by Felix Gilman
She was shocked out of her thoughts by the sound of shouting and running feet. Instinctively she ducked into a doorway and tried to look inconspicuous.
A man came running down the darkening street, darting in and out of the slants of window light, so that his motion seemed stiff, jerky, hectic, helpless. The first thing Ruth noticed about him was his eyes; they had the frightened and lost look that said that he didn’t know where he was, that he’d come tumbling down the Mountain with his memory ruined and found himself in some alien city. The second thing she noticed was that he carried a rifle, clutching it in his arms like a baby, and wore a grey-black military-looking uniform, torn as if by sharp wire, and that he seemed vaguely familiar, as if she’d met him before under better circumstances. He was shrieking something incoherent. Behind him people were shouting, “Stop, you idiot!” and, “Just wait a moment!” and, “Keep that fucking noise down, or the Know-Nothings’ll be here!”
Ruth stepped out into the street in front of the running man, her arms spread wide to show she wasn’t an enemy, trying to say something to calm him; but he simply crashed into her, knocked her aside, and kept running.
As he staggered away he was calling out something about a war, about his lost men, about the airships.
One of those, Ruth thought. One of the ones from the War. (What War? Against the Mountain, presumably. When? Why? No one knew, yet. Lost soldiers like him came through every so often, and upset everyone with their ranting.)
The man turned into an alley and his shouting—this is all ruins, where am I, who are you people—echoed dully and faded.
Zeigler helped Ruth to her feet. Her hip was bruised where she’d fallen in the gutter. “I’m all right,” she told him. “I’m fine.”
He offered her a handkerchief; there was dirt on her face. “Poor man,” he said. “One of those.”
Her hip hurt abominably. “Most of them manage not to break my bloody leg.”
“Oh dear, is it really … ?”
“I’m only showing off, Mr. Zeigler. I’m fine.”
Zeigler cupped a hand to his ear and craned his head, but the soldier was gone from earshot. He shook his head. “Ghosts, I’ve always said, are like the omnibus; you wait and you wait and two come at once.”
Ruth sighed, smiled. “That’s true, Mr. Zeigler. That’s quite good.”
They went looking down the alley for the soldier, but he was gone, vanished into the night as if cleaned away by patient, silent street sweepers.
A Garden for Paranoids-
“Are You New?”-The Dancers-
The Whip-An Inelegant Combat
Arjun
In the violet light of the evening sky the plants in the garden seemed both exotic and artificial, lush and yet flat. The effect was heightened by the presence among the trees and the bushes and the vines of what were, on closer inspection, only paintings of flowers and vines, on the side of the grottos and nooks and marble chambers with which the garden was generously, extravagantly appointed. Those paintings were executed so skillfully that in the uncomfortable and ambiguous light it was easy to take them for real things, until one ran one’s hands over their cold stone surfaces. And after wandering awhile Arjun realized that all of the strangest and wildest plants—the swollen, obscene, and organic things, in lurid shades; the predatory thorns and strangling sinewy tentacles; the funeral-cloth flowers; the asymmetries and improbabilities— were in the paintings, not in life. Only so much could be done to pervert flowers and trees.
There was an obscene hedge maze. Arjun avoided it. The marble structures had their own varieties and eccentricities. Grim sepulchers rubbed shoulders with rose-draped lovers’ nooks; or with hissing fountains; with tall carved needles of stone; with what seemed to be shrines, in which statues of exotically dressed individuals adopted strange and significant poses; or with … but Arjun steered clear of all Brace-Bel’s buildings and statues. They were, he thought, quite likely to be booby-trapped.
Though they came in a mad cacophony of styles, stolen from a hundred Ages of the city, each of them was quite clearly new construction; fresh stone, clean-lined, and unworn. None of them could be more than a few years old.
There was distant music, coming from the mansion that overlooked the house. Once there was a sound that might have been a shriek, or might have been laughter. No birds; no rustle of vermin; a cold and lifeless un-city Only a faint buzz and click and cold electric whine.
