The Scar (8 page)

The organization, the mumming of legality, confused her.

These were pirates. This was a pirate city, ruled by cruel mercantilism, existing in the pores of the world, snatching new citizens from their ships, a floating freetown for buying and selling stolen goods, where might made right. The evidence of this was everywhere: in the severity of the citizens, the weapons they wore openly, in the stocks and whipping posts she saw on the Garhouse vessels. Armada, she thought, must be ordered by maritime discipline, the lash.

But the ship-city was not the base brutocracy that Bellis had expected. There were other logics at work. There were typed contracts, offices administrating the new arrivals. And officials of some kind: an executive, administrative caste, just as in New Crobuzon.

Alongside Armada’s club law, or supporting it, or an integument around it, was bureaucratic rule. This was not a ship, but a city. She had entered another country as complex and organized as her own.

The officials had taken her to the
Chromolith
, a long-decaying paddleship, and berthed her in two little round rooms joined by a spiral staircase, built in what had been the vessel’s big chimney. Somewhere far below her, in the ship’s guts, was an engine that had once vented its soot through what was now her home. It had gone cold long before she was born.

The room was hers, they told her, but she must pay for it, weekly, at the Garwater Settlement Office. They had given her an advance on her wages, a handful of notes and change—“ten eyes to a flag, ten flags to a finial.” The currency was rough-cut and crudely printed. The colors of the ink varied from note to note.

And then they had told her, in rudimentary Ragamoll, that she would never leave Armada, and they had left her there alone.

She had waited, but that was all. She was alone in the city, and it was a prison.

Eventually hunger had driven her down to buy greasy street-food from a vendor who jabbered at her in Salt too quick for her easily to understand. She had walked the streets, astonished that she was not accosted. She felt so alien, bowed under culture shock as crippling as migraine, surrounded by the women and men in lush, ragged dress, the street children, the cactacae and khepri, hotchi, llorgiss, massive gessin and vu-murt, and others. Cray lived below the city and walked topside in the day, sluggish on their armored legs.

The streets were narrow little ridges between the houses crammed on decks. Bellis grew used to the city’s yawing, the skyline that shifted and jostled. She was surrounded by catcalls and conversations in Salt.

It was easy for her to learn: its vocabulary was obvious, stolen as it was from other languages, and its syntax was easy. She had to use it—she could not avoid buying food, asking for directions or clarification, speaking to other Armadans—and when she did her accent marked her out as a newcomer, not city-born.

For the most part those she spoke to were patient with her, even crudely good-humored, forgiving her surliness. Perhaps they expected her to relax as she made Armada her home.

She did not.

That morning, as Bellis stepped out of the
Chromolith
smokestack, the question
How did I get here?
broke through into her mind again.

She was out in the street in the city of ships, in the sun, enclosed in a press of her kidnappers. Men and women, tough-faced humans and other races, even a few constructs were all around her, bartering, working, jabbering in Salt. Bellis walked on through Armada, a prisoner.

She was heading for The Clockhouse Spur. This riding abutted Garwater, and was more commonly known as Booktown, or the khepri quarter.

It was a little more than a thousand feet from
Chromolith
Towers to the Grand Gears Library. The walk there took her over at least six vessels.

The sky was full of craft. Gondolas swayed beneath dirigibles, ferrying passengers across the angling architecture, descending between close-quartered housing and letting down rope ladders, cruising past much larger airships that hauled goods and machinery. Those were chaotic. Some were congealed from lashed-together gasbags, extruding cabins and engines randomly, like chance accretions of material. Masts were mooring posts, sprouting aerostats of various shapes, like plump, mutant fruit.

From
Chromolith
Bellis crossed a steep little bridge to the schooner
Jarvee
, crowded with little kiosks selling tobacco and sweets. She passed up onto the barquentine
Lynx Sejant
, its deck full of silk merchants selling offcuts from Armada’s piracy. Right, past a broken llorgiss sea pillar bobbing like some malevolent fishing lure, and Bellis crossed Taffeta Bridge.

