The Scar (57 page)

Something was approaching from the city’s fore, bearing down on the assembled pirates—something Bellis could not yet see. She saw the armed groups splinter, some turning to face the new threat with terror scrawled all over them. Bellis ran from the room, heading up to the deck to see.

The
Grand Easterly
was all confusion. The bridges were still guarded by nervous patrols, unclear on their orders, desperately watching the storm of arrows and cannonfire that assaulted the
Hoddling
. Pirates were leaving the
Grand Easterly
, running to join their comrades.

Bellis ran to the edge of the deck, past the bridge, hiding in the darkness beside its raised quarters. She was at the level of Armada’s roofs. She tried to make out what was happening in the city.

Firepower was beating down on the
Hoddling
, and on whatever it contained. The hidden enemy sent out more of their bizarre and murderous thaumaturgic strikes, like fireworks, dissolving the substance of the surrounding vessels and the attacking Armadans. But beyond the nearby vessels, Bellis could see an indistinct second front spreading into the city. She could see undisciplined, chaotic attacks, could hear the irregular staccato of gunfire.

The new attackers grew closer to the tight tangle of boats below her, where most of Garwater’s yeomanry had been waiting to retake the
Hoddling
. She could see, suddenly, who had launched the second assault, from within the city. The Garwater forces were suddenly hemmed in and stormed by Dry Fall’s vampir.

Bellis peered around, her hand held tight to her mouth, breathing hard. She did not understand what she was seeing—some collapse of trust, some revenge? Mutiny, at the Brucolac’s hand.

She could not keep the vampir in her eyes. They moved like nightmares. Congregating and atomizing and re-forming, moving with feral speed.

They would swing down with terrifying grace in some cul-de-sac where only five or six or seven armed fighters at a time could attack them, and would dispatch the defenders with appalling ferocity, punching horn-hard nails through throats, savaging with their predatory teeth until their chins were sopped with blood, salivating and growling with bloodlust. And then they were gone, bounding over the collapsing bodies and onto some other concrete block or bridge or gun tower or ruin. Rustling like lizards they would disappear from sight.

Bellis could not tell how many there were. Wherever she looked, there seemed to be fighting, but she could only ever see Garwater’s troops clearly.

Uther Doul, she realized, had turned his attention to the vampir. She saw him shoving people out of his way and sprinting back onto the
Grand Easterly
’s deck, to stare down onto the zones of battle. He spun and screamed orders, directed reinforcements toward the various combats. Then he hurled himself toward the rear of an ancient war trimaran by the
Grand Easterly
’s side, lumpen with brick housing, where through a thicket of ragged washing Bellis glimpsed a brutal melee.

It was only two hundred feet from her, and she could still see Doul. She could watch him sliding down the steeply angled bridge, thumbing on the Possible Sword, which shimmered and became a thousand ghost-swords as he ran. She watched him disappear behind a billowing sheet, as if it had swallowed him up. The sheet gusted and cracked with the wind, and beyond it there were a series of sudden noises.

The stark white linen was streaked from behind with red.

It fluttered twice, as if wounded, and then was torn down as a staggering body collapsed into it and gripped it in death, staining it bloodier and twisting it into a makeshift shroud, revealing the scene behind. Doul stood among a mass of wounded, who were cheering and kicking the swaddled vampir corpse.

Their triumph was brief. Thaumaturgic energy spat like hot fat across from the
Hoddling
, and the wood and metal around the men and women began to buckle and ooze. Uther Doul pointed with his red-dripping sword, sending the exhausted fighters running from the boat.

The vampir they left behind was not the only one to fall. Bellis could not see much of the fighting—her view was interrupted by cobbled streets and building sites and cranes and avenues of stumpy trees. But she thought she could see, here and there, other vampir succumbing. They were terrifyingly fast and strong, and they left a trail of punctured bodies, bleeding and dead, but they were vastly outnumbered.

