Gears of the City

by Felix Gilman

  Hanging like old coats in a wardrobe …

  He walked among them, brushed against them. They were cold. They shifted as if in a breeze and fluttered and it seemed that sometimes two or more stood in the same spot; perhaps an infinite number could stand on a single point.

  Like pale reflections in a cracked mirror …

  Did he recognize any of them? He wasn’t sure. Their heads hung dismally down. Their faces were all so similar, so vague— Shay’s hollowing process stripped them of their identities. There was sometimes a subtle suggestion of place or time to them—the dark skin and pronounced brows of the princes of Erigena; a stain across the temples and cheek that might have been one of the tattoos of the thieves of the House of Moth. One of them might have been Mr. Zeigler. Maybe; it was hard to tell, and what were the odds? There were so many. Explorers and adventurers of a thousand Ages of the city … Arjun’s ill-fated peers; his fellow dreamers. Most had probably been men; it was hard to be sure. Their clothes were androgynous, ill-fitting, ill-defined. He hoped they were men because when he saw a pale ambiguous face that he believed to be female he found it unbearably sad, he felt unbearably ashamed. He looked for Ruth’s face; he didn’t find her among them.

  Like ripples in a moonlit pool …

  It was possible that the dim light came from the servants themselves; or that its reflection glowed from their brittle skin, that some part of them was in a place where moonlight fell …

  Dusty valves in a monstrous calculating-engine …

  A signal went through the room and every head snapped attentively up, and Arjun’s heart seized with terror.

  He was in the middle of the room; no exit was visible. Why had he come here?

  Because you belong here.

  His legs buckled. He sat numbly on the floor. The servants gathered around.

  A cane clacked on the concrete. A bent figure approached. The servants stepped flinching aside.

  An old man pointed his cane at Arjun’s face.

  “I remember you,” Shay said. “You again. You little shit. You little shit of a thief. Don’t you ever learn? What am I going to have to take from you this time?”

  Come Home-Tne Pawns-Stalemate-

  First Blood-Reunion

  Ruth

  Where was she?

  Ruth sat bolt upright. Sparks showered and stung her skin, drilled tiny black holes in her shirt. What? A pipe overhead had burst, and black cables like guts spilled. All along the corridor the pipes rattled and shook. Oh! She remembered how once the Dad had come stamping up the stairs in the middle of the night shouting fire, fire, everybody out—some experiment gone wrong. The stink, the fear, the sudden constriction of the throat, tears and screaming. So long ago! She remembered the bombs falling. She lurched to her feet and threw herself backward through the nearest door. She stumbled a little way in the dark and fell against the wall again. Where was she?

  She was at home, and half asleep. Perhaps she was dreaming. A great exhausting ache in her back—a hard day’s work behind her. What had she been doing, where had she been? Come home, come home. Every corridor, every door, every unsteady staircase was something she half recognized. She lay down, and got up again. If she could only lie down in her own bed! But the house seemed unusually large, and empty. She climbed the stairs and kept climbing. Where were her sisters? An awful creaking and banging of pipes. Shutters banging. Take care of it in the morning! Lie down. Where was her father? Familiar cobwebs and dust, those old familiar splintery chairs, the cracked molding on the old windows! If not for the dull pain she’d have been happy. Things hadn’t been the same since. Come home.

  Not her bedroom, but good enough. A mattress, under the declining angle of a staircase. A candle, a glass of wine, a little heap of old newspapers. Ivy’s bed? No one would mind. Begin again in the morning. She lay down and fell asleep.

  A man stood over her. Her father? No. Too heavy, he moved wrong, he didn’t belong there any more than she did, and when he saw her he only sighed.

  Sometime later someone held her arm and slipped a cold and silvery needle in. It made her shake, and there was a silvery taste at the back of her throat.

  She sat up slowly. Her back ached, and her head ached. Where was she? Not at home—not at home at all.

  A little makeshift bedroom, under the stairs. Like a servant’s nook, or a refugee’s squat.

  A man sat on a three-legged stool at the foot of the bed. He appeared to be doing a newspaper crossword puzzle.

  “Miss Low.” The newspaper lowered—the date, the place names, briefly glimpsed, had been impossible—and behind it was a badly burned face, an ill-fitting black suit, two piercing lavender eyes. “You look so very much like Ivy. Which one are you?”

  “Brace-Bel!”

