But a plan of such magnitude could not be hidden forever.
“We have the Sorghum,” said the Lover, “so we decide where we all go. But what will the rest of the city think while they sit stranded in some patch of sea waiting for our landing party to return? What are they going to think when we reach the sinkhole, raise the damned avanc? Their rulers won’t talk: our allies take our lead, and our enemies don’t want this in the open. They’re afraid of which way their people will turn.
“Perhaps,” she concluded slowly, “it’s time to bring the citizens to our side. Enthuse them . . .”
She looked at her partner. As always, they seemed to be communicating silently.
“We need lists,” the Lover said, “of everyone who should go to the island. We must look at new arrivals—there may be expertise we’ve missed. And we need security details for all candidates. And we have to represent all ridings.” He smiled, his scars tracing the contours of his face, and picked up Bellis’ translation.
When Johannes reached the door, the Lovers called his name.
“Come with us,” said the Lover, and Johannes’ stomach yawed uneasily.
Oh Jabber, he thought. What now? I’ve had enough of your
company.
“Come and talk to us,” the Lover continued, and waited while his partner finished for him.
“We want to talk to you about this woman, Coldwine,” she said.
Past midnight, Bellis was woken by a repeated banging on her door. She looked up, thinking it must be Silas, until she saw him lying motionless and awake beside her.
It was Johannes. She tugged her hair out of her face and blinked at him on her doorstep.
“I think they’re going to go ahead,” he said. Bellis gasped.
“Listen, Bellis. They were . . . well, intrigued by you. What they’ve heard has suggested that . . . well, that you’re not their material. Nothing bad, you know?” He was eager to mollify her. “Nothing, you know, dangerous . . . but not exactly sympathetic. Like a lot of press-ganged: best left aboard at all costs. It’s normally years before incomers get letters of pass.”
Was that all it was? thought Bellis slowly. The misery and loneliness, the aching for New Crobuzon that made her feel something had been torn from her—was it just an everyday symptom, shared by a thousand like her? Was it so banal?
“But . . . well I told them all the things you’d said to me,” Johannes said, and smiled. “And I can’t promise anything, but . . . I think you’d be the best person, and I told them that.”
Silas seemed to be sleeping when she returned to bed, but something in the shallowness of his breath told her he was not. She leaned over him as if about to kiss him hard, her lips found his ear, and she whispered, “It’s working.”
They came for her the next morning.
It was after Silas had left, heading for Armada’s underworld to perform his opaque, illegal activities. To the work that kept him under the city’s skin, that made him too dangerous even to attempt passage to the anophelii island.
Two of the Garwater yeomanry, pistols slung easy in their belts, steered Bellis to an aerostat cab. It was not far from Chromolith to the Grand Easterly. The mass of the enormous steamer stretched out above the city. Its six colossal masts, its chimneys, its bare decks unadorned by houses or towers.
The sky was full of aerostats: Scores of little cabs studding the air like bees around a hive; outlandish vessels built for freight, transporting heavy goods between the ridings; the peculiar little single-rider balloons with their pendulous occupants. A little way out were warflots, elliptical flying guns. And above them all the massive, crippled Arrogance.
They wound over the skyscape of Armada, lower than Bellis was used to, rising and sinking with the topography of roofs and rigging. Warrens of brick like New Crobuzon slums passed below. Built on the cramped space of deck tops, they looked precarious: their outer walls too close to the water, the alleyways that riddled them impossibly thin.
Beyond the haze above the Gigue, whose fore was an industrial district of foundries and chymical plants, the Grand Easterly was approaching.
Bellis was uncertain. She had never been inside the Grand Easterly before.
Its architecture was austere: darkwood panels, lithographs and heliotypes, stained glass. A little age-blistered, but well kept, its innards were a tangle of passageways and staterooms. Bellis was left to wait in a small chamber. The door was locked on her.
