The Scar (40 page)

“I do,” she said.

“You want to be careful. You don’t want to advertise yourself as dealing with dissidents.”

Bellis laughed. “Jabber and fuck, Silas. You should see the list of your—or Mr. Fench’s—supposed friends. They include bigger fish than me, by far. Is it true you drink with Hedrigall?” He did not reply. “So I don’t think anyone’s going to care about me.”

They eyed each other quietly.
How many times have we done this?
Bellis thought hopelessly.
Communed secretively—over tea, in my room, at night, to discuss what we do and don’t know . . . ?

“They’re planning something,” she said, and her own conspiratorial tone almost reduced her to bitter laughter. “The avanc’s not the end of it. Aum’s learning Salt in double-quick time, and they’ve taken him off to some new secret project. Even some of the scientists involved are feeling cut out. There’s a core—Tintinnabulum, the Lovers, Aum—and this time Uther Doul’s part of it. They’re planning something.”

Silas nodded. It was obvious that he already knew.

“So?” Bellis demanded. “What is it?”

“I don’t know,” he said, and she could not tell if she believed him.

“If we can work out what they’ve planned,” she said, “we might still be able to . . . to get out of here.”

“Sincerely,” he said slowly, “I can’t work out what their plan is. If I find out, I’ll tell you. Of course.”

They studied each other.

“I gather Uther Doul’s courting you,” he continued. He was not trying to be unpleasant, but his smirk was irritating.

“I don’t know
what
he’s doing,” Bellis said curtly. “Sometimes I think that’s exactly it—he’s courting me—but if so, by gods he’s out of practice. Sometimes I think he has other motives, but I can’t make sense of them.”

Again silence. Outside, a cat began to wail.

“Tell me, Silas,” Bellis said. “This is your world. Is there any kind of serious opposition to their project?
Serious,
I mean? And if there is, could we use it to get out of here? Can it help us?”

What exactly might I have in mind?
she wondered.
We’ve sent a message to our home port. We’ve
saved it
, for Jabber’s sake. There’s nothing else to be done. There are no factions to win over. There’s no one we might persuade to take us home.

Whatever Silas claimed about trying to escape, the way he submerged into Armada’s hinterland, ducked out of sight, became Simon Fench, suspended himself in a web of deals and rumors and favors and threats—these were survival tactics. Silas was adjusting.

There was nothing for Bellis to do. No schemes she could engage in, no secret plans.

She still dreamed of that river between New Crobuzon and Iron Bay.

No,
she thought fiercely, uncompromisingly.
Whatever the truth, whatever the case, however hopeless the cause—I do not give up on escape.

It had taken her quite some effort to reach this coldly burning pitch of anger, of desire for escape, and to relinquish it now would be unbearable.

And so she kept that
No
loud in the back of her head, undiluted by doubt.

She woke the next day and leaned from her window into the warm wind, watching the exhausted, hungover crews clear the detritus of last night’s party from the streets and decks. They swept up huge piles of dust and colored paper, costumes and disguises from the masque parties, the debris of drug-taking.

The bilious flames had stopped rolling from the top of the
Sorghum
’s derrick. The rig had gone cold, its harvest of oil and rockmilk siphoned up and stored. Over the ships’ roofscape, the steamers, the tugs, the squat industrial vessels were moving back toward the city, like iron filings toward a magnet. Bellis watched their crews attach them again to the edge of Armada.

When all the servant ships had attached themselves to the city, they bore off to the southeast, venting black smoke, their gears grinding, devouring huge quantities of stolen coal and anything else that might burn. With appalling slowness, Armada began to move.

Below, in the clear water, the divers continued working. The stripping down of ship after ship continued, their substances delivered to the industrial works. An endless train of dirigibles passed between the vessels’ corpses and the forges.

The sea moved in faint currents around the massive bridle hidden below the waves. Armada’s pace was almost imperceptible: only a mile or two every hour.

But it did not slacken. It was ceaseless. Bellis knew that when it reached the place it sought, when the chains were lowered, when the thaumaturgy was attempted, everything would change. And she heard herself again,
No,
refusing to acquiesce, refusing to make her home here.

As her days passed, she was needed less and less. Her translation sessions with the engineers were fewer, as the bridle’s crews worked their endless hours and problems of design were reached, one by one, and solved. Bellis felt herself slipping from the core of things.

