The Scar
Bellis looked forward eagerly to the time that she would be redundant; when she would not have to sit endlessly scribbling notes in a scientific register she did not understand. She had been released from her job in the library. Now her mornings were taken up with teaching Aum, and her afternoons with translating between Aum and the scientific committee of Garwater. She enjoyed none of it.
During the day she ate with Aum, and during the evenings she sometimes accompanied him throughout the city, with a guard of Garwater yeomanry. What else, she thought, can I do? She escorted him to Croom Park, to the colorful thoroughfares and shopping streets of Garwater and Jhour and Curhouse. She took him to Grand Gears Library.
While she stood and spoke in a low voice to Carrianne, who seemed sincerely delighted to see her again, Krüach Aum wandered from shelf to shelf. When she came to tell him that they must go, he turned to her and she was truly alarmed at his expression—a reverence and joy and agony like religious ecstasy. She pointed out the High Kettai books to him, and he reeled, as if drunk at the sight of all that knowledge in his grasp.
She felt a constant low-level unease at spending her days in the presence of the Garwater authorities: the Lovers, Tintinnabulum and his crew, Uther Doul.
How did it come to this? she wondered.
Bellis had been cut off from the city since the first moment, and she had assiduously kept that wound raw and bloodied. She defined herself by it.
This is not my home, she had said to herself again and again, endless repetitions. And when the chance had come to make some connection with her true home, she had taken it with all its risk. She had not renounced her claim to New Crobuzon. She had discovered a terrible threat to her city, and had (at great risk, with careful planning) worked out a way to save it.
And somehow in that very action, in the very act of reaching out to New Crobuzon across the sea, she had tied herself closely in to Armada, and to its rulers.
How did it come to this?
It made her laugh humorlessly. She had done what was best for her true home, and as a result she spent her days working for the governors of her prison, helping them gain the power to take her anywhere they wanted.
How did it come to this?
And where is Silas?
Every day, Tanner thought about what he had done on the anophelii island.
It was not something he felt comfortable considering. He was not sure what his emotions were. He probed the memory of what he had done, as if it were a wound, and discovered a reserve of pride inside him. I saved New Crobuzon, he thought, not quite believing it.
Tanner thought carefully about the few people he had left behind there. The drinking partners, the friends and girlfriends: Zara and Pietr and Fezhenechs and Dolly-Ann . . . He thought of them with a sort of abstracted fondness, as if they were characters in a book of whom he had grown affectionate.
Do they think of me? he thought. Do they miss me?
He had left them behind. He had been so long in that stinking prison in Iron Bay, and in that drab place in the Terpsichoria, and then his life had been so suddenly and extraordinarily renewed, that New Crobuzon had attenuated as a memory in him.
But still there was a wellspring of feeling for it, a recognition that the city had shaped him. He would not have seen it destroyed. He could not think of the men and women he had known there, murdered. So—it bewildered him to consider it—he had given them a valedictory gift that they would never know they had received. New Crobuzon had been saved. He had saved it.
The awareness of that gnawed at him. It troubled him and made him sheepishly proud. It was such a huge thing he had done, something to change the tide of history. He imagined the city preparing for war, never knowing who had saved it. It was such a big thing, and here he was remembering it with a little arch of his eyebrows, not sure how much mind to pay it, as if it were a detail.
It wasn’t a betrayal of Armada, not really. No one was hurt; it was just a little thing to them—a quick night’s absence. He had taken a few hours to slip away and save New Crobuzon. And he was glad of it. It made him happy to think of what he’d done. Despite the magisters and the punishment factories.
He had saved it. Now tell it good-bye.
The avanc was a rare visitor to the seas of Bas-Lag. The intricacies of transplanar life were abstruse and uncertain. Neither Tanner Sack nor any of his colleagues knew whether the creature that breached in Bas-Lag was a partial or a total manifestation, a confusion of scale (some protozöon, some plankton from a huge brine dimension), a pseudoorganism spontaneously generated in the vents between worlds. No one knew.
All they knew was what Bellis Coldwine told them, as she read the intricate scribbles of Krüach Aum.
The anophelius was clearly stunned by his new environment, but it did not affect his ability to focus, to provide answers to their questions. Every day Aum gave his new workmates enough information for their purposes.
He drew designs for them, designs for the harness (bigger than a battleship), the bit, and the reins. Even though the engineers did not understand exactly what of the avanc would go where, what flesh exactly would be trapped by what clasp, they took Aum’s word that the mechanisms would work.
The science, the plans, were moving at a stunning pace. The engineers and scientists had to remind themselves of how far they had come, how fast, and how they continued to move. It was obvious to all of them that without Aum they could not have succeeded, despite what they might once have thought. It was only working with him that they came to see how much they needed him.
They incorporated engines burning in sealed containers at the yoke’s joints, triple-exchange boilers and complex pulley systems to regulate movement, all suspended in the freezing darkness of the deep sea, at the end of the miles of colossal chain links suspended below the city.
And what if they went wrong? Garwater’s ancient bathypelagicrafts would have to be refitted.
