“It’s damn hard to be on your own. When I started,” she said hesitantly, “I thought I was probably writing to my sister. We’re not close, but there are times when I crave talking to her. Still, there are things I’d never say to her. And I needed to tell them, so I thought that perhaps this letter was to one of my friends.”
Bellis thought of Mariel, of Ignus and Téa. She thought of Thighs Growing, the cactacae cellist, the only one of Isaac’s friends she had remained in touch with. She thought of others. The letter could be to any of you, she thought, and knew that was not true. She had pushed most of them away in those frightened months before she had fled. And even before then, she had not been close to many. Could I have written to any of you? she wondered suddenly.
“Whoever you speak to,” she said, “whoever you write to, there are things you wouldn’t say, things you’d censor. And the more I wrote—the more I write—the more I need to say, the more I need to be quite, quite open. So I’ll write it all, and I’ll not have to close it down. I can leave that to the end. I can wait and decide who it’s to after I’ve said everything I have to say.”
She did not mention the fact that she would never be able to deliver her letter, that she would be writing it on Armada until she died.
There’s nothing strange about it, Bellis wanted to say. It makes sense. She felt fiercely protective. Don’t think about it as if there’s an emptiness at the other end, she thought at him fiercely. That’s not it at all.
“You must write carefully,” said Doul, “only about yourself. No shared jokes. It must be a cold kind of letter.”
Yes, thought Bellis, looking at him. I suppose it must.
“You exiles,” he said. “You exiles and your writing. Silas Fennec is the same. You look in there now, he’s trying to scribble in his notebook, with his left hand.”
“You let him keep it?” Bellis said, wondering what had happened to Fennec’s right hand and suspecting that she knew. Uther Doul looked ostentatiously around her room: at the clothes, the notebooks, the letter.
“You see how we treat our prisoners,” he said slowly, and Bellis remembered that she was a prisoner, just like Tanner Sack, just like Fennec.
“Why didn’t you tell the Lovers,” said Doul suddenly, “when Fennec told you that New Crobuzon was in danger? Why didn’t you try to get a message back that way?”
“They wouldn’t have cared,” she said. “They might even have been glad: one less rival on the sea. And think of the bones to be picked over. They would’ve done nothing.”
She was right, and she could sense that he knew it. Still, the maggot stirred in her again.
“Look in the letter,” she said suddenly. “It proves I knew nothing.”
For a long time, he did not respond.
“You’ve been judged,” he said at last. She felt blood cold in her stomach. Her hands trembled, and she swallowed several times and clenched her lips closed.
“The Senate’s met,” he continued, “after we’d questioned Fennec. It’s generally believed that Sack and you had no deliberate part in calling New Crobuzon here. Your story’s been accepted. You don’t need to show me your letter.”
Bellis nodded and felt her heart beat quickly.
“You gave yourselves up,” he said in a dead tone. “You told us what you know. I know you. I’ve watched you—both of you. I’ve watched you carefully.”
She nodded again.
“So you’re believed. So that’s that. You’ll be allowed to go free, if you want.” He paused then, for just a tiny second. And later Bellis remembered that pause, and could not forgive him. “You get to choose your sentence.”
Bellis looked away and smoothed her letter and breathed deeply for a while, then looked back at him.
“Sentence?” she said. “You said you believed me . . .”
“I do,” he said. “I was the main reason you were believed.” He did not say this as if he expected gratitude. “Which is why your prospective sentences are as they are. Why you’re not dead, as Silas Fennec will be dead, once we get what we need from him.
“But you knew you’d not go unpunished. Since when did intent determine judgment? Whatever you thought, or convinced yourself you thought you were doing, you’re responsible for unleashing a war that killed thousands of my people.” His voice hardened.
“You should consider yourself fortunate,” he continued, “that we want to keep the details of all this quiet. If the citizens ever heard what you’d done, you’d definitely be dead. Secrecy allows us a degree of leniency. You should be glad I’ve testified as to your character. I fought hard to have you both freed.” His beautiful voice was frightening her.
“Tell me,” she heard herself ask, and Doul met her eyes as he answered.
“I’m here representing the Senate, to see Tanner Sack and Bellis Coldwine,” he said clearly. “To sentence you both. Ten years, here, alone. Or time already served, plus lashes.
“It’s your choice.”
Doul left soon after that, leaving Bellis very alone.
Fennec had betrayed her. There would be no pamphlets from Simon Fench. No one would listen to her. The city would not turn back.
Doul had not even asked to see her letter. He did not take it from her; he did not peer over her shoulder as she held it; he did not show any interest in it at all.
Don’t you understand what I’ve told you? Bellis thought. You know what revelations are in this. This isn’t any normal kind of communication, all personal secrets and details and nods and references meaningless to any but two people. This is unique—this is my clear communication; this is my own clear voice, everything I’ve done and seen here.
Don’t you want to read it, Doul?
Doul had left once she had chosen her punishment, without glancing back at the thick sheaf of paper still in her hands. All its evidence went unread, languishing still. Uncommunicated.
