by Felix Gilman
Easier said than done—where else was there to go? Wanting to ascend the Mountain wasn’t enough. You couldn’t just walk there, any more than you could walk to the moon. It required a cunning, a vicious disregard of the world and its logic, that Ruth simply couldn’t achieve. She was no Ivy. She wasn’t her father’s daughter. And besides, she was never alone—with the Hollow Men abroad in the streets, no one was ever supposed to be alone. She was accompanied everywhere by colleagues, refugees, armed men and women. She couldn’t think. She couldn’t see. When she tried to explore the borders of the Ruined Zone, the dark alleys, friends held her back—they asked her if she was mad.
At night the bombers went over, and though these days they usually passed over harmlessly, bound for southern districts, everyone still went below, into the cellars and tunnels. The new life of Fosdyke was half in the light, half subterranean. In the cellar beneath the old Low house there were now cots and oil lamps and homemade shrines to the new Gods of the city. It was home during the day to two refugees, and it was night shelter for half the street. Ruth was Ward Coordinator for Carnyx Street; it was her job to count her neighbors in, to bang on doors and help out the elderly. Tonight there was one man too many clamoring for shelter.
He was a dark-skinned man in a red shirt and spectacles. He was thin, dirty, and bruised. Ruth stopped him with a hand on his shoulder, and asked who he was. These days you couldn’t be sure— it was tempting to think that everyone in Fosdyke was on the same side, but there were maniacs from the Night Watch out there, there were raiders from the Ruined Zone, there might be spies from other districts.
He flinched from her touch and she wondered what had happened to him to make him frighten so easily. He said his name was Hatch; he was from Walbrook; he didn’t have a home anymore. His eyes were pleading—the searchlights were coming slowly closer, over the hills, covering the peaked rooftops and the tall chimneys in white ice. “Come on,” Ruth said. “Come on, get down, don’t make any trouble.” She closed the door firmly behind them both—it upset the children to hear the drone of the bombers going overhead.
Mrs. Watts lit two oil lamps and a warm convivial glow suffused the darkness. Joanie Crick shared out the playing cards. The children began to play a game among the crates in the corner; one of them would stand on a crate and announce himself the ruler of the Mountain, and the others would try to knock him off and claim it for themselves. Mr. Titus Schott, who’d joined the cult of the Bird, decided it was a good time to make converts, and got shouted down and laughed into a huffy red-faced silence. Hatch smiled and tears sparkled on his dirty cheeks. “They said there was still real life, real people, here in Fosdyke, but I couldn’t believe it.”
Ruth blushed—her hospitality seemed poor enough to her. “Where have you been, Mr. Hatch?”
He shook his head. “You don’t want to know.” He got up and paced. Joanie Crick pulled the children away from him, by ears and dirty collars.
He saw the nervous expression on Ruth’s face and smiled as if to apologize for his oddness.
He began to sit down—and then something in the corner of the cellar caught his attention, and he darted across to it, scattering the playing cards.
In the far corner they’d heaped the last of the Dad’s stuff they’d never gotten round to clearing out of the cellar. There were a couple of peculiar clocks, a few things with dials and wires and black tuberous growths that the Dad had called telephones, some boxes, some books, half a dozen stuffed birds and vermin. These last seemed to horrify and fascinate Hatch. He picked them up by their stiff limbs and lacquered wings, and turned them over and over.
Ruth put a hand on his shoulder. “My father’s,” she said. “It was a hobby of his. Are you all right? Did you lose someone who …”
He held up a kind of—well, Ruth supposed it was a kind of lizard. It was oddly brightly colored—shiny in an oily way. She was never sure where her father got those creatures—she was very small during his fascination with taxidermy. She remembered visits to the house in the middle of the night by shifty-looking people. She remembered Marta explaining sourly that they were going hungry that week because the Dad had bought a rare parakeet or something. He’d been a terrible taxidermist, anyway; the creature was scarred and hacked about and ruined. The scars reminded her of…
Hatch took a deep breath and put the horrid thing down. “Where I’ve been—it reminded me of something. The man I ran away from, he did this sort ofthing, all the time. Those of us who followed him, he had us picking through the ruins for vermin. He was bloody mad, he was.”