She was now on the
Severe
, a massive clipper, the edge of Booktown riding, where the khepri ruled. Beside carts pulled by Armada’s sickly inbred ox and horses, Bellis passed a team of three khepri guard-sisters.

There were similar trios in Kinken and Creekside, New Crobuzon’s khepri ghettos. It had astonished Bellis the first time she had seen them here. The khepri in Armada, like those in New Crobuzon, must be descendants of refugees from the Mercy Ships, worshipping what was left, what they remembered, of the Bered Kai Nev pantheon. They held traditional weapons. Their lithe humanoid women’s bodies were weatherbeaten, their heads like giant scarabs iridescent in the cold sun.

With so many mute khepri residents, the streets of Booktown were quieter than those of Garwater. Instead, the air was slightly spiced with residue from the chymical mists that were part of khepri communication. It was their equivalent of a boisterous hubbub.

Punctuating the alleyways and squares were khepri-spit sculptures, like those in New Crobuzon’s Plaza of Statues. Figures from myth, abstract forms, sea creatures executed in the opalescent material the khepri metabolized through their headscarabs. The colors were muted, as if colorberries were less plentiful here, or of worse quality.

On an avenue on the
Compound Dust
, a khepri clockwork ship—a Mercy Ship that had fled the Ravening—Bellis slowed, fascinated by its cogs and architecture. Insects and husks blew fitfully into her path from the gusting deck-field of a farm ship aft, and the distant bleating of livestock sounded through slats in its lower decks.

Then on to the fat factory ship the
Aronnax Lab
, past metallurgy workshops and refineries, into Krome Plaza, where a great suspended platform reached out across the water onto the deck of the
Pinchermarn
, the aftmost of the vessels that made up Grand Gears Library.

“Relax . . . no one cares that you’re late, you know,” said Carrianne, one of the human staff, as Bellis hurried past. “You’re new, you’re press-ganged, so you might as well milk it.” Bellis heard her laughing, but did not respond.

The corridors and converted mess halls were crammed with bookshelves and guttering oil lanterns. Scholars of all races pursed their lips, if they had them, and looked up wistfully in Bellis’ wake. The reading rooms were large and quiet. Their windows were filmed in dust and desiccated insects, and seemed to age the light falling across the communal tables and the volumes in scores of languages. Stifled coughs sounded like apologies as Bellis entered the acquisitions department. Books tottered on cabinets and trolleys and in loose towers on the floor.

She was there for hours, coding methodically. Stacking books written in scripts she could not read, recording the details of the other volumes onto cards. Filing them alphabetically—the Salt alphabet was a slightly variant form of the Ragamoll script—according to author, title, language, themes, and subjects.

A little before she was due to break for her lunch Bellis heard footsteps. It must be Shekel, she thought. He was the only person from the
Terpsichoria
she saw or spoke to. She smiled at the thought of it: herself consorting with the cabin boy. He had come swaggering in to find her, almost a fortnight previously, all adolescent nerve, excited at their capture and new situation. (Someone had told him about “a scary lofty lady in black with blue lips” working in the library, he explained to her. He grinned when he said that, and she had looked away to avoid smiling back.)

He was living by various vague means, sharing a house with a Remade man from the
Terpsichoria
. Bellis offered Shekel a brass flag to help her with reshelving, which he accepted. Since then he had come several times, done a little work, talking to her about Armada and the scattered remnants of their ship.

She learned a lot from him.

But it was not Shekel who was now approaching her in the narrow corridor, but a nervous, quizzically smiling Johannes Tearfly.

It was with some embarrassment, later, that she remembered herself rising at his arrival
(with a cry of pleasure like a gushy child, for gods’ sakes)
and throwing her arms around him.

He opened to her, too, smiling with shy warmth. And after a long moment of close greeting, they disengaged and looked at each other.

