The Scar (43 page)

For the first time Bellis could remember, he began to mention New Crobuzon regularly.

“What month is it at home?” he asked.

“Swiven,” Bellis replied, chastising herself silently for not appearing to have to work it out.

“Winter’s over,” he said, “back there. Back in New Crobuzon.” He nodded toward the west. “Spring now,” he said quietly.

Spring.
And here am I
, thought Bellis,
who had winter stolen from me
. She remembered the river journey to Iron Bay.

“Do you suppose they know by now that we never arrived?” he said quietly.

“Nova Esperium must do,” said Bellis. “Or at least they assume we’re very severely delayed. Then they’ll wait for the next New Crobuzon boat, probably in another six months’ time, to send them word. So they won’t know for sure back home for a long time.”

They sat and drank their thin city-grown coffee.

“I wonder what’s been happening there,” Johannes said eventually.

They did not say much to each other, but the air was pregnant with their quiet.

Things are speeding up,
Bellis said to herself, not quite understanding her own thought. She did not think of New Crobuzon as Johannes seemed to: when she imagined it, it was preserved as if in glass, quite unmoving. She did not think of it
now
. Perhaps she was afraid to.

She was nearly alone in knowing what might have happened, what wars might be being fought on the banks of the Tar and the Canker. It was bewildering to think that if the city was saved it was down to her. Or that it might not, in fact, have been saved.

The uncertainty,
she thought,
the silence, the potentiality of what might have happened, what might be happening . . . it should crush me
. But it did not. Instead, Bellis felt as if she were waiting.

She spent that evening with Uther Doul.

They would drink together perhaps one night in three. Or they might walk through the city, directionless, or they might return to his room, or sometimes to hers.

He never touched her. Bellis was exhausted by his reticence. He would spend minutes without speaking, only to embark on some mythic-sounding story or other in response to some vague statement or question. His wonderful voice would subdue her then, and she would forget her frustration until his story ended.

Uther Doul clearly drew something from his time with her, but still she could not be sure what. She was not intimidated by him anymore, even carrying her secrets. For all his deadly skills, his brilliance in branches of obscure theology and science, she thought she saw in him someone more lost and confused than she, someone removed from all societies, uncertain of norms and interaction, retreated behind cold control. It made her feel safe in his presence.

She was drawn to him, powerfully. She wanted him: his power and his grim self-control, his beautiful voice. His cool intelligence, the obvious fact that he liked her. The sense that she would be more in control than he, should anything happen between them, and not just because she was older. She would not coquette, but she engineered enough of a dynamic that he must know.

But he never touched her. Bellis was unsettled by that.

It made little sense. His behavior clearly spelled out battened-down, incompetent desire, but there was something else as well. His manner was like some chymical compound, most of the ingredients of which she could identify instantly. There was, though, some mysterious component she could not make sense of, that modified everything that made him. And when Bellis became flushed with lust or loneliness for Doul, when she would otherwise have set matters in motion between them, she held back, flustered by his secret. She was not certain her advances would be reciprocated. And she would not risk that rejection.

Bellis’ desire for sex with him became almost petulant—added to her physical attraction she felt a desire to clarify matters.
What is he doing?
she thought, time and again.

She had heard nothing from Silas Fennec for many days.

His toes touching the cold foot-wide barrel jutting from an ancient gunboat, his head staring down from higher than the
Grand Easterly
’s mainmast, the man stands still and gazes and the scud of waves beside the boats makes him feel as if he is falling.

He is stronger with every day that passes. More puissant, more controlled and controlling, more exact in his machinations.

His kisses grow more languorous.

The man holds the statue in his hand, and he caresses the flap of fin-tissue with his fingertips. His mouth is still bloody and salty from the last tonguing kiss.

He moves about the city in the impossible ways that the statue has granted him. Space and physical forces loosen their weft to him when his mouth and tongue tingle from the cold salt press of the stone. The man steps forward and straddles the water between vessels, unseen, and steps forward again and hides in the shadow of a yeoman’s shoe.

Here and there and back again. He travels the city, tracing the rumors and information that he has set in motion. He watches his own influence spread like antibiotic in diseased flesh.

It is all true. Everything he says is true. The discord he leaves behind him in the trail of whisper and pamphlet and paper is a correct reaction.

