The Scar

  Furiously, she wiped her eyes and nose.

  Tanner tried to speak, but her glare shook him, and it was only with an effort that he could utter words. “Now, there, now,” he whispered. “I didn’t mean anything by that . . .”

  “What . . . do you want?” she whispered.

  Chastened but not cowed, Tanner looked down at the package in her hands.

  “What’s the matter with you, then?” he said. “What’s that? Trying to stow away, are you? Hoping the Samheri’ll take you home?” As he spoke he felt his anger growing again, until he had to struggle to control it. “Want to tell Mayor Rudgutter how badly you was treated on the pirate ship, is that it, miss? Let them know about Armada so’s they can try to hunt us down, and gather me and the likes of me and put us back in the fucking shit below the decks? Slaves for the colonies?”

  Bellis was staring at him in a dignified, tearful rage. There was a long pause, and below the skin of her still, set face, Tanner saw her make a resolution.

  “Read it,” she hissed suddenly. She slapped a long letter into his hands and slumped against the door.

  “ ‘Status seven’?” he muttered. “What the fuck is a Code Arrowhead?” Bellis said nothing. She had stopped crying. She stared at him, sullen as a child (but now there is something in the back of her eyes, some hope).

  Tanner continued, hacking his way through the thickets of code and finding trails of sense, places where meaning became suddenly and shockingly clear.

  “ ‘Arrival of kissing magi’?” he whispered incredulously. “ ‘Canker to be clotted by wormtroopers’? ‘Algae-bombs’? What the fuck is this? This is about some fucking invasion! What the fuck is this?” Bellis watched him.

  “This,” she echoed him remorselessly, “is about some fucking invasion.”

  She kept him in a cruel silence for several seconds and then told him.

  He leaned back, gripping the paper, staring sightlessly at its seal, running his fingers through the chain on Silas’ tag.

  “You’re right about me, you know,” said Bellis. They whispered, to keep the woman in the other room from waking. Bellis’ voice sounded dead. “You are right,” she repeated. “Armada is not my place. I can see you. You think, ‘I wouldn’t trust that uptown bitch.’ ”

  Tanner shook his head, trying to disagree, but she would not let him.

  “You’re right. I’m not trustworthy. I want to go home, Tanner Sack. And if I could open a door and walk through and be in Brock Marsh, or Salacus Fields, or Mafaton or Ludmead or anywhere in New Crobuzon, then by Jabber I would walk through it.”

  Tanner almost winced at her intensity.

  “But I can’t,” she went on. “And yes, there was a time when I imagined rescue. I imagined the navy sailing in to whisk me home. But there are two things in the way of that.

  “I want to go home, Sack. But . . .” She hesitated and slumped a little. “But there were others on the Terpsichoria without that urge. And I know what it would mean . . . for you, and for the others . . . for all the Crobuzoner Remade . . . to be . . . ‘rescued.’ ” She turned her eyes to him in an unflinching stare. “And you can believe me or not, as you like, but that’s not something I want. I have no illusions about New Crobuzon, about the transportation. You know nothing about my circumstances, Tanner Sack. You don’t know anything about what forced me onto that fucking loathsome ship.

  “No matter how I want to return home,” she said, “I know that what’s best for me isn’t so for you, and I’d not willingly be party to that. And that’s true,” she said suddenly, as if in surprise, as if to herself. “I lost that argument. I concede. That is true.”

  She hesitated, then looked up at him.

  “And even if you think I’m full of nothing but lies, Mr. Sack, there’s always the second factor: There is nothing I can do. I can’t stow away with the Samheri; I can’t give directions to the New Crobuzon navy. I’m stuck with Armada. I’m damn well stuck with it.”

  “So who’s Silas Fennec?” he said. “And what is this?” He waved the letter.

  “Fennec is a Crobuzoner agent, no less marooned than me. Only with information,” she said coldly. “Information about a fucking invasion.”

