“That was the Ghosthead homeland. Imagine what kind of creatures might live, might survive in such a place; how hungry they might be for rest. That’s why they left.”
She said nothing.
“Do you know what I mean,” Doul said, “by the belief in the Broken Country?”
Bellis furrowed her brow, then suddenly nodded. “In New Crobuzon we call it . . .” She thought for the translation. “The Fractured Land Hypothesis. I once had a friend who was a scientist. He was always talking about things like this.”
“The Broken Country, across an impossible sea,” said Doul. “I spent a long time, in youth, studying myths and cosmogony. Fractured Land, Ghosthead Country, the Verses of the Day.
“The Ghosthead came here from the universe’s eastern rim. They passed the rock globes that circulate in the sky—another, more evanescent kind of world than ours on the infinite plateau—and came here, to a land so mild it must have seemed like balm: an endless, gentle midmorning. And its rules were not theirs. Its nature was debatable.
“There are some who say that when they landed, the force of it was enough to unleash the chaos of Torque, up from the vent. That’s fable. But their arrival was violent enough to smash open the world—reality itself. The Fractured Land is real, and was their doing. You break something . . . what’s inside spills out.
“When I left my first home, I spent years studying that breakage. Searching for techniques and instruments to make sense of it, control it. And, when I came here, the Lovers saw things in what I’d learnt that I hadn’t imagined.
“Think of the Ghostheads’ power, their science, their thaumaturgy. Imagine what they could do, what they did do, to our world. You see the scale of the cataclysm of their arrival. Not just physically—ontologically. When they landed, they fractured the world’s rules as well as its surface. Is it a surprise that we whisper the name of the Ghosthead Empire in fear?”
And yet, thought Bellis, reeling with the heretic philosophy, and yet it was we who put paid to the Ghosthead. Through the Contumancy, and then the Sloughing Off. Weak as we are.
“They say you led the Contumancy,” she said.
“I lead nothing,” said Doul sharply, surprising her, “not anymore. I’m a soldier, not a leader. High Cromlech . . . it’s a caste world. You grew up in a mercantile city, so you take it for granted. You can have no idea of the liberation of selling your services, doing what your employer tells you. I am not a leader.”
Uther Doul walked with her through the Grand Easterly’s corridors.
When he stopped at one of the numerous intersections, she thought for a sudden second that he would kiss her, and her eyes widened. But that was not his intention.
He put his finger to his lips. “I want you to learn something,” he whispered, “about the Lovers.”
“What are their names?” Bellis said in tired anger. “I’m sick of the . . . the mystery, and I don’t believe you can’t remember.”
“I can,” said Uther Doul. “Of course I can remember. But what they were once called is not at all the point. They’re the Lovers now. You’d better learn that.”
Doul led her into the lower decks. He took her away from sound, away from the patrols. What is this? thought Bellis, excited and unnerved. They were now in dark, very quiet portions of the ship. There were no windows; they were below the waterline, in a long-deserted place.
Finally Doul ducked below a snarl of pipes and ushered her into a tiny chamber. It was not a room, just a little found space. All the surfaces were dusty, and the paint was peeling.
Doul gently put his finger in front of her lips.
Bellis was aware that meekly following Doul, fraternizing with him, was not sensible behavior from one who had been deeply involved in counter-Garwater activities. What am I doing here? she thought.
Uther Doul was pointing up at the ceiling, only an inch or so above her head. He cocked an ear expressively. It took some seconds before Bellis heard anything, and when she did, she was not at first sure what it was.
Voices. Muffled by layers of air and metal. Half-familiar. Bellis turned her head up. She could almost make out words now. This was an accidental little listening post. By quirk of architecture and materials, the sounds from the room above issued (by pipes, hollow walls?) through the ceiling.
Voices from the room above.
The Lovers’ room.
She started in astonishment. It was the Lovers that she could hear.
Cautious and slow, as if they might somehow see her, Bellis craned her neck and listened.
