He nodded slowly. When he spoke his tone was neutral, as if they discussed some academic project. “How did you manage it?”
How did we? Bellis thought in the silence. Did we? I have no evidence, no proof of anything.
“I couldn’t do it on my own,” she began slowly, and then she sat upright, shocked by Silas’ look of stricken anger.
“You what?” he cried. “You fucking what?” He was on his feet. “What did you do, you stupid godsdamned cunt . . . ?”
“Sit . . . down . . .” Bellis was standing now, pointing at him, her fingers shaking with rage. “How dare you?”
“Bellis . . . what did you do?”
She glared at him. “I don’t know,” she said coldly, “how you might have managed to cross a swamp crawling with six-foot mosquitos, Silas. I don’t know how you would have managed that. We were a mile or more from the Samheri ships—oh, they were there, don’t fret about that. Now maybe you are a cactus-man or a fucking scabmettler or something, but I’m blood, and they would have killed me.”
Silas remained quiet.
“So . . .” Bellis’ voice was measured now. “I found a man who could travel to the ships, without danger, without being detected. A Crobuzoner, prepared to do the whole deal on the hush, just to stop his first home being devastated.”
“Did you show him the stuff?” said Silas.
“Of course I did. You think he’d swim off blithely at midnight taking only my word as to what he was carrying?”
“Swim? It was Tanner fucking Sack, wasn’t it? Do you think, if you’d looked long and hard”—his voice was strained—“you could have found someone more loyal to Garwater?”
“But he did it,” said Bellis. “He wasn’t going to do anything without proof. I showed him the letters, and yes, Silas, he’s loyal to Garwater. He’s no intention of ever going back. But, dammit, you think he doesn’t have friends left behind? You think he relishes the idea of the grindylow taking New Crobuzon? Godspit!
“For the sake of the people he left. For the sake of memories. Whatever. He took the box, the seal, the letters, and I told him what to do. It was a last good-bye to his fucking city. From him as much as from me and you.”
Silas was nodding slowly, acknowledging that perhaps she had had no choice.
“You gave him the stuff?” he said.
“Yes. But it all went ahead, no problems. Silas . . . we owe Tanner Sack.”
“But does he know . . .” said Silas hesitantly, “who I am?”
“Of course not.” He relaxed visibly at her words. “Do you think I’m stupid? I remember what was done to the captain. I’d not have you killed, Silas,” she said. Her voice was soft but not warm. It was a statement of fact, not of closeness.
After some moments of reflection, Silas seemed to finish his deliberations.
“I suppose it was the only choice,” he said, and Bellis nodded curtly.
You ungracious fuck, she thought, furious. You weren’t there. . .
“And you say the Samheri have the package? Sealed and ready to deliver?” He was grinning furiously. “We’ve done it,” he said. “We’ve done it.”
“That was more the reaction I was expecting,” Bellis said unpleasantly. “Yes, we have.” They looked at each other for a long time. “When do you think they’ll reach New Crobuzon?”
“I don’t know,” said Silas. “Maybe it won’t work. Maybe it will, and we’ll hear nothing. We’ll save the city, and hear nothing about it, ever. I may see out my days on this fucking tub, desperately scheming to get off. But godsdammit, isn’t it something to know what we’ve done?” He spoke fervently. “Even without response, even without thanks, isn’t it something to know that we’ve saved them?”
And yes, thought Bellis Coldwine, it was something. It was certainly something. She felt a wave of loneliness breaking over her. Was it worse? she wondered. Could it be worse? To never know? To send that message across the world, through so many hazards, through such danger, for it to disappear without a sound? To never know?
Gods, she thought, bereft and stunned. Is that the last of it? Is that the end?
“What happens now?” he said. “With me and you?”
Bellis shrugged. “What did you want?” Her voice was more tired than scornful.
“I know it’s hard,” he said gently. “I know it’s more compli-cated than we’d thought. I don’t expect anything from you. But Bellis . . . there are things we share, things between us—and I don’t think that’s the only reason we spent time together. I would like us to be friends. Can you really afford not to have me? To have no one who knows? How you really feel? Where you want to be?”
