Hedrigall’s head was visible, bowed and sun-bleached, his spines withered and snapped. He looked around him at the congregated citizens, staring and reaching out for him, calling solicitous, and he drew back his head and began to howl.
“How are you all here?” he bellowed. “You’re dead. I saw every one of you die . . .”
There was a shocked silence, and then a cacophony. The throng began to push in again. The yeomanry shoved them back. The masses grew hushed and menacing.
Bellis watched Uther Doul draw the Lovers aside and whisper to them sharply, then indicate the door. The Lover nodded, then stepped forward with his hands outstretched.
“Armadans,” he shouted, “for gods’ sakes wait.” He sounded sincerely angry. Behind him, Hedrigall began to shout again, as if in a fever, You’re dead, you’re all dead, and he was bundled back toward the door, the yeomen hissing as his thorns pierced their skins. “None of us know what’s happened here,” the Lover said. “But look at him, by Croom. He’s a wreck; he’s ill. We’re taking him below, to our own berth, away from everything, for him to rest, to recover.”
Blazing with displeasure, he moved back, toward where Hedrigall lolled in yeomen’s arms and Uther Doul swept his eyes quick and hard over the crowd.
“It ain’t right,” someone suddenly shouted, forcing his way forward. It was Tanner Sack. “Hed!” he called. “He’s my mate, and Jabber knows what you’re going to do to him.”
There were shouts of agreement around him, but the crowd’s momentum was draining away, and though there were some curses, no one tried to follow and intercept Hedrigall or the Lovers. There was too much uncertainty.
Bellis realized that Uther Doul had found her in the crowd, and was watching her carefully.
“It ain’t right,” yelled Tanner, veins protruding with rage as the party entered the doors and the guards moved in behind them. Uther Doul still did not move his eyes. Bellis could not help but meet them, uncomfortable in his gaze. “He’s my mate,” said Tanner. “It’s my right. It’s my right to hear what he has to say . . .”
And as he spoke, at that moment, something extraordinary happened.
Bellis still met Doul’s unshaking stare, and as Tanner claimed his right to hear Hedrigall, Doul’s eyes spasmed and opened wide with an almost sexual intensity. Bellis watched, stunned, as his head inclined a fraction of an inch, as if in invitation, or agreement.
He gazed at her even as his party entered the corridors, walking backward to join them, holding her attention, raising his eyebrows a tiny bit, suggestive, as he disappeared.
Oh my gods.
Bellis felt as if she had been punched hard in her solar plexus.
A great revelatory wave washed over her: a stunned appreciation, an insinuation of the layers and layers and layers of manipulation in which she was caught, frozen, maneuvered and exploited, used and supported and betrayed.
She still understood virtually nothing of what was happening around her, what was being done, what had been planned, and what was contingent.
But some things she knew, humbly and suddenly.
Her own place. So much, so many plans, so much effort had been expended to bring her to this place at this instant, to hear the words that she had heard. Everything came together here and now; everything coalesced and became clear.
And in her astonishment and awe, and in her humiliation, and despite her anger, feeling herself danced undignified as a marionette to her allotted mark, Bellis bowed her head and readied herself, knowing she had one more job to do, to effect a change she wanted, and knowing she would not spite herself for revenge, and that she would do it.
“Tanner,” she said to him as he raged and cursed, arguing furiously, shouting against the majority, at those who told him he was overreacting, that the Lovers knew what they were doing.
He paused and stared at her in angry bemusement. She beckoned him.
“Tanner,” she said, unheard by any but him. “I agree with you, Tanner,” she whispered. “I think you have every right to hear what Hedrigall might say, down there in the Lovers’ berth.
“Come with me.”
It was not hard to find a way through empty hallways in the Grand Easterly. The loyal guards were stationed at points by which someone might make their way to the Lovers’ quarters, down in the boat’s low reaches. But only those corridors, and that was not where Bellis and Tanner were heading.