  “You want it to fall?” she demanded. “Godspit, I understand you’ve no love for the place. Why in Jabber’s name should you have? But do you really want New Crobuzon to fall?” Her voice was suddenly very hard. “Have you no friends left there? No family? There’s nothing left in the whole fucking city you’d preserve? You wouldn’t mind it falling to The Gengris?”

  A little to the south of Wynion Street, in Pelorus Fields, was a tiny market. It appeared in a mews behind a warehouse on Shundays and Dustdays. It was too small to have a name.

  It was a shoe market. Secondhand, new, stolen, imperfect, and perfect. Clogs, slippers, boots, and others.

  For some years it had been Tanner’s favorite place in New Crobuzon. Not that he bought any more shoes than anyone else, but he enjoyed walking the short length of the mews, past the tables of leather and canvas, listening to the shouts of the vendors.

  There were several small cafés on that little street, and he had known the proprietors and the regulars well. When he had no work and a little money, he might spend hours in the ivy-covered Boland’s Coffees, arguing and idling with Boland and Yvan Curlough and Sluchnedsher the vodyanoi, taking pity on mad Spiral Jacobs and buying him a drink.

  Tanner had spent many days there, in a haze of smoke and tea and coffee, watching the shoes and the hours ebb away through Boland’s imperfect windows. He could live without those days, for Jabber’s sake. It wasn’t as if they were a drug. It wasn’t as if he lay awake missing them at night.

  But they were what he thought of, instantly, when Bellis asked him if he cared whether the city fell.

  Of course the thought of New Crobuzon and all those people he knew (whom he had not thought of for some time), and all the places he had been, all broken and destroyed and drowned by the grindylow (figures who existed only in a nightmare, shadow form in his head), of course that appalled him. Of course he would not wish for that.

  But the immediacy of his own reaction astonished him. There was nothing intellectual, nothing thought out about it. He looked through the window into that sweltering hot island night and remembered looking through those other windows, of thick and mottled glass, onto the shoe market.

  “Why didn’t you tell the Lovers? Whyn’t you think they’d help try to get a message to the city?”

  Bellis shucked her shoulders in a false, silent laugh.

  “Do you really think,” she said slowly, “that they would care? Do you think they’d put themselves out? Send a boat, maybe? Pay for a message? You think they’d risk uncovering themselves? You think they’d go to all that effort, just to save a city that would destroy them if it had the slightest chance?”

  “You’re wrong,” he said, uncertain. “There’s enough Crobuzoners among the press-ganged who’d care.”

  “Nobody knows,” she hissed. “Only Fennec and I know, and if we spread the word, they’ll discredit us, write us off as troublemakers, dump us at sea, burn the message. Godsdammit, what if you’re wrong?” She stared at him until he shifted in her gaze. “You think they’ll care? You think they won’t let New Crobuzon drown? If we told them and you were wrong, it would be over—our only chance gone. Do you see what’s at stake? You want to risk it? Really?”

  With a hollowness in his throat, Tanner realized that what she said made sense.

  “And that is why I’m sitting here crying like a cretin,” she spat. “Because getting this message, and this proof, and this bribe to the Samheri is the only chance we have to save New Crobuzon. Do you see? To save it. And I’ve been standing here, frozen, because I can’t think of a way to get to the beach. Because I’m terrified of those woman-things out there. I do not want to die, and dawn is coming, and I can’t go out there, and I have to. And it’s more than a mile to the beach.” She looked at him ca
refully, and then away. “I don’t know what to do.”

  They could hear the cactacae guard walking through the moonlit township, from house to house. Tanner and Bellis sat facing each other, leaning against the walls, their eyes fixed.

  Tanner looked again at the letter he held. There was the seal. He held out his hands, and Bellis gave him the rest of her little bundle. She kept her face composed. He read the letter to the Samheri pirates. The reward was generous, he thought, but hardly excessive if it meant saving New Crobuzon.

  Saving it, keeping it safe from harm.

  He went through each letter again, line by line. Armada was not mentioned.

