When she raised her eyes to the horizon, Bellis could see disturbances out to sea: churning water, wakes without obvious cause. Wind- and weather-born, usually, but sometimes she might glimpse a pod of porpoises, or a plesiaur or seawyrm neck, or the back of something big and fast that she could not identify. The life beyond the city, and all around it.
Bellis watched the city’s fishing boats return in the evenings. Sometimes pirate ships would appear and be welcomed back into the harbors of Basilio or Urchinspine, the motors of Armada’s economy finding their way, uncannily, home.
Armada was full of figureheads. They poked up in unlikely places, ornate and ignored like the carved door knockers on New Crobuzon houses. At the end of a terrace, walking between rows of close brick dwellings, Bellis might come face-to-face with a splendid corroded woman, her breastplate moldering, her painted gaze flaked and vague. Hanging in the air like a spirit, below the bowsprit of her ship, which jutted across its neighbor’s deck and pointed into the alley.
They were all around. Otters, drakows, fish, warriors, and women. Above all women. Bellis hated the blank-eyed, curvaceous figures, wobbling up and down moronically with the swell, haunting the city like banal ghosts.
In her room, she finished Essays on Beasts and remained uncomprehending of Armada’s secret project.
She wondered where Silas was, and what he was doing. She was not upset or angry at his absence, but she was curious and a little frustrated. He was, after all, the closest thing she had to an ally.
He returned on the evening of the fifth of Lunuary.
Bellis let him enter. She did not touch him, nor he her.
He was tired and subdued. His hair was mussed, his clothes dusty. He sat back in a chair and covered his hands with his eyes, murmuring something inaudible, some greeting. Bellis made him tea. She waited for him to speak, and when after a while he did not, she returned to her book and her cigarillo.
She had made several more pages of notes before he spoke.
“Bellis. Bellis.” He rubbed his eyes and looked up at her. “I have to tell you something. I have to tell you the truth. I’ve kept things from you.”
She nodded, turning to face him. His eyes were closed.
“Let’s . . . take stock,” he said slowly. “The city’s heading south. The Sorghum . . . Do you know what the Sorghum’s for? The Sorghum, and the other rigs that I gather the Terpsichoria took you past, suck fuel from under the sea.”
He spread his hands wide, indicating massiveness. “There are fields of oil and rockmilk and mercus under the earth, Bellis. You’ve seen the screwbores they use to plumb for the stuff on land. Well, geo-empaths and the like have found vast deposits under the rock, lying under the sea.
“There’s oil under southern Salkrikaltor. That’s why the Manikin and the Trashstar and Sorghum have been perched out there for more than three decades. The supports of the Manikin and Trashstar go down four hundred feet and sit on the bottom. But the Sorghum . . . The Sorghum’s different.” He spoke with a morbid relish. “Someone in Armada knew what they were doing, I tell you. The Sorghum sits on two iron hulls—submersibles. The Sorghum’s not tethered. The Sorghum’s a deepwater rig. The Sorghum can travel.
“You can just keep adding sections to its drill shaft, and it can go down Jabber fucking knows how far. Miles down. You can’t find oil and so on everywhere. That’s why we were stationary for so long. Armada was sitting over a field of something or other the Sorghum could get at, and we couldn’t move off until it had stored up for wherever it’s going.”
How do you know all this? thought Bellis. What’s this truth you have to tell me?
“I don’t think it’s just oil,” Silas continued. “I’ve been watching the flame over the rig, Bellis. I think they’ve been drawing up rockmilk.”
Rockmilk. Lactus saxi. Viscous and heavy as magma, but bone cold. And dense with thaumaturgons, the charged particles. Worth several times its considerable weight in gold, or diamonds, or oil or blood.
“Ships don’t use fucking rockmilk to fire their engines,” Silas said. “Whatever they’ve stockpiled for, it’s not just to keep their vessels trim. Look at what’s happening. We’re heading south, to deeper, warmer seas. I’ll bet you a finial we’re skirting close to ridges beneath, where there are deposits, a route that lets the Sorghum drill. And when we get wherever we’re going, your friend Johannes and his new employers are going to use . . . what, several tons of rockmilk and Jabber knows how much oil to do . . . something. By which time . . .” He paused, and held her gaze. “By which time it’ll be too late.”
