The Scar (60 page)

All they have to do is keep the naysayers talking,
thought Bellis
. We can’t be so far from the Scar now. If they’re right, if it exists, we must be going to get there soon.

Standing a little behind the Lovers, Uther Doul met her eye. She realized for the first time what she had done the night of the mutiny, what she had risked. She had broken into his room and stolen an alien artifact, then delivered it to the marauders. But she was simply too tired of fear to feel it now.

When the talk was done, and as the crowd dissipated, Doul crossed the deck and stood still before Bellis, without sign of rancor or friendship.

“What happened?” he said softly. “It was you, in my room. You took it. I found the shards, at the bottom of the jail. The magus fin was there, rotting. I burned it. So that wasn’t what they wanted, after all?”

Bellis shook her head.

“They came,” she said, “but not for that. I thought it was, which is why . . . I’m sorry about your door. I was trying to get rid of them. They said they’d leave when they had what was taken from them. But that wasn’t what they wanted. It was they who . . . Fennec . . .”

Doul nodded.

“He’s alive,” Bellis whispered, wondering whether that was still true.

Doul’s eyes flashed wide for a moment.

Bellis waited. She wondered with tired nervousness what he would do. There were many things he could punish her for. She had lost Armada the grindylow figurine, for nothing at all. Needlessly. Or was there a trace of the old closeness in him?

But there seemed nothing but a flatness, a resignation in his manner, and Bellis was not surprised when finally he nodded and turned from her, walked back across the deck. She felt deflated, watching him.
What do the Lovers think of that?
she wondered. She could not imagine the Lovers giving up the magus fin without some rage.
Don’t they care?

Do they even know?
she thought suddenly.
And if they know it’s gone, do they know it was me?

That night, Tanner Sack came to her door. She was astonished.

He stood on her doorstep, staring at her with eyes so bloodshot, in skin so grey, he looked like a junkie. He stared at her with dislike for several silent seconds, then pushed a sheaf of papers at her.

“Take these,” he said. They were used and reused scraps on which she recognized Shekel’s enthusiastic script. Lists of words he had found, that he had seen and wanted to remember, to cross-reference, to look for in the storybooks he pillaged.

“You taught the boy to read,” Tanner said, “and he loved that.” He kept his eyes on hers and his face expressionless. “You might want to keep some of these, to remember him by.”

Bellis was shocked and embarrassed. She was not constructed that way. It was absolutely against her instincts to accumulate mawkish, morbid remembrances of the dead. Not even when her mother or father had died, and certainly not at the death of this child she had barely known, no matter how she felt his loss.

She almost refused the papers. She almost framed some cant about not deserving them—
as if one could deserve these ragged scraps!
—but two things stopped her.

One was guilt.
Don’t run from it, you coward,
she thought. She would not allow herself to escape it. Her personal taste in death, she told herself, was not the issue—how convenient it would be for that to let her reject these evidences. And besides her guilt was her respect for Tanner Sack.

He stood there, holding out these things that must be precious to him, offering them to someone who had caused him so much pain. And not because they shared some spurious community of grief. He offered the papers to her because he was a good man, and he imagined that she had lost Shekel, too.

Shamed, she took them, and nodded thanks to him.

“One more thing,” Tanner said. “We bury him tomorrow.” His voice skipped only a moment on the word
bury
. “In Croom Park.”

“How . . . ?” Bellis began, surprised. Armadans gave their dead sea burials. Tanner gesticulated the question away.

“Shek weren’t a . . . a sea animal at heart,” he said carefully. “He was a
city
boy more than anything, and I suppose there are traditions I thought I’d left . . . I want to know where he is. When they told me I couldn’t do it, I told them to try and stop me.”

“Tanner Sack,” she said as he turned to go, “why Croom Park?”

“You told him about it one time,” he said. “And he went to see for himself and he loved it. I think it reminded him of Rudewood.”

Bellis cried when he had gone, could not stop herself. She told herself furiously that it was for the last time.

It was a brief service, clumsy and poignant. A mongrel of theology, gods of New Crobuzon and Armada asked humbly to look after Shekel’s soul.