The man slips under the water. The sea opens to him, and he drifts down past the huge links of chain, toward the unthinkable beast of burden that stretches its limbs in the deepest reaches. When he needs breath he pulls the statue to him, the little grotesquerie hunched and glowing in the night sea with faint biotic light, the toothed osculum a puncture-hole of dark, the open eye wide and mocking, tar-black, and he kisses it deeply and feels its flickering tongue-thing with the disgust that he can never banish.

And the statue breathes air into him.

Or it bends space again and lets him lift his chin—yards deep as he is—and break the water with his face and gasp a lungful.

The man moves through the water without his limbs shifting position, the statue’s filigree of once-living fin moving, as if that is what propels him. He weaves in and around the five great chains, moving downward until he becomes frightened by the dark and cold and silence (even powerful and puissant as he is) and he rises again to walk in the secret compartments of the city.

All the ridings are open to him. He enters all the flagships with ease and without hesitation, except one. He visits the
Grand Easterly
and the
Therianthropus
in Shaddler, and Thee-And-Thine’s
Salt Godling
and all the others—except for the
Uroc
.

He is afraid of the Brucolac. Even flushed with his statue’s kiss as he is, he will not risk facing the vampir. The moonship is out of bounds to him—that is a promise he has made himself, and that he keeps.

The man practices the other things the statue has taught him while he licks at its mouth. It allows him more than travel and infiltration.

It is true what they say about the haunted quarter: it is inhabited. But those presences in the old ships see what he is doing, and they do not trouble him.

The statue protects him. He feels like its lover. It keeps him safe.

Chapter Thirty-four

Since it had been stolen, the
Sorghum
had drilled for many weeks, and there were now great stores of oil and rockmilk in Garwater’s reserves. But Armada was hungry, almost as voracious for fuel as New Crobuzon.

Before Garwater had the
Sorghum
, Armada’s boats had got by only with careful husbanding of what resources they stole. Now their demand increased with the available supply. Even the ships allied to Dry Fall and Bask took the oil that Garwater provided.

The rockmilk was more precious by far, and rarer. In guarded storerooms in the
Grand Easterly
the heavy liquid slopped in rows of jars. The rooms were secured and earthed by careful geo-thaumaturgic processes, to dispel any dangerous emanations. The engine that sent the lulling pulses into the avanc’s brain was powered on the stuff, and the thaumaturges and technicians who ran it kept a careful eye on their reserves of fuel. They knew exactly how much they needed.

Tanner and Shekel and Angevine studied the air over the
Sorghum
’s cold derrick and saw there was no effluent.

They sat together in a beer tent on the
Dober
, under a sprawl of tarpaulin-covered poles. The
Dober
would not support more solid buildings. It was the body of a blue whale, disemboweled, its top half removed, its carcass preserved by some long-forgotten process. It was quite hard and inflexible, though its floor was disturbingly organic: the remnants of blood vessels and viscera varnished as solid as glass underfoot.

Tanner and Shekel were frequent visitors here. Its beer tent was good. They sat facing the whale’s frozen flukes, which jutted from the water as if about to slap its surface and swim free. The
Sorghum
was directly in their line of sight, framed by the pointed edges of the whale’s tale. The enormous, ugly presence lolled silently.

Angevine was quiet. Shekel was solicitous, making sure her glass was full, murmuring to her quietly. She was still somewhat shocked. Everything had changed for her since Tintinnabulum left, and she had not yet adapted.

(Tanner had no doubts that she would be alright. Gods knew he did not begrudge her a few days’ befuddlement. Tanner just hoped Shekel himself was alright. He was glad the lad was spending a little time with him.)

What will I do?
thought Angevine. She kept thinking that she would go along to see what Tinnabol had for her . . . and then of course she remembered that he was gone. It was not that she missed him. He had been courteous and pleasant to her, but there had been no closeness. He had been her boss, and he had given her orders that she had obeyed.

But even that was an overstatement. He had not really been her boss. Her boss was Garwater—the Lovers. It was Garwater money that paid her wages, Garwater that had commissioned her, in the first days after her arrival, to serve the strange, muscular, white-haired hunter. And having disembarked from a ship taking her away to slavery, from a city where her Remaking had stripped her of rights, made her work a duty, to be told that she would be paid as if she were any other citizen had stunned her. It was that which had bought her loyalty.

And now Tintinnabulum was gone, and she was not sure what she would do.

It was hard, having taken pride in work, to be reminded that it did not matter what she did, so long as she labored, for money. Eight years of her history had sailed with Tintinnabulum and his hunters.