Except for Doul. He still spoke to her, still gave her wine in his cabin. There was still something shadowy between them, but Bellis could not make it out. And Doul’s conversations were as cryptic as ever, and she took no comfort in them. Once, twice more, he took her again to that little room, the sound box below the Lovers’ chamber. Why she went with him she could not say. It was always at night, always a secret. She heard their gasping declarations, their mews of pain and desire. The emotion still appalled and nauseated her, like something rotting in her stomach.

The second time she had heard them hiss with whatever passed for pleasure in their minds, and the next day, when she entered the meeting room with Aum, the Lovers stared at her with fresh wounds, blood crusting on their foreheads, scored deep in mirror images across their faces.

And Bellis had faltered. She could not bear the thought that she was at the mercy of people hooked on the emotion she had heard.

No
.

Even as the weather grew hotter still, day after day till a week and then two had passed, and the bridle was nearly done, and Silas had not come to her, and Doul still made no sense; even as she slipped from the center of power, and her relief that she need not see the Lovers every day was effaced by the fear of her own growing ineffectuality; even as she lost the last semblance of power she had had; even as it became clear that she was trapped, the voice inside Bellis hardened and was absolutely clear.

No.

Chapter Thirty-two

Armada found the place it was looking for.

The city was near the southern border between the Swollen Ocean and the Black Sandbar Sea. Bellis was stunned when she heard that.
Have we really come so fucking far?
she had thought.

They lay absolutely still in the water. By arcane techniques like echo-catching and sensory projection, Armada had found its way to the center of a deadeye. These existed randomly across the oceans—patches of water a few miles across, where there were no currents or winds. Without motive power, things floating on the surface of deadeyes would bob up and down with waves, but would not move an inch in any compass direction.

They were signs of sinkholes.

In this region, the ocean was between three and four miles deep. But below the deadeye the seafloor fell away in a steep cone, into a circular hole that stretched down below the reach of any geo-empath.

The sinkhole was a mile and a half wide, and bottomless.

It stretched so deep that Bas-Lag’s dimension could not possibly contain the water’s gravity and density, and reality was unstable in the shaft’s lower reaches. The sinkhole was a duct between realms. Where the avancs breached.

There was not a time when Krüach Aum and his new subordinates declared their researches over—there was no sudden announcement, no claim that the last problems had been solved. Bellis could not say exactly when she knew that Armada was ready.

Doul did not tell her. The knowledge soaked into her, and into all the other citizens. In rumor and guesswork, in triumphant speculation and then in triumph, the word spread.
They’ve succeeded. They know how to do it. They’re waiting.

Bellis wanted not to believe it. The awareness that the scientists had perfected the techniques they needed took her so gently that there was no sudden shock, just a slowly waxing foreboding.
How?
she thought, again and again. She considered the scale of what was to be attempted, and the question overwhelmed her.
How can they do it?

She considered everything that had to be done, all the knowledge that they had had to amass, the machines to be built, the puissance to channel. It seemed impossible.
Is it down to me?
she wondered incredulously.
Without Aum, without his book, could this be done?

With every hour, Bellis could feel the tension, the anxiety and excitement, increasing all around her.

Days after they reached the deadeye, finally, the announcement was made that everyone had been expecting. Posters and criers warned people to be ready, that the research was over, that an attempt was to be made.

As momentous, as extraordinary, as it was, it surprised no one. And after such long official silence, even to Bellis, that final confirmation was almost a relief.

Tanner Sack found the bridle and the now-visible chains a great pleasure to his eye. He had been born and raised in New Crobuzon, where mountains picked out the western sky and the architecture was complex and encompassing. There were times, he would admit, when the endless open skies of Armada, the unbroken water below, troubled him.

He found a comfort in the submerged harness. It gave him something big and real to stare at, breaking the monotonous deeps.

Tanner hung in the still waters of the deadeye.

There were a very few figures in the water—Tanner, Bastard John, the menfish—watching from below.

Everything had been prepared.

It was almost midday. The city was as still as if it were before dawn.

On neighboring ships, Bellis could see people watching from their roofs, or peering from behind railings or from the city’s parks. But there were not many. There was almost no noise. There were no dirigibles in the sky.

“Half the city’s indoors,” she hissed to Uther Doul. He had found her on the deck of the
Grand Easterly
, gathered with the few Armadans who, like Bellis, felt compelled to watch the attempt from the flagship itself.

