Tanner nods.
It takes Captain Sengka a very long time to scan that dense, coded letter from Silas to his city. He is not reading it—he cannot; his Ragamoll is not good enough. He is looking for words that concern him: cactus, Dreer Samher, pirate. There are none. There seems to be no double cross here. When he is done, he looks up quizzically.
“What does it mean?” he says. Tanner shrugs quickly.
“I don’t know, Captain,” he says, “truly. Makes little more sense to me than you. All I know is that’s information that New Crobuzon needs.”
Sengka nods to him sympathetically, considering his options. Turn the man away and do nothing. Kill him now (easily done) and take his seal. Deliver the package; don’t deliver it. Hand the man over to the Armadan woman, the leader he is so obviously betraying, though how and for what Sengka cannot make out. But Nurjhitt Sengka is intrigued by this situation, and by this bold little intruder. He bears him no ill will. And he cannot make out for whom the man works, which aegis protects him.
Captain Sengka is unwilling to risk war with Armada, and even less with New Crobuzon. There is nothing in the letter to compromise us, he thinks, and cannot, though he tries, see a reason not to act as courier.
At the worst the letter is not honored, after he has gone a very long way out of his usual trading paths. But will that be a catastrophe? He will be in the richest city in the world, and he is a trader as well as a pirate. It would not be a good outcome, he thinks, and it is not an easy journey or a short one, but perhaps it is worth it? For the possibility?
The possibility that the letter (with the city’s seal, with the authority of its procurator) will be honored.
They stand together to complete this secret deal. Tanner seals the long letter with the ring. He nestles Silas Fennec’s necklace (And who is he? the question comes again) into the cushioned box and covers it with both letters, folded. He locks the box, and then drools more of the wax all over its seam. He pushes his old city’s ring into it as it dries, and when he pulls it away he is faced by the city’s heraldic seal in miniature, in greasy bas-relief.
He ties the fastened box back in its drab leather bag, and Sengka takes it from him and locks it in his sea chest.
The two watch each other a while.
“I’ll not go on about what I’ll do if I find you’ve betrayed me,” says Sengka. It is an absurd threat: each man knows that he will never see the other again.
Tanner dips his head.
“My captain,” he says slowly, “she can’t know.” It hurts him to say that, and he must remind himself fervently of the letter’s contents, of the reason for secrecy. He keeps his eyes level, meets Captain Sengka’s gaze, gives away nothing. The captain does not torment him with conspiratorial winks or smiles, but only nods.
“You’re sure?” says Sengka.
Tanner Sack nods. He is looking around nervously, on the prow of the ship, fearful for the telltale mosquito sounds. The captain is fascinated anew by Tanner’s refusal to accept food or wine or money. He is intrigued by this man’s impenetrable mission.
“Thank you, Captain,” says Tanner, and shakes the cactus-man’s thorn-plucked hand.
Watching Tanner as he leaps from the guardrail, Captain Sengka leans forward, half smiling, oddly warm to the fierce little human who has visited him. He stays on deck for some time, watching the ripples that Tanner leaves behind. And when they have been assimilated by the waves, he looks up into the night, untroubled by the sounds of the she-anophelii who will do no more than circle him, sniffing eagerly, failing to smell blood.
He thinks about what he will say to his officers, the new orders he will give in the morning, when the Armadans are gone. He wonders wryly how they will react. They will be aghast. Intrigued.
Tanner Sack is swimming doggedly back to the split in the cliffs. He anticipates the terrifying climb up that staggered path, practicing the movement of kicking out from the rock should the mosquito-women come, hurtling back into the sea.
He is unhappy. It does not help to think that he had to do it.
He wishes suddenly that the sea would do what poets and painters promise of it: that it would wash everything away so that he could start again, that it would make everything new. The water sluices through him as if he were hollow, and he closes his eyes as he moves, and imagines it cleansing him from the inside.
Tanner’s fist is clenched around the ugly seal ring. He wishes his memories would wash out of him, but they are tenacious as his innards.
He stops suddenly in the middle of the sea, suspended fifty feet below the surface, hanging like a condemned man in the black water. This is my home, he tells himself, but takes no comfort from it. Tanner feels a rage in him, a rage that he controls, sadness as much as anger, and loneliness. He thinks of Shekel and Angevine (as he has done scores of times).
He reaches out deliberately and opens his hand, and the heavy Crobuzoner ring pitches instantly away.
It is so black, the sense of his own pale skin is more memory than sight. He can only imagine the ring falling from his palm. Plunging. Falling for a long time. Coming to rest at last in a snarl of rock or lost engine parts. Threading perhaps by chance onto some frond of weed, some finger of coral—a mindless, contingent affectation.
And then, and then. Ground down by the endless motion of the water. Not swallowed as he tries to imagine, not lost forever. Reconstituted. Until one day, years or centuries from now, it will resurface, thrown up by submarine upheavals. Diminished perhaps by the implacable currents. And even if the gnawing of brine has been absolute, if the ring is dissipated, its atoms will rise to the light and add to Machinery Beach.
