The Scar

Chapter Forty-three

The avanc is sick.

Trying to continue its mindless motion at the rockmilk engine’s command, it slows and slows. It is-what? Bleeding, wounded? Fevered? Chafed sore by the alien reality around it? Too mute or stupid or obedient to feel or show its pain, the avanc’s lesions are not healing. They are shedding their dead matter in suppurating clots that eddy free and drift up like oil, expanding as the crushing pressure lessens, enveloping and suffocating fish and weed, until what breaks the waves with a mucal slurp is a noisome coagulate of infection and smothered sea-life.

Somewhere between two and three thousand miles into the Hidden Ocean, the avanc is sick.

A few miles clear of the repulsive pus-flats, the avanc came to a stop.

Desperately, signals from the rockmilk engine were increased, sent down repeatedly, but there was no response. The avanc was absolutely still.

It hovered, static, unable or unwilling to move, miles down.

And when everything that the avanc’s protectors and doctors knew how to do had been done, and nothing had happened; when all the different wavelengths had been tried to entice the great creature back into motion, and it had not responded; there was only one option left. The city could not be allowed to molder motionless.

The avanc was sick, and none of the scholars knew why. They would have to examine it, from close quarters.

Garwater’s bathyscaphos swung like an unwieldy pendulum from a crane on the Hoddling, a factory ship at the Grand Easterly’s bow. The submersible was a stubby sphere, broken by pipes and rivets, random extrusions in reinforced iron. Its engine bulged at its rear like a bustle. Handspan-thick glass fronted its four portholes and chymical lamp.

Engineers and work crews were hurriedly checking and refitting the deep-water vessel.

The crew of the bathyscaphos Ctenophore were preparing on the Hoddling’s deck, pulling on overalls and checking the books and treatises they had with them. A scabmettler pilot, Chion, her face puckered by the remnants of ritual cuts; Kruach Aum (and Bellis, watching, shook her head to see him, her erstwhile pupil, his tight sphincter-mouth dilating with agitation); and at the front, looking excited, proud, and terrified in equal parts, Johannes Tearfly.

He had no choice but to go-he more than anyone but Kruach Aum understood the avanc, and it was imperative that the creature be tended as expertly as possible. Bellis knew that Johannes would have gone even without the Lovers’ coercion.

“We’re going down,” he had explained to Bellis earlier, staring at her with the same expression he wore now, while he kitted up on the Hoddling’s deck. “We’re going to take a look. We have to cure it.” And if he looked aghast, he looked no less excited.

As a scientist, he was fascinated. She saw fear in him, but no foreboding. Bellis remembered him describing the scar he carried, where he was once gored by a sardula. He could be utterly craven, but his cowardice was only social. She had never seen him flinch from the dangers his research entailed. He did not balk now at this appalling commission.

“Well,” Bellis had said, carefully. “I’ll see you in a few hours, I suppose.” And Johannes was so excited that her measured voice, the careful neutrality of her tone, which undermined the meaning of her words and stressed the danger he was in, passed him by. He nodded naively and gripped her shoulder, an awkward gesture, then left.

The preparation took a long time. There was not much of a crowd around the city’s aft edge to watch them and see them off. The strained air of the city kept people away-it was not that they did not care, but they felt without energy, as if they were sucked dry.

Johannes glanced up toward the few onlookers and waved. Then he climbed into the cabin of the Ctenophore.

Bellis watched the hatch being screwed down tight on the cramped vessel. She watched the bathyscaphos being tugged up above the water, lurching sickeningly, and she remembered that same motion from when she had been lowered into Salkrikaltor City. A huge wheel on the Hoddling, reeling out reinforced rubberized cable, began to revolve as the deepwater submersible descended.

It touched the waters of the Hidden Ocean with a muted splash and sank below without pause. It would take at least three hours for the bathyscaphos to reach the avanc. Bellis watched the ripples from the disappearing submersible till she felt someone behind her and turned to face Uther Doul.

She set her mouth and waited. He studied her calmly and did not speak for several seconds.

“You’re worried for your friend,” he said. “The Grand Easterly is out of bounds during this emergency, but if you’d like, you can wait there for him to return.”

He took her to a small room at the rear of the Grand Easterly, whose porthole looked out over the Hoddling, which was suspending the submersible. Doul left her without a word, closing the door behind him. But he had taken her to a room more comfortable and better furnished than her own quarters and, five minutes after she arrived, one of the Garwater stewards brought her tea, unbidden.

Bellis sipped it as she watched the water. She was bewildered and untrusting. She did not understand why Doul was indulging her.

