“And after all that, it’s just over for me. They’ve moved on to other things.”
Jealous, realized Bellis. Spurned, deserted, and pissed off. Johannes’ work—and Johannes himself—was invaluable to conjure up the avanc, but whatever came after that did not require him.
Gently, subtly, Bellis probed his wound. Moment by moment, interspersing her investigation with meaningless minutiae.
In his anger, Johannes was willing to talk seriously about the doubts that had been raised over the Lovers’ plans.
They strolled through the wooded boat, past reclaimed funnels and bulkheads, while Bellis fed Johannes’ resentment in a coy and sly interrogation, learning things piece by piece.
Once she started listening, Bellis heard the same names, the same rumors, everywhere. The veneer of loyalty that had been painted over Armada was thin. Anxieties and controversies were now as clearly traceable through it as woodgrain through varnish.
She was startled to realize that it was not only the worthies of Bask and Curhouse who were linked to such dissident voices. Some of Garwater’s longest-loyal servants were doubters, linked to the renegades.
The Lovers’ consensus, she realized, was not stable. And, as she half expected, the name that recurred most often, that came up again and again as a focus for this discontent, was Simon Fench.
Bellis began to search for him.
She asked all the people she knew after Simon Fench. Carrianne shrugged, but said she would keep her ears open. Johannes looked askance and said nothing. Shekel, at one of their infrequent meetings, nodded. “Ange mentioned him,” he said. Feigning faint interest, Bellis asked Shekel to find out more.
Her query was tossed around on street corners, among the youths who hung over ship railings, firing catapults at the city’s monkeys, or sat in pubs, playing dice and arm wrestling. Each had their own friends, their own contacts, men and women who might slip them coins and food and favors in exchange for whatever trivial services the boys and girls might perform. Bellis’ question passed through them, through the drinking halls of Garwater and Shaddler and Booktown and Thee-And-Thine.
In New Crobuzon, what was not regulated was illicit. In Armada, things were different. It was, after all, a pirate city. What did not directly threaten the city did not concern its authorities. Bellis’ message, like other secrets, did not have to strive to be covert, as it might back home to avoid the militia. Instead, it sped through this wrangling city with ease and speed, leaving a little trail for those who knew how to look.
“You wanted me.”
Silas was standing by Bellis’ bed. She had not yet undressed. She was sitting with her knees up, reading a book by gaslight. A moment before, she had been alone.
More thaumaturgy, Silas? she thought.
It was the evening of the tenth Scabdi of Hawkbill, the last day of the quarto—a festival. The streets were loud; people were drunk, shouting and laughing. The ships and streets were draped with colored bunting. The air was full of fireworks and confetti (and still the work went on below the water).
“I do,” she said.
“You want to be careful. You don’t want to advertise yourself as dealing with dissidents.”
Bellis laughed. “Jabber and fuck, Silas. You should see the list of your—or Mr. Fench’s—supposed friends. They include bigger fish than me, by far. Is it true you drink with Hedrigall?” He did not reply. “So I don’t think anyone’s going to care about me.”
They eyed each other quietly. How many times have we done this? Bellis thought hopelessly. Communed secretively—over tea, in my room, at night, to discuss what we do and don’t know . . . ?
“They’re planning something,” she said, and her own conspiratorial tone almost reduced her to bitter laughter. “The avanc’s not the end of it. Aum’s learning Salt in double-quick time, and they’ve taken him off to some new secret project. Even some of the scientists involved are feeling cut out. There’s a core—Tintinnabulum, the Lovers, Aum—and this time Uther Doul’s part of it. They’re planning something.”
Silas nodded. It was obvious that he already knew.
“So?” Bellis demanded. “What is it?”
“I don’t know,” he said, and she could not tell if she believed him.
“If we can work out what they’ve planned,” she said, “we might still be able to . . . to get out of here.”
“Sincerely,” he said slowly, “I can’t work out what their plan is. If I find out, I’ll tell you. Of course.”
They studied each other.
“I gather Uther Doul’s courting you,” he continued. He was not trying to be unpleasant, but his smirk was irritating.
“I don’t know what he’s doing,” Bellis said curtly. “Sometimes I think that’s exactly it—he’s courting me—but if so, by gods he’s out of practice. Sometimes I think he has other motives, but I can’t make sense of them.”
Again silence. Outside, a cat began to wail.
“Tell me, Silas,” Bellis said. “This is your world. Is there any kind of serious opposition to their project? Serious, I mean? And if there is, could we use it to get out of here? Can it help us?”
What exactly might I have in mind? she wondered. We’ve sent a message to our home port. We’ve saved it, for Jabber’s sake. There’s nothing else to be done. There are no factions to win over. There’s no one we might persuade to take us home.
Whatever Silas claimed about trying to escape, the way he submerged into Armada’s hinterland, ducked out of sight, became Simon Fench, suspended himself in a web of deals and rumors and favors and threats—these were survival tactics. Silas was adjusting.
There was nothing for Bellis to do. No schemes she could engage in, no secret plans.
She still dreamed of that river between New Crobuzon and Iron Bay.