They used the architecture and the shadows as their allies, but they could not avoid every one of the deluge of bullets and sword strokes that followed them. And though those wounds might not kill them as they would an ordinary woman or man, they hurt and slowed them down. And inevitably there were places where a gang of terrified pirates closed in on one of the buckling, snarling figures and hacked the head from its shoulders, or savaged it so remorselessly that they destroyed its bones and innards beyond even the preternatural vampir capacity for self-repair.

Alone, the vampir might eventually have been contained, but too many of Garwater’s fighters were engaged with the unseen enemy on the
Hoddling
.

Small, low boats had been launched, forty-footers with cannons and fire-throwers on their decks. They raced across the little bay toward the factory ship, to cover it from its open sides, to surround it.

But in the water around the
Hoddling
, shapes were rising.

The sea was illuminated by the glow from the fires and the firepower, and through a few feet of brine Bellis could make out the outlines of the things below: bloated bodies wobbling like sacks of rotten meat; malignant little pig eyes; degenerate fin stubs. Splitting them wide open, mouths mounted with irregular footlong teeth of translucent cartilage.

They breached fleetingly.
What in Jabber’s name are they?
thought Bellis, dizzily.
How can the Brucolac control those? What’s he done?
The men who approached them fired volleys of missiles at them, and the things disappeared again.

But when the little boats came close and the men within leaned out to take aim again, there was a quick organic twitching and they were in the sea, in stunned shock, and with an inrush of water and a quick glare of teeth, they were taken down.

Armada was tearing itself apart. Bellis heard gunshots and saw a flickering of flames where Dry Fall met Garwater. A human mob was approaching, and there were running fights between them and the Garwater sailors. It was not now the city against the vampir alone—as news of the rebellion spread, those who opposed the Lovers’ plans had come out to fight. Hotchi slammed their spines against men; cactacae hurled their great bulks against each other in ugly combat.

There was no structure to the fighting. The city was burning. Dirigibles moved overhead in ungainly panic. Above it all towered the
Grand Easterly
. Its dark iron was still silent and empty, still deserted.

Bellis became sluggishly aware that this was bizarre. She stared at the trireme below her. The rope bridge that had linked it to the
Grand Easterly
had been severed, and so, she realized, had the one beyond it.

Bellis flattened herself carefully against the wall, inched forward, and peered out of the darkest shadows onto the main deck. She saw three dim figures moving with vampir speed, hacking at the chains and knots that attached the bridges to the ship. They split one and sent it swinging into the sea, its far end slapping the flank of the vessel to which it was attached, and then they flitted to the next and began again.

Bellis’s stomach lurched. The vampir were cutting her off, confining her on the ship with them. She pressed against the wall and could not move, as if a film of ice held her.

On an old trawler, below mildewing eaves, Uther Doul put his blade through a man’s face. He turned away from the split, screaming thing he had made and raised his voice over the sounds of violence.

“Where,”
he bellowed, “is the fucking Brucolac?”

And as he spoke, he was facing the
Grand Easterly
. He paused for a second at his own words and looked up at the steamer’s rail, toward its invisible deck and its miles of corridors, where he had left the Lovers in emergency session with their scientific advisors, and his eyes widened.

“Gods
damm
it!” he shouted, and began to run.

Bellis could hear a voice.

It came from very close to her, just around the corner from where she stood frozen, by the doors to the raised section. She held her breath, her heart quite cold with fear.

“Do you understand?” she heard. The voice spoke tersely, hoarse and guttural. The Brucolac. “He’ll be somewhere in
that
section—I don’t know exactly where, but I’ve no doubt that you can find him.”

“We understand.”
Bellis closed her eyes at that awful second voice. It sounded as if the whispered words were chance echoes in parting slime.
“We will find him,”
it continued,
“and take back what was stolen, and then we will leave, and the avanc will move freely again.”

“Well, I’ll be quick then,” the Brucolac said. “There’s two people I still have to kill.”

Footsteps receded. Bellis risked opening her eyes and moving her head a tiny way, and she saw the Brucolac stalking calmly and at speed toward the raised section of superstructure below which were the
Grand Easterly
’s meeting rooms.

Bellis heard the door open, and quick wet sounds brushing the threshold as the intruders entered.

