The Scar (61 page)

“Tanner,” she said to him as he raged and cursed, arguing furiously, shouting against the majority, at those who told him he was overreacting, that the Lovers knew what they were doing.

He paused and stared at her in angry bemusement. She beckoned him.

“Tanner,” she said, unheard by any but him. “I agree with you, Tanner,” she whispered. “I think you have every right to hear what Hedrigall might say, down there in the Lovers’ berth.

“Come with me.”

It was not hard to find a way through empty hallways in the
Grand Easterly
. The loyal guards were stationed at points by which someone might make their way to the Lovers’ quarters, down in the boat’s low reaches. But only those corridors, and that was not where Bellis and Tanner were heading.

She took him down other passageways she had learned very well over the weeks of indulging what she could only think of as her perversion.

They passed storerooms and engines and armories. Walking quickly but openly, not like trespassers, Bellis led Tanner lower and lower, into a dimly lit zone.

She did not know it, but Bellis took Tanner close by the way to the rockmilk engines that were churning and whirring and sparking, driving the avanc on.

And eventually, in a dark and narrow passage where the walls were free of aging wallpaper and heliotypes and etchings, were lined instead with knotted pipework as intricate as veins, Bellis turned to Tanner Sack and gestured him to enter. She stood in the cramped and cosseted environs, turned her head to him, and kept him silent with a raised finger.

They stood without movement for some time, Tanner looking around him, at the ceiling at which Bellis stared, at Bellis herself.

When finally they heard the sound of a door opening and closing, it was so loud and flawless to the ear that Tanner stiffened violently. Bellis had never seen the room above, but she knew its echoes well. She knew where above her were chairs, and tables, and a bed. She followed the four sets of footsteps above with her stare—light, heavier, heavier, and massive and slow—as if she could see through the ceiling-floor the Lover, the Lover, Doul, and Hedrigall.

Tanner followed her example, his eyes widening. He and Bellis could trace the bodies above them. One was by the door; two ranged near the bed, sinking now into chairs; and the fourth, the big one, shuffled back and forth toward the far wall, locking his legs as the cactacae did in sleep or exhaustion, his weight driving down through the wood.

“So,” said Uther Doul, his voice astonishingly clear. “Tell us, Hedrigall.” He was hard. “Tell us why you ran. And how you ended back here again.”

“Oh,
gods
.” Hedrigall sounded drained and shattered. It was just barely his voice. Tanner shook his head in amazement.

“Gods, dear gods please don’t start that again.” Hedrigall sounded as if he would cry. “I don’t understand you. I’ve never run from Armada in my life. I never would. Who
are
you?” he screamed suddenly. “
What
are you? Am I in
hell
?
I saw you die
. . .”

“What’s happened to him?” whispered Tanner, appalled.

“You’re talking fucking dung, Hedrigall, you treacherous shit,” the Lover exclaimed. “Look at me, you dog. You were scared, weren’t you? Too frightened, so you patched up the
Arrogance
in secret and cut loose. Now, where did you go, and how did you get back here?”

“I’ve never betrayed Armada,” Hedrigall shouted, “and I never would. Croom, look at me . . . disputing with a dead man! How can you be here? Who are you? I saw all of you die.” He sounded quite mad with grief or shock.

“When, Hedrigall?” It was Doul’s voice, clipped and dangerous. “And where? Where did we die?”

Hedrigall whispered his answer, and something in his voice made Bellis shiver, though she had expected it. She nodded as she heard it.

“The Scar.”

When they had calmed him, Uther Doul and the Lovers conferred quietly, moving away from him.

“. . . mad . . .” said the Lover, not quite audible. “Either mad . . . strange . . .”

“We have to know.” Doul’s voice. “If he’s not mad he’s a dangerous liar.”

“It makes no sense,” said the Lover furiously. “Who is he lying to? Why?”

“Either he is a liar, or . . .” said the Lover.

Tanner and Bellis could not tell if she said more, quietly, or if her words petered out.

“How has this happened?”

“We’d been a month, more than a month in the Hidden Ocean.”

Many minutes had passed. Hedrigall had been silent for a long time while the Lovers debated what to do, whispering so low that Bellis and Tanner could not hear them. When suddenly he spoke, it was unbidden, and his voice was low and unchanging, as artless as if he were drugged.