Arjun took a winding route through the garden—the wide graveled path also seemed likely to be rigged, or watched. He trampled the flower beds and shoved through thorny bushes, one eye on the warm light of the mansion’s windows, one on the ground at his feet, in which he detected a number of dangers—everything in Brace-Bel’s garden was ersatz except the dangers.
Some of them were crude and obvious. The flower beds sprouted iron mantraps. Even in the half-light they were impossible to miss—their function was possibly ornamental. Here and there Brace-Bel had strung razor wire at neck height between trees. No intruder with the sense to not run blindly could have been caught by it; perhaps Brace-Bel only wanted to ensure that his guests took the time to appreciate his garden.
There were wires at ankle height attached to shotguns, or bells. Those took more care to avoid. Arjun found that he had a great capacity for patience and caution.
There were traps that could not reasonably exist—not here, not yet. In the branches, in the shadows of the marble shrines, glittered the hard unblinking eyes of cameras; devices for which Thayer and Basso and Miller and the rest would have had no name, which they would not, being local folk, have known to avoid. Arjun ducked and crept and hid from their gaze. He remembered, vaguely, a place in the city where every street corner carried one of those little devices like a hidden knife; he remembered he’d gone there to plead with a bank manager for release of a sealed safe-deposit box containing a certain valuable key, and he remembered quite clearly the manager’s insincere smile of refusal and the dull brass of the box, but couldn’t remember what the key opened, or why he …
One thing at a time. Whatever door it opened you must have passed through, because here you are; it’s behind you now. Brace-Bel is the step before you.
On the elegant arch of a little white bridge across an artificial stream Arjun noted two black boxes, one on either side of the walkway, just above ankle height. He knelt close but did not touch them. Their smooth cool material was not quite metal. A wire ran away from them into the grass and up to the house. Between the two boxes was an invisible etheric force—Arjun remembered that without knowing how or why or where he’d seen those devices before—a force that if interrupted would trigger an alarm. Even the empty air in Brace-Bel’s garden was watchful for intruders.
And there were traps that could not reasonably exist anywhere; fragments of ancient superstitions, dragged up and nailed up on the trees; things that Thayer and Basso and the rest would not have known to take seriously, even if they’d noticed them, having never traveled in parts of the city where such things were not jokes, or quaint curiosities, but real and deadly weapons in the bitter nighttime wars of gutter-witches and fortune-tellers and madmen and paranoids. Arjun surprised and dismayed himself with his own knowledge of those nasty little tricks. The horseshoes didn’t worry him too much; they were set to catch ghosts and devils, and he was, whatever people said, flesh and blood. Some of the spiderweb constructions of twig and wire and feather and bird-skull hung in the branches were set to catch nightmares, and those didn’t concern him. Others were set to release those nightmares on those who brushed past them. Poor mad Thayer, perhaps, had blundered into something like that—or perhaps there was hallucinating gas, or a needle, if one tripped the wrong wire. Some of the devices glowed, like marsh gas; others blinked a steady electric light, red, green, tiny, like distant stars. Brace-Bel’s garden was a contest of light and shadow; shadow was winning.
Arjun ducked his head and watched his step.
A line of salt; a s
plash of blood; a knot of hair; a severed hand dangling spiderlike from rusty wires; a withered bird—corpse nailed upside down to a tree trunk; all those were snares or wards of one kind or another. Out of the corner of his eye Arjun saw a word of power chalked on the side of a stand pipe—sodom—a curse of judgment and fire, a wicked word to utter or invoke in any city, let alone one of Ararat’s fragile substance—and he spoke the counter-word at once, by instinct, and then couldn’t remember what it was.
Perhaps it was all hocus-pocus and superstition; perhaps not. Arjun took no chances. He made it to the house apparently unscathed. If some curse had been placed on his soul, he thought, it wouldn’t be the first and it would have to fight for its prize. If a camera had caught sight of him and triggered a silent alarm, he’d find out soon.
The lower floors of the house were dark. From the upper windows there was light and music; a fast waltz.