This was the first chance he’d had to get out, he told her, and she demanded to know what he had been doing. He’d been sent to the library and had taken the chance to seek her out, and again she told him to tell her what he had been damn well
doing
. When he told her that he could not, that he had to go now, she almost stamped in frustration, but he was telling her
wait
,
wait,
that he had more free time now, and that she should just
listen
a moment.

“If you’re free tomorrow night,” he said, “I’d like to take you to supper. There’s a place in starboard Garwater, on the
Raddletongue
, called the Unrealized Time. Do you know it?”

“I’ll find it,” she said.

“I could come and collect you,” he began, and she cut him off.

“I’ll find it.”

He smiled at her, with the bemused pleasure she remembered.
If you’re free indeed!
she thought sardonically.
Does he really think . . . Is it possible?
She felt suddenly uncertain, almost afraid.
Do the others go out every night? Am I alone in exile? Are the
Terpsichoria
’s passengers carousing every evening in their new home?

As she left the library that evening, Armada’s close quarters and narrow streets oppressed Bellis. But when she raised her eyes and looked beyond the skyline, the Swollen Ocean weighed down on her like granite, and she felt breathless. She could not believe that the mass of water and air beyond Armada did not drown it, disappear it in an instant. She counted her coins and approached a skycab driver refilling his dirigible from a gas depot on
Aronnax Lab
.

She swayed in the cradle as it buzzed sedately a hundred feet above the highest deck. Bellis could see the edges of the city bobbing randomly, moving very slowly with whatever currents took it. There, the distant wood of the haunted quarter. The arena. The stronghold of the Brucolac.

And in the center of Garwater riding, something extraordinary that Bellis never grew accustomed to seeing—the source of the riding’s strength. Something looming enormously over the shipscape around it: the largest ship in the city, the largest ship that Bellis had ever seen.

Almost nine hundred feet of black iron. Five colossal funnels and six masts stripped of canvas, more than two hundred feet high; and tethered way above them a huge, crippled dirigible. A vast paddle on each side of the ship, like industrial sculptures. The decks seemed almost bare, unbroken by the haphazard building that misshaped other vessels. The Lovers’ stronghold, like a beached titan: the
Grand Easterly
, lolling austere amid Armada’s baroque.

“I’ve changed my mind,” Bellis said suddenly. “Don’t take me to
Chromolith
.”

She directed the pilot aft-aft-star’d—the city’s directions all relative to the colossal
Grand Easterly
itself. As the man gently tugged at his rudder she looked down over the crowds. Air eddied as the aeronaut picked a way through the masts and rigging that jutted up around them in the Armada sky. Around the towers Bellis saw the city birds: gulls and pigeons and parakeets. They brooded on roofs and in decktop aeries, alongside other presences.

The sun was gone, and the city sparkled. Bellis felt a gust of melancholy as she passed light-strung rigging close enough to grasp. She saw her destination, the Boulevard St. Carcheri on the steamer
Glomar’s Heart
, a shabby-opulent promenade of gently colored streetlamps, knotted rustwood trees, and stucco façades. As the gondola began to descend, she kept her eyes on the shabbier, darker shape beyond the parkland.

Across four hundred feet of water glinting with impurities rose a tower of intertwined girders as high as the dirigibles, gushing with flame. A massive concrete body on legs like four splintering pillars emerging from the dirtied sea. Dark cranes moving without visible purpose.

It was a monstrous thing, awe-inspiring and ugly and foreboding. Bellis sat back in her descending aerostat and kept her eye on the
Sorghum
, New Crobuzon’s stolen rig.

Chapter Seven

It rained remorselessly all the next day, hard grey drops like shards of flint.

The costermongers were quiet; very little business was done. Armada’s bridges were slippery. There were accidents: the drunk or the clumsy slipping into the cold sea.

The city’s monkeys sat subdued under awnings and bickered. They were pests, feral tribes that raced across the floating city, fighting, vying for scraps and territory, brachiating below bridges and careering up rigging. They were not the only animals living wild in the city, but they were the most successful scavengers. They huddled in the cold damp and groomed each other without enthusiasm.

