The Scar

Chapter Twenty-four

Tanner Sack missed the sea.

His skin was blistering in the heat, and his tentacles felt sore.

He had waited for most of a day as the Lover and Tintinnabulum and Bellis Coldwine and the others conversed with the silent anophelii men. He and his companions had muttered to each other, had chewed their biltong and tried without success to ask for fresher food from their curious, reserved hosts.

“Stupid arse-faced pricks,” Tanner heard from some hungry men.

The Armadans were traumatized by the starving ferocity of the she-anophelii. They were conscious that their hosts’ mates lurked in the air just beyond the walls, that the placid silence of the township outside was misleading-that they were trapped.

Some of Tanner’s companions made nervous jokes about the she-anophelii. “Women,” they said, and laughed shakily about females of all species being bloodsuckers, and so on.

Tanner tried, for the sake of conviviality, but he could not bring himself to laugh at their idiocies.

There were two camps in the big, austere chamber. On one side were the Armadans, and on the other the Dreer Samher cactacae. They watched each other warily. Captain Sengka was engaged in fierce Sunglari discussion with Hedrigall and two other Armadan cactus-people, and his crew watched and listened uncertainly. When, finally, Sengka and his crew stormed out, the Armadans relaxed. Hedrigall walked slowly to the wall and sat beside Tanner.

“Well, he don’t like me much,” he said, and grinned wearily. “Kept calling me a traitor.” He rolled his eyes. “But he’s not going to do anything stupid. He’s scared of Armada. I told him we’d be gone quickly, and that we’d brought nothing and we’d take nothing, but I also implied that if he cut up rough, he’d be declaring war. There ain’t going to be any trouble.”

After a time, Hedrigall noticed how Tanner was endlessly stroking his skin, how he licked his fingers and soothed it down. He left the big chamber, and Tanner was deeply touched when the cactus-man came back, fifteen minutes later, carrying three fat leather waterskins full of brine. Tanner drooled them over himself and sluiced the water through his gills.

Anophelii men came in and watched the Armadans. They nodded to each other, and hooted and whistled. Tanner watched the herbivorous men eat, forcing handfuls of garish flowers into their tight mouth orifices and sucking, with the same force, he supposed, with which their women drained living meat. Then they would eject the spent petals with a little burst of air, crushed and tissue-thin, drained of nectar and juices, colorless.

The Armadan crew were left to thirst and sweat for hours as the Lover and Tintinnabulum made plans. Eventually, Hedrigall and several other cactacae left the chamber, led by an anophelius.

The light that came through the shafts in the rock began to ebb away. Dusk came fast. Through the little rock slits, and in reflections in mirrors, Tanner could see that the sky was violet.

They were barracked uncomfortably wherever they sat and lay. The anophelii scattered reeds thickly around the room. The night was hot. Tanner removed his stinking shirt and folded it for a pillow. He doused himself in more brine and saw that, around the room, the other Armadans were also attempting what limited ablutions they could.

He had never been so tired. He felt as if every spark of energy had been sucked from him and replaced with the night heat. He rested his head on a makeshift pillow, damp with his own sweat, and even on that hard floor, that thin and ineffectual layer of vegetation (the smell of pollen and plant dust strong), he was very quickly asleep.

When he woke he thought it was only minutes later, but he saw the daylight and groaned miserably. His head ached, and he drank desperately from the jugs of water left them.

As the Armadans woke, the Lover and Doul and Coldwine stepped from the little side room, accompanied by the cactacae who had set out the previous night. They looked tired and dusty, but they were smiling. A very old anophelius was with them, dressed in the same robes as all his fellows, and with the same expression of calm interest.

The Lover faced the assembled Armadans. “This,” she said, “is Kruach Aum.”

Kruach Aum stood beside her, bowing, his old eyes taking in the crowd.

“I know that many of you have been bemused by this trip,” the Lover said. “We’ve told you that there was something on this island that we need, that’s vital to the raising of the avanc. Well, this-” She indicated Aum. “-is what we need. Kruach Aum knows how to raise an avanc.” She waited for that to sink in.

