The Scar Read online

  Beside the market was a corbita smeared with ivy and climbing flowers. Low dwellings were built onto it and beautifully carved. Its masts had not been felled, but were wound with greenery that made them look like ancient trees. There was a submersible that had not dived for decades. A ridge of thin houses extended around its periscope like a dorsal fin. The two vessels were joined by rippling wooden bridges that passed above the market.

  A steamship was become a residential block, its hull broken with new windows, a children’s climbing frame on its deck. A boxy paddleboat housed mushroom farms. A chariot ship, its bridle polished decoratively, was covered with brick terraces that filled the curves of its naval foundations. Chains of smoke rose from its chimneys.

  Buildings laced with bone, colors from greys and rusts to the flamboyant glares of heraldry: a city of esoteric shapes. Its hybridity was stark and uncharming, marred with decay and graffiti. The architecture hunkered and rose and hunkered again with the water, vaguely threatening.

  There were slums and mansions in the bodies of tramp merchant ships, and built tottering across sloops. There were churches and sanatoria and deserted houses, all licked by constant damp, contoured with salt—steeped in the sounds of waves and the fresh-rot smell of the sea.

  The ships were tethered together in a weave of chains and hinged girders. Every vessel was a pontoon in a web of rope bridges. Boats coiled toward each other in seawalls of embedded ships, surrounding free-floating vessels. Basilio Harbor, where Armada’s navy and visitors could tie up, repair or unload, sheltered from storms.

  The largest ships meandered instead around the edges of the city, beyond the tugs and steamers tethered to Armada’s sides. Out in the open water were fleets of fishing boats, the city’s warships, the chariot ships and whim trawlers and others. These were Armada’s pirate navy, heading out across the world, coming in to dock with cargoes plundered from enemies or the sea.

  And beyond all that, beyond the city sky that thronged with birds and other shapes, beyond all the vessels was the sea.

  The open sea. Waves like insects in incessant motion.

  Stunning and empty.

  Bellis was protected by those who had caught her, she was made to understand. She was a resident of Garwater riding, ruled by the man and woman with the scars. They had promised work and a berth for all those they had taken, and it had happened quickly. Agents had met the terrified, confused new arrivals, calling out the names on their lists, checking the skills and details of the newcomers, brusquely explaining in pidgin Salt what work they offered.

  It had taken Bellis some minutes to understand, and more to believe, that she was being offered work in a library.

  She had signed the proffered papers. The officers and sailors from the Terpsichoria were being led forcibly away for “assessment” and “reeducation,” and Bellis had felt in no mood to be difficult. She had scratched her name, tight with resentment. Call this a damned contract? she felt like shouting. There’s no choice here, and everybody knows it. But she had signed.

  The organization, the mumming of legality, confused her.

  These were pirates. This was a pirate city, ruled by cruel mercantilism, existing in the pores of the world, snatching new citizens from their ships, a floating freetown for buying and selling stolen goods, where might made right. The evidence of this was everywhere: in the severity of the citizens, the weapons they wore openly, in the stocks and whipping posts she saw on the Garhouse vessels. Armada, she thought, must be ordered by maritime discipline, the lash.

  But the ship-city was not the base brutocracy that Bellis had expected. There were other logics at work. There were typed contracts, offices administrating the new arrivals. And officials of some kind: an executive, administrative caste, just as in New Crobuzon.

  Alongside Armada’s club law, or supporting it, or an integument around it, was bureaucratic rule. This was not a ship, but a city. She had entered another country as complex and organized as her own.

  The officials had taken her to the Chromolith, a long-decaying paddleship, and berthed her in two little round rooms joined by a spiral staircase, built in what had been the vessel’s big chimney. Somewhere far below her, in the ship’s guts, was an engine that had once vented its soot through what was now her home. It had gone cold long before she was born.

  The room was hers, they told her, but she must pay for it, weekly, at the Garwater Settlement Office. They had given her an advance on her wages, a handful of notes and change—“ten eyes to a flag, ten flags to a finial.” The currency was rough-cut and crudely printed. The colors of the ink varied from note to note.

