The Scar (13 page)

“What do you trade?”

“Whatever.” He shrugged. “Furs, wine, engines, livestock, books, labor. Whatever. Liquor for pelts in the tundra north of Jangsach, pelts for secrets in Hinter, secrets and artworks for labor and spices in High Cromlech . . .”

His voice drifted away as Bellis caught his eye.

“No one knows where High Cromlech is,” she said, but he shook his head.

“Some of us do,” he said quietly. “Now, I mean. Some of us do now. Oh it’s a damn hard journey, granted. From New Crobuzon you can’t go north through the ruins of Suroch, and south adds hundreds of miles through Vadaunk or the cacotopic stain. So it’s Penitent’s Pass to Wormseye Scrub, round Gibbing Water, skirt Kar Torrer Kingdom and over Cold Claw Sound . . .” His voice faded and Bellis hung on, eager to hear where next.

“And there are the Shatterjacks,” he said softly. “And High Cromlech.”

He took a long drink of wine.

“They’re nervous of outsiders. Live ones. But gods know we were a sorry-looking bunch. We’d been on the road for months, lost fourteen men. We went by dirigible, barge, llama, and pterabird, and miles and miles on foot. I lived there for months. I brought back a lot of . . . amazing things to New Crobuzon. I’ve seen things even stranger than this city, I tell you.”

Bellis could say nothing. She was wrestling with what he said. Some of the places he mentioned were virtually mythological. The idea that he might have visited them—lived in them, for Jabber’s sake—was extraordinary, but she did not think he was lying.

“Most people who try to get there die,” he said in a matter-of-fact tone. “But if you can do it, if you can get to the Cold Claws, especially the far shores . . . well, you’re made. You’ve access to the Shatterjack Mines, the grasslands north of Hinter, Yanni Seckilli Island in the Cold Claw Sea—and they’re eager for business, I tell you. I spent forty days there, and the only real trade they have is with the savages from the north, who turn up in coracles once a year, carrying stuff like biltong. Of which there’s only so much you can eat.” He grinned. “But their main problem is that The Gengris cuts them off from the south, doesn’t let outsiders pass that way. Anyone who can get past that from the south, they treat like a lost brother.

“If you make it, you have access to all manner of information, places, goods, and services that no one else has. That’s why I’ve . . . an arrangement with Parliament. That’s why that pass, giving me powers to commandeer vessels, in certain circumstances; giving me certain rights. I’m in a position to provide information to the city that they can’t get from anywhere else.”

He was a spy.

“When Seemly crossed the Swollen Ocean and found Bered Kai Nev six and a half centuries ago,” he said, “what do you think he carried in his holds? The
Fervent Mantis
was a big ship, Bellis . . .” He paused—she had not invited him to use her first name. But she made no sign of disapproval, and he continued. “It carried booze and silk and swords and gold. Seemly was looking to trade. That’s what unlocked the eastern continent. All the explorers you’ve heard of—Seemly, Donleon, Brubenn, probably Libintos and bloody Jabber, too—they were traders.” He spoke with childish gusto.

“It’s people like me who bring back the maps and the information. We can offer insights like no one else. We can trade them with the government—that’s my commission. There’s no such thing as exploration or science—there’s only trade. It was
merchants
who traveled to Suroch, who brought back the maps Dagman Beyn used in the Pirate Wars.”

He saw Bellis’ expression and registered that this particular story did not cast him and his fellows in the best light.

“Bad example,” he muttered, and Bellis could not help but laugh at his contrition.

“I won’t live here,” Bellis said. It was near two in the morning, and she was watching the stars through the window. They dragged with excruciating slowness across the pane as Armada was tugged gradually around.

“I don’t like it here. I resent being kidnapped. I can understand why some of the other press-ganged from
Terpsichoria
don’t mind . . .” She said that as a grudging sop to the guilt that Johannes had inculcated in her, and she knew uncomfortably that it was grossly insufficient, that it denigrated the freedom that had been granted to the
Terpsichoria
’s human cargo. “But I will not live out my life here. I’m going home to New Crobuzon.”

She spoke with a hard certainty she did not quite feel.

