The Scar Read online

  A coldly furious man descended toward them. He was tall and young-looking and built like a dancer, with freckled skin the color of pale ash. His hair seemed to belong to someone else: it was dark and long and very tightly curled, and it hung in unruly locks from his scalp like an unkempt fleece. It jounced and coiled as he descended.

  As he passed the scabmettlers he gave a peremptory little bow, which they returned with more ceremony. He stood still before the man in grey. The two men eyed each other with impenetrable expressions.

  “Liveman Doul,” said the newcomer eventually, in a whispering voice.

  “Deadman Brucolac,” was the reply. Uther Doul gazed at the Brucolac’s broad, handsome face.

  “It seems your employers are going ahead with their idiot scheming,” the Brucolac murmured, and then was silent. “I still can’t believe, Uther,” he said finally, “that you approve of this lunacy.”

  Uther Doul did not move, did not take his eyes from the other man.

  The Brucolac straightened his back and gave a sneer that might have indicated contempt, or a shared confidence, or many other things. “It won’t happen, you know,” he said. “The city won’t allow it. That’s not what this city is for.”

  The Brucolac opened his mouth idly, and his great forked tongue flickered out, tasting the air and the ghosts of Uther Doul’s sweat.

  There were things that made very little sense to Tanner Sack.

  He did not understand how he could bear the cold of the seawater. With his bulky Remade tentacles, he had to descend with his chest uncovered, and the first touch of the water had shocked him. He had almost balked, then had smeared himself with thick grease; but he had acclimatized much faster than made sense. He was still aware of the chill, but it was an abstract knowledge. It did not cripple him.

  He did not understand why the brine was healing his tentacles.

  Since first they had been implanted at the caprice of a New Crobuzon magister—a punishment supposedly related to his crime according to some patronizing allegorical logic that had never made any sense to him—they had hung like stinking dead limbs. He had cut at them, experimentally, and the layers of nerves implanted in them had fired and he had nearly fainted with pain. But pain was all that had lived in them, so he had wrapped them around himself like rotting pythons and tried to ignore them.

  But immersed in the saltwater, they had begun to move.

  Their multitude of small infections had faded, and they were now cool to the touch. After three dives, to his grinding shock, the tentacles had started to move independently of the water.

  He was healing.

  After a few weeks of diving, new sensations passed through them, and their sucker pads flexed gently and attached themselves on surfaces nearby. Tanner was learning to move them by choice.

  In the confused first days when the captives had first arrived, Tanner had wandered through the ridings and listened bewildered as merchants and foremen offered him work in a language he was learning very quickly to understand.

  When he verified that he was an engineer, the liaison officer for the Garwater Dock Authority had eyed him greedily, and had asked him in child’s Salt and pantomime hand gestures whether he would learn to be a diver. It was easier to train an engineer to dive than to teach a diver the skills that Tanner had accumulated.

  It was hard work learning to breathe the air pumped down from above without panicking in the hot little helmet, how to move without overcompensating and sending himself spinning. But he had learned to luxuriate in the slowed-down time, the eddying clarity of water seen through glass.

  He did similar work now to that he had always done—patching and repairing, rebuilding, fumbling with tools by great engines—only now, well below the stevedores and the cranes, it was performed in the crush of water, watched by fishes and eels, buffeted by currents born miles away.

  “I told you that Coldarse is working in the library, didn’t I?”

  “You did, lad,” Tanner said. He and Shekel were eating below an awning at the docks while the deluge continued around them.

  Shekel had arrived at the docks with a little group of raggedy-arsed youngsters between twelve and sixteen years old. All the others, from what Tanner could tell, were city-born; and that they had let a press-ganged join them, one who still struggled to express himself in Salt, was evidence of Shekel’s adaptability.

  They had left Shekel alone to share his food with Tanner.

  “I like that library,” he said. “I like going there, and not just because of the ice woman, neither.”

  “There’s a lot worse you could do than settle into some reading, lad,” said Tanner. “We’ve finished Crawfoot’s Chronicles; you could find some other stories. You could read them to me, for a change. How’re your letters?”