Words fluttering across registers, uttered with quick breaths. Mewing, pleading, delighting. Gasps of sexual closeness and pain and other intense emotions. And words coming through the metal.
. . . love . . . soon . . . fuck . . . yes and . . . cut . . . now . . . love . . . cut . . . yes, yes . . .
Yes.
The words were thick. Bellis recoiled from them—physically, literally, stepping away from the weak spot in the metal. The words, the sounds, were crooned quickly, so steeped in passion and need that they had to be bitten out or they would become a wordless shriek.
cut yes love cut
Two streams of words, male and female, overlapping and interweaving and inextricable—their rhythms inextricable.
Dear Jabber! thought Bellis. Uther Doul watched her, expressionless.
Cut and cut and love and cut! she thought, and went for the door, appalled. She thought of what they were doing, in their room, a few feet away.
Doul led her away from that terrible little cubbyhole. They ascended through layers of metal toward the night air. Doul still did not speak.
What are you doing? she thought, staring at his back. Why show me that?
There had been nothing prurient in his demeanor. She did not understand. Stiff, eloquent, and formal in his own room, uncovering extraordinary stories and theories to keep himself talking, he had become, in these corridors, a truculent child with a secret hideaway. And with something like the wordless, inarticulate pride she would expect from such a child, he had led her to his private den and shown her its secret. And she could not fathom why.
She shuddered at the memory of those breathy exclamations, the Lovers’ twisted declarations of passion. Of love, she supposed. She thought of their scars, the cutting. The blood and split skin, the fervor. She felt as if she would sick up. But it was not the violence, not the knives they used or what they did, that horrified her. It was not that at all. Peccadillos did not disturb her at all—those, she could understand.
This had become something else. It was the emotion itself, the intense, giddying, slick, and sick-making ardor she had heard in their voices that appalled her. They were trying to cut through the membrane between them and bleed one into the other. Rupturing their integrity for something way beyond sex.
That violent, moaning thing that they thought was love, she thought was something akin to masturbation, and it disgusted her.
Bellis was left aghast by it. Nauseated and threatened and aghast.
Chapter Thirty-one
During the days, Shekel was free.
Like most of the young bravos who hung out around the Basilio docks, he made his living as he had in New Crobuzon—running errands, delivering messages and goods, keeping his eyes and ears open, for whatever handful of change his momentary employer chose to give him. His Salt was game and comprehensible, if not fluent.
A little more than half of his evenings he spent with Angevine. She berthed in Tintinnabulum’s Castor, below its belfry. She often returned very late at night, since Tintinnabulum spent long hours in the meetings with his colleagues, and with Krüach Aum and Bellis and the Lovers, and Angevine fetched books or materials for him, from the library or from his hidden laboratory at the back of his ship. She would return tired, and Shekel would soothe her with supper and inexpert massages.
Angevine did not speak much about the avanc project, but Shekel could easily sense her tension and excitement.
Other evenings he spent at what he still thought of as his own home, which he shared with Tanner Sack.
Tanner was not always there—like Angevine, the project was keeping him at work long and difficult hours. But when he was present, he spoke more about what he was doing. He described to Shekel the extraordinary look of the bridle, stretching out in the clear water, the schools of bright tropical fish circulating through its links, which were scaling already with the plants and tenacious shellfish; picked out at night with cold lights. All the hours of work, of welding and testing and suggesting, acting as designer, foreman, and builder, left Tanner exhausted and very happy.
Shekel kept the rooms clean and warm. When he was not cooking for Angevine, he cooked for Tanner.
He was troubled.
Two nights previously, on Luddi, Shekel had woken suddenly a little after midnight, in his old rooms on the factory ship. He had sat up and stayed quiet and unmoving.
He had looked around the room, in the pale half-shadow shed by lights and stars outside: at the table and chairs, the bucket, the plates and pans, at Tanner’s empty bed. (working late again). Even swaddled in shadows, there was nowhere for anyone to hide, and Shekel could see that he was alone.