In the dim light of Grand Gears Library, the signs requesting silence were made absurd by the percussion of rain.

The bloodhorns of Shaddler riding sounded mournfully, as they customarily did when it rained hard and the scabmettlers said that the sky was bleeding. Water beaded weirdly on the surface of the
Uroc
, Dry Fall riding’s flagship. The dark and rotting fabric of the haunted quarter mildewed and glowered. People in the neighboring Thee-And-Thine riding pointed at the deserted quarter’s decrepit skyline and warned, as they always did, that somewhere within, the tallow ghast was moving.

In the first hour after dusk, in the muted edifice of Barrow Hall on the
Therianthropus
, the heart of Shaddler, a bad-tempered meeting came to an end. The scabmettler guards outside could hear delegations leaving. They fingered their weapons and ran their hands over the crust of their organic armor.

There was a man among them: a few inches shy of six feet and prodigiously muscled, dressed in charcoal-colored leather, a straight sword by his side. He spoke and moved with quiet grace.

He discussed weaponry with the scabmettlers, then had them show him strokes and sweeps from
mortu crutt
, their fighting science. He let them touch the filigree of wires that wound around his right arm and down the side of his armor into the battery on his belt.

The man was comparing the Stubborn Nail strike of stampfighting with the
sadr
punch of
mortu crutt
. He and his sparring partner swept their arms in slow demonstration attacks, when the doors opened at the top of the stairs above them and the guards came to quick attention. The man in grey straightened slowly and walked to the corner of the entresol.

A coldly furious man descended toward them. He was tall and young-looking and built like a dancer, with freckled skin the color of pale ash. His hair seemed to belong to someone else: it was dark and long and very tightly curled, and it hung in unruly locks from his scalp like an unkempt fleece. It jounced and coiled as he descended.

As he passed the scabmettlers he gave a peremptory little bow, which they returned with more ceremony. He stood still before the man in grey. The two men eyed each other with impenetrable expressions.

“Liveman Doul,” said the newcomer eventually, in a whispering voice.

“Deadman Brucolac,” was the reply. Uther Doul gazed at the Brucolac’s broad, handsome face.

“It seems your employers are going ahead with their idiot scheming,” the Brucolac murmured, and then was silent. “I still can’t believe, Uther,” he said finally, “that you approve of this lunacy.”

Uther Doul did not move, did not take his eyes from the other man.

The Brucolac straightened his back and gave a sneer that might have indicated contempt, or a shared confidence, or many other things. “It won’t happen, you know,” he said. “The city won’t allow it. That’s not what this city is
for
.”

The Brucolac opened his mouth idly, and his great forked tongue flickered out, tasting the air and the ghosts of Uther Doul’s sweat.

There were things that made very little sense to Tanner Sack.

He did not understand how he could bear the cold of the seawater. With his bulky Remade tentacles, he had to descend with his chest uncovered, and the first touch of the water had shocked him. He had almost balked, then had smeared himself with thick grease; but he had acclimatized much faster than made sense. He was still aware of the chill, but it was an abstract knowledge. It did not cripple him.

He did not understand why the brine was healing his tentacles.

Since first they had been implanted at the caprice of a New Crobuzon magister—a punishment supposedly related to his crime according to some patronizing allegorical logic that had never made any sense to him—they had hung like stinking dead limbs. He had cut at them, experimentally, and the layers of nerves implanted in them had fired and he had nearly fainted with pain. But pain was all that had lived in them, so he had wrapped them around himself like rotting pythons and tried to ignore them.

But immersed in the saltwater, they had begun to move.

Their multitude of small infections had faded, and they were now cool to the touch. After three dives, to his grinding shock, the tentacles had started to move independently of the water.

He was healing.

After a few weeks of diving, new sensations passed through them, and their sucker pads flexed gently and attached themselves on surfaces nearby. Tanner was learning to move them by choice.

