Chapter Twenty-six

That night Bellis roused herself many hours after everyone had gone to sleep.

She removed the sweat-damp sheet that covered her and stood. The air was still warm, even in these dark hours. She picked up Silas’ package from below her pillow, pulled aside the curtain, and walked slow and quiet through the room where Tanner lay wrapped in shadows on his pallet. When she reached the wooden door she leaned her head against it and felt its grain on her skin.

Bellis was afraid.

She peered very carefully through the window and saw a cactus-man guard wandering through the deserted square, from doorway to doorway, checking them idly, moving on. He was some way from her, and she thought she could open the door and run without him seeing or hearing her.

And then?

Bellis could see nothing in the sky. There was no threatening whine, no voracious insectile woman with claw-hands and jutting mouth, hungry for her blood. She put her hand on the bolt and waited—waited to hear or see one of the she-anophelii, for confirmation, so that she could avoid her (easier to hide if you know where it is), and she thought about that leather-and-bone sack she had seen that morning, which had once been a man. She froze, her hand like wire on the door.

“What you doing?”

The words came in a hard whisper from behind her. Bellis spun, her hands gripping her shift. Tanner had sat up and was staring at her from within his dark alcove.

She moved a little, and he stood. She saw the odd encumbrances of tentacles spill from his midriff. He faced her, his stance tense and suspicious. He looked as if he was about to attack her. And yet he whispered, and something in that reassured her.

“I’m sorry,” she said quietly. He stood in the entranceway to hear her, and his face was as hard and untrusting as she had ever seen it. “I didn’t mean to wake you,” she whispered. “I just . . . I had to . . .” And her inventiveness fled her: she did not know what she would say she had had to do. Her words dried up.

“What are you doing?” he said. Slow and angry and curious, he spoke to her in Ragamoll.

“I’m sorry,” she said again, and shook her head. “I felt . . .” She held her breath and looked at him again, her eyes steady.

“Can’t open that bolt,” he said.

He was looking at the package in her hands, and with an effort, Bellis did not try to hide it or move her fingers nervously, but kept it in plain view as if it was nothing important.

“What is it, call of nature? Was that what it was? You’ll have to use the pot, lady. You can’t be shamed of things like that here. You saw what happened to William.”

She straightened then and nodded, keeping her face immobile, and walked back to where her bed lay. “Sleep better, won’t you,” said Tanner Sack behind her, and settled himself slowly. At the curtain between the rooms, Bellis turned briefly to look at him. He sat up, obviously waiting and listening, and setting her teeth she pulled the curtain to.

For a few moments there was silence. Then Tanner heard the sound of a tiny little spray, a few grudging drops, and he grinned humorlessly into his sheet. A few feet from him, separated by the curtain, Bellis stood up from the chamberpot, her face set and furious.

Through her humiliated anger, she grasped at something. Began to shape a hope, an idea.


The next day was the Armadans’ last full day on the island.

The scientists put together their reams of paper and their sketches, talking and laughing like children. Even the taciturn Tintinnabulum and his companions seemed buoyed up. All around Bellis schedules and plans were taking shape, and it seemed like the avanc was caught in all but fact.

The Lover flitted into the discussions and out again, a heavy smile on her, her new cut red and shining. Only Uther Doul was impassive—Uther Doul and Bellis herself. Their eyes met, across the room. Motionless, the only still points in the bustling hall, they shared a moment of some superior feeling akin to scorn.

All day, the anophelii came and went, their sedate, monkish manner shaken. They were very sorry to see the newcomers go, realizing they were soon to be bereft of the sudden influx of theories and impressions that they had brought.

Bellis watched Krüach Aum and saw how like a child the old anophelius was. He watched his new companions packing what bags and clothes and books they had brought, and he tried to copy them, though he had nothing. He left the hall and returned a little while later with a bundle of rags and edges of scrap paper that he collected and tied together at the top in a crude imitation of a traveling sack. It made Bellis shiver to watch.

Deep in her own bag, Bellis could feel Silas’ package: the letters, the necklace, the box, the wax, the ring.Tonight , she told herself, and felt panic.Tonight, come what may.

For the rest of the short day she tracked the sun’s passage. In the late afternoon, when the light had become thick and slow and every shape bled shadows, dread overtook her. Because she realized that there was no way she could cross past the swamps and the territories of the murderous mosquito-women.


Bellis looked up in alarm as the door was thrown open.

Captain Sengka stepped forward into the room, flanked by two of his crew.

The three cactacae stood at the entrance, their arms crossed. They were big men, even for their race. Their vegetable muscles bunched around their sashes and loincloths. Light gleamed on their jewelry and on their weapons.

Sengka pointed his massive finger at Krüach Aum. “This anophelius,” he announced, “is going nowhere.”

No one moved. After several still seconds, the Lover stepped forward.