And yet he had felt as if he was not.
Shekel lit a candle. There were no unusual sounds or lights or shadows, but he kept thinking that he had just a moment before heard or seen something—again and again, as if his memories were outpacing him, reminding him of something that had not yet happened.
He went back to sleep eventually, and woke the next morning with only a vague sense of the foreboding he had felt. But the next night, the same sense of intrusion came with dusk, long before he had gone to bed. He stood—with a concentrated, silly stillness—looking about him vaguely. Had those clothes been moved? That book? Those plates?
Shekel’s attention switched rapidly from one object, one drawer or collection or pile of things, and the next, his eyes moving across them, exactly as if he were watching someone move through the room, touching or rummaging in each place in turn. He grew angry and afraid at once.
He wanted to flee, but loyalty to Tanner kept him in those rooms. It made him light the lamps and sing loudly, and cook expansively and quickly until Tanner returned—mercifully, before the late evening, when the sounds outside faded away.
To Shekel’s relief and surprise, when he broached the subject of his strange intuitions, Tanner reacted with interest and seriousness.
He looked around the little room and muttered carefully. “It’s a peculiar time, lad.” Exhausted as he was, he raised himself and followed the route that Shekel described around the room. He picked up the items he passed, carefully checking them. He hummed and rubbed his chin.
“I can’t see a sign of nothing, Shekel,” he admitted. His eyes did not relax. “It’s a peculiar time. There’s all manner of types trying all manner of things at the moment—there’s lies and rumors, and Jabber knows what. Thus far, those who’ve problems with Garwater and the project ain’t spoken of it too loud—that’ll come later, I shouldn’t doubt. But maybe there’s some who’re trying other ways of undermining things. It ain’t as if I’m a bigwig in this, Shekel, lad, but I’m known to have gone to the island, and I’m known to be helping build the bridle. It might be someone’s made their way in here to try to . . . I don’t know . . . undermine things. To look for something to strengthen their side. As if I’m stupid enough to keep any plans here.
“People are tense. Things are moving too quick. It’s like it ain’t in anyone’s control.” He looked around him once more, then caught Shekel’s eye.
“I’m tempted to say let ’em come. If you’re right, then so long as they take nothing and leave us alone, then fuck ’em. I ain’t scared.” He grinned with bravado, and Shekel smiled back.
“All the same,” Shekel said quietly. “All the same.”
When he spoke to Angevine about his experience the next day, she echoed Tanner Sack almost exactly.
“Might be there’s something in it,” she said slowly. “It’s a strange time, you know. People are excited, and some are scared. I doubt that unseen intruders’ll be the strangest thing we have to face over the next weeks, lover. With the factories working overtime for the bridle, people are grumbling. There’s no time or engineers to fix up machines elsewhere, no engine parts or metalwork being built. ‘With all the power from that rig,’ people are saying, ‘when’ll we see it put to our use? How much does the damn avanc need, anyway?’
“Well, it needs a lot, Shekel. A damn lot, now and always.” She met his eye and took his hand. “And the rumblings that you can hear now—in Bask and Curhouse and Dry Fall, most especially, but all over—are bound to grow. When people get to understand that there’s other things more important to put the oil and rockmilk to than all their schemes.”
She spoke absently, recalling conversations that she had overheard between Tintinnabulum and others, and Shekel could do little more than nod.
“They’re appearing already, the troublemakers,” she mused. “Vordakine in Curhouse, Sallow in Bask. The mysterious Simon Fench. Pamphlets, graffiti, whispers. And good people have their doubts, too. I heard that Hedrigall, who’s loyal to his wooden bones, even knows this Fench, drinks with him sometimes. People’ll get fired up if the avanc is called—something so wonderful as that, it’ll excite them. But that won’t be the end, Shekel, believe me.”
In the blazing heat of Armada’s accidental, equatorial summer, Croom Park blossomed.