In the confused first days when the captives had first arrived, Tanner had wandered through the ridings and listened bewildered as merchants and foremen offered him work in a language he was learning very quickly to understand.

When he verified that he was an engineer, the liaison officer for the Garwater Dock Authority had eyed him greedily, and had asked him in child’s Salt and pantomime hand gestures whether he would learn to be a diver. It was easier to train an engineer to dive than to teach a diver the skills that Tanner had accumulated.

It was hard work learning to breathe the air pumped down from above without panicking in the hot little helmet, how to move without overcompensating and sending himself spinning. But he had learned to luxuriate in the slowed-down time, the eddying clarity of water seen through glass.

He did similar work now to that he had always done—patching and repairing, rebuilding, fumbling with tools by great engines—only now, well below the stevedores and the cranes, it was performed in the crush of water, watched by fishes and eels, buffeted by currents born miles away.

“I told you that Coldarse is working in the library, didn’t I?”

“You did, lad,” Tanner said. He and Shekel were eating below an awning at the docks while the deluge continued around them.

Shekel had arrived at the docks with a little group of raggedy-arsed youngsters between twelve and sixteen years old. All the others, from what Tanner could tell, were city-born; and that they had let a press-ganged join them, one who still struggled to express himself in Salt, was evidence of Shekel’s adaptability.

They had left Shekel alone to share his food with Tanner.

“I like that library,” he said. “I like going there, and not just because of the ice woman, neither.”

“There’s a lot worse you could do than settle into some reading, lad,” said Tanner. “We’ve finished Crawfoot’s Chronicles; you could find some other stories. You could read them to me, for a change. How’re your letters?”

“I can make them out,” said Shekel vaguely.

“Well, there you go then. You go and have a word with Miss Coldy, and get her to recommend some reading for you.”

They ate silently for a while, watching a group of the Armada cray come up from their hivewreck below.

“What’s it like under there?” Shekel said at last.

“Cold,” said Tanner. “And dark. Dark but . . . luminous. Massive. You’re just surrounded by massiveness. There are shapes you can only just see, huge dark shapes. Subs and whatnot—and sometimes you think you see others. Can’t make them out properly, and they’re guarded, so’s you can’t get too close.

“I’ve watched cray under their wrecks. Seawyrms that saddle up sometimes to the chariot ships. The menfish, like newts, from Bask riding. Can’t hardly see them, the way they move. Bastard John, the dolphin. He’s the Lovers’ security chief below, and a colder, more vicious sod you could not imagine.

“And then there’s a few . . . Remade.” His voice eddied into silence.

“It’s weird, isn’t it?” said Shekel, watching Tanner closely. “I can’t get used to . . .” He said nothing more.

Neither could get used to it. A place where the Remade were equal. Where a Remade might be a foreman or a manager instead of the lowest laborer.

Shekel saw Tanner rub his tentacles. “How are they?” he asked, and Tanner grinned and concentrated, and one of the rubbery things contracted a little and began to drag itself like a moribund snake toward Shekel’s bread. The boy clapped appreciatively.

At the edge of the jetty where the cray were surfacing, a tall cactus-man stood, his bare chest pocked with fibrous vegetable scars. A massive rivebow was strapped across his back.

“D’you know him?” said Tanner. “His name’s Hedrigall.”

“That don’t sound like a cactacae name,” said Shekel, and Tanner shook his head.

“He’s no New Crobuzon cactus,” he explained, “nor even a Shankell one. He’s a press-ganged, like us. Came to the city more than twenty years ago. He’s from Dreer Samher. Near enough two thousand miles from New Crobuzon.

“I tell you what, Shekel, he’s got some stories. You don’t need books to get tales off him.

“He was a trader-pirate before he got captured and joined the city here, and he’s seen just about all the things that live in the sea. He can cut your hair with that rivebow; he’s that good a shot. He’s seen keragorae and mosquito-men and unplaced, and whatever else you like. And gods, he knows how to tell you about ’em. In Dreer Samher, they’ve fablers who tell stories for a calling. Hed was one. He can make his voice hypnagogic if he wants, keep you totally drunk on it. All while he tells you stories.”

