by Felix Gilman
“What are you writing, Brace-Bel?”
“This? This awful hole is only another kind of prison,” he said. “I shall continue my memoirs. It’s a comfort,” he added. “You may borrow my pen.”
“I have no gift for words.”
“A musician. A monk. A pilgrim. Thinker of simple passionate thoughts. A man who lives in the moment of ecstasy.”
“I’ve never thought of myself as passionate.”
“I would hate to see what bloody and mad things you’d do if you ever were passionate.”
“What do you mean, Brace-Bel?”
“Not an introspective man. No compulsion to apology or self-accounting. No urge to spin theories or excuses. I admire you. ButImust write. Moreover, I am compelled to leave behind some record of myself in the event that we do not return from the Mountain.”
“We?”
Brace-Bel was thoughtful for a long time. Then he said, “I mean to see this through to the end, now. Besides,” he smiled, “Ivy will need my counsel.”
“Ivy?”
“She will take me, she will need my counsel, she will need someone to tell her story. I would not serve Shay but it would be my pleasure to serve her.”
“No, Brace-Bel. I’m going up the Mountain. My God is there. I’ve spent years …”
“Well, but here you are in this horrible cellar with me, and she is out there with the Beast and his secrets and planning the way up the Mountain, so perhaps you have not played your hand as well as you might.”
Arjun sat in scowling silence for a minute. Then he moved suddenly, and crept toward the door panel, and slid it open a crack.
The voices of Know-Nothings echoed and boomed in the bar just outside.
“I think it’s the afternoon,” Brace-Bel said. “Try again at night.”
Ruth
Why hide in the Pumping Station? It fitted the Beast’s nature, but not Ivy’s. She was always fastidious about cleanliness—and Fosdyke offered a hundred other less damp hiding places. Cellars, bolt-holes, conspirators’ hidden rooms, the city was riddled with them. Ruins, abandoned buildings, warehouses that even the Combines that owned them had forgotten existed, lost in a fog of bureaucracy.
Ruth slipped through the streets, down to the Station, again, another moonlit night. The route was becoming familiar. She wondered if the Station meant anything to Ivy. If she remembered.
Because in the years before the Dad left, when the sisters had been small, and the Dad was always going on longer and longer journeys, leaving them alone, they’d had a game. They’d gone exploring the streets, creeping out of the house at night. All three of them together. (They had been strange children.) Exploring, conquering, naming and renaming waste grounds, inventing history for shuttered ruins. Declaring themselves Princesses of abandoned spaces. They had followed the canal as far out as Walbrook. They had broken into Pumping Station 300 and claimed it as theirs. It had been one of their favorites for a week or two before they found the stables on Crow Street. It was still active in those days—the pumps heaved and roared and rose and fell. Ruth had imagined the machines were an army, shifting in centuries-long fairy-tale sleep, waiting to be woken. Marta had declared the place a ruined castle, left over from forgotten Ages of the city, disguised in concrete and slate.
Did Ivy remember? Was that why she’d gone to ground there? Maybe. Maybe not. In retrospect Ruth thought little Ivy had been less interested in their childish fantasy than in the machines, the processes and systems they represented.
Ruth knew something was wrong as soon as she turned the street corner and saw the Station, down by the water. At first she couldn’t say what it was. But then, of course, she realized that the Station’s windows were dark, again.
She stopped, and she waited, and the lights did not come back. She approached slowly, already knowing what she would see: the ruined building returned to disuse, cold and silent again.
Scraps of Ivy’s notes and calculations were scattered on the damp floor. Numbly Ruth picked them up and scanned them. She didn’t understand any of it.
They’d taken the lanterns. Perhaps the Mountain was dark, or the path to it. They’d left most of the food for the rats. Maybe you didn’t need food on the Mountain.
In the muddy ground outside the Station there were footprints. Were they fresh? Ruth wasn’t sure. A dozen people or more, walking together, down along the water—and the tracks were lost in the weeds.
Who’d gone? Who’d been left behind?