When last Bellis had visited it, it had been all-over green: wet, and lush, and sap-stinking. Now the green was overlaid with spring and summer colors: a mulch of hurried blossom underfoot, and here and there still frosting the tips of trees. The first bright summer flowers vied with vivid weeds, dogwood, and daffodils. The woods rustled with small life.
Bellis came to the park not with Silas, but with Johannes Tearfly, and she was wryly amused that she felt as if she were being somehow unfaithful.
She walked her favorite route, along what had once been a corridor between ship’s cabins and was now an ivy-smothered canyon. The walls were studded with passion flowers, broken windows just visible beneath a mesh of roots. Where the old cabin-hills sank into the grassy surface and the pathway opened out into the sun, there was a fringe of pungent honeysuckle purring with bees.
This is a good moment, thought Bellis carefully as she walked, Johannes shy and wondering behind her. But you’ll have to spoil it in a moment, Johannes—you’ll have to speak.
And after some more minutes of flowers and grass, when the only sound was the vibrato of warm insects, he did.
They talked for a long time about the work below the city.
“I’ve been down in a submersible a couple of times,” Johannes told her. “It’s extraordinary, Bellis. The speed with which they’re constructing it—it’s truly amazing.”
“Well, I’ve seen the rate they’ve decommissioned the Terpsichoria, among others,” she said. “I can just imagine.”
Johannes was wary of her, still, but he was eager to feel the connection they had once had. She could feel him reaching to her, explaining away to himself any curtness she might display.
“You’ve not told me much about the island,” he said.
Bellis sighed. “It was hard,” she said. “I don’t relish discussing it.” But she gave him a little more than that: told him of the excruciating heat, the constant fear, the gurning curiosity of the he-anophelii and the murderous hunger of their mates.
He tried to gauge her. She wondered whether he thought he was shrewd and subtle.
“They took Aum away, yesterday,” she continued, and he turned to her, startled. “I’ve been teaching him Salt for a couple of weeks, that’s all. He learns at a rate that frightens me. He takes notes on everything I say—he’s already amassed enough for a textbook. But, still, I didn’t think he was capable of conversing without my help—not yet. But yesterday afternoon, when we’d
concluded with Tintinnabulum and the engineers’ committee, they took him away and told me I wasn’t needed for a while.
“Perhaps their opinion of his Salt is higher than mine. Or perhaps one of their other High Kettai experts has practiced enough to come in useful.” This she said with a superior sneer, and Johannes laughed briefly. “They’ve been telling me for some time that I’m to bring him to fluency in Salt at the very earliest possible time; that he’ll be needed for projects that don’t concern me. They’re trying to get rid of me.”
She turned to Johannes and held his gaze. They were alone in a clearing, ringed by trees and briars, stunted spring roses.
“My usefulness is ending, and I’m delighted, because I’m so godsdamned tired. But Aum’s is only just starting, it appears. And it wasn’t any of the usual group who took him away. It was Uther Doul, and it was men and women I’d never seen. I don’t know what that’s all about. Seems to me that calling the avanc is not the end of it.”
Johannes turned away from her and fingered the flowers.
“Only now realizing that, Bellis?” he said quietly. “Of course you’re right. There’s more to come. Given the scale of what we’re attempting with the avanc, it’s difficult to imagine, but it seems that perhaps that’s just a . . . prelude to whatever’s really going on. And what that is, I don’t know. It’s been decided it should not involve me.
“You know,” he said, “it was just luck, really, that I ever got my commission here.”
Luck? thought Bellis, incredulous.
“Of those in the know,” he continued, “who’d seen the old chains, there’ve been some arguing for decades that Armada should try to call the avanc. But the Lovers ignored them, had no interest in it for years—that’s what I heard.
“It changed when Uther Doul came to the city, came to work for them. I don’t know what he did or said to them, but all of a sudden the avanc project was revived. Something he told them meant those old plans got dusted off, for the first time since those chains were built—and no one knows how long ago that was, or what happened.