The Lovers and Uther Doul waited.

Hedrigall spoke as if he knew it was expected of him.

He spoke for a long time, and he was not interrupted. He spoke with unnatural grace, with a trained fabler’s eloquence; but there was in his careful monotone a hesitance, and underlying that a trauma that was frightening to sense.

Hedrigall stumbled on his words, and paused suddenly, sporadically, and drew shaking breaths; but he spoke for a long time. His audience—those in the room with him and those below—were absolutely silent and attentive.

“We’d been more than a month in the Hidden Ocean.”

Chapter Forty-six

“We’d been more than a month in the Hidden Ocean, and the sea was in chaos. We couldn’t plot a course, we couldn’t keep north at the top of our compasses, we couldn’t navigate. Every day I’d stare out from the
Arrogance
, looking for sign of the Scar, the Fractured Land, anything at all. And there was nothing.

“You kept us moving.

“You insisted; you fired us up. You told us what we’d do when we reached the Scar. What powers it would give you, give us. You told us that we would all have power.

“I’ll not pretend there was no dissent. As we went on, people were more and more . . . fearful. And they began to whisper that maybe the Brucolac had been right to mutiny. That maybe there wasn’t so much wrong with the way the city was before.

“They came to you . . . we came to you and asked you to turn back. Said we were happy with how things had been. That we didn’t need this, that too much had gone wrong already, and that we were fearful there was worse to come. Some of us had been having terrible dreams. The city was . . . so tense. Like a cat, fur all sparking and jagged.

“We asked you to turn us back. Before it was too late. We were afraid.

“I don’t know how you did it, but you kept . . . for just enough time, you kept us . . . I’ll not say happy; I’ll not say willing. You kept us obedient; and we waited, and let you take us further in, fearful as we were.”

“If it had been another week, I don’t think we would have put up with any more. I think we would have turned back, and then you all wouldn’t have
died
.

“But it wasn’t like that, was it? It was too late.

“At six in the morning, on the ninth Playdi of Flesh, from the cabin of the
Arrogance
I saw something, forty miles ahead, at the edge of the horizon. A disturbance in the air, very faint, very frightening. And there was something else.

“The horizon was too close.

“An hour, five miles later, I knew we were definitely approaching something. And the horizon was still too close, and getting closer.

“I sent messages down below. And I could see them all preparing. I could look down and see the mass of ships all pushed together—all colors, all different shapes. I could see the crews setting up the cranes on the city’s edge, and firing up engines and gods knew what else. Getting ready with all the sciences they’d been preparing. Little aerostats belting from one end of the city to another. Way below me.

“I was watching where the sea and sky met. I didn’t believe it for the longest time; I kept thinking I must have it wrong and that any moment I’d see it right, make sense of it, but I didn’t. And finally I couldn’t deny what I saw.

“The horizon was only twenty miles away. I could see it clear, jagging across the face of the sea. The Scar.

“It was like seeing a god.

“You’d told us almost nothing, when you described it.

“It was a big wound in reality, broken open by the Ghosthead, you told us, thick with seams of what might be, all the possible ways. A big wound in reality, you said, and I thought you were speaking . . . like poetry.

“When the Ghosthead touched down in that continent, the force of it split the world right open, broke a fissure right through Bas-Lag. A split. Jagging in from the world’s rim for more than two thousand miles, splintering the continent.

“That’s the Scar. That crack. Teeming with the ways things weren’t and aren’t but could be.

“We were only a few miles away.

“It was a crevice in the sea.

“It was uneven, listing across us as we approached it, so the horizon seemed tilted. And because it was irregular, not guillotined but
cracked
, jutting a bit this way and the other, serrating back on itself here and there, there were places I could see over the edges. I could see the sides of the split. They were sheer.

“The ocean was choppy, a strong current heading north even though the wind went south. All the waves washed up past the city, carrying it along, and where they reached the edge of the Scar it was a wall, a clear wall. The water right-angled sharp and plunged down, vertical and split-smooth perfect as glass. Dark, moving water, pressing up against nothing and holding fast. And then . . .

“Empty air.

“A precipice.

“And way, way beyond it, scores of miles, a hundred miles away, only just visible on the other side of that empty gulf, there was a matching face. Hazy with distance. The other side of the crack.