She was not quite sure of him, but it was as he said: they shared things that no one else did. Could she afford to lose him? There might be years ahead of her in this city (she shudders to think it). Could she afford to have no one to whom she could speak the truth?
When he stood to go, he held out his hand, his palm open and up, expectantly.
“Where’s the New Crobuzon seal?” he said.
Bellis had been afraid of this. “I don’t have it,” she said.
He did not get angry this time, just closed his hand with a soft clap and raised his eyes to ask her what had happened.
“It was Tanner,” she said, ready for him to fly at her. “He dropped it in the sea.”
“It’s a ring, Bellis,” Silas said quietly. “It sits safe on your finger. You don’t lose it. He hasn’t lost it. He’s kept it, gods know why. Souvenir from home? Something to blackmail you with? Gods know.” He shook his head and sighed, and she was furious with his manner, which said I am disappointed in you.
“I’d better leave, Bellis,” he said. “Carefully—you’re watched, remember. So don’t be surprised if I come and go by . . . unconventional means. Would you excuse me a moment?”
He descended the spiral stairs. Bellis heard the sound of his feet dissipating on the metal, ringing hollow like thin tin on tin. She turned at the weird sound, but he had gone. She could still hear the slightest ring of his feet on her staircase, descending, reaching the bottom step, but there was nothing to be seen. He was invisible or gone.
Bellis’ eyes widened very slightly, but even in his absence she begrudged Silas any awe.
He comes and goes like a rat or a bat, now, she thought. Keeping out of sight. Been learning thaumaturgy, has he? Got some facility, a little puissance?
But she was unnerved and somewhat intimidated. His departure suggested a charm of exceptional subtlety and strength. I didn’t know you had that in you, Silas, she thought. She realized again how little she knew of him. Their conversation was like an elaborate game. Despite his words, despite the fact that she knew they shared secrets, she felt alone.
And she did not think that Tanner Sack had kept the New Crobuzon seal, though she could not say why.
Bellis felt as if she were waiting.
The man stands waiting with wind gusting him on the staircase that spirals the height of her absurd chimney-pot apartment, and he knows that the eyes that might watch her door cannot see him at all.
In his hand is the statue, its filigree of fin folded like layers of cake pastry, its round betoothed remora mouth pouting upward, and his tongue is still cold where he has kissed it. He is much quicker now; he finds it much easier to accept the cold stone’s flickering little tonguing, and he can direct the energies their passionless coupling unleashes far more adroitly.
He stands at angles to the night at a place the statue shows him and where its kiss allows him to stand, at a place or a kind of place where the beams of lights intersect and he is unnoticed, as doors and walls and windows do not notice him so long as he is the brine-stinking statue’s lover.
The kissing is never a pleasure. But the power that he has, that enters him with the stone thing’s spit, is a wonder.
He steps out into the night, unseen and emboldened, with arcane energies in him, to look for his ring.
Chapter Thirty
Armada lolled in the sun. It was getting hotter.
The frantic work continued, and below the water, the shape of the avanc’s harness grew slowly more solid. It was ghosted, its outlines in girders and wooden supports, like an abstract for some implausible building. As the days went on it grew a little more substantial, its intricate spines and gears more like something real. It grew through the extraordinary efforts of the crews. The city was on something like a war footing, every iota of industry and effort commandeered. People understood that they were careering at breakneck speed into a new epoch.
The scale of the harness always staggered Tanner Sack. It loomed below the ecology of scavenger fish that never left the city’s underside, larger by a long, long way than any ship. It dwarfed the Grand Easterly, which bobbed above it like a bath toy. And the bridle was to be completed within weeks.
The work was constant. During the dark hours, the sputtering illumination of chymical flares and welding torches attracted night fish. They surrounded the chains and gangs of divers, schools of them staring big-eyed, agog at the lights.
