The Scar (50 page)

The city came closest to true silence in its empty haunted quarter. The tapping and grating and slopping of water seemed more hollow there. But in that place there were other, more obscure sounds that frightened those who heard them, and kept intruders away.

A slow crackling, like a tower of kindling collapsing. The rhythmic thudding of something mechanical piercing wood. A faint crooning like a mistuned flute.

The haunted quarter lolled among its odd noises, and moldered and swelled faintly with years of water, and continued its long, drawn-out collapse. No one knew what was hidden there in its age-blistered boats.

The
Wordhoard
was the largest vessel in the haunted quarter. An ancient ship more than four hundred feet long, carved in ocher wood, once deep-stained with intense colors, all blasted now by age and salt air. It was littered with the debris of five masts and a profusion of derricks and stays and yards. The staves and poles lay across the deck like crosshatching. They were losing their shapes, rotting and worm-eaten into nothing.

It was almost midnight. Sounds came from Dry Fall and Thee-And-Thine ridings: drinking and everything that went with it; mechanical noises of reconstruction from the building sites created by the war. There were still bridges linking the ridings to the haunted quarter, old and unused, put in place unknown numbers of years ago and tenaciously refusing to become dust.

From a rude little barge at the edge of Thee-And-Thine, a man crept across water to the derelict vessels beyond. He walked without fear through a shipscape of decay: mildew, and rust corrosive as frostbite. There was only starlight to see by, but he knew his way.

At the fore of an iron trawler, the great winches were split, and they splayed their mechanical innards as if they had been butchered. The man picked a way through the greased carnage and crossed onto the
Wordhoard
. Its long deck reared out before him, listing a little off true.

(It was held below by the vast chain, fitted long ago, that stretched down into the water and held the avanc in place.)

The man descended into the darkness at the haunted vessel’s core. He was not quiet. He knew that if he was heard, he would be thought a phantom.

He moved through half-lit corridors, their contours outlined with thaumaturgy or phosphorescent mold.

The man slowed and looked around him, his face creasing in hard concern, his fingers tightening on the statue he held. When he reached age-slimed steps leading down, he stopped, resting his free hand on the banister. He held his breath and turned his head slowly around him, staring hard into every dark place, listening.

Something was whispering.

That was a sound the man had never heard before, even on these ghost-infested decks.

The man turned. He gazed into the pitch-black at the end of the passageway as if it were a battle of wills, as if he tried to stare down the darkness, until eventually he won, and it gave up what it had been hiding.

“Silas.”

A man stepped out of the shadow.

Instantly Silas Fennec brought up the statue in his hand and slammed his tongue deep into its gorge. The figure was running at him, covering the distance in the darkness, a sword extended.

And suddenly there were others. Hard-faced figures emerged from boltholes in the wood, all around, and came at him with shocking speed. They bore down on him with guns and weapons outstretched.

“
Keep him alive!”
shouted Doul.

Silas Fennec felt a tremor from the lascivious tongue of his stone icon, and puissance roared through him. He stepped up—up onto spaces that he would not have seen or been capable of treading a moment before. Fennec twisted as the first Garwater man passed stupidly below him, then he opened his mouth and gasped as his gut spasmed. With a retching growl he spewed up a bolt of green-black glowing bile, a mouthful of thaumaturgically charged plasma that was not quite viscous liquid and not quite energy. It burst from him and landed foursquare in his attacker’s face.

Silas Fennec stepped quickly through ways of seeing, leaving the corridor, rising through the boat, the man on whom he had spat shrieking weakly and clawing himself, and dying.

The yeomanry were everywhere, emerging from doors and clutching at his clothes. They burst from closed spaces like rats or dogs or worms or gods knew what, reaching out for him and swinging their blades. They were quick, chosen for skill and courage: a plague, an infestation, an invasion, hemming him, penning him in, hunting him down.

Jabber and fuck they’re all around me,
Fennec thought, and hungrily pressed his mouth again to the statuette. Planes and angles folded around him, reconfiguring in his path and wake, and he twisted and bolted up stairs feeling like a drowning man, reaching for air. He was angry.

The Garwater crew grabbed for him, gripped hold of what they could.
You do not fuck with me,
he thought, and felt a swell of power.
I can do more than fucking run
. He turned, snarling, spat and spewed and puked at his attackers, venting the baleful coagulum that collected in him with the statue’s kiss. He rolled his tongue and hawked snotty jets of the stuff at the faces around him.

