The Scar

Chapter Eleven

Silas was waiting for Bellis as she emerged from the Pinchermarn, the sun low over the sea. She saw him leaning back against a railing and watching for her.

He smiled when he saw her.

They ate together, and talked, gently fencing around one another. Bellis could not tell if it was him she was glad to see, or whether she had simply had enough of loneliness, but either way she welcomed his company.

He had a suggestion. It was the fourth Bookdi of Hawkbill. That was a scabmettler blood-day, and in Thee-And-Thine riding there was a major fight festival. Several of the best fighters from Shaddler riding were coming, to show their skills. Had she ever seen mortu crutt, or stampfighting?

Bellis took convincing. In New Crobuzon she had never visited Cadnebar’s glad circus, or any of its lesser imitators. The idea of watching such combat repelled her somewhat, and bored her more. Silas was insistent. Studying him, she realized that his desire to see these fights was not motivated by sadism or voyeurism: she did not know what did drive it, but it was less base than that. Or differently base, perhaps.

She also knew that he was eager for her to come with him.

To get to Thee-And-Thine, they passed over Shaddler riding, the scabmettler home. Their aircab moved sedately past a spindly tower of girders at the rear of the great iron Therianthropus, and on, star’d.

This was to be Bellis’ first time in Thee-And-Thine. It’s about time, she told herself with shame. She was committed to understanding the city, but her resolution risked waning and becoming a nebulous depression again.

The fighting ground was a little way fore of Thee-And-Thine’s flagship, a big clipper with sails sliced into decorative patterns, in the thick of the merchant riding’s backstreets. The arena was a ring of small vessels with benches laid in gradients on their decks, facing into the circle of sea. Opulent gondolas hung from dirigibles around the edges of the arena. These were the private boxes of the rich.

Tethered in the middle was the stage itself; it was a wooden platform, its edges studded with brass gas lamps to light it and barrels to keep it afloat. That was the fighting ground: a circle of refitted ships and balloons around a piece of driftwood.

With a flourish of money and a brief word, Silas freed up two seats in the front row. He talked continuously in a low voice that outlined the politics and personalities around them.

“That’s the vizier of Thee-And-Thine,” he would explain, “come to make up the money he lost at the start of the quarto.” “The woman over there with the veil never shows her face. She’s said to be on the Curhouse council.” His eyes moved constantly over the crowd.

Vendors sold food and spiced wine, and bookmakers shouted odds. The festival was unpretentious and profane, like most of what went on in Thee-And-Thine.

The crowd was not all human.

“Where are the scabmettlers?” Bellis said, and Silas began to point, seemingly randomly, around the arena. Bellis struggled to see what he saw: he was indicating humans, she thought, but their skin was blanched grey, and they looked squat and strong. Scarification marked their faces.

Bloodhorns sounded, and by chymical trickery the lights of the stage burst suddenly red. The crowd brayed enthusiastically. Two seats along from her, Bellis saw a woman whose physiognomy marked her as scabmettler. She did not cheer or shout, but sat still through the vulgar enthusiasm. Bellis could see other scabmettlers reacting similarly, waiting stolidly for the holy-day battles.

At least the general bloodlust was honest, she thought, contemptuous. There were enough scabmettler bookies to show that this was an industry, whatever the Shaddler elders might pretend.

Bellis realized wryly that she was tense to see what would happen. Excited.

When the first three fighters were ferried over to the arena, the crowd fell silent. The scabmettler men stepped onto the platform, naked except for loincloths, and stood in a triangle back-to-back in the center.

They were poised, all of them well muscled, their grey skin pallid in the gas jets.

One of the men seemed to be facing her directly. He must have been blinded by the lights, but still she entertained the fancy that it was a private performance for her.

The fighters kneeled and washed themselves, each from a bowl of steaming infusion the color of green tea. Bellis saw leaves and buds in it.

Then she started. From their bowls each man had pulled out a knife. They held them still and dripping. They were recurved, the cutting edge curling like a hook or a talon. Skinning knives. Something with which to score, to pare off flesh.

“Is that what they fight with?” she turned to Silas to ask, but the sudden mass gasp from the crowd pulled her attention back to the stage. Her own cry came an instant later.

The scabmettlers were carving furrows in their own flesh.

