The Scar (62 page)

“Three hundred feet of the
Grand Easterly
was jutting over the void now, and all around it much smaller ships spewed into the ravine. And suddenly its weight told, and I heard a cracking like some god’s bone breaking, and the rear third of the ship, to which I was tethered, split and hinged down, hauling me with it, clinging with my arms locked around a girder, down, into the Scar.

“You wonder how you’re going to die, don’t you? Bravely, screaming, unaware, or what? Well, I met my death in a stupor, my mouth hanging like a fucking fool, as a steamer’s arse pulled me down.

“The edge of water rose up past me as I plummeted past the Scar’s lip, below the surface level of the sea.

“For a second I could see through water to the keels of ships that were
above
me, watch them plow on to their destruction. I was rushing down, and the rest of the
Grand Easterly
and every ship of the city was collapsing toward me.

“Once or twice, for moments, I saw dirigibles. Little cabs, men in harnesses, who’d managed to leap from the decks of their vessels as they went over, and were caught in the slipstream fighting to haul their balloons skyward. They were crushed and killed, again and again. A falling hull or shards of towerblocks would smash them out of the air.

“The
Arrogance
was accelerating down. I closed my eyes and tried to die.

“And then, four miles below me, the avanc moved.

“It must have been in agony, its body bursting and hemorrhaging in the air, folding over and bending double as it came out of the water wall. Half a mile of its back was through into the Scar, now. Maybe it was spasming in pain. It pushed itself very suddenly out, bursting right out of the sea, into the Scar, and down.

“It cried out again as the whole of its fucking bulk emerged, and its thrust shoved it down faster than gravity would have taken it. The avanc lurched; its chains went suddenly taut and tugged the rest of the city over the edge. The aft of the
Grand Easterly
was wrenched down, too, and the
Arrogance
was snatched so suddenly that the tattering rope that held it snapped.

“It snapped.

“My eyes flew open as the aerostat hurtled skyward, up past the falling city, up and out of the shadow of that wall of ocean, pelted by metal and sharp-split wood, out of the Scar, into the sky.

“I roared out of that crevice and careered into the sky. My arms were locked tight, holding me into place. I was going to live.

“Below me, the last of Armada slipped into the Scar. Winterstraw Market in a rain of little vessels. The
Uroc
, the
Therianthropus
, the asylum, the old sawdust boats of the haunted quarter—all become nothing. Tipping up, in sheets of spray, and going over, till the surface of the Hidden Ocean was left undisturbed.

“As I rose, I looked down directly into the Scar and saw an interference, a haze like dust, as Armada fell, and far below that the avanc, spinning as it went, wrapping itself in twenty miles of chain, moving pathetically, trying to swim out of that endless fall. Even it looked small and dwindling.

“Eventually I fell back, exhausted and stunned to be alive, and when I looked down again I could see nothing at all.”

Hedrigall’s voice ebbed away. He spoke again after several seconds of quiet.

“I went higher than I’ve ever been before. High enough to look down and see the Scar as it really is. A crack, that’s all. A crack in the world.

“I don’t know if any other aeronauts got free. But I was more than a mile up, and I saw nothing.

“The wind that high was strong, gusted me south for hours. It took me away from there. Out of that murderous place in the water, where all the currents lead to the Scar. The
Arrogance
was leaking. Split and burnt by debris. I was coming down.

“I sawed myself some hide from the dirigible, lashed it to wood from the cabin. Made myself a raft, knowing what was coming. I waited by the bay doors till we were scudding low and fast, and I threw out the raft and leapt after it.

“And
then
finally, only then, curled in my little raft, I let myself remember what I’d seen.

“I was all alone with those memories for two days. I thought I’d die.

“I thought for a moment that maybe if I could stay alive for long enough, the currents might take me and shove me out into the Swollen Ocean, where our other ships are waiting. But I’m not a fool. I knew there was no chance of that.

“And then . . . this.”

For the first time in his extraordinary story, Hedrigall sounded as if he would break down again.