The cactus-man was standing very still, letting the rain pelt his skin.

“And now he’s an aeronaut,” Tanner said. “He’s been piloting
Grand Easterly
’s airships—scouts and warflots—for years. He’s one of the Lovers’ most important men, and a fine bloke he is. He spends most of his time now up in the
Arrogance
.”

Tanner and Shekel looked behind them, and up. More than a thousand feet above the deck of the
Grand Easterly
the
Arrogance
was tethered. It was a big, crippled aerostat, with twisted tail fins and an engine that had not moved in years. Attached by hundreds of yards of tar-stiffened rope, winched to the great ship below it, it served as the city’s crow’s nest.

“He likes it up there, Hedrigall,” said Tanner. “Told me he just wants things quiet, these days.”

“Tanner,” said Shekel slowly, “what do you reckon to the Lovers? I mean, you work for them: you’ve heard them talk; you know what they’re like. What d’you think of them? Why d’you do what they say?”

Tanner knew, as he spoke, that Shekel would not fully understand him. But it was such an important question that he turned and looked very carefully at the boy he shared his rooms with (on the port end of an old iron hulk). The boy who had been his jailer and his audience and his friend and was becoming something different, something like family.

“I was going to be a slave in the colonies, Shekel,” he said quietly. “The Lovers of
Grand Easterly
took me in and gave me a job that pays money and told me they didn’t give a cup of piss that I was Remade. The Lovers gave me my life, Shekel, and a city and a home. I tell you that
whatever
they fucking want to do is
alfuckingright
by me. New Crobuzon can kiss my arse, lad. I’m an Armada man, a Garwater man. I’m learning my Salt. I’m loyal.”

Shekel stared at him. Tanner was a slow-talking, quiet man, and Shekel had never seen that intensity from him before.

He was very impressed.

It continued raining. All across Armada, the passengers from the
Terpsichoria
who had been let out tried to live.

On gaudy yawls and barquentines, they were arguing, buying and selling and stealing, learning Salt, some weeping, poring over maps of the city, calculating the distance from New Crobuzon or Nova Esperium. They mourned their old lives, staring at heliotypes of friends and lovers at home.

In a reeducation jail between Garwater and Shaddler were scores of sailors from the
Terpsichoria
. Some were shouting at their guard-counselors, who were trying to soothe them, all the time gauging whether this man or that could overcome his ties, whether his link to New Crobuzon would attenuate, whether he could be won over to Armada.

And if not, deciding what was to be done with them.

Bellis arrived at the Unrealized Time with her makeup and hair rain-battered. She stood bedraggled in the doorway while a waiter greeted her, and she stared at him, astonished at this treatment.
As if he were a
real
waiter,
she found herself thinking,
in a real restaurant in a real city
.

The
Raddletongue
was a big and ancient vessel. It was so crusted with buildings, so recrafted and interfered with, that it was impossible to tell what kind of ship it had once been. It had been part of the Armada for centuries. The ship’s forecastle was covered with ruins: old temples in white stone, much of their substance scattered and pounded to dust. The remnants were smothered in ivy, and nettles that did not keep the city’s children away.

There were strange shapes in the
Raddletongue
’s streets, lumps of obscure sea-salvaged stuff left in corners as if forgotten.

The restaurant was small and warm and half-full, paneled in darkwood. Its windows looked out over a fringe of ketches and canoes to Urchinspine Docks, Armada’s second harbor.

Bellis saw with a stab of emotion that from the restaurant’s ceiling hung little strings of paper lanterns. The last place she had seen that had been in the Clock and Cockerel, in Salacus Fields in New Crobuzon.

She had to shake her head to clear it of a biting melancholy. At a table in the corner, Johannes was getting to his feet, waving to her.