It was just a job,
she told herself.
Jobs change. Time to move on
.

“Where are we going?” Bellis asked Uther Doul.

She had finally given in and asked him.

As she had expected, he did not answer her. He looked up at her question, then down again without a word.

They were in Croom Park, in an evening darkness stained with the colors and the strong smell of flowers. Somewhere nearby, an inbred nightingale sounded its attenuated song.

I want to know, Doul,
Bellis felt like saying.
There are ghosts clinging to me, and I want to know if the wind wherever we’re going will blow them away. I want to know which way my life is likely to turn. Where are we going?

She did not say any of that. Instead they walked.

A path was visible in the moonlight. It was rough, formed by footsteps rather than design. It wound up the steep slope of bushes and trees that rose above them, broken here and there by the remnants of architecture—railings and stairways, their shapes visible like optical illusions below the garden’s surface.

They climbed the incline onto the raised, tree-shadowed plateau that had once been the poop deck. It looked down over the ships of Curhouse, lit up with their traditional green-and-white lanterns. Bellis and Uther Doul stood in the darkness below the trees. The park moved sedately beneath them.

“Where are we going?” said Bellis again, and again there was a long time when all they could hear were the boat sounds of the city.

“You told me once,” she continued hesitantly, “about your life in High Cromlech. You told me about when you left. What happened then? Where did you go? What did you do?”

Doul shook his head, almost helplessly. After a time, Bellis gestured at his scabbard.

“Where did you get that sword? What does it mean, its name?” she said.

He drew his bone-white weapon. He held it flat in the air and stared at it, then looked up at Bellis and nodded once again. He seemed pleased.

“It’s a large part of why they trust and fear me as they do: the Possible Sword.” He moved it slowly in a precise, curving sweep. “How I got this sword? At the end of a long search . . . and a great, a phenomenal amount of research. Everything’s there, in the Imperial Canon, you know. All the information you might need, if you know how to read it.” He watched Bellis calmly. “The work I’ve done. The techniques I’ve learnt.

“The Ghosthead broke open the world, when they arrived. They made the Fractured Land with the force of their landing, and it was more than physical damage.

“They used the break. You’ve heard the refrain about the Ghosthead always ‘digging for their chances’? It’s normally taken to mean that they had an uncanny kind of luck, that they gripped every chance they had, no matter how tenuous.” He smiled slowly.

“Do you really think that would be enough to keep control of a continent?” he said. “A world? To hold absolute power for five hundred years? You think they could do that by keeping a lookout for opportunities? It was much more than that. ‘Digging for chance’ is a clumsy rendition of what the Ghosthead really did. It was an altogether more exact science.

“Possibility mining.”

Uther quoted something like a singer. “ ‘We have scarred this mild world with prospects, wounded it massively, broken it, made our mark on its most remote land and stretching for thousands of leagues across its sea. And what we break we may reshape, and that which fails might still succeed. We have found rich deposits of chance, and we will dig them out.’

“They meant all that literally,” he said. “It wasn’t an abstract crow of triumph. They had
scarred
, they had
broken
the world. And, in doing so, they set free forces that they were able to tap. Forces that allowed them to reshape things, to fail and succeed
simultaneously
—because they mined for possibilities. A cataclysm like that, shattering a world, the rupture left behind: it opens up a rich seam of potentialities.

“And they knew how to pick at the might-have-beens and pull out the best of them, use them to shape the world. For every action, there’s an infinity of outcomes. Countless trillions are possible, many milliards are likely, millions might be considered probable, several occur as possibilities to us as observers—and one comes true.

“But the Ghosthead knew how to tap some of those that might have been. To give them a kind of life. To use them, to push them into the reality that in its very existence denied theirs, which is
defined
by what happened and by the denial of what did not. Tapped by possibility machines, outcomes that didn’t quite make it to actuality were boosted, and made real.

“If I were to toss a coin, most certain it would land on one side or the other; it’s just possible it might land on its edge. But if I were to make it part of a possibility circuit, I’d turn it into what the Ghosthead would have called a coin of possible falls—a Possible Coin. And if I toss
that
, things are different.

“One of either heads or tails or just maybe edge will come up as before, and lie there as strong as ever. That’s the fact-coin. And surrounding it, in different degrees of solidity and permanence, depending on how likely they were, are a scattering of its
nighs
—close possibilities made real. Like ghosts. Some almost as strong as the factual, fading to those that are just barely there. Lying where they would have fallen, heads and tails and a fair few edges. Possibilities, mined and pulled through into the light. Fading as the possibility field shifts.