She went to the iron-fringed window and looked down over Armada’s random ships. In the distance she could see the green of Croom Park, spread like disease across the bodies of several ships. The room she was in was higher by far than any of the surrounding vessels, the side of the ship falling away below. At eye level she saw dirigibles and a mass of thin masts.
“This is a New Crobuzon ship, you know.”
Even as she turned, Bellis recognized the voice. It was the scarred man, the Lover, standing in the doorway, alone.
Bellis was shocked. She had known that there would be interrogation, investigation, but she had not expected this: to be questioned by him. I translated the book, she thought. I get special treatment.
The Lover closed the door behind him.
“It was built more than two and a half centuries ago, at the end of the Full Years,” he continued. He spoke to her in Ragamoll, with only a slight accent. He sat, indicated to her to do the same. “In fact, it’s been claimed that the Grand Easterly’s building itself brought the Full Years to an end. Obviously,” he said, deadpan, “that is ridiculous. But it’s a useful symbolic coincidence. Decline was setting in at the end of the 1400s, and what more potent symbol of the failure of science than this ship? In a scramble to prove that New Crobuzon was still in its golden age, they come up with this thing.
“It’s a very poor design, you know. Trying to combine the paddle power of those stupid huge wheels, on her flanks, with a screw propeller.” He shook his head, not taking his eyes from Bellis. “You can’t power something of this size with paddles. So they just loomed there like tumors, ruining the ship’s line, acting as brakes. Which meant the screw didn’t work very well, either, and you couldn’t sail it. Isn’t it ironic?
“But there’s one thing that they did right. They set out to build the biggest vessel ever seen. They had to launch the thing sideways, in the estuary by Iron Bay. And for a few years it limped around. Awesome but . . . ungainly. They tried to use it during the Second Pirate Wars, but it lumbered like a massively armed rhinoceros while the Suroch and Jheshull ships danced around it.
“Then, they’ll tell you, it sank. Of course, it didn’t. We took it.
“They were wonderful years for Armada, the Pirate Wars. All that carnage; ships disappearing every day; missing cargos; sailors and soldiers fed up with fighting and dying, eager to escape. We stole ships and technology and people. We grew and grew.
“We took the Grand Easterly because we could. That was when Garwater took control, which it has never lost. This ship is our heart. Our factory, our palace. It was a dreadful steamer, but it is a superlative fortress. That was the last . . . great age for Armada.”
There was silence for a long time.
“Until now,” he said, and smiled at her. And the interrogation began.
When it was all finished, and she emerged mole-eyed into the afternoon, she found it hard to recall his questions exactly.
He had asked her a great deal about the translation. Had she found it hard? Was there anything that had not made sense? Could she also speak High Kettai, or merely read it? And on and on.
There had been questions designed to gauge her state of mind, her relationship to the city. She had spoken carefully: it was a tentative line between the truth and lies. She did not try to hide all of her distrust, her distaste at what had been done to her, her resentment. But she battened it down, somewhat: contained it, made it safe.
She tried not to seem to try.
There was no one to meet her outside, of c
ourse, and that gladdened her, obscurely. She crossed the steep bridges that descended from the Grand Easterly to the lower ships beside it.
She made her way home through some of the most intricate byways and alleys. Passing under brick arches that dripped with Armada’s constant salt damp; by groups of children playing variants of the shove-stiver and catch-as-can she remembered from the streets at home, as if there were a deep grammar of street games shared across the world; beside small cafés in the shadow of raised forecastles, where their parents played their own games, backgammon and chatarang.
Gulls arced and shat. The backstreets pitched and shifted with the surface of the sea.
Bellis relished her solitude. She knew that if Silas had been with her, the sense of complicity would have been cloying.
They had not had sex for a long time. It had only ever happened twice.
After those times, they had shared her bed and thrown off their clothes in front of each other without shyness or hesitation. But neither, it seemed, was moved to fuck. It was as if having used sex to connect and open to each other, the channel was in place and the act was superfluous.