Suddenly she thought of Arjun, in the dark of Rawley’s bolt-hole. Was he still there?
She ran back to Carnyx Street.
Arjun
All evening the Know-Nothings in the bar outside had been making noise—drinking and shouting and arguing. The bolt-hole echoed with muffled voices. Where was Mrs. Rawley? Arjun hadn’t seen her since the afternoon of the day before, and in her absence the Know-Nothings seemed to have moved in permanently. They seemed to be drinking her cellars dry.
Arjun was hungry. Brace-Bel had fallen asleep.
The Know-Nothings all went silent, very suddenly and all at once. Brace-Bel muttered in his sleep.
There were footsteps in the corridor outside. Arjun picked up Brace-Bel’s stick and held it like a club, waiting in the dark.
The door slid back. Framed in the lamplight that poured in, glowing like an angel, was a head of curly blond hair, and a brilliant smile.
“Arjun? There you are.”
“St. Loup?”
Behind St. Loup stood a little round man in a brown suit, with an egg-shaped head and mild bespectacled eyes.
“Turnbull?”
Behind Father Turnbull, lying in the corridor, was what appeared to be at least one Know-Nothing, possibly deceased.
St. Loup vaguely waved the needle-gun in his hand.
“I think at this point you should probably regard yourself as our captive,” St. Loup explained.
Brace-Bel rolled over, snoring.
“And I suppose we’ll take the fat one, too.”
Ruth
Ruth went to bed that night without a word to anyone. Marta tried to say something to her; she didn’t listen. She slept most of the next day, and most of the day after.
Who was gone? Ivy was gone. Rawley was gone—when Ruth had gone running panting into Rawley’s pub, she’d found it empty, except for a half-dozen Know-Nothings who appeared to be passed out in a dead drunk, so total that they might in fact have been drugged. Arjun was gone—the bolt-hole was empty. Had Ivy come to Arjun, had Arjun gone to her? Had they all left together? She couldn’t know. Who else was gone? She didn’t care.
“Ivy’s gone,” Marta said. It wasn’t a question.
“Yes.”
“Huh. Well, good riddance.”
But Marta was tough. Good riddance was what she’d said when the Dad disappeared, too.
Ruth couldn’t stand to be alone in the house. She went walking, on the streets on which she was trapped. The Know-Nothings hung around for a few more days, inquiring after the mysterious disappearances of the following individuals of interest to their inquiries: Mrs. Rawley, Mr. Zeigler, a Mr…. Then they went home. The patrols were recalled—the state of emergency was relaxed. Carnyx Street was quiet again. Hours were increased at the local factories to compensate for the lost productivity of the past week. The weather got a little worse. The Mountain looked the same. The lights of distant streets were scattered on it like nameless constellations. The peaks were a void, coal-black.
One night there was a storm over the Mountain, a real shocker, slashes of violent white lightning and lurid clouds, nets of rain sweeping and surging across the city, and maybe that storm meant something and maybe it didn’t. In the morning everyone slogged to work through the puddles, same as every day. Whatever Ivy had done on the Mountain had made no difference to anything, except that she was gone, and Arjun, and everyone else. The city felt the same as ever, only slightly less so.
One night, as she sat in the upstai
rs window smoking xaw and watching the unchanging Mountain, she saw three bright specks appear against its dark mass. At first she thought they were stars. Then she wondered if they were birds.
She watched them as they approached, fanning out across the city. As they spread out it became clear that there were more than three—six, twelve, twenty-four points of light.
They appeared to have come from the Mountain. But that, of course, was impossible. They might as well have come from the moon. Was she hallucinating? She stubbed out the cigarette.
The lights continued to move across the city. Most of them drifted off to east or west, but one came closer and closer.
It was hard to judge perspective—how large was it? It appeared to be a sort of flying machine. The mass of the thing was a dark grey balloon, long and bulletlike and ugly. The light was just something that hung from a cage below it—a cold, hard artificial light of a kind that she had not seen for years, not since the Dad’s experiments with electricity.
The thing droned. It had engines.
