The Scar (41 page)

Across all the ridings of the city, Armadans scrambled to get below. The decks emptied fast. Men and women struggled to uncouple the bridges as the vessels they linked began to buck. Here and there stood people transfixed like Bellis, in fear or fascination, staring into the storm.

“Godspit!” shouted Bellis. “Sweet Jabber protect us!” She could not hear her own voice.

The storm was muted for Tanner, cosseted deep as he was in the water of the deadeye. The surface above him lost its integrity in the rain. The city rose and fell as if the sea were trying to shuck it off. The huge chains moved below it.

Even through the tons of water, Tanner realized, the sound of thunder and the water’s motions were increasing. He swam, agitated, waiting for the storm to reach its final pitch, growing more and more nervous as the violence did not dissipate, as it continued to increase.

’
Stail,
he thought in awe and fear.
They’ve done it this time, ain’t they? What the fuck kind of storm is this? What the fuck have they done?

Bellis held tight to the rail, terrified that the wind would pull her out and over, to be crushed between vessels.

The air was stained by shadows, a darkness burst by lightning like camera flashes.

Even with air rinsed by the torrent, the weird stink of rockmilk vapor was strong and increasing. Bellis could see ripples distorting the air. Lightning struck the city’s masts again and again, lingering around the huge copper-shrouded column on the
Grand Easterly
.

Armada danced as the sky boiled. As the aeromorphic engine vented ever more power, the lightning patterns began to change. Bellis watched the clouds, mesmerized.

At first the streaks and jags were random, snapping and shivering like brilliant snakes in the darkness. But they began to synchronize. They grew closer in time, so that the light from one still scored Bellis’ eyes while the next fired, and their movements grew more purposeful. The lightning bursts bolted toward the center of the cloud, vanishing at its core.

The thunder grew more intense. The rockmilk smell was nauseating. Bellis was hypnotized by what she saw through the deluge, capable only of thinking
come on come on!
without consciousness of what she was waiting for.

And then finally, with a single stunning report of thunder, the lightning reached phase.

They burst out of nothing at the same moment around the storm’s edge, scored through the dark air together toward its heart as if they were spokes, meeting at the axis of the tempest in a single, painfully intense point of light that crackled and
did not dissipate
.

Energy burst up, invisible, amplified through the valves and transformers of occult engines, spurting out of the
Grand Easterly
’s smokestacks, racing skyward into the storm.

The invocation burst in the heart of the cloud.

The crackling star of lightning shone cold and intense and blue-white, trembling, glowing brighter, taut as if pregnant as if full as if ready to explode and then it

burst

and a swarm of shrieking presences coalesced out of its shreds and were about the ship, crackling apparitions outlined in energy, in elyctricity, leaving trails of burned air as they raced with intent through the sky, informed and capricious and purposeful.

Fulmen. Lightning elementals.

They screamed and laughed as they zigzagged, their cries something between sound and current. The fulmen tore with astonishing speed over the skyline, metamorphosing in arcs of current, trailing a slew of ghost shapes formed in their discharge, mimicking the outlines of the city’s buildings, mimicking fish and birds and faces.

A cluster swept down to the
Chromolith
deck, shrieking past Bellis and almost stopping her heart. They gusted around the funnel.

From somewhere in the
Grand Easterly
came a pulse of power, and all over the city the elementals snapped up from their games and eddied in agitation. Again the hidden machines gave out a jolt of energy, sending it coursing along the wires to the tip of the mast. The fulmen howled, and danced along chains and metal railings. They began to swarm. Bellis turned her head and watched them go, out over the body of her ship, through the channels of water between vessels, up and over reconstituted decks toward the huge steamer’s mainmast.

Bellis did not notice the rain or the thunder. All she could see or hear were the living lightnings that outlined Armada with their blazing cold, squabbling and spasming in and out of existence by the city’s tallest roofs. She peered through the storm, over the intervening vessels. Like bait, a flow of energy dangled at the tip of the
Grand Easterly
’s towering mast.

