The Scar

Chapter Twenty-two

Thirty-six hours after the aerostat had risen over Armada and headed away to the southwest, land began to appear beneath them.

Bellis had slept little. She was not tired, however, and rose before five on the second morning to watch the dawn from the stateroom.

When she entered, there were others already awake and watching: several of the crewmen, Tintinnabulum and his companions, and Uther Doul. Her heart sank a little at the sight of him. She found his manner-even more reserved and measured than her own-troubling, and she did not understand his interest in her.

He noticed her and wordlessly indicated the windows.

In the sunless predawn light, rocks were breaking the water below. It was hard to judge the size or distance of the land formations. A scatter-pattern of stones like whales’ backs, none more than a mile across, few larger than Armada itself. Bellis could see no birds or animals-nothing but bleak brown rock and the green of scrubland.

“We’ll reach the island within the hour,” someone said.

The airship hummed with vague industry, with preparations that Bellis did not care to understand. She returned to her berth and packed quickly, then sat in the stateroom in her black clothes, her thick carpetbag at her feet. Deep within it, nestled in the folds of her spare skirts, was the little leather pouch and its contents that Silas Fennec had given her, along with the letter she was writing.

The crew were walking quickly back and forth, barking incomprehensible orders to each other. Those of them who were not working congregated by the windows.

The airship had descended considerably. They were only a thousand feet or so above the water, and the face of the sea had grown more intricate. Its wrinkles had resolved themselves into wave shapes and foam and currents, and the darknesses and colors of reefs and weed forests-and was that a wreck?-below.

The island was ahead of them. Bellis shivered to see it, laid out so stark in the hot sea. It stretched perhaps thirty miles long and twenty across. It was jagged with dust-colored peaks and little mountains.

“Sunshit, I didn’t think I’d have to see this place again!” said Hedrigall in Sunglari-accented Salt. He pointed at the island’s farthest shore. “There’s more than a hundred and fifty miles between it and Gnurr Kett,” he continued. “They’re not strong in the air, the anophelii. Couldn’t last more than sixty miles. That’s why the Kettai let them live, and trade with them through the likes of me and my old comrades, knowing they’ll never make the mainland. That-” He jerked a thick green thumb. “-is a ghetto.”

The dirigibles were slanting, skirting the coastline. Bellis watched the island intently. There was nothing to see, no life apart from plants. With a sudden chill, Bellis realized that the skies were empty. There were no birds. Every other island they had passed had been a mass of shifting feathered bodies, the rocks that edged it smeared with guano. The gulls had surrounded every landmass in a little gusting corona, swooping to take fish from the warm seas, squabbling on thermals.

The air above the anophelii island’s volcanic cliffs was as dead as bone.

The aerostat passed over silent ocher hills. The inlands were hidden by a ridge of rock, a spine that ran parallel to the coast. There was a long silence broken only by the engines and the wind, and when someone finally did speak-shouting “Look!”-the sound seemed intrusive and defensive.

It was Tanner Sack, pointing at a little crabgrass meadow nestling in rocks, sheltered from the waves. The green was broken by a little clutch of moving white specks.

“Sheep,” said Hedrigall after a moment. “We’re nearing the bay. There must have been a delivery recently. There’ll be a few herds of them left for a while longer.”

The shape and nature of the coastline was changing. The stone spines and jags were giving way to lower, less antagonistic geography. There were short beaches of black shale; slopes of hard earth and ferns; low, bleached trees. Once or twice, Bellis saw farmyard animals, wandering feral: pigs, sheep, goats, cattle. Just a very few of them, here and there.

Inland a mile or two, there were ribbons of grey water, sluggish rivers oozing from the hills, intersecting and crisscrossing the island. The waters slowed over plateaus of flat land and burst their banks, diffusing and becoming pools and swampland, feeding white mango trees, vines, greenery as thick and cloying as vomit. In the distance, on the other edge of the island, Bellis saw stark shapes that she thought were ruins.