Ruth squeezed his shoulder. “It’s all right now.” There was a muffled thump from the streets above, and one of the children shrieked. Hatch flinched; she held his shoulder firmly. “In the morning we’ll get you a billet and a job. But where have you been, Mr. Hatch?”
“Out in the Ruined Zones—out east of what used to be Walbrook—out in Juno, where the quarries were—and all around. We followed him, all around. Through the ruins, the quarries. Like he was a God. He made us call him Beast. He made things like this, all the time. We brought him rats and cats. He was scarred like he was one of them himself. Sometimes he did it to one of us …” He shuddered; then he recoiled from the intense interest in Ruth’s eyes.
She wouldn’t let go of him. “Where is it? Mr. Hatch, where is the Beast?”
She left the cellar at first light. She gave Joanie Crick a message for Marta. With a smile and a wave it was easy to steal a pack and a rifle from one of the Committee’s storehouses—”Morning, Miss Low, you go ahead, don’t hurt yourself with that, now.” She stuffed the pack with food and filled the leather canteen that was strapped to it. There were too many straps and she wasn’t sure she’d buckled them right—the pack shifted uncomfortably. She went out of Fosdyke alone, and into the Ruined Zones.
The Beast! It lived! Well, after a fashion. It would tell her the way to the Mountain. It would tell her how to put things right. It would tell her who made it. It would tell her what was wrong with the world. She had so many questions to ask it. It would talk to her, she knew. It was suffering—she could feel it. It was like a sister to her.
The Night Watch-Maury at War-
The Lamplighters-Brace-Bel at War
Arjun
There were two chairs in the office, and a desk. There was no light except the moon outside. Arjun sat in one chair; Inspector Maury sat facing him. The office was raised on a mezzanine of iron walkways and platforms above the floor of an old cattle-pen or slaughtering-house, from which all the cattle seemed to have fled. There was a disconcerting crack in the concrete ceiling, which leaked. The timbers creaked, the pipes shrieked, the shutters banged, the obscene tubes and clamps of the old pre-War milking-machines clattered. In the darkness below the men of the Night Watch slept, paced, cleaned their boots, prayed. No lights—no lights anywhere. Arjun coughed and Maury swore. There was a strange intimacy between them, and neither of them was sure what to say.
“What …”
“Do you …”
“No, you …”
“Sorry—you go on.”
Maury swore again. He hunched in his chair. His maimed left arm was bound in a sling across his body; otherwise he looked unchanged. The battered black leather coat, the shabby suit, the necktie loose and frayed. A little older, more tired; a grizzled white growth of beard like mold on old food. He swore and growled, “Still alive, then?”
“Apparently.”
“Still stuck here in this shit-hole?”
“I seem to be.”
“We’re all just circling the fucking drain, aren’t we.”
“Fosdyke seems to be weathering the crisis well enough, Inspector—are you still an Inspector? Maury, do you know if Ruth and Marta Low of Carnyx Street are still …”
“Fosdyke!” Maury grunted. “They’ll get theirs soon enough.”
“Maury, are the Lows still alive?”
“How would I know? Probably. We’re at fucking war wi
th Fosdyke, aren’t we? Bastards.”
“Maury, where are we?”
The men of the Night Watch had dragged Arjun through the streets, in the dark. They’d ducked and dodged as if avoiding patrols, and he’d lost his sense of direction. Periodically they’d stopped to smash streetlights, break windows, and extinguish the lamps inside, confiscate the candles from the hands of lone pedestrians. Their behavior had struck Arjun as peculiar, though he reserved judgment; the city had changed, again, and perhaps what they were doing made a kind of sense. They’d dragged him out through empty ruined places, through wide open spaces under the dark clouds, and into these abandoned and unpleasant stockyards. Arjun had no real idea where he was.
Maury grunted. Apparently he didn’t intend to answer.
“What’s happening here, Inspector Maury?”
“Where’ve you been?”
“Elsewhere.”
“Elsewhere? What’s that mean? Where’s Ivy?”