Tell me, Bellis thought, and Silas was nodding as if he had heard her.
“When we met on the Terpsichoria, I was in something of a state, I remember. I told you I had to return to New Crobuzon immediately. You reminded me of that yourself, recently. And I told you that I’d been lying. But I wasn’t. What I said on Terpsichoria was true: I have to return. Dammit, you probably realized all this.”
Bellis said nothing.
“I didn’t know how to . . . I didn’t know if I could trust you, if you’d care,” he continued. “I’m sorry I wasn’t honest with you, but I didn’t know how far I could go. But dammit, Bellis, I trust you now. And I need your help.
“It’s true, what I told you, that sometimes the grindylow turn against some poor sod for no reason anyone can figure. That people disappear at their whim. The grindylows’ whim, the deeplings.” But it’s not true, what I said then, about that happening to me. I know exactly why the grindylow wanted to kill me.
“If they chose, the grindylow could swim upriver to the top of the Bezheks, where all the rivers join together, and they could cross into the Canker. Be swept downriver on the other side of the mountains, all the way to New Crobuzon.
“Others could cross into the ocean through the tunnels, come at the city by sea. They’re euryhalinic, the grindylow, happy in freshwater or brine. They could make their way to Iron Bay. To the Gross Tar, and New Crobuzon. All it would take for the grindylow to get to the city is determination. And I know they have that.”
Bellis had never seen Silas so tense.
“When I was there, there were rumors. Some big plan was in the offing. One of my clients, a magus, a kind of thug-priest, its name came up again and again. I started to keep my eyes and ears open. That’s why they want to kill me. I found something out.
“The grindylow don’t do secrecy; they don’t do policing as we do. There was evidence in front of me for weeks, but it took me a long time to recognize it. Mosaics, blueprints, librettos, and such-like. Took me a long time to understand.”
“Tell me what you found,” said Bellis.
“Plans,” he said. “Plans for an invasion.”
“It would be like nothing you can imagine,” he said. “Gods know our history’s littered with betrayal and fucking blood, but . . . ‘Stail, Bellis . . . You’ve never seen The Gengris.” There was a desperation in his voice that Bellis had never heard before. “You’ve never seen the limb-farms. The workshops, the fucking bile workshops. You’ve never heard the music.
“If the grindylow take New Crobuzon, they wouldn’t enslave us, or kill us, or even eat us all. They wouldn’t do anything so . . . comprehensible.”
“But why?” said Bellis, finally. “What do they want? Do you think they can do it?”
“I don’t godsdamned know. No one knows a thing about them. I suspect the New Crobuzon government has more plans about what to do if fucking Tesh invades than if the grindylow do. We’ve never had any reason to be scared of them. But they have their
own . . . methods, their own sciences and thaumaturgies. Yes,” he said. “I think they have a chance.
“They want New Crobuzon for the same reason every other state or savage on Ragamoll does. It’s the richest, the biggest, the most powerful. Our industries, our resources, our militia—look at everything we have. But unlike Shankell or Dreer Samher or Neovadan or Yoraketche, The Gengris . . . The Gengris has
a chance.
“They can come with surprise . . . Poison the water, come into the sewers. Every godsdamn crevice and crack and water tank in the city would be a fucking encampment. They can storm us with weapons we’d never understand, in an endless guerrilla war.
“I’ve seen what the grindylow can do, Bellis.” Silas sounded exhausted. “I’ve seen it, and I’m scared.”
From outside came the far-off sound of monkeys squabbling sleepily.
“That’s why you left,” said Bellis in the quiet that followed.
“That’s why I left. I couldn’t believe what I’d found out. But I dithered . . . I fucking farted time away.” His anger welled up suddenly. “And when I realized that there was no fucking mistake, that this wasn’t a confusion, that they really did intend to unleash some godsforsaken unthinkable apocalypse on my hometown . . . then I left. I stole the sub, and left.”
