scraped-up voice. Everyone looked at him in surprise. The vampir seemed unusually hesitant. He sighed and unrolled his flickering tongue, then continued.

“It’s no secret that Dry Fall riding has strong differences with the rulers of Garwater over the summoning of the avanc, and the city’s trajectory—which is still undisclosed,” he added with a brief flash of anger. “However—“ His tan eyes took in the room like a challenge. “—I hope it would never be alleged that the Brucolac, or any of my cadre, are less than absolutely loyal to this city. It’s a matter of deep regret to us that we weren’t able to fight for Armada in the war that’s just passed.

“I know,” he went on quickly, “that my citizens fought. We have our share of the dead—but not me and mine. And we feel that. We owe you a debt.

“I know where Silas Fennec is.”

There was a quick chorus of gasps.

“How do you know?” said the Lover. “How
long
have you known?”

“Not long,” said the Brucolac. He met her eyes, but he did not look proud. “We found out where
Simon Fench
rested his head and printed his works. But you know . . .” he said with sudden fervor. “You
know
that we had no idea of his plans. We would never have allowed this.”

The implication was obvious. He had allowed “Simon Fench” to spread his influence, to print his dissident literature and unleash damaging rumors, so long as he had thought the victim of that activity would be Garwater rather than the city as a whole. He had not known about the Crobuzoner fleet that Fennec had called. Like Tanner and Bellis, he found himself implicated in what had happened.

Bellis watched, sneering inwardly at the Lovers’ ostentatious outrage.
As if you’ve never done the same or more,
she thought.
As if that’s not how all of you bastards operate against each other
.

“I’m aware,” hissed the Brucolac, “of how this stands. And I want this bastard brought down as much as any of you do. Which is why it will be a pleasure, as well as a duty, to take him.”

“
You
don’t take him,” said Uther Doul. “I take him—my men and I.”

The Brucolac turned his yellowing eyes to Doul. “I have certain advantages,” he said slowly. “This mission is important to me.”

“You do not get absolution this way, Deadman,” Doul said coldly. “You chose to let him play his games unimpeded, and this is the result. Now, tell us where he is, and then your interference ends.”

There was silence for several seconds.

“Where is he?” shouted the Lover suddenly. “Where’s he been hiding?”

“That’s another reason it makes sense for my cadre to hunt him,” the Brucolac replied. “He’s in a place many of your troops might refuse to go. Silas Fennec is in the haunted quarter.”

Doul did not flinch. He stared at the vampir. “You do not take him,” he said again. “I am
not
afraid.”

Bellis listened with shame, and a slow-burning hatred for Fennec.
You fuck,
she thought with savage satisfaction.
Let’s see you lie your way out of this.

Even though he might still be her best hope to get out, she could never allow that fucking pig to lie to her, to use her. That could not go without payback, no matter the cost. She would rather take her chances in Armada, or at the Scar.

You should have fucking told me, Silas
, she thought, breathing hard with fury.
I wanted—I want—to get away, too. If you’d told me the truth—if you’d been open, if you’d been honest, if you’d not used me—I might have helped you,
she thought.
We might have done it all together.

But she knew that was not true.

Desperate as she was to get out of this place, she would not have helped him had she known his plans. She would not have been party to that.

With dreadful self-disgust, Bellis realized that Silas had judged her well. His job was to know what he could tell to whom, to know how far those around him would go, and to lie to them accordingly. He had to judge what to tell each of his pawns.

He had been right about her.

Bellis remembered Uther Doul’s rage when she and Tanner had come to him.

He had stared at them as they explained, his face growing stiller and more cold, his eyes darker, as they spoke. Flustered, Bellis and Tanner in turn had tried to explain to him that they had known nothing, that they had both been used.

Tanner had gabbled, and Doul had been impassive, waiting for him to finish and punishing him with silence, saying nothing at all. But then he had turned to Bellis and waited for her explanations. He had unnerved her—he was quite unmoving when she told him that she knew Silas Fennec,
Simon Fench
. He had not seemed surprised at all by that. He had stood quietly, waiting for more information. But when she told him what she had done, what she had couriered for Fennec, then quite suddenly Doul had exploded with anger.

“
No
,” he had shouted. “What did he
do
?”

And when she had murmured something to him—some shamefaced, stuttered assertion that she had had no idea, that she had never
dreamed
, that she could not have
known
—he had stared at her very hard, with an expression of cold dislike and cruelty that she had never seen him wear before and that had cut her to her innards.

“Are you sure?” he had said to her, appallingly. “Is that so? No idea? None at all?”