“We’ve come here to learn from him. There are many processes involved. The problems of containment and control demand that we use engineering as sophisticated as our thaumaturgy and oceanology. Miss Coldwine will be translating for us. It’s a time-consuming process, so patience will be required.

“We’re hoping to be off this rock within a week or two. But that means working hard, and quickly.” She was silent for a moment. Her stern voice broke, and she gave an unexpected grin. “Congratulations to all of you. To all of us. This is a great, great day for Armada.”

And though most of those gathered had no real idea what was going on, her words had the intended effect, and Tanner joined in with the cheer.

The cactacae crew set up camp around the township. They found empty rooms safe from the she-anophelii, to house the Armadans in smaller groups and greater comfort.

The anophelii were as passionlessly curious as ever, keen to talk, keen to be involved. It was quickly clear that Aum had a dubious reputation: he lived and worked alone. But with the newcomers on the island, all the township’s best thinkers wanted to help. The weapons hidden on the Trident could not have been less needed. And out of politeness, the Lover allowed them all to join the consultations, though it was only Aum she listened to, and she told Bellis to precis all other contributions.

For the first five hours of the day, Aum sat in discussion with the Armadan scientists. They pored over his book and showed him the damaged appendix, and although, to their astonishment, he had no copies of the work himself, he was able to remember. With the help of an abacus and some of the cryptic engines scattered around, he began to fill in the missing information.

After eating-the cactacae had gathered for their crewmates enough edible plants and fish to supplement the dried rations-the engineers and builders studied with Kruach Aum. In the morning Tanner and his colleagues argued about strain thresholds and engine capacities, drew up rough blueprints, and came up with lists of questions that they put to Aum, shyly, in the afternoon.

The Lover and Tintinnabulum sat in on all sessions, beside Bellis Coldwine. She must be exhausted, Tanner thought with pity. Her writing hand was cramped and covered in ink, but she never complained or asked for a break. She only passed the questions and answers through herself endlessly, scrawling on innumerable reams of paper, translating Aum’s written replies into Salt.

At the end of each day came a short, fearful time as the humans, hotchi, and khepri ran in small groups to wherever they had been lodged. None had to spend more than thirty seconds in the open air, but still they were watched over by rivebow-wielding cactacae and male anophelii protecting their guests from their deadly females with sticks and rocks and klaxons.

There was another engineer already quartered in Tanner’s chambers, a woman in the further room. Tanner lay awake for a while.

“There’s another one to come,” said a cactus voice from outside his window, making them start. “Don’t bolt the door.”

Tanner blew out his candle and slept. But when, much later, Bellis Coldwine was escorted through the vestibule by a cactus guard, and crept in and bolted the door and stumbled, more exhausted than she had ever been before, through Tanner’s dark room into the one beyond, he woke and saw her.

Even in such a hot and strange a place as this, amid all the blood and the threat of violence, even so far from home, routine was powerful.

It took a day, no more, before the Armadans had their routine. The cactacae guards foraged and fished and escorted their fellow crew members, and hauled the Armadans’ rubbish, as the anophelii did, to the gorge at the rear of the village, onto the rock shelf and then into the sea.

Every morning Aum and his constantly shifting anophelii hangers-on debated and lectured Armada’s scientists, and every afternoon the same with the engineers. It was draining: intensely hot, ceaseless work. Bellis became semiconscious. She became a writing syntactical machine, existing only to parse and translate and scribble questions and read out answers.

For the most part, the meaning she imparted was opaque to her. On rare occasions she had to refer to the glossary in her own High Kettai monograph. She kept it hidden from the anophelii. She did not want to be responsible for them learning another language, breaking out of their prison.

There was no systematicity or coherence to the island’s library. Most of the works available were the most abstract theory. The authorities in Kohnid and Dreer Samher kept from their subjects any works they deemed dangerous. There was almost nothing that related the anophelii to the world outside. To find those, the anophelii had to search the ruins of their ancestors’ habitations on the other side of the island.