“Not me,” he said. “I mean, I like coming back, and living it up after some trip or other—dinners in Chnum, that sort of thing—but I couldn’t
live
there. Though I understand why you’d like it. I’ve seen a lot of cities, and never anything to compare. But whenever I’ve been there more than a couple of weeks, I start to feel claustrophobic. Hemmed in by the dirt and the begging and the people . . . and the cant they spout in Parliament.

“Even when I’m uptown, you know? BilSantum Plaza or Flag Hill or Chnum—still I feel like I’m trapped in Dog Fenn or Badside. I just can’t ignore them. I have to get out. And as for the bastards that run the place . . .”

Bellis was interested in his unabashed disloyalty. He was in the pay of the damn New Crobuzon government, after all, and even through the slight fog of wine, Bellis was coldly conscious that it was they, his bosses, who had caused her to flee.

But Fennec showed no commitment to them at all. He badmouthed the Crobuzoner authorities with bohemian good humor.

“They’re snakes,” he went on. “Rudgutter and all the others, I wouldn’t trust them as far as I could piss them. Dammit, I’ll take their money. If they want to pay me to tell them things I’d be happy to tell them anyway, am I going to say no? But they’re no friends of mine. I can’t sit easy in their city.”

“So is all this . . .” Bellis spoke carefully, trying to gauge him. “Is this not a hardship, then, being here? If you’ve no great love for New Crobuzon—“

“No.” He interrupted her with a hard manner quite unlike the amiable arrogance he had so far displayed. “That is not what I said. I’m a New Crobuzon man, Bellis. I want somewhere to come home to . . . even if I leave it again. I’m not rootless; I’m not some vague wanderer. I’m a businessman, a merchant, with a base and a house in East Gidd and friends and contacts, and New Crobuzon is always where I return to. Here . . . I’m a prisoner.

“This isn’t the kind of exploring that I have in mind. I’m
damned
if I’m staying here.”

And hearing that, Bellis opened another bottle of wine and poured him some more.

“What were you doing in Salkrikaltor?” she asked. “More
business
?”

Fennec shook his head. “I got picked up,” he said. “Salkrikaltor patrols sometimes deploy hundreds of miles away from the city, checking the kraals. One of their craft picked me up in the outskirts of the Basilisk Channel. I was heading south in a crippled ammonite-sub, leaking and very slow. The cray in the shallows east of the Sols told them about this dubious-looking tub limping round the edge of their village.” He shrugged. “I was damn well livid to get picked up, but I think they did me a favor. I doubt I’d have made it home. By the time I met any cray who could understand me, we were all the way out in Salkrikaltor City.”

“Where’d you come from?” said Bellis. “Jhesshul Islands?”

Fennec shook his head and observed her, without speaking, for several seconds.

“Nothing like that,” he said. “I crossed over from the other side of the mountains. I was in the Cold Claw Sea. In The Gengris.”

Bellis looked up sharply, ready to laugh or sniff dismissively, but she saw Fennec’s face. He nodded slowly.

“The Gengris,” he said again, and she looked away, astonished.

More than a thousand miles west of New Crobuzon was a huge lake, four hundred miles across—Cold Claw Loch. From its northern tip jutted Cold Claw Sound, a corridor of freshwater a hundred miles wide and eight hundred long. At its northern end the sound expanded massively and suddenly, stretching back eastward almost the width of the continent, narrowing like a talon, became the jaggedly curving Cold Claw Sea.

These were the Cold Claws, a conjoined body of water too vast to be anything but an ocean. A massive, freshwater, inland sea ringed by mountains and scrubland and swamps and the few hardy, remote civilizations that Fennec claimed to know.

At its easternmost edge, Cold Claw Sea was separated from the saltwater of the Swollen Ocean by a tiny strip of land: a ribbon of mountainous rock less than thirty miles wide. The sea’s sharp southernmost tip—the point of the talon—was almost directly north of New Crobuzon, more than seven hundred miles away. But the few travelers who made the journey from the city always bore a little west, to reach the waters of Cold Claw Sea two hundred miles or so away from its southern vertex. Because lodged like an impurity in the sea’s jag was an extraordinary, dangerous place, something between an island, a half-sunk city, and a myth. An amphibious badland about which the civilized world knew next to nothing, except that it existed and that it was dangerous.

That place was called The Gengris.

It was said to be the home of the grindylow, aquatic demons or monsters or degenerate crossbred men and women, depending on which story one believed. It was said to be haunted.