Sengka spoke before she could. “What did you think, Captain?” he said, disgusted. “Captain? Is that what I should fucking call you, woman? What did you think? I’ve turned a blind sun-fucked eye on your presence here, which I did not have to do. I’ve put up with your communication with the natives, which is a breach of security risking a new fucking Malarial Age . . .” The Lover shook her head impatiently at this hyperbole, but Sengka continued. “I’ve waited patiently for you to get the fuck off this island, and what? You think you can smuggle one of these creatures off-land without my knowledge? You think I’d let you go?

“Your vessels will be searched,” he said decisively. “Any contraband lifted from Machinery Beach, any anophelii books or treatises, any heliotypes of the island will be confiscated.” He indicated Aum again and shook his head incredulously. “Have you read history, woman? You want to take an anopheliusout ?”

Krüach Aum watched the altercation with wide eyes.

“Captain Sengka,” said the Lover. Bellis had never seen her more alive with presence, more magnificent. “No one would ever criticize your concern for safety, or your commitment to your commission. But you know as well as I that the male anophelius is a harmless herbivore. We have no intention of bringing out any but this one.”

“I will not have it!” Sengka shouted. “Sunshit, this system is absolute, and it’s absolute because we can learn the lessons of history. No anophelii are to leave this island. That is a condition of their being allowed to live. There are no exceptions.”

“I’m tiring of this, Captain.” Bellis could not but admire the Lover’s calm, cold and hard as iron. “Krüach Aum is leaving with us. We have no wish to antagonize Dreer Samher, but we are taking this anophelius.” She turned her back on him and began to walk away.

“My men on Machinery Beach,” he said, and she paused, then turned back to him. He drew a huge pistol and held it loose, dangling down. The Armadans were quite still. “Trained cactacae fighters,” Sengka said. “Defy me and you will not leave this island alive.” So slowly that the motion did not seem threatening, he raised his gun and pointed it at the Lover. “This anophelius . . . Aum, you said . . . he is coming with me.”

The guards all around the room were poised on the edge of motion. Their hands fluttered over their swords and bows and pistols. Scabmettlers in cracked armor and huge cactacae, their eyes moved quickly from Sengka to the Lover and back again.

The Lover did not look at any of them. Instead, Bellis saw her catch the eye of Uther Doul.

Doul walked forward, placing himself between the Lover and the gun.

“Captain Sengka,” he said in that beautiful voice. He stood still, the pistol now trained on his head, looking up at the cactus-man, more than a foot taller and vastly more massive than he. He stared into the barrel of the gun as he spoke, as if it were Sengka’s eye. “It falls to me to bid you good-bye.”

The captain looked down and seemed momentarily uncertain. He drew back his free hand then, his biceps knotting enormously under his skin, his meaty fist tensed and ready to swing, bristling with thorns. He was moving slowly, obviously hoping not to hit Doul, but to intimidate him into submission.

Doul reached out with both his hands, as if supplicating. He paused, and there was a sudden snapping motion of such speed that Bellis—who had expected it, who had known that something of the sort would happen—could not possibly follow it. Sengka was reeling back, shocked, holding his throat where Doul had jabbed him with stiff fingers (not hard but like a warning, finding a space between those vicious spines and taking the breath from him). Doul held the gun now, still pointing toward his own skull, trapped between his flat palms like something granted him in prayer. He kept his eyes on Sengka and whispered to him, words that Bellis could not hear.

(Bellis’ heart is slamming. Doul’s actions shatter her. Whether an attack is brutal or muted, the motion itself, its preternatural speed and perfection, makes it seem like an assault on the order of things, as if time and gravity can no more withstand Uther Doul than flesh.)

The two cactacae standing behind Sengka stepped forward, sluggish and outraged. They reached to their belts, drawing weapons, and the gun held in Doul’s frozen applause flickered and faced them, and flickered again and was clenched in his outstretched right hand, pointed directly first at one and then (instantaneously) the other sailor.

(There is no movement. The three cactacae are appalled at this velocity and control that border on thaumaturgy.)

Doul shifted again, the gun leaving his fingers and spinning out of reach. His white sword was in his hand. There were two reports, and Sengka’s crew members yelled in pain, in quick succession, their hands snapping away from their weapons, now clutched in front of them, wrists split.

The sword’s tip was at Sengka’s throat now, and the cactus-man stared at Doul with fear and hatred.

“I hit your men with the flat of my blade, Captain,” said Doul. “Don’t make me show you the edge.”

Sengka and his men backed away, retreating out of his range, through the door and into the last of the daylight. Doul waited by the entrance, his sword extended into the open air.

All around the room a sound was building, a rhythmic muttering, a triumphant, awed bark. Bellis remembered it. She had heard it before.

“Doul!” the men and women of Armada chanted. “Doul! Doul! Doul!”

As they had at the glad’ circus, as if he were a deity, as if he could grant them wishes, as if they were chanting in church. Their adorations were not loud, but they were fervent and grimly joyous, and ceaseless, and in perfect time. They enraged Sengka, who heard in them a taunt.

He glared back at Doul, framed in the doorway.

“Look at you,” he shouted furiously. “You coward, you pig-man, you fuckingcheat ! What demon did you let fuck you in return for those skills, pig-man? You won’t leave this fucking place.”

