She could imagine it, though. She saw them progressing sedately, the Lover sad and pensive, looking around her, memorizing the details of the city she had helped rule for so long. Hefting her pack, feeling the weight of all the books of arcane science, the tracts on possibility mining, the ancient machines that Doul had given her.
Doul beside her, his hand ready by his sword, to protect her in her last minutes in Armada. Was it necessary? Did he need to step in? Bellis heard no stories of him cutting Armadans down.
And was the Lover really alone?
It seemed hard to believe that after the years of her presence she would have no one ready to follow her. Her narrative logic was not the brutal mercantilism that drove Armada, but could it be alien to all its citizens? She could not have controlled a ship, even a small one, on her own. Bellis found it easier to imagine that as she walked through the city, she drew certain men and women out of their hiding places, that they sensed her passing and came to her. Alienated from their neighbors, impelled by other motivations, a gathering come out to drift in behind the Lover and Uther Doul, walking at her pace, themselves packed and ready to leave their city.
Romantics, storytellers, misfits, the suicidal and the mad. Bellis imagined them behind the Lover.
She could not help thinking that there was a small crew of them by the time the Lover emerged from below the eaves and crossed the deserted warehouses of the docks. She imagined that they must have joined the Lover on the deck of the prepared ship, helping her to stoke the engines, casting off, saying good-bye.
But Bellis did not know. The Lover might have gone alone.
All Bellis knew was that after almost an hour, with the sun very low and its light thick, a sail passed unmolested through the narrow entrance to Basilio Harbor and out into the sea. It was not large. Its deck was equipped with little cranes and winches and all manner of engines and boilers, the purposes of which Bellis had no idea of. It seemed well equipped and clean.
Bellis could not see it clearly. She was watching over the irregular contours of Armada’s roofs, all those flats and slopes in grey and red, slate, concrete, iron. She could just make out the vessel’s progress through oily morning sunlight, past the other vessels tied up carefully in the harbor, out through the gap in the city’s ship matter. She could see the woodsmoke it vented as the strong, strange currents of the Hidden Ocean took it away.
A little way from Bellis, the Lover was watching.
His eyes were so raw with tears it looked as though they had been rubbed with dust. And of course, his cheek had only its old scars.
The boat powered on. It moved with an undeviating speed that Bellis had never witnessed on the Hidden Ocean. Without fuss, without a fusillade of shots or fireworks, it headed north, directly away from the city, slipping into Armada’s wake and heading for the horizon, toward the Scar.
A long time after that, after it had disappeared from sight, Uther Doul came back to the Grand Easterly, alone.
Doul stood below the mast on which the Brucolac was crucified, the vampir’s early-morning shrieks beginning weakly with the sun.
“Cut him down,” said Uther Doul with authority to a nearby group of men and women. They looked up, startled, but did not question him. “Cut him down and take him home.”
And on that extraordinary morning, while the city felt its way toward new rules and nobody knew what was permissible or normal or acceptable or right, Uther Doul’s merciful order was obeyed.
Not the Lover anymore, thought Bellis suddenly. She stared out toward the horizon’s rim, where the little vessel had disappeared. She thought of the Lovers’ argument, and of the new wound—a newborn scar that tore across the Lover’s face, re-creating and separating her. You’re not the Lover anymore.
Bellis tried to reconceive of the Lover, out there at the helm of her ship, heading toward the most extraordinary place in the world. Bellis tried to rethink her, to be clear, to give credit or blame where it was due and think about the woman piloting that lost vessel toward the edge of the world according to no one’s plans or desires but her own.
But Bellis kept thinking of her as Lover Lover Lover, even as she tried not to.
She did not know the woman’s name.
Coda
Tanner Sack
It’s been bloody mad here. You’d never believe what I’ve been doing.
We ain’t heading for the Scar no more. We’re heading back for waters way back the way we came. We’re going back to how things were.
