China Mieville - The Scar

That night for the first time, Bellis wondered aloud what she and Silas might do if they could not return home. She raised the possibility as a spur.

But a kind of calm horror descended on her as she realized that her own escape was not the only consideration. What if we can’t escape? she thought coolly. Is that the end of it? Is that the last word?

Silas was watching her, his face bleak and tired. Looking at him, Bellis saw the spires and markets and brick rookeries of her home city with sudden, stark clarity. She remembered her friends. She thought again about New Crobuzon. In spring, stinking of sap; at the close of the year, cold and intricate; at the festival of Jabber’s Morning, lit up, strung with gimgews and lanterns, jostled by singing crowds, the trains decked out in pious livery. At midnight on any day of the year, in the lamplight.

At war, at bloody war with The Gengris.

“We have to get a message to them,” she said quietly. “That’s the most important thing. Whether or not we can get back, we have to warn them.”

With that, she let go of what she could not achieve. And miserable as it made her, something inside her became less frantic. The schemes that she tentatively suggested now were more grounded, more systematic, more likely to succeed.

Bellis realized that Hedrigall was key.

There were many stories about the big cactus-man, the Samheri fabler and aeronaut. A cloud of rumors, truth and lies. And among the things that Shekel had breathlessly told her, one had stuck hard in Bellis’ memory: Hedrigall had been to the island of the mosquito-people.

It could be true. He had been a trader-pirate from Dreer Samher, who were the only group known regularly to deal with the anophelii. Sap, not blood, ran in them: they were undrinkable. They could barter without fear.

And he might remember things.

The day was overcast and warm, and Bellis sweated from the moment she left her rooms for work. Even scrawny as she was, by the end of the day she felt laden down with excess flesh. The smoke from her cigarillos seemed to cosset her head like a stinking hat, and even Armada’s unending winds didn’t dust her clean.

Silas was waiting for her outside her rooms.

“It’s true,” he said, grimly elated. “Hedrigall’s been there. He remembers it. I know how the Dreer Samher traders operate.”

Their maps could become more accurate, their knowledge of the island less tenuous.

“He’s loyal, is Hedrigall,” Silas said, “so I’ve got to be careful. Agree or disagree with what he’s told to do, he’s a Garwater man. But I can get information out of him. It’s my job.”

Even with what they learned from Hedrigall, they were armed with nothing more than a sheaf of unconnected facts. They shuffled and reshuffled them, dropped them like spillikins and watched how they fell. And, having stripped herself of that unrealistic desperation for her own freedom, Bellis began to see order in the facts’ patterns.

Until they had a plan.

It was so loose, so nebulous, it was hard to admit that it was all they had.

They sat back in silent unease. Bellis heard the recurring muttering of the waves, watched the smoke from her cigarillo unravel in front of the window, obscuring the night sky. The conjuncture disgusted her suddenly: it seemed to have trapped her. Her life was reduced to a succession of nights and smoking and scratching for ideas. But now something had changed.

It might be the last night that she needed to do this.

“I hate this,” said Silas eventually. “I fucking hate it, that I can’t… But can you do it? There’s a lot falling on you.”

“I have to,” she replied. “You don’t know High Kettai. Is there any other way you could convince them to take you?”

Silas grit his teeth and shook his head.

“But what about you?” he said. “Your friend Johannes knows you’re not exactly a model Armadan citizen, doesn’t he?”

“I can convince him,” Bellis said. “There aren’t going to be too many Kettai readers in Armada. But you’re right; he’s the only real barrier.” She was silent for some time, eventually continuing thoughtfully. “I don’t think he’s mentioned me to them. If he’d wanted to make life hard, if he suspected me of being… dangerous, I’d know it by now. I think he has a sense of… of honor, or something, that stops him talking about me.”

That’s not what it is , she thought even as she spoke. You know why he hasn’t reported you for dissidence.

Like it or not, however you left it, whatever you think of him, he counts you a friend.

“When they read this,” said Silas, “and they realize that Kruach Aum’s not from Kohnid, and that he may still be alive, they’ll probably fall over themselves to find him. But… what if they don’t?

“We have to get them to that island, Bellis. If we can’t do that, we have nothing. It’s no small thing we want them to do. You know where we’re trying to head them. You know what’s there. You can leave me to do the rest-I can put together what we need. I have the seal, so I can get the messages written. I can do all that. But dammit, that’s all I can do.” He was bitter. “And if we can’t get them to the fucking island, we have nothing at all.”

He picked up Kruach Aum’s book and turned the pages slowly. When he reached the data appendix, he held it up to Bellis.

“You’ve translated this, haven’t you?” he said.

“What I can.”

“They’re not expecting ever to see this book, but they think they can maybe raise the avanc anyway. If we give them this-” He waggled it, and the pages flapped like wings. “-maybe it’s all they’ll need. Maybe they’ll just look through these pages, and do whatever decoding they have to do to make sense of it, using you, using all the other translators and scientists in the Lyceum and in the Grand Easterly … Maybe everything they’d need to raise the avanc is right here. We might just be handing them the last piece they need.”

He was right. If Aum’s claims were true, all the data he had used, all the information, all the configurations were there in those pages.

“But without this book,” Silas continued, “we have nothing. Nothing to sell you to them, nothing to entice them to the island. They’ll just head off as they were planning, and work on whatever they’ve got, and maybe raise the avanc anyway. If they had nothing, they’d make do. But if we give them a part of what they want, they’ll have to have it all. We have to turn this from a gift… into bait.”

And after a moment, Bellis understood. She pursed her lips and nodded quickly. “Yes,” she said. “Give it to me.”

She leafed through to the data appendix and paused, wondering how to start.

Eventually she shrugged and simply tore out a clutch of pages.

After that initial, oddly euphoric moment, she was more careful. She had to make it look right. She thought about other damaged volumes she had seen, picturing the misfortunes that could befall books. Water and fire? Mold? Those were impossible to mimic well.

Trauma, then.

She placed the appendix open, flat, on a strategic nail on her floor, trod on it, and kicked it hard. The nail hooked into the equations and footnotes and yanked them away, to lie in a crumpled pile.

It was perfect. There were three pages at the start of the appendix, where terms were discussed and defined, and then the paper was torn out by its roots. Only the ragged fringes remained, little wedges of half-eradicated words. It looked like the result of a random, stupid accident.

They burned the appendix, whispering like reprobate children.

It did not take long for all the pages to vent as smoke and particles out over Armada, where the wind took and dissipated them.