He was silent then, suddenly, his voice collapsing, as Uther Doul stepped out of the room, into what the cactacae had thought of as the safety of the open air. The Armadans gasped, but most of them kept chanting.

Bellis was at the door immediately, ready to slam it against any she-anophelii. She saw Doul stalking without hesitation toward Nurjhitt Sengka, his blade held poised. She could hear him speaking.

“I know you’re angry, Captain,” he said softly. “Control yourself, though. There’s no danger in Aum coming with us, and you know that. It’ll be his last contact with this island. You came to forbid it because you felt your authority leaching from you. That was a miscalculation, but so far only two of your men have seen this.”

The three cactacae were ranged a little way around him, their eyes meeting and parting again, wondering if they could rush him. Bellis was shoved aside suddenly as Hedrigall and several other Armadan cactacae and scabmettlers came to stand outside. They did not approach the stand-off.

“You will not stop us leaving, Captain,” Doul went on. “You don’t want to risk war with Armada. And besides, you know as well as I that it’s not my crew or even my boss you want to punish, it’s me. And that . . . ,” he finished softly, “will not happen.”

Bellis heard the sound, then: the high drone of anophelii women approaching. She gasped, and heard others gasp, too. Sengka and his men began to look up shiftily, as if trying to avoid being seen.

Uther Doul’s eyes did not move from Captain Sengka’s face. A scudding shape cut across the sky, and Bellis pinched her mouth closed. The chant of “Doul!” had dwindled, but it continued almost subliminally. No one yelled out to him that he was in danger. They all knew that if they had heard the anophelii,he certainly had.

As the sound of their wings approached, Doul moved closer to the captain, suddenly, till he was staring very close into Sengka’s eyes.

“Do we understand each other, Captain?” he said, and Sengka bellowed and tried to grab Doul and crush him in a thorned bear hug. But Doul’s hands flickered in Sengka’s face then swung down to block his arm, and then Doul was standing a few feet back, and the cactus-man was doubled up and cursing as sap dripped from his smashed nose. Sengka’s crewmen watched with a kind of appalled indecision.

Doul turned his back to them then, and raised his sword to meet the first of the mosquito-women who came for him. Bellis stopped breathing. The she-anophelius was suddenly visible, plummeting through screaming air, a starved shape. The jag erupted from her mouth. She skirted over the earth, irregular and very fast, her arms outstretched, slavering and starving.

For long moments she was the only thing that moved.

Uther Doul was still, waiting for her, his sword held vertically on his right. And then suddenly, when the anophelius was so close that Bellis thought she could smell her, so that her proboscis seemed to be touching Doul’s flesh, his arm was suddenly stretched across his body, the sword still vertical and immobile but on the other side of him, and the mosquito-woman’s head and left forearm were tumbling free and bloody across the dry earth as her body crashed to the ground beyond him. Thick, sluggish gore streaked Doul’s blade, and the corpse and the dust.

Doul had moved again, and was turning, leaping up, reaching with his hands as if he were plucking a fruit, spitting the second she-anophelius (which Bellis had not even seen) as she flew over his head, and then twisting, pulling her out of the air on the end of his blade and flicking her to the ground, where she lay screaming and drooling and still trying to reach him.

He dispatched her quickly, to Bellis’ appalled relief.

And then the sky was quiet, and Doul had turned again to Sengka and was wiping his blade.

“This is the last you’ll hear of me, or any of us, Captain Sengka,” he assured the cactus-man, who stared at him with more fear than hatred now, and whose eyes took in the bloody corpses of those two mosquito-women, each stronger than a man. “Go now. This can end here.”

Then again the hateful sound of the she-anophelii, and Bellis almost cried out at the thought of more carnage. The humming grew closer, and Sengka’s eyes grew wide. He stood for a moment longer, looking quickly around him for the ravenous she-anophelii, a part of him still hoping that they might kill Doul, but knowing that they would not.

Doul did not move, no matter that the sound grew closer.

“Sunshit!” Sengka shouted, and turned away, defeated, waving his hands to bring his men with him. They walked quickly away.

Bellis knew that they wanted to get away before any more of the she-anophelii attacked and were killed. Not because they cared for the terrible woman-things, but because the sight of Doul’s mastery was appalling to them.

Uther Doul waited until the three cactus-people had disappeared. Only then did he turn, calmly, resheathing his sword, and walk back to the room.

The sound of wings was very close by that time, but mercifully, they were a little too slow, and they did not reach him. Bellis heard the screaming wings dissipate as the mosquito-women scattered.

Doul reentered the room, and the shout of his name went up again, proud and insistent like a battle cry. And he acknowledged it this time, bowed his head and raised his arms to the height of his shoulders, his palms outstretched. He stood immobile, lowering his eyes, as if adrift on the sound.


And it was night again, the last night, and Bellis was in her room, on her bed of dusty straw, Silas’ package in her hands.