The sea forgets nothing, forgives nothing, whatever we’re told, thinks Tanner.
He should swim on, and he will soon; he’ll return and clamber up dripping into the mosquito township. Tentacles flailing like fly whisks, he will scuttle back to the door where Bellis will admit him (he knows she’ll be waiting). And the job will be done and the city (the old city, his first city) safe, perhaps. But for now he can’t move.
Tanner is thinking of all the things he has still to see. All the things he has been told are out there in the water. The ghost ships, the melted ships, the basalt islands. The plains of ossified waves where the water is grey and solid, where the sea has died. Places where the water is boiling. The gessin homelands. Steam-storms. The Scar. He is thinking about the ring below him, hidden in the weeds.
It’s all still there, he thinks.
There is no redemption in the sea.
Interlude VI
Elsewhere
The whales are dead. Without these vast, stupid guides, the going is harder.
Brother, have we lost the trail?
There are many possibilities.
Once again they are just a cabal of dark bodies above the base of the sea. They slide through blood-warm water.
Around them, the salinae are anxious. Miles off, thousands of feet below the waves, something is shaking the crust of the world.
Can you taste it?
Amid the millions of mineral particles that eddy in the sea are some in unusual strengths: splintered flint (shards and dust), little gobs of oil, and the intense, unearthly residue of rockmilk.
What are they doing?
What are they doing?
The taste of the sea here is reminiscent. This is drool that the hunters can taste; this is the world’s spittle. It dribbles (they remember) from ragged mouths cut by the platforms that suck up what they find, where beside concrete plinths men in inefficient swaddlings of leather and glass gaze wide, and are easily stolen and questioned and killed.
The floating city is drilling.
The currents here are labyrinthine, a morass of competing flows that dissipate the impurities in convoluted chains, taste-trails that make little sense, little pockets of different dirts.
They are hard to follow.
The whales are dead.
And what of others? Dolphins
(willful) or manatee (slow and too stupid) or?
There are none suitable; we are alone.
There are others, of course, who might be called from the deep sea, but they are not trackers. Their work is very different.
Alone, but still the hunters can hunt. With a patience that is implacable (that does not sit well with this hot, quick place), they continue searching, teasing through the skeins of flavor and pollution and rumor, finding the path and taking it.
They are much closer to their quarry than they were before.
Even so, this warm water is hard, and sticky and prickling, and disorienting. The hunters circle, chasing ghost spoor and lies and illusions. They cannot quite, cannot quite find the trail.
Part Five
Storms
Chapter Twenty-seven
Dockday 9th Soluary 1780/Ninth Markindi Hawkbill
Quarto 6/317. Trident
He speaks to me again.
Uther Doul has decided that we will be—what? Friends? Companions? Discussants?
Since we left the island, the crew have been bustling, and the rest of us have sat quiet and watched and waited. I have been numb. Ever since Tanner Sack returned last night—wet and salt-stained and terrified by his short time under the open sky—I have been unable to settle. I shift in my seat and think about that precious letter, that ugly tin necklace—a priceless proof—and the long journey that awaits them. Tanner Sack has told me that Sengka agreed to ferry them. It is a long way, an arduous journey. I hope he does not change his mind. I pray that Silas has offered enticement enough.
Tanner Sack and I avoid each other’s eyes. We shift past each other in the Trident’s luxurious gondola, and we are stiff with guilt. I do not know him or he me: that is our consensus.
I have spent my hours watching Krüach Aum.
It is affecting to see him. It is moving.
He is shaking with fascination and excitement. His eyes are stretched wide, and his puckered sphincter-mouth is dilating and contracting with his breath. He moves—not quite running, but if it is a walk it is an undignified and frantic one—from window to window, staring at the engines that power the vessel, going to the pilot’s control booth at the front, to the privies, to the berths, and up into the great cathedral of the balloon itself, filled with the gasbags.
Aum can communicate with no one but me, and I expected him to hanker for my services. But, no, I have nothing to do. He is content to watch. I need only sit here and watch him, trotting past me this way and that like a child.
He has spent his lifetime on that rock. He is gorging on what is around him now.
Doul approached me. As before (that first time) he sat opposite me, his arms gently crossed, his eyes impassive. He spoke in his lovely voice.
This time I felt congested with terror—as if he had seen what I did with Tanner Sack—but I could face him with the calm he would expect.
I remain convinced that we understand each other, Doul and I. That this is what underlies the connection I feel, and I have used this conviction. He sees me (I am sure) struggling to control the fear I feel in seeing him, and he respects me for not giving in to nervousness at facing the legendary Uther Doul . . .
Of course my nervousness is that he will discover that I am a traitor. But that does not occur to him.
We watched Aum, without words for a long time. Eventually, Doul spoke. (I am never the one to break silence.)
“Now that we have him,” he said, “I can’t see anything that could stop the invocation. Armada will soon enter a new period.”
“What of the ridings that are unhappy about this?” I asked.
“Certainly there are some who have concerns,” he said, “but imagine it. Currently the city crawls. With the avanc at our control . . . harnessed to a beast like that, there’s nothing we couldn’t do. We could cross the world in a tiny fraction of the time it takes us now.” He paused and moved his eyes briefly. “We could go to places currently denied us,” he said, his voice lowering.