  “I can make them out,” said Shekel vaguely.

  “Well, there you go then. You go and have a word with Miss Coldy, and get her to recommend some reading for you.”

  They ate silently for a while, watching a group of the Armada cray come up from their hivewreck below.

  “What’s it like under there?” Shekel said at last.

  “Cold,” said Tanner. “And dark. Dark but . . . luminous. Massive. You’re just surrounded by massiveness. There are shapes you can only just see, huge dark shapes. Subs and whatnot—and sometimes you think you see others. Can’t make them out properly, and they’re guarded, so’s you can’t get too close.

  “I’ve watched cray under their wrecks. Seawyrms that saddle up sometimes to the chariot ships. The menfish, like newts, from Bask riding. Can’t hardly see them, the way they move. Bastard John, the dolphin. He’s the Lovers’ security chief below, and a colder, more vicious sod you could not imagine.

  “And then there’s a few . . . Remade.” His voice eddied into silence.

  “It’s weird, isn’t it?” said Shekel, watching Tanner closely. “I can’t get used to . . .” He said nothing more.

  Neither could get used to it. A place where the Remade were equal. Where a Remade might be a foreman or a manager instead of the lowest laborer.

  Shekel saw Tanner rub his tentacles. “How are they?” he asked, and Tanner grinned and concentrated, and one of the rubbery things contracted a little and began to drag itself like a moribund snake toward Shekel’s bread. The boy clapped appreciatively.

  At the edge of the jetty where the cray were surfacing, a tall cactus-man stood, his bare chest pocked with fibrous vegetable scars. A massive rivebow was strapped across his back.

  “D’you know him?” said Tanner. “His name’s Hedrigall.”

  “That don’t sound like a cactacae name,” said Shekel, and Tanner shook his head.

  “He’s no New Crobuzon cactus,” he explained, “nor even a Shankell one. He’s a press-ganged, like us. Came to the city more than twenty years ago. He’s from Dreer Samher. Near enough two thousand miles from New Crobuzon.

  “I tell you what, Shekel, he’s got some stories. You don’t need books to get tales off him.

  “He was a trader-pirate before he got captured and joined the city here, and he’s seen just about all the things that live in the sea. He can cut your hair with that rivebow; he’s that good a shot. He’s seen keragorae and mosquito-men and unplaced, and whatever else you like. And gods, he knows how to tell you about ’em. In Dreer Samher, they’ve fablers who tell stories for a calling. Hed was one. He can make his voice hypnagogic if he wants, keep you totally drunk on it. All while he tells you stories.”

  The cactus-man was standing very still, letting the rain pelt his skin.

  “And now he’s an aeronaut,” Tanner said. “He’s been piloting Grand Easterly’s airships—scouts and warflots—for years. He’s one of the Lovers’ most important men, and a fine bloke he is. He spends most of his time now up in the Arrogance.”

  Tanner and Shekel looked behind them, and up. More than a thousand feet above the deck of the Grand Easterly the Arrogance was tethered. It was a big, crippled aerostat
, with twisted tail fins and an engine that had not moved in years. Attached by hundreds of yards of tar-stiffened rope, winched to the great ship below it, it served as the city’s crow’s nest.

  “He likes it up there, Hedrigall,” said Tanner. “Told me he just wants things quiet, these days.”

  “Tanner,” said Shekel slowly, “what do you reckon to the Lovers? I mean, you work for them: you’ve heard them talk; you know what they’re like. What d’you think of them? Why d’you do what they say?”

  Tanner knew, as he spoke, that Shekel would not fully understand him. But it was such an important question that he turned and looked very carefully at the boy he shared his rooms with (on the port end of an old iron hulk). The boy who had been his jailer and his audience and his friend and was becoming something different, something like family.

  “I was going to be a slave in the colonies, Shekel,” he said quietly. “The Lovers of Grand Easterly took me in and gave me a job that pays money and told me they didn’t give a cup of piss that I was Remade. The Lovers gave me my life, Shekel, and a city and a home. I tell you that whatever they fucking want to do is alfuckingright by me. New Crobuzon can kiss my arse, lad. I’m an Armada man, a Garwater man. I’m learning my Salt. I’m loyal.”