Bellis turned the pages over, one by one, recounting what had happened to her in Armada. She tried to calm herself. There was something very important that she had to address. Her plans were collapsing. With Fennec caught, there was no one to put out the information she had, no one to stop the Lovers’ crazy plan to cross the Hidden Ocean. And Bellis should turn her mind to that, should try to think of some way to disclose the truth.
But she could not concentrate on that, on anything but what Doul had just told her.
Her hands were shaking. She gritted her teeth, furious at that, and ran her hands over her swept-back hair and exhaled, but she could not stop herself from trembling. She had to press her pen quite hard upon the paper so that the trembling would not make her words illegible. She scrawled a single quick sentence, then stopped suddenly, and stared at it, and could not write any more. She read what she had written, again and again.
Tomorrow they flog me.
Interlude IX
The Brucolac
Now in this deepest gutter of night where moments lie still like frightened things and we who are about are free of time I go walking.
My city moves. Its outlines shift.
Spires converge and part again and ropes coil like muscles and take the strain as Armada’s skyline breaks, heals, breaks.
Wild animals alive in shadows keep their whimpers quiet, sniff my dead smell and move on (four-footed or two) quick and cowed through a randomly serrated shipscape, along trenches of brick and wood on reshaped decks. The cadavers of vessels incorporated. Backstay stools, coaming, pawls, davits, and catheads encased in salt-aged architecture.
Behind every wall a maritime atomy, a mummy, a sacrifice, like a servant murdered in the temple’s foundations. This is a city of ghosts. Every quarter is haunted. We live like graveworms on our dead ships.
Withered flowers and weeds strain for what poor lamplight in the veins of walls, in ruts of concrete and wood. Life is tenacious, as we who have died know.
Trails of dust, parings of bone and brick, past ragged wounds of bomb-surgery: carbon and rubble, waste-g
round punctuation in the city’s dull monologue. Paint, age, all the rubbish of urban chance brands squat towerblocks (on foredecks) and tenements (in the shadows of bowsprits). Flowerpots and wheels like meager tattoos, deliberate defacements. Infinite markings, sculptures accidental and made (the drabness peppered with signs of life and preference, awnings left just so, ribbons on sleeping livestock).
Where glass is, it is burst and scored—intricate with shadows. Lit windows are edged with darkness. Austere and coldly shining.
Moths and night-birds, things that move by the moon make their little sounds. What footsteps there are dissolve and are quickly formless. It is as if there is fog, though there is not. We who walk tonight come out of nowhere and return to it quickly.
Past factories, music halls, churches; over bridges rattling like vertebrae. Armada rides the waves dumb and buoyant like a rust-flecked corpse.
Through the slats of scaffold is the sea. I see myself (shadowed and unclear) and through myself into black water. Into a darkness so profound (random chymical lights like fireflies howbeit) it is an alien communication. It has its own grammar. Unseeing I look to the farmed fish circling autistic in cages, the menfish, the keels pipes crevices inked in, the spaces, the chains splinted with molluscs and algae-slick and the great unseen shape that bears us on, idiotic and futile.
History is formless and oppressive all around me, a nightmare I will make into sense.
A rhythm becomes sensible (extruded from a covert place), gives a shape to this night, gives it time again, and the clocks let out their held breaths.
I make a rooftop way to my moonship. Over torn-up slates and boards and their crossbreeds, through a low nightlit forest of flues steeples watertowers, in ridings not my own. I do not rule here, there is no goretax, it is a day since I have fed and it would take very little to slip along this drainpipe groundward like the drops of calcium that beard it. Very little to find a blood-filled nightwalker and dispose of his her husk but those days are gone, now I am bureaucrat not predator, and it is much better.
It is a long time till dawn but something has passed. We are moving on toward morning. My time is over.
I am on trawlers and houseboats and gone again (fleeting foot-strokes as if uncertain) through Shaddler and its cottages and industry (on for my fat ship). Dry Fall where scored streets are quieter and cushioned in dust.
Where does it come from? Swept hourly by neurotic sea-wind, when does dust touch down?
In some lights (reveries no less than true for that) I see it thick as snowfall and cobwebs clog my passage home. Alone I drown in dust and choke in it, in time’s desiccated exhaust.
I know when things are stirring. I know all the city’s rhythms. Something new is here.
There are tracks on the Uroc’s moon-white decks. Some hand unknown to me has held this rigging.
I watch for the newcomer.
Let us see.
What are you?
In my corridors, toward my berth, you have left your spoor. One, two drops of brine. Smears of something mucal. Scuffed varnish and iron. What are you?
You are hardly hiding from me. You are welcoming me home.
And oh see, here on my threshold you have left me blood.
Drizzled like sugar.
I can hear you behind my door.
My room smells like an estuary. River coagulate and fishgut blood. You rattle for me stranger, like a summons you shake the bones you wear. I have not pulled open any sluices to let the moon illuminate my bedchamber, but light is for the living. These that look upon you are vampir eyes.
And welcome to you.
Three of you to wait for me in a grisly tableau: reclined upon my bed and in front of my window and by me now, closing my door, ushering me respectful into my home.