It was not that she had no desires. The last two or three nights they had been together, she had waited for him to sleep, then masturbated quietly. She often kept her thoughts from him, sharing only what they needed to make their plans.
Bellis was not inordinately fond of Silas, she realized with mild surprise.
She was grateful to him; she found him interesting and impressive, though not so charming as he thought himself. They held something between them: extraordinary secrets, plans that could not be allowed to fail. They were comrades in this. She did not mind him sharing her bed; she might even tup him again, she thought with an inadvertent smirk. But they were not close.
Given what they had shared, this seemed a little bizarre, but she acknowledged it.
The next morning, before six, when the sky was still dark, men and women gathered in a fleet of dirigibles on the deck of the Grand Easterly. Between them they hauled bundles of raggedly printed leaflets. They lugged them into the aerostat carriages, argued over routes, and consulted maps. They divided Armada into quadrants.
The daylight was filling up the city as they lifted off sedately.
Costermongers, factory workers, yeomanry, and a thousand others looked up from the brick and wood warrens around the Grand Easterly: from Winterstraw Market’s intricate concatenation of vessels, from towers in Booktown and Jhour and Thee-And-Thine, peering over the city’s rigging. They saw the first wave of dirigibles lift off and spread out over the city’s chambers, out across the ridings. And at strategic points in the airflow, tacking against the wind, the aerostats began to shed paper.
Like confetti, like the blossom already straining to grow on
Armada’s hardy trees, the leaflets coiled out and down in great
billows. The air sounded with them—a susurrus of paper sliding against paper—and with the gulls and city sparrows that cut away from them in confusion. Armadans looked up, shielding their
eyes against the rising sun, and saw the scudding clouds and clear warm blue, and descending below them the snips of paper skittering through the air.
Some fell into chimneys. Hundreds more touched the water. They funneled into the trenches between vessels and settled on
the sea. They bobbed on the waves, becoming saturated, their ink spreading to become unreadable, nibbled by fishes, till the brine clogged their fibers and they sank. Below the surface there was a snow of disintegrating paper. But many thousands landed on the decks of Armada’s ships.
Again and again the dirigibles circled the city’s airspace, passing over each of the ridings, finding pathways between the tallest towers and masts, scattering their leaflets. Curious and delighted, people picked them out of the air. In a city where paper was expensive, this extravagance was extraordinary.
Word spread fast. When Bellis descended to the deck of the Chromolith, onto a layer of leaflets rustling like dead skin, all around her there were arguments. People stood in the doorways of their shops and houses, shouting to each other or muttering or laughing, waving the leaflets in inky hands.
Bellis looked up and saw one of the last of the aerostats to port, moving away from her out over Jhour, another fluttering cloud descending behind it. She picked up one of the papers gusting at her feet.
Armadan citizens, she read, after long and careful study, something can be achieved that would have astounded our grandparents. A new day is soon to dawn. We are to change our city’s movements forever.
She scanned the page quickly, racing through the propagandist explanation, and her eyes moved slower over the key word, picked out in bold.
Avanc . . .
Bellis felt a thrill of confused emotion. I did this, she thought with weird pride. I set this in motion.
“It is choice work,” said Tintinnabulum thoughtfully.
He was hunkered down in front of Angevine, thrusting his face and hands into the engines in her metal underparts. She leaned her flesh body back, impassive and patient.
For some days, Tintinnabulum had been conscious of a change in his servant, a difference in the clattering of her engines. She moved more quickly and exactly, turning in tight arcs and stopping without a wheezing slowdown. She found it easier to negotiate Armada’s swaying bridges. An edge of anxiety in her was gone—her constant scavenging, her scrabbling for discarded coal and wood, had stopped.
“What has happened to your engine, Angevine?” he had asked her. And smiling with immense, shy pleasure, she had shown him.
He rummaged in her tubework, burning his hands stoically on her boiler, examining her reconfigured metal viscera.