  “No.Iam Brace-Bel.” The burned man shuddered and closed his eyes. “There are too many mirrors here, and sometimes I feel myself watching myself with displeasure. It’s easy to become confused here. I remain however Brace-Bel. Are you Ruth or are you Marta?”

  “Yes. Ruth, I mean.”

  There were footsteps outside in the corridor. Brace-Bel rolled up his newspaper and held it as if it was a weapon. The footsteps receded, and he relaxed. “Ivy wasn’t sure who would answer the call. Ruth it is, then. Can you stand?”

  “Yes. What happened …”

  “Ivy’s medicines. There are laboratories here. Engines of making. I understand it all depends on the will, or the imagination. I have little left of either. Your sister has a message for you.” He unrolled the newspaper again, and read from a snarl of jagged handwriting on the corner: “I told you to stay on the path, touch nothing, don’t be followed. Hope you’ve learned your lesson. This game has rules.’” He rerolled the newspaper. “There you go. She’s impatient today. Stand, then, and come quickly.”

  “This isn’t my house, is it, Brace-Bel?”

  “In a manner of speaking you are heir to it. But it is no house. Speaking of mirrors—do not look in them. They are prisons, traps. The old man keeps souls locked away in them. A friendly warning.”

  The footsteps returned outside.

  “Come quickly. Ivy needs you. No place here is safe.”

  He rapped with the newspaper on a brass pipe that ran along the edge of the skirting. The wall shook, releasing white dust from the ceiling, and a door opened.

  Brace-Bel

  How long ago was it, weeks ago now, years perhaps, time being different within the Mountain, in the play of its electric fields and monstrous pressures—how long ago was it that Brace-Bel ascended into the light?

  The fire had played around his feet. The glow of molten metal had scribed the outline of a door in the wall before him, and he’d fallen through, staggering, believing himself dead, through sparks and gouts of flame, through foul smoke, and he had burned. He had felt his flesh burn away. Weightlessly, he ascended on the wind. That, he’d thought, was how stars were made. And as a greasy glowing cloud he’d stretched across the sky—could he make it rain? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if he could make it rain on the city? —until the jagged peaks of the Mountain snagged him, fishhooklike, and dragged him down, and down again. He’d had the sensation of being stretched and dragged through monstrous gears, ground away, refined from the stuff of that world to the stuff of this, and still always down, and down, terrible pressure gathering around him, until he was tumbling through hot brick and soot, through a chimney, and he rolled naked and scorched out through the coals of the fireplace, past the black iron grating, at Ivy’s feet.

  “Get up,” she said. “Get up, Brace-Bel. Stop your screaming.”

  Was he screaming? Well, why not? Be fair.

  “He’ll be here in a moment. Get up, and come with me. I just took a big chance on you, Brace-Bel.”

  He followed her. His burned feet pained him, and he left bloody prints on the grimy carpet. She led him up what seemed like dozens of flights of stairs. (Had he really been a star? A cloud? Already the memory was fading, uncertain—an
ambiguity in the translation from Below to Above, from life to death.) She opened various hidden doors, the last of which led into what appeared to be a neatly furnished spare bedroom. She sat cross-legged on the edge of the grey-white bed, took off her shoes, and rubbed her feet as if she, not him, had had the harder day. Released of the need to follow her or be lost in Hell, he fell on the floor.

  “He won’t let me do that again,” she said. “Ha! You’d better be worth it, Brace-Bel. Now that he knows that little trick’s possible, he’ll put a stop to it. Just watch. Just watch.”

  Indeed, when Brace-Bel ventured outside the bedroom, outside Ivy’s wards and locks, the first thing he noticed was that Shay’s servants had boarded up all the fireplaces.

  Maury

  And Maury had stumbled into darkness. The servants held him under his arms, dragging him, his legs dangling helplessly. They carried him as you might carry a suicide out of the cell in which he’d hung himself. Maury’s throat was tight. He could almost feel the noose. They walked for hours, maybe days, and he heard the servants murmur, grumble, unlock and lock the doors, disarm and rearm the traps. Finally he was lowered onto a cold metal slab. This is all right, he thought, it’s not so bad being dead. The rattle of sharp instruments on a steel tray. The hum of machinery. An old man’s hacking cough. Numb, indifferent, he waited for the knife; the autopsy; the cause of death. Whose fault was it all? It didn’t matter much anymore, did it? That was the best thing about it.