Arjun climbed a drainpipe round the back, by what appeared to be the servants’ quarters. There was a heap of stinking refuse there, days or weeks old; Brace-Bel’s household was wasteful and ill-kept. He entered through an open second-story window.
He found himself in a cold room containing two mirrors, two claustrophobically small claw-footed bathtubs, and a scatter of clothing on the damp, moldy floorboards.
The room confirmed his guess: these were servants’ quarters. For one thing, Brace-Bel surely bathed in more style; for another, the man who’d made that garden would not leave his windows unlocked. So Brace-Bel’s servants were unreliable, then. That might be worth knowing.
Outside was a corridor, uncarpeted, unadorned, lit by a single candle on a side table. On the white walls was a thin spatter of something that might have been blood.
The corridor ran in two directions, into and away from the heart of the house. Arjun headed toward the music.
The servants’ quarters had their own staircase, an iron spiral leading down into shadow and up into light. As Arjun came close he heard it clatter under the weight of running feet; by the time he turned the corner there was no one there.
The corridor at the top of the stairs was empty, too.
The music was louder now, sounding through the door at the end of the hall. At this distance it was clear that it was not well played. An amateurish quartet sawed away in and out of pitch. Someone hit a drum at seemingly random intervals—possibly the same individual who clashed the cymbals as and when the mood took him.
Arjun pushed open the door and blinked in the light. Something blue in feathers rushed past him, shoes clacking. His eyes landed on a dark and wide-eyed face that he realized was his own, in a mirror. There was a smell of cigarettes and makeup, paint and sweat. A young woman sat on a low stool polishing her boots; she looked up and asked him, “Are you new?”
I said, are you new?”
“Maybe he’s mute.”
“Or deaf. The boss doesn’t have anyone deaf yet.”
“You’re supposed to call him Master.”
“Yeah? You’re supposed to be the most beautiful woman in the world. I don’t point out your shortcomings.”
“Fuck you. So, are you new?”
“What are you, stupid? He broke in. Like old Basso.”
The room appeared to be a dressing room; an antechamber, full of mirrors and costumes, to the room beyond in which the music played.
Four women looked Arjun up and down. Two sat on stools. A third leaned against the window, smoking. A fourth stood in front of a mirror, attaching gaudy rings to her ears and nose; “He broke in,” she repeated.
They were wary but not frightened, Arjun thought. They seemed curious to see what he’d do.
“I told you I heard an explosion earlier.”
“Is he an anarchist? He doesn’t have a mask.”
“Ask him yourself.”
On further inspection they were not all women. Two of them were young men dressed and made up as women, and one of the actual women wore a fake red beard, which she pulled aside in order to smoke. All of them, in fact, were in quite improbable costumes. In addition to the ridiculous beard, the smoking woman wore what appeared to be a parody of armor: clanking parts of metal and chain, spiked and dented, that left most of her flesh exposed and anyway were made thinly out of tin and would crumple at the first touch. One of the young men wore a long dress stylized with flames and coruscating golden thread, and his eyes were somehow tinted red. The other wore black furs and his white boots were like bulls’ hooves.
The fourth woman, who wore the rings—who was now attaching further baubles to a gold chain that swung between her ears and her lip—appeared to be being devoured by a jewelry-shop locust swarm. Emeralds contested passionately with rubies over the prize of her flesh. Most of her back was bare, though little studs and bars and glittering things pierced her, marking rail-track lines down her spine. She was bruised by purple cane-strokes, by sore burn-marks, by the marks of needles …
“Are you Brace-Bel’s prisoners?” Arjun asked. “I came here to free Ivy Low, but …”
“Hah!” The woman’s jewels clanked as she laughed. She moved to the far door; she opened it a crack and the clumsy music tumbled into the room. “Just like Basso. Why’s it always Ivy? What’s that bitch got that I haven’t?”
“I found a path through the garden,” Arjun said. “Help me find Ivy and we can all escape.”
“That’s sweet.”