We fish for a storm to fish for the elementals to fish for the avanc,
thought Bellis. She felt drunk.

The fulmen circled the mast, a sheet of bristling presences, spinning into a vortex. They spat in the storm’s darkness, illuminating the city negatively, as if with black sunlight, until a last great gout of binding energy burst out of the wires.

The fulmen shrieked and gibbered and began to pour into the metal.

With hexes and machinery, the elementalists reeled them in.

The elementals screamed as they were taken, their forms conducted through the thick cabling, lights snuffed out in rapid succession. In half a second the sky was dark again.

The elyctric elementals coursed as supercharged particles along the network of copper, bleeding one into the other and becoming a stream of living power, racing down stairs and into the
Grand Easterly
’s guts, to the rockmilk engine, into the stump ends of the chain that stretched down into the rift below the sea.

Below millions of tons of brine, this condensed substance of a tribe of lightning elementals burst through the links of chain, through prongs the size of masts, out into the water in a bolt of massively potent energy that blazed white light and spasmed instantly into the deeps of the sinkhole, bleaching and destroying what rude life it passed, until it lanced the membrane between dimensions, many miles down.

In the bottom of the
Grand Easterly
, the rockmilk engine hummed, and sent potent pulses out along the chain.

Only now there was a rent beneath the sea, and now the enticing signals the machine sent out, inaudible to anything born in the seas of Bas-Lag, might be heard.

Tanner Sack heads down into the twilit water. The storm has dissipated, almost instantly, and the sea above him is bright. Tanner is testing himself, pushing on and down, as far as he can go, into the disphotic zone.

There are others around him: cray and menfish and Bastard John, he supposes, curious to plumb as far as they are able, but he cannot see them. The water is cold, and silent, and dense.

He felt the jolts of energy pass him through the huge links of chain. He knows that astonishing events are unfolding directly below, and like a child he indulges himself, sinking toward the dark. He has never swum so deep before, but he follows the enormous chain links as far down as he can go, steeling himself, acclimatizing as the pressure wraps him tight. His tentacles reach out and seem to grasp, as if he can pull himself deeper, gripping the substance of the water.

His head hurts; his blood is constricted. He hangs still in the water when he can go no further. He does not know how far he has come down. He cannot see the great chain by his side. He can see nothing. He is suspended in the cold and the grey, and he is quite alone.

A long time passes while the signals from the rockmilk engine continue to reverberate enticingly into the deep water. Everything is still.

Until Tanner’s eyes snap open (
he did not know they were closed
).

There has been a sound, a sudden feeling of slick grinding, like the snapping of bolts, things slotting into grooves. A long, rumbling report that travels through the water like whalesong, that he feels in his stomach more than he hears.

Tanner is still. He listens.

He knows what he has heard.

It was the restraints on the quarter-mile bridle—the jags and pegs and pins and rivets, the bolts as long as ships—sliding into place. Something has come snuffling up through layers of water and reality, he thinks, to investigate the delicious rockmilk pulses, and has slipped its neck or some part of itself into the collar until the harness is around it, and the spines and studs like tree trunks have jutted forward, piercing its flesh, and the cinctures have tightened, and the thing is trapped.

There is silence again, and stillness. Tanner knows that above him, the thaumaturges and engineers are sending carefully measured signals into what approximates the creature’s cortex, soothing, suggesting, cajoling.

He feels minute shifts of tide and temperature—thaumaturgic washes rolling up at him.

Tanner feels vibrations against his skin and then, harder, inside him.

The thing is moving, way below the dying fringes of sunlight, in the midnight water miles down, past lantern fish and spider crabs, eclipsing their feeble phosphorescence. He feels it creeping nearer, displacing great gouts of cold water and sending them rolling up and out of the abyss in uncanny tides.

He is enthralled.

There is a lazy booming that makes the water shudder. Tanner imagines some monstrous appendage casually slapping the continental shelf, an unthinking apocalypse wiping out scores of crude bottom dwellers.