  “Yes. The Know-Nothing. The Inspector. Yes. My darling daughter’s little friend. What’s his name?”

  A harsh voice, a voice Maury remembered. The old man. Shay. The whisper of the servants answered.

  “Maury? Maury. Ha. Blind, is he? He’ll do. Got no arm. He’ll be grateful, then, maybe. About bloody time someone was grateful to me! Eyes first. Let’s get you some new eyes. Any preferences?”

  Maury said nothing—he was dead, after all. It wouldn’t have been proper.

  “Cat? Come on, Inspector. Lizard? Bird? Cat’s good for shadows. Bird’s good for things that move too quick or too slow. Lizard’s good for secrets. Come on, come on. I haven’t got all day. While we’re down here she’s scheming against me upstairs. Turning my servants against me. Stealing my keys and spying on my secrets. Interfering with things she doesn’t understand. You were one of the ones who brought her here, Inspector. You ruined everything. That bloody woman! You’re going to help me put this right. Cat’s got your tongue? Cat, then. You, you, and you: hold him down. This is going to hurt.”

  Brace-Bel

  Brace-Bel had no idea who was winning. The struggle between father and daughter took place on levels that he comprehended only dimly. As best he could tell they were in a position of bitter stalemate. Sometimes they brushed against each other in the corridors, as they went about their business. He snarled; she sneered; sparks flew.

  It was all to do with control of the machines. Brace-Bel knew very well that the Mountain was not what it appeared to be. Shay had occupied the Mountain for so many long lonely years that he had shaped it around himself, like a worn and grimy sweater, like a favorite armchair; but, though it now took the outward form of a vast and appallingly ugly, old, and empty house, the machines were sometimes visible beneath the facade. The pipes that crawled the walls like bulging veins—the valves and diodes that grew like mushrooms in dark corners—the wires that bunched and knotted from the ceilings—the gears—all spoke of the Mountain’s true function. Those delicate incomprehensible machines! Those were the machines that made the city. Brace-Bel spent many of the timeless hours of his afterlife with his head pressed against the warm copper of the plumbing pipes, listening to the churn of creation; or staring into the glare of an electric bulb, the black filament like the seed of universes, until the afterimages of whorish scarlet angels were burned on his eyes. Sometimes out of the corner of his eye, or through the cracks in the curtains, he thought he could glimpse the machine’s true immense architecture: a spiral, a lattice, a mesh of gears of light, a necklace of vast and glistening pearls, greater than worlds. A vast machine. The engine of creation, left behind by the Builders of the city, spinning endlessly, idly.

  He tried to imagine those Builders. He couldn’t picture them. He imagined pillars of intelligent fire; vast silver-winged women; tower-tall scientists in white coats; misshapen gargantua, ogreish gaolers, clinking golden keys the size of tree trunks, soaked in seas of blood and oil. None of those guesses convinced him. His imagination was unequal to the task.

  “Who made this?” he asked Ivy, over and over again. “Who made this? Who built the city? What beautiful terrifying creatures?” She wouldn’t tell him. She smiled and told him to be patient. The secret of it was one of the many, many, infinitely many things that she held over him, to keep him in her service.

  The old Brace-Bel would have raged at the Builders, would have fought past the doors of the Mountain to spit in their unthinkable eyes; but he was too tired now, and too old, and too lost. He was content to wait and see what was revealed to him.

  He subsisted on cheese and fine wines, which Ivy had her servants steal for him from Shay’s pantries. The finest wines in the city, hoarded, going to waste! He drank and laughed too eagerly at all Ivy’s jokes. He went out spying for her. Following her instructions, he made certain precise adjustments to the machinery, the purpose of which he didn’t understand.

  She controlled most of the upper floors now, and the east wing. Shay controlled the cellars, the west, the echoing halls of the ground floor. Day by day, room by room, she turned more of Shay’s machines against him. She was knotted into the control of the Mountain now. In the lower floors it was always twilight, the way Shay liked it, but in the upper floors it was a cold and bright morning—Ivy said it helped her think. She lay on the bed and counted the cracks on the ceiling and plotted out her strategy. Dozens of Shay’s little surgical abominations followed her—adored her—nuzzled against her and begged to serve her. The loyalties of Shay’s Hollow Servants were divided. When father and daughter passed in the corridors they were each flanked by shadowy phalanxes.

