The Scar (54 page)

That so stunned her that for a moment she could not breathe. She blinked rapidly, bringing him back into focus. He watched her without any particular cruelty or maliciousness in his face.

“You’re not going to learn anything from me, Bellis,” he said, his voice unchanging. “You’re not going to get anything out of this. This won’t be catharsis, and you won’t feel better when you leave.
Yes
, do you understand? Yes, I lied to you; I used you. And a lot of other people. I did it without thinking twice. I’d do it again. I wanted to go home. If you’d been there and it was easy, I’d have taken you with me, but if you weren’t, I wouldn’t. Bellis . . .” He leaned forward on his bench and rubbed his wrist stump. “Bellis, you have nothing to confront me with.” He shook his head slowly, utterly unabashed by her.

She was shaking with hatred. He had been right not to tell her the truth about what he was doing. She would never have helped him then, even desperate as she was to get home.

“There’s nothing special about you, Bellis: you were one of many. I treated you no differently from anyone else. I thought of you no more and no less. The only difference between you and any of the others is that you’re
here
now. And you think there’s some
point
to you being here. That you had to . . . what?
Have it out?
” Silas Fennec, procurator for New Crobuzon, shook his head, pitying.

“There is no
it
, Bellis,” he said. “Go away.” He lay down and gazed at the ceiling. “Go away. I wanted to get home, and you were useful. You know what I did, and you know why. There’s no mystery, no resolution to be had.

“Go away.”

Bellis stayed a few seconds longer, but managed to leave before speaking again. She had said only six words. She felt her stomach churn with a strong feeling to which she could not put a name.

They won’t kill him,
she thought bleakly.
They won’t even punish him. He’s not even been flogged. He’s too valuable, too scary. They think he can teach them things, that they can get information out of him. Maybe they can.

As she left, she could not help realizing that Fennec was right about at least one thing.

She felt no better at all.

Bellis was surprised to discover Johannes remaining in her life. There had been a time when he had seemed disgusted with her, not concerned ever to see her again.

She still found him spineless. Even when her own loyalty to New Crobuzon was such an odd, unsystematic thing, she could not help thinking of Johannes as a kind of turncoat. The speed of his accommodation with Armada disgusted her.

But now there was something plaintive in him. His rediscovered eagerness to be her friend was a little pathetic. And though Bellis spent what time she could with Carrianne, whose irreverence and affection were genuine pleasures, and though Carrianne did not much like Johannes, there were times when Bellis let him stay a while. She felt pity for him.

With the avanc caught, trapped, and tethered, and with Tintinnabulum’s crew gone, Johannes’ job was done. Now, after all Johannes’ work, Krüach Aum was working with the Lovers’ thaumaturges and Uther Doul, ushered into the new inner circle to discover the secrets of possibility mining. Johannes had realized, Bellis supposed, that there were very many years ahead of him as a captive in the city.

Johannes still worked with a group overseeing the avanc: plotting its speed, estimating the biomass in the area, and the thaumaturgic flows. But it was make-work half the time. When drunk, he would whine about how he had been used up and dispensed with. Bellis and Carrianne would sneer at him behind his drink-fuddled back.

Johannes voiced cautious uncertainties about their trajectory, about their presence in the Hidden Ocean. To find any sign of dissonance, of opposition to the Lovers’ journey, warmed Bellis with surprise. That was part of why she tolerated Johannes’ presence.

He was too cowardly to admit it, but he wished they would turn back, as Bellis did. And as the days passed and Armada slipped further and further into uncharted waters, into the Hidden Ocean, Bellis discovered (with stabs of unexpected hope) that she and Johannes were not alone.

Hedrigall’s desertion was a trauma that did not heal.

Armada moved on into seas that did not obey laws that any oceanologer understood. It could have seemed an adventure or some god-granted destiny to a citizenry still grimly fired up by triumph in war and by the rhetoric of Garwater’s greatest-ever leaders. But then loyal, reliable Hedrigall had run, and that gave a terrible coloration to the city’s journey.

The
Arrogance
had quickly been replaced. Now another airship hung over the
Grand Easterly
, watching the horizons. But it was not so large or quite so high. It did not have the
Arrogance
’s range of vision, and the metaphors thrown off from that fact troubled men and women otherwise loyal.