She took him down other passageways she had learned very well over the weeks of indulging what she could only think of as her perversion.
They passed storerooms and engines and armories. Walking quickly but openly, not like trespassers, Bellis led Tanner lower and lower, into a dimly lit zone.
She did not know it, but Bellis took Tanner close by the way to the rockmilk engines that were churning and whirring and sparking, driving the avanc on.
And eventually, in a dark and narrow passage where the walls were free of aging wallpaper and heliotypes and etchings, were lined instead with knotted pipework as intricate as veins, Bellis turned to Tanner Sack and gestured him to enter. She stood in the cramped and cosseted environs, turned her head to him, and kept him silent with a raised finger.
They stood without movement for some time, Tanner looking around him, at the ceiling at which Bellis stared, at Bellis herself.
When finally they heard the sound of a door opening and closing, it was so loud and flawless to the ear that Tanner stiffened violently. Bellis had never seen the room above, but she knew its echoes well. She knew where above her were chairs, and tables, and a bed. She followed the four sets of footsteps above with her stare—light, heavier, heavier, and massive and slow—as if she could see through the ceiling-floor the Lover, the Lover, Doul, and Hedrigall.
Tanner followed her example, his eyes widening. He and Bellis could trace the bodies above them. One was by the door; two ranged near the bed, sinking now into chairs; and the fourth, the big one, shuffled back and forth toward the far wall, locking his legs as the cactacae did in sleep or exhaustion, his weight driving down through the wood.
“So,” said Uther Doul, his voice astonishingly clear. “Tell us, Hedrigall.” He was hard. “Tell us why you ran. And how you ended back here again.”
“Oh, gods.” Hedrigall sounded drained and shattered. It was just barely his voice. Tanner shook his head in amazement.
“Gods, dear gods please don’t start that again.” Hedrigall sounded as if he would cry. “I don’t understand you. I’ve never run from Armada in my life. I never would. Who are you?” he screamed suddenly. “What are you? Am I in hell? I saw you die . . .”
“What’s happened to him?” whispered Tanner, appalled.
“You’re talking fucking dung, Hedrigall, you treacherous shit,” the Lover exclaimed. “Look at me, you dog. You were scared, weren’t you? Too frightened, so you patched up the Arrogance in secret and cut loose. Now, where did you go, and how did you get back here?”
“I’ve never betrayed Armada,” Hedrigall shouted, “and I never would. Croom, look at me . . . disputing with a dead man! How can you be here? Who are you? I saw all of you die.” He sounded quite mad with grief or shock.
“When, Hedrigall?” It was Doul’s voice, clipped and dangerous. “And where? Where did we die?”
Hedrigall whispered his answer, and something in his voice made Bellis shiver, though she had expected it. She nodded as she heard it.
“The Scar.”
When they had calmed him, Uther Doul and the Lovers conferred quietly, moving away from him.
“. . . mad . . .” said the Lover, not quite audible. “Either mad . . . strange . . .”
“We have to know.” Doul’s voice. “If he’s not mad he’s a dangerous liar.”
“It makes no sense,” said the Lover furiously. “Who is he lying to? Why?”
“Either he is a liar, or . . .” said the Lover.
Tanner and Bellis could not tell if she said more, quietly, or if her words petered out.
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“How has this happened?”
“We’d been a month, more than a month in the Hidden Ocean.”
Many minutes had passed. Hedrigall had been silent for a long time while the Lovers debated what to do, whispering so low that Bellis and Tanner could not hear them. When suddenly he spoke, it was unbidden, and his voice was low and unchanging, as artless as if he were drugged.
The Lovers and Uther Doul waited.
Hedrigall spoke as if he knew it was expected of him.
He spoke for a long time, and he was not interrupted. He spoke with unnatural grace, with a trained fabler’s eloquence; but there was in his careful monotone a hesitance, and underlying that a trauma that was frightening to sense.