  Shekel stared at him. Tanner was a slow-talking, quiet man, and Shekel had never seen that intensity from him before.

  He was very impressed.

  It continued raining. All across Armada, the passengers from the Terpsichoria who had been let out tried to live.

  On gaudy yawls and barquentines, they were arguing, buying and selling and stealing, learning Salt, some weeping, poring over maps of the city, calculating the distance from New Crobuzon or Nova Esperium. They mourned their old lives, staring at heliotypes of friends and lovers at home.

  In a reeducation jail between Garwater and Shaddler were scores of sailors from the Terpsichoria. Some were shouting at their guard-counselors, who were trying to soothe them, all the time gauging whether this man or that could overcome his ties, whether his link to New Crobuzon would attenuate, whether he could be won over to Armada.

  And if not, deciding what was to be done with them.

  Bellis arrived at the Unrealized Time with her makeup and hair rain-battered. She stood bedraggled in the doorway while a waiter greeted her, and she stared at him, astonished at this treatment. As if he were a real waiter, she found herself thinking, in a real restaurant in a real city.

  The Raddletongue was a big and ancient vessel. It was so crusted with buildings, so recrafted and interfered with, that it was impossible to tell what kind of ship it had once been. It had been part of the Armada for centuries. The ship’s forecastle was covered with ruins: old temples in white stone, much of their substance scattered and pounded to dust. The remnants were smothered in ivy, and nettles that did not keep the city’s children away.

  There were strange shapes in the Raddletongue’s streets, lumps of obscure sea-salvaged stuff left in corners as if forgotten.

  The restaurant was small and warm and half-full, paneled in darkwood. Its windows looked out over a fringe of ketches and canoes to Urchinspine Docks, Armada’s second harbor.

  Bellis saw with a stab of emotion that from the restaurant’s ceiling hung little strings of paper lanterns. The last place she had seen that had been in the Clock and Cockerel, in Salacus Fields in New Crobuzon.

  She had to shake her head to clear it of a biting melancholy. At a table in the corner, Johannes was getting to his feet, waving to her.

  They sat quietly for a while. Johannes seemed shy, and Bellis found herself resentful that it had been so long since she had heard from him, and suspecting that she was not being fair she retreated into silence.

  Bellis saw with amazement that the red wine on the table was a vintage Galaggi, a House Predicus 1768. She looked up at Johannes with eyes wide. With her mouth set shut she looked disapproving.

  “I thought we might celebrate,” he said. “I mean, at seeing each other again.”

  The wine was excellent.

  “Why’ve they just left me . . . us . . . to get on with it? Or to rot?” Bellis demanded. She picked at her concoction of fish and bitter ship-grown leaves. “I’d have thought . . . I’d have thought it illadvised to pluck a few hundred people from their lives, then let them loose in . . . this . . .”

  “They’ve not done that,” Johannes said. “How many of the other Terpsichoria passengers have you seen? How many of the crew? Don’t you remember the interviews, the questions, when we first arrived? They were tests,” he said gently. “They were estimating who was safe, and who not. If they think you’re too troublesome, or too . . . tied to New Crobuzon . . .” His voice petered away.

  “Then what?” demanded Bellis. “Like the captain . . . ?”

  “No no no,” said Johannes quickly. “I think that they . . . work on you. Try to persuade you. I mean, you know about press-ganging. There are plenty of sailors in the New Crobuzon navy who were doing nothing more nautical than carousing in a tavern the night they were ‘recruited.’ It doesn’t stop most of them working as sailors once they’re taken.”

  “For a while,” said Bellis.

  “Yes. I’m not saying it’s exactly the same. That’s the big difference: once you join Armada you don’t . . . leave.”

  “I’ve been told that a thousand times,” Bellis said slowly. “But what about Armada’s fleet? What about the cray underneath? You think they can’t get away? Anyway, if that were true, if people never did have a chance to leave, no one but the city-born would be prepared to live here.”

