The Scar
The outlines of the city rose, ominous like storm clouds. Tanner was counting down in his head, allowing Shekel twenty seconds of stored air. Tanner peered through the Hidden Ocean’s dusk, still watching for the shaft of the cable.
When he veered up and hauled the boy into the air, Shekel was smiling.
“It’s fucking brilliant, Tanner,” he said, and coughed, swallowing seawater. “Do it again!”
Tanner took him deeper. Seconds moved slowly, and Shekel showed no discomfort.
They were ten feet below, by the crusted slope of the Hoddling. Some shank of moonlight splashed down, and Shekel pointed. Forty, fifty feet away, the submersible’s cable was momentarily clear.
Tanner nodded, but turned his head to the blackness con-gealed below the factory ship. He had heard a sound.
Time to rise, he thought, and turned back to Shekel. He touched Shekel and pointed up, reaching out with his hands. Shekel grinned, parting his lips and showing his teeth, even as air slipped from his mouth.
There was a sudden spurting rush of water, and something sinuate and very quick punched in and out of Tanner’s vision. It was gone and there and gone like a fish flashing in to feed. Tanner blinked, stunned. Shekel still stared at him, his face collapsing into perturbation. The boy frowned and opened his mouth as if to speak, and in a great belching roar released all his air.
Tanner spasmed with shock and reached out, and saw that something followed the racing bubbles from Shekel’s mouth, billowing up darkly. For a moment Tanner thought it was vomit, but it was blood.
Still staring with an expression of confusion, Shekel began to sink. Tanner grappled with him, hauling him up with his tentacles, kicking out for the surface, his mind filled up with a shattering sound. And blood smoked up ferociously not only from Shekel’s mouth but from the massive wound on his back.
It seemed so far to the surface.
There was only one word in Tanner’s mind. No no no no no no no no no no no no.
He shrieked it without sound, his suckered polyp arms gripping Shekel’s skin, pulling him fitfully toward the air, and indistinct shapes gusted around Tanner, in and out of shadows, baleful and predatory as barracuda, jackknifing and twisting away, there and gone, moving with an effortless piscine ease that made him feel clumsy and heavy, fumbling with his boy, fleeing the sea. He was an intruder, disturbed and making an escape, cowed by real sea-things. His reconfigured body was suddenly a terrible joke, and he cried and floundered with his burden, struggling in water suddenly quite alien to him.
When he broke the surface he was screaming. Shekel’s face came up in front of him, twitching, leaking brine and gore from his mouth, emitting little sounds.
“Help me!” screamed Tanner Sack, “Help me!” But no one could hear, and he clamped his ridiculous suckered limbs to the side of the Hoddling and tried to drag himself from the water.
“Help me!”
“Something’s wrong! Something’s wrong!”
For hours, the laborers on the Hoddling’s deck had tended the great steam pumps that sent air to the Ctenophore, and prepared themselves to haul it back. One by one they had slipped into a kind of torpor. They had noticed nothing at all until the cactus-woman greasing the safety wire began to bellow.
“Something’s fucking wrong!” she yelled, and they came running, panicked by her voice.
They watched the wire, their hearts slamming. The great wheel—almost empty now, its harness almost all played out—was shaking violently, juddering against the deck, trembling the screws that held it down. The cable began to shriek, tearing its way past the guard-piece.
“Bring them up,” someone shouted, and the crews ran to the massive winch. There was a snap and the noise of slipping gears. The pistons punched into each other like boxers. The engine’s cogs bit down and tried to turn, but the cable fought them. It was taut as a treble string.
“Get them out get them out,” someone screamed uselessly, and then with a hideous cracking sound the huge winch rocked backward violently on its stand. The engine smoked and steamed and whined childishly as its guts began to spin freely. Its complex of ratchets and flywheels blurred, revolving so fast they were as dim as apparitions.
“It’s free!” the cactus-woman reported to a hysterical cheer. “It’s coming up.”
But the bathyscaphos was never designed to rise that fast.
