The Scar by China Miéville

from sound, and each of them moved ponderously alongside their fellows, quite alone. They clambered like lice across a pipe that poked into the dim sea like an inverted chimney. It was a thriving patchwork of algae and shells in extraordinary shades. Weeds and stinging filigree smothered it like ivy and dangled out and down, fingering the plankton.
    There was a diver whose chest was bare, from which two long tentacles extruded, waving in the current, but also according to their own faint inclinations.
    It was Tanner Sack.

    Pumping its tail, the dolphin plunged up past the edges of the city, out and up toward the light. He burst through decreasing water pressure and out into the air, jackknifing, suspended in spray, fixing the city with a cunning eye.
    Below again, he curled back through striae of water. Huge shapes were dimly visible some way off, unclear through water and a shimmering of thaumaturgy. Patrolled by tethered sharks, they were not to be investigated. The eye could not focus on them.
    There were no divers upon them.

    Bellis came out of sleep to the sound of voices.
    It was weeks since she had arrived in Armada.
    Every morning was the same. Waking and sitting up, waiting, looking around her little room with an incredulity, a shuddering disbelief that would not stop. It welled up even stronger than the longing with which she missed New Crobuzon.
    How did I get here?
The question was constant in her.
    She opened her curtains, gripped her windowsill, and stood staring out over the city.

    When they had arrived, on the first day, they had stood huddled with their belongings on the
Terpsichoria
’s deck, surrounded by guards, and by women and men with checklists and paperwork. The faces of the pirates were hard, made cruel by weather. Through her fear, Bellis watched carefully, and could make no sense of them. They were disparate, a mixture of ethnicities and cultures. Their skins were all different colors. Some were scarified in abstract designs; some wore batik robes. They looked as if they shared nothing except their grim demeanor.
    When they stiffened suddenly into a kind of attention, Bellis knew their superiors had arrived. Two men and a woman were standing by the ship’s rail. The murderer—the grey-armored leader of the raiding party—stepped up to join them. His clothes and sword were now quite clean.
    The younger man and the woman stepped forward to the swordsman. When Bellis saw them she could only stare.
    The man wore a dark grey suit; the woman a simple blue dress. They were tall and held themselves with immense authority. The man had a trim mustache and an easy arrogance. The woman’s features were heavy and irregular, but the flesh of her mouth was sensual, the cruel cast of her eyes compelling.
    What had made Bellis stare at them both with fascination and distaste, what commanded her attention, were the scars.
    Curling down the outside of the woman’s face, from the corner of her left eye to the corner of her mouth. Fine and uninterrupted. Another, thicker and shorter and more jagged, swept from the right side of her nose across her cheek and curled up as if to cup her eye. And others, contoured to her face. They disfigured her ocher skin with esthetic precision.
    Flickering her eyes from the woman to the man, Bellis had felt something curdle inside her.
What fucking unhealthiness is this?
she had thought uneasily.
    He was adorned with identical, but mirrored marks. A long curved cicatrix down the right side of his face, a shorter flourishing cut below his left eye. As if he were the woman’s distorted reflection.
    As Bellis watched the wounded pair, aghast, the woman spoke.
    “You will have realized by now,” she said in good Ragamoll, projecting her soft voice so that everyone could hear, “that Armada is not like other cities.”

    Is that a welcome?
Bellis had thought. Was that all that the traumatized and bewildered survivors of the
Terpsichoria
were to be offered?

    The woman had