“In between, that emptiness that I could still feel kicking out all manner of puissance. Welling out of the fucking lesion. The Scar.”

“I can’t hardly imagine what it must have been like on the city. They must have been able to see it. Was there panic? Were you excited?”

Of course the Lovers did not answer.

“I knew what the plan was. In sight of the Scar we’d stop at five miles’ distance. And from there a dirigible would set out, and see if it could cross just that short distance to the Scar. And I was the lookout. Any sign of danger, I was to fire my flares, hang out my flags, call the airship back in.

“I don’t know what danger you thought we might face. You had no idea. I don’t think you knew what the Scar was. What did you think might happen? Did you think it might be crawling with Possible Beasts? Things that might have evolved but didn’t, patrolling?

“It was nothing like that.

“The scale of it. The scale of that fucking thing. It was humbling.

“The city didn’t slow,” he said.

He was silent then, for several seconds. He had spoken his last sentence in the same hypnotic monotone he had been using for a long time, and it took Bellis a few heartbeats to realize what it meant.

Her heart spasmed and began to hammer.

“It didn’t slow,” Hedrigall said. “The avanc wasn’t slowing down at all. The avanc was speeding up.

“We were ten miles away, then we were five miles away, and then four, and the city didn’t stop, and didn’t slow down.

“The world was foreshortened . . . The horizon was only a few thousand yards away, and it was growing closer, and Armada was accelerating.

“I began to panic then.” There was no emotion in Hedrigall’s voice, as if he had bled dry of it in the sea. “I began to fire off my flares, trying to warn you of what you must have known.

“Probably . . . probably there was panic then,” he said. “I wouldn’t know; I couldn’t see. Maybe you were all mesmerized, glass-eyed and stupid. But I bet not. I bet there was panic, as the end of the world crept up. With my flares bursting over you, ignored.

“Three miles, two.

“I was unmoving for a long time. Frozen.

“The southerly wind was strong, so the
Arrogance
was lowering, stretching back away from the Scar as if it was afraid, as afraid as me. That woke me.

“Who knows what happened? Maybe you knew, before you died. I wasn’t there.

“Maybe it was the avanc. Maybe after weeks of obedience it broke free of the impulses being fed into it. Maybe some spine that was supposed to plug into its brain snapped off, and the beast woke, confused and snared, and it tugged to try to free itself, careering on.

“Maybe the rockmilk engines failed. Maybe some possibility spilt out from the Scar, a
possibility
that the engines didn’t work. Gods know what happened.

“When I looked down I saw flotillas of little boats being dropped over the sides of the city, and tiny frantic crews hauling at oars and throwing up sails to get away. But the sea fought them, and I saw their sails bellying in all directions. The lifeboats, the yachts, the little skiffs began to eddy in those waters and curl around the city, overtaking it northward, even as they fought to go the other way. But the currents and the waves pulled them on like they were hungry.

“It was only minutes before the first of them reached the Scar. I watched that little dinghy spinning toward the edge, and saw specks that must have been the people inside it jumping out into the sea, and then the stern of the boat tipped suddenly and went over and was gone. Into that airy emptiness.

“There was a trail of them, little boats peppering the sea between the city and the Scar, sliding north toward it. And dirigibles, too. A flock of them, trying to get airborne. Men and women were weighing them down, trying to get aboard, clinging to ropes to drag themselves in. All overloaded, they hauled themselves over the city’s edge and flopped into the sea, where the current took them and they spun like dead whales, shedding their crews, heading for the Scar.

“Armada began to spin, slowly. The horizon lurched and angled as the city coiled clockwise in the water.

“We were half a mile away now and my mind went all cold and I suddenly knew what I had to do. I ran to the
Arrogance
’s bay and looked down through the hatches. I took up my rivebow and steadied myself on the edge of the bay doors and fired at the rope that held me tethered.

“It was thick as a thigh, attached to the aerostat thirty feet from me, swinging like a python. I had six chakris. Three of them I sent wide, way wide. The fourth connected, but not cleanly—cut half the rope’s width. The fifth went wide, and I only had one more chance.

“But even though my aim felt good, and I’d steadied my hands, I missed.

