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Back The Scar Save as PDF
Chapters (65)
  1. Prologue
  2. Part One: Channels
  3. Chapter One
  4. Chapter Two
  5. Chapter Three
  6. Chapter Four
  7. Chapter Five
  8. Interlude I: Elsewhere
  9. Interlude II: Bellis Coldwine
  10. Part Two: Salt
  11. Chapter Six
  12. Chapter Seven
  13. Chapter Eight
  14. Chapter Nine
  15. Chapter Ten
  16. Chapter Eleven
  17. Chapter Twelve
  18. Chapter Thirteen
  19. Chapter Fourteen
  20. Interlude III: Elsewhere
  21. Part Three: The Compass Factory
  22. Chapter Fifteen
  23. Chapter Sixteen
  24. Chapter Seventeen
  25. Chapter Eighteen
  26. Chapter Nineteen
  27. Chapter Twenty
  28. Interlude IV: Elsewhere
  29. Part Four: Blood
  30. Chapter Twenty-One
  31. Chapter Twenty-Two
  32. Chapter Twenty-Three
  33. Chapter Twenty-Four
  34. Chapter Twenty-Five
  35. Chapter Twenty-Six
  36. Interlude V: Tanner Sack
  37. Interlude VI: Elsewhere
  38. Part Five: Storms
  39. Chapter Twenty-Seven
  40. Chapter Twenty-Eight
  41. Chapter Twenty-Nine
  42. Chapter Thirty
  43. Chapter Thirty-One
  44. Chapter Thirty-Two
  45. Interlude VII: Basilisk Channel
  46. Interlude VIII: Elsewhere
  47. Part Six: Morning Walker
  48. Chapter Thirty-Three
  49. Chapter Thirty-Four
  50. Chapter Thirty-Five
  51. Chapter Thirty-Six
  52. Chapter Thirty-Seven
  53. Chapter Thirty-Eight
  54. Chapter Thirty-Nine
  55. Chapter Forty
  56. Interlude IX: The Brucolac
  57. Part Seven: The Lookout
  58. Chapter Forty-One
  59. Chapter Forty-Two
  60. Chapter Forty-Three
  61. Chapter Forty-Four
  62. Chapter Forty-Five
  63. Chapter Forty-Six
  64. Chapter Forty-Seven
  65. Coda: Tanner Sack

And when the conversation is done, the magi, quiet in the darkness very far below the surface of the Swollen Ocean, three thousand miles from their home, blink and shake their heads, and the sound that has reached them from across the world dissipates with the water that carries it.

Boats are coming, they tell their hunters. Many. Quickly. From Iron Bay. Hunting, too. Searching, like us. Crossing the sea. Our sisters and brothers are with them, clinging like remora, singing to us. We can find them easily.

The boats. The boats seek the same thing we do. They know where they are going. They have machines to find it.

We track them, and they will track for us.

The hunters grin with their very long teeth and emit the barking gasps of water that are their laughter, folding their limbs away into streamlined shapes and setting out for the north, in the direction they have been given, aiming for where New Crobuzon’s flotilla will be. So they will intercept it, and join their other troops, and at last find their quarry.

Part Six: Morning Walker

Part Six: Morning Walker

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Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Three

The avanc, and Armada behind it, maintained an unchanging, steady speed-always northward. Nothing like as quick as a ship, but faster by many times than the city had ever been able to travel before.

Armadan vessels were returning every day. Their secret mechanisms had shown them their home port’s unprecedented pace, and they were racing across the sea in panic or jubilation to their city with booty of jewels and food and books and earth.

The returned sailors found the city an astounding sight. Surrounded by the fleet of tugs and steamboats that had always pulled it but that now followed it in a huge disparate mass like a second, disintegrating city, loyal and useless, Armada was powering slowly through the sea as if by its own will.

Some of those now-redundant ships were being integrated into the city’s substance, hooked and welded into place, stripped and refitted, built up. Others were converted into pirate vessels, outfitted with armor and guns of a hundred different kinds. They were crossbred, bristling with found ordnance.

The city’s bearing was north-northeast, but there were deviations this way and that, to avoid some storm or rocky island, or some irregularity in the ocean floor that the citizens of Armada could not see.

The pilots on the Grand Easterly were equipped with a rack of pyrotechnic flares in a variety of colors. When the avanc’s course needed correcting, they would fire them in combinations, in prearranged signals. Engineers in the other ridings would respond, firing up the massive winches that would haul back on one or other of the submerged chains.