The Scar (56 page)

“I think . . .” said Johannes, pointing for the others. “I think we’re coming to a limb.”

The water spasmed and was still, again and again. The corrugations of skin grew tighter. Here, with every beat of the avanc’s heart, great networks of the huge veins appeared, as intricate as shattered glass, tracing muscles like mountains. Crabs scuttled out of the light, into their burrows in the avanc’s skin.

There were impurities in the water. The lamp caught on a billow of opaque liquid like ink.

“What’s that?” whispered Johannes, and Krüach Aum wrote something down for him.

Blood
.

The heart beat again, and the water was full of the dark stuff. It dissipated quickly, folding in all directions. The lamplight broke through the blood’s tentacles and glinted on something beyond: a hard, regular surface.

The bathynauts gasped. It was the massive iron edge of Armada’s harness. Crusted with the remains of limpets long-killed by pressure, and the rude life native to these deeps. One corner, one clasp, folding around the avanc’s body.

“Gods,” whispered Chion, “maybe it’s us. Maybe it’s just the buckles, the bridles—maybe they’ve been rasping it sore.”

The
Ctenophore
bobbed through currents of displaced blood, back over the avanc’s body. The blood welled up from behind hills in its hide.

“Look there!” shouted Johannes suddenly. “There!”

Twenty feet below them, the avanc’s skin was raw and seeping. It was like an excavation: a wide, ragged trench at least thirty feet deep and many yards long, curling into the darkness. Its inner walls were a crumbling mess of shattered cells fouled with the residue of that oily pus. Even as they watched, clots of the semiliquid broke away and began to rise, strings of matter stretching and snapping behind them.

In the deepest part of the gash, at its base, the phosphor illuminated a wet flesh-red.

“Jabber and
fuck
,” hissed Johannes. “No wonder it’s been slowed.”

Krüach Aum was scribbling madly, and he held up his paper to the lantern light.
Is nothing,
Johannes read.
Think of avanc size. Must be more
.

“Look,” hissed Chion. “The edges of that cut . . . they don’t meet the bridle. It’s not the metal that’s caused this.” There was a silence at that. “We’re missing something.”

The avanc’s lacerated epidermis rose to either side of them as they descended into the trench.

Like explorers in some lost river, they traced the wound toward its source.

The V of split flesh disappeared in sharp perspective before them, but was swallowed by darkness long before any vanishing point. With every heartbeat, a wash of blood welled up around them, blinding them for seconds till it evanesced.

There were small motions below them, and on either side, as scavengers ate at the exposed meat.

The submersible moved slowly in the shadows of this meat ravine. And everyone in the little bubble of metal and air thought and did not say,
What did this?

They turned as the split turned, as hard corners of ruined skin reared before them. The
Ctenophore
swiveled in the water.

“Did you see something move?”

Chion’s face was white.

“There! There! Did you? Did you see it?”

Silence. The stroke of blood. Silence.

Johannes tried to see what Chion saw.

The gulch is widening. They are at the edge of a deep pit. Its base is blood and pus. It stretches out, a hollow scores of yards across. This is the avanc’s wound.

Something moves. Johannes sees it and cries out, and the others answer him.

There is motion in the blood below them.

“Oh dear gods,” he whispers, and his voice dies and becomes a thought.
Oh gods
. Something inevitable and very bad is unfolding.

The
Ctenophore
rocks, to more screams. Something buffets it.

A part of Johannes’ mind is frozen, and he thinks,
We must find it and cure it, find what’s wrong and cure it, cut out what’s bad, cure it,
but on top of that, and smothering it, a shock of fear descends as they enter the pit, the heart of the malady.

(It’s been in me since the waves closed over my head.)

The rotten blood below them is pulsing with strange tides. The submersible shudders again as something heavy hits it, unseen. Chion begins to keen.

Moving his head slowly, through time suddenly congealed, Johannes watches the scabmettler’s hands, as sluggish and clumsy as stumps, grappling with the controls, hauling backward, tugging to pull the vessel away; but it is hit again, and it eddies unsteadily.

Johannes hears himself shrieking with Chion to
get out get out
.

Something outside is knocking at the
Ctenophore
’s hatch.

Johannes cries out, staring aghast at the blood-plain below.

A dark harvest, a thicket of black flowers, has burst from it in the oscillating glare of the lamp, blossoms that thrust upward toward that cold false sun on thick stems, muscled and veined, that are not stems but arms, those are not flowers but hands; claws, crooked, and arms spread wide and predatory, and now chests and heads and bodies rise, shoved up from below the slick of blood where they have been gnawing and spitting venom.