There were moving parts, and joints, and rubberized gasbags cannibalized from old dirigibles. There were sealed motors. But essentially it was just a vast halter, its links and segments stretching more than a quarter of a mile long.
Ship after ship was gutted, stripped from the inside, scuttled, and melted down. The fleet of warships and traders that surrounded the city and its ports was thinned, for the sake of this project. A frontier of smoke plumes enveloped the sacrificed vessels while heat torches took them apart.
As Shekel made his way along the aft of Garwater one evening, to Bellis’ house, he looked out toward the horizon and saw a half-gone ship at the edge of the city. It was the Terpsichoria: its outlines crumbled and broken; its bridge, most of its superstructure, and its deck gone; its metal viscera taken to the factories. The sight brought him up short. He had no affection for the vessel; he was not dismayed—but astonished, for reasons he could not articulate.
He stared down at the water that turned below him. It was hard to believe that it was happening, that such colossal efforts were taking place, link after link slotted together in a vast series under the fabric of the city.
There were several languages active in Bellis’ life. She felt exhilarated to relearn her disciplines: the nameless technique she had perfected for segmenting her mind, keeping her internal dictionaries distinct; the language trance she had last used in Tarmuth.
Aum made quick progress with Salt. Her pupil was talented.
During the afternoon’s discussions with Tintinnabulum and the other scientists, every so often—to Bellis’ pleasure—Aum would intercept some question before she had translated it and written it down. He would even write down some of his own answers, in basic Salt.
It must be extraordinary for him, Bellis thought. Salt was the first language he was conscious of having both spoken and written dimensions. It was unthinkable to him to hear High Kettai—it had been a meaningless concept. To hear Salt questions and to write the answers in the same language must be an astonishing mental leap, but he dealt with it with aplomb.
Bellis did not warm to Krüach Aum. She found his constant wide-eyed curiosity draining, and she felt no strong sense of personality beneath it. He was a brilliant, boring man whose culture had made him like a precocious child. She was cheered by the speed with which he learned Armada’s language; she suspected that she would be mostly redundant soon.
High Kettai and Salt surrounded her every day.
Her own head was the preserve of Ragamoll. She had never been one of those linguists who thought in the language she was using at the time. Silas was the only person to whom she spoke in her first language, in the rare times that she saw him.
There was a day when a fourth language entered her life, briefly. Quiesy—more popularly known as Deadish. The language of High Cromlech.
She still did not really understand Uther Doul’s reasons for talking to her about his home tongue. After one of her sessions with Aum, he had asked her if she enjoyed learning new languages, and she told him truthfully that she did.
“Would you be interested to hear a bit of Quiesy?” he said. “I don’t often get to speak my own tongue.”
Dumbfounded, Bellis had agreed. That evening she had gone with him to his quarters aboard the Grand Easterly.
The sounds of Quiesy were formed in the back of the throat, softly barked, the noises swallowed, and interspersed with precisely timed silences as important as the sounds. It was, Doul warned her, a language of strange subtleties. Many of the thanati gentry had sewn-shut mouths, he reminded her, and others had voice-boxes too rotted to work. There were modes of Quiesy spoken with hands and eyes, as well as written forms.
Bellis was fascinated by the gentle language, and was held by Uther Doul’s performance. In his quiet, controlled way he was enthusiastic as he recited several passages of what sounded like poetry. Bellis realized that she was not there to learn the language, but to appreciate it as an audience.
There was still a foreboding in her at being in Doul’s company, alongside other emotions. Alongside excitement.
He wordlessly handed her a glass of wine. She recognized this as an invitation to stay. She sat and sipped and waited, looking around his room. She had expected some hidden stronghold, but he lived in a berth like thousands of others. It was sparse: there were a desk and two chairs, a shuttered window, a chest, one small black-and-white etching on the wall. Below the window was a weapons rack, full of familiar and arcane armaments; and in the corner of the room a complex musical instrument, with strings and keys, like a harp-accordion hybrid.