The water around him swirls. Thaumaturgic tides wash dissonant up from the hole. There is a sudden spasm of water pressure, and then a very faint sound of pounding reaches Tanner’s ears. Uncertain, he strains to hear.

It is a faint, regular beat that he feels in his innards. A ponderous, smashing stroke. His stomach pitches.

He hears it only for an instant, a quirk of space and thaumaturgy, but he knows what it is, and the knowledge stuns him.

It is a heart the size of a cathedral, beating far below him in the dark.

On the rain-wet steps, below a fierce sun and cloudless skies, Bellis waited.

Armada was like a ghost town. All but the most enthralled of its inhabitants hid, still terrified.

Something had happened. Bellis had felt the shifting of the
Chromolith
and the knocking of the chains. There had been many minutes now of silence.

She started, once again hearing metal on metal: a slow, threatening percussion as the chains below the city shifted, moving up and stretching out, emerging from the sinkhole below the world, returning to their home dimension, immersing themselves fully in the waters of the Swollen Ocean.

They angled slowly away from vertical, extending until they were stretched taut out in front of the city. Miles below, the bridle was just above the ocean floor.

There was a sudden juddering noise, and Armada shifted violently against itself, its ships shifting into subtly new positions, pulled in new directions from below, altering its outlines.

The city began to move.

The spasm almost knocked Bellis down.

She was agog.

The city was
moving
.

Cruising southward at a leisurely pace that easily eclipsed anything that had ever been achieved by the scores of tugboats.

Bellis could see the waves against the flanks of the outside vessels. She could see the turmoil of the city’s wake. They were traveling fast enough to leave a
wake
.

From the edge of Armada to the horizon, the city’s fleet of untethered ships—merchant-pirates, factories, messengers and warships and tugs—were now frantically moving. They were turning to face the city, starting their motors, unfurling their sails to catch up with their mother port.

Oh dear gods,
Bellis thought, stunned.
They must not be able to believe what they’re seeing
. From the nearest of them, Bellis heard a chorus of delight. The sailors were standing on deck cheering.

The sound was taken up, slowly, all over Armada as people began to appear: opening windows and doors, emerging from bunkers, standing up at the railings behind which they had cowered. Everywhere Bellis looked, the citizens were shouting. They were toasting the Lovers. They were screaming with delight.

Bellis looked out to sea, watching the waves pass by as the city moved. As it was towed.

At the end of its four-mile reins, coddled by the rockmilk engine, held tight by hooks like recurved steeples, the avanc progressed steadily and curiously through what was, to it, an alien sea.

Interlude VII

Basilisk Channel

For over four weeks, the
Tetneghi Dustheart
has been at sea.

The galleon has faced dreadful summer storms. It has been becalmed between Gnurr Kett and Perrick Nigh. In the dangerous channels of the Mandrake Islands it sailed too close to some nameless rock and was beset by marauding flying things that tore the sails and pulled several apes from the rigging to their deaths. In the cold waters by the Rohagi eastern coast, the ship was met and attacked—by nasty chance—by a Crobuzoner navy ship. With lucky winds, the
Tetneghi Dustheart
outran the ironclad, sustaining damage that slowed but did not destroy it.

Its cactacae crew whistle instructions to the exhausted simians above, and the gaudy vessel approaches port-peace, winds through the channel toward Iron Bay.

The day after his meeting with Tanner Sack, when Captain Nurjhitt Sengka announced his new orders to his crew, they reacted with the astonishment and bad feeling that he had expected. The relaxed discipline of Dreer Samher vessels had allowed them to express themselves more or less freely, and they had told Sengka they disapproved, they were pissed off, they did not understand, they were deserting their posts, that the anophelii needed more guards than the skeleton crew that would be left there.

He was implacable.

With every misfortune on the way, with every hold-up, every dragging minute of the month, the crew’s grumbling grew louder. But Sengka, having decided to risk his career on the written promises Tanner had given him, did not deviate from his plan. And his standing with his crew is good enough that he has been able so far to contain their anger, to keep them waiting with hints and winks.