Strange. I put it like that, but I never knew this place when it wasn’t hankering for the Hidden Ocean. Neither did you. Everything that happened, it was all geared up to getting us out there. I’ve never lived here when it was just a pirate port.
Neither have you.
I’ve been spending time with your Angevine. I’ll be lying if I tell you we’re best friends. We’re a bit shy, you might say. But we see each other, and talk about you, mostly.
We were lied to, and we had enough, and they were risking our necks, dammit, so we made them turn back.
It doesn’t go away, that you’re gone.
I don’t live here anymore. I live nowhere. This place killed you.
I don’t know what it was, the things in that water. I know that what we fought in the water that night was no vampir. No one talks about them. No one knows what they were. Only that they helped to try to turn us.
Bastard John saw them. I see it in his little piggy eyes. But he says nothing.
It was me who turned the city. Those things, the things that took you, the vampir man who fought beside them, they failed.
I did the job for them. Turned us round.
I don’t know if that’s funny. I only know I don’t want to live here anymore, and I can’t go.
I’m a sea-thing now. It’s a bad joke. We both know what real sea-things are, how they move, how fast. Not like me, heavy clumsily stolen fins flapping, slimy sweating, Remade.
And I’m scared, now. I put myself in the sea I sweat. Now every little blenny looks like one of the things that took you.
But I can’t live in the air now. I ain’t got that option no more.
What’ll I do? I can’t go back to New Crobuzon, and if I could I’d rot, without brine.
I’ll make myself swim. It’ll get easier again. I’ll get it done.
They can’t hold me. I can leave. Maybe we’ll go near some coast one day, and there I’ll slip away. There I’ll go and live alone in the shallows so I can see rock under me, where trees and scree meet in the water. I can live there alone. I’ve had enough of it, I tell you.
I ain’t got nothing. I’ve got nothing.
In time, in time they tell me, I’ll not feel so bad. I don’t want time to heal me. There’s a reason I’m like this.
I want time to set me ugly and knotted with loss of you, marking me. I won’t smooth you away.
I can’t say good-bye.
Dustday 2nd Tathis, 1780. Armada.
The avanc is slowing again, one final time.
It is still wounded from the grindylow’s abuse. Whatever they did to it has not healed, not scarred, but remains raw and unpleasant. We pass from time to time by messes of its pus again.
Its heart, I think, is winding down.
We all know that the avanc is dying.
Perhaps it is looking for its home. Perhaps it is trying to find its way back to the universe of lightless brine from where we fished it. And all the time it grows ill, and weak, its blood thickening, decaying and clotting, its great flukes moving more slowly.
Never mind. We are very close to the edge of the Hidden Ocean. We will emerge soon—any day, perhaps within hours—and there the Armadan fleet will be waiting. The avanc will live till then.
The day is close, though, when the city will come to a final stop.
We will be stranded, attached to an organic anchor, millions of tons of corpse rotting on the floor of the abyss.
Five chains, five links to sever. For each
link, two cuts. Each link many feet thick, and thaumaturgically tempered. It will take some time, but eventually, one by one, the miles of metal will fall free.
What a catastrophe that will be, to the bottom dwellers—like divine anger. Tons of metal falling, accelerating, through four, five miles, eventually to slam into the ooze at the sea’s bottom, cutting through to the rock below. Landing across the poor avanc’s corpse, perhaps, bursting it open, its miles of intestines littering the dark mud.
Perhaps in time whole ecosystems will evolve around that unprecedented richness.
We will be gone.
We will have reached the fleet, and they will reattach themselves, and Armada will be as it was. There will be less vessels to drag it, of course, after the carnage of the Crobuzoner War, but the city will have shed countless thousands of tons of chain. It will balance.
Armada will be as it was.
Back across the Swollen Ocean, back toward the richest shipping lanes, back toward the ports and traders. The Armadan pirates who have waited for months, tracking the city with strange devices, will find it again. We will go back toward the Gentleman’s Sea, the Hebdomad, Gnurr Kett, the Basilisk Channel.