There was an extraordinary amount to be done.
Tanner almost rubbed his hands with happiness.
Armada had taken only a morning to recover after the storm: clearing broken slates and wood away from decks; reattaching bridges; counting and mourning the few missing or drowned, those who had been trapped outside during the deluge.
And when that was done, Garwater turned, with more of the incredible speed, to manufacturing what it needed for its historic project.
There were five of the ancient, hidden chains under Armada. Tanner Sack and the teams traced them, plotted their end points. All industrial capacity in Garwater, and what little there was in Booktown and Shaddler and Thee-And-Thine, was turned over to the direct control of Tintinnabulum and the project committee. The work of building began.
Several recently press-ganged metal ships were designated scrap. Piece by piece, they were taken apart. Thousands of men and women swarmed over them: the regular dock work was relegated to skeleton crews, and huge day rates were offered to the city’s casual workers. The iron exoskeletons of warships, the girders and innards of steamers, the enormous tempered metal masts, were stripped. The vessels were peeled and disemboweled, and all the tons of metal were shipped by barge and airlifted by convoys of dirigibles to the factories.
The avanc’s harness would sport girders and screws still marked with the scars of previous service. In foundries, iron too ruined to be reshaped was melted down.
Armada was not a city with a grand tradition of thaumaturgy. But there were competent metallo-thaumaturgists among the pirates, and gangs of them entered the factories. They worked closely with the engineers, mixing arcane compounds in great vats to strengthen and lighten and bind the metal. At last, some of Garwater’s stores of rockmilk were used. The liquid was brought in vials, vastly heavy and dense. When it was unstoppered it gave off disorienting vapors like spice and oil. It moiled behind the glass, a cold mother-of-pearl.
The metallo-thaumaturges would add measured drops of it as they mouthed incantations and passed their hands over
the melting metal in puissant currents, charging it and sealing it.
And after rolling out the metal and hammering and more arcane procedures, the components of the avanc’s bridle began to be dragged by submersibles into place below the city. An army of divers worked on them with chymical welders that sputtered colorfully in the water, and wielded hammers and wrenches with water-slowed motions.
It was an incredible, sudden industry.
The chains were anchored in the bases of five ships. The Psire of Booktown; Jhour’s Saskital; the big steamer Tailor’s Moan, the capital ship of Bask; the Wordhoard in the haunted riding; and Garwater’s Grand Easterly. From the keels and sloping flanks of each of these old, massive ships curved an arc of iron the size of some great church doorway, bolted on and veiled thaumaturgically. And from each of those stretched links the size of boats.
The guard sharks were let free. It seemed impossible that the chains had ever been hidden. The rumors spread—about what had been done before and what might happen now. It was said that Bask riding had tried to sever the chain below their vessel, to scupper Garwater’s plans, but that it had been too strong, too massive, too protected by puissant charms.
In a big, windowless chamber at the bottom of the Grand Easterly, a new engine was being built. The redundant boilers and their tangle of head-height pipes were stripped away, like clearing a rusty forest. When the ghosts of engines were gone, two great stamped-flat discs of iron were visible, embedded in the floor. Waist-high and many yards around, encrusted with age and grease. They were the ends of the chain attached to the ship, pushed through its hull, then hammered and flattened to attach them tight, centuries ago. The first time this had been tried.
Someone planned this before, Tanner Sack thought. He was stunned by the hours of work, the thaumaturgy that had been tried, the industry, the planning, the effort that had been made, generations ago, and then deliberately forgotten.
Between these two chain stubs, Tanner Sack and his colleagues began to build an extraordinary engine. They worked to specifications calculated over long hours by Krüach Aum.
Tanner examined the plans carefully. The motor they constructed did not work to any rules that he understood. It would be huge: it would fill the room with pounding hammers and ratchets, powered by some source that he did not fathom.
He worked from the base of what would be the piston-pounding boilers, upward. He started with the stumps of giant chain, drilling into them and embedding them with molten alloys, into which he plunged wrist-thick wires in rubber and tar. They passed through transformers the size of his leg, ribbed columns of white clay, and on to thickets of cables and insulators and difference engines.
This was the pacific engine, by which complex energies would be transmitted along the Grand Easterly chain, into that great bridle and whatever it contained, miles below the surface. A goad. Bait and whip.
The sea was clear. Divers thronged the huge underwater construction site. Components were lowered from the cranes of factory ships. The massive harness was taking shape at the end of the huge chains, still tethered scant scores of feet below the surface, its scale troubling to the eye, its outlines exotic and unfathomable, surrounded by the vividly colored fish of this sea, and by submarines and cray craftsmen and suited workers and Tanner Sack all moving with the slow fluidity of the submerged.
Sometimes there was a vibration through the water. The legs of the rig Sorghum disappeared into the cylindrical iron floats that supported it below the surface like suspended ships. The shaft of its drill plunged straight down, dim through the tons and tons of water, disappearing, to puncture the seafloor like a mosquito and feed.
Chapter Twenty-nine
Silas came to Bellis three days after she returned.