“What did he see coming?” they muttered. “Hedrigall, what did he see coming?”

The city’s motion was its own dynamic. There were no strong voices arguing to turn back. Even those other rulers who disapproved of the Lovers’ plans had given in, or only spoke their criticisms in camera. But Hedrigall’s dissident ghost stalked the ridings, and the triumph, the excitement with which the journey had started, was gone.

Tanner and Shekel gave new names to the creatures they saw below the water: runrunners and dancing flies and yellowheads.

They watched Armada’s naturalists drifting over the curious new animals, snatching a few in nets, keeping their distance from the big, snub-faced yellowheads, heliotyping them with unwieldy waterproof cameras and phosphoric flares.

Schools of the animals gusted through the pipes and hulls that jutted below like roots. They mixed with more recognizable fish—there were whiting and baitfish even in the Hidden Ocean—eating them or being eaten.

Tanner dived and teased a couple of hand-sized specimens with his tentacles. At the surface, Shekel looked down on Tanner’s scars.

Further and further into that sea.

There were strange sounds at night: the rutting calls of unseen animals with voices like bulls. Some days there was no swimming at all, not by the hardiest or most inquisitive diver, and even the menfish hid themselves in their little city-bottom caverns. These were dangerous waters. Armada passed through the unpredictable edges of boiltides, by the hunting grounds of piasa, living whirlpools that circled the city hungrily but kept their distance.

In moonless dark, lights pulsed below the waters, like the bioluminescence of benthic things magnified many hundreds of times. There were times when the clouds above the sea moved much faster than the wind. One day when the air was dry as elyctricity, shapes appeared off the city’s star’d edge, like tiny islands. They were rafts of unknown weed, great clots of mutant bladderwrack that moved suddenly away from the city under some motive power of their own.

Across the whole of Armada, in every riding, in tumbledown slums and the most elegant townhouses, there was a tension, a neurotic expectancy. People did not sleep well. Bellis blenched when that began, remembering the misery of the nightmares that had racked New Crobuzon and that ultimately had led her here.
From one set of ruined nights to another,
she thought after several miserable, insomniac hours.

During some of those dark times, Bellis walked to the
Grand Easterly
to watch the city’s journey through mysterious, faintly moving seas. She would stare out at the remorseless miles of water until, cowed by the scale of it, she fled into the corridors of the great ship, moved by a compulsion she did not understand.

She would wind through its warren of empty passages, into the forgotten zone of the steamer, to the little cubbyhole that Doul had shown her. And there she would perch, uncomfortable and disturbed, eavesdropping on the fucking and the bedroom talk of the Lovers.

It was a habit that revolted her, but she could not shake off the sly sense of power it gave her.
My little rebellion, my little escape—someone’s listening, and you don’t know,
she would think, and hear the Lovers mutter wetly to each other and grapple with an abandon that still appalled her.

They never gave her any revelations. They never spoke of anything important. They only rolled and lay together, and murmured their fetishistic connection. The Lover sounded more and more febrile with every night, her voice growing harder, and the Lover debased himself to her, eager to dissolve into her.

I do not want to be here,
Bellis thought, fervently and repeatedly. She spoke it aloud, finally, to Carrianne one night, knowing that her friend would not agree.

“I do not want to be here.” Bellis swilled the wine in her glass. “Now there’s nightmares, and what comes next are fugues. I’ve seen it before. And we can’t be heading anywhere that’s any good—and what can happen then? Either we die . . . or the Lovers get control of the most . . . terrible, terrible power. Would you really trust them, Carrianne?” she demanded drunkenly. “That cut-up fuck and his psychopath woman? You’d trust them with power like that? I do not want to be here.”

“I know, Bellis,” Carrianne said, searching for words. “But I want to see what’s out there. I think this is something amazing, you understand? Whether or not the Lovers get hold of . . . whatever’s there. And no, I don’t really trust them. I’m Dry Fall, remember? But I’ll tell you what . . . Since Hedrigall did a runner, I think there’s a lot of people who are starting to agree with you.”