Tanner Sack did not sleep. He was too wired from the excitement of the day, the fights. He was caught up in astonishment at what he now knew, what he had learned from Krüach Aum. Only tiny fragments of a much larger theory, but his new knowledge, the scale of the commission expected of him, was dizzying. Too dizzying to let him sleep.

And, besides, he was waiting for something.

It came between one and two in the morning. The curtain to the women’s room was drawn back, very gently, and Bellis Coldwine crept across the room.

Tanner twisted his mouth in a hard smile. He had no idea what it was that she had been doing the previous night, but it was obvious that pissing had not been on her mind. He gave a half smile, half wince as he thought of his little cruelty, forcing her into such a performance. He had felt somewhat guilty afterward, though the thought of the prim, tight Miss Coldwine squeezing out a few drops for his benefit had kept him grinning all the next day.

He had known then that her business, whatever it was, was unfinished, and that she would come back.

Tanner watched her. She did not know he was awake. He could see her standing by the door in her white underdress, peering through the window. She was holding something. It would be that leather packet she had tried not to draw his attention to the previous night.

He felt curiosity about her actions, and a spark of cruelty, some redirected revenge for his mistreatment on theTerpsichoria settling on Bellis. Those feelings had stopped him from informing Doul or the Lover of her actions.

Bellis stood and looked, then hunkered down and rummaged silently in her package, and stood and looked again and bent and stood and so on. Her hand hovered ineffectually around the bolt.

Tanner Sack stood and walked soundlessly toward her; she was too engrossed with her indecision to notice him. He stood a few feet behind her, watching her, irritated and amused by her irresolution, until he had had enough and he spoke.

“Got to go again, have you?” he whispered sardonically, and Bellis spun around to face him, and he saw with shock and shame that she was crying.

His mean little smile disappeared instantly.

Tears were pouring from Bellis Coldwine’s eyes, but she did not utter a sob. She was breathing hard, and each deep breath shook and threatened to break, but she was quite silent. Her expression was fierce and controlled, her eyes intense and bloodshot. She looked like something cornered.

Furiously, she wiped her eyes and nose.

Tanner tried to speak, but her glare shook him, and it was only with an effort that he could utter words. “Now, there, now,” he whispered. “I didn’t mean anything by that . . .”

What. . . do youwant ?” she whispered.

Chastened but not cowed, Tanner looked down at the package in her hands.

“What’s the matter with you, then?” he said. “What’s that? Trying to stow away, are you? Hoping the Samheri’ll take you home?” As he spoke he felt his anger growing again, until he had to struggle to control it. “Want to tell Mayor Rudgutter how badly you was treated on the pirate ship, is that it, miss? Let them know about Armada so’s they can try to hunt us down, and gather me and the likes of me and put us back in the fucking shit below the decks? Slaves for the colonies?”

Bellis was staring at him in a dignified, tearful rage. There was a long pause, and below the skin of her still, set face, Tanner saw her make a resolution.

“Read it,”she hissed suddenly. She slapped a long letter into his hands and slumped against the door.


“ ‘Status seven’?” he muttered. “What the fuck is a Code Arrowhead?” Bellis said nothing. She had stopped crying. She stared at him, sullen as a child (but now there is something in the back of her eyes, some hope).

Tanner continued, hacking his way through the thickets of code and finding trails of sense, places where meaning became suddenly and shockingly clear.

“ ‘Arrival of kissing magi’?” he whispered incredulously. “ ‘Canker to be clotted by wormtroopers’? ‘Algae-bombs’? What the fuck is this? This is about some fucking invasion! What the fuckis this ?” Bellis watched him.

“This,” she echoed him remorselessly, “is about some fucking invasion.”

She kept him in a cruel silence for several seconds and then told him.


He leaned back, gripping the paper, staring sightlessly at its seal, running his fingers through the chain on Silas’ tag.

“You’re right about me, you know,” said Bellis. They whispered, to keep the woman in the other room from waking. Bellis’ voice sounded dead. “You are right,” she repeated. “Armada is not my place. I can see you. You think, ‘I wouldn’t trust that uptown bitch.’ ”

Tanner shook his head, trying to disagree, but she would not let him.

“You’re right. I’m not trustworthy. I want to go home, Tanner Sack. And if I could open a door and walk through and be in Brock Marsh, or Salacus Fields, or Mafaton or Ludmead or anywhere in New Crobuzon, then byJabber I would walk through it.”

Tanner almost winced at her intensity.

“But I can’t,” she went on. “And yes, there was a time when I imagined rescue. I imagined the navy sailing in to whisk me home. But there are two things in the way of that.

“I want to go home, Sack. But . . .” She hesitated and slumped a little. “But there were others on theTerpsichoria without that urge. And I know what it would mean . . . for you, and for the others . . . for all the Crobuzoner Remade . . . to be . . . ‘rescued.’ ” She turned her eyes to him in an unflinching stare. “And you can believe me or not, as you like, but that’s not something I want. I have no illusions about New Crobuzon, about the transportation. You know nothing about my circumstances, Tanner Sack. You don’t know anything about what forced me onto that fucking loathsome ship.