The light beamed down across the darkness of the city, freezing flashes of white rooftops and chimneys and fences.
Was it looking for something ?
“Ivy?” Ruth said. She leaned out of the window.
The thing passed overhead and two streets away. She ran to another window to try to see where it went, but the angle was bad; all she could see were the edges of the light as it passed. All she could hear was the drone of its engines.
Did it have a pilot? Did it have a mission? Who sent it?
Moments later there was an impossibly loud and earth-shaking crash, and a flash of red flame from over on Ezra Street, and the window cracked and the house shuddered.
An explosion? A bomb?
Ruth ran downstairs, pulled on a coat, and went out into the streets.
After the Second Expedition
Wake Upl-Inquiries, Cryptozoological
and Otherwise-News of the War and
a Dialogue on Faith-Fragile Alliances
Arjun
Wake up.”
“Wake up.”
“Is he dead? He’d better not be dead, Turnbull.”
“We can know very little in this life, St. Loup. We are but mortals stumbling in the dark. But I do know poisons. He is not dead, and he will wake up.”
“He’d better, Turnbull. He’d better.”
“Are you threatening me, St. Loup?”
“A man of the cloth? Perish the thought.”
“His eye just twitched.”
“Give him another shot. More electricity, that’s the ticket.”
“Be quiet, St. Loup. Did you just hear him moan?”
“That’s scintillating conversation by his standards. I’ll give him a kick.”
“Ah, there we go. There we go.”
“Finally. Wake up! Wake up! It’s your old friend St. Loup and good old Father Turnbull. We have questions for you.”
They held Arjun in a small suite of rooms, somewhere in a tall building. It appeared to be anonymous commercial office space. Perhaps St. Loup had rented it—he had business interests all over the city. Perhaps it belonged to one of Turnbull’s people—Father Turnbull operated in a number of districts, working with young people, in churches, seminaries, universities, and temples, undermining and corrupting naive faith, and a surprising number of his proteges later became great successes in the business world. Perhaps it was neutral space.
The walls were grey and the carpets blue. There was a room with an ivory-white conference table, a small bathroom, and an office with a typewriter, on which he was encouraged to record his experiences. (He refused.) The conference table was covered in rows of bulky black telephones, all disconnected. The windows were all barred, and the door onto the corridor outside was locked. There were faint sounds of typing and conversation and elevators from the rest of the building, but no music, and certainly no doors out into the Metacontext.
It was high summer, and not air-conditioned.
They had drugged Arjun to bring him into the building, and he had no real idea where he was. Nowhere in particular, he supposed. Somewhere far distant from Fosdyke, certainly, in time and space and other respects. They had drugged him twice since then, once with something that Turnbull claimed was a truth serum, and once—apparently out of spite—with a hallucinogen that had caused him to imagine that the telephones were all ringing at once, and their black shiny bodies were like children burned in some horrible war, wailing for the death of his God; that was unpleasant.
Otherwise they hadn’t tortured him much yet. Once St. Loup had petulantly stamped on his wounded hand, and sometimes Father Turnbull rapped his knuckles or twisted his ears. Mostly they tormented him with endless questions. They were convinced that he knew more than he was telling them.
Arjun wasn’t sure how they’d come to be allied—they’d never been fond of each other. St. Loup was decadent, materialistic; Turnbull ascetic, intellectual. Probably Turnbull’s spies and St. Loup’s spies, both watching Arjun, had gotten tangled together, and now the two of them had reached a kind of wary entente. They were like two predators facing off over the same downed prey. They questioned him separately, taking turns. Apparently despite their new arrangement they still couldn’t stand to be in the same room with each other.
He expected they might kill him eventually. He’d asked St. Loup what they’d done with Brace-Bel, and the man had waved a hand vaguely and said, “He was useless. We got rid of him.”
That was days ago now. The beard he’d started to grow in the bolt-hole was coming in thick and scruffy.
What a stupid, humiliating way to go! There was still so much left to do.
St. Loup sauntered in. One of his thugs locked the door behind him and stood mute, arms folded, scowling like a bouncer.