Where the sputum hit, it corroded normal space like a dimensional acid, and the yeomen cried out in dreadful alien pain as their eyes and bones and flesh folded in on themselves and out of corporeality, dissolving, dissipating, torn away in impossible directions. They lay wounded and wetly screaming, and Silas looked at them without pity as he passed, seeing their faces flayed of reality, bleeding a viscous nothingness that spat and sizzled, their heads and chests punctured with holes into a void. They hemorrhaged into that unspace, a deadening vacuity spreading like gangrene from the edges of their wounds so that their flesh became hard to notice, vague and irrelevant, and then suddenly did not exist.

His attackers rolled and screamed as long as they still had mouths.

Fennec kept running, his heart hammering. He ran and kissed and bent space with his intricate steps, unfolding the planes around him.

Uther Doul followed him grimly, with such tenacity that even confined to conventional space, he stayed on Fennec’s tail.

Doul was relentless.

Fennec burst from the dark confines of the
Wordhoard
and slammed into the air. He hung poised for a moment, tongue bloody from the statue’s marble teeth.

Fuck you all
, he thought fiercely, all his fear running out of him. He plunged his tongue deep into his statue, felt power coruscate him, felt aglow with it like a dark star. Whirling, he skittered through a fringe of torn rigging, moving up by the shadows of wires, bending reality around him, buckling it and sliding along the fold he had created—up, out over the decrepit ship.

A corps of grim yeomanry rose from the hatch below and spread with expert speed across the deck. Uther Doul came with them, and he stared straight into Fennec’s eyes.

“Fennec,” he said, and raised his sword.

Silas Fennec looked down at him, grinned his rage, and answered in a voice that reverberated wrongly, sounding close up to the ear like a threatening whisper. “Uther Doul.”

Fennec was poised fifteen feet above the deck, in a corona of warping aether. Reality rippled around him. He hung unclear, his outlines oscillating between states. He moved with a slow and predatory marine grace, blurring in and out of visibility. Blood drooled from his mouth and torn tongue. He turned like a pike in the air, held suspended by the power of his statue’s kiss, staring at the men below him.

They raised their weapons. Fennec shimmered, and bullets passed through where he had been—through bristling air—and spat as they disappeared. He opened his mouth, and gobs of that corrosive spit-puke flew out of him like shrapnel from a shell.

They burst across the deck and into the faces of his attackers, and there was a percussion of shrieks. The men scattered in panic.

Fennec kept his eyes on Doul.

Doul leaped out of the path of the spittle with brutal economy, his face taut, still watching Fennec. Fennec flickered and was lower, was ghosting over the deck crooning his delight, leaving a slick of caustic drool. Any man came close to him and he spat, and they backed off, or died. He tracked Uther Doul.

“
Take me, then
,” whispered Fennec with drunk bravado. His throat was raw with the uncanny spit, but he felt he could do anything, burn a hole in the universe. He felt uncontainable. Doul retreated before the puissant, bristling figure, leaping, moving with terse anger, gritting his teeth against Fennec’s voice, which still muttered up close to his ear. “
Come on . . .”

Then through the light and dark and the heaviness of wood, through the slap of water like little fists around him, the lights of Armada only a few yards away, Fennec heard a voice behind him.

“Siiiiiilassssss.”

Like the strike of a monstrous snake.

With his heart spasming Fennec turned, and through agitated space he saw the Brucolac—bestial, glowing, hate cast in bone. Leaping up out of darkness, his vast tongue uncoiled. Hurtling for him.

Fennec screamed and tried to kiss his grotesque again, but the Brucolac reached him and punched out, straight-fingered, lancing his hand into Fennec’s throat.

The strike sent Fennec caroming to the deck, supine, fighting to breathe. The Brucolac fell with him, his eyes burning. Still Fennec tried to bring the figurine toward his face, and with a kind of contemptuous ease, the Brucolac snatched Fennec’s free hand and held it effortlessly. He raised his foot (
with humbling speed
) and brought it down on Fennec’s right wrist, stamping savagely, pushing it into the deck and shattering it.

Fennec screamed in a high, silly vibrato as his ruined fingers spasmed. The statue spun across the wood.

He lay on the splinters and howled, blood leaking from his mouth and nose, and from a wrist torn apart. Fennec screamed in agony and terror and paddled his legs uselessly, trying to get away. He was fully corporeal again, broken and pathetically there. Uther Doul appeared, leaning into his field of vision.

As he floundered, Fennec’s shirt tore and flapped open, baring his chest.

It was mottled, clammy, and discolored in great patches of dirt-green and white. It glowed unhealthily like dead flesh. Here and there were ragged flanges, extrusions like catfish whiskers, like fins.

Doul and the Brucolac took in his alterations.