“No matter how I want to return home,” she said, “I know that what’s best for me isn’t so for you, and I’d not willingly be party to that. And that’s true,” she said suddenly, as if in surprise, as if to herself. “I lost that argument. I concede. That is true.”

She hesitated, then looked up at him.

“And even if you think I’m full of nothing but lies, Mr. Sack, there’s always the second factor:There is nothing I can do. I can’t stow away with the Samheri; I can’t give directions to the New Crobuzon navy. I’m stuck with Armada. I’m damn wellstuck with it.”

“So who’s Silas Fennec?” he said. “And what is this?” He waved the letter.

“Fennec is a Crobuzoner agent, no less marooned than me. Only with information,” she said coldly. “Information about a fucking invasion.”


“You want it to fall?” she demanded. “Godspit, I understand you’ve no love for the place. Why in Jabber’s name should you have? But do you really want New Crobuzon tofall ?” Her voice was suddenly very hard. “Have you no friends left there? No family? There’s nothing left in the whole fucking city you’d preserve? You wouldn’t mind it falling to The Gengris?”


A little to the south of Wynion Street, in Pelorus Fields, was a tiny market. It appeared in a mews behind a warehouse on Shundays and Dustdays. It was too small to have a name.

It was a shoe market. Secondhand, new, stolen, imperfect, and perfect. Clogs, slippers, boots, and others.

For some years it had been Tanner’s favorite place in New Crobuzon. Not that he bought any more shoes than anyone else, but he enjoyed walking the short length of the mews, past the tables of leather and canvas, listening to the shouts of the vendors.

There were several small cafés on that little street, and he had known the proprietors and the regulars well. When he had no work and a little money, he might spend hours in the ivy-covered Boland’s Coffees, arguing and idling with Boland and Yvan Curlough and Sluchnedsher the vodyanoi, taking pity on mad Spiral Jacobs and buying him a drink.

Tanner had spent many days there, in a haze of smoke and tea and coffee, watching the shoes and the hours ebb away through Boland’s imperfect windows. He could live without those days, for Jabber’s sake. It wasn’t as if they were a drug. It wasn’t as if he lay awake missing them at night.

But they were what he thought of, instantly, when Bellis asked him if he cared whether the city fell.

Of course the thought of New Crobuzon and all those people he knew (whom he had not thought of for some time), and all the places he had been, all broken and destroyed and drowned by the grindylow (figures who existed only in a nightmare, shadow form in his head), of course that appalled him. Of course he would not wish for that.

But the immediacy of his own reaction astonished him. There was nothing intellectual, nothing thought out about it. He looked through the window into that sweltering hot island night and remembered looking through those other windows, of thick and mottled glass, onto the shoe market.

“Why didn’t you tell the Lovers? Whyn’t you think they’d help try to get a message to the city?”

Bellis shucked her shoulders in a false, silent laugh.

“Do you really think,” she said slowly, “that they would care? Do you think they’d put themselves out? Send a boat, maybe? Pay for a message? You think they’d risk uncovering themselves? You think they’d go to all that effort, just to save a city that would destroy them if it had the slightest chance?”

“You’re wrong,” he said, uncertain. “There’s enough Crobuzoners among the press-ganged who’d care.”

“Nobodyknows,” she hissed. “Only Fennec and I know, and if we spread the word, they’ll discredit us, write us off as troublemakers, dump us at sea, burn the message. Godsdammit, what if you’re wrong?” She stared at him until he shifted in her gaze. “You think they’ll care? You think they won’t let New Crobuzon drown? If we told them and you were wrong, it would be over—our only chance gone. Do you see what’s at stake? You want to risk it? Really?”

With a hollowness in his throat, Tanner realized that what she said made sense.

“And that is why I’m sitting here crying like a cretin,” she spat. “Because getting this message, and this proof, and this bribe to the Samheri is the only chance we have to save New Crobuzon. Do you see? Tosave it. And I’ve been standing here, frozen, because I can’t think of a way to get to the beach. Because I’m terrified of those woman-things out there. I donot want to die, and dawn is coming, and I can’t go out there, and I have to. And it’s more than a mile to the beach.” She looked at him carefully, and then away. “I don’t know what to do.”

They could hear the cactacae guard walking through the moonlit township, from house to house. Tanner and Bellis sat facing each other, leaning against the walls, their eyes fixed.

Tanner looked again at the letter he held. There was the seal. He held out his hands, and Bellis gave him the rest of her little bundle. She kept her face composed. He read the letter to the Samheri pirates. The reward was generous, he thought, but hardly excessive if it meant saving New Crobuzon.

Saving it, keeping it safe from harm.

He went through each letter again, line by line. Armada was not mentioned.

He looked at the necklace with its little tag, its name and symbol. There was nothing to link this to Armada. Nothing to tell the Crobuzoner government where to find him. Bellis watched him from her silence. She knew what he was. He could sense the hope in her. He picked up the big ring, examined its intricate inverted seal, troughs for peaks and vice versa. He felt hypnotized by it. It meant more than one thing to him, like New Crobuzon.