Below her there was motion.

She tried to track whatever it was, but it was too fast, too erratic. She was left with nothing more than an impression fleeting across her eye. Something had skated through the air, emerging from some dark hole in the rocks and entering another.

“What do they trade?” said Tanner Sack, without looking away from the landscape. “The sheep and pigs and whatnot get left here: your lot bring them and other stuff in from Dreer Samher, for the Kettai. What’s in it for them? What do the anophelii trade?”

Hedrigall stood back from the window and gave a curt laugh. “Books and intelligence, Tanner, man,” he said. “And flotsam and jetsam, driftwood, bits and pieces they find on the beach.”

There was more motion in the air below the dirigible, but Bellis simply could not focus on whatever it was that moved. She bit her lip, frustrated and nervous. She knew she was not imagining things. There was really only one thing the shapes could be. She was perturbed that no one else had mentioned them. Don’t they see? she thought. Why does no one say anything? Why don’t I?

The dirigible slowed, moving against a faint wind.

Surmounting a ridge of rockland, it was buffeted. There was an explosion of breath and whispers, incredulous excitement. Below them, in the shadows of hills patched barren and lush in random patterns, was a rocky bay. Anchored in the bay were three ships.

“We’re here,” Hedrigall whispered. “Those are Dreer Samher vessels. That’s Machinery Beach.”

The ships were galleons, ornately picked out in gold, surrounded, enclosed by cosseting rocks that jutted into the sea and curled around the natural harbor. Bellis realized she was holding her breath.

The sand and shale of the inlet’s beach was a dark red, dirty like old blood. It was broken by weirdly shaped boulders the size of torsos and houses. Bellis’ eyes skittered over the dark surface, and she saw trails, pathways scored in the matter of the shoreline. Beyond the boundary of stringy boscage that edged the beach, the trails became more defined. They entered rocky elevations that rose slowly from the earth to overlook the sea. The air was broken by heat waves where the sun baked the stone, and trees like olives and dwarf jungle species specked the slopes.

Bellis followed the trails winding up the scorched hillsides until (her breath stopping again) her eyes came to rest on a scattering of light-bleached houses, dwellings that extruded from the rocks like organic growth-the anophelii township.

There was no wind in the bay. There was a tiny grouping of clouds like paint dots around the sun, but heat blasted through them and reverberated around the enclosed rock walls.

There were no sounds of life. The tedious repetition of the sea seemed to underline the silence rather than break it. The dirigible hung quietly, its engines powered down. The Samheri boats creaked and shifted nearby. They were empty. No one had come to greet the airship.

Scabmettler guards in their bloodclot armor kept watch with cactacae as the passengers descended. Bellis touched land, crouching beside the rope ladder, and ran her fingers through the sand. Her breathing was quick and very loud in her head.

At first she was conscious of nothing but the novelty of being on ground that did not sway. She remembered her land-legs delightedly, only realizing at that moment that she had forgotten them. Then she became aware of her surroundings again, and felt the beach beneath her closely, and for the first time registered its strangeness.

She remembered the naive woodcuts in Aum’s book. The stylized monochrome of the man in profile on the beach, broken mechanisms around him.

Machinery Beach, she thought, and looked out across the dirty-red sand and scree.

Some way off were the shapes she had taken to be boulders- huge things the size of rooms, breaking up the shoreline. They were engines. Squat and enormous and coated with rust and verdigris, long-forgotten appliances for unknown purposes, their pistons seized by age and salt.

There were smaller rocks, too, and Bellis saw that these were shards of the larger machines, bolts and pipework junctions; or finer, more intricate, and complete pieces; gauges and glasswork and compact steam-power engines. The pebbles were gears, cogs, flywheels, bolts, and screws.

Bellis looked down at her cupped hands. They were full of thousands of minuscule ratchets and gear wheels and ossified springs, like the innards of inconceivably tiny clocks. Each particle of wreckage a grain like sand, hard and sun-warmed, smaller than a crumb. Bellis let them sift from her hands, and her fingers were stained the dark blood color of the shoreline-painted with rust.