St. Loup sat on the edge of the desk, took his sunglasses off, and smiled.
“Are you well? Are you getting enough to drink? You look tired.”
“Well enough.” Every day one of the thugs brought him greasy noodles wrapped in white paper, bought off the street below, and bottles of water. It gave him indigestion.
“If there’s anything we can do to make you comfortable.”
“The silence is oppressive. A record player might be nice.”
“Ha. Perhaps not. Speaking of music, I visited the opera in Maliverne last night. Some thousand years forward and leagues clockwise of this place. Do you know it?”
“I don’t think so.”
“They engineer their sopranos from birth for fat. They make their fat ladies almost literally spherical. They think it’s important. One of those misunderstandings that gets passed down that buzzing telephone-line of the city’s history. It looks rather remarkable. Shining in stagelight, a chorus of perfect spheres, like people sometimes imagine angels. Except sweating copiously into velvet dresses. And the noise is very loud but not very good. My date was unhappy, I had to leave early. But this reminds me: how was the Beast engineered? Describe its scars. Describe its shape.”
“It was a very big lizard.”
“Oh, don’t be tiresome. What was it took your fingers off, by the way? Does the thing bite?”
“A machine. I got caught in its gears.”
“Did it have very sharp teeth?”
St. Loup wanted to know everything about the Beast. Again and again he questioned Arjun—what had it said? How was it made? Bird, reptile, mammal, or indeterminate? What had it said about the Mountain? What had it said about Shay?
Because Shay’s Beasts were rare, and precious. They were the most extraordinary game in the city. Shay made them and used them and discarded them, scattered across the city in freak shows and sewers and temples and ruins—whispering Shay’s secrets, babbling prophecy. Rumor had it that they knew what Shay knew of the Mountain, which was likely considerable. Most of them didn’t last long. Hunters caught and beheaded them. Churches burned them, mistaking them, not unreasonably, for demons or lycan-thropes. Somet
imes they died of their own surgical wounds, or simply relaxed into nonexistence. Sometimes one or other of St. Loup and Arjun’s fellow-travelers caught one, squeezed its secrets out of it, and killed it quickly so it could speak to no one else. The magus Abra-Melin had a glass jar containing a dead cat that had borne the marks of Shay’s manipulations, but didn’t dare open it for fear the little thing would turn to dust. Once St. Loup had fought a duel with Lord Losond, up on the roof of the Hotel, in the glass and sunlight and murmuring bloodthirsty antennae, over the ownership of a recently discovered Sphinx; and both of them had cheated, but Losond cheated better, and St. Loup ended up in the hospital, and Losond listened to what the Sphinx had to say, and vanished soon after and was never seen again.
“Where did it go? After the Museum, where did it go?”
“It took on the form of a prosperous local businessman and I believe it went to start a new life for itself.”
“Oh, Arjun, haven’t we been through too much together for you to tell me such ridiculous lies?”
T urnbull pulled up a chair and sat down opposite him, folding his hands neatly in his lap, leaning forward as if slightly concerned.
“Has St. Loup been mistreating you?”
“I think you were the one who drugged me.”
“You were talking to him for a long time yesterday.”
“I told him nothing I won’t tell you: that I don’t know anything useful.”
“Well, now, don’t sell yourself short. You found one of Shay’s Beasts. That’s not bad work, even if you did manage to lose it again.”
There were two thugs at Turnbull’s back—a big low-browed man in a cheap suit, and an even bigger man in janitor’s overalls. They glared at Arjun, they glared at Turnbull’s back, they kept glancing warily at each other, braced for action. Arjun guessed that one was Turnbull’s man and the other St. Loup’s. When would they betray each other?
“But frankly the Beast interests me less than the place where you found it. Shay’s Beasts lie. There is no such thing as prophecy. But the Age it was hiding in … For such a drab little backwater, it has some remarkably unusual properties. ‘Ghosts.’ The proximity of the Mountain. Very unusual. Very unusual place. So tell me more about the Combines. Who owns Holcroft? Who owns Patagan?”
