by Felix Gilman
Turning and turning, he worked his way out of the Cere House. He was still learning the art. Art—he would not call it a trick, he cheated nobody by it; Shay and Lemuel had spoken of it as if it was fraud or theft, but the city was ready and willing to unfold its impossible profusion to those who were patient and attentive. It took Arjun a long time to find his path out of the House, and its countless cognates on other angles of the city. Between one passage and another, he walked for a while through a House that took its victims alive, and against their will. He ran through its corridors.
In an overgrown graveyard precinct, he let the hazy song of the grasshoppers direct him through a trail in the thick grass, and then he was out on the Heath, or something much like it, though he felt lumpish and grey among the beautiful, swan-necked young men and women who lounged on the meadows. He walked for a while until he found a band playing by a white bridge.
Most of the places he saw were unremarkable. He passed through a dozen places like Shutlow, where ordinary dull lives were spent. But there was a place where the people all had cats curled around their shoulders, whispering to them, and he walked quickly—instinct told him not to run—to get away from their curious stares; and there was another place where a great bird-god (was it the same one?) held its shining wings over the city’s whole sky, their slow beating marking out day and night, and all the people drifted between their city’s high arches. But perhaps their own lives were unremarkable to them, too.
He thought about the Atlas. Even if the city’s gods and rulers had not turned against them, their project would have been impossible. The city was infinite, and unmappable.
But then again, if the city was infinite, so were the people in it, all of whom the Atlas-makers might turn to their project in time. An infinity of time, and of hands, and of space; which would prevail? The idea of the Atlas could propagate endlessly across the city.
Just as, he was delighted to see, the echoes of the Voice he had released into the city were doing. He heard that song everywhere. It had slipped through the city’s cracks and taken new forms. It had gone on ahead of him, to mark his path.
As he walked over a rope-bridge between towers, it crossed his mind that perhaps one of those echoes of the Voice he had released into the city had found its way down some street that led into the past of the Atlas-maker’s city, had grown there, swelling into the true god, and had left the city to go south. Unlikely, but possible; he supposed there was no way of knowing.
The echo of the Voice led him to the end of his first journey. He followed behind a group of protestors chanting it, then turned into an alley where a flower girl sang it, then up a broad street where it boomed out from the walls of a grand theater. Then he followed its trail through a number of little streets, until it took on a scratchy and distant sound, as if sung by a tin throat. A tin throat that was only just learning to sing, because it stuck grindingly again and again on the same note, and had to start over. Through a door, and he was in the room where the song was playing.
The sound was coming from a device sitting in the room’s window, high above the city; the sound had spilled out into the air. The device was a kind of spinning music box. He poked at it cautiously, and moved some kind of lever, and the music screeched to a halt.
Everything was very silent. The room was spare and empty. He looked out of the window, into silent and empty streets. He had never known the city so quiet.
He stepped out of the room, and walked down a great many winding stairs to get outside. The street was empty. The high windows all around him were empty. The music he had stilled had been the only sound. He walked for some time without seeing or hearing anyone, even a dog or a bird.
There were no signs of sudden abandonment: no half-finished meals, no empty vehicles in the streets. In fact, there were only a handful of signs of human habitation at all, other than the blank grey buildings, and those that there were, were utterly arbitrary. The street had one lamppost, unlit. There was a single black shoe in the road. Looking in through a window, he saw a room containing nothing except a single chair, facing the wall. The next room contained a blank book, half-open on a lectern. The word DELICATESSEN was painted on a third window, in square grey script, but the interior was as empty as all the rest. There weren’t even doors in the grey walls.
It was the loneliest place he had ever been. There was no life or purpose in it. It made him think of the Typhon. Was this lifelessness, this absence, this abscess, what the Typhon would make of the city? Had he walked into the future of the Atlas-makers’ city, after the Typhon had grown to swallow the life in it? Possibly. There was no way of knowing. It chilled him, however it had come about. It was unbearable.