The beach was an imitation, a found sculpture mimicking nature in the materials of the junkyard. Every atom from some shattered machine.

When does this age from? How old is this? What happened here? thought Bellis. She was too numb to feel any but the most tired awe. What disaster, what violence? She imagined the seafloor around the bay-a reclaimed reef of decaying industry, the contents of a city’s factories allowed to collapse, pounded by waves and sun, oxidizing, bleeding with rust, breaking into their constituent parts and then into smaller shards, thrown back by the water onto the island’s edge, evolving into this freakish shore.

She picked up another handful of machine-sand, let it dissipate. She could smell the metal.

This is the flotsam Hedrigall meant, she realized. This is a graveyard of dead devices. There must be millions of secrets moldering here into rust-dust. They must sift through it, and scrub it clean, and offer the most promising bits for trade-two or three pieces picked randomly from a thousand-piece puzzle. Opaque and impenetrable, but if you could put it together, if you could make sense of it, what might you have?

She stumbled away from the rope ladder, listening to the crunch of ancient engines underfoot.

As the last of the passengers descended, the guards kept careful watch on the horizon, muttering. A little way from Bellis, the pen of livestock had been winched to the ground. It stank like a farmyard, and its inhabitants sounded noisily and stupidly into the still air.

“Close together and listen to me,” said the Lover harshly, and she was surrounded. The engineers and scientists had been scattering, dumbly running their fingers through the metal shale. A few, like Tanner Sack, had gone to the sea. (He had submerged briefly, with a sigh of pleasure.) For a moment, there was no sound except little breakers foaming on the rust shore.

“Now listen, if you want to live,” the Lover went on. People shifted, uneasy. “It’s a mile or two to the village, up those rocks overlooking this place.” They gazed up at them; the hillside looked empty. “Keep together. Take the weapon issued to you, but don’t use it unless you’re in immediate danger of your life. There are too many of us here, and too many untrained, and we don’t want to start shooting each other in panic. We’ll be flanked by cactacae and scabmettler guards, and they know how to use what they’re carrying, so hold fire wherever possible.

“The anophelii are fast,” she said. “Famined, and dangerous. You remember the briefings, I hope, so you know what we face. The menfolk are somewhere in that village, and we have to find them. A little way over there are the swamplands, and the waters. Where the women live. And if they hear or smell us, they’ll come. So move quickly. Is everybody ready?”

She indicated with her arms, and cactacae guards corralled them. They unlocked the animal pen, still attached like an anchor to the Trident by its chains. Bellis raised her eyebrow on seeing that the pigs and sheep wore collars and strained against leashes. The muscular cactacae held them in check.

“Then let’s go.”

It was a nightmarish journey from Machinery Beach to the hillside township. When it was done, and she thought back on it, days or weeks later, Bellis found it impossible to distinguish events into any coherent stream. There was no sense of time in her memories, nothing but snippets of images pieced into something like a dream.

There is the heat, which clots the air around her and stops up her pores and her eyes and ears, and the rich smell of rot and sap; insects in relentless profusion, stinging and licking. Bellis has been given a flintlock, and (she remembered) holds it away from herself as if it stinks.

She is herded, shuffling with the other passengers-the solitary hotchi’s spines bristling and relaxing in nervous alternation, the khepri headlegs squirming-surrounded by those whose physiognomy makes them safe: the cactacae and the scabmettlers, who drag the livestock after them. The one group is bloodless, the other full of blood so sensitive it protects them. They carry guns and rivebows. Uther Doul is the only human guard. He holds weapons in each hand, and Bellis would swear that whenever she looks at him they have changed: knife and knife; gun and knife; gun and gun.

Looking out over the vine-smothered rocks and into clearings, down inland, over slopes of dense foliage and pools that look as thick as snot. Hearing sounds. Bursts of motion in the leaves, at first; nothing more offensive. But then the start of a horrible keening, impossible to pinpoint, as if the air itself is in pain.