They’re frightened,
she thought, staring over the empty streets on vessels below.
They’ve realized what’s at stake here. Like shipwrecked sailors in a jolly boat tethering themselves to a whale.
She almost laughed.
And they’re afraid of the storm.

The citizens of Armada dreaded severe storms. The city could not avoid or ride the weather’s tempers, and the worst winds could tear vessel from vessel, throw them together no matter how strong their buffers. Armada’s history was punctuated with the stories of terrible and deadly squalls.

Never before had anyone
deliberately
called one down.

To puncture the membrane between realities, even at a weak point, to entice the avanc into this plane, a burst of colossal energy was required. Something like that required not just an elyctric storm, but a living one. An orgy, a frenzy of fulmen, lightning elementals.

And given that living storms were—thankfully—almost as rare as Torque rifts, Garwater would have to create one.

The
Grand Easterly
’s six masts, particularly its towering main mast, were swathed with copper wiring, insulated with rubber, that stretched down and disappeared into the ship itself, passing down corridors and stairs, carefully guarded by the yeomanry, winding through the vessel until it slotted into the esoteric new engine running on rockmilk at the
Grand Easterly
’s base, ready to send extraordinary charges into the stub ends of the colossal chain, down through the metal into the bridle and the deep sea.

Somewhere, scholars and pirate-thaumaturges from Booktown and Shaddler and Garwater were gathered: meteoromancers and elementalists with weird engines, furnaces, unguents, and offerings. Perhaps a sacrifice. Bellis could imagine their frantic work gauging aetherial currents, stoking and conjuring.

For a long time there was only whispering and the faint noises of gulls and the waves. Everyone who stood in the bleak heat strained to hear something that they had not heard before, but they had no idea what they were waiting for. When it finally came it was a sound so monolithic that they felt it, deep below, resonating through the ships.

Bellis heard Uther Doul exhale, then he whispered “Now,” his voice thick with emotion she did not recognize.

The deck of the
Grand Easterly
moved suddenly below their feet, with a cracking percussion.

Armada vibrated violently.

“The bridle, the chains,” Doul said quietly. “They’re being lowered. Into the hole.”

Bellis gripped the rail.

Below the water Tanner gasped, water rushing over his gills, as the vast pulleys turned and the restraining bolts on the harness were burst with explosive charges. In carefully choreographed sequence, displacing great tides of brine, the metal ring more than a quarter of a mile across, studded with cruel hooks and collars, began to descend.

It slid in stages through the water, reaching the limit of its freedom as each section of boat-long links ended. And then another charge would detonate, and huge gears would turn, and a few more hundred feet of metal would sink.

As each length of chain reached its end, the city above moved, and reconfigured a little, its dimensions shifting under the strain. The chains were so huge, they operated at a geographic scale, each weighty tug a seismic trauma. But Armada was buoyed by careful design and gas and thaumaturgy, and though the sudden jolts shook it as if in a high storm, and strained at those few wickerwork-and-rope bridges that were not uncoupled, and snapped them, they could not capsize the city.

“Jabber and
fuck
,” Bellis shouted. “We have to get below!”

Doul held her, gripped her hard and kept her feet flat.

“I’ll not miss this,” he said, “and I don’t think you should, either.”

The city bucked appallingly; then, suddenly.

The bridle’s descent began to speed up. Tanner Sack realized he was shouting soundlessly, airlessly, his jaw biting out silent profanities at the sight. He was hypnotized by the scale of what he saw, the rapid disappearance of the huge harness into the absolutely dark sea. Seconds and minutes passed. The city stabilized a little and there was only the continuing unfolding of the great tethered chains, five lines of links descending into the hidden deeps.

Colonies of barnacles and limpets had scabbed the chains over generations, and as the links ripped free of the ships’ undersides, they sent clouds of dying shellfish into the abyss.

After many minutes had passed, Armada was almost still again, undulating very slightly with the last reverberations of the chain. Birds shunted mindlessly back and forth overhead. The huge weight of the metal settled. There was a tense expectancy.

And everyone held their breath, and nothing happened.

The bridle now dangled below miles of chain. The city above moved on the swell, peacefully.

Armadans were braced and waiting. But the water of the deadeye remained peaceful, and the sky clear. Slowly, more and more people began to emerge onto the decks. They were nervous and hesitant at first, still waiting for an occurrence the parameters of which they could not imagine. But nothing happened.