Like spirits rising from graveyard earth, bodies are ascending, dissipating the blood with their tails, staring up at the newcomers with colossal eyes into which Johannes gazes with awe and horror. Their faces are fixed in unwitting grins that mock him, flesh scraps fluttering free from teeth bigger than his fingers.

They swim with the grace of eels toward the vessel, which rolls under their weight, which is borne down by their outstretched hands, whose portholes sway and face suddenly up, tipping the three within into each other, where they lie screaming, staring up and screaming in the dying lantern light at the faces at their windows, the scrabbling hands.

Johannes feels his mouth stretched wide, but he can hear nothing. His arms smash against the bodies of his crew, and they beat him in terrified turn, and he feels nothing.

The light pours up from the
Ctenophore
and is eaten by the abyss. Johannes watches the creatures press down on the portholes, and a rage of thoughts arc through him.
These are the sickness,
he keeps thinking hysterically.
These are the sickness
.

The sickness crowd around the submersible. They burst the phosphor lamp, which douses in a rush of bubbles, and now all that illuminates their distended faces is the faint yellow from the lantern within.

Johannes is staring up through the cabin into a pair of eyes outside, four miles below the sea. For a tiny fraction of a second he sees, absolutely vividly and clearly, how he must appear to those eyes, his own face bloodied from the tumbling and stark with lines and lantern light, his frozen, stricken expression.

He watches as the battered portholes vein. He watches the cracks crawl like busy things over and around each other, tracing pathways, riddling the glass until it creaks and the submersible shakes. He crawls backward from the ruined window, as if another handful of inches might save him.

As the
Ctenophore
stutters in its last moments, as the blood-smeared creatures and the sea outside eddy with hungry expectation, the lantern winks out, and in the middle of the heat and chaos and the three voices, three bodies fumbling together, Johannes is absolutely alone.

Chapter Forty-four

0The sun was gone, but the water was still warm. It was very still. Below its surface the constellation of cray lightglobes picked out Armada’s underside.

Tanner and Shekel swam between the
Hoddling
and the
Dober
, the ossified whale, in a runnel of water forty feet wide. They were cosseted from the city’s sounds, only the debris of which floated down to their heads, bobbing on the surface like seals’.

“We’ll not go too close,” warned Tanner. “It could be dangerous. We’re staying on this side of the ship.”

Shekel wanted to dive the few feet he dared, and see through his goggles the line running down to the bathyscaphos. Tanner’s descriptions of the avanc’s chains had always held him transfixed, but they were invisible to him except as faint dark shapes even if he held his courage and swam below the lowest ships in the city. He wanted to see such a cord stretching from the air into the darkness. He wanted to be faced by the scale of it.

“I doubt you’ll see it,” warned Tanner, watching the boy’s enthusiastic, inefficient strokes. “But we’ll see how close we can get, alright?”

The sea lapped at Tanner. He unstretched in it, unrolled his extra limbs. He dived below into the rapidly darkening water and felt himself framed by the cool cray lights.

Tanner breathed water and swam a few feet below Shekel, watching his progress. He thought he could feel something vibrating in the water. He had grown sensitive to the sea’s little shudders.
Must be the cable,
he thought,
still letting the sub down. That’s what it must be.

Three hundred feet from them, the bulky girdered legs of the
Sorghum
rose from the water. The sun had set behind the rig, and the plaited metal of its struts and derricks were dark stitches in the sky.

“We’ll not get too close,” warned Tanner again, but Shekel was not listening.

“Look!” he crowed, and pointed for Tanner, losing his momentum and sinking momentarily, coming up laughing, pointing again toward the far end of the
Hoddling
. They could see the thick wire, taut and rigid, descending into the water.

“Keep away, Shek,” warned Tanner. “No closer now.”

The cable penetrated the water like a needle.

“Shekel.”
Tanner spoke decisively, and the boy turned, spluttering. “That’s enough. Let’s see what we can see while there’s still a bit of light.”

Tanner reached Shekel and sank below him, staring up as the boy pulled the goggles over his eyes, took a lungful of air, and kicked down, holding Tanner’s hand.

The outlines of the city rose, ominous like storm clouds. Tanner was counting down in his head, allowing Shekel twenty seconds of stored air. Tanner peered through the Hidden Ocean’s dusk, still watching for the shaft of the cable.

When he veered up and hauled the boy into the air, Shekel was smiling.

“It’s fucking
brilliant
, Tanner,” he said, and coughed, swallowing seawater. “Do it again!”

Tanner took him deeper. Seconds moved slowly, and Shekel showed no discomfort.

They were ten feet below, by the crusted slope of the
Hoddling
. Some shank of moonlight splashed down, and Shekel pointed. Forty, fifty feet away, the submersible’s cable was momentarily clear.