The quiet went on while he turned the package over and over in his hands, ran his fingers over the nub of sealing wax, and the ring, and the long letter with its dreadful warning.

There was his Remaking to remember, but that was not all. There were places and people. There was more than one side to New Crobuzon.

Tanner Sack was loyal to Garwater, and he felt the passion of that loyalty inside him, beside a sad affection for New Crobuzon—a kind of melancholic regretful fondness. For the shoe market, and for other things. The two emotions flickered inside him and circled each other like fish.

He thought of his old city all blasted, destroyed.

“It’s true,” he whispered slowly. “It’s a mile or more to Machinery Beach, down the hill past the swamps and all that, where the women live.”

He jerked his head, suddenly indicating the other end of the township, the cleft in the rocks with the waves like oil below.

“But it’s only a few yards from here to the sea.”

 

Interlude V

Tanner Sack

It don’t take much.

Keep my eyes on the window (Bellis Coldwine herself crouched and waiting hiding behind me. Nervous I reckon that I’m playing her but still she’s alight with hope). Waiting till the guard wanders off around a corner, away from the plaza and out of sight.

—Don’t you move, I tell her, and she shakes her head most fervent. —Don’t you move an inch from here (I’m putting it off now, scared as I am). Don’t you shift a muscle till you hear me knocking.

She’s to open the bolt. She’s to watch make sure no anophelii push their way in while that door’s unlocked. She’s to wait as long as it takes till I come back.

And then I’m nodding, that leather bag of hers fastened and folded tight and rubbed with wax to keep the water out, held by my gut as if I clutch a wound, and she’s pulled that door to and I’m out, in the starlight, in the air, in the hot night, with the mosquito-women all around me.


Tanner Sack does not hesitate. He bolts toward the chasm that splits the rear of the village like its anus, from where the rubbish is thrown into the sea.

He runs with his head down, blind and quite terrified, hurtling toward the crack in the rock. His nerves scream and his body arcs as each part of him fights to be nearest to the water.

He is sure he can hear the sound of the mosquito wings.

It is only five seconds that he is out under the sky listening to the wind and the night insects until his feet touch the flat rock that perches like a balcony over the sea. The air is still, and the darkness cossets him more tightly as he plunges into the shadow-stained gap in the mountain. For a moment his feet skitter as he hesitates and considers a more laborious and careful descent by the thin path that winds in tight, back and forth, down the stone, but it is too late: his legs have taken him on and out, as if he hears the whine of a she-anophelius, and he has left the rock and is falling.

There is nothing but air beneath him, more than fifty feet of air, and then the slickly moving water that glints like iron. He has seen the movement of the sea in the chasm below. And he is a sea creature now, and he can read the shapes of the currents. He knows the water beneath is deep, and so it proves to be.

He pulls himself up tight, and the surf opens to him with a plunging sound and smashes the air from his lungs, and he opens his mouth with the shock of it and breathes the water across his poor, desiccated gills as the sea seals itself above him again, taking him into its body. It makes him welcome, little microbe that he is.

There is a blissful time, when he drifts unmoving in the dark water. The space around him is giddying, the safety of it. No mosquito-women come here (he thinks then of other predators, and is for a moment a little less secure).

Tanner feels the weight of the package in its greased pouch. He holds it against his belly and kicks out with his webbed toes. It has been so long since he has swum. He feels as if his skin is blossoming in the water, his pores opening like flowers.

The black is not absolute. As his pupils dilate, he can make out varying shades of darkness: submerged crags, the detritus of the village, the split into the open sea, and the unremitting pitch of the deep. He swims through the hole in the cliff and feels the flow of the water change. Above him the waves chew the shore like something senile and toothless.

His bearings, his directions, are clear. Little presences glide past him, little night fishes. Tanner is reaching out around him with his tentacles, swimming low until they feel the edges of rock and he begins to swim around the coil of coast. His tentacles are braver than he. He pushes them inquisitive as an octopus into holes in the stone from which he would snatch away his hands. They are the most aquatic part of him, those appendages, and he accepts their lead.

Tanner swims around the edges of the anophelii island. He feels anemones and urchins and realizes with sudden sadness that this is the first time he has swum close enough to the seabed to sense its life, and it is almost certainly the last, and it is too dark to see. He can only imagine the gnarls of sand and stone over which he swims, the spurs of rock and dead wood that must look furry with weed, the rich colors that light would reveal.

Minutes of urgent swimming pass. This coastal sea tastes different from the open ocean around Armada. These waters are a thicker stew. The taste of tiny life and death suffuses him.

And then very suddenly the taste of rust.

Machinery Beachthinks Tanner. He has swum around a convolution in the island’s outline, into the bay. His suckers caress new things: decomposing iron, engines scabbed by the sea. The water above this bed of iron is awash with metal salts and tastes to him of blood.

At the moon-glittering surface above him are three big shapes, the Samheri ships, occluding what little light there is. Their stubby chains taut in the water, their anchors at rest amid the bones of much older metal artifacts.