“What is this? What
is
this?” The hysteria in his voice grew louder. “I thought I was dying. I thought you were a dying man’s dream.
I saw you die
. . .” He whispered it. “I saw you die. What are you? What city is this? What’s happening to me?”

Hedrigall became dangerous then, shouting, feverish, and terrified. The Lovers tried to soothe him, but it was some time before his rantings became subdued and he fell into a stupefied sleep.

A long silence followed—a long, stretched-out quiet—and Bellis felt herself back in her own skin again as the spell of Hedrigall’s story slowly faded. Her skin was elyctric; she bristled with tension. She felt all drunk on awe from his telling.

“What,”
hissed the Lover coldly, his voice fraught, “has happened?”

“It’s the Scar,” Tanner whispered to Bellis. “I know what it is. This close to the Scar, it’s
leaking
. And that Hed up there . . .” He paused and shook his head, his face haggard and bleached with wonder. Bellis knew what he would say.

“That ain’t the real Hedrigall,” said Tanner, “not the
factual
one, not the one from . . . from here. Our Hedrigall ran away. That Hedrigall’s leaked out . . . from another possibility. He’s from one where he stayed on, and where we traveled that bit faster, got to the Scar earlier. He’s what happened . . . what
will
happen.

“Oh my Jabber, oh dear Jabber and shit.”

Above them, the Lovers and Uther Doul were arguing. Someone—Bellis had not heard who—had said the same thing as Tanner. The Lover was reacting violently.

“Dung!” she spat. “Fucking
dung
! It doesn’t work that way; that’s not what happens. Out of the whole sea, you think we’d
happen to
find him, even if he
had
leaked through? This is a fucking setup. That’s Hedrigall, alright. It’s
our
Hedrigall, and he
never left
. This is a setup to turn us back. He is
not
effluvium from the Scar.”

She was furious. She let no one else speak. She raged at Uther Doul, and even at the Lover, to Bellis’ amazement; he was asking her to calm down, to just
think
. . . So close to what she sought, the Lover felt it threatened, and she was thundering.

“I’ll tell you what,” she said. “This is shit, and we will keep this lying bastard locked up until we get the truth from him. We say he’s recovering; we wait; we find out what really happened. We don’t accept this
crap
he’s spouted to us.”

“Is she
mad
?” hissed Tanner Sack to Bellis. “What’s she talking about?”

“This is obviously designed to create panic,” the Lover continued. “This is a plan to ruin everything. He’s in fucking league with gods knows who, and we can’t let them win. Uther, take him away. Brief the guards—and pick them well; pick those you’re certain of. Brief the guards about the lies he might shout to them.

“We will stop this, right here,” she said, hard. “We’ll not let this seditious shit succeed. This goes no further. We bury this story, right now, right here, and we go on. Agreed?”

Perhaps the Lover and Uther Doul nodded to her. Bellis heard nothing.

She had turned her face to Tanner at those last words. She watched him listen to his ruler—to whom he had committed himself absolutely, declared himself utterly loyal—announce her plans to deceive everyone in the city. To keep secret everything she had heard. And to drive on to the Scar.

Bellis watched a cold, a dead and frightening cast come over Tanner’s face as he listened. The muscles of his jaw clenched, and Bellis knew that he was thinking of Shekel.

Was he remembering how he’d said and thought that this—what had happened to them, being found—was a blessing? Bellis did not know. But something had set in Tanner’s face, and he looked at her with murderous eyes.

“She,”
he hissed to her, “will bury
nothing
.”

Chapter Forty-seven

Tanner Sack was known. He was the one who had fought a bonefish to save a dying man. He had Remade himself into a kind of manfish, the better for life in Armada. He had lost his boy.

Tanner was known, and he was respected.

You listened to Tanner, and you believed him.

Bellis could tell no one anything. Her mouth was hard and cold as a stone.

She had to turn to others to spread words.

Everyone knew Tanner Sack.