No, she thought fiercely, uncompromisingly. Whatever the truth, whatever the case, however hopeless the cause—I do not give up on escape.
It had taken her quite some effort to reach this coldly burning pitch of anger, of desire for escape, and to relinquish it now would be unbearable.
And so she kept that No loud in the back of her head, undiluted by doubt.
She woke the next day and leaned from her window into the warm wind, watching the exhausted, hungover crews clear the detritus of last night’s party from the streets and decks. They swept up huge piles of dust and colored paper, costumes and disguises from the masque parties, the debris of drug-taking.
The bilious flames had stopped rolling from the top of the Sorghum’s derrick. The rig had gone cold, its harvest of oil and rockmilk siphoned up and stored. Over the ships’ roofscape, the steamers, the tugs, the squat industrial vessels were moving back toward the city, like iron filings toward a magnet. Bellis watched their crews attach them again to the edge of Armada.
When all the servant ships had attached themselves to the city, they bore off to the southeast, venting black smoke, their gears grinding, devouring huge quantities of stolen coal and anything else that might burn. With appalling slowness, Armada began to move.
Below, in the clear water, the divers continued working. The stripping down of ship after ship continued, their substances delivered to the industrial works. An endless train of dirigibles passed between the vessels’ corpses and the forges.
The sea moved in faint currents around the massive bridle hidden below the waves. Armada’s pace was almost imperceptible: only a mile or two every hour.
But it did not slacken. It was ceaseless. Bellis knew that when it reached the place it sought, when the chains were lowered, when the thaumaturgy was attempted, everything would change. And she heard herself again, No, refusing to acquiesce, refusing to make her home here.
As her days passed, she was needed less and less. Her translation sessions with the engineers were fewer, as the bridle’s crews worked their endless hours and problems of design were reached, one by one, and solved. Bellis felt herself slipping from the core of things.
&
nbsp; Except for Doul. He still spoke to her, still gave her wine in his cabin. There was still something shadowy between them, but Bellis could not make it out. And Doul’s conversations were as cryptic as ever, and she took no comfort in them. Once, twice more, he took her again to that little room, the sound box below the Lovers’ chamber. Why she went with him she could not say. It was always at night, always a secret. She heard their gasping declarations, their mews of pain and desire. The emotion still appalled and nauseated her, like something rotting in her stomach.
The second time she had heard them hiss with whatever passed for pleasure in their minds, and the next day, when she entered the meeting room with Aum, the Lovers stared at her with fresh wounds, blood crusting on their foreheads, scored deep in mirror images across their faces.
And Bellis had faltered. She could not bear the thought that she was at the mercy of people hooked on the emotion she had heard.
No.
Even as the weather grew hotter still, day after day till a week and then two had passed, and the bridle was nearly done, and Silas had not come to her, and Doul still made no sense; even as she slipped from the center of power, and her relief that she need not see the Lovers every day was effaced by the fear of her own growing ineffectuality; even as she lost the last semblance of power she had had; even as it became clear that she was trapped, the voice inside Bellis hardened and was absolutely clear.
No.
Chapter Thirty-two
Armada found the place it was looking for.
The city was near the southern border between the Swollen Ocean and the Black Sandbar Sea. Bellis was stunned when she heard that. Have we really come so fucking far? she had thought.
They lay absolutely still in the water. By arcane techniques like echo-catching and sensory projection, Armada had found its way to the center of a deadeye. These existed randomly across the oceans—patches of water a few miles across, where there were no currents or winds. Without motive power, things floating on the surface of deadeyes would bob up and down with waves, but would not move an inch in any compass direction.
They were signs of sinkholes.
In this region, the ocean was between three and four miles deep. But below the deadeye the seafloor fell away in a steep cone, into a circular hole that stretched down below the reach of any geo-empath.
The sinkhole was a mile and a half wide, and bottomless.
It stretched so deep that Bas-Lag’s dimension could not possibly contain the water’s gravity and density, and reality was unstable in the shaft’s lower reaches. The sinkhole was a duct between realms. Where the avancs breached.
There was not a time when Krüach Aum and his new subordinates declared their researches over—there was no sudden announcement, no claim that the last problems had been solved. Bellis could not say exactly when she knew that Armada was ready.
Doul did not tell her. The knowledge soaked into her, and into all the other citizens. In rumor and guesswork, in triumphant speculation and then in triumph, the word spread. They’ve succeeded. They know how to do it. They’re waiting.
Bellis wanted not to believe it. The awareness that the scientists had perfected the techniques they needed took her so gently that there was no sudden shock, just a slowly waxing foreboding. How? she thought, again and again. She considered the scale of what was to be attempted, and the question overwhelmed her. How can they do it?
She considered everything that had to be done, all the knowledge that they had had to amass, the machines to be built, the puissance to channel. It seemed impossible. Is it down to me? she wondered incredulously. Without Aum, without his book, could this be done?
With every hour, Bellis could feel the tension, the anxiety and excitement, increasing all around her.
Days after they reached the deadeye, finally, the announcement was made that everyone had been expecting. Posters and criers warned people to be ready, that the research was over, that an attempt was to be made.