Understanding and amazement hit her so hard she reeled. She knew in a sudden gust of insight what those newcomers were, and what—and whom—they were seeking.

So far . . . ?
she thought, giddy.
So far?
But she had no doubt.

Holding her breath so that her terrified hyperventilation would not betray her, Bellis looked around the corner. There was no one in sight.

She tried desperately to think of what to do. She heard a rushing sound and a series of terrible screams from the ships below. She could not help but give a quiet cry when she saw what the intruders’ thaumaturgy had done, what was now happening to the men and women of Armada. She shook her head and moaned, stupefied by the blood and disfigured corpses she saw.

Another burst of energy crossed the air from the
Hoddling
, and a vivid anger settled very suddenly in Bellis’ guts, making her tremble. Her fear remained, but this new rage was much stronger.

It was directed at Silas Fennec.

You fucking bastard!
she thought.
You fucking stupid selfish swine! Look what you’ve done! Look what you’ve brought here!
She watched the carnage, her own hands bloodless.

I have to stop this.

And then she knew how.

She knew what had been stolen, and she knew where it was.

As the vampir sawed at the age-fused rope of the last of the
Grand Easterly
’s bridges, a sword-wielding figure hurled himself up the slats. The vampir stepped back in surprise and fumbled for their weapons.

Uther Doul reached the deck. The vampir closest to him brought out her flintlock and turned it on him, flickering her tongue and snarling, her fangs extending like a snake’s. Doul beheaded her with a kind of contempt.

Her two fellows watched the tattoo of her heels on the wood. Doul walked toward them without hesitation, and they ran.

“Where,”
Uther Doul bellowed after them, “is the
Brucolac
?”

Crying out with every stroke, Bellis battered at the handle and lock with the candlestick she had grabbed, swinging it with all her strength. She wedged it into the crack and levered. The wood splintered and dented, but the door was thick and well made, and it was several loud minutes before the lock gave way. Bellis bayed in triumph as the door swung open, bleeding wood chips.

She threw open Doul’s cupboards and rummaged under his bed, kicking at floorboards, searching for the statue. It was not in the weapons rack, or by the weird instrument he had said was a Ghosthead artifact. Minutes passed and kept her in agonies as she imagined the bloodshed that must be continuing outside.

Bellis found the statue suddenly, wrapped in its cloth at the bottom of a cylinder in which Doul stored arrows and javelins. With a sudden reverential fear, she cradled the heavy thing as she ran through the
Grand Easterly
’s empty corridors, finding her bearings, remembering where she herself had been held in jail, searching for the secure wing of the old ship, looking very much as if she held a baby.

The Lovers were gathered in a meeting room with those few of their advisors they could find. The fighting was not yet an hour old.

The Lover was yelling uselessly at the frightened scientists, telling them that Aum and Tearfly were
dead
, and that there was something
tearing their city apart
, and that they had to know what it
was
, to
fight it
, when the door flew open, its bolt disintegrating.

In the shocked silence, everyone in the room turned to face the Brucolac.

He stood in the doorway, breathing heavily, his jaw stretched wide and his teeth wicked. He tasted the air with his serpent’s tongue and cast his yellow eyes over the assembled. Then he swept his arm quickly, encompassing everyone in the room except the Lovers.

“Leave,” he whispered.

The exodus took only a few seconds, and the Lovers and the Brucolac were left alone.

They watched the vampir, not fearful but wary, as he stalked toward them.

“This ends,” he whispered, “now.”

Without speaking, the Lovers moved slowly apart, making themselves two targets. Each had drawn their pistols; neither spoke. The Brucolac made sure neither could get past him to the door.

“I don’t want to rule,” he said, and there seemed to be a quite genuine note of despair in his voice, “but this ends. This isn’t a plan; it’s fucking lunacy. I won’t let you destroy this city.” He drew back his lips, and he hunkered down to leap. The Lovers hefted their weapons, knowing that it was pointless. They stole a glance at each other but looked quickly back at the Brucolac, who was ready to take them.