The fighter right before Bellis was tracing the outlines of his muscles in wicked strokes. He hooked the knife under the skin of his shoulder, then curled around with surgical precision, drawing a red line that linked deltoid and biceps.

The blood seemed to hesitate for a second, then to blossom, an eructation of it, bursting out from the fissure like boiling water, pouring out of him in great gouts, as if the pressure in his veins was immeasurably greater than in Bellis’. It raced across the man’s skin in a macabre slick, and he turned his arm expertly this way and that, channeling his own blood according to some design Bellis could not see. She watched, waiting for a cascade of gore to foul the stage, which did not happen, and her breath stopped in her throat as she saw that the blood was setting.

It poured in great oozing washes from the man’s wounds, the substance of the blood crawling over itself to reach higher, and she saw that the edges of the wound were crusted with embankments of clotting blood, vast accretions of the stuff, the red turning swiftly brown and blue and black, and freezing in crystalline jags that jutted inches from his skin.

The blood that ran down his arm was setting also, expanding at an impossible rate and changing color like vivid mold. Shards of scab matter frosted into place like salt or ice.

He dipped his knife again in the green liquid and continued to cut, as did his fellows behind him. He grimaced against the pain. Where he sliced the blood exploded, and coursed along the runnels in his anatomy, and set hard in an abstract armor.

“The liquid’s an infusion that slows coagulation. It allows them to shape the armor,” Silas whispered to Bellis. “Each warrior perfects his own pattern of cuts. That’s part of their skill. Quick-moving men cut themselves and direct the blood so as to leave their joints free, and they pare off excess armor. Slow, powerful ones coat themselves in scab until they’re as clumsy and heavily armored as constructs.”

Bellis did not want to speak.

The men’s grisly, careful preparations took time. Each of them sliced in turn at his face and chest and belly and thighs, and grew a unique integument of dried blood: hardened cuirasses and greaves and vambraces and helmets with irregular edges and coloration; random extrusions like lava flows, organic and mineral at once.

The laborious act of cutting turned Bellis’ stomach. The sight of that armor so carefully cultivated in pain astounded her.

After that cruel and beautiful preparation, the fight itself was as dull and unpleasant as Bellis had thought it would be.

The three scabmettlers circled each other, each wielding two fat scimitars. Encumbered by their bizarre armor, they looked like animals in outlandish plumage. But the armor was harder than wax-boiled leather, deflecting strokes from the weighted swords. After a long, sweaty battering, a clot of the stuff fell free from the forearm of one fighter, and the quickest man slashed out at him.

But scabmettler blood provided another defense. As the man’s flesh parted, his blood gushed out and over his enemy’s blade. Unthinned by anticoagulant, it set almost instantly as it met the air, in an ugly, unsculpted knot that grasped the scimitar’s metal like solder. The wounded man bellowed and spun, ripping the sword out of his opponent’s hand. It juddered absurdly in his wound.

The third man stepped in and cut his throat.

He moved with speed, at such an angle that although his blade was spattered with quick-setting gore, it was not trapped by the glacier of blood that bloomed and froze in the ragged hole.

Bellis was holding her breath with shock, but the defeated man did not die. He fell to his knees in obvious pain, but the rime of scab had immediately sealed his wound, saving him.

“You see how hard it is for them to die on that arena?” murmured Silas. “If you want to kill a scabmettler, use a club or a bludgeon, not a blade.” He looked briefly around him and then spoke intensely and quietly, his voice muffled by the spectators. “You’ve got to try to learn things, Bellis. You want to defeat Armada, don’t you? You want out? So you have to know where you are. Are you accumulating knowledge? Godspit, trust me, Bellis; this is what I do. Now you know how not to try to kill a scabmettler, right?”

She stared at him, eyes widening in astonishment, but his brutal logic made sense. He committed to nothing and collated everything. She imagined him doing the same thing in High Cromlech and The Gengris and Yoraketche, hoarding money and information and ideas and contacts, all of it raw material, all of it potentially a weapon or a commodity.

He was, she realized uneasily, more serious, far more serious, than she. He was preparing and planning all the time.

“You have to know,” he said. “And there’s more to come. There are some people you need to know.”

There were other scabmettler fights, all with their oddly stunted savagery: varieties of scab armor, different styles of combat all executed with the stylized movements and ostentation of mortu crutt.

And there were other contests, between humans and cactacae and all the nonaquatic races of the city-displays of stampfighting.