And Bellis nodded in sudden surprise, and raised her glass in a toast. Carrianne responded sardonically.

She’s right,
thought Bellis suddenly.
Godsdammit, she’s fucking right. Something’s changing.

The avanc began to slow.

Perhaps ten days after Armada entered the Hidden Ocean, people began to notice.

At first it was Bastard John, the menfish and the cray, Tanner Sack and the other few upsiders who still swam. It was growing easier for them to keep up with the city. At the end of a few hours’ immersion, skittering below the city’s barnacle-scaled underside, their muscles burned less than they would have expected. They were not traveling so far, so fast.

It was not long before the air-breathing citizens noticed. Without land, in cryptic seas, it was not so easy to chart the distances the city was traveling. But there were methods.

Something was happening to the mile-long creature hidden in the deep. Something had changed. The avanc was slowing down.

At first it was hoped that it was a temporary change, that the avanc’s pace would increase again. But the days went on, and still the beast slowed.

With delight and triumph, Johannes found himself suddenly back in favor. His old team was reassembled by the Lovers, to make sense of what was happening.

Bellis was surprised to discover that he still talked to her and Carrianne about his work, now that he had been brought back into the inner circle.

“There can’t be anyone in the city who hasn’t noticed,” he told them one night, exhausted and mystified. “The Lovers are waiting for us to solve it.” He shook his head. “Even Aum can’t fathom it. The rockmilk engine’s still controlling it; the avanc’s still traveling . . . It’s just slowing.”

“Something in the Hidden Ocean?” suggested Bellis.

Johannes bit his lip. “Doesn’t make sense,” he said. “What in Bas-Lag can fuck with an
avanc
?”

“It must be sickening,” said Carrianne, and Johannes nodded.

“I think it must be,” he agreed slowly. “Krüach’s confident that we can fix whatever’s wrong. But I’m not sure we know enough to cure it.”

The air above the Hidden Ocean was desiccated and suddenly hot. The city’s crops became brittle.

All the ridings withdrew into themselves, and the ridiculous semblance of normality that Armada had recently affected began to break down. There was little work done. The pirate-citizens waited, motionless in their homes beneath a punitive sky. The city was bleached and vague. Marooned. Lolling like a lifeboat, almost immobile.

Its wake grew daily more faint as the avanc slowed.

A slow-burning panic began to spread. Meetings were called. For the first time, they were not organized by the rulers, but by popular committees operating across the ridings. And if at first they were made up almost totally of men and women from Curhouse and Dry Fall, the minorities from Jhour and Booktown and Garwater grew each day. They discussed what was happening, urgently, seeking answers no one was able to give them.

A nightmare image was recurring in people’s heads: Armada, adrift, without motive power, in the barren waters of the Hidden Ocean. Or tethered by the motionless avanc, an anchor of unimaginable weight.

The city’s speed was still decreasing.

(Much later, Bellis realized that the day when the avanc’s condition became shockingly clear, the day that so many people died, was in Crobuzoner terms the first of Melluary—a Fishday. That fact made her cough with a desolate approximation of laughter, when she realized it later when the killing was over.)

It was midmorning when the impurities appeared in the sea.

At first, those who saw them thought they were more aggregates of the semisentient weed, but it became quickly obvious that they were something else. They were lighter, and lower in the water—sprawling patches of color, liquescent at the edges.

The blemishes appeared miles off, in the city’s path. As they came gradually closer, word spread, and crowds gathered in Shaddler’s Sculpture Garden, at Armada’s fore, to watch whatever it was approach.

It was a mass of some viscous liquid, thick as dense mud. Where waves reached its outer edges they reduced to ugly ripples that crawled weakly across the surface of the substance and were swallowed up.

The stuff was the pallid yellow-white of a caveworm.

Bellis swallowed, feeling sick with anxiety, and then realized very suddenly as the wind shifted that it was not anxiety at all. It was the stench.

A rolling mass of smell oozed over them. The citizens blenched and puked. Bellis and Carrianne staggered and stared at each other, paling, managing not to spew even amid a chorus of retching. The wobbling white mass stank of the worst, most septic rot, air-starved flesh gone putrid.