If Bellis had tried to tell what she had heard in that unpleasant little cubbyhole, if she tried to tell the secrets she had listened to, she would not be believed. She would not be heard. But she had introduced someone else to her room, so that he could speak for her and tell the story.

She could not help nodding. Smiling without warmth.
Gods, it’s well done,
she thought, bowing her head, acknowledging consummate work. She felt skeins of cause, effect, effort, and interaction tying around her. She felt things all coming together, pushing her into this place, at this time, having done this thing.

Oh, it’s well done.

It started almost as soon as she and Tanner came up out of the lower decks.

She blinked, and looked around her at the flags and the washing and the bridges and the towers, still all strong and knotted together with mortar. She was haunted by the images from Hedrigall’s story. She saw the city shattering and falling so clearly that it was a true relief to emerge and see it all solid.

Tanner began. The Lovers were still below, still organizing, trying to hide Hedrigall. While they secreted themselves below the air and schemed, Tanner began.

He looked first for the people he knew well. He spoke quickly and fiercely. One of the first he found was Angevine, and he involved her carefully with the group of dockers to whom he was speaking, who did not know her.

His passion was genuine, utterly guileless. He did not orate.

Bellis watched him move through the crowd still milling on the
Grand Easterly
’s decks, arguing in angry tones about what it was they had heard, about what Hedrigall had seen—how and why he had come back. There were still a good number of pirates on the huge old ship, and Tanner spoke to them all.

He trembled with rage. Bellis followed him by an irregular and discrete course. She watched him, and was impressed by his fervor. She watched the stunned reactions move like a disease through the masses. She watched the disbelief quickly become belief and frightened anger, and then resolve.

Tanner insisted—she heard him—that they had the right to know the truth, and something uncertain moved inside Bellis.

She did not know what the truth was; she was not sure what she believed. She was not sure what lay behind Hedrigall’s extraordinary story. There were several possibilities. But it did not matter. She refused to think about that now. She had been brought to this place, and she would do what was required, and bring this to an end.

Bellis watched as those whom Tanner had told then told others, and they told more, until it was quickly impossible to track the story. It moved under its own momentum. Very soon, most of those who told a garbled story of Hedrigall’s escape from the Scar could not have said how they knew it.

The Lovers had told a great deal of the truth about the Scar, as they understood it, in a popular form. There were few people in Armada who did not know that possibilities spilled from it, that that was the source of its power. Several had seen Uther Doul’s sword switched on: they knew what probability mining did. And here, so deep in the Hidden Ocean, so close to the Scar itself, with its seepage, with probabilities welling up from it like plasma, it was not hard to believe that Hedrigall—
this
Hedrigall, raving in the lower decks of the steamer—was telling the truth.

And while their own Hedrigall might be thousands of miles away, fled weeks ago, adrift above the ocean or crashed or surviving as a hermit on some foreign land or drowned in the sea, the Armadans accepted that the one they had picked up was a nigh-man. A refugee from a terrible Bas-Lag in which Armada had been lost.

“Two days ago,” Bellis heard one woman say with a dreadful awe. “All of us, we’ve been dead for two days.”

It was a warning. No one could possibly miss that.

While the sun crossed toward the lowest quarter of the sky, the story spread its fingers, passing into all the ridings. Its presence clogged up the atmosphere.

Hedrigall was hidden, and the Lovers made a stupid mistake by staying below, trying to work out plans. Over their heads, Tanner vented and ran from ship to ship, spreading word.

On the
Grand Easterly
, Bellis waited, remembering Hedrigall’s story—remembering it so that it filled her head, and she saw all the dreadful collapse again. She did not try to evaluate what he had said. It was a story, an awesome story, awesomely told. That was all that was important.

She watched the Armadans come and go around her, debating and conferring darkly. There were plans, she could see that; there was movement. Something was coming to a close.

Time moved quickly. The sun was low. All over Garwater, workshops were closing, their workers amassing, converging on the
Grand Easterly
.