Look at you.
Look at you shimmering before me great salamander tails folded in layers on my floor, blunt streamlined skulls like viperfish, your teeth protruding like fistfuls of nails, eyes black and big as tarpits, wet skin stretched on muscled bone like sap on knotted wood. See you upright in my room.
And you, recumbent on my covers like a painter’s nude, grinning at me without intent on your piscine face, your neck wrapped all about with charms and bones, beckoning me politely, whose is the face you carry in your hand?
Whose head is that you have taken, to bring blood for me? What woman was she? A guard who found you? Missing in the carnage of the New Crobuzon war, drowned or cut apart, was it you who split her neck to take that misshapen trophy? It is a frayed-enough edge, a bloody and fibrous laceration.
The tan-haired woman stares at me from your fist.
Look at you!
You drop her dead flesh and rise like something I have never seen.
—Seigneur Brucolac, you tell me in a voice colder than mine.—We must talk.
I don’t mind. I will talk to you. I know who you are. I think I have expected you.
And as the hours unfold toward the morning oh what conspiracies oh what secrets we uncover.
You have come late, riverthing. Waterman. You have come late from the Cold Claw Sea, searching these salt currents for what was taken from you. Nothing you say to me with that spastically moving blood-flecked jaw is clear. Like the riverthing you are you flicker toward your meaning and disturb a silt of effluvial words that cloud your intent. But I have dealt with seers poets and Weavers and can track your insinuations.
You have hunted on currents. Cleaved parasitic to the undersides of our attackers and then fluttered free in the squalor of battle and you have plucked bodies from the dead and dying plenty.
And then, what am I to understand? Hiding away you have used them. You have kept some alive, fed them air and questioned them (questioned them after they have died, is that? have I that right?). Learning from them (terrified on the outskirts of death they have babbled everything to you, immobile in water, trapped under their homes).
Only days here and like the subtlest spies you have learnt most everything about this place.
That is why (what is that you say?) that is why you have come to me.
One took something from your towers a world away, something precious and unique that you would have back. One has escaped you for scores of miles, for the length of continents, onto this place, to my city. And it has taken you a long a very long time but that one was a benighted fool to think you would let him run.
You tracked him. You have found his home.
But there have been commotions through the floors above you as you lie and wait and prepare and ask questions of whomever you can snatch from Armada’s decks. And cunning predatory and without fear as you may be there are too many above you, there is no way you can scour the whole city. Step from the water and you are unhidden, and hunted.
You cannot find your quarry. He has disappeared. And he will not surrender what you have come for, not willingly, not without terror. And if you were to ask for help of those who run the city and they were not to take your side, you have played up all your counters, and you could not oppose them if they turned on you. You are not so many. You cannot wage war. You cannot search for the one who has fled you.
Not without help.
Why have you come to me?
Deepling why have you come to me?
You come here kill my citizens and face me the Brucolac brazen like a blackmailer. How do you know I will not destroy you?
I understand.
Oh you are fine, you are a prodigious spy. I am in awe of you and of what you have learnt in only these few days and nights. Let me—here—bow my head to you.
Is there anything you have not learnt? Not understood?
You have come to me because you know that I am angry.
You know what the Lovers have called up. Perhaps you even know where we are going.
You know that I do not accept this. That I am the only force that stands against them.
Perhaps you know that I consider mutiny.
Have you heard my name, again a
nd again? I am sure that is what has happened. You know that I am the most powerful person here who is hankering for something, who is angry, who wishes things were not as they are.
You know that I can be bought.
What is it you propose, hakenmann?
There are actions none but you could perform that might tip a balance. That might create new circumstances. Change forces, force changes. Create facts.
Perhaps this journey, this idiot pilgrimage, might be halted.
Oh yes, if you did that. If you could stop our progress.
Only you can help me, you tell me in your intricate ways. Only you can stop this mad journey. What then is up to me?
Even I, perhaps, could not fight my way through the gangs and gangs of guards who patrol their engines, their rockmilk spurs. I do not know what must be done. But there is another way—something else, some force—to bring us to a slow, and stop. You can halt the beast.
If you could do that.
And in return? (See? you tell me, strange pride flashing like scales, you know all about this barter by which we live.)
In return? I will help you find that hidden one who has run from you.
Perhaps you do not know what it is to laugh. Certainly you do not know why I laugh so hard so long.
You cannot know.
Whom I have held and bloodied. What I have seen him wield. You cannot know that loyal to Armada and without alternative I have put aside my anger at the Lovers and let them take him, shamed as I was, implicated in the carnage he brought us. He is no ordinary thief, this war criminal, and they hold him in limbo till we can sentence him right. When our lunatic journey ceases.
You have come just a little late.
Not too late, however. What’s done is not too late to undo.
I know where they hold him.
You cannot know that what you offer me would any other time make me kill you. You cannot know that tonight is different, that I am tired of the dangerous idiocy into which my city is being led. That if mutiny is needed to turn us back, then I will do what I must to bring it about.