Tanner angles up, rising, feeling the water expand. He raises his hands, still clutching the package. The shade of the biggest ship is directly in his path.


The cactacae from Dreer Samher bluster at the sight of him, mimicking anger, threatening him with upraised fists and spined forearms, but they are dissembling. They are puzzled by this bedraggled Remade man who has scaled their chains to stand dripping on their deck, looking nervously at the sky, waiting for the sailors to take him below.

“Let me talk to the captain, lads,” he says to them in Salt again and again, fearful but determined. And after their threats do not deter him, they bring him into the ship’s candlelit darkness.

They lead him past the treasury, where the spoils of their trade and their battles are stored. The kitchen where the smell of rotting vegetation and stew is strong. They take him through corridors of cages where angry chimpanzees scream and rattle their bars. The cactacae are too heavy and their thick digits too imprecise to scuttle the rigging. The primates are trained from birth to obey whistled and shouted commands, capable of unfurling and tying and hanging sails like experts, without ever knowing what it is they do.

The bored apes are hidden here from the hunger of the mosquito-women.

Sengka sits quietly in his cabin, making Tanner Sack stand drying his face and hands nervously with a rag. With his huge green arms resting on his desk, his hands clasped, Sengka looks unnervingly like a human bureaucrat. The same suspicious patience.

He is a politician. He knows as soon as he sees Tanner’s unlikely figure that something illicit is occurring, something beyond the purview of the Armadan authorities. In case it is something that he alone can take advantage of, he dismisses the guards. They leave with sulky looks, curiosity not assuaged.

There are some seconds of silence.

“So tell me,” says Sengka, eventually. He does not bother with preamble, and Tanner Sack (skin drooling brine on the matting, hands clutching his package, feeling fearful and guilty, full of treachery that he does not want to commit) respects that.

Inside the wax-treated leather and the box, the contents remain dry.

He hands over the shorter letter, the promise to the bearer, without a word.

Sengka reads slowly, very carefully, time and again. Tanner waits.

When he finally looks up, Sengka’s face gives away nothing, (but he sets the letter very carefully to one side).

“What,” he says, “would you like me to deliver?”

Again without words, Tanner pulls out the heavy box and shows it. He removes the ring and the wax and turns the open container toward Sengka, showing him the letter and the necklace within.

The captain examines the rough necklace, pursing his lips as if unimpressed. His hand hovers over the longer letter.

“I’d carry nothing I wasn’t allowed to read,” he says. “It might say ‘Disregard the other letter.’ I’m sure you understand that. I’d only let you seal it after I’ve seen what’s within.”

Tanner nods.

It takes Captain Sengka a very long time to scan that dense, coded letter from Silas to his city. He is not reading it—he cannot; his Ragamoll is not good enough. He is looking for words that concern him:cactus, Dreer Samher, pirate. There are none. There seems to be no double cross here. When he is done, he looks up quizzically.

“What does it mean?” he says. Tanner shrugs quickly.

“I don’t know, Captain,” he says, “truly. Makes little more sense to me than you. All I know is that’s information that New Crobuzon needs.”

Sengka nods to him sympathetically, considering his options. Turn the man away and do nothing. Kill him now (easily done) and take his seal. Deliver the package; don’t deliver it. Hand the man over to the Armadan woman, the leader he is so obviously betraying, though how and for what Sengka cannot make out. But Nurjhitt Sengka is intrigued by this situation, and by this bold little intruder. He bears him no ill will. And he cannot make out for whom the man works, which aegis protects him.

Captain Sengka is unwilling to risk war with Armada, and even less with New Crobuzon.There is nothing in the letter to compromise us, he thinks, and cannot, though he tries, see a reason not to act as courier.

At the worst the letter is not honored, after he has gone a very long way out of his usual trading paths. But will that be a catastrophe? He will be in the richest city in the world, and he is a trader as well as a pirate. It would not be a good outcome, he thinks, and it is not an easy journey or a short one, but perhaps it is worth it? For the possibility?

The possibility that the letter (with the city’s seal, with the authority of its procurator) will be honored.

They stand together to complete this secret deal. Tanner seals the long letter with the ring. He nestles Silas Fennec’s necklace (And who is he?the question comes again) into the cushioned box and covers it with both letters, folded. He locks the box, and then drools more of the wax all over its seam. He pushes his old city’s ring into it as it dries, and when he pulls it away he is faced by the city’s heraldic seal in miniature, in greasy bas-relief.

He ties the fastened box back in its drab leather bag, and Sengka takes it from him and locks it in his sea chest.

The two watch each other a while.

“I’ll not go on about what I’ll do if I find you’ve betrayed me,” says Sengka. It is an absurd threat: each man knows that he will never see the other again.

Tanner dips his head.

“My captain,” he says slowly, “she can’t know.” It hurts him to say that, and he must remind himself fervently of the letter’s contents, of the reason for secrecy. He keeps his eyes level, meets Captain Sengka’s gaze, gives away nothing. The captain does not torment him with conspiratorial winks or smiles, but only nods.