Tanner nodded, but turned his head to the blackness con-gealed below the factory ship. He had heard a sound.

Time to rise,
he thought, and turned back to Shekel. He touched Shekel and pointed up, reaching out with his hands. Shekel grinned, parting his lips and showing his teeth, even as air slipped from his mouth.

There was a sudden spurting rush of water, and something sinuate and very quick punched in and out of Tanner’s vision. It was gone and there and gone like a fish flashing in to feed. Tanner blinked, stunned. Shekel still stared at him, his face collapsing into perturbation. The boy frowned and opened his mouth as if to speak, and in a great belching roar released all his air.

Tanner spasmed with shock and reached out, and saw that something followed the racing bubbles from Shekel’s mouth, billowing up darkly. For a moment Tanner thought it was vomit, but it was blood.

Still staring with an expression of confusion, Shekel began to sink. Tanner grappled with him, hauling him up with his tentacles, kicking out for the surface, his mind filled up with a shattering sound. And blood smoked up ferociously not only from Shekel’s mouth but from the massive wound on his back.

It seemed so far to the surface.

There was only one word in Tanner’s mind.
No no no
no no
no
no
no
no
no no no
.

He shrieked it without sound, his suckered polyp arms gripping Shekel’s skin, pulling him fitfully toward the air, and indistinct shapes gusted around Tanner, in and out of shadows, baleful and predatory as barracuda, jackknifing and twisting away, there and gone, moving with an effortless piscine ease that made him feel clumsy and heavy, fumbling with his boy, fleeing the sea. He was an intruder, disturbed and making an escape, cowed by real sea-things. His reconfigured body was suddenly a terrible joke, and he cried and floundered with his burden, struggling in water suddenly quite alien to him.

When he broke the surface he was screaming. Shekel’s face came up in front of him, twitching, leaking brine and gore from his mouth, emitting little sounds.

“Help me!”
screamed Tanner Sack,
“Help me!”
But no one could hear, and he clamped his ridiculous suckered limbs to the side of the
Hoddling
and tried to drag himself from the water.

“Help me!”

“Something’s wrong!
Something’s wrong!
”

For hours, the laborers on the
Hoddling
’s deck had tended the great steam pumps that sent air to the
Ctenophore
, and prepared themselves to haul it back. One by one they had slipped into a kind of torpor. They had noticed nothing at all until the cactus-woman greasing the safety wire began to bellow.

“Something’s fucking wrong!”
she yelled, and they came running, panicked by her voice.

They watched the wire, their hearts slamming. The great wheel—almost empty now, its harness almost all played out—was shaking violently, juddering against the deck, trembling the screws that held it down. The cable began to shriek, tearing its way past the guard-piece.

“Bring them
up
,” someone shouted, and the crews ran to the massive winch. There was a snap and the noise of slipping gears. The pistons punched into each other like boxers. The engine’s cogs bit down and tried to turn, but the cable fought them. It was taut as a treble string.

“Get them
out
get them
out
,” someone screamed uselessly, and then with a hideous cracking sound the huge winch rocked backward violently on its stand. The engine smoked and steamed and whined childishly as its guts began to spin freely. Its complex of ratchets and flywheels blurred, revolving so fast they were as dim as apparitions.

“It’s free!” the cactus-woman reported to a hysterical cheer. “It’s coming up.”

But the bathyscaphos was never designed to rise that fast.

The wheel accelerated in ridiculous haste, hauling up the cable at dizzying speed. The gears gave off the dry stink of burning metal and grew red-hot as they whirred.

It had taken three hours to send the
Ctenophore
to the bottom. The disk of rewound cable increased so quickly they could watch it grow, and they knew it would be no more than minutes before it was all pulled back.

“It’s coming up too fast! Get away!”

A mist of brine boiled where the thigh-thick cable was torn from the sea. It scored through the water. Where it met the
Hoddling
’s side, it wore a deep groove in the metal, howling in a monsoon of sparks.

Engineers and stevedores scrambled to get away from the machinery, which struggled with its remaining bolts like a terrified man.

Tanner Sack hauled himself onto the
Hoddling
’s deck, dragging Shekel’s wet, cooling shape behind him.

“Help me!”
he screamed again, but still no one heard a word.

(At the edge of Dry Fall, the Brucolac was leaned over the edge of the
Uroc
, watching the water intently. A domed, toothed head rose before him, framed by ripples, nodded once, and disappeared. The Brucolac turned to his cadre, on the deck behind him.

“It’s time,” he said.)

With a vaulting plume of water, the end of the cable burst from the sea and arced over the spinning winch, heavy metal cordage whipping toward the deck, its end splayed jagged where the submersible had been pulled free.