The wheel accelerated in ridiculous haste, hauling up the cable at dizzying speed. The gears gave off the dry stink of burning metal and grew red-hot as they whirred.
It had taken three hours to send the Ctenophore to the bottom. The disk of rewound cable increased so quickly they could watch it grow, and they knew it would be no more than minutes before it was all pulled back.
“It’s coming up too fast! Get away!”
A mist of brine boiled where the thigh-thick cable was torn from the sea. It scored through the water. Where it met the Hoddling’s side, it wore a deep groove in the metal, howling in a monsoon of sparks.
Engineers and stevedores scrambled to get away from the machinery, which struggled with its remaining bolts like a terrified man.
Tanner Sack hauled himself onto the Hoddling’s deck, dragging Shekel’s wet, cooling shape behind him.
“Help me!” he screamed again, but still no one heard a word.
(At the edge of Dry Fall, the Brucolac was leaned over the edge of the Uroc, watching the water intently. A domed, toothed head rose before him, framed by ripples, nodded once, and disappeared. The Brucolac turned to his cadre, on the deck behind him.
“It’s time,” he said.)
With a vaulting plume of water, the end of the cable burst from the sea and arced over the spinning winch, heavy metal cordage whipping toward the deck, its end splayed jagged where the submersible had been pulled free.
The Hoddling’s workers watched, aghast.
The frayed end of the wire slammed into the deck with a cataclysmic sound, leaving a long stripe of shattered wood and metal shavings, and the winch kept turning. The end of wire lashed around and under it and flogged the ship again and again.
“Turn it off!” the foreman screamed, but no one could hear him over the punishment, and no one could get close. The motor kept the great wheel spinning, flagellating the Hoddling, until the boiler exploded.
When it did, and showered the factory ship with molten detritus, there was a moment of still and shock. And then the Hoddling lurched again, from more fire and explosions within.
Alarms were sounding across the city.
Yeomanry and armed cactacae from Garwater and Jhour were taking up positions on the vessels around the Hoddling, which glowed and boomed as the great bonfire on its deck spread. Its crews raced, frantic, away from it, over the rope bridges and into the city. The Hoddling was a huge ship, and there was a steady stream of men and women surging up out of its guts, through the smoke and away from its ruins.
Etched in black against the flames, a figure could be seen shambling slowly in a vague path toward a bridge, bent under a burden that lolled and dripped. His mouth was open wide, but what he said could not be heard.
“Do you all know what to do?” whispered the Brucolac, tersely. “Then go.”
Moving too fast for the eye easily to follow, a swarm of figures spread out from the Uroc.
They raced like apes, swinging with easy speed over roofs and rigging, their passage soundless. The unclear garrison fractured into smaller forces.
“Bask and Curhouse won’t help, but they won’t hinder, either,” the Brucolac had told them. “Dynich is young and nervous—he’ll wait and go where the wind blows. Shaddler’s the only other riding with which we have to concern ourselves. And there’s a quick way of taking them out of the equation.”
A small group of the vampir made their uncanny way toward Shaddler, toward the Therianthropus and Barrow Hall, toward the general’s court. The main force loped and leaped aft, stretching their limbs, febrile and excited, heading for Garwater.
Behind them, walking briskly but without any attempt to rush or hide, came the Brucolac.
There was something on the Hoddling. The men and women who escaped and collapsed on the surrounding vessels gasped for breath and shrieked warnings.
Something had burst through the ship’s hull, somewhere in its lowest quarters, and scored a tunnel up through the metal. As the engine had spun and lashed the deck with the stub of the Ctenophore’s cable, things had emerged from the hidden decks, attacking those on the bridge and in the boilers and engine rooms, tearing the ship apart.
Things that were hard to describe—there were reports of chattering teeth like razored slabs, vast corpsy eyes.
The deck of the Grand Easterly was almost empty, only crossed occasionally by some running servant or bureaucrat. The yeomanry guarded its entrance points, where the bridges rose to it from below—they could not allow such chaos to spread to the flagship. The crowds gathered as close as they could get to the violence, on roofs and balconies, towerblocks, thronging the vessels that surrounded the Hoddling. They surged forward like waves. Aerostats came near the gusting updraft from the fire.
