Understanding was uncoiling in Bellis like cold water. She remembered the conversations she had had with Fennec, when they had first grown close. She remembered his stories, the extraordinary tales of his travels. She remembered what he had said.
If you can get across the Cold Claws, if you can reach the islands and the far shores, if you can trek across those miles and miles of punitive geography, to the Shatterjack Mines and Hinter, to those hungry trade partners and those untouched miles of resources, then you are made. But most can’t make it, because the route is so terrible; because you can’t come at it from the south, because The Gengris are in charge of the southern tip of the Cold Claw Sea and won’t let outsiders pass.
But what if you could reach it from the south, directly, Bellis thought, coming straight? Not into some tumbling fucked-up overland caravan shedding its goods and machines and crews like spoor across the mountains and the grasslands, but by ship. What if you could sail from New Crobuzon, safely past The Gengris in safety, and straight up to the north?
“My good gods,” she murmured, and stared at Fennec. “A canal. They’re planning a canal.”
It made such sense. The rock ridge between the freshwater of the Cold Claw Sea and the Swollen Ocean’s brine was only thirty, forty miles wide in places, its ridges wrinkled with valleys. Bellis could picture the work. A prodigious project, true, but what a prize.
Ships sail north from Iron Bay, skirting the harsh coastline of Lubbock Scrub and the Bezheks, then out to sea to avoid the ruins and residuum of Torque by Suroch, skirting the straits between the Pirate Islands and the mainland; and then a week’s sailing north of New Crobuzon, the flint spines that shield the Cold Claw Sea would rise to port, to the west.
But no longer impenetrable. Breached.
A wide runnel scored at the bottom of a strath. Tall ships and steamers passing sedately between overhangs and scree landscapes.
And there would be locks. Huge locks segmenting the canal, raising the brackish water in stages, massive wooden doors and careful engineering, bringing the ships closer to the Cold Claws, step by ponderous step. They would ascend the strata of the canal while the ocean barnacles clinging to their hull grew weak and died as the water lost its salt.
Until—what?
Out.
The rock monoliths part before the ships, and the canal bleeds into the deep waters of the freshwater sea: the Cold Claw Sea.
Perhaps Fennec’s papers, his researches, planned for a passage that emerged north of The Gengris and its wider borders. Perhaps the traders and industrialists and soldiers of New Crobuzon could ignore the grindylow, sail blithely past them to the pickings beyond, leaving them raging, pathetic and ignored, in their little corner to the south.
But surely that was not enough. Fennec’s book contained too many details, assiduously and covertly collected, of grindylow strategies, weapons, and plans. Perhaps any such incursion by New Crobuzon would necessitate war, and Fennec had gathered the information to ensure that his paymasters would win it.
A constellation of places that were so far little more than myth would open to New Crobuzon. With trade, colonies, and all that they entailed. Bellis remembered the stories she had heard about Nova Esperium, the riches and the brutality.
Whatever happened, the grindylow monopoly on terror in the Cold Claw Sea would be broken. New Crobuzon’s canal would open up a free market in power—control of which only New Crobuzon could possibly win.
Bellis shook her head, astonished. This hadn’t been some dramatic, romantic escapade. Fennec’s theft had been planned carefully, an analysis of costs and difficulties carried out by an expert. And how much more sense this made of the grindylow. They were not like the vengeful bugaboos of the stories she had read to Shekel, chasing a symbol. Their motivations were clear. They were protecting the source of all their power, their interests, and existence.
“The statue was just a trinket, wasn’t it?” Bellis said, and even in his fear Fennec met her eyes, for a second. “A bonus just for you? That wasn’t why New Crobuzon sent you there, or why the grindylow came.
“You were doing a feasibility study . . .”
He could have sent it home. He could have hidden his papers in the message he had given Bellis, to courier for him like a fool, but then, of course, his masters would not have come to rescue him. So he had held on to his research, knowing what it was worth, knowing that for those scrawls New Crobuzon would send its navy across the world.