Back toward New Crobuzon.
It has been a month since the woman left, whose name I did not know. Things have changed.
It did not take long for the mutineers to relinquish control. They had no program, no party. They were only ever a disparate group who found out they had been lied to, who did not want to die. They snatched power in an anarchic and momentary coup, and gave it up easily.
Within days, the Lover reemerged. He came out of the Grand Easterly and issued orders. People were glad to carry them out. No one has a quarrel with him.
He is lost, though. Everyone knows it. His eyes do not focus, and his orders are vague. Uther Doul whispers to him carefully, and the Lover will nod and issue some meaningful command, Doul’s words through the Lover’s mouth.
Doul will not allow that to continue. He is a mercenary: he works for money; he sells his loyalty. If he must have control, I do not believe he wants it to be so unsubtle. If he rules, he hides it, for the freedom of paid subordinance. I have learnt that, if nothing else.
I do not know what happened to him, to make him flinch from naked power so much.
I have never met a more complicated man, or, I suspect, a more tragic one. His own history planted the ideas that brought us all here, so far from what he himself sought in Armada. It is hard to tell what in him has been intent, and what reaction. I cannot believe that this is satisfactory for him: that he looks at his position, and that of the Lover, and he nods, and says, “This is what I wanted.”
Either he spends his life in control of everything, or in panicked fear. Either he has planned everything to a dizzying degree, or he moves us all desperately from crisis to crisis, not knowing what he wants, showing nothing on his face.
The Lover keeps his dead gaze on the horizon. Although at the end, the woman was despised and feared as a liar, she was never pathetic, and her erstwhile lover has become so. I suspect that he will not survive this. Perhaps one day he will discover that Doul is no longer at his side. Especially now that the Brucolac controls Dry Fall again.
Few actually saw the grindylow, and fewer talk about it. It is only I who cannot forget them.
I have seen the Brucolac at night. He walks free.
He is sun-scarred, and will always be. He is subdued. Carrianne talks of him with an austere kind of affection. His citizens have rallied to him, and most others were fast to forgive him—even those who lost lovers on the night he rebelled. After all, he led his cadre against Garwater because he said we must turn the city around. And he was right, and that has now been done.
There is no war between Dry Fall and Garwater. Doul visits the Brucolac, at night, on the Uroc, Carrianne tells me.
I spend many of my days with Carrianne. She is quiet about her one-time support for the Lovers’ project. For almost a fortnight she did not speak much at all. Perhaps she was ashamed, to have found herself on the side of that woman who was so ready to lie, to lead us to our deaths.
That is the accepted story, apparently. We believe what the returned Hedrigall said. That is what people believe; that is why the city was turned.
Tanner Sack and I—we see each other, from time to time. He has begun to work again, under the city. He never mentions the time I took him to the little room and spurred a rebellion.
Did I do that?
Was this mutiny my doing? This city heading southward again, toward the waters we have passed through before, to the places that mean something to me—was this my doing?
And does that mean that I have won?
Perhaps she made it safely, the woman, and moored herself at the water’s rim, and lowered her equipment into the chasm and extracted all the energies she needed, and is now as powerful as a god.
Perhaps she fell in.
Perhaps there was nothing to fall into.
Hedrigall is ill, delirious from his ordeal, we are told, somewhere in the innards of the Grand Easterly. When I hear that I think: we were not told the truth.
The woman was right. What kind of stupid, idiot coincidence would we have to believe—what chain of unlikeliness—to think that our Hedrigall leaves, and in a nigh-world another stays, and is lost—and found again, in the whole of the sea, by us. We have not been told the truth.
I remember the look Doul gave me.
He looked for me and found me, on the Grand Easterly, and told me with his eyes to come, listen, and finish this. He told me so much with that glance, and left so much unexplained. So much was clear: What he had done. His games, his manipulations.