At first it was merely warm in the tiny spherical cabin of the Ctenophore, with three breathing bodies pushed together. They crushed each other uncomfortably, negotiating around each other’s arms and legs to peer through the little portholes.

The light fell away with astonishing speed, and Johannes checked this waning visibility with nervous fascination. They descended by one of the great chains that tethered the avanc, slipping past one massive link after another, psoriatic with shellfish and generations of weed. Placid fish with eyes like cows’ investigated their light, peering in at the intruders on their way down, spiraling the tubes that fed them air, shying away from the bubbles their vessel exhaled.

As the light in the sea declined, the chain became baleful. Its black shafts plumbed almost vertically, plaiting one into the other in patterns that seemed suddenly obscure and sinister, the links suggestive as hieroglyphs.

At the edge of absolute darkness, the sea seemed absolutely still, uncut by the Hidden Ocean’s predatory currents. The crew did not speak. The cabin was now quite black. There were chymical lights and lanterns aboard, but they could not risk exhausting them during their descent-it was at the bottom that they must be able to see. So they sat, pressed together, in the most profound darkness any of them had ever experienced.

There was only the wheeze of breath and a faint percussion as they moved their cramped limbs and knocked them against metal or each other. The whisper of pumped air. The engine was not running-gravity took the vessel down.

Johannes listened to his own breath, and that of those around him, and realized that they were unconsciously synchronizing. Which meant that after every exhalation there was a pause, a moment when he could pretend for a fraction of a second that he was alone.

They were far beyond the sun’s reach now. They warmed the sea. Heat leached through from the boilers into the cabin, through the vessel’s metal skin into water that ate it hungrily.

Time could not survive this unbroken dark heat and monotonous susurrus of air and creaking leather and shifting skin. It was broken and bled. Its moments did not segue into each other, but were stillborn. I am out of time, Johannes thought.

For a shocking instant he felt claustrophobia like bile, but he held himself still and closed his eyes (uncomforted by the darkness he found there, no more or less profound than that he had shut out), swallowed, and defeated it. Stretching out his hand, Johannes found the glass of the porthole, and was shocked by its cold, condensation-wet surface-the water outside was like ice.

After uncountable minutes, the darkness outside was momentarily broken, and the crew gasped as time returned to them like an elyctric shock. Some living lamp was passing them by, some tentacular thing that inverted its body with a peristaltic wave, enveloping itself in its luminescent innards and shooting away, its austere glimmer snuffed out.

Chion ignited the lamp at the bathyscaphos’s front. It stuttered on, its phosphorous glow casting a cone of light. They could see its edges as clearly as if they were marble. There was nothing visible in the lamp’s field except a soup of minute detritus, particles that seemed to eddy upward as the Ctenophore plunged. There was nothing to see: no ocean floor, no life, nothing. That crushing emptiness they had illuminated depressed them more profoundly than the darkness. They descended unlit.

The iron carapace began to creak under the pressure. Every ten or twelve seconds there would be another sudden shuddering creak, as if the pressure increased in sudden, discrete zones.

The percussive stroke became stronger the lower they went, until suddenly Johannes realized that it was not just their own craft, not just the metal around them that shook, but the sea-the whole sea, the tons of water to all sides-vibrating, spasming with sympathetic shock, in echoes of the thunderous strokes rising from below.

The avanc’s heart.

When miles of wire had been played out by the huge wheel on the Hoddling, a safety catch snapped into place and halted their plunge. The Ctenophore jerked, buffeted by the arterial booming around them. The avanc’s heart felt solid through the metal.

Chion lit a lantern. The three bathynauts stared at each other’s sweat-moist, sepia faces. They looked grotesque, drowned in shadows. With every heartbeat that made the bathyscaphos tremble, a tic of fear and awe passed over every one of them. Darkness flickered around the close cabin, over its gauges and dials.

Chion began to work at the levers, pushing cards into the analytical engine by her side. There was a heart-stopping moment when nothing happened, and then the sphere began to shudder with the sound of its engines.

“It should be a couple of hundred yards below us,” said Chion. “We’ll take it slowly.”

With a puttering groan, the Ctenophore curved down, pulling toward the avanc.

The lamp flared into life again. The cold beam speared into the unceasing marine light. Johannes studied the water, its suspension of particles, and saw it judder with the avanc’s heart. His mouth was thick with saliva at the thought of the millions of tons of water eager to crush them.