But they had failed to recover him, or his precious notes. There would be no canal, thought Bellis, watching the grindylow. Not now.
Fennec was jabbering. For a moment Bellis thought he was having a fit and venting random sounds, but she realized that he was speaking in some attenuated, human version of the grindylow tongue. He leaned back against the wall for strength and held forth with controlled panic. Pleading, Bellis supposed, for his life.
But the grindylow had what they wanted, and he had nothing to offer them.
The figure eddying before him in the cell raised its claws. It spoke, slowly and loudly, in its own language, and Silas Fennec let out a shriek.
Bellis felt the air beside her twitch, disturbed, as the other two grindylow wriggled their bodies, sending a ripple from their shoulders through their taut bellies and down their elongated tails. They moved with that same marine suddenness to the bars. Their leader moved his hands in brute arcana till the iron became flaccid again, and they squeezed through.
Fennec began to shriek louder as the three grindylow surrounded him.
With a horrible sense of nausea, Bellis was certain that she was about to see him butchered, and she heard herself protest weakly. No more, she thought.
But the grindylow reached out and gripped him, and he screamed and battered at them, but they plucked at him easily with their intricate cruel fingers and, linking together in an unsettling, ill-defined morass, the three deepwater creatures locked him into a tangle of limbs, and began to rise.
They were suspended above the floor. Fennec’s shrieks were muting. His feet did not touch the ground. He was being borne up, across the little cell, swaddled in limbs and thick eel tails.
The grindylow magus gripped the notebook hard in one hand, and with the other he reached out, for a moment releasing his grip on his companions and his captive, and gesticulated at the largest porthole that broke the wall of the little prison. She heard the bones around his neck rattle balefully.
As if it were liquid, as if it were a still pool into which someone had slipped a stone, the glass in the porthole rippled, and Bellis realized what the grindylow was doing as the glass began to vein. She pulled herself from her daze—a torpor of disgust and shock and fear—and slipped in blood as she scrambled for the door.
She heard Fennec cry out once, and then a moist exhalation and the sound of wetness as the magus clamped his massive mouth over Fennec’s, lacerating his face with sharp teeth but breathing air into him as the hexed glass burst like a boil and the sea blasted into the room.
In seconds the room was inches deep, and the cannoning water did not slow. Bellis’ fingers were numb as she pulled at the door handle, the water pushing against the hatch. She hauled it open and turned for half a second at the threshold, her skirt wrapping her wetly, cold water bleeding torrentially past her feet into the corridor and chilling her.
The grindylow floated, poised, in this gush of ocean. Fennec’s hands extruded from their tight-cloyed mass, clenching and unclenching. As the water level grew higher beneath them, with stunning speed the grindylow triumvirate moved together in the air, congealing tightly, impossibly tightly, until with a perfectly timed spasm of their tails they jetted for the porthole, passing through it without pause, and on, and out, taking Fennec away, carrying what was stolen from them—information, secrets—into the sea.
As Bellis spun the lock on the door, sealing off that ruptured room, the corridor around her swilled with water. It swept in a thin layer back and forth, illustrating al
l the Grand Easterly’s movements.
She leaned back, sat back, her thighs and arse splashing down, feeling nothing as a wave of trembling took her over. She did not weep, but as the adrenaline dissipated through her body, she let out the most bestial croaking cries, absolutely without control, retching as all the pent-up fear in her spewed out.
She sat like that for a long time.
Somewhere out in the night, in the cold and the dark of deep water, was Silas Fennec. Borne away. For interrogation or unthinkable punishment. Alive.
It took Bellis a long time to retrace her steps, up out of the Grand Easterly’s jailhouse cellars. She moved doggedly, her long salt-wet skirt abrading her skin. Assiduously, she thought of nothing. She had never been so tired, or cold.
When finally she emerged into the night air, below the gently swinging old rigging and the enormous iron masts, she felt a drab surprise that everything was still as it had been, that everything was still there.
She was alone. The sound of shouts and fire could still be heard, but were very distant to her now.