I picture him, meeting with Hedrigall, the loyal cactus-man frightened and appalled by the Lovers’ plan. Doul, making his suggestions. Hiding Hedrigall somewhere secret and quiet. Slipping out silently as only he could move, cutting the Arrogance free; bringing Hedrigall out again, later, to terrify the populace with his stories of canyons in the sea. So that Doul would have to say nothing. Safe in his loyalty.
Or perhaps it was Fennec who suggested that Hedrigall hide: a plan in case the Crobuzoner rescue failed to turn us back to home waters.
But I saw Doul’s look. If all this was Fennec’s doing, then Doul knew of it, and helped it run.
I think of all the times that Doul told me things, and hinted to me, letting me know where we would go, what we would do. Knowing that I knew Silas Fennec, Simon Fench, knowing that I would spread the word to him. Angry only when I spread the wrong sedition.
Spending time with me, and bringing me close. I came close. Using me as a conduit.
I am agog with how much he knew, and watched. I wish I could know when it started—whether I have been used for many, many months, or only in the final days. I do not know how much of what Doul does is strategy, and how much is recoil. Certainly he has known far, far more than I had thought.
I am left uncertain of how much I was used.
There is another possibility. It disturbs me.
I have heard again and again, from many people, many times, that this Hedrigall is not quite the same as ours. His manner is different, his voice more hesitant. His face, they say, is more—or perhaps less—scarred. He is a refugee from another world. People believe that.
It is possible. It is possible that he told us the truth.
But even so, it could not be luck alone. I saw Doul: he was waiting for this Hedrigall, and for me. So it cannot be chance that this Hedrigall came. There is another explanation.
Maybe it was Doul’s doing. I heard music. Maybe this was Doul, playing possibilities, making a concerto of likelihood and unlikelihood.
Did he play his perhapsadian at night, as we approached the Scar, as the possible worlds around us grew more intrusive? Finding the one where Hedrigall survived, pulling him out of it, pulling him here to be found?
Such a tenuous chain: that I would be there with someone who would be believed,
that Doul could find me with his eyes. So many chances: Doul must be the luckiest man in Bas-Lag. Or he planned the unplannable. Preparing me for that moment.
Could he play possibilities like a virtuoso, making sure the one that occurred was the one that had me there, beside Tanner, watching and listening as Hedrigall arrived, ready?
And what if fact-Bellis would not be there at that time? Did he bring out another? Bring out me? The one who would be in the right place at the right time, for his plans?
Am I a nigh-Bellis?
And if I am, what happened to the other? The fact?
Did he kill her? Is her body floating somewhere, rotting and eaten? Am I a replacement? Pulled through into existence to replace a dead woman—to be where Doul needed her to be?
All that so that he could turn the city around, and never come forward. Was this the only way? He would do all this to have his way, and to seem to have no will at all.
I will never be certain of what happened, of exactly how and how much, amid all the chaos and the blood and fighting, I was used.
That I was used, I have no doubt.
Doul has no interest in me now.
All the time we were together, he was playing me, making me his agent to turn the city around, so that it was not him that did it. A loyal mercenary, making the city merely pirate again.
Now that I have done what I was required to do, I am less than nothing to him.
It is strange to find yourself a game piece. I am humbled by him, but I am too old to be wounded by betrayal.
Still, twice now I have tried to see him, to understand what it was he did. Twice I have knocked and had him open the door to me, and stare at me unspeaking as if I am a stranger. And both times my words have gone sour in my mouth.
There is no “it,” I remember Silas Fennec scolding me.
It is probably the best advice.
Right now, there are a small handful of possibilities that can explain what happened. Any of them might be true. And if Doul were to claim innocence of all of them, I would have less to make sense with, less than I have now. I would have to contemplate the possibility that there was no plan—that there is nothing to be explained.