  He looked at the necklace with its little tag, its name and symbol. There was nothing to link this to Armada. Nothing to tell the Crobuzoner government where to find him. Bellis watched him from her silence. She knew what he was. He could sense the hope in her. He picked up the big ring, examined its intricate inverted seal, troughs for peaks and vice versa. He felt hypnotized by it. It meant more than one thing to him, like New Crobuzon.

  The quiet went on while he turned the package over and over in his hands, ran his fingers over the nub of sealing wax, and the ring, and the long letter with its dreadful warning.

  There was his Remaking to remember, but that was not all. There were places and people. There was more than one side to New Crobuzon.

  Tanner Sack was loyal to Garwater, and he felt the passion of that loyalty inside him, beside a sad affection for New Crobuzon—a kind of melancholic regretful fondness. For the shoe market, and for other things. The two emotions flickered inside him and circled each other like fish.

  He thought of his old city all blasted, destroyed.

  “It’s true,” he whispered slowly. “It’s a mile or more to Machinery Beach, down the hill past the swamps and all that, where the women live.”

  He jerked his head, suddenly indicating the other end of the township, the cleft in the rocks with the waves like oil below.

  “But it’s only a few yards from here to the sea.”

  Interlude V

  Tanner Sack

  It don’t take much.

  Keep my eyes on the window (Bellis Coldwine herself crouched and waiting hiding behind me. Nervous I reckon that I’m playing her but still she’s alight with hope). Waiting till the guard wanders off around a corner, away from the plaza and out of sight.

  —Don’t you move, I tell her, and she shakes her head most fervent. —Don’t you move an inch from here (I’m putting it off now, scared as I am). Don’t you shift a muscle till you hear me knocking.

  She’s to open the bolt. She’s to watch make sure no anophelii push their way in while that door’s unlocked. She’s to wait as long as it takes till I come back.

  And then I’m nodding, that leather bag of hers fastened and folded tight and rubbed with wax to keep the water out, held by my gut as if I clutch a wound, and she’s pulled that door to and I’m out, in the starlight, in the air, in the hot night, with the mosquito-women all around me.

  Tanner Sack does not hesitate. He bolts toward the chasm that splits the rear of the village like its anus, from where the rubbish is thrown into the sea.

  He runs with his head down, blind and quite terrified, hurtling toward the crack in the rock. His nerves scream and his body arcs as each part of him fights to be nearest to the water.

  He is sure he can hear the sound of the mosquito wings.

  It is only five seconds that he is out under the sky listening to the wind and the night insects until his feet touch the flat rock that perches like a balcony over the sea. The air is still, and the darkness cossets him more tightly as he plunges into the shadow-stained gap in the mountain. For a moment his feet skitter as he hesitates and considers a more laborious and careful descent by the thin path that winds in tight, back and forth, down the stone, but it is too late: his legs have taken him on and out, as if he hears the whine of a she-anophelius, and he has left the rock and is falling.

  There is nothing but air beneath him, more than fifty feet of air, and then the slickly moving water that glints like iron. He has seen the movement of the sea in the chasm below. And he is a sea creature now, and he can read the shapes of the currents. He knows the water beneath is deep, and so it proves to be.

  He pulls himself up tight, and the surf opens to him with a plunging sound and smashes the air from his lungs, and he opens his mouth with the shock of it and breathes the water across his poor, desiccated gills as the sea seals itself above him again, taking him into its body. It makes him welcome, little microbe that he is.

  There is a blissful time, when he drifts unmoving in the dark water. The space around him is giddying, the safety of it. No mosquito-women come here (he thinks then of other predators, and is for a moment a little less secure).

  Tanner feels the weight of the package in its greased pouch. He holds it against his belly and kicks out with his webbed toes. It has been so long since he has swum. He feels as if his skin is blossoming in the water, his pores opening like flowers.

  The black is not absolute. As his pupils dilate, he can make out varying shades of darkness: submerged crags, the detritus of the village, the split into the open sea, and the unremitting pitch of the deep. He swims through the hole in the cliff and feels the flow of the water change. Above him the waves chew the shore like something senile and toothless.

