The Scar - China Mieville [235]
“The Hidden Ocean,” said Carrianne, her voice guarded. Bellis managed to give a little smile.
“That’s right,” she said. Damn you all, she thought. I don’t need that treacherous fucker Fennec. I will make this happen myself. “And do you know where we’re heading?” She paused again, and in the silence, Johannes spoke.
“The Scar,” he said, and Bellis’ words withered in her throat. She stared at him, saw him watch her with concern and confusion and look to Carrianne, who nodded.
“The . . . Scar,” Bellis heard herself say, all hesitant and stupid. Not a revelation but an absurd echo.
They had broken her. They had won. There was nothing left in her, nothing at all.
When Johannes left, Bellis and Carrianne sat up late, talking. Carrianne told her everything.
What a week, Bellis kept thinking with absurd understatement. What a week to miss.
The Lovers had announced it.
It could not be kept from the pilots and captains and nauscopists of Armada that the water and the air were changing. There was no disguising the sudden crosscurrents, the hidden streams that ran below the surface, counter to the waves. Compasses had begun to veer maniacally, losing north for minutes at a time. The winds were utterly unpredictable. The horizon’s distance varied. Armada’s fleet had begun to struggle.
The avanc, of course, was quite unconcerned by these forces. It plowed its undeviating course far below, with the city in its wake.
There had been a plethora of rumors, but there were enough experienced, well-read sailors in the city that the truth was impossible to hide. The avanc, directed by the Garwater pilots, was pulling Armada into the Hidden Ocean. About which, it seemed, all the stories were true.
And then, four days previously, on Flesh Quarto’s sixth Khandi, the Lovers had held a series of mass meetings across Garwater and its allied ridings.
“He’s a fucking fine speaker, the Lover,” Carrianne said. “I heard him in Booktown. ‘When I came here I was nothing,’ he said, ‘and I began to make me, and that was finished by my Lover, who made me and made herself and made this city,’ his voice all trembling. ‘And haven’t we brought Armada power?’ And people loved it. Because, you know, he has. These have been good years, great harvests and booty. And the Sorghum—you weren’t here for that, were you? You weren’t here when they took that.” Carrianne smiled and shook her head appreciatively.
“He’s made us a power, there’s no denying it. And then the fucking avanc . . .”
“I thought you were loyal to Dry Fall,” said Bellis, and Carrianne nodded hard.
“So I am, but I’m saying that here . . . I think the Brucolac may be . . . wrong about their plans. I mean . . . it does all fit into place.”
There is a source of power, the Lover had told the crowds, on the edge of the world. An awesome place: a rip through which great waves of puissance pounded reality. One man in Armada has the proof, said the Lover, and knows how to tap that power. But for many years it could not be reached.
There is a beast, the Lover had told them: a stunning kind of thing, an animal that breaches into Bas-Lag and slips away again from time to time. And Armada had called to it certain famous men who could learn how to trap that animal.
The woman who made me, the Lover had thundered, pointing to the Lover, realized that the second fact meant the first could be acted on.
On the far side of the Hidden Ocean, the Lover had said, is the source of that power. But no ship has crossed the Hidden Ocean, they say. Friends—he had spread his arms with triumph, as Carrianne imitated to Bellis—the avanc is no ship.
And so, Bellis realized, the Lover had admitted the truth that he and his had kept from the city for years, the plans that they had already had in place when they employed Tintinnabulum, snatched the Sorghum, traveled to the anophelii island, raised the avanc. He had admitted the truth of those plans, and had done so in such a way that he was not stoned for his manipulation and lies, but was buoyed up by applause.
We can cross the Hidden Ocean,