The
Hoddling
’s workers watched, aghast.

The frayed end of the wire slammed into the deck with a cataclysmic sound, leaving a long stripe of shattered wood and metal shavings, and the winch kept turning. The end of wire lashed around and under it and flogged the ship again and again.

“Turn it off!” the foreman screamed, but no one could hear him over the punishment, and no one could get close. The motor kept the great wheel spinning, flagellating the
Hoddling
, until the boiler exploded.

When it did, and showered the factory ship with molten detritus, there was a moment of still and shock. And then the
Hoddling
lurched again, from more fire and explosions within.

Alarms were sounding across the city.

Yeomanry and armed cactacae from Garwater and Jhour were taking up positions on the vessels around the
Hoddling
, which glowed and boomed as the great bonfire on its deck spread. Its crews raced, frantic, away from it, over the rope bridges and into the city. The
Hoddling
was a huge ship, and there was a steady stream of men and women surging up out of its guts, through the smoke and away from its ruins.

Etched in black against the flames, a figure could be seen shambling slowly in a vague path toward a bridge, bent under a burden that lolled and dripped. His mouth was open wide, but what he said could not be heard.

“Do you all know what to do?” whispered the Brucolac, tersely. “Then go.”

Moving too fast for the eye easily to follow, a swarm of figures spread out from the
Uroc
.

They raced like apes, swinging with easy speed over roofs and rigging, their passage soundless. The unclear garrison fractured into smaller forces.

“Bask and Curhouse won’t help, but they won’t hinder, either,” the Brucolac had told them. “Dynich is young and nervous—he’ll wait and go where the wind blows. Shaddler’s the only other riding with which we have to concern ourselves. And there’s a quick way of taking them out of the equation.”

A small group of the vampir made their uncanny way toward Shaddler, toward the
Therianthropus
and Barrow Hall, toward the general’s court. The main force loped and leaped aft, stretching their limbs, febrile and excited, heading for Garwater.

Behind them, walking briskly but without any attempt to rush or hide, came the Brucolac.

There was something on the
Hoddling
. The men and women who escaped and collapsed on the surrounding vessels gasped for breath and shrieked warnings.

Something had burst through the ship’s hull, somewhere in its lowest quarters, and scored a tunnel up through the metal. As the engine had spun and lashed the deck with the stub of the
Ctenophore
’s cable, things had emerged from the hidden decks, attacking those on the bridge and in the boilers and engine rooms, tearing the ship apart.

Things that were hard to describe—there were reports of chattering teeth like razored slabs, vast corpsy eyes.

The deck of the
Grand Easterly
was almost empty, only crossed occasionally by some running servant or bureaucrat. The yeomanry guarded its entrance points, where the bridges rose to it from below—they could not allow such chaos to spread to the flagship. The crowds gathered as close as they could get to the violence, on roofs and balconies, towerblocks, thronging the vessels that surrounded the
Hoddling
. They surged forward like waves. Aerostats came near the gusting updraft from the fire.

Forgotten in her room at the
Grand Easterly
’s rear, Bellis watched in horror as the crisis took shape.

Johannes is gone,
she thought, staring at the shattered ruins of the winch engine.

He was gone—and she had no words for the weird, muted shock and loss she felt.

She looked down on the trawlers that abutted the
Hoddling
. Their decks thronged with injured, terrified men and women being dragged to safety from the flames.

On one of them, Bellis saw Uther Doul. He shouted, moving sparely, his eyes darting ceaselessly.

The fire on the
Hoddling
was abating, though the Armadans had not put it out.

Bellis gripped the windowsill. She could see shadows moving through the windows of the factory ship. She could see things within.

Armed pirates were arriving from all over the city. They took up positions, checking their weaponry and massing by the bridges leading to the
Hoddling
.

Something streaked from the factory ship’s smoke-fouled bridge: a jet of disturbance that buckled the air as it lanced out. It struck the wooden mast of a schooner just beyond the
Hoddling
.

Agitated particles coiled around the mast and soaked into it, and then Bellis let out an astonished sound. The mast was
melting
as if it were wax, the great pillar of wood bending like a snake, its substance oozing over itself as it spat and drooled downward, spitting in and out of existence, leaving an effervescence in the air—a blistered reality through which Bellis caught glimpses of a void. Folds of denaturing wood slid like toxic sludge over the crowded deck.

Uther Doul was pointing with his sword, directing a group of cactacae to bring their rivebows to bear on the
Hoddling
’s windows, when a chorus of cries rose
away
from the factory ship, out of Bellis’ sight. She saw the men and women below shift their attention, watched an expression of horror and astonishment pass through them like a virus.