As momentous, as extraordinary, as it was, it surprised no one. And after such long official silence, even to Bellis, that final confirmation was almost a relief.
Tanner Sack found the bridle and the now-visible chains a great pleasure to his eye. He had been born and raised in New Crobuzon, where mountains picked out the western sky and the architecture was complex and encompassing. There were times, he would admit, when the endless open skies of Armada, the unbroken water below, troubled him.
He found a comfort in the submerged harness. It gave him something big and real to stare at, breaking the monotonous deeps.
Tanner hung in the still waters of the deadeye.
There were a very few figures in the water—Tanner, Bastard John, the menfish—watching from below.
Everything had been prepared.
It was almost midday. The city was as still as if it were before dawn.
On neighboring ships, Bellis could see people watching from their roofs, or peering from behind railings or from the city’s parks. But there were not many. There was almost no noise. There were no dirigibles in the sky.
“Half the city’s indoors,” she hissed to Uther Doul. He had found her on the deck of the Grand Easterly, gathered with the few Armadans who, like Bellis, felt compelled to watch the attempt from the flagship itself.
They’re frightened, she thought, staring over the empty streets on vessels below. They’ve realized what’s at stake here. Like shipwrecked sailors in a jolly boat tethering themselves to a whale. She almost laughed. And they’re afraid of the storm.
The citizens of Armada dreaded severe storms. The city could not avoid or ride the weather’s tempers, and the worst winds could tear vessel from vessel, throw them together no matter how strong their buffers. Armada’s history was punctuated with the stories of terrible and deadly squalls.
Never before had anyone deliberately called one down.
To puncture the membrane between realities, even at a weak point, to entice the avanc into this plane, a burst of colossal energy was required. Something like that required not just an elyctric storm, but a living one. An orgy, a frenzy of fulmen, lightning elementals.
And given that living storms were—thankfully—almost as rare as Torque rifts, Garwater would have to create one.
The Grand Easterly’s six masts, particularly its towering main mast, were swathed with copper wiring, insulated with rubber, that stretched down and disappeared into the ship itself, passing down corridors and stairs, carefully guarded by the yeomanry, winding through the vessel until it slotted into the esoteric new engine running on rockmilk at the Grand Easterly’s base, ready to send extraordinary charges into the stub ends of the colossal chain, down through the metal into the bridle and the deep sea.
Somewhere, scholars and pirate-thaumaturges from Booktown and Shaddler and Garwater were gathered: meteoromancers and elementalists with weird engines, furnaces, unguents, and offerings. Perhaps a sacrifice. Bellis could imagine their frantic work gauging aetherial currents, stoking and conjuring.
For a long time there was only whispering and the faint noises of gulls and the waves. Everyone who stood in the bleak heat strained to hear something that they had not heard before, but they had no idea what they were waiting for. When it finally came it was a sound so monolithic that they felt it, deep below, resonating through the ships.
Bellis heard Uther Doul exhale, then he whispered “Now,” his voice thick with emotion she did not recognize.
The deck of the Grand Easterly moved suddenly below their feet, with a cracking percussion.
Armada vibrated violently.
“The bridle, the chains,” Doul said quietly. “They’re being lowered. Into the hole.”
Bellis gripped the rail.
Below the water Tanner gasped, water rushing over his gills, as the vast pulleys turned and the restraining bolts on the harness were burst with explosive charges. In carefully choreographed sequence, displacing great tides of brine, the metal ring more than a quarter of a mile
across, studded with cruel hooks and collars, began to descend.
It slid in stages through the water, reaching the limit of its freedom as each section of boat-long links ended. And then another charge would detonate, and huge gears would turn, and a few more hundred feet of metal would sink.
As each length of chain reached its end, the city above moved, and reconfigured a little, its dimensions shifting under the strain. The chains were so huge, they operated at a geographic scale, each weighty tug a seismic trauma. But Armada was buoyed by careful design and gas and thaumaturgy, and though the sudden jolts shook it as if in a high storm, and strained at those few wickerwork-and-rope bridges that were not uncoupled, and snapped them, they could not capsize the city.
“Jabber and fuck,” Bellis shouted. “We have to get below!”
Doul held her, gripped her hard and kept her feet flat.
“I’ll not miss this,” he said, “and I don’t think you should, either.”
The city bucked appallingly; then, suddenly.
The bridle’s descent began to speed up. Tanner Sack realized he was shouting soundlessly, airlessly, his jaw biting out silent profanities at the sight. He was hypnotized by the scale of what he saw, the rapid disappearance of the huge harness into the absolutely dark sea. Seconds and minutes passed. The city stabilized a little and there was only the continuing unfolding of the great tethered chains, five lines of links descending into the hidden deeps.
Colonies of barnacles and limpets had scabbed the chains over generations, and as the links ripped free of the ships’ undersides, they sent clouds of dying shellfish into the abyss.
After many minutes had passed, Armada was almost still again, undulating very slightly with the last reverberations of the chain. Birds shunted mindlessly back and forth overhead. The huge weight of the metal settled. There was a tense expectancy.
And everyone held their breath, and nothing happened.