Forgotten in her room at the Grand Easterly’s rear, Bellis watched in horror as the crisis took shape.
Johannes is gone, she thought, staring at the shattered ruins of the winch engine.
He was gone—and she had no words for the weird, muted shock and loss she felt.
She looked down on the trawlers that abutted the Hoddling. Their decks thronged with injured, terrified men and women being dragged to safety from the flames.
On one of them, Bellis saw Uther Doul. He shouted, moving sparely, his eyes darting ceaselessly.
The fire on the Hoddling was abating, though the Armadans had not put it out.
Bellis gripped the windowsill. She could see shadows moving through the windows of the factory ship. She could see things within.
Armed pirates were arriving from all over the city. They took up positions, checking their weaponry and massing by the bridges leading to the Hoddling.
Something streaked from the factory ship’s smoke-fouled bridge: a jet of disturbance that buckled the air as it lanced out. It struck the wooden mast of a schooner just beyond the Hoddling.
Agitated particles coiled around the mast and soaked into it, and then Bellis let out an astonished sound. The mast was melting as if it were wax, the great pillar of wood bending like a snake, its substance oozing over itself as it spat and drooled downward, spitting in and out of existence, leaving an effervescence in the air—a blistered reality through which Bellis caught glimpses of a void. Folds of denaturing wood slid like toxic sludge over the crowded deck.
Uther Doul was pointing with his sword, directing a group of cactacae to bring their rivebows to bear on the Hoddling’s windows, when a chorus of cries rose away from the factory ship, out of Bellis’ sight. She saw the men and women below shift their attention, watched an expression of horror and astonishment pass through them like a virus.
Something was approaching from the city’s fore, bearing down on the assembled pirates—something Bellis could not yet see. She saw the armed groups splinter, some turning to face the new threat with terror scrawled all over them. Bellis ran from the room, heading up to the deck to see.
The Grand Easterly was all confusion. The bridges were still guarded by nervous patrols, unclear on their orders, desperately watching the storm of arrows and cannonfire that assaulted the Hoddling. Pirates were leaving the Grand Easterly, running to join their comrades.
Bellis ran to the edge of the deck, past the bridge, hiding in the darkness beside its raised quarters. She was at the level of Armada’s roofs. She tried to make out what was happening in the city.
Firepower was beating down on the Hoddling, and on whatever it contained. The hidden enemy sent out more of their bizarre and murderous thaumaturgic strikes, like fireworks, dissolving the substance of the surrounding vessels and the attacking Armadans. But beyond the nearby vessels, Bellis could see an indistinct second front spreading into the city. She could see undisciplined, chaotic attacks, could hear the irregular staccato of gunfire.
The new attackers grew closer to the tight tangle of boats below her, where most of Garwater’s yeomanry had been waiting to retake the Hoddling. She could see, suddenly, who had launched the second assault, from within the city. The Garwater forces were suddenly hemmed in and stormed by Dry Fall’s vampir.
Bellis peered around, her hand held tight to her mouth, breathing hard. She did not understand what she was seeing—some collapse of trust, some revenge? Mutiny, at the Brucolac’s hand.
She could not keep the vampir in her eyes. They moved like nightmares. Congregating and atomizing and re-forming, moving with feral speed.
They would swing down with terrifying grace in some cul-de-sac where only five or six or seven armed fighters at a time could attack them, and would dispatch the defenders with appalling ferocity, punching horn-hard nails through throats, savaging with their predatory teeth until their chins were sopped with blood, salivating and growling with bloodlust. And then they were gone, bounding over the collapsing bodies and onto some other concrete block or bridge or gun tower or ruin. Rustling like lizards they would disappear from sight.
Bellis could not tell how many there were. Wherever she looked, there seemed to be fighting, but she could only ever see Garwater’s troops clearly.