“Do they know that . . . you know?” she asked.
He shook his head. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I took some stuff with me, so that it looks like I stole and ran.”
Bellis could see that he was tight with tension. She could remember some of the heliotypes she had seen in his notebook. Her heart lurched, and slow alarm crept through her with her blood, like a sickness. Bellis struggled to grasp what he was telling her. It was too big for her; it made no sense. She could not contain it. New Crobuzon . . . How could it be threatened?
“Do you know how long?” she whispered.
“They have to wait till Chet to harvest their weapons,” he said. “So maybe six months. We have to find out what Armada’s planning to do, because we have to know where we’re going, with this fucking rockmilk and all. Because we . . . we have to get a message back to New Crobuzon.”
“Why,” Bellis breathed, “didn’t you tell me before?”
Silas laughed hollowly. “I didn’t know who on this place to trust. I was trying to get away from here myself, trying to find some way home. It took me a long time to believe that . . . that there
wasn’t any. I thought I could just take the message to New Crobuzon myself. What if you didn’t believe me? Or what if you were a spy? What if you told our new fucking rulers—“
“Well, what about that?” Bellis interrupted. “Isn’t it worth thinking about? Maybe they’d help us get a message . . .”
Silas stared at her with nasty incredulity.
“Are you mad?” he said. “You think they’d help us? They don’t give spit what happens to New Crobuzon. They’d most likely welcome its fucking destruction—one less competitor nation on the sea. You think they’d let us ride to the rescue? You think they’d care? The bastards would probably do everything they could to hold us back, to let the grindylow do their worst. And, besides, you’ve seen how they treat . . . Crobuzoner officials and agents. They’d search my notes, my papers, and it would come out that I have a commission. That I work for New Crobuzon. Jabber Almighty, Bellis, you saw what they did to the captain. What do you think they’d do to me?”
There was a long silence at that.
“I needed . . . I need someone to work with me. We have no friends in this city. We have no allies. And thousands of miles away, our home’s in danger, and we can’t trust anyone to help us. So it’s up to us to get a message back.”
After he said that there was a pause that became a silence. It dragged out, longer and longer, and became terrible because they both knew it should be filled. They should be coming up with plans.
And both of them tried. Bellis opened her mouth several times, but words dried in her throat.
We’ll hijack one of their boats, she wanted to say but could not; the idiocy of it choked her. We’ll sneak out just the two of us in a dinghy; we’ll get through the guard boats and row and sail for home. She tried to say that, tried to think it without scorn, and almost moaned. We’ll steal an airship. All we need are guns and gas, and coal and water for the engine, and food and drink for a two-thousand-mile journey, and a map, a chart of where in the godsforsaken fucking middle of the fucking entire Swollen Ocean we are, for Jabber’s sake . . .
Nothing, there was nothing, she could say nothing; she could think nothing.
She sat and tried to speak, tried to think of ways she could save New Crobuzon, her city which she treasured with a ferocious,
unromantic love, and which lay under the most baleful threat.
And the moments passed and passed, and Chet and the summer and the grindylow harvest kept coming closer, and she could say nothing.
Bellis imagined bodies like puffy eels, eyes and slablike recurved teeth heading under cold water toward her home.
“Oh dear gods, dear Jabber . . .” she heard herself say. She met Silas’ troubled eyes. “Dear gods, what are we going to do?”
Chapter Fourteen
Slow like some vast, bloated creature, Armada passed into warmer water.
The citizens and the yeomanry put aside their heavier clothes. The press-ganged from the Terpsichoria were disorientated. The idea that seasons could be escaped, could be outrun physically, was profoundly unsettling.
The seasons were only points of view—matters of perspective. When it was winter in New Crobuzon, it was summer in Bered Kai Nev (so they said), though they shared the days and nights that grew long and short in antiphase. Dawn was dawn all across the world. In the eastern continent, summer days were short.