“Look at you . . .” murmured Uther Doul.

“Is that what it was all about?” hissed the Brucolac, looking at the statue Doul held.

Fennec continued to scream, snottily. The stone doll stared inscrutably at Uther Doul, winking at him, its open eye limpid and cold. It hugged itself with its unclear limbs cut from freezing stone, green-grey or black by turns. It gurned at him with its horrible round mouth, showing its teeth. Doul fingered the flap of skin that was folded down the statue’s back.

“That is a puissant thing,” the Brucolac said to Fennec, who shivered as shock set in. “How many Armadans has it killed?”

“Bring him,” said Doul to his unwounded men. They came forward, pausing nervously when the Brucolac did not move.

He had interfered despite Doul’s orders, and perhaps had saved his life, but Doul denied him any rueful or apologetic thanks. He simply stared at the Brucolac coldly until, defeated, the vampir moved back.

“He’s
ours
,” whispered Doul to the Brucolac, hefting the figurine.

There were yeomen dying in incomprehensible agony across the deck. Their comrades hefted Fennec without any shade of pity, grabbing him roughly, ignoring his screams.

The citizens at the outer edges of Dry Fall and Thee-And-Thine shivered to hear the sounds from the haunted quarter, and made warding signs.

“That’s like nothing I’ve heard before,” they whispered, or similar words, as the screams rang out thinly in the night. “That’s no ghast or ghul . . . That’s something new, that’s got no business in there.”

They could tell it was a man.

Chapter Forty

Uther Doul sat on the bed in Bellis’ cell. The room was still sparse, though the surfaces were now piled with a few accoutrements he had had brought from her rooms: her notebooks, a few clothes.

He watched her as she turned the grindylow statue in her hands. She ran her fingers over it carefully, curiously, feeling the intricacies of its carving. She stared at its twisted face, and into its mouth.

“Be careful,” Doul advised her as she touched her nail to one of its teeth. “It’s dangerous.”

“This is . . . the cause of it all?” said Bellis.

Doul nodded. “He carried it with him. He used it to kill several men. He folded space with it, performed thaumaturgy I’d never seen. That must be how he got into the compass factory.”

Bellis nodded. She understood that Doul was talking about the means by which Fennec had allowed New Crobuzon to find Armada. Some secret engine, some mechanism.

“It must be safe now,” Doul went on. “The lodestone must have been on their
Morning Walker
.”

Probably
, thought Bellis. A device that tracked Armada.
You’d better hope it’s not languishing on one of those ironclads, drifting all sunbaked and pocked, stinking by now with its dead crew, where maybe it could be found one day.
She turned the statue over again and studied it closely.

“From what we can tell . . .” Doul continued slowly, “from what we’ve got out of Fennec, this statue is not the main thing. Just as the point of a gun isn’t the gun but the bullet, so with this: it’s not the statue itself that has the puissance. That’s just a conduit. This,” he said, “is the source of the power.”

Doul tickled the tough, thin strip of flesh embedded in the statue’s back.

“This is the fin of some ancestor, some assassin-priest, some thaumaturge, some
magus
. Housed in stone, in a shape that mimics its original form. This is a grindylow relic,” said Doul, “the remnant of some . . . saint. That’s what stinks of power.

“That’s what Fennec told us,” he said, and Bellis could imagine the techniques by which Fennec had been made to answer those questions.

“This is what’s behind it all,” said Bellis, and Doul nodded.

“It did amazing things. It allowed Fennec to do amazing things. But even so, I think he’d only just begun to understand it. I think New Crobuzon must have reason to believe that this . . . this charmed debris has far more power than Fennec had learnt to use.” He looked Bellis in the eye. “I don’t think New Crobuzon would come so far, try so hard, for anything less than the most powerful forces.”

Bellis looked reverentially at the object in her hands.

“We have our hands,” Doul said quietly, “on something extraordinary. We have found a very great thing. Gods know what it might allow us to do.”

This is the cause of it all,
she thought.
This is what Fennec stole. He even
told
me he’d stolen something from The Gengris. This is what he told New Crobuzon he had—didn’t try to pass it on to them, of course. They’d never have come looking for him if he’d
given
it to them. This is what he dangled in front of them, from across the world, said “Save me and this is yours,” and made them come.

This is what New Crobuzon crossed the world and waged war for. It set everything in motion. For this (unknowingly) I led Armada to the mosquito island. To send some lying message to New Crobuzon, I gave Armada the avanc instead of throwing Aum’s fucking book into the sea.

This is what everyone’s been chasing.

This magus fin.