Combatants used the bottom of their clenched fists, as if they were banging a tabletop-a blow called a hammerpunch. They did not kick with the front of the foot but stamped with the base. They swept and pulled and tripped and slammed, moving with quick and jerky sinuosity.

Bellis watched minutes and minutes of broken noses, bruises, blackouts. The bouts blurred into one. She tried to see possibilities in everything, tried to hoard what she saw, as she sensed Silas was doing.

Little waves lapped over the edges of the stage, and she wondered when this display would end.

Bellis heard a rhythmic, pounding sound in the crowd.

At first it was a murmur, a repeated murmur that beat below the susurrus of the spectators like a heartbeat. But it gathered strength, and became louder and more insistent, and people began to look around and to smile, and to join their voices to it with increasing excitement.

“Yes…” said Silas, stretching out the word with a hard delight. “Finally. This is what I wanted to see.”

At first Bellis heard the sound like it was drums, spoken drums. Then suddenly as an exclamation-Oh, Oh, Oh-repeated in perfect time, accompanied by banging arms and kicking feet.

It was only when the frenzy spread to her own boat that she realized it was a word.

“Doul.” It came from all around her. “Doul, Doul, Doul.”

A name.

“What are they saying?” she hissed to Silas.

“They’re calling for someone,” he said, his eyes scanning the surrounds. “They want a display. They’re demanding a fight from Uther Doul.”

He gave her a quick, cold smile.

“You’ll recognize him,” he said. “You’ll know him when you see him.”

And then the percussion of the name broke down into cheers and applause, an ecstatic wave of it that grew and grew as one of the little dirigibles tethered to the rigging cast off and drew slowly closer to the stage. Its crest was a steamer against a red moon, the sigil of Garwater. The gondola below it was polished wood.

“It’s the Lovers’ carriage,” Silas said. “They’re giving up their lieutenant for a moment, another ‘spontaneous’ display. I knew he couldn’t resist.”

Sixty feet above the arena, a rope spilled down from the airborne craft. The shrieks from the spectators were extraordinary. With great speed and skill, a man leaped from the vessel and slipped, hand over hand, to the blood-spattered fighting ground.

He stood, shoeless and bare-chested, wearing only a pair of leather britches. With his arms relaxed by his sides he rotated slowly to take in the crowd (frenzied now that he had touched down to fight). And as he turned his face swept slowly over Bellis’, and she gripped the rail in front of her, her breath catching momentarily, recognizing the crop-haired man, the man in grey, the murderer who had taken Terpsichoria.

By some goading, a clutch of men were blandished into fighting him.

Doul-the sad-faced butcher of Captain Myzovic-did not move, did not stretch or bounce or pull his muscles this way or that. He merely stood waiting.

Four opponents stood ill at ease on the edge of the arena. They were buoyed on the audience’s enthusiasm, shouts and raging washing over them as they shifted and murmured tactics to each other.

Doul’s face was set absolutely blank. When his rivals fanned out opposite him, he dropped slowly into stampfighting stance, his arms slightly raised, his knees bent, looking quite relaxed.

In the first brutal, astonishing seconds, Bellis did not even breathe. One hand to her mouth, her lips pursed shut. Then she emitted little gasps of astonishment with the rest of the crowd.

Uther Doul did not seem to live in the same time as anyone else. He seemed like some visitor to a world much more gross and sluggish than his own. Despite the bulk of his body, he moved with such speed that even gravity seemed to operate more quickly for him.

There was nothing spare to his movements. As he shifted from stamp to hammerpunch to block, his limbs slipped from one poise, one state, to the next by the most utterly seamless and pared-down routes, like machines.

Doul slapped open-handed, and one man went down; he stepped sideways and, poised on one leg, kicked twice to another’s solar plexus, then used the raised leg to block the attack of the third. He spun and shoved without flourish, with brutal precision, dispatching his rivals at his ease.

He took the last one with a throw, scooping his arm from the air and hugging it tight to him, pulling the man after his trapped limb. Doul seemed to roll through the air, preparing his body as he fell, landing astride the other’s back, pinioning his arm and immobilizing him.

There was a long silence, and then a rapture burst from the crowd like blood from a scabmettler, a tide of applause and cheers.

Bellis watched, and went cold, and held her breath again.