No one was sure what gods, if any, Shekel had respected.

Bellis brought flowers, stolen from the colorful beds elsewhere in the park.

The city was dragged on, east-northeast, decelerating very gradually as the avanc slowed. No one knew how badly it was wounded. They would not risk sending another crew down.

In the days after the war, and especially after Shekel’s funeral, Bellis felt unable to focus. She spent much of her time with Carrianne, who was as subdued as she, and who refused even to discuss where the city was going. It was hard to concentrate on the journey, and impossible to imagine what would happen when they arrived.

If the Garwater scholars were correct, the city was drawing close. Perhaps two weeks, perhaps one; that was what was whispered. A few days more until Armada reached the wound in this empty sea; and then the hidden engines and arcane science would be let loose, and all the possibilities that swarmed around the Scar would be mined.

The air was tense with expectancy, with fear.

When Bellis opened her eyes in the morning, sometimes she felt that the aether bristled, as if forces she did not understand coursed around her. Strange rumors began to spread.

First it was the gamblers, the cardsharps in the late-night games at Thee-And-Thine. There were stories of hands changing in the instant they were raised, the colored costumes of the suits shimmering like kaleidoscopes, dimly glimpsed for the tiniest moment, freezing into a configuration
after
they had been dealt.

There were stories of intrusive spirits, browners or kelkin, fleeting invisibly through the city, moving things. Objects put down were discovered again inches from their place—in places where they might have been left, but had not been. Things that were dropped broke and then were not broken, and perhaps had not been dropped but waited on the side.

The Scar,
Bellis thought with dull wonder.
It’s bleeding.

The sea and sky became very suddenly dangerous. Rain clouds appeared and raged and very suddenly went again, not quite hitting the city, skirting it. The avanc dragged Armada through violent patches, where the waves were suddenly choppy and high, in a tightly circumscribed area, with gentle waters clearly visible to either side.

Tanner no longer swam, but only dipped himself daily. He was afraid to immerse himself for long. The sounds and lights from beneath the water were strong enough now that even those on the city above could hear and see them—ejections from unseen things.

Sometimes clots of the sentient weed passed by Armada, and sometimes there were other shapes on the waves—they moved and could not easily be identified, that looked at once organic, random, and made.

Still the Brucolac floundered and did not die. The deck below him was stained with his emissions.

Walking the decks and corridors of the
Grand Easterly
, over the quiet city noise Bellis heard faint and cryptic music. It was hard to trace, evanescing across frequencies, audible at random moments and places. She strained and made it out in snatches. It was ugly and uncanny: a web of halftones and minor chords, mutating rhythms. A dirge overlaid with plucked strings. On the second night she heard it, she was sure that it came from Uther Doul’s room.

The flotsam, the strange currents in the sea, and odd events in Armada grew more frequent and powerful as the avanc plowed on. When, on the fifth morning after the mutiny, something was seen bobbing within two miles of the city, no one was surprised. But when telescopes were turned to it, a great screaming cacophony of excitement began. The lookouts on the
Grand Easterly
barked for people’s attention and ran madly from room to room, looking for the Lovers.

Word swept the city with startling rapidity through every riding, and a great rush of citizens congregated in Jhour’s aft edge. A small aerostat set out overhead, over the treacherous currents, toward the speck that eddied closer and closer to the city. Those in the crowd were gazing out at it, sharing their telescopes and jabbering in incredulity as its outlines became clear.

Clinging to a ragged raft of wood and ocher canvas, staring up exhaustedly at his home, was Hedrigall the cactus-man, the renegade.

“Bring him here!” “What the fuck happened?” “Where’d you
go
, Hed? Where’ve you
been
?” “Bring him the hell
here
!”

As soon as it was obvious that the airship that had gone to fetch him was returning to the
Grand Easterly
, there were angry cries. Wedges of people tried to run from whatever vessel they were on, through the obstructed streets, to intercept the dirigible. Crowds collided chaotically.