Hedrigall stumbled on his words, and paused suddenly, sporadically, and drew shaking breaths; but he spoke for a long time. His audience—those in the room with him and those below—were absolutely silent and attentive.
“We’d been more than a month in the Hidden Ocean.”
Chapter Forty-six
“We’d been more than a month in the Hidden Ocean, and the sea was in chaos. We couldn’t plot a course, we couldn’t keep north at the top of our compasses, we couldn’t navigate. Every day I’d stare out from the Arrogance, looking for sign of the Scar, the Fractured Land, anything at all. And there was nothing.
“You kept us moving.
“You insisted; you fired us up. You told us what we’d do when we reached the Scar. What powers it would give you, give us. You told us that we would all have power.
“I’ll not pretend there was no dissent. As we went on, people were more and more . . . fearful. And they began to whisper that maybe the Brucolac had been right to mutiny. That maybe there wasn’t so much wrong with the way the city was before.
“They came to you . . . we came to you and asked you to turn back. Said we were happy with how things had been. That we didn’t need this, that too much had gone wrong already, and that we were fearful there was worse to come. Some of us had been having terrible dreams. The city was . . . so tense. Like a cat, fur all sparking and jagged.
“We asked you to turn us back. Before it was too late. We were afraid.
“I don’t know how you did it, but you kept . . . for just enough time, you kept us . . . I’ll not say happy; I’ll not say willing. You kept us obedient; and we waited, and let you take us further in, fearful as we were.”
“If it had been another week, I don’t think we would have put up with any more. I think we would have turned back, and then you all wouldn’t have died.
“But it wasn’t like that, was it? It was too late.
“At six in the morning, on the ninth Playdi of Flesh, from the cabin of the Arrogance I saw something, forty miles ahead, at the edge of the horizon. A disturbance in the air, very faint, very frightening. And there was something else.
“The horizon was too close.
“An hour, five miles later, I knew we were definitely approaching something. And the horizon was still too close, and getting closer.
“I sent messages down below. And I could see them all preparing. I could look down and see the mass of ships all pushed together—all colors, all different shapes. I could see the crews setting up the cranes on the city’s edge, and firing up engines and gods knew what else. Getting ready with all the sciences they’d been preparing. Little aerostats belting from one end of the city to another. Way below me.
“I was watching where the sea and sky met. I didn’t believe it for the longest time; I kept thinking I must have it wrong and that any moment I’d see it right, make sense of it, but I didn’t. And finally I couldn’t deny what I saw.
“The horizon was only twenty miles away. I could see it clear, jagging across the face of the sea. The Scar.
“It was like seeing a god.
“You’d told us almost nothing, when you described it.
“It was a big wound in reality, broken open by the Ghosthead, you told us, thick with seams of what might be, all the possible ways. A big wound in reality, you said, and I thought you were speaking . . . like poetry.
“When the Ghosthead touched down in that continent, the force of it split the world right open, broke a fissure right through Bas-Lag. A split. Jagging in from the world’s rim for more than two thousand miles, splintering the continent.
“That’s the Scar. That crack. Teeming with the ways things weren’t and aren’t but could be.
“We were only a few miles away.
“It was a crevice in the sea.
“It was uneven, listing across us as we approached it, so the horizon seemed tilted. And because it was irregular, not guillotined but cracked, jutting a bit this way and the other, serrating back on itself here and there, there were places I could see over the edges. I could see the sides of the split. They were sheer.
“The ocean was choppy, a strong current heading north even though the wind went south. All the waves washed up past the city, carrying it along, and where they reached the edge of the Scar it was a wall, a clear wall. The water right-angled sharp and plunged down, vertical and split-smooth perfect as glass. Dark, moving water, pressing up against nothing and holding fast. And then . . .
“Empty air.
“A precipice.
“And way, way beyond it, scores of miles, a hundred miles away, only just visible on the other side of that empty gulf, there was a matching face. Hazy with distance. The other side of the crack.