The fallen men raised themselves, or were dragged off, and Uther Doul stood, breathing heavily but rhythmically, his arms held very slightly out, the ridges of his muscles running with sweat and other men’s blood.

“The Lovers’ guard,” said Silas amid the audience’s frenzy. “Uther Doul. Scholar, refugee, soldier. Expert in probability theory, in Ghosthead history, and in fighting. The Lovers’ guard, their second, their assassin and strong-arm and champion. That’s what you had to see, Bellis. That is what’s trying to stop us leaving.”

They left and walked the winding nightlit pathways of Thee-And-Thine toward Shaddler, and Garwater and the Chromolith.

Neither spoke.

At the end of Doul’s fight, Bellis had seen something that had brought her up short and made her afraid. As he had turned, his hands clawed, his chest taut and heaving, she had seen his face.

It was stretched tight, every muscle straining, into a glare of feral savagery unlike anything she had ever seen on a human being.

Then a second later, with his bout won, he had turned to acknowledge the crowd and had looked once more like a contemplative priest.

Bellis could imagine some fatuous warrior code, some mysticism that abstracted the violence of combat and allowed one to fight like a holy man. And equally she could imagine tapping into savagery, letting atavistic viciousness take over in a berserker fugue. But Doul’s combination stunned her.

She thought of it later, as she lay in her bed, listening to light rain. He had readied and recovered himself like a monk, fought like a machine, and seemed to feel it like a predatory beast. That tension frightened her, much more than the combat skills he had shown. Those could be learned.

Bellis helped Shekel through books that grew more complex by the hour. When they separated she left him exploring the children’s section again, and went back to the rooms where Silas waited for her.

They drank tea and talked about New Crobuzon. He seemed sadder, quieter than usual. She asked him why, and he would only shake his head. There was something tentative about him. For the first time since meeting him, Bellis felt something like pity or concern for him. He wanted to tell or ask her something, and she waited.

She told him what Johannes had said to her. She showed him the naturalist’s books and explained how she was trying to piece together Armada’s secret from those volumes, without ever knowing which were important, or what within them might be clues.

At half-past eleven, after an extended silence, Silas turned to her. “Why did you leave New Crobuzon, Bellis?” he asked.

She opened her mouth, and all her usual evasions came to her throat, but she remained silent.

“You love New Crobuzon,” he continued. “Or… is that the best way to put it? You need New Crobuzon. You can’t let it go, so it doesn’t make sense. Why would you leave?”

Bellis sighed, but the question did not go away.

“When were you last in New Crobuzon?” she said.

“More than two years ago,” he calculated. “Why?”

“Did word reach you, when you were in The Gengris… Did you ever hear of the Midsummer Nightmare? The Dream Curse? Sleeping Sickness? Nocturne Syndrome?”

He was flicking his hand vaguely, trying to catch the memory. “I heard something from a merchant, a few months back…”

“It was about six months ago,” she said. “Tathis, Sinn… Summer. Something happened. Something went wrong with… with the nights.” She shook her head vaguely. Silas was listening without scepticism. “I still have no idea what it was-it’s important you know that.

“Two things happened. Nightmares. That was the first thing. People were having nightmares. And I mean everybody was having nightmares. It was as if we’d all… breathed bad air, or something.”

The words were inadequate. She remembered the exhaustion and the misery, the weeks of dreading sleep. The dreams that woke her screaming and weeping hysterically.

“The other thing. There was a… a disease, or something. People were being afflicted all over the place. All races. It did something… It killed the mind, so there was nothing left but the body. People would be found in the morning, in the streets or in bed or whatever, alive, but… mindless.”

“And the two were linked?”

She glanced at him and nodded, then shook her head. “I don’t know. Nobody knows, but it seems so. And one day it all stopped, all of a sudden. People had been talking about martial law, about the militia coming out openly onto the streets… It was a crisis. I’m telling you it was horrendous. It arrived for no reason. It ruined our sleep and stole hundreds of peoples’ minds away-they were never cured-and then suddenly it went. For no reason.”

She went on eventually. “After it quieted, there were rumors… There were a thousand rumors about what had happened. Daemons, Torque, biological experiments gone wrong, a new strain of vampirism…? No one knew. But there were certain names that came up again and again. And then in early Octuary, people I knew began to disappear.