There was one more thing he had to do. He had to turn back, and finish things. He went back to the room where the machine sat, and fiddled with it, growing increasingly nervous, until he found how to move the lever and its needle back onto the spinning disc, and the music resumed. Passing under its sign, he stepped back through the door, starting back onto the path.
B ack in the Atlas-makers’ city, Arjun left the Cere House and took a coach across the city.
“I won’t cross Fourth Ward for you,” the coachman said. “It was always a bad place, but now…they say the white robes and the Thunderers fight all over it. With unnatural powers. They say some of ’em can fly, and some can steal your breath with a look. I keep a gun and a club under the seat, but that’s only good for drunks, the odd robber. I won’t go into that.”
Arjun entered the Ward on foot. The driver’s fears were overblown: the Ward was no battlefield. It was still full of its usual dirty, toothless folk, frightening if they were young, frightened and pitiable if they were old. It was sad; there were so many other ways they might be, in other places. But he knew by now that if he walked firmly, with a hand on his weapon, he was safe enough.
Outside a broken-down cobwebbed smithy, a shark-school of the white robes slouched across the street ahead of him—turning their shaven heads in his direction it seemed, for an awful moment—but he ducked into an archway until they were gone.
In the late afternoon, he reached the street of factories where Jack had brought him, where they had met the Thunderers, and prepared to travel north to the Iron Rose. How long ago had it been? Not that long, apparently, because the factories were all still vacant, the street locked away behind a wire fence. He climbed the fence and walked between the empty buildings. Jack had made him wait at the end of the street; he didn’t know which factory exactly was theirs. If they were still there at all. Everything was quiet; a light, warm wind blew dry litter about.
If he tried to blunder about searching, he might come across one of Jack’s wild lieutenants, who would probably cut his throat before looking at his face. The safest thing to do was wait. If Jack came there still, he’d see him soon enough. So he sat cross-legged in the dusty street, and cleared his mind.
J ack came down out of a red sunset. He cocked his head, jokingly, as if listening. “So, is that Voice of yours singing here,” he said, “or is there some other reason why you’re sitting in the middle of my street?”
“I have not found the Voice. How does your battle go?”
“Well.” Jack stood for a moment, then sat down. He sprawled loose-limbed and boyish, but his face was lined and troubled. “Yeah, not so well. We don’t do anything now but fight the white robes. We haven’t touched a prison in ages. It’s hard. They’ve killed…they’ve taken a few of us. And we don’t have their numbers. And we’ll never have more. They have some terrible new strength. We all had a dream, that it was that monster that follows you that rides them now. Is that true?”
“I believe it is. But there’s a way of defeating the monster. I need your help, though. I’ve found a man who may be the key to defeating it. I need you to come see him with me.”
T hey walked back across the Ward together. Night was the most dangerous time—the white robes, or the thing that had swallowed them, was at home in t
he darkness—but Jack knew the safe ways to go. Jack pointed out the burnt-out places, the plague-ridden places, the empty black wounds the Typhon and its creatures had made on the Ward’s map. “This has to work,” he said. “We can’t fight it. It’ll swallow everything in darkness. It’s the worst gaoler in the city.”
The gate to the Cere House was locked, but unguarded. Jack lifted them both over the wall and into the inner precincts.
The corridors of the House were not empty: many of the House’s ceremonies were conducted at night. But the people who passed them were engrossed in their own rituals, and they passed unchallenged. Jack wore a thick grey jacket to cover his notorious shirt.
The door to Lemuel’s office was ajar. Arjun knocked on it and called out, “Mr. Lemuel? I’m back,” through the crack.
From the depths of the morgue room behind the office, Lemuel called, “Come in, then! Let’s see you!”
Lemuel was standing in the middle of the room. He wore long, bloody gloves, and held a bloody knife; he had apparently been elbow-deep in the guts of the body on the table next to him. Behind his gold-rimmed glasses, his eyes lit up to see Jack.