“In between, that emptiness that I could still feel kicking out all manner of puissance. Welling out of the fucking lesion. The Scar.”
“I can’t hardly imagine what it must have been like on the city. They must have been able to see it. Was there panic? Were you excited?”
Of course the Lovers did not answer.
“I knew what the plan was. In sight of the Scar we’d stop at five miles’ distance. And from there a dirigible would set out, and see if it could cross just that short distance to the Scar. And I was the lookout. Any sign of danger, I was to fire my flares, hang out my flags, call the airship back in.
“I don’t know what danger you thought we might face. You had no idea. I don’t think you knew what the Scar was. What did you think might happen? Did you think it might be crawling with Possible Beasts? Things that might have evolved but didn’t, patrolling?
“It was nothing like that.
“The scale of it. The scale of that fucking thing. It was humbling.
“The city didn’t slow,” he said.
He was silent then, for several seconds. He had spoken his last sentence in the same hypnotic monotone he had been using for a long time, and it took Bellis a few heartbeats to realize what it meant.
Her heart spasmed and began to hammer.
“It didn’t slow,” Hedrigall said. “The avanc wasn’t slowing down at all. The avanc was speeding up.
“We were ten miles away, then we were five miles away, and then four, and the city didn’t stop, and didn’t slow down.
“The world was foreshortened . . . The horizon was only a few thousand yards away, and it was growing closer, and Armada was accelerating.
“I began to panic then.” There was no emotion in Hedrigall’s voice, as if he had bled dry of it in the sea. “I began to fire off my flares, trying to warn you of what you must have known.
“Probably . . . probably there was panic then,” he said. “I wouldn’t know; I couldn’t see. Maybe you were all mesmerized, glass-eyed and stupid. But I bet not. I bet there was panic, as the end of the world crept up. With my flares bursting over you, ignored.
“Three miles, two.
“I was unmoving for a long time. Frozen.
“The southerly wind was strong, so the Arrogance was lowering, stretching back away from the Scar as if it was afraid, as afraid as me. That woke me.
“Who knows what happened? Maybe you knew, before you died. I wasn’t there.
“Maybe it was the avanc. Maybe after weeks of obedience it broke free of the impu
lses being fed into it. Maybe some spine that was supposed to plug into its brain snapped off, and the beast woke, confused and snared, and it tugged to try to free itself, careering on.
“Maybe the rockmilk engines failed. Maybe some possibility spilt out from the Scar, a possibility that the engines didn’t work. Gods know what happened.
“When I looked down I saw flotillas of little boats being dropped over the sides of the city, and tiny frantic crews hauling at oars and throwing up sails to get away. But the sea fought them, and I saw their sails bellying in all directions. The lifeboats, the yachts, the little skiffs began to eddy in those waters and curl around the city, overtaking it northward, even as they fought to go the other way. But the currents and the waves pulled them on like they were hungry.
“It was only minutes before the first of them reached the Scar. I watched that little dinghy spinning toward the edge, and saw specks that must have been the people inside it jumping out into the sea, and then the stern of the boat tipped suddenly and went over and was gone. Into that airy emptiness.
“There was a trail of them, little boats peppering the sea between the city and the Scar, sliding north toward it. And dirigibles, too. A flock of them, trying to get airborne. Men and women were weighing them down, trying to get aboard, clinging to ropes to drag themselves in. All overloaded, they hauled themselves over the city’s edge and flopped into the sea, where the current took them and they spun like dead whales, shedding their crews, heading for the Scar.
“Armada began to spin, slowly. The horizon lurched and angled as the city coiled clockwise in the water.
“We were half a mile away now and my mind went all cold and I suddenly knew what I had to do. I ran to the Arrogance’s bay and looked down through the hatches. I took up my rivebow and steadied myself on the edge of the bay doors and fired at the rope that held me tethered.