And sometimes they found fables, like the story of the man who raised the avanc.

Stories were self-generating. Little references in abstruse philosophical texts, footnotes, vague folk memories. The mosquito-people had their own etiolated legends.

Bellis did not see a raging curiosity about the world as she had expected. The anophelii seemed intrigued only by the most abstract of questions. But there appeared a glimmer of a more fierce, more earthed interest from Kruach Aum himself.

There are currents in the water, he wrote, that we can measure, that cannot be born in our seas.

Aum had started at the highest conceptual level and had proved to himself the reality of the avanc. The Armadan scientists sat spellbound as Bellis falteringly translated his story. From three or four scrawled equations to a page of logical propositions, mining what works of biology, oceanology, dimensional philosophy he could find. A hypothesis. Testing his results, checking the details of the story of the first summoning.

The scientists gasped and nodded excitedly at the equations and notations she copied into Salt.

And after eating, Bellis gathered her strength again and sat with the engineers.

Tanner Sack was one of the first to speak. “What manner of beast is it?” he said. “What’ll we need to bind it?”

Many of the engineers were press-ganged, and several were Remade. She was surrounded by criminals, Bellis realized, most from New Crobuzon. They spoke Salt with Dog Fenn and Badside accents, peppered with slum slang she had not heard for months, which made her blink with surprise. Their expertise was as arcane to her as the scientists’. They asked about the strength of steel and iron and various alloys, and the honeycomb structure of the chains below New Crobuzon, and the power of the avanc. Soon matters turned to steam engines and gas turbines, and rockmilk, and the gearwork of a harness, and bits and bridles the size of ships.

She knew it would be to her advantage to make sense of it all, but it was beyond her and she stopped trying.

That night, as one of the men was taken to his room, a she-anophelii came close to him, screaming gibberish, her hands extended, and a cactus guard shot her dead with his rivebow.

Bellis heard the thwacking report and watched through the window slits. The he-anophelii crooned with their sphincter mouths, and knelt beside her body, and felt her. Her mouth hung open, and her proboscis lolled like a massive stiff tongue. She had fed recently. Her still-plump body was cut almost in half by the rivebow’s massive, spinning chakri, and enormous gouts of blood were soaking into the earth and pooling in dusty slicks.

The males shook their heads. A he-anophelius beside her plucked at Bellis’ arms and wrote something on her pad.

Not necessary. She did not want to feed.

And then he explained to her, and Bellis’ head swam with the monstrousness of it.

Bellis was hungry to be alone. She had spent every minute of the day with others, and it exhausted her. So when the day’s tasks had ended, and the scientists were talking together, trying to agree on a direction for the next day’s research, she slipped briefly into the smaller side room, thinking it empty. It was not.

She made an apologetic noise and turned away, but Uther Doul spoke quickly.

“Please don’t leave,” he said.

She turned back, grasping the bag she carried, painfully aware of the weight of the box Silas had given her at the bottom of it. She stood by the doorway, waiting, her face immobile.

Doul had been training. He stood in the room’s center, relaxed, holding his sword. It was a straight blade, thin and edged on both sides, something over two feet long. It was not big or ornate or impressive, or carved with puissant signs.

The blade was white. It moved suddenly, flickered like water, soundless and impossible to follow, in a sudden murderous formation. And then it was sheathed, too fast for her to see.

“I’m done here, Miss Coldwine,” he said. “The room is yours.” But he did not leave.

Bellis nodded thank-you and sat, waiting.

“Let’s hope that unfortunate killing won’t sour our relations with the mosquito-men,” he said.

“It won’t,” said Bellis. “They hold no grudges when their womenfolk die. They remember enough to know it’s necessary.” He knows this, she thought suddenly, incredulous. He’s making conversation with me again.

But even suspicious as she was, the details she had been told were so ghastly and fascinating that she wanted to share them; she wanted to make someone else know them.