Uther Doul, she realized, had turned his attention to the vampir. She saw him shoving people out of his way and sprinting back onto the Grand Easterly’s deck, to stare down onto the zones of battle. He spun and screamed orders, directed reinforcements toward the various combats. Then he hurled himself toward the rear of an ancient war trimaran by the Grand Easterly’s side, lumpen with brick housing, where through a thicket of ragged washing Bellis glimpsed a brutal melee.
It was only two hundred feet from her, and she could still see Doul. She could watch him sliding down the steeply angled bridge, thumbing on the Possible Sword, which shimmered and became a thousand ghost-swords as he ran. She watched him disappear behind a billowing sheet, as if it had swallowed him up. The sheet gusted and cracked with the wind, and beyond it there were a series of sudden noises.
The stark white linen was streaked from behind with red.
It fluttered twice, as if wounded, and then was torn down as a staggering body collapsed into it and gripped it in death, staining it bloodier and twisting it into a makeshift shroud, revealing the scene behind. Doul stood among a mass of wounded, who were cheering and kicking the swaddled vampir corpse.
Their triumph was brief. Thaumaturgic energy spat like hot fat across from the Hoddling, and the wood and metal around the men and women began to buckle and ooze. Uther Doul pointed with his red-dripping sword, sending the exhausted fighters running from the boat.
The vampir they left behind was not the only one to fall. Bellis could not see much of the fighting—her view was interrupted by cobbled streets and building sites and cranes and avenues of stumpy trees. But she thought she could see, here and there, other vampir succumbing. They were terrifyingly fast and strong, and they left a trail of punctured bodies, bleeding and dead, but they were vastly outnumbered.
They used the architecture and the shadows as their allies, but they could not avoid every one of the deluge of bullets and sword strokes that followed them. And though those wounds might not kill them as they would an ordinary woman or man, they hurt and slowed them down. And inevitably there were places where a gang of terrified pirates closed in on one of the buckling, snarling figures and hacked the head from its shoulders, or savaged it so remorselessly that they destroyed its bones and innards beyond even the preternatural vampir capacity for self-repair.
Alone, the vampir might eventually have been contained, but too many of Garwater’s fighters were engaged with the unseen enemy on the Hoddling.
Small, low boats had been launched, forty-footers with cannons and fire-throwers on their decks. They race
d across the little bay toward the factory ship, to cover it from its open sides, to surround it.
But in the water around the Hoddling, shapes were rising.
The sea was illuminated by the glow from the fires and the firepower, and through a few feet of brine Bellis could make out the outlines of the things below: bloated bodies wobbling like sacks of rotten meat; malignant little pig eyes; degenerate fin stubs. Splitting them wide open, mouths mounted with irregular footlong teeth of translucent cartilage.
They breached fleetingly. What in Jabber’s name are they? thought Bellis, dizzily. How can the Brucolac control those? What’s he done? The men who approached them fired volleys of missiles at them, and the things disappeared again.
But when the little boats came close and the men within leaned out to take aim again, there was a quick organic twitching and they were in the sea, in stunned shock, and with an inrush of water and a quick glare of teeth, they were taken down.
Armada was tearing itself apart. Bellis heard gunshots and saw a flickering of flames where Dry Fall met Garwater. A human mob was approaching, and there were running fights between them and the Garwater sailors. It was not now the city against the vampir alone—as news of the rebellion spread, those who opposed the Lovers’ plans had come out to fight. Hotchi slammed their spines against men; cactacae hurled their great bulks against each other in ugly combat.
There was no structure to the fighting. The city was burning. Dirigibles moved overhead in ungainly panic. Above it all towered the Grand Easterly. Its dark iron was still silent and empty, still deserted.
Bellis became sluggishly aware that this was bizarre. She stared at the trireme below her. The rope bridge that had linked it to the Grand Easterly had been severed, and so, she realized, had the one beyond it.
Bellis flattened herself carefully against the wall, inched forward, and peered out of the darkest shadows onto the main deck. She saw three dim figures moving with vampir speed, hacking at the chains and knots that attached the bridges to the ship. They split one and sent it swinging into the sea, its far end slapping the flank of the vessel to which it was attached, and then they flitted to the next and began again.