  And then they had told her, in rudimentary Ragamoll, that she would never leave Armada, and they had left her there alone.

  She had waited, but that was all. She was alone in the city, and it was a prison.

  Eventually hunger had driven her down to buy greasy street-food from a vendor who jabbered at her in Salt too quick for her easily to understand. She had walked the streets, astonished that she was not accosted. She felt so alien, bowed under culture shock as crippling as migraine, surrounded by the women and men in lush, ragged dress, the street children, the cactacae and khepri, hotchi, llorgiss, massive gessin and vu-murt, and others. Cray lived below the city and walked topside in the day, sluggish on their armored legs.

  The streets were narrow little ridges between the houses crammed on decks. Bellis grew used to the city’s yawing, the skyline that shifted and jostled. She was surrounded by catcalls and conversations in Salt.

  It was easy for her to learn: its vocabulary was obvious, stolen as it was from other languages, and its syntax was easy. She had to use it—she could not avoid buying food, asking for directions or clarification, speaking to other Armadans—and when she did her accent marked her out as a newcomer, not city-born.

  For the most part those she spoke to were patient with her, even crudely good-humored, forgiving her surliness. Perhaps they expected her to relax as she made Armada her home.

  She did not.

  That morning, as Bellis stepped out of the Chromolith smokestack, the question How did I get here? broke through into her mind again.

  She was out in the street in the city of ships, in the sun, enclosed in a press of her kidnappers. Men and women, tough-faced humans and other races, even a few constructs were all around her, bartering, working, jabbering in Salt. Bellis walked on through Armada, a prisoner.

  She was heading for The Clockhouse Spur. This riding abutted Garwater, and was more commonly known as Booktown, or the khepri quarter.

  It was a little more than a thousand feet from Chromolith Towers to the Grand Gears Library. The walk there took her over at least six vessels.

  The sky was full of craft. Gondolas swayed beneath dirigibles, ferrying passengers across the angling architecture, descending between close-quartered housing and letting down rope ladders, cruising past much larger airships that hauled goods and machinery. Those were chaotic. Some were congealed from lashed-together gasbags, extruding cabins and engines randomly, like chance accretions of material. Masts were mooring posts, sprouting aerostats of various shapes, like plump, mutant fruit.

  From Chromolith Bellis crossed a steep little bridge to the schooner Jarvee, crowded with little kiosks selling tobacco and sweets. She passed up onto the barquentine Lynx Sejant, its deck full of silk merchants selling offcuts from Armada’s piracy. Right, past a broken llorgiss sea pillar bobbing like some malevolent fishing lure, and Bellis crossed Taffeta Bridge.

  She was now on the Severe, a massive clipper, the edge of Booktown riding, where the khepri ruled. Beside carts pulled by Armada’s sickly inbred ox and horses, Bellis passed a team of three khepri guard-sisters.

  There were similar trios in Kinken and Creekside, New Crobuzon’s khepri ghettos. It had astonished Bellis the first time she had seen them here. The khepri in Armada, like those in New Crobuzon, must be descendants of refugees from the Mercy Ships, worshipping what was left, what they
remembered, of the Bered Kai Nev pantheon. They held traditional weapons. Their lithe humanoid women’s bodies were weatherbeaten, their heads like giant scarabs iridescent in the cold sun.

  With so many mute khepri residents, the streets of Booktown were quieter than those of Garwater. Instead, the air was slightly spiced with residue from the chymical mists that were part of khepri communication. It was their equivalent of a boisterous hubbub.

  Punctuating the alleyways and squares were khepri-spit sculptures, like those in New Crobuzon’s Plaza of Statues. Figures from myth, abstract forms, sea creatures executed in the opalescent material the khepri metabolized through their headscarabs. The colors were muted, as if colorberries were less plentiful here, or of worse quality.

  On an avenue on the Compound Dust, a khepri clockwork ship—a Mercy Ship that had fled the Ravening—Bellis slowed, fascinated by its cogs and architecture. Insects and husks blew fitfully into her path from the gusting deck-field of a farm ship aft, and the distant bleating of livestock sounded through slats in its lower decks.