The proliferation of that sound, all around them.

Bellis and her neighbors bump into each other, clumsy with terror and exhaustion and the wet heat, trying to watch all sides at once, and seeing the first signs of movement, shapes zigzagging through the trees like buffeted dust motes, always getting closer, an unstable mix of random motion and malign intent.

And then the first of the she-anophelii breaks the cover of the trees, running.

Like a woman bent double and then bent again against the grain of her bones, crooked and knotted into a stance subtly wrong. Her neck twisted too far and hard, her long bony shoulders thrown back, her flesh worm-white and her huge eyes open very wide, utterly emaciated, her breasts empty skin rags, her arms outstretched like twists of wire. Her legs judder insanely fast as she runs until she falls forward but does not hit the ground, continues toward them, just above the earth, her arms and legs dangling ungainly and predatory, as (Gods and Jabber and fuck) wings open on her back and take her weight, giant mosquito wings, nacreous paddles shudder into motion with that sudden vibrato whine, moving so fast they cannot be seen, and the terrible woman seems borne toward them below a patch of unclear air.

What happened next came back to Bellis again and again in memories and dreams.

Gazing hungrily, the mosquito-woman stretches her mouth open, spewing slaver, lips peeled back from toothless gums. She retches, and with a shocking motion a jag snaps from her mouth. A spit-wet proboscis, jutting a foot from her lips.

It extrudes from her in an organic movement, something like vomiting, but unmistakably and unsettlingly sexual. It seems to come from nowhere: her throat and head do not look long enough to contain it. She veers toward them on screaming wings, and from the undergrowth come others.

Memories were blurry. Bellis remained sure of the heat, and of what she had seen, but the immediacy of the images shocked her whenever she thought back. The landing party almost breaks up in sudden terror, and random shots are fired in dangerous, chaotic directions (Doul barking angrily hold fire).

Bellis sees the first of the flitting mosquito-women skirting the cactacae, uninterested in them. They fly instead for the scabmettler guards, alighting on them (the muscular men moving only slightly under the weight of the fatless winged women), stabbing mindlessly at them with their lancelike mouthparts, unable to penetrate the scabs that armor them. Bellis hears the snap of cut leashes as the terrified pigs and sheep scatter in a trail of shit and dust.

There are ten or twelve of the mosquito-women now (so many so quickly), and as the livestock bolt they turn instantly to that easier prey. They rise on those thin wings, their heads hunkered, their hips and limbs loose beneath them, dangling in the air like puppets suspended from their elongated shoulderblades, their dark proboscises still wet and extended; and they descend on the petrified animals. They overtake them easily, descending with their half-random motion to block their paths and intercept them, their arms outstretched, their fingers wide, tugging hold of hair and skin. Bellis watches (she remembered moving backward inexpertly, constantly, stumbling over the feet of those around her but staying upright through force of horror), aghast and hypnotized, as the first of the she-anophelii moves in to feed.

The woman-thing straddles a huge sow, pulling herself out of the air and wrapping her limbs around it as if it is a loved toy. Her head draws back, and the long mouth-jag extends a few inches extra, as smooth as a crossbow quarrel. Then the mosquito-woman jerks her face forward, her stretched-open mouth twisting, and she slams the proboscis into the body of the animal.

The pig screams and screams. Bellis still watches (her legs taking her away from that sight, but her eyes staying desperately fixed on it). The pig’s legs give way in sudden shock as its skin is punctured, as six, ten, twelve inches of chitin ease through the resistance of skin and muscle and infiltrate the deepest parts of its bloodstream. The mosquito-woman straddles the collapsed animal and pushes her mouth into it, and grinds her proboscis deep, and tenses her body (every muscle and tendon and vein visible through the shrunken skin) and begins to suck.

For a few seconds, the pig continues to scream. And then its voice gives out.

It is thinning.