Something became sensible below them, like a ghost. Johannes was chilled. They descended toward a great flat zone of lighter darkness-a ruptured, pebbled field that insinuated itself into visibility. At first utterly faint, it grew in solidity, its random, rugged contours sliding into sight in the phosphor beam. Slimed and rocky, it stretched out on all sides, broken by stains, lichen growths of the deepest sea. It harbored deepwater animal life. Johannes saw the faint flickerings of blind, eel-like hagfish; squat echurians; thick, blanched trilobites.

“We’re in the wrong place,” said Chion thickly. “We’re coming down above the ocean floor.” But as she spoke the last word her voice broke and became a trembled whisper as she realized her mistake. Johannes nodded with a kind of triumph and awe, like a man in the presence of his god.

The avanc’s heart beat again, and a huge ridge cracked the vista, reconfiguring it suddenly, rising twenty feet high, sending dust and muck particles spinning. The thick crest burst up across the surface of the gnarled plain, scoring as far as Ctenophore’s lamp could pierce, and branching, splitting into two or three, tracing pathways across the plateau.

It was a vein.

Filling with blood, pulsing, protruding, and sinking slowly back again.

The submersible was perfectly positioned. They were above the avanc’s back.

Even Kruach Aum, emotionless as he was, seemed stunned. They hunkered together and muttered for comfort.

The landscape below them was all beast.

The Ctenophore cruised slowly, twenty-five feet above the avanc’s surface, over a valley between two veins. Johannes gazed down through the dense water. He was mesmerized by the creature’s colors. He would have expected an anemic white, but the thing’s mottled hide contained striations in hundreds of shades, coiled in whorls as distinct as fingerprints: pebbled grey, reds, ocher.

In places the avanc’s skin was broken by jags that looked like rock or horn-whiskers reaching up around the Ctenophore like ossified trees. Chion steered the submersible carefully between them.

They passed over orifices. Puckered impurities in the avanc’s flesh that would suddenly and randomly dilate, open gaping pits, smooth-edged, pulsing tunnels into the interior of the carcass, lined with alveoli bigger than men.

The Ctenophore drifted like dust over the skin.

“What in the gods’ names are we doing?” Johannes whispered.

Kruach Aum was sketching rapidly, making notes, as Johannes stared at what he had helped conjure.

“We don’t have more than a couple of hours’ light,” said Chion anxiously.

The submersible edged up, over a little copse of those steeple-sized hairs, and descended again between two extrusions-maybe the ends of gills, or scars, or fins. The skinscape heaved and rippled with subcutaneous motion. Its contours were slowly changing, the plain sloping away and down.

“We’re coming to its flank,” said Johannes.

Quite suddenly the corium below them was precipitous, a callused dermal cliff into dense darkness. Johannes heard his breath come shaky as the avanc fell away and the Ctenophore descended by its side. Light played over strata of cells and parasitic life that were suddenly sheer beside them, an organic precipice.

The geography of their patient humbled them.

Wrinkles began to appear, scores of great rucks like the edges of tectonic plates, where the avanc’s skin rode over itself in slablike folds, curving to what might be a haunch, a paddle, or a tail.

“I think…” said Johannes, pointing for the others. “I think we’re coming to a limb.”

The water spasmed and was still, again and again. The corrugations of skin grew tighter. Here, with every beat of the avanc’s heart, great networks of the huge veins appeared, as intricate as shattered glass, tracing muscles like mountains. Crabs scuttled out of the light, into their burrows in the avanc’s skin.

There were impurities in the water. The lamp caught on a billow of opaque liquid like ink.

“What’s that?” whispered Johannes, and Kruach Aum wrote something down for him.

Blood.

The heart beat again, and the water was full of the dark stuff. It dissipated quickly, folding in all directions. The lamplight broke through the blood’s tentacles and glinted on something beyond: a hard, regular surface.

The bathynauts gasped. It was the massive iron edge of Armada’s harness. Crusted with the remains of limpets long-killed by pressure, and the rude life native to these deeps. One corner, one clasp, folding around the avanc’s body.

“Gods,” whispered Chion, “maybe it’s us. Maybe it’s just the buckles, the bridles-maybe they’ve been rasping it sore.”

The Ctenophore bobbed through currents of displaced blood, back over the avanc’s body. The blood welled up from behind hills in its hide.

“Look there!” shouted Johannes suddenly. “There!”

Twenty feet below them, the avanc’s skin was raw and seeping. It was like an excavation: a wide, ragged trench at least thirty feet deep and many yards long, curling into the darkness. Its inner walls were a crumbling mess of shattered cells fouled with the residue of that oily pus. Even as they watched, clots of the semiliquid broke away and began to rise, strings of matter stretching and snapping behind them.

In the deepest part of the gash, at its base, the phosphor illuminated a wet flesh-red.