The grindylow, or The Gengris (the distinction between race and place was unclear), controlled the south of the Cold Claw Sea with unbreakable power and a cruel, capricious isolationism. Their waters were lethal and uncharted.

And here was Fennec claiming—what?—to have lived there?

“It isn’t true that there are no outsiders there,” he was saying, and Bellis quieted her mind enough to listen. “There are even a few native human, born and bred in The Gengris . . .” His mouth twisted. “And
bred
is the word, though I’m not sure
human
is, anymore. It suits them fine that everyone thinks it’s . . . like a little piece of hell there in the water, that it’s beyond any kind of pale. But, shit, they deal with traders like everyone else. There’re a few vodyanoi, a couple of humans . . . and others.

“I was there for more than half a year. Oh, it’s dangerous like nowhere else I’ve been, don’t get me wrong. You know if you trade in The Gengris that the rules . . . are very different. That you’ll never learn, never understand them. I’d been there six weeks when my best friend there, a vodyanoi from Jangsach who’d been there for seven
years
, trading back and forth . . . he was taken away. I never found out what happened to him, or why,” Fennec said flatly. “It might be that he insulted one of the grindylow gods, or it might have been that the catgut he supplied wasn’t thick enough.”

“So why did you do it?”

“Because, if you could last,” he snapped, suddenly excited, “it was so worth it. There was no reason to grindylow trades, no point bartering or trying to second-guess. They ask me for a bushel of salt and glass beads in equal parts—fine. No questions, no queries; I’ll provide it. Mixed fruit? It’s there for them. Cod, sawdust, resin, fungus, I don’t care. Because, by Jabber, when they paid, when they were happy . . .

“It was worth it.”

“But you left.”

“I left.” Fennec sighed. He got up and rummaged around in her cupboard. She did not scold him for it.

“I was there for months, buying, selling, exploring The Gengris and its environs—diving, you understand—and keeping my journal.” He spoke with his back to her, fussing with the kettle. “Then I got word that I’d . . . that I’d transgressed. That the grindylow were angry with me, and that my life was over unless I could get out, fast.”

“What had you done?” said Bellis slowly.

“I have no idea,” he snapped. “No idea at all. Maybe the ball bearings I provided were the wrong kind of metal, or the moon was in the wrong house, or some grindylow magus had died and they blamed me. I don’t know. All I knew was that I had to leave.

“I left a few things that gave them a false trail. See . . . I’d come to know the southern jag of Cold Claw Sea pretty well. They like to keep it secret, but I could find my way around it better than any outsider’s supposed to. There are tunnels. Fissures in the ridge that cuts off Cold Claw Sea from the Swollen Ocean. Through those burrows, out to the coast.”

He paused and looked out into the sky. It was nearly five o’clock. “I was trying to head south once I got into the ocean, but I got dragged out into the edges of the channel. Which is where the cray found me.”

“And you waited for a New Crobuzon ship to take you home,” Bellis said. He nodded. “Ours was going in the wrong direction, so you decided to commandeer it . . . with the powers vested in your little letter.”

He was lying, or leaving out some important part of the truth. That was trivially obvious, but Bellis did not comment. If he wanted to fill out his story he would do so. She would not pester him.

As she sat back in her chair, her half-drunk tea beside her on the uneven floor, she felt a sudden gush of tiredness, so that all of a sudden she could barely speak. She saw the first sickly light of dawn and knew it was too late to go to bed.

Fennec watched her. He saw her slump with exhaustion. He was more awake than she. He made himself another cup of tea as she let fits of dozing lap at her like little waves. She flirted with dreams.

Fennec began to tell her stories about his time in High Cromlech.

He told her the smells of the city, flint dust and rot and ozone, myrrh and embalming spices. He told her about the pervading quiet, and the duels, and the high-caste men with lips sewn shut. He described the descent of the Bonestrasse, great houses looming to either side on ornate catafalques, the Shatterjacks visible at the thoroughfare’s end, spilling out for miles. He talked on for nearly an hour.

Bellis sat with her eyes open, starting now and then as she remembered that she was awake. And as Fennec’s stories lurched east, across one and a half thousand miles, and he began to tell her about the malachite chapels of The Gengris, she was conscious that there was a growing crop of shouts and clattering from below, that Armada was waking beneath them, and she stood and smoothed her hair and clothes, and told him that he had to leave.