He had birthed a maggot of doubt in her head that grubbed pitilessly through her remorse and misery.

Did I never know? Did I never doubt?

The rulers were arguing about the geography of Armada’s haunted quarter, about the ghuls and the tallow ghast, about how they should set their trap.

Bellis spoke loud enough to interrupt them all. “Senate,” she said. They were silent.

Doul took her in, his eyes absolutely unforgiving. She did not flinch.

“There’s something else that should be remembered,” she said. “I don’t believe that New Crobuzon would cross so many thousands of miles out of
love
. They wouldn’t risk all those ships, and all that effort, not even for the
Sorghum
, and certainly not just to bring their man home.

“Silas Fennec has something they want. I don’t know what it is, and I . . . I swear to you that I would tell you if I knew. I believe . . . One thing I believe is true, that he told me, is that he spent time in High Cromlech, and most recently in The Gengris. I saw his notebooks, and I believe that.

“He told me that the grindylow had hunted him. And maybe that was true, too. Perhaps because of something he’d taken: something that New Crobuzon would risk crossing the world for, when they found out he had it. Perhaps that’s why they came.

“You’ve all agreed that he’s done things he should never have been able to do: stolen things, broken into impregnable places. Well, perhaps whatever Silas Fennec has—whatever he stole, whatever the Crobuzoners came to fetch—is behind all that. So I suppose I’m saying . . . remember that, when you track him down, that he might be using something . . . And be careful.”

There was a long, unbending silence after she spoke.

“She’s right,” someone said.

“And what of her?” said a pugnacious youth from the Curhouse Council. “Do you—do
we
—believe them? That they knew
nothing
? That they were just trying to save their own city?”

“
This
is my city,” shouted Tanner Sack suddenly, to shocked silence.

Uther Doul looked at Tanner, whose head slumped slowly back down.

“We deal with them later,” Doul said. “They’ll be incarcerated for now, until we bring in Silas Fennec. Then we can question him, and we can judge.”

It was Uther Doul himself who led Tanner and Bellis to their cells.

He took them from the meeting room into the warren of tunnels that riddled the
Grand Easterly
. Through the darkwood paneled corridors, past ancient heliotypes of New Crobuzon sailors. Down gaslit tunnels. Where they eventually stopped, there were strange sounds of settling metal and laboring engines.

Doul pushed Tanner (
gently
) through a door, and Bellis glimpsed a sparse berth within: a bunk, a desk and chair, a window. Doul turned away from Bellis and walked on. He judged correctly that she would follow him: even like this, toward her own imprisonment.

In the cell, the darkness beyond the window was not cloudy night. They were lower than the waterline, and her porthole opened onto the unlit sea. She turned and held onto the door, stopping Doul from pushing it closed.

“Doul,” she said, and looked for any sign of softness, or friendship or attraction or forgiveness, and saw none.

He waited.

“One thing,” she said, meeting his eyes resolutely. “Tanner Sack . . . he’s a bigger victim here than anyone. He’d do nothing to endanger Armada. He’s in hell; he’s broken. If you’re going to punish anyone . . .” She drew shaky breath. “I’m trying to say, if you’re interested in justice, you’ll . . . not punish
him
, at least. Whatever else you decide. He’s the most loyal Armadan—the most loyal Garwater man—I know.”

Uther Doul stared at her for a long time. He twisted his head slowly to one side, as if curious.

“Goodness, Miss Coldwine,” he said eventually, his voice level: softer, more beautiful than ever. “By the gods. What a display of bravery, self-sacrifice. To take onto yourself the largest share of blame, to altruistically beg mercy for another. Had I suspected you of base motivations and manipulations—of deliberately and cynically or uncaringly bringing war to my city—had I been considering treating you severely for your actions, I believe I would have to rethink now, in the light of this, your obvious . . . selfless . . . nobility.”

Bellis had looked up sharply as he began to speak, but her eyes widened as he continued. His level voice became sour as he mocked her.

She burned, utterly dismayed. Shamed, and alone again.

“Oh,” she breathed. She could not speak.

Uther Doul turned the key and left Bellis alone to watch the fishes that swarmed stupidly to whatever light spilled from her window.

There was no such thing as silence in Armada. In the quietest part of the longest night, without a soul on any side, the city was full of noises.

The wind and water played it incessantly. Armada rode on swells, and compacted, and spread its substance wide and brought it tight again. The rigging whispered. Masts and smokestacks shifted uncomfortably. Vessels knocked together for hour upon hour, like bones, like someone infinitely stupid and patient at the door of an empty house.