  His bearings, his directions, are clear. Little presences glide past him, little night fishes. Tanner is reaching out around him with his tentacles, swimming low until they feel the edges of rock and he begins to swim around the coil of coast. His tentacles are braver than he. He pushes them inquisitive as an octopus into holes in the stone from which he would snatch away his hands. They are the most aquatic part of him, those appendages, and he accepts their lead.

  Tanner swims around the edges of the anophelii island. He feels anemones and urchins and realizes with sudden sadness that this is the first time he has swum close enough to the seabed to sense its life, and it is almost certainly the last, and it is too dark to see. He can only imagine the gnarls of sand and stone over which he swims, the spurs of rock and dead wood that must look furry with weed, the rich colors that light would reveal.

  Minutes of urgent swimming pass. This coastal sea tastes different from the open ocean around Armada. These waters are a thicker stew. The taste of tiny life and death suffuses him.

  And then very suddenly the taste of rust.

  Machinery Beach thinks Tanner. He has swum around a convolution in the island’s outline, into the bay. His suckers caress new things: decomposing iron, engines scabbed by the sea. The water above this bed of iron is awash with metal salts and tastes to him of blood.

  At the moon-glittering surface above him are three big shapes, the Samheri ships, occluding what little light there is. Their stubby chains taut in the water, their anchors at rest amid the bones of much older metal artifacts.

  Tanner angles up, rising, feeling the water expand. He raises his hands, still clutching the package. The shade of the biggest ship is directly in his path.

  The cactacae from Dreer Samher bluster at the sight of him, mimicking anger, threatening him with upraised fists and spined forearms, but they are dissembling. They are puzzled by this bedraggled Remade man who has scaled their chains to stand dripping on their deck, looking nervously at the sky, waiting for the sailors to take him below.

  “Let me talk to the captain, lads,” he says to them in Salt again and again, fearful but determined. And after their threats do not deter him, they bring him into the ship’s candlelit darkness.

  They lead him past the treasury, where the spoils of their trade and their battles are stored. The kitchen where the smell of rotting vegetation and stew is strong. They take him through corridors of cages where angry chimpanzees scream and rattle their bars. The cactacae are too heavy and their thick digits too imprecise to scuttle the rigging. The primates are trained from birth to obey whistled and shouted commands,
capable of unfurling and tying and hanging sails like experts, without ever knowing what it is they do.

  The bored apes are hidden here from the hunger of the mosquito-women.

  Sengka sits quietly in his cabin, making Tanner Sack stand drying his face and hands nervously with a rag. With his huge green arms resting on his desk, his hands clasped, Sengka looks unnervingly like a human bureaucrat. The same suspicious patience.

  He is a politician. He knows as soon as he sees Tanner’s unlikely figure that something illicit is occurring, something beyond the purview of the Armadan authorities. In case it is something that he alone can take advantage of, he dismisses the guards. They leave with sulky looks, curiosity not assuaged.

  There are some seconds of silence.

  “So tell me,” says Sengka, eventually. He does not bother with preamble, and Tanner Sack (skin drooling brine on the matting, hands clutching his package, feeling fearful and guilty, full of treachery that he does not want to commit) respects that.

  Inside the wax-treated leather and the box, the contents remain dry.

  He hands over the shorter letter, the promise to the bearer, without a word.

  Sengka reads slowly, very carefully, time and again. Tanner waits.

  When he finally looks up, Sengka’s face gives away nothing, (but he sets the letter very carefully to one side).

  “What,” he says, “would you like me to deliver?”

  Again without words, Tanner pulls out the heavy box and shows it. He removes the ring and the wax and turns the open container toward Sengka, showing him the letter and the necklace within.

  The captain examines the rough necklace, pursing his lips as if unimpressed. His hand hovers over the longer letter.

  “I’d carry nothing I wasn’t allowed to read,” he says. “It might say ‘Disregard the other letter.’ I’m sure you understand that. I’d only let you seal it after I’ve seen what’s within.”