“And I knew that I was dead. I dropped my rivebow, my fingers all thick and stupid, and I clung to the bars at the edge of the hatchway. I could only watch. I could feel the wind buffeting me, up through the doors, and I watched the rope fray too slowly to save me.

“The roofs, the slates, the towers, the aircabs, the flags, the monkeys all frantic with fear they didn’t understand, the citizens running stupid from one place to the next as if anywhere would be spared.

“I watched them all through my telescope. I wonder what it was like, under the sea. I wonder how the cray and the menfish and Bastard John were acting. Maybe they’re still alive, who knows? Maybe they could swim free. Maybe they quit the city as it went on toward its end.

“The
Sorghum
rig and Croom Park and the
Grand Easterly
and me were first to reach the edge.

“The wind changed for a moment, and the
Arrogance
drifted out over the cliff of water, and looked down into the chasm.

“Time was very slow as the
Arrogance
passed above the Scar. Just handfuls of seconds, but they lasted a long time.”

“I crossed past the rim of the sea and looked down, over my knees dangling from the hatch, at the edges of the water. They were vertiginous.

“The sun angled down through the surface of the sea, filtered and refracted by the waves, and passed out again through the vertical face. I could see fishes bigger than me nosing up to the edge where it met the air, a hundred feet below the surface. Light bathed into it. There must be a whole ecology around the edges of the Scar. Even two, three miles down, where the pressure’s merciless, the water there’s sunlit.

“That sheer face of water, colors and eddies moving in strata, extended down
miles
. Perspective defeated me.

“And then mud. I could see it: a thick, sandwiched band of mud, black, at the bottom of the sea. And then rock. Rock extending down for so many miles that it dwarfed the layer of water. Red and black and grey rock, split wide, clean-edged. And many miles down a glow that moved and burned, showing dimly through the air. Magma. Rivers of molten stone, geothermal tides.

“And then? Below that?

“Then the void.”

Hedrigall’s voice was hollow and appalled.

“It must have been seconds I saw it,” he said, “but I remember every layer, like colors of sand drooled into a bottle. It defeated the eye. It was too big to see.

“Armada paused, poised for seconds on the edge of that abyss, and the avanc gave a final push forward.

“I saw it first through the water. I saw it four miles down, a little way above the dark sea bottom. I saw a shape appear in the deeps, unclear through the sea, suddenly nearer, its outline visible, as it powered itself forward. Until with a sound like a cataclysm it began to breach. To push itself through the brine cliff.

“A mile of flesh.

“Its head was through, water splintering, shattering around it, cataracts thousands of yards long booming and splitting, drops of water the size of houses spinning and disintegrating, falling voidward, into the Scar.

“I could see the first of its chains, colossal, bursting through the water in a four-mile straight tear, splitting the sea between the avanc and the city above. Other chains came through after it, so that the sea wall was scored with parallel vertical rips, like a claw wound.

“The avanc’s body continued through, indescribable, fins and spines, cilia, and as it came through into the air gravity took it, and it began to pitch forward. The chains tightened on the city, and the edges of Armada reached the edge and were pulled on, over.

“The avanc gave out a sound that burst all the glass around me.

“I saw the submarine hulks on which the
Sorghum
rested welling up toward the flat cliff face of water and then burst through, and all around them, hundreds of feet away on either side, the aft of Garwater and Bask and Curhouse reached the end of the sea, and jutted out, and trembled, and fell.

“There are so many ships in Armada.

“Steamers reached the edge flat-on, and rolled terribly and ponderously over, houses and towers spilling from them like crumbs, a rain of masonry and bodies, hundreds of bodies, pitched kicking and convulsing into the air and down, down many miles. Past all the inner layers of the world.

“I wasn’t even praying. I had no will. I could only watch.

“Bridges and tethers snapped. Trawlers came apart as they fell. Barges and lifeboats, and tugs and wooden warships. Splintering. Bursting, exploding, on fire as boilers spun and red-hot coals spewed through them. Ships six hundred feet long and centuries old cartwheeled as they went down.

“The
Grand Easterly
’s aft was over the Scar now, jutting out into the air.

“Armada spilt over the lip of the ocean and broke down into a random, plummeting constellation of parts, the live and the dead falling through an avalanche of bricks and masts. I could hear nothing except the splintering water and the avanc’s cry.