“She went to the Mountain. I didn’t. I don’t know what happened to her. “
Maury sagged. Then he jumped up, and Arjun braced for violence; but instead Maury went to the door and yelled out, “Pike, Drummond. Get us some fucking coffee.”
Maury slumped back down. “If there’s one thing we’ve got here it’s coffee. The warehouse next door used to store it and ship it. Boxes and bloody boxes of it. Coffee, salt beef. Spoons, for some reason. You really don’t remember?”
Arjun told Maury how he’d woken to himself in the ruins of the Carraway Estates, in the South Bara Ruined Zone. One of Maury’s men—Pike? Drummond?—brought in coffee in two black mugs. Maury gestured Arjun to shut up. When Drummond—Pike?—was gone, Maury said, “They don’t know. They don’t need to know about that monster, about the Museum, about Ivy. I told them to look out for you, you had valuable intelligence. Didn’t say what. No one needs to know that. Who knows what the boys would say if they knew this was all our fault? All right? Maybe I should just shoot you now, shut your mouth, that’s what’d be safest. Was it our fault? None of this makes sense. That woman, that monster, the Mountain. I should shoot you now but this is all about you, isn’t it? Last chance. Last chance to put this right. Only lead in my inquiries. What’s going on? What do we do?”
Maury said this in a monotone, while he held his coffee near his lips in a shaking hand. Then his eyes settled on Arjun and he said, “Yeah, I tried to kill you, but you tried to kill me. With the birds and all that. No reason we can’t be friends now. We saw some things together. That changes a man. I’m being serious. It’s a different city. Everything’s different now. We have to work together. Between us we’ve got just about enough hand for a handshake, right?”
So Maury was mad, then, Arjun thought. How mad? A little madness, under the circumstances, was understandable. How dangerous was he?
In fits and starts, swearing and snarling, Maury told his story.
“I missed the War. After what happened at the … after what happened I was pretty much nearly dead. You did a good job on me, you little bastards.”
He paused to fumble one-handed with a cigarette. “We’ve got about a million of these, too,” he said. “Warehouses stacked high.” Arjun helped him light it—Maury flinched at the fire and glanced nervously at the window.
“I suppose I don’t know who took me in. My guess is they didn’t know who I was or they’d probably have slit my throat. More fool them, right? Someone put me in a hospital bed. No name, no papers. Death sentence, anyway, they might as well have left me in the gutter. Someone sewed up the arm. Then they leave you to sweat and shit out the fever. I didn’t die. I didn’t. I wouldn’t. Do you think something kept me alive for a purpose?”
“I don’t know.”
“Me neither. I think I was just too fucking angry to die. The first bombs fell and I slept through it. They left us alone in the hospital and we had to fight for what food was left, too weak to crawl. I didn’t die then either. I didn’t even know who I was for a long time, all I knew was that everything was wrong in the world. I went out into the city and everything was different, I didn’t know who I was or where I was and maybe I went mad for a bit.”
“I’m sorry. I know how that feels.”
“I’d missed the War. Waited all my life and I missed it. Went walking. Turns out the hospital wasn’t far from Barking Hill— where we met, remember the good old days? We had a laugh, didn’t we? Empty now. Rich folk lived there, they went to shelters. Evacuated. Don’t know what happened then. Walked through the ruins. Learned a thing or two—saw the airships. Light calls to them. Light brings the airships, noise brings the Hollow Men. World’s over. City’s over. Trying to start again—that’s madness. Hide in the dark—all we’re good for now.”
He went quiet for a long time. Suddenly he said, “Anyway. Met up with some of the lads. Guardpost south of the Hill. Not bad lads. Deserters, I suppose, in a way, but that’s all past now. They didn’t recognize me at first. I thought, maybe I’m a ghost now, too.”
Maury lit another cigarette. Clouds passed across the moon and the red tip was the only light. “I understand something now. All my life those ghosts who came down and talked of War. Soldiers. Bombers. Ruins. Fifty years of fearing what was coming. I was only a kid when I looked into that alley and the man in it who I’d thought was sick dragged me in and said: all you kids die in the War. Hands all filthy with soot. Not my fault, is it, if I was frightened? I know who they were now, all them poor lads. Our lads, who we sent up to the Mountain, and the Mountain threw ‘em back down, higgledy-piggledy, all over the years. Minds gone. Just did it to scare us, I reckon. Not our fault. Someone played a nasty game with us. If those ghosts had left us alone we’d all have been kinder people. I really believe that.”