When probably a minute had passed, and Uther Doul had said nothing, Bellis spoke.
“I was . . . very interested to hear the story of your youth,” she said. “I admit that I hadn’t previously been sure of High Cromlech’s existence—until I met you. However, apart from the whispers about the land of the dead and defeating the Ghosthead Empire, I’ve lost your trail of rumors.” She was not practiced at the kind of hard humor for which she was trying, but he moved his eyebrows to signify a pretense at amusement. “I’d be very pleased if you wanted to tell me more about what happened after you left High Cromlech. I doubt I’ve ever met anyone so traveled. Have you ever . . . ?” She paused, suddenly anxious, and he replied to her.
“No. I’ve never visited New Crobuzon,” he said. He seemed to be fretting, in his poised, silent way.
“You aren’t sure you believe what I told you about my sword, are you?” he said suddenly. “I don’t blame you. It isn’t nearly old enough, you were thinking. What do you know about the Ghosthead Empire, Miss Coldwine?”
“Little,” she admitted.
“Of course, though, you know that they were in no way human—or khepri, vodyanoi, strider, or what have you. These were not xenian in the sense we usually mean it. Whatever prints and descriptions you may have seen are fallacious. The question What did they look like? has no straightforward answer. This weapon—“ He indicated his belt. “—is so obviously shaped for human hands, you might have thought my claims about its provenance a lie.”
Bellis had had no thoughts at all about the shape of the Possible Sword, as Uther Doul must have known.
“You’re not seeing the sword,” he went on softly. “Only one aspect of it. It’s contextual—as was so very much for the Ghosthead. I take it you’ve read some of their Imperial Canon? Even as translations of translations of translations, even with all the additions and omissions and commentary that implies, there are some extraordinary things there. Especially the Covertiana.” He sipped his wine.
“Some purport to be passages from the earliest days of the arrival of the Ghosthead in Bas-Lag, before the Empire began.” He blinked at Bellis. “Certainly,” he said as if she had disputed him. “Arrival. The Ghosthead were not native to this world.”
Bellis knew the myths.
“There is one passage . .
. ,” Doul mused (and Bellis realized with consternation how his wonderful voice was lulling her). “ ‘The Verses of the Day.’ Perhaps you know them? ‘Redoubtable, tail flicking, swimming over a plain of worlds, past orbs, lights in the night’s blindness.’
“That describes the Ghostheads’ journey from . . . their place to Bas-Lag. In the belly of a metal fish swimming through a dark sea of stars. But what’s most interesting is the description of their home, where they came from. It has been confused with hell.”
Uther Doul sat on his crib, and did not speak for some time.
Is this why I’m here? thought Bellis suddenly. Is this what he wants to tell me? He was like a boy, wanting her there but quite uncertain what to do.
“It describes the morning coming with ‘ferrous cataracts and a wall of fire,’ ” he said eventually. “The entire eastern sky was ablaze with light and heat enough to blind anyone looking up even from the bottom of a sea, to ignite the air, burn the mountains, liquefy metal. Far, far hotter than the heart of any foundry. Morning broke, and the world burned.
“Within minutes the wall of heat had risen and curved above them, directly overhead, blotting out the sky and burning every atom of gas in the air. And then, as the minutes went on, the fire shrank, until its edges became visible, and it was a disc. And the heat began to ebb away a little, though the oceans were still molten iron.
“The fire in the sky receded, moving west, as the day passed. By midmorning, the disc had shrunk further, and it was the sun, nearly at the far horizon. By noon it was much smaller, and the land was very cold.
“The sun shrank and traveled west in a long, drawn-out dusk, and the Ghosthead homeworld became icier than the Rime Ocean. By nightfall, the sky was already dark, and the sun was no more than a moving star.
“And it was cold—colder than anything we could imagine. The world was enveloped in layers of ice and frost—the very gases, the very aether piled up in bergs and walls, chilled more solid than stone.”
He gave Bellis a faint smile.