“At first I just heard some story about some friend of a friend whom no one could find. Then, a little while later, there was another, and another. I wasn’t yet worrying. No one was. But they never reappeared. And they got closer to me. The first person to go I barely knew. The second I’d seen at a party some months before. The third was someone I worked with at the university, and drank with now and then. And the rumors about the Midsummer Nightmare, the names began to get whispered a bit louder, and I heard them again and again, until… until one name came out loudest. One person was being blamed; a person who linked everyone who was disappearing to me.

“His name was der Grimnebulin. He’s a scientist and a… a renegade, I suppose. There was money on his head-you know how the militia puts the word out, all hints and pass-it-ons, so no one knew how much or for what. But it was understood that he was gone, and that the government was keen to find him.

“And they were coming for the people who knew him: colleagues, acquaintances, friends, lovers.” She held Silas’ gaze bleakly. “We’d been lovers. Godspit, four, five years ago. We’d not even spoken for probably two. He’d taken up with a khepri, I heard.” She shrugged. “Whatever he’d done, the Mayor’s boys were trying to find him. And I could see it was soon my turn to disappear.

“I was paranoid, but I was right to be. I was avoiding going to work, I was avoiding the people I knew, and I realized I was waiting to be taken. The militia,” she spoke with sudden zeal, “were fucking predatory in those months.

“We’d been close, Isaac and me. We’d lived together. I knew the militia would want me. And maybe they did let some of the people they questioned go, but I never heard from any of them again. And whatever questions they wanted to ask, I had no answers. Gods knew what they’d have done to me.”

It had been a forlorn, miserable time. Never one with many close friends, those that she had she had been too afraid to seek, in case of incriminating them, or in case they had been bought. She remembered her frantic preparations, her furtive deals and dubious sanctuaries. New Crobuzon had been a dreadful place then, she remembered. Oppressive and coldly tyrannical.

“So I made plans. I realized… I realized that I had to leave. I had no money and no contacts in Myrshock or Shankell; I had no time to organize. But the government pays you to go to Nova Esperium.” Silas began to nod slowly. Bellis jerked her head in a desultory laughing motion. “So one branch of government was hunting me, while another was processing my application to leave and discussing pay. That’s the advantage of bureaucracy. But I didn’t have long to play games like that with them, so I took passage on the first ship I could. I learnt Salkrikaltor Cray to do it.

“Two years? Three?” She shrugged. “I didn’t know how long it would be till I’d be safe. Ships come from home at least annually to Nova Esperium. My contract was five years, but I’ve broken contracts before. I thought I’d stay until they forgot, till some other public enemy or crisis or whatever took over their attention. Until I got word that it was safe to go back-there are people who know where… where I was going.” She had been about to say where I am. “And so…” she concluded.

They looked at each other for a long time.

“So that’s why I ran away.”

Bellis thought of the people she had left, the few people she had trusted, and was suddenly and briefly overwhelmed by how much she missed them.

These were strange circumstances. She was a fugitive, eager, desperate to return to the place she had fled. Well, she thought, in all plans, circumstances intervene. She smiled with cold humor. I tried to leave the city for a year or two, and circumstances intervened-some things happened-and instead I find myself trapped for the rest of my life as a librarian in an itinerant pirate city.

Silas was subdued. He seemed moved by what she had told him, and she studied him and knew that he was thinking over his own story. Neither of them were self-pitying. But they had come to be here through no fault or design of their own, and they did not wish to stay.

There were minutes more silence within the room. Outside, of course, the subdued puttering from the hundreds of engines that dragged them south continued. And the glottals of waves continued; and the other sounds-city noise, night noise.

When Silas rose to leave, Bellis came with him to the door, sticking quite close by him, though she did not touch or look at him. He paused at her entrance and met her eyes, melancholy. There was a long second, and then they bent in to each other, his arms on the door, hers unmoving by her sides, committing to nothing.

They kissed, and only their lips and tongues moved. They were carefully poised, so as not to breathe, or to encroach too far on the other with touches or sound, but finding a connection nonetheless, warily and with relief.

When their long and deep kiss broke, Silas risked moving his lips gently as they parted, finding her again with a little succession of mouth-to-mouth touches; and she allowed him that, even though that first moment was passed and these tiny codas took place in real time.

Bellis breathed slowly and looked at him steadily, and he at her, for just as long as they would have done anyway, and he opened the door and walked out into the cool, speaking his goodnight quietly, not hearing her echo.