Bellis had been watching from her window, her heart hammering with foreboding. She joined the rush toward the flagship, impelled by motivations she did not fully understand. Bellis reached the foredeck of the steamer before the airship had come low enough for anyone within to disembark. A crowd of loyalists were waiting, surrounding Uther Doul and the Lovers.

Bellis joined the growing crowd, who jostled and pushed at the yeomanry, trying to see the returned man.

“Hedrigall!” they shouted. “What the fuck happened?”

There was a roar as he stepped down, gaunt and exhausted, but he was quickly enveloped in armed men. The little group began to approach the doorways to the lower decks, with Doul and the Lovers at its head.

“Tell us!”
The shouts were insistent and turning ugly. “He’s one of us; bring him back.” The guards were nervous, drawing their flintlocks as the Armadans pressed in on them. Bellis saw Angevine and Tanner Sack at the front of the crowd.

Hedrigall’s head was visible, bowed and sun-bleached, his spines withered and snapped. He looked around him at the congregated citizens, staring and reaching out for him, calling solicitous, and he drew back his head and began to howl.

“How are you all here?”
he bellowed.
“You’re dead. I saw every one of you die . . .”

There was a shocked silence, and then a cacophony. The throng began to push in again. The yeomanry shoved them back. The masses grew hushed and menacing.

Bellis watched Uther Doul draw the Lovers aside and whisper to them sharply, then indicate the door. The Lover nodded, then stepped forward with his hands outstretched.

“Armadans,” he shouted, “for gods’ sakes
wait
.” He sounded sincerely angry. Behind him, Hedrigall began to shout again, as if in a fever,
You’re dead, you’re all dead
, and he was bundled back toward the door, the yeomen hissing as his thorns pierced their skins. “None of us know what’s happened here,” the Lover said. “But
look
at him, by Croom. He’s a wreck; he’s ill. We’re taking him below, to our own berth, away from everything, for him to rest, to recover.”

Blazing with displeasure, he moved back, toward where Hedrigall lolled in yeomen’s arms and Uther Doul swept his eyes quick and hard over the crowd.

“It ain’t right,” someone suddenly shouted, forcing his way forward. It was Tanner Sack. “Hed!” he called. “He’s my mate, and Jabber knows what you’re going to do to him.”

There were shouts of agreement around him, but the crowd’s momentum was draining away, and though there were some curses, no one tried to follow and intercept Hedrigall or the Lovers. There was too much uncertainty.

Bellis realized that Uther Doul had found her in the crowd, and was watching her carefully.

“It ain’t
right
,” yelled Tanner, veins protruding with rage as the party entered the doors and the guards moved in behind them. Uther Doul still did not move his eyes. Bellis could not help but meet them, uncomfortable in his gaze. “He’s my
mate
,” said Tanner. “It’s my
right
. It’s my
right to hear what he has to say
. . .”

And as he spoke, at that moment, something extraordinary happened.

Bellis still met Doul’s unshaking stare, and as Tanner claimed his right to hear Hedrigall, Doul’s eyes spasmed and opened wide with an almost sexual intensity. Bellis watched, stunned, as his head inclined a fraction of an inch, as if in invitation, or agreement.

He gazed at her even as his party entered the corridors, walking backward to join them, holding her attention, raising his eyebrows a tiny bit, suggestive, as he disappeared.

Oh my gods.

Bellis felt as if she had been punched hard in her solar plexus.

A great revelatory wave washed over her: a stunned appreciation, an insinuation of the layers and layers and
layers
of manipulation in which she was caught, frozen, maneuvered and exploited, used and supported and betrayed.

She still understood virtually nothing of what was happening around her, what was being done, what had been planned, and what was contingent.

But some things she knew, humbly and suddenly.

Her own place. So much, so many plans, so much effort had been expended to bring her to this place at this instant, to hear the words that she had heard. Everything came together here and now; everything coalesced and became clear.

And in her astonishment and awe, and in her humiliation, and despite her anger, feeling herself danced undignified as a marionette to her allotted mark, Bellis bowed her head and readied herself, knowing she had one more job to do, to effect a change she wanted, and knowing she would not spite herself for revenge, and that she would do it.