  “Obviously,” Johannes said. “The city’s freebooters are on sail for months, maybe years at a time till they make their way back to Armada. And they’ll dock at other ports during those journeys, and I’m sure some of their crew must have disappeared. There must be ex-Armadans scattered here and there.

  “But the fact is, those crews are chosen: partly for their loyalty, and partly for the fact that if they do run, it won’t matter. They’re almost all city-born, for a start: it’s a rare press-ganged who’s given a letter of pass. The likes of you and me, we couldn’t hope to get on a vessel like that. Armada is where most of us press-ganged’ll see things out.

  “But dammit, think who gets taken, Bellis. Some sailors, sure, some ‘rival’ pirates, a few merchants. But the ships the Armadans encounter—you think they all get taken? Most of the press-ganged vessels are . . . well, ships like the Terpsichoria. Slavers. Or colony ships full of transported Remade. Or jail ships. Or ships carrying prisoners of war.

  “Most of the Remade on the Terpsichoria realized long ago that they’d never be going home. Twenty years, my eye—it’s a life sentence, and a death sentence, and they know it. And here they are now, with work and money and respect . . . Is it any wonder they accept it? As far as I know there are only seven Remade from the Terpsichoria being treated for rejection, and two of those already suffer dementia.”

  And how the fuck, wondered Bellis, how in the name of Jabber do you know that?

  “What about the likes of you and me?” Johannes continued. “All of us . . . we already knew we’d be away from home—away from New Crobuzon—for five years at the very, very least, and probably more. Look at the motley group we were. I’d say very few of the other passengers had unbreakable ties with the city. People arriving here are unsettled, sure; and surprised, confused, alarmed. But not destroyed. Isn’t it a ‘new life’ that they promise Nova Esperium colonists? Wasn’t that what most of us sought?”

  Most, perhaps, thought Bellis. But not all. And if it’s satisfaction with this place they look for before they let us live free here, then gods know—I know—they can make mistakes of judgment.

  “I doubt,” Johannes said quietly, “they’re so naÏve as to just leave us to roam unchecked. I’d be surprised if they didn’t keep careful note of us. I suspect we don’t go unwatched. But what could we do, anyway? This is a city, not a dinghy we can commandeer or scuttle.
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  “It’s only the crew who’d represent any kind of real problem. Many have families waiting for them. Those are the ones who’d likely refuse to accept that this is their new home.”

  Only the crew? thought Bellis, a bad taste in her throat.

  “So what happens to them? Like the captain?” she said in a dead voice. “Like Cumbershum?”

  Johannes flinched. “I . . . I’ve been told it’s . . . it’s only the captains and first officers of any ships encountered . . . That they simply have too much to lose, that they’re particularly tied to their home port . . .”

  There was something fawning and apologetic in his face. With a waxing alienation, Bellis realized that she was alone.

  She had come here tonight thinking that she might be able to talk to Johannes about New Crobuzon, that he would share her unhappiness, that she could touch the bloodied part of her mind and talk about the people and streets she missed so hard.

  Perhaps that they might broach the subject that had burrowed through her thoughts for weeks: escape.

  But Johannes was acclimatizing. He spoke in a carefully neutral register, as if what he said was just reportage. But he was trying to come to terms with the city’s rulers. He had found something in Armada that made him prepared to consider it home.

  What did they do to achieve this? she thought. What is he doing?

  “Who else have you heard about?” she said after a cold silence.

  “Mollificatt, I’m very sorry to say, was one of those who succumbed when we first arrived,” he said, looking genuinely sad. The mongrel and changing population of Armada made it a carrier of countless diseases. The city-born were hardy, but every batch of press-ganged was afflicted with fevers and murrains on its first arrival, and several of their number inevitably died. “I’ve heard rumors that our newcomer, Mr. Fennec, is working somewhere in Garwater, or Thee-And-Thine riding. Sister Meriope . . .” he said suddenly, his eyes widening. He shook his head. “Sister Meriope is . . . She is being held for her own safety. She threatens herself with violence constantly. Bellis,” he whispered, “she is with child.”