Bellis can see it shrink.

Its skin shifts uneasily and begins to wrinkle. The tiniest trickles of blood ooze out from the imperfect seal where the anophelii mouthparts puncture it. Bellis watches in disbelief, but it is not her imagination-the pig is shrinking. Its legs kick with spastic terror, and then with the judder of dying nerves as its extremities are drained. Its fat shanks are compressing as its innards shrivel, drying. Its skin is well creased now, in tides and ridges all over its diminishing body. The color is leaving it.

And as the blood and health disappear from the sow, they enter the mosquito-woman.

Her belly swells. She attached herself to the pig a husk, gaunt and malnourished. As the pig lessens, she grows, becoming fatter at an astonishing rate, color flooding her from her distending stomach outward. She moves oily on the dying animal, growing sluggish and replete.

Bellis watches with sick fascination as the pints of pig blood pass fast through that bony fletch, rushing from one body into another.

The pig is dead now, its rucked skin sinking into new valleys between its drained muscles and its bones. The anophelius is fat and pinking. Her arms and legs have nearly doubled in girth, and the skin is now stretched around them. The swelling is mostly concentrated on her bosoms and belly and arse, which are obese now, but not soft like human fat. They look tumorous: taut, gore-swelled, and pendulous growths.

All around the clearing, the same is happening to the other animals. Some are adorned with one woman, some with two. All are shriveling, as if sun-dried and desiccated, and all the anophelii are growing gross and tight with blood.

It has taken that first mosquito-woman a minute and a half to suck the last of the liquid from the pig (Bellis could never shake the memories of that sight, or of the little sounds of the woman-thing’s satisfaction).

The anophelius rolls from the animal’s shrunken carcass, sleepy-eyed, drooling a little blood as her proboscis retracts. She withdraws, leaving the pig a sack of tubes and bone.

The hot air around Bellis is thick now with the stink of spew as her companions lose control of themselves at the sight of the anophelii feeding. Bellis does not vomit, but her mouth twists violently and she feels herself raising her pistol in what does not feel like anger or fear, but disgust.

But she does not fire. (And what would have happened if someone untrained as she had pulled the trigger? Bellis wondered much later, looking back.) The danger seems to have passed. The Armadans are moving on up the hill, past that little clearing and the smells of dung and hot blood, past more rocks and pestilential water, toward the township they had seen from the air.

The sequence of events became less blurred, less mashed together by heat and fear and disbelief. But then, at that point, at that moment, as Bellis retreated from that hot carnage of pig and sheep blood and drained offal, the repulsive frenzy of the anophelii repast and then (worse) their bloated torpor, a mosquito-woman looked up from the sheep she had arrived at too late to drain and saw their retreat. She hunched her shoulders and flew dangling toward them, her mouth agape and her proboscis dripping, her stomach only a little swelled by her sisters’ leftovers, eager for fresh meat, angling past the cactacae and scabmettler guards and bearing down on the terrified humans, her wings awail.

Bellis felt herself jerked by fear back toward that confused trash of disjointed images, and she saw Uther Doul step forward calmly into the mosquito-woman’s path, raise his hands (carrying two guns now) and wait until she was nearly upon him, till her mouthparts jutted at his face and he fired.

Heat and noise and black lead exploded from his weapons and burst the mosquito-woman’s stomach and face.

Even half-empty as she was, the woman’s gut split audibly, in a great gout of blood. She collapsed from the air, her shattered face runnelling in the dirt, her proboscis still extended, a greasy red slick soaking rapidly into the earth. Her body came to rest in front of Doul.

Bellis was back in linear time. She felt stunned, but remote from what she saw. Some yards away, the gorged anophelii did not notice their fallen sister. As the landing party turned on the steep path and headed into the foothills, the mosquito-women were beginning to haul their newly heavy bodies away from the now-bloodless carnage they left to rot. Swollen as grapes, they hung below their malevolently piping wings and flew slowly back toward their jungle.