She had been expecting his visit—waiting with one eye on the door every evening—but still he managed to surprise her.
Bellis had had supper with Carrianne. She liked her ex-colleague sincerely, finding her perceptive and humorous. But still, as she made an effort to smile, Bellis’ sense of loneliness was unabated. Is it a surprise? she asked herself ruthlessly. You court it; you milk it; you make it.
She remembered how things had been in New Crobuzon and admitted to herself that they were not so different. At least here her isolation had a reason; it was a fuel that she burned.
Carrianne had demanded detailed descriptions of the anophelii island, and the weather, and the behavior of the mosquito-people themselves. There was melancholy in her manner—however reconciled Carrianne was to her life aboard, it had been many years since she had set foot on solid land, and Bellis’ stories could only make her feel nostalgia.
Bellis had found the recent trip hard to talk about. She remembered it as if at a great distance, as a monotony of frightened boredom interspersed with grander emotions. There were some things, of course, that she could not discuss. She was deliberately vague about the anophelii, about the Samheri pirates, and most of all about Krüach Aum.
After the altercation she had witnessed between the Brucolac and Uther Doul, Bellis had become fascinated by Dry Fall’s ruler. Carrianne told her what she wanted to know, about the political structure of the riding, the cadre of vampir lieutenants under the Brucolac, and the riding’s goretax.
“That’s when you usually get to meet him,” Carrianne said. She tried to be matter-of-fact, but Bellis could hear the awe in her voice. “Not always—often it’s taken by some lieutenant—but sometimes. They cut you, here or here or here.” She indicated her thigh and breast and wrist. “They paint it with an anticoagulant, and vacuum it into a belljar.”
“How much do they take?” said Bellis, aghast.
“Two pints. The Brucolac is the only one who drinks his fill. The rest of the cadre are restricted—they dilute it. The more they drink, the stronger they grow—that’s the word. And even though the Brucolac chooses his lieutenants carefully, it’s possible that one or other might get power-hungry.
“If they took it traditionally, straight from the vein, they might not be able to control themselves—and they don’t want to kill. And even if they did break away, there’s the contagion. In the spit. So everyone they drink directly from and leave alive, they risk turning into a competitor.”
Bellis left Carrianne at the borders of Dry Fall—“I could not possibly be safer than here,” Carrianne said, smiling—and walked home.
She could have taken a cab; the winds were not strong, and she heard shouts from above as the aeronauts touted for custom. Two days previously, when her day’s work with Aum was finished, she had been wordlessly handed a packet of flags and finials that represented a good deal more than her weekly wage at the library.
I’ve been given a raise, she thought dryly, now that I work for Garwater.
The consciousness of her hidden centrality to all that had happened, the awareness that without her, Armada would not be where it was, doing what it was doing, oppressed her, even though her reasons had been clear and good at every stage.
She walked home not to save money but to experience Armada again. Locked in a room full of incomprehensible conversations all day, she felt herself losing contact with the city around her. And any city, she told herself, is better than none.
The walk took her through Shaddler’s cool, quiet streets and into Garwater via the Tolpandy. Past the quiet bickerings of the monkeys that nested in building sites and rooftops, and deserted berths and the canopy of rigging; past the city’s cats (glancing at her, predatory) and its rare dogs and the masses of rats and the nightwalkers; around hen coops; lifeboats and steam launches rusted into position and remade as flower beds; homes cut into the sides of gun batteries, pigeons cooing from the bore of a twelve-inch gun; under wooden huts built onto foretops and yards which met masts like tree houses; through the light of gas and phlogistic cells and oil lamps; and through darkness tinted in various colors, squeezing along the corridors of damp brick that covered Armada’s vessels like a fur of mold. Back to her rooms in the Chrom
olith Smokestacks, where Silas Fennec was sitting, waiting for her.
She was shocked by his unclear figure sitting in the dark. She hissed at him, and turned away until her heart had slowed.
He studied her. His eyes were big and calm.
“How did you get in?” she said. He waved the question away like an insect.
“You know your apartment’s still watched,” he said. “I can’t exactly come knocking.”
Bellis walked over to him. He was motionless except for his face and eyes, tracking her progress. She came close—she came within his space—and leaned toward him slowly, examining him like some scientific specimen. She was ostentatious about it: she inspected him coolly and intrusively. It might have been designed to intimidate, to put him off his ease.
As she bent over him, as if cataloging his aspects, he caught her eye, and for the first time in some weeks, he smiled at her eagerly and openly. She remembered the reasons that she had had for kissing him, and fucking him. Not just loneliness or isolation, though they were paramount. But there were other factors, more centered in him. And although as she stood there she felt not the slightest urge to touch him, although she felt only a ghost of the affection that had once motivated her, she did not regret what had happened.
We both needed it, she thought. And it helped; it really did.
She patted the back of his head as she turned away. He accepted that with good grace.
“So . . .” he said.
“It’s done,” she said. He raised his eyebrows.
“As simple as that?”
“Of course not as simple as that. What do you damn well think? But it’s done.”