“They don’t know much history, the anophelii, but they know that the cactacae-the sapwalkers-aren’t the only people across the sea. They know about us, the bloodwalkers, and they know why usually none of us visit. They’ve forgotten the details of the Malarial Queendom, but they have a sense that their womenfolk… did wrong… centuries ago.” She paused to let that understatement sink in. “They treat them without… affection or distaste.”

It was a melancholy pragmatism. They bore their women no ill will. They coupled with them eagerly enough once in the year, but they ignored them where possible and killed them if necessary.

“She wasn’t trying to feed, you know,” Bellis went on. She kept her voice neutral. “She was full. They’re… they’re intelligent. It’s not that they’re mindless. It’s the hunger, he told me. It takes a long, long time for them to starve. They can spend a year without feeding, screaming ravenous for all those weeks: it’s all they can think about. But when they’ve fed, when they’re full-really sated-there’s a day or two, maybe a week, when the hunger abates. And that’s the time they try to talk.

“He described them coming up from the swamplands, landing in the square and shrieking at the men, trying to make words. But they could never learn language, you see. They were always too hungry. They know what they are.”

Bellis caught Uther Doul’s eye. She was aware, suddenly, that he respected her. “They know. Once in a while they can stop themselves, when their bellies are full and their minds clear for a few days or hours, and they know what it is they do, how they live. They’re as intelligent as you or me, but they grow up too distracted by starvation to speak, and then once every few months, for a handful of days they can concentrate, they try to learn.

“But they don’t have the males’ mouthparts, obviously, so they can’t make the same sounds. It’s only the most inexperienced, the youngest, who try to mimic the anophelii men. With their proboscises retracted, their mouths are much more like ours.” She saw that he understood.

“Their voices sound like ours,” she went on softly. “They’ve never heard language they could mimic before. Full as she was, without language but conscious that she was without it, it must have made her quite giddy to hear us all conversing, in sounds that she herself could make. That’s why she came for that man. She was trying to talk to him.”

“It’s a strange sword,” she said a little later.

He hesitated for a tiny moment (the first time, Bellis realized, she had ever seen him uncertain) then drew it with his right hand, held it out for her to see.

Three little buds of metal seemed embedded in the heel of his right hand, connected to the veinlike mass of wires under his sleeve, running down his side to a little pack on his belt. The handle of the sword was padded in leather or skin, but a patch was bare metal, which the nodes in his flesh touched when he held the sword.

The blade was not, as Bellis had supposed, stained metal.

“May I touch it?”

Doul nodded. She tapped the flat of the blade with a fingernail. It sounded dull and unresonant.

“It’s ceramic,” he said. “More like china than iron.”

The edges of the sword did not have the matte sheen of a sharpened blade. They were the same featureless white as the flat (a white stained fractionally yellow, like teeth or ivory).

“It’ll cut deeper than bone,” Doul said quietly in that melodious voice. “This is not a ceramic you’ve seen or used before. It won’t bend or give-it has no flex-but nor is it brittle. And it’s strong.”

“How strong?”

Uther looked at her, and she felt his respect again. Something inside her responded.

“Diamond,” he said. He sheathed his blade (with another exquisite, instantaneous motion).

“Where does it come from?” she said, but he did not answer her. “Is it from the same place as you?” She was surprised by her own persistence and… what? Bravery?

She did not feel as if she was being brave. Instead, she felt as if she and Uther Doul understood each other. He turned to her from the doorway and inclined his head in farewell.

“No,” he said. “It would be… hard to be less accurate.” For the first time, she saw a smile take him, very quickly.

“Good night,” he said.

Bellis took the solitary moments she had craved, steeped herself in her own company. She breathed deeply. And finally, she allowed herself to wonder about Uther Doul. She wondered why he was speaking to her, tolerating her company, respecting her, it seemed.

She could not read him, but she realized that she felt a faint connection to him, something woven out of shared cynicism, detachment, strength, understanding, and-yes-attraction. She did not know when or why she had stopped fearing him. She had no idea what he was doing.