There it was again: a hint at some motive undisclosed.
Silas and I have only learnt half the story. There is more to this project than the conjuring of the avanc. Having thought myself to have uncovered Armada’s secrets, I dislike this sudden sense of ignorance. I dislike it strongly.
“To the lands of the dead, maybe?” I said slowly. “To the shadeworld and back?”
I spoke as if idly, citing the rumors I had heard about him. To bait him into correcting me. I want to know the truth about the project, and I want to know the truth about him.
Doul astonished me then. I had expected perhaps some elliptical hint, some vague suggestions as to his origin. He gave me much more than that.
It must be part of his own project, the creation of some kind of link between us (I cannot yet work out what kind) but for whatever reason, he gave me much more.
“It’s a chain of whispers,” he said. He leaned in and spoke quietly, ensuring that our conversation was private.
“When they tell you that I came from the world of the dead, you’re at the end of a chain of whispers. Each link has an imperfect join with those around it, and meaning leaches out between them.”
If these were not his exact words they are like them. He speaks like this, in monologues that sound scripted. My silence was not begrudging—it was an audience’s.
“At my end of the chain is the truth,” he continued. He took my hand suddenly and shockingly and placed my two fingers on the slow pulse in his wrist. “I was born in your lifetime. More than three millennia after the Contumancy—do they still credit me with that? There’s no coming back from the world of the dead.” Beat beat beat went the pulse, languid like some cold-blooded lizard.
I know these stories are for children, I thought. I know you’re no revenant. And you know I know that. Do you just want me touching you?
“Not the world of the dead,” he continued. “But it’s true that I come from a place where the dead walk. I was born and raised in High Cromlech.”
It was all I could do not to cry out. As it was, I am sure my eyes must have spasmed wide.
Ask me six months ago and I would not have been certain that High Cromlech existed. I knew it only as a vague half-imagined place of zombie factories and the aristocratic dead. A place where the ghouls are hungry.
Then Silas tells me that he has been, that he has lived there—and I believe him. But still, his descriptions are more dreamlike than exact. Only the most nebulous and austere visions.
And now I know a second person who is familiar with that place? And not a traveler this time, but a native?
I realized that I was pressing the artery in Doul’s pulse hard. Gently he disengaged from my fingers.
“It’s a misconception,” he said, “to think that High Cromlech is all thanati. The quick are there, too.” (I am listening intently to him now, trying to detect his accent.) “We are a minority, it’s true. And of those born every year, many are farm-bred, kept in cages till they’re of strength, when they can be snuffed and recast as zombies. Others are raised by the aristocracy until they come of age, and are slain and welcomed to dead society. But . . .”
His voice petered out, and he became introspective for a moment. “But then there’s Liveside. The ghetto. That’s where the true quick live. My mother was prosperous. We lived at the better end.
“There are jobs that only the living can do. Some are manual, too dangerous to risk giving to zombies—they’re expensive to animate, but one can always breed more of the quick.” His voice was deadpan. “And for those lucky enough, for the cream—the livemen and livewives, the quick gentry—there are the taboo jobs that the thanati won’t touch, at which a quick can make a decent living.
“My mother made enough that she chose to put herself down, so that she could have herself embalmed and revivified by the necrurgeon. Not high caste, but she became thanati. Everyone knew when Livewife Doul became Deadwife Doul. But I was not there. I had left.”
I do not know why he told me all this.
“I grew up,” he said, “surrounded by the dead. It’s not true that they are all silent, but many are, and none are loud. Where I grew up, we used to run, the boys and girls of Liveside, pugnacious through the streets past the mindless zombies and a few desperate vampir, and the thanati proper, the gentry, the liches with sewn-shut mouths, with beautiful clothes and skin like preserved leather. More than anything I remember the quiet.
“I wasn’t treated badly. My mother was respected, and I was a good boy. We were treated with nothing more overtly unpleasant than a kind of sympathetic sneer. I became involved with cults and criminals and heresies. But not deep, and not for long. There are two things that the quick are more adept at than the thanati. One is noise. The other is speed. I turned my back on the first, but not the second.”
After it became clear that his pause had become a silence, I spoke.
“Where did you learn to fight?” I said.
“I was a child when I left High Cromlech,” he said. “I didn’t think so at the time, but I was. Slipping onto the funicular railway—out, away.”
He would not tell me anything more than that. Between that time and his arrival at Armada there must have been more than a decade. He would not tell me what happened then. But that, it is obvious, is when he learnt his unfathomable skills.
Doul was quieting, and I felt his willingness to talk ebb away. I did not want that. After weeks of isolation, I wanted to keep him talking. I made a clumsy attempt, something like a witticism. I must have sounded arch and flippant.
“And when you left, you fought the Ghosthead Empire and won—what do they call it?—the Mighty Blade?” I indicated his plain ceramic sword.
His face was quite impassive for a moment, and then a sudden beautiful smile illuminated him for a second. He looks like a boy when he smiles.