“Arjun. And a friend.” He pulled off his gloves. “Don’t mind all this, boy. The followers of Uktena, you see, my boy,” he said, adopting an avuncular tone, “won’t go into the next life, they don’t think, unless they have fresh raw meat in their stomachs. To show their strength. Sometimes they don’t have a chance to take a bite before they go, and—well. It’s a dirty job, but it has to be done. For the time being, it’s my job. Are you scared? No, you’re not scared, are you? Brave boy like you.”
Arjun said, “Jack, this is Mr. Lemuel. Mr. Lemuel, I told Jack about your offer to help him with his gift.”
“Did you now? Yes, Jack, that’s right. I can teach you a great deal. We can teach each other, can’t we, my boy? Come here and let me see what you can do.”
Jack glanced at Arjun, who said, “It’s all right. I promise.”
Jack shrugged. “This had better be worth it, Mr. Lemuel. I have work to do.” He crossed the floor, hands insolently in pockets, over to Lemuel, who had moved to his table of cages, and was pulling aside the tarpaulin.
“Don’t be scared of these, boy. Has your friend told you about these? They’re just lights. Well, not just lights. I can help you. Come here.”
Jack stopped in the middle of the floor. “I think I’ll stay here, Lemuel. You tell me, what is it you can do for me?”
Sadly, Lemuel shook his head as he removed and polished his spectacles. “He should be less suspicious, shouldn’t he, little ones? You stay there, then, suspicious boy. All places are one to me, anyway. Stay. You’re mine now.”
The cages pulsed with light. Arjun saw Jack stagger slightly, his eyes darting around the room, suddenly lost, confused. Arjun, too, was lost; he could see the two figures of Lemuel and Jack, but the room was a dark maze, and those two figures spun through strange angles in relation to each other.
Lemuel walked closer to Jack, who took faltering, frightened steps forward, back, and side to side, and reached a clawlike hand to snatch the boy’s hair and pull his head back. Both of them were snarling like dogs.
Arjun reached into his jacket and put his hand on his gun, just in case. But it wasn’t necessary. As Lemuel pulled at Jack, Jack drew his beautiful knife and lunged to his left and to his right, faster than the eye could see; lunging forward and back and over his shoulder, darting down every path and angle Lemuel opened, seeming to Arjun’s slow eyes to be everywhere at once, his speed opening an escape from every trap Lemuel tried to make, blurring into a bursting storm of knives, until blood struck a bright trail out of the empty air behind him. Then that space was occupied by Lemuel, who staggered back, gasping, clutching his reddening shirt to his belly.
The room was just a grubby mortician’s parlor again, a big square box. Lemuel choked and fell.
“It was like you said,” Jack said. “He tried to get into my head. There were hundreds of him. So”—he kneeled to wipe his blade off on Lemuel’s grey smock—“I just had to strike them all. Told you I could do it.”
“I didn’t doubt it.” Arjun knelt by Lemuel’s moaning head. “He’s too fast, Shay. You shouldn’t have tried to chain him.”
T ogether, they walked out of the Cere House, Arjun leading them under the sign of the city’s music. The music that had pointed his way was no longer there, but he remembered the route, and he found to his relief that that was all he needed. Jack followed, keeping close to Arjun’s heels as they left the city he knew.
The cats in that strange place stopped their whispering, and lifted their flat heads from their bearers’ shoulders and hissed at Jack, who spat back. They watched him as he followed Arjun into a street marked by their howling cat-music. The flying folk beckoned to Jack to join them, but he shook his head.
When they were done with what they had to do, they walked back, and into the dark mortician’s parlor.
Arjun said, “Then we have just one more thing to do.” He looked around the room, and at the eerie glow of the god-cages. “Two more things, I suppose.”
Lemuel had two big black suitcases in the corner of the room, like the ones Shay had had. One was empty. The other was half-full of what Arjun guessed was photographic paraphernalia, though it was a little different from Shay’s stuff.
They packed the glowing glass cages into the suitcases. It took a long time. They had to hold the cages at arm’s length, and even then their fingers tingled and a rush of stolen glory ran up the veins of their arms, filling their heads with thick light, so that they had to go and sit in a corner for a few minutes, heads between their legs, breathing slowly.