Bellis did not know what had changed. Doul seemed to have forgiven her. His vicious demeanor had altered. He had come here to show her what they had found, to talk to her as he had done be-fore. She was nervous: she felt all uncertain of him.

“What will you do with it?” she said.

Uther Doul was rewrapping the figurine in a wet cloth. He shook his head.

“We’ve no time to examine this properly, not yet. Not now. There are too many other things to be done; too much is unfolding. We’ve been . . . distracted. This comes at a bad time.” He spoke without inflection, but she sensed that there was more than that, as he hesitated.

“And anyway, it’s done things to Fennec. It’s changed him.

“Even he doesn’t understand what, or if he does he’s saying nothing. No one knows what forces the grindylow can tap. We can’t reverse what’s happened to Fennec, and we don’t know what the full effects are. No one’s willing to become this statue’s new lover.

“So we’ll store it, somewhere safe, till we finish our project, till we reach our objective and have time and scholars to study this thing. We’ll keep all that’s happened quiet, but in case anyone did discover what Fennec brought on board, I think we’ll keep it somewhere no one would think, or dare, to look for it. Somewhere everyone knows there’s already a charmed treasure or two, and where they know the risks of trespass are just . . . too severe.”

As he said that, Doul stroked the grip of the Possible Sword for an unthinking instant. Bellis noticed it and knew where the magus fin would be hidden.

“And where,” she said slowly, “is Fennec?”

Doul stared at her. “Taken care of,” he said, and nodded briefly toward the corridor outside. “Held.”

There was a silence that stretched out.

“What are you doing here?” said Bellis eventually, quietly. “How long have you believed me?” She studied him, her confusion exhausting her.
Since I stepped onto this fucking city,
she thought with sudden clarity,
I’ve been on the edge of my nerves, every moment. I’m tired.

“I always believed you,” he said, his voice expressionless. “I never thought you summoned New Crobuzon deliberately, though I know—I’ve always known—you have no love for this place. When you came to me before, I was expecting to hear something else.

“Listening to Fennec, hearing him talk, trying to stay silent, trying to implicate you, admitting the truth . . . He’s saying different things with every minute. But the truth is obvious: you were stupid,” Doul said without emotion. “You believed him. Thought you were . . . what? What did he tell you again?
Saving your city
. You weren’t out to destroy us; you were trying to save your homeland so that one day you could return to it, still whole and saved. You weren’t trying to destroy us; you were just stupid.”

Bellis’ face was set. She was burning.

Doul watched her. “You were caught up in it, weren’t you?” he said. “In the idea of . . . connecting with your home. The fact of doing something. That was enough, wasn’t it? You . . . saving your city.”

Doul spoke in a soft monotone, and Bellis looked down at her hands.

“I bet,” he continued, “that if you ever did think about what you’d been told . . . I bet you felt uneasy.”

He said it almost kindly. The maggot of doubt was alive again, grubbing through Bellis’ head.

“There was nothing of him,” said Doul, “in the
Wordhoard
.

“His berth down in the hold, it was clean and dry. His walls were covered with notes, pinned everywhere. Diagrams telling him who’s whose man or woman, and who runs what, and who owes whom. It was damned impressive. He’d learnt everything he needed. He had . . . spliced himself into the city’s politics. Always keeping himself hidden. Different rendezvous for different informants, and different names—Simon Fench and Silas Fennec were only two of many.

“But nothing of him. He’s like an empty doll. Those notes everywhere, like posters, and a little hand printing press, and ink and grease. His clothes in a trunk, his notebook in his bag—that’s all there was of him. It was pathetic.” Doul met Bellis’ eyes. “You could examine that room for hours, and you’d still have no idea what Silas Fennec was like.

“He’s nothing but an empty skin stuffed with schemes.”

But he’s been quieted now
, thought Bellis,
and we continue northward. The Lovers win. Their troubles are over, is that right, Uther?
She stared at him and tried to reestablish between them something she had lost.

“What were you writing?” said Doul, shocking her, “when I came in?” He indicated her pocket, where she had stuffed her letter.

She always kept it on her, its many thick pages growing heavier. It had not been taken away from her. It could not possibly help her escape.

It had been a while since she had added to it. There were times when she wrote it as regularly as a diary, and weeks when she did nothing. In that small, featureless prison room, with her window facing out into nothing but watery dark, she had turned to it again, as if it could settle her head. But she had found it almost impossible to write.

“Ever since I first saw you,” said Doul. “You’ve always kept it. Even on the dirigible.” Bellis’ eyes widened. “What is it? What are you writing?”