“Jabber and fuck,” hissed Johannes. “No wonder it’s been slowed.”

Kruach Aum was scribbling madly, and he held up his paper to the lantern light. Is nothing, Johannes read. Think of avanc size. Must be more.

“Look,” hissed Chion. “The edges of that cut… they don’t meet the bridle. It’s not the metal that’s caused this.” There was a silence at that. “We’re missing something.”

The avanc’s lacerated epidermis rose to either side of them as they descended into the trench.

Like explorers in some lost river, they traced the wound toward its source.

The V of split flesh disappeared in sharp perspective before them, but was swallowed by darkness long before any vanishing point. With every heartbeat, a wash of blood welled up around them, blinding them for seconds till it evanesced.

There were small motions below them, and on either side, as scavengers ate at the exposed meat.

The submersible moved slowly in the shadows of this meat ravine. And everyone in the little bubble of metal and air thought and did not say, What did this?

They turned as the split turned, as hard corners of ruined skin reared before them. The Ctenophore swiveled in the water.

“Did you see something move?”

Chion’s face was white.

“There! There! Did you? Did you see it?”

Silence. The stroke of blood. Silence.

Johannes tried to see what Chion saw.

The gulch is widening. They are at the edge of a deep pit. Its base is blood and pus. It stretches out, a hollow scores of yards across. This is the avanc’s wound.

Something moves. Johannes sees it and cries out, and the others answer him.

There is motion in the blood below them.

“Oh dear gods,” he whispers, and his voice dies and becomes a thought. Oh gods. Something inevitable and very bad is unfolding.

The Ctenophore rocks, to more screams. Something buffets it.

A part of Johannes’ mind is frozen, and he thinks, We must find it and cure it, find what’s wrong and cure it, cut out what’s bad, cure it, but on top of that, and smothering it, a shock of fear descends as they enter the pit, the heart of the malady.

(It’s been in me since the waves closed over my head.)

The rotten blood below them is pulsing with strange tides. The submersible shudders again as something heavy hits it, unseen. Chion begins to keen.

Moving his head slowly, through time suddenly congealed, Johannes watches the scabmettler’s hands, as sluggish and clumsy as stumps, grappling with the controls, hauling backward, tugging to pull the vessel away; but it is hit again, and it eddies unsteadily.

Johannes hears himself shrieking with Chion to get out get out.

Something outside is knocking at the Ctenophore’s hatch.

Johannes cries out, staring aghast at the blood-plain below.

A dark harvest, a thicket of black flowers, has burst from it in the oscillating glare of the lamp, blossoms that thrust upward toward that cold false sun on thick stems, muscled and veined, that are not stems but arms, those are not flowers but hands; claws, crooked, and arms spread wide and predatory, and now chests and heads and bodies rise, shoved up from below the slick of blood where they have been gnawing and spitting venom.

Like spirits rising from graveyard earth, bodies are ascending, dissipating the blood with their tails, staring up at the newcomers with colossal eyes into which Johannes gazes with awe and horror. Their faces are fixed in unwitting grins that mock him, flesh scraps fluttering free from teeth bigger than his fingers.

They swim with the grace of eels toward the vessel, which rolls under their weight, which is borne down by their outstretched hands, whose portholes sway and face suddenly up, tipping the three within into each other, where they lie screaming, staring up and screaming in the dying lantern light at the faces at their windows, the scrabbling hands.

Johannes feels his mouth stretched wide, but he can hear nothing. His arms smash against the bodies of his crew, and they beat him in terrified turn, and he feels nothing.

The light pours up from the Ctenophore and is eaten by the abyss. Johannes watches the creatures press down on the portholes, and a rage of thoughts arc through him. These are the sickness, he keeps thinking hysterically. These are the sickness.

The sickness crowd around the submersible. They burst the phosphor lamp, which douses in a rush of bubbles, and now all that illuminates their distended faces is the faint yellow from the lantern within.

Johannes is staring up through the cabin into a pair of eyes outside, four miles below the sea. For a tiny fraction of a second he sees, absolutely vividly and clearly, how he must appear to those eyes, his own face bloodied from the tumbling and stark with lines and lantern light, his frozen, stricken expression.

He watches as the battered portholes vein. He watches the cracks crawl like busy things over and around each other, tracing pathways, riddling the glass until it creaks and the submersible shakes. He crawls backward from the ruined window, as if another handful of inches might save him.

As the Ctenophore stutters in its last moments, as the blood-smeared creatures and the sea outside eddy with hungry expectation, the lantern winks out, and in the middle of the heat and chaos and the three voices, three bodies fumbling together, Johannes is absolutely alone.