When the suitcases were full, heavy and clanking, they each took one and walked out of the Cere House, this time without any special trickery or art. They crossed the dark Heath, and went down to the river, where they walked out onto the jetty. It was, Jack had heard, the place from which the Thunderer had been launched. They threw the suitcases in. The suitcases bobbed for a moment in the black water, then sank as their air leaked out.
“They’ll rise again,” Jack said. “Or be dredged, sooner or later.”
“Yes. And perhaps Shay’ll come back again, or someone like him, out there somewhere in the city. But this will keep those things down for a good long time, and in this place. That’ll have to be enough.”
“So what now?”
Arjun leaned against the poles of the jetty to catch his breath, and listened to the river rushing past the mossy timbers below. “Not much further. I think I know the way.”
T hey left the River and went down through the streets, across the edge of Shutlow, which was silent now, exhausted, and into the looming warehouses of Barbary Ward, and along a street of empty mills. They wriggled under a wire fence and made themselves muddy. They crossed a vacant lot strewn with weeds and dogshit and gnawed bone, under the light of a filthy moon. They came to a great black warehouse straddling a canal. A lightless tunnel cut beneath. The canal smelled stagnant but its waters flowed urgently, powerfully.
Arjun climbed down onto the damp mossy towpath and slowly approached the tunnel’s mouth. Jack leaned against the wall and watched.
“This is where you began,” Arjun said. “Do you remember?”
Nothing stirred in the dark.
“This is where I made you. I’m sorry for that. This is where Shay and I made you.”
Water rushed urgently into the tunnel. The stones hissed and something echoed distantly in the depths.
“I was the first thing you ever saw in the world. No wonder you hate me.”
The echoes in the tunnel slowly died out. The rushing waters slowed, grew torpid, sluggish, stale.
“You hideous thing.”
Arjun turned back to Jack. “Stand close to me. It won’t be long now.”
T he water was still. A cold and foul mist rose from it. Both of them knew the signs of the monster’s coming. To stop himself from runni
ng or screaming, Arjun clutched the tow-post by the tunnel’s mouth so hard that his hand throbbed and stung.
Fog rose off the canal, cutting them off from all the city’s lights, so that there was nothing around them but the water.
Beneath Arjun’s hand, the wood of the tow-post became slimy and cracked.
Out of the darkness came a small white figure, and another, and another, walking slowly up the towpath. Their shaved heads were cocked at odd angles. As if, Arjun thought, they were listening to a secret signal; as if, Jack thought, their necks were hanging from an invisible noose. Darkness followed them. Each of them was the white crest of a wave of darkness, and darkness poured from their slack mouths and blank eyes, and pooled in their footsteps.
One by one, the white robes halted their approach, and stood slouching around the jetty.
One last sallow creature kept coming. Then it stood before them, alone, and opened its gaping mouth even wider, and freezing silence echoed out of its depths. It was no larger than the others, but it seemed to Arjun that perhaps he was seeing it from very far away, as if he was sinking away into the void while it loomed hugely above him, willing him down.
“I see it,” Jack said. “Behind that boy. Riding him. Gods, it’s so fucking ugly. It’s so fucking sick.”
“Yes.” Arjun grabbed Jack’s shoulder. “That’s it. Love of the Voice, that’s it. That’s the Typhon itself, inside that one. Now.”
Jack linked his arm with Arjun’s, and ran forward, right at the monster. Arjun stumbled to keep up, but was quickly off his feet, falling; then it didn’t matter, because they were both off their feet, hurtling just over the surface of the muddy towpath.
Jack threw his knife at the monster, with impossible silvery speed. It struck the monster in its stolen head, shearing away a part of its jaw. The thing did not flinch.
Then Jack, carrying Arjun, passed over its head, climbing into the sky, away from it, west and over the squat flat warehouses of Barbary, over the chimney pots and slumping roofs of Shutlow, and all of the sleeping city fell away beneath them as they came out over the Heath and across it. And howling, the monster came after them.