Tintinnabulum knew that Armadan science was a mongrel. It was as piratical as the city’s economy and politics, the product of theft and chance—as various and inconsistent. The engineers and thaumaturges learned their skills on equipment that was rotted and out of date, and on stolen artifacts of such sophisticated de-sign that they were mostly incomprehensible. It was a patchwork of technologies.
“This man,” he murmured, up to his elbow in Angevine’s motor, fingering a three-way switch at the back of her chassis, “this man may be just a jobbing engineer, but . . . this is the choicest work. Not many aboard Armada could make this. Why did he do it?” he asked her.
She could only respond vaguely to that.
“Is he trustworthy?” Tintinnabulum said.
Tintinnabulum and his crew were not Armadan-born, but their commitment to Garwater was unquestionable. Stories were told about how they had joined Armada—the Lovers had tracked them by esoteric means, persuaded them to work in the city for unknown wages. For them, the ropes and chains linking the fabric of Garwater had been parted. The riding had opened itself, let Tintinnabulum enter and embed himself in the very heart of the city, which had resealed behind him.
That morning, Angevine too had picked up one of the slew of leaflets that suddenly clogged up Armada’s alleys, and had learned the purpose of the Garwater project. It had excited her, but had not, she realized, come as a particular surprise. She had been present on the edge of official discussions for a long time, had seen the literature left lying on Tintinnabulum’s desk, had caught glimpses of scribbled diagrams and half-finished calculations. As soon as she discovered what it was that Garwater was attempting, she felt that she had always known. After all, did she not work for Tintinnabulum? And what was he but a hunter?
His room was full of evidence. Books—the only ones that she knew of outside the library—etchings, carved tusks, broken harpoons. Bones and horns and hides. In the years she had worked for him, Tintinnabulum and his crew of seven had lent their expertise to Garwater. Horned sharks and whales and ceti, bonefish, shellarc—he had snared and harpooned and caught them all, for food, for protection, for sport.
Sometimes, when the eight were meeting, Angevine would put her ear flat against the wood and press hard, but she could only ever h
ear the occasional snatch of sound. Enough to learn tantalizing things.
The ship’s madman, Argentarius, whom no one ever saw, she would hear railing and screaming to them, telling them he was afraid. Some prey of theirs had done this to him long ago, Angevine came to understand. It had galvanized his comrades. They were stamping their authority on the deep sea, thumbing their noses at that terrible realm.
When she had heard them speak of hunting, it was the largest game that enthused them: the leviathan and lahamu, the cuttlegod.
Why not the avanc?
None of it was any surprise, really, Angevine thought.
“Is he trustworthy?” Tintinnabulum repeated.
“He is,” Angevine said. “He’s a good man. He’s grateful for
being spared the colonies; he’s angry with New Crobuzon. He’s
had himself Remade, the better to dive, the better to work in the docks—he’s a sea creature now. He’s loyal as any Garwater born, I’d say.”
Tintinnabulum raised himself and shut Angevine’s boiler. His mouth pursed thoughtfully. On his desk he found a long, handwritten list of names.
“What’s he called?” he said.
He nodded, leaned over, and carefully added Tanner Sack.
Chapter Eighteen
Rumor and word of mouth were even stronger forces in Armada than in New Crobuzon, but Armada was not without a more organized media than that. There were criers, most yelling the semiofficial line of one or other of the ridings. A few news sheets and periodicals were available, printed on dreadful-quality, ink-saturated sheets that were constantly recycled.
Most were irregular, available when writers and printers could be bothered or find the resources. Many were free; most were thin: one or two folded sheets crammed with print.
Armada’s halls were full of plays and music, coarse and very popular, so the publications were full of reviews. Some contained titillation and scandal mongering, but to Bellis they were depressingly parochial. Disputes about allocation of seized goods, or over which riding was responsible for which haul, were generally the most provocative and controversial topics they carried. And those were just the news sheets she could make sense of.