  Then on to the fat factory ship the Aronnax Lab, past metallurgy workshops and refineries, into Krome Plaza, where a great suspended platform reached out across the water onto the deck of the Pinchermarn, the aftmost of the vessels that made up Grand Gears Library.

  “Relax . . . no one cares that you’re late, you know,” said Carrianne, one of the human staff, as Bellis hurried past. “You’re new, you’re press-ganged, so you might as well milk it.” Bellis heard her laughing, but did not respond.

  The corridors and converted mess halls were crammed with bookshelves and guttering oil lanterns. Scholars of all races pursed their lips, if they had them, and looked up wistfully in Bellis’ wake. The reading rooms were large and quiet. Their windows were filmed in dust and desiccated insects, and seemed to age the light falling across the communal tables and the volumes in scores of languages. Stifled coughs sounded like apologies as Bellis entered the acquisitions department. Books tottered on cabinets and trolleys and in loose towers on the floor.

  She was there for hours, coding methodically. Stacking books written in scripts she could not read, recording the details of the other volumes onto cards. Filing them alphabetically—the Salt alphabet was a slightly variant form of the Ragamoll script—according to author, title, language, themes, and subjects.

  A little before she was due to break for her lunch Bellis heard footsteps. It must be Shekel, she thought. He was the only person from the Terpsichoria she saw or spoke to. She smiled at the thought of it: herself consorting with the cabin boy. He had come swaggering in to find her, almost a fortnight previously, all adolescent nerve, excited at their capture and new situation. (Someone had told him about “a scary lofty lady in black with blue lips” working in the library, he explained to her. He grinned when he said that, and she had looked away to avoid smiling back.)

  He was living by various vague means, sharing a house with a Remade man from the Terpsichoria. Bellis offered Shekel a brass flag to help her with reshelving, which he accepted. Since then he had come several times, done a little work, talking to her about Armada and the scattered remnants of their ship.

  She learned a lot from him.

  But it was not Shekel who was now approaching her in the narrow corridor, but a nervous, quizzically smiling Johannes Tearfly.

  It was with some embarrassment, later, that she remembered herself rising at his arrival (with a cry of pleasure like a gushy child, for gods’ sakes) and throwing her arms around him.

  He opened to her, too, smiling with shy warmth. And after a long moment of close greeting, they disengaged and looked at each other.

  This was the first chance he’d had to get out, he told her, and she demanded to know what he had been doing. He’d been sent to the library and had taken the chance to seek her out, and again she told him to tell her what he had been damn well doing. When he told her that he could not, that he had to go now, she almost stamped in frustration, but he was telling her wait, wait, that he had more free time now, and that she should just listen a moment.

  “If you’re free tomorrow night,” he said, “I’d like to take you to supper. There’s a place in starboard Garwater, on the Raddletongue, called the Unrealized Time. Do you know it?”

  “I’ll find it,” she said.

  “I could come and collect you,” he began, and she cut him off.

  “I’ll find it.”

  He smiled at her, with the bemused pleasure she remembered. If you’re free indeed! she thought sardonically. Does he really think . . . Is it possible? She felt suddenly uncertain, almost afraid. Do the others go out every night? Am I alone in exile? Are the Terpsichoria’s passengers carousing every evening in their new home?

  As she left the library that evening, Armada’s close quarters and narrow streets oppressed Bellis. But when she raised her eyes and looked beyond the skyline, the Swollen Ocean weighed down on her like granite, and she felt breathless. She could not believe that the mass of water and air beyond Armada did not drown it, disappear it in an instant. She counted her coins and approached a skycab driver refilling his dirigible from a gas depot on Aronnax Lab.

  She swayed in the cradle as it buzzed sedately a hundred feet above the highest deck. Bellis could see the edges of the city bobbing randomly, moving very slowly with whatever currents took it. There, the distant wood of the haunted quarter. The arena. The stronghold of the Brucolac.