At six o’clock the Lovers emerged. Some sense of what was happening had filtered down to them, some inchoate awareness that their riding and their city were in crisis.

They came out into the light, followed by Uther Doul, wearing hard and nervous expressions. Bellis saw them blink with shock at the ranks of their citizens who faced them. Scores lined up like a ragged army: hotchi and cactacae among the humans, even the Garwater llorgiss.

Above them, twitching as his nerves died in the light, was the Brucolac. And at their head, standing a little forward, his chin pushed out, facing the Lovers, was Tanner Sack.

The Lovers looked out at their men and women, and Bellis was certain that she saw them flinch. She glanced at them and then ignored them, staring past them at their mercenary. Uther Doul did not meet her eyes.

“We have spoken to Hedrigall,” the Lover began, her voice not showing any anxiety.

Shockingly, Tanner Sack interrupted her.

“Spare us,” he said. All around him, people glanced at each other, held by the force of his voice.

The Lovers stared at him, their eyes widening very slightly, their faces inscrutable.

“Enough lies,” Tanner said. “We know the truth. We know where Hedrigall—this maybe-Hedrigall, the one you’ve locked away, hiding him from us—we know where he’s been. Where he’s
from
.”

He moved forward, and the mass moved up behind him, shuffling, determined.

“Jaddock,” Tanner shouted, “Corscall, Guddrunn, you lot, go find Hedrigall. He’s down there somewhere. Bring him out here.” A group of cactacae stepped forward nervously toward the Lovers and Uther Doul, and the door behind them.

“Stop!”
shouted the Lover. The cactacae halted and looked to Tanner. He moved forward, and the crowd came with him. Emboldened, the cactus-people moved on.

“Doul . . .” said the Lover, her voice dangerous. Everyone stopped, instantly.

Uther Doul stepped forward, between the Lovers and the advancing Armadans.

And after a second, Tanner came to meet him.

“All of us, Uther Doul?” he said, loud enough for everyone around him to hear. “You want to take every one? You think you can do that? Because we are fetching Hedrigall up here, and if you threaten them—“ He indicated the cactacae. “—then the rest of us are coming with them, and you threaten all of us. Think you can take us all? Shit, maybe you can, maybe you can. But if you fucking do . . . what then? Who are your bosses going to rule?”

There were hundreds of Armadans behind him, and they nodded as he spoke, and some of them shouted their agreement.

Uther Doul looked from Tanner to the masses behind him, back to Tanner again. And then he showed weakness, his command broke, he hesitated and turned his head. Uncertain, he turned, to look to his bosses, to seek clarification. His shoulders moved in a minuscule shrug; he tilted his head in a question:
He’s right, what do you want me to do, do you want me to kill them
all
. . . ?

When he turned like that, when he showed doubt, Tanner won. He moved his hand again, and the cactacae moved past Doul and the Lovers and into the corridor, setting out to find Hedrigall, uneasy but not afraid, knowing that they would be safe.

The Lovers did not even look at them. They stared instead at Tanner Sack.

“What more could you ask?” said Tanner, his voice hard. “You’ve been shown what’ll happen to us. But you’re so fucking insane with this, so fucking caught up in it, that you’d ignore
this
? You still want to go on.

“And you’d keep this quiet from us. You’d
lie
to us, let us drive ourselves, mute and stupid as the fucking avanc, over the edge. That’s
enough
. This stops here. You take us no further. We are turning back.”

“Dammit!” The Lover jabbed her hand at Tanner, meeting his eye. She spat on the deck before him. “You fucking coward! You
fool
! Do you really think that story he told is the truth?
Think
about it, godsdammit. You think that’s how the Scar really is? And you think that out of all the ocean, out of the
entire fucking Hidden Ocean
, we found him by sheer chance? You think it’s a fucking
coincidence
that our own Hedrigall runs and then we meet
another
, from some other place, with stories to scare us stupid?