Breathing hard and walking slowly, Bellis made her way to the boat’s edge and leaned her head against the rail, pushing it against her cheek, closing her eyes. When she looked up, she realized that she was watching the Hoddling. The outlines of the fat ship came into slow focus. Its fires had gone out.
There were no jets of weird energy emitted from behind its walls. There were no deep-sea monstrosities guarding it like a moat. There were men and women on its decks, moving without urgency, but with exhaustion and despondency.
She saw the waves nodding against the sides of the city, and with a sensitivity that had grown inside her without her knowing it, Bellis became aware that Armada was moving again.
Very slowly, as yet no faster than it had when the masses of tugs had hauled it. But it was being borne forward again. The avanc was moving, the pain of its wound receding.
The grindylow had gone.
(And Silas is alive.)
Walking forward, clutching the rail, Bellis headed toward the Grand Easterly’s great prow, and as she rounded a low set of cabins, she heard sounds. There were people ahead of her.
She gazed out over Garwater and Dry Fall and Jhour and Booktown. The sounds of the fighting were subdued. She could no longer hear the great massed movement of crowds, the constant drum of gunshots. Only a few ragged shouts and isolated attacks.
The war was dying. The mutiny was over.
She heard no declamations of revolt or stability; there was nothing around her that might hint at which side had won. And yet somehow when she rounded the last wall and witnessed the scene on the Grand Easterly’s foredeck, she felt no surprise.
Around the edges of the deck stood grim-faced men and women of all races, carved and bloodied. They carried their weapons drawn.
Before them lay a mass of corpses. Many were shattered, their chests torn open and burned dry or emptied out. Most had been decapitated; heads littered the charnel ground randomly, all gaping, fanged, and snake-tongued.
The vampir. Tens of them. Beaten. Executed and dispatched. Overpowered when the tide turned, when their mysterious allies had disappeared and the spontaneous small riots supporting them had petered out in confusion. It was a doomed adventure without the people of their own riding behind them, without a movement of revolt. Eventually the Garwater fighters had lost their fear, and terrorism could not win once the real terror went.
There was a weak movement above her. Looking up at the foremost of the Grand Easterly’s masts, Bellis widened her eyes in shock. And she thought, Oh . . . so that was when it was over.
That was when the Dry Fall cadre lost. After that, they couldn’t win. With that macabre pennant swinging there, the fear they spread must have faded like an echo.
Ten feet up, lashed cruciform to a crossbar, his heels and hands tied tightly with great thick skeins of rope, his snarls pathetic, tongue lolling like a dead animal’s, the blood that discolored his teeth and lips his own, was the Brucolac.
Chapter Forty-five
When day broke, the Brucolac found the strength to scream.
The sun bleached him. He closed his eyes and shook his head pointlessly, trying to get his eyes out of the light. His skin began to welt, as if some punishing chymical had been poured on him. His grave-pale face reddened, blistering, suppurating in the daylight.
He flopped with ugly motion, like a sea-thing beached. His strength leached from him, and he emitted little gasps of pain.
The sun might not kill him for some time, strong as he was: but it disabled him, and more than anything it hurt mercilessly. Two hours after dawn he was too groggy to make a sound. His spittle and venom drooled from him, denaturing.
The sunlight scalded the flesh of his slaughtered cadre, too. As the day crawled on, the tens of frozen bodies became blebbed and misshapen. At dusk, they were swept together and tipped into the sea.
Darkness came like unguent to the Brucolac. The pain began very slowly to bleed from him, and he cracked open his rheum- and pus-locked eyes. His body began to repair, but the sun’s depredations were severe, and it was not till nearly midnight that he found the strength to speak.
His ruined croaking was ignored. He was not tended; he was not fed. Cramp and pain ossified his limbs. Throughout the night he bayed for help or mercy; he tried to issue threats. But his words broke down into a despairing animal wail as the hours sluggishly passed and he saw the darkness diluting in the east.
He had only started to heal. His wounds were still raw when the sun reached out and probed them with its sadistic fingers as, like a cog in some remorseless engine, the day came round again.