  And in the center of Garwater riding, something extraordinary that Bellis never grew accustomed to seeing—the source of the riding’s strength. Something looming enormously over the shipscape around it: the largest ship in the city, the largest ship that Bellis had ever seen.

  Almost nine hundred feet of black iron. Five colossal funnels and six masts stripped of canvas, more than two hundred feet high; and tethered way above them a huge, crippled dirigible. A vast paddle on each side of the ship, like industrial sculptures. The decks seemed almost bare, unbroken by the haphazard building that misshaped other vessels. The Lovers’ stronghold, like a beached titan: the Grand Easterly, lolling austere amid Armada’s baroque.

  “I’ve changed my mind,” Bellis said suddenly. “Don’t take me to Chromolith.”

  She directed the pilot aft-aft-star’d—the city’s directions all relative to the colossal Grand Easterly itself. As the man gently tugged at his rudder she looked down over the crowds. Air eddied as the aeronaut picked a way through the masts and rigging that jutted up around them in the Armada sky. Around the towers Bellis saw the city birds: gulls and pigeons and parakeets. They brooded on roofs and in decktop aeries, alongside other presences.

  The sun was gone, and the city sparkled. Bellis felt a gust of melancholy as she passed light-strung rigging close enough to grasp. She saw her destination, the Boulevard St. Carcheri on the steamer Glomar’s Heart, a shabby-opulent promenade of gently colored streetlamps, knotted rustwood trees, and stucco façades. As the gondola began to descend, she kept her eyes on the shabbier, darker shape beyond the parkland.

  Across four hundred feet of water glinting with impurities rose a tower of intertwined girders as high as the dirigibles, gushing with flame. A massive concrete body on legs like four splintering pillars emerging from the dirtied sea. Dark cranes moving without visible purpose.

  It was a monstrous thing, awe-inspiring and ugly and foreboding. Bellis sat back in her descending aerostat and kept her eye on the Sorghum, New Crobuzon’s stolen rig.

  Chapter Seven

  It rained remorselessly all the next day, hard grey drops like shards of flint.

  The costermongers were quiet; very little business was done. Armada’s bridges were slippery. There were accidents: the drunk or the clumsy slipping into the cold sea.

  The city’s monkeys sat subdued under awnings and bickered. They were pests, feral tribes that raced across the floating city, fighting, vying for scraps and territory, brachiating below bridges and careering up rigging. They were not the only animals li
ving wild in the city, but they were the most successful scavengers. They huddled in the cold damp and groomed each other without enthusiasm.

  In the dim light of Grand Gears Library, the signs requesting silence were made absurd by the percussion of rain.

  The bloodhorns of Shaddler riding sounded mournfully, as they customarily did when it rained hard and the scabmettlers said that the sky was bleeding. Water beaded weirdly on the surface of the Uroc, Dry Fall riding’s flagship. The dark and rotting fabric of the haunted quarter mildewed and glowered. People in the neighboring Thee-And-Thine riding pointed at the deserted quarter’s decrepit skyline and warned, as they always did, that somewhere within, the tallow ghast was moving.

  In the first hour after dusk, in the muted edifice of Barrow Hall on the Therianthropus, the heart of Shaddler, a bad-tempered meeting came to an end. The scabmettler guards outside could hear delegations leaving. They fingered their weapons and ran their hands over the crust of their organic armor.

  There was a man among them: a few inches shy of six feet and prodigiously muscled, dressed in charcoal-colored leather, a straight sword by his side. He spoke and moved with quiet grace.

  He discussed weaponry with the scabmettlers, then had them show him strokes and sweeps from mortu crutt, their fighting science. He let them touch the filigree of wires that wound around his right arm and down the side of his armor into the battery on his belt.

  The man was comparing the Stubborn Nail strike of stampfighting with the sadr punch of mortu crutt. He and his sparring partner swept their arms in slow demonstration attacks, when the doors opened at the top of the stairs above them and the guards came to quick attention. The man in grey straightened slowly and walked to the corner of the entresol.