“
It’s the same man!
This was always his plan. Can’t you fucking see? We thought he’d left us, but he didn’t. Where would he go? He cut loose the
Arrogance
, and he hid somewhere. And now, when we get so close, so fucking close to the most amazing place in our world, he comes out to frighten us away. Why? Because he’s a coward, like you, like all of you.

“That was his plan. He didn’t even have the courage to run away in shame. He waited to take all of you with him.”

There were those who wavered at that. Even in her blistering rage, her points scored home.

But Tanner gave her nothing.

“You were going to keep it from us,” he said. “You were going to lie. We’ve come so far with you, and you were going to lie to us about this. Because you’re so blinded by some greed you couldn’t risk us facing you down. You know nothing about the Scar,” he shouted. “
Nothing
. Don’t tell me coincidence; don’t tell me unbelievable—maybe this is how it
works
. You don’t even know.

“All we know is that one of the best fucking Garwater men I ever knew is down there in your jail, warning us that if we go to the Scar we’ll die. And I believe him. This ends here.
We
say what happens now. We’re taking control. We’re turning around; we’re heading home. Your orders to proceed . . . are
in-fucking-validated
. You can’t jail or kill us all.”

There was a roar at that, a mass exhalation of excitement, and people began sporadically to chant
Sack Sack Sack
.

Bellis paid no attention. Something extraordinary was happening, something almost inaudible under the noisy approval around her.

Behind Uther Doul, the Lover had been watching and listening with a terrible uncertainty in his eyes. He had reached forward, touched the Lover, and turned her around, then had said something low and urgent to her, something inaudible that had made her react with incredulity and rage.

The Lovers were arguing.

Quiet came down over the crowd as they realized what was happening. Bellis held her breath. It shocked her deeply. That they could whisper to each other, their faces growing red, their scars white-scored with anger, their voices hissed, muttered curt, growing slowly louder until they shouted, ignoring those around them, who stared at them in stupid amazement.

“. . . he’s right,”
Bellis heard the Lover shout. “He’s right. We don’t know.”

“Don’t know
what
?” the Lover shouted back. Her face was outraged and terrible. “Don’t know
what
?”

Overhead, a little flock of cowed city birds cut across the sky, touching quickly down, somewhere out of sight. Armada creaked. The silence went on and on. Tanner Sack and his mutineers were frozen. They watched the argument between the Lovers unfold with an awe more fitting to a geological event.

As Bellis watched the last of the birds, her eyes came to the Brucolac’s blasted figure and stayed there, though the vampir disgusted her. His convulsions were dying down, his body calming. He opened eyes seared milk-white and blind by the daylight, and turned his head slowly.

He was listening. Bellis was sure of it.

The Lovers ignored everything outside them. Uther Doul moved silently aside, as if to give those assembled a better view.

There was no other sound at all.

“We don’t know,” said the Lover again. Bellis felt as if an arc of heat or electricity spat between the Lovers’ eyes. “We don’t know what’s ahead. He might be right. Can we be sure? Can we risk it?”

“Oh . . .” the Lover responded, her voice coming out of her in a querulous sigh. She stared at her lover with a terrible disappointment and loss. “Oh, godsdammit,” she breathed quietly. “Gods rot and fuck you dead.”

Again there was quiet, and palpable shock. The Lovers stared at each other.

“We cannot force them,” the Lover said finally. His voice shook violently. “We can’t rule without concord. This isn’t a war. You can’t send Doul to fight
them
.”

“Don’t turn away from this now,” the Lover said, her voice unstable. “You’re turning from me. After what we’ve done. After I made you. After we made ourselves together. Don’t deny me . . .”

The Lover glanced up around him, at the encircling faces. A visible panic came over him. He held out his hands. “Let’s go inside.”

The Lover was rigid, her scars glowing. She was tense with self-control. She shook her head at him, tightly raging. “Who the fuck are we to care who hears? What is this? What’s happened to you? Are you as stupid as these fools? You think the lying cant that returned bastard told us rings true? Do you? You believe him?”