“You’re sure?” says Sengka.

Tanner Sack nods. He is looking around nervously, on the prow of the ship, fearful for the telltale mosquito sounds. The captain is fascinated anew by Tanner’s refusal to accept food or wine or money. He is intrigued by this man’s impenetrable mission.

“Thank you, Captain,” says Tanner, and shakes the cactus-man’s thorn-plucked hand.

Watching Tanner as he leaps from the guardrail, Captain Sengka leans forward, half smiling, oddly warm to the fierce little human who has visited him. He stays on deck for some time, watching the ripples that Tanner leaves behind. And when they have been assimilated by the waves, he looks up into the night, untroubled by the sounds of the she-anophelii who will do no more than circle him, sniffing eagerly, failing to smell blood.

He thinks about what he will say to his officers, the new orders he will give in the morning, when the Armadans are gone. He wonders wryly how they will react. They will be aghast. Intrigued.


Tanner Sack is swimming doggedly back to the split in the cliffs. He anticipates the terrifying climb up that staggered path, practicing the movement of kicking out from the rock should the mosquito-women come, hurtling back into the sea.

He is unhappy. It does not help to think that he had to do it.

He wishes suddenly that the sea would do what poets and painters promise of it: that it would wash everything away so that he could start again, that it would make everything new. The water sluices through him as if he were hollow, and he closes his eyes as he moves, and imagines it cleansing him from the inside.

Tanner’s fist is clenched around the ugly seal ring. He wishes his memories would wash out of him, but they are tenacious as his innards.

He stops suddenly in the middle of the sea, suspended fifty feet below the surface, hanging like a condemned man in the black water.This is my home, he tells himself, but takes no comfort from it. Tanner feels a rage in him, a rage that he controls, sadness as much as anger, and loneliness. He thinks of Shekel and Angevine (as he has done scores of times).

He reaches out deliberately and opens his hand, and the heavy Crobuzoner ring pitches instantly away.

It is so black, the sense of his own pale skin is more memory than sight. He can only imagine the ring falling from his palm. Plunging. Falling for a long time. Coming to rest at last in a snarl of rock or lost engine parts. Threading perhaps by chance onto some frond of weed, some finger of coral—a mindless, contingent affectation.

And then, and then. Ground down by the endless motion of the water. Not swallowed as he tries to imagine, not lost forever. Reconstituted. Until one day, years or centuries from now, it will resurface, thrown up by submarine upheavals. Diminished perhaps by the implacable currents. And even if the gnawing of brine has been absolute, if the ring is dissipated, its atoms will rise to the light and add to Machinery Beach.

The sea forgets nothing, forgives nothing, whatever we’re told,thinks Tanner.

He should swim on, and he will soon; he’ll return and clamber up dripping into the mosquito township. Tentacles flailing like fly whisks, he will scuttle back to the door where Bellis will admit him (he knows she’ll be waiting). And the job will be done and the city (the old city, his first city) safe, perhaps. But for now he can’t move.

Tanner is thinking of all the things he has still to see. All the things he has been told are out there in the water. The ghost ships, the melted ships, the basalt islands. The plains of ossified waves where the water is grey and solid, where the sea has died. Places where the water is boiling. The gessin homelands. Steam-storms. The Scar. He is thinking about the ring below him, hidden in the weeds.

It’s all still there,he thinks.

There is no redemption in the sea.

 

Interlude VI

Elsewhere

The whales are dead. Without these vast, stupid guides, the going is harder.

Brother, have we lost the trail?

There are many possibilities.

Once again they are just a cabal of dark bodies above the base of the sea. They slide through blood-warm water.


Around them, the salinae are anxious. Miles off, thousands of feet below the waves, something is shaking the crust of the world.

Can you taste it?

Amid the millions of mineral particles that eddy in the sea are some in unusual strengths: splintered flint (shards and dust), little gobs of oil, and the intense, unearthly residue of rockmilk.

What are they doing?


What are they doing?

The taste of the sea here is reminiscent. This is drool that the hunters can taste; this is the world’s spittle. It dribbles (they remember) from ragged mouths cut by the platforms that suck up what they find, where beside concrete plinths men in inefficient swaddlings of leather and glass gaze wide, and are easily stolen and questioned and killed.

The floating city is drilling.


The currents here are labyrinthine, a morass of competing flows that dissipate the impurities in convoluted chains, taste-trails that make little sense, little pockets of different dirts.

They are hard to follow.

The whales are dead.

And what of others? Dolphins (willful) or manatee (slow and too stupid) or?

There are none suitable; we are alone.

There are others, of course, who might be called from the deep sea, but they are not trackers. Their work is very different.

Alone, but still the hunters can hunt. With a patience that is implacable (that does not sit well with this hot, quick place), they continue searching, teasing through the skeins of flavor and pollution and rumor, finding the path and taking it.

They are much closer to their quarry than they were before.

Even so, this warm water is hard, and sticky and prickling, and disorienting. The hunters circle, chasing ghost spoor and lies and illusions. They cannot quite, cannot quite find the trail.