The clean-up began quietly. Crews entered the cooling Hoddling and gauged the damage, trying to see how much could be salvaged.
Whole rooms and corridors had been reshaped by the heat, their edges made fluid. There were many bodies: some pristine, some variously disturbed.
Across Garwater, and in the fringes of its neighboring ridings, the conflict was manifest in broken glass and bullet holes, and bloodstains in the city’s gutters. What rubble there was was swept up and taken to foundries and factories, to be broken down or resmelted.
Garwater loyalists patrolled the streets. Bask and Curhouse ridings were quiet. Their rulers had known nothing of the revolt, and they had waited, paralyzed, watching it, carefully gauging the forces, ready to join against a defeated Garwater. But the vampir had been defeated. Their rulers kept themselves low, cowed by the Lovers. Quiescent.
The general of Shaddler was dead, killed by the vampir who had held him hostage, acting in their panic when they heard their ruler was captured. They had been killed in turn, at great cost to the scabmettlers. The walls of Barrow Hall were disfigured with great streaking sculptures in dark red, where scabmettler blood had spattered.
No one knew exactly how many vampir had made up the Brucolac’s cadre, and no one was exactly sure how many had been killed. Without question, some had survived. Defeated, they must have gone underground, become nondescript new citizens. Squatting in ruins, lodging in flophouses. Invisible.
They would have to be careful when they fed. They would have to be selective, and restrained, and quite brutal—they could leave no prey alive. Because when they were found—and they would be found, the Garwater crews swore implacably—they would be killed.
The fear of them was gone.
And meanwhile the arch traitor, the Brucolac himself, was stretched out on his metal cross, slowly scorching and starving to death.
The avanc had picked up its stupid, ponderous progress. But it remained slow, and its pace was not so steady. It swam, and dragged the city, and sped up and slowed, and never achieved the speed it had previously reached.
As the hours and days passed, the navigators became convinced that its wounds, sustained in mysterious circumstances known only to a small clutch of Armadans, were not healing. It was bleeding, weakening, still.
No revenge was taken ag
ainst the citizens of Dry Fall, whom the Lovers announced curtly to be innocent of their ruler’s guilt. There was even amnesty for those who had rioted. It was a chaotic time, the Lovers ruled, and no one had known what was happening; there was confusion. This was a time to bring the city together, they said, and blame was not appropriate.
Still, the patrols of Garwater’s yeomanry and armed citizens were kept largest and best-armed in Dry Fall. The Dry Fallen watched them resentfully, staring from doorways, hiding bruises and wounds sustained that night, not trusting the Lovers’ mercy.
Like smoke from the riots’ fires, something had spread over the city that night, and it remained: a traumatizing uncertainty, a rancor. And even many of those who had fought hard to repulse the Brucolac were touched by it.
Blood, violence, and fear—they seemed the legacy of the Lovers’ projects. After centuries of peace, Armada had been twice to war in less than thirty days—once with itself. Armada’s intricacies of diplomacy had collapsed under the Lovers’ fervor, the networks of obligations and interests splitting, tearing the city apart.
The Lovers were subordinating everything to their search for the abstract power of the Scar. This was a break with Armada’s mercantile venality: that kind of intrepidity, that kind of voyage, was governed by an other, older logic. The citizens of Armada were pirates, and as their understanding of the Lovers’ project grew, so did their alienation. The Lovers were not proposing thievery or usury, nor even a tactic for survival. This was something very different.
While Armada was riding high, while its power was growing and feat after incredible feat was performed, the Lovers had buoyed up the citizens with their rhetoric and zeal.
When the Sorghum had been stolen, it was the greatest military feat of Armada’s recent history, and everyone could see that it gave the city power, that their ships and engines were better fueled. When the avanc had been raised, the Lovers had spoken of the ancient chains; of fulfilling Armada’s secret, historic mission; of the swift sailing from port to port that was now a possibility; of the quick, worldwide search for booty.