The birds of Armada’s microclimate increased in number. The small, inbred community of finches and sparrows and pigeons that clung to the city’s skyline wherever it moved were joined by transients: migrators that crossed the Swollen Ocean, following the year’s heat. A few were waylaid from their gigantic flocks by Armada, coming down to rest and drink, and staying.
They circled confused over the wheeled spires of Curhouse, where the Democratic Council met in session after emergency session, fiercely and ineffectually debating Armada’s direction. They agreed that the Lovers’ secret plans could not be good for the city, that they must do something, bickering miserably as their impotence became more and more clear.
Garwater had always been the most powerful riding, and now Garwater had the Sorghum, and the Democratic Council of Curhouse could do nothing at all.
(Nevertheless, Curhouse opened tentative communications with the Brucolac.)
The hardest thing for Tanner was not gill-breathing, not moving his arms and legs like a frog or vodyanoi, but staring into the face of the colossal gradient of dark water below him. Attempting to look it full-on and not be cowed.
When he had worn his diving suit, he had been an intruder.
He had challenged the sea, and he had worn armor. Clinging to
the rungs and the guy ropes, hanging on for life, he had known
that the endless space below him that stretched out like a maw
was exactly that: a mouth the size of the world, straining to swallow him.
Now he swam free, descending toward darkness that no longer seemed to hunger for him. Tanner swam lower and lower. At first he seemed close enough to reach up and stroke the toes of the swimmers above him. It gave him a voyeuristic pleasure to see their frantic, paddling little bodies above him. But when he turned his face to the sunless water below him his stomach pitched at its implacable hugeness, and he turned quickly and made back for the light.
Each day he descended further.
He slipped below the level of Armada’s keels and rudders and descending pipeways. The long sentinels of weed that fringed them, that delimited the city’s lowest points, reached out for him, but he slipped past them like a thief. He stared at the deep.
Tanner passed through a rain of baitfish that nibbled at the city’s scraps, and then he was down in clear water, and there was nothing of Armada around him. He was below the city, all the way below it.
He hung still in the water. It was not difficult.
The pressure coddled him, tightly as if in swaddling.
The ships of Armada sprawled almost a mile acros
s the sea, occluding his light. Above him, Bastard John fussed around below the docks like a hornet. In the twilight water around him Tanner saw a thick suspension of particles, life upon tiny life. And beyond the plankton and krill he faintly saw Armada’s seawyrms and its submersibles, a handful of dark shadows around the city’s base.
He struggled to overcome his vertigo; he made it something else. No less awe, but less fear. He took what was like fear in him, and made it humility.
I’m damn small, he thought, hanging like a mote of dust in still air, in a sea that’s damn big. But that’s alright. I can do that.
With Angevine he was shy and a little resentful, but he worked hard for Shekel’s sake.
She came to eat with them. Tanner tried to chat with her, but she was withdrawn and hard. For some time they sat and chewed their kelp bread without any sounds. After half an hour, Angevine motioned to Shekel, and he, well-practiced, stood behind her and scooped pieces of coke from the container behind her back into her boiler.
Angevine met Tanner’s gaze without embarrassment.
“Keeping your engines stoked?” he said eventually.
“They aren’t the most efficient,” she replied slowly (in Salt, spurning the Ragamoll that he had used, though it was her native tongue).
Tanner nodded. He remembered the old man in the hold of the Terpsichoria. It took a while for him to say more. Tanner was shy of this stern Remade woman.
“What model is your engine?” he said eventually, in Salt. She stared at him in consternation, and he realized with astonishment that she was ignorant of the mechanics of her own Remade body.
“It’s probably an old pre-exchange model,” he continued slowly. “With only one set of pistons and no recombination box. They were never any good.” He stopped there for a while. Go on, he thought. She might say yes, and the lad’d like it. “If you fancy, I could take a look. Worked with engines all my life. I could . . . I could even . . .” He hesitated at a verb that sounded somehow obscene, discussing a person. “I could even refit you.”