What she said or did here, now, Bellis realized with a kind of cool panic, would reverberate for a long time. Things waited to fall into place. She felt as if she were holding her breath.

Bellis drew the paper from her pocket and read what she had written.

Dustday 9th Chet, 1780. Sixth Playdi of Flesh.

Hello again.

“
It’s a letter,” she said.

“To whom?” said Doul. He did not lean over and peer at the paper. Instead he caught her eyes.

She sighed and leafed through the many pages of the letter, finding its beginning and holding it up to him so that he could read the first word.

Dear
, the letter said, and then there was a blank. A word-hole.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“It’s not to no one,” she said. “That would be sad, pathetic, to write a letter to no one. And it’s not a letter to someone dead, or anything so . . . sad. It’s the opposite of all that, the opposite. It’s not closed down like that: it opens up; it’s a door; it could be to anyone.”

She heard herself, became aware of how she must sound, and was horrified.

“When I left,” she said, more quietly, “I’d spent many weeks, many months, in fear. People I knew were disappearing. I knew that I was being hunted. You’ve never been in New Crobuzon, have you, Uther?” She looked at him. “For all your explorations and your skills, you’ve never been there. You’ve no idea—do you have any idea? There’s a special kind of fear, a unique fear, when the militia are closing in on you.

“Who’ve they got to? Who’ve they taken, tortured, corrupted, frightened, threatened, bought? Who can you trust?

“It’s damn hard to be on your own. When I started,” she said hesitantly, “I thought I was probably writing to my sister. We’re not close, but there are times when I crave talking to her. Still, there are things I’d never say to her. And I needed to tell them, so I thought that perhaps this letter was to one of my friends.”

Bellis thought of Mariel, of Ignus and Téa. She thought of Thighs Growing, the cactacae cellist, the only one of Isaac’s friends she had remained in touch with. She thought of others.
The letter could be to any of you,
she thought, and knew that was not true. She had pushed most of them away in those frightened months before she had fled. And even before then, she had not been close to many.
Could I have written to any of you?
she wondered suddenly.

“Whoever you speak to,” she said, “whoever you write to, there are things you wouldn’t say, things you’d censor. And the more I wrote—the more I
write
—the more I need to say, the more I need to be quite, quite open. So I’ll write it all, and I’ll not
have
to close it down. I can leave that to the end. I can wait and decide who it’s to after I’ve said everything I have to say.”

She did not mention the fact that she would never be able to deliver her letter, that she would be writing it on Armada until she died.

There’s nothing strange about it
, Bellis wanted to say.
It makes sense
. She felt fiercely protective.
Don’t think about it as if there’s an
emptiness
at the other end
, she thought at him fiercely.
That’s not it at
all.

“You must write carefully,” said Doul, “only about yourself. No shared jokes. It must be a cold kind of letter.”

Yes
, thought Bellis, looking at him.
I suppose it must
.

“You exiles,” he said. “You exiles and your writing. Silas Fennec is the same. You look in there now, he’s trying to scribble in his notebook, with his left hand.”

“You let him keep it?” Bellis said, wondering what had happened to Fennec’s right hand and suspecting that she knew. Uther Doul looked ostentatiously around her room: at the clothes, the notebooks, the letter.

“You see how we treat our prisoners,” he said slowly, and Bellis remembered that she was a prisoner, just like Tanner Sack, just like Fennec.

“Why didn’t you tell the Lovers,” said Doul suddenly, “when Fennec told you that New Crobuzon was in danger? Why didn’t you try to get a message back that way?”

“They wouldn’t have cared,” she said. “They might even have been glad: one less rival on the sea. And think of the bones to be picked over. They would’ve done nothing.”

She was right, and she could sense that he knew it. Still, the maggot stirred in her again.

“Look in the letter,” she said suddenly. “It proves I knew nothing.”

For a long time, he did not respond.

“You’ve been judged,” he said at last. She felt blood cold in her stomach. Her hands trembled, and she swallowed several times and clenched her lips closed.

“The Senate’s met,” he continued, “after we’d questioned Fennec. It’s generally believed that Sack and you had no deliberate part in calling New Crobuzon here. Your story’s been accepted. You don’t need to show me your letter.”

Bellis nodded and felt her heart beat quickly.

“You gave yourselves up,” he said in a dead tone. “You told us what you know. I know you. I’ve watched you—both of you. I’ve watched you carefully.”

She nodded again.

“So you’re believed. So that’s that. You’ll be allowed to go free, if you want.” He paused then, for just a tiny second. And later Bellis remembered that pause, and could not forgive him. “You get to choose your sentence.”