The armored woman finished her cigarette and attached her fake beard. Her arm rattled as she opened the door.
Behind it was a ballroom. The floor was a dark polished wood; the walls were invisible in the darkness. There was a suggestion of heavy curtains. The room was huge and only darkly lit, by sparks of electric light and reflected glitter from the jewels and sequins and masks of the dancers who swept and circled that troubling space.
“Our cue,” said the armored woman. “The boss’ll go crazy if we miss it, mister whoever-you-are. Ladies and gents; after you.” And the jeweled woman and the flaming man and the bull filed out into the ballroom and joined the dance. The door closed behind them, leaving Arjun in the dressing room, not quite alone; his reflection, dark and puzzled, watched him from a half-dozen mirrors.
Arjun and his reflections shrugged and opened the door.
A woman in a costume that appeared to be made largely out of leaves drifted toward him, performing elaborate waving gestures with her bare arms. She was counting under her breath and appeared to be having trouble remembering her steps. She looked bored and tired. When she found Arjun blocking her path she stopped dead and swore.
“Shit. Am I out of line or are you? Wait, who are you?”
Arjun put a finger to his lips, and stepped around her. A young and surprisingly fat man came past, circling counterclockwise, dressed in something that appeared to be a kind of clock, as if open wounds had exposed his organs and they’d turned out, to his murderer’s surprise, to be glittering clockwork. The fat man ignored Arjun, his attention fixed on his feet, and on a structure of gears and wires and brass that was coming unstitched from his shirt, and had to be held in place with his free left hand (the right hand brandished a kind of tuning fork). And behind him, in the center of the room, Arjun saw Ivy.
There was no question about it. She had both Ruth’s and Marta’s features; Ruth’s beauty and strangeness, and Marta’s solidity and seriousness. She was taller than either of her sisters. She seemed both younger and older than them. There was something cold about her face, and something haughty; but then, she could hardly not appear haughty, while she was at the center ofthat elaborate dance, orbited subserviently by some ten or twenty dancers.
She stepped sideways out of the heart of the dance and her place was taken by a young woman in filthy rags.
It was only as an afterthought that Arjun noticed what Ivy was wearing. White feathers clung tightly to her and white wings hung weightlessly from her arms, stark and brilliant against her dark hair and eyes.
Arjun approached her and was about to sp
eak when a door in the room’s far wall opened, and a new figure pushed through the room’s red curtains.
It was a man, perhaps in his forties, and fat—pendulously so— and sweaty, and acne covered, and naked. His hair was wild, as if recently removed from the constraints of a wig. His pale flesh was bruised, like the jeweled woman’s had been. A short and stiff penis bobbed like the bill of a heron. In his hand he held a long three-tailed whip.
The newcomer came running through the room, hooting and scattering the dancers. His eyes were wide and black and mad; they nearly revolved. He snorted. He blundered into the heart of the dance and flailed at the young woman in rags with his whip.
The other dancers withdrew silently into the room’s shadowy corners.
The ragged woman shrieked under his blows. She was hardly more than a child. He crowed and struck again.
Arjun caught the man’s whip-hand on the backswing, by the fleshy wrist. He yanked it backward, seizing the whip and throwing it aside, sending the man sprawling in his ugly nakedness on the polished floor.
The girl pulled her torn rags closer around herself and sniffed, but stayed in her place.
The naked man drew himself up to his full height, which was not impressive, and fixed Arjun with a glittering mad eye, which somehow was. He seemed entirely unembarrassed at his own nudity. “Did I not give the most express instructions,” he barked. “Did I not make plain my one inviolable command in this place where nothing is inviolable save this one, this one Goddammit command: do not under any circumstances interrupt me at the moment of… Now wait, sir; you are not one of mine, are you?”
“Mr. Brace-Bel, I assume? Keep your distance, please.”
Brace-Bel stepped eagerly toward Arjun, and Arjun stepped back, cursing himself as he did so for what it cost him in control of the situation; but Brace-Bel was wildly intoxicated and there was no hope of intimidating him.