Bellis did not know precisely what manner of crisis had overtaken the scientists and thaumaturgists. The promised storm did not appear. The rockmilk engines did not move.

It was no surprise, she reflected. The techniques were unique, unproven and experimental. It was no surprise that they did not work straight away.

Still, the anticlimax was overwhelming. Within two hours the city was as it had been. The unnatural hush abated.

Disappointed pirates bickered and told jokes about the failure. No one from Garwater, no scientist or bureaucrat, made any announcement about what had happened. Armada sat in the gentle water and the heat, and the hours of official silence became half a day, and continued.

Bellis could not find Doul, who had gone to find out what had happened. She spent her evening alone. She should have been delighted at Armada’s failure, but a ruefulness infected even her. A curiosity.

Two days passed.

In the deadeye’s still water, some of the city’s effluent congealed around the city, and lolling in the sun, Armada began to smell. Once, Bellis and Carrianne walked in Croom Park, but the odor and the raucous cries of too-hot animals, feral and in farm-ships, made the atmosphere unpleasant. It was not refreshing to be out of doors. Bellis confined herself and her smoking to her room.

Apart from that brief meeting with Carrianne, she spent the hours alone. Doul did not reappear. Bellis fidgeted in the heat and smoked and waited, watching the city return to its raucous routine with willful speed. It infuriated her.
How can you all pretend that nothing’s going on?
she thought, watching the vendors in Winterstraw Market.
As if this is just a place like any other, as if this is a normal time?

There was still no word as Krüach Aum, his assistants, and the crews of engineers and hunters, all unseen, worked over their calculations again, took measurements, tinkered with their engines, as Bellis was sure they must be doing.

Two days passed.

Tanner lay under the city, floating motionless, facing down. It was as if he stood at the entrance to a dark pentangular tunnel edged with chains. In line with his head, each arm and each leg, the five great fetters soared downward, converging with perspective and disappearing into the dark.

He was exhausted. The frantic repairs since the first attempt had robbed him of sleep. He had been yelled at by overseers livid from failure.

The enormous chain corridor stretched out below him was more than four miles long. Hanging absolutely motionless in the darkness at its end was the bridle, bigger than any ship. It dangled into the pit below, investigated, perhaps, by the oarfish and huge-mouthed eels that frequented that depth.

Sitting and reading beside her window, Bellis became slowly aware of an odd stillness: a silence and a shift in the quality of the light. A neurotic pause, as if the air and the bleaching sun were waiting. She knew with a shock of amazed fear what was happening.

At last,
she thought.
Gods help me, they’ve done it
.

From her front step, high up on the
Chromolith
chimney, she looked out over Armada’s gently bobbing vessels, at the
Grand Easterly
’s masts. She stared into the crowded city. There had been no warning that another attempt was to be made: there were people everywhere. They were standing still in the markets and streets, peering up, trying to work out what they had sensed.

The sky began to change.

“Dear Jabber,” whispered Bellis. “Oh my gods.”

In the middle of the sun-bleached blue stretched out over Armada, a darkness unfolded. Thousands of feet above them, the clear sky spasmed for an instant and shat out of nothingness a tiny smear of cloud, a mote, an atom of impurity that unfurled like a flower, like a trick box—a conjuror’s prop that opened again and again, multiplying itself with its own substance.

It spread quickly like squid ink, uncoiling, staining the sky, spreading in a circle, an expanding disk of shadow. It emitted ominous sounds.

There was a wind, suddenly, slapping Armada’s shanks and towers, strumming the city’s rigging. Something was drifting down around Bellis, minuscule particles like mist, an arcane stink descending from the
Grand Easterly
’s funnels and spreading out, the effluent of whatever forces were tearing the clouds out of nothing. Bellis recognized the smell: rockmilk. Some aeromorphic engine was being boosted.

The sun was completely occluded. Bellis shivered in the newborn dark and cold. Beyond the city limits, the sea had become choppy, seesawing with foam. The sound from the sky increased: from low vibrations it became purring, and then a drawn-out shout, and finally a bark of thunder, and with that percussive noise the storm erupted out of the cloudmass.

The wind went berserk. The sea pitched. Thunder again, and with it the oily darkness over the city shattered a thousand ways, and through every crack lightning glared incandescent. Rain raced in screaming swells, dousing Bellis in moments.