“This—“ He indicated his sword again, seeing Bellis begin to understand. “—is a sword of possible strikes. A Possible Sword. It’s a conductor for a very rare kind of energy. It’s a node in a circuit, a possibility machine. This—“ He patted the little pack strapped to his waist. “—is the power: a clockwork engine. These,” the wires stitched into his armor, “draw the power up. And the sword completes the circuit. When I grip it, the engine’s whole.

“If the clockwork is running, my arm and the sword mine possibilities. For every factual attack there are a thousand possibilities, nigh-sword ghosts, and all of them strike down together.”

Doul sheathed the blade and stared up into the trees’ pitch-black canopy.

“Some of the most likely are very nearly real. Some are fainter than mirages, and their power to cut . . . is faint. There are countless nigh-blades, of all probabilities, all striking together.

“There’s no martial form I’ve not studied. I’m proficient with most of the weapons I’ve ever encountered, and I can fight without any weapons at all. But what most people don’t know is that I’ve trained with this sword twice. I’ve mastered
two
kinds of technique.

“This engine . . . It’s not tight. And it can’t just be wound again, either—there’s more to it than that.

“So I have to husband what seconds I have. When I fight, I rarely switch on the Possible Sword. For the most part, I fight with it as a dumb, purely factual weapon: a diamond-hard blade with edges finer than honed metal. And I wield it
precisely
. Every strike I make is exact, and lands where I wish it to land. It’s what I trained for so many years to do.”

Bellis could hear no pride in his voice.

“But when the situation’s severe, when odds are very bad, when a display’s needed, or I’m in danger . . . then I switch on the motor for a few seconds. And in that situation, precision is the one thing I cannot afford.”

He was silent as a gust of warm wind shook the trees, making them sound as if they shivered at his words.

“A headsman knows where his blade must land. With every nuance of skill, he aims for the neck. He narrows the possibilities. If he were to use a Possible Sword, the vast bulk of the nighs would exist within an inch of the factual strike. The rub is this: the better the headsman, the more precise his strike, the more constrained potentiality, the more
wasted
the Possible Sword. But, obviously, put a weapon like this in the hands of an amateur, it’s as lethal to him or her as to any quarry—the possibilities that’ll manifest include self-harm, unbalancing, dropping the weapon, and so on. A middle way is needed.

“When I attack with a dumb weapon, I’m an executioner. My blade lands in the space I decide, and not to either side. That’s how I learned to fight; it would be a stupid waste of power to use the Possible Sword so. So when I finally found it, after a very long time of searching, I had to learn swordsmanship again. A very different art: skill without precision.

“Fighting with a Possible Sword, you must never constrain possibilities. I must be an opportunist, not a planner—fighting from the heart, not the mind. Moving suddenly, surprising myself as well as the opponent. Sudden, labile, and formless. So that each strike could be a thousand others, and each of those nigh-swords is strong. That’s how to fight with a Possible Sword.

“So I am two swordsmen.”

When his lovely voice ebbed away, Bellis was aware again of the surrounds of the park, the warm darkness and the noise of roosting birds.

“What’s known about possibility mining,” he said, “I know. That’s how I knew of the sword.”

Uther Doul was stirring things in Bellis’ mind. In New Crobuzon, during her time when the scientist Isaac was her lover, Bellis had observed his obsessions, and had learned certain things.

He had been of chaotic and heretical inclinations. Many of his projects came to nothing. She had watched him chase ideas. And during the months they had spent together, the one that she had seen him worry at with the greatest tenacity was the investigation of what he called crisis energy. It was theoretical physics and thaumaturgy of astonishing complexity. But what she had taken from Isaac’s frantic, off-color explanations was his conviction that underlying the facticity of the world, in all its seeming fastness, was an instability, a crisis pushing things to change from the tensions within them.

She had always found it an idea that accorded with her own instincts. She drew obscure comfort from the sense that things, even while as they were, were always in crisis, always pulled to become their opposite.

In the possibility mining that Uther Doul had just described Bellis saw a radical undermining of crisis theory. Crisis, Isaac had once told her, was manifest in the tendency of the real to become what it was not. If what
was
and what was
not
were allowed to coexist, the very tension—the crisis at the center of existence—must dissipate. Where was that crisis energy in the real becoming what it was not, if what it was not was right there alongside what it was?