Softly, Arjun said, “Maybe that’s true, Inspector. There’s something cruel in the Mountain. It’s taken from all of us.”
“Maybe. Maybe. Too late for mending now. Anyway.” Maury waved vaguely. “The lads recognized me in the end. We met up with a few others. People need order, now. They don’t know what’s good for them. Trying to pretend nothing’s changed. No sense. No sense to fear. We’re a kind of police, I suppose. Night Watch. Going from door to door, reminding people to put out their damn lights, hide. Making ‘em see sense, if they won’t do it for themselves. Here in this House we’ve got twenty men, but there’s lots of us, all over. Mad gangs, now, and worse, Lamplighters and things. One big stupid war turns into lots of stupid little wars. Something has to be done. It just makes sense, you see.”
“That’s good, Inspector. These people need help. What are Lamplighters?”
Maury ignored the question. “What happened on the Mountain?” he said. “What did she do? Ivy … I shouldn’t have trusted Ivy. Bad things happened and I don’t know what. But,”—he jabbed his finger at Arjun’s face—”I remember this. At the Museum, on the steps, there’s me lying there with my arm all bloody, everything numb or cold or burning, dying maybe, and I saw that Beast, I should never have tried to talk to that thing, I saw it changing. And it said something I remember well—it said Shay. It said Shay rules the Mountain. It said Shay made it. Whined about it. It said Shay made it to show the way. You know about this stuff. What’s Shay got to do with all this?”
Arjun nearly jumped out of his seat. “You know Shay?”
Maury banged the table and roared, “Sit the fuck down!” In a calmer voice he said, “Yeah. I know the name. He was a ghost we saw a lot of—us in the League. Troublemaker. It’s in the files. I don’t remember now. Nasty magics. Skulking around the shadows, making deals. Asking funny questions about the Mountain. Bunch of different names. Sometimes he looked like an old man, sometimes he looked young. Always got away, came back over the years. Well connected. Knew people. Don’t remember the details. Never thought much about him. Name stuck in my mind, is all. What’s he got to do with all this?”
“I don’t know,” Arjun said. “I don’t know. Where are these files?”
&nb
sp; Maury shrugged. “Don’t know. Any Chapterhouse.”
Arjun sighed. “Secret files, ruins, buried intelligence. Ghosts and criminals. Inspector—I came here to this city, so many years ago, thinking things would be simple. I came naively, in search of music. I dreamed I would wander down broad sunlit boulevards, find my God singing in golden temples, and bear it home. But everything is very complicated here. I am trapped in some horrible game I do not understand. We all are. I’ll tell you everything I know about Shay, and it won’t be enough. The answers are on the Mountain. Help me get there, Inspector—do you want answers?”
“Fuck answers,” Maury said, with finality—and Arjun, who’d found a passably sharp pen on the desk, and palmed it in the dark, readied himself to strike at the Inspector and run. “Fuck answers,” Maury repeated. “It’s too late for answers. The city’s dead. I want revenge on whoever did this. Not my fucking fault.”
Maury stretched out his hand. They shook on it.
“First we find the Low sisters,” Arjun said.
Maury sneered, looked sick, but didn’t say no.
Arjun felt himself sag with relief—had he ever in his life been so tired? He added, “And I need somewhere to sleep tonight.”
Brace-Bel
And what had happened to Brace-Bel? He wasn’t dead, not yet; in fact he was very happy to say that he was more alive than ever. He had landed in the aftermath of War, and found beauty in the ruins. He’d personally shot and killed at least three or four people and the men under his command had detonated a number of bombs, and he had a new appreciation for the speed and power and thrilling aesthetic purity of rifles and bullets, the glories of rockets. It occurred to him from time to time that he might have lost his mind, but could he really be blamed for that?