  Ruth

  “Who’s winning?” Brace-Bel shrugged. “I don’t know. Come on, come on.” He flapped his hands, gesturing Ruth toward a splintery ladder. “Up, up. He can’t kill her, she can’t kill him. The machines are too delicate. She’s begun processes that he can’t repair. He knows things she’s only beginning to learn. The whole thing might fall apart and then where would we all be?” He spoke quickly, nervously, his usual orotund manner deserting him, as if the shadows of the house depressed him. There was a knocking behind the walls; perhaps they were being followed?

  She climbed the ladder. At the top Brace-Bel took the lead again, shuttling back and forth through empty rooms and bare corridors. “And the Hollows are less useful than you might think.” Brace-Bel patted his pockets. “There are charms and wards. Lines they can’t cross.” He withdrew a glittering crystal from his pocket. “Ivy gave it to me. The Hollows fear its light. I used to have a stone very much like it. I kept it on the handle of my stick, and I thought it very fine and rare. But her father has a hundred of them. There is or was or will be a district called Islegh where they mine these things, or mill them, or I forget what. Not special. Seen from here, nothing in the city is special.”

  He tapped with his toe on a little brass grille in the skirting. There was a slithering scrabbling dusty sound, and a small scarred monkey emerged from the hole. Brace-Bel said, “Which way today?” The monkey limped off down the corridors, and Brace-Bel followed. “Things change,” Brace-Bel explained. “You’d be lost here by yourself.”

  The monkey led them up narrow staircases, through attic rooms where dust spun in the sunlight, slowly, as if thinking. “Who knows what she’s got planned for you? Some scheme, some strategy. Maybe she thinks your father won’t hurt you. Maybe she thinks you can get close. I don’t know. She doesn’t tell me. I do as she says.”

  They followed the monkey
through room after room of bathrooms: claw-foot tubs, slippery tiled floor, cold stagnant air, and the choke and hiss of overburdened plumbing. Mildewed doors swung, faded curtains rustled. The pattern on the tiles was green and yellow, like moss.

  Ruth said, “Are you happy here, Brace-Bel?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Are you happy? You seemed so proud, when I met you before. You thought you were so clever. You were, too, you really were, though I didn’t like you much. You can’t be happy serving my sister, in this horrible place, not understanding anything.”

  Brace-Bel turned to her. His head was framed by rusting pipes, and he stooped beneath them. His burned face wore an expression of genuine surprise. “Why do you ask?”

  “I don’t know, Brace-Bel. Maybe I’m sorry for you. You didn’t deserve to get caught up in all this, did you? You were probably all right in your own place, before we ruined you. Never mind. Never mind. I don’t mean to be rude. Let’s go see Ivy.”

  He shook his head. He seemed to be about to say something.

  Maury

  Shay should have killed her at once, the bitch Ivy, killed her when she’d first set foot on the Mountain. That was what Maury thought. That was what Maury thought because that was what Shay had said, muttering, snarling, all through the operation, and during the grey days that came after, when Shay hunched in his chair and Maury scuttled around at his feet, cleaning, fetching, serving, adjusting the wheels and the levers of the machinery. Now, as Maury skulked and spied through the corridors of the terrible house, the old man’s words echoed in his head, scraped his skull. I should have killed her. He should have hollowed her out, stolen her memories, thrown her back down. He could have done it then, when she was new, when her position was vulnerable. But he’d been soft. He’d been sentimental. Now it was too late—now she had servants, she had control of the machinery. That was the problem with family, with women; they made you weak. Often at that point Shay started to weep, and Maury turned his scarred face away in embarrassment; but the old man’s point was basically sound, Maury thought. And when he saw the new woman, that little copy of Ivy, creeping around the house, he knew there was no room for delay. The thing had to be done now. So he followed her, and the fat man. He could go where the Hollows couldn’t. He didn’t know why. And he waited for his moment, and he drew his knife—Shay’s servants had armed him with a meat cleaver from the kitchens, very useful, very nice indeed—and stepping from the shadows he buried it in the fat man’s back. The fat man’s words were replaced with blood. Was he happy? Was he fucking happy? Who cared? They were all beyond happiness or unhap-piness now. They were dead, at the end of the world. Nothing left but strength and fear. He worked the knife loose from the wound. The woman was screaming, running. The Inspector’s new eyes were particularly good at watching prey.