by Felix Gilman
Ruth
Brace-Bel, jerking, bleeding, lifted the glittering crystal and waved it vaguely under his attacker’s nose, as if trying to tempt him with sweets. The attacker, all too substantial, ignored it. The cleaver struck again and the crystal rolled off under a bathtub.
Ruth ran.
The murderer’s face had been terribly wrong—the scars, his yellow monstrous eyes. He wore torn leathers, rags, what appeared to be an old bedsheet. His left arm was a stump that jerked spastically.
The Inspector—Maury—was it possible? Was he real, or a creation of the machines, her father’s will, Ivy’s mean streak and vivid imagination?
She ran and slid on the wet tiles. Nearly falling, she pulled herself upright on a cold pipe, threw doors open, pushed through damp curtains. Boots stamped behind her. She panted, moaned. He was silent.
A long room of wooden wash tubs, in ranks along the walls. Green-black water. Air that choked. The floorboards thick with moss. Her feet slipped and she regained her balance, at the cost of a shooting pain in her calf, a stab of sick-making adrenaline. She froze, too scared to go further.
Behind her the Inspector stamped, grunted, slid with a sad flatulent squeak, and landed with a thump and a crack.
She turned. He’d caught his head on the edge of one of the wash-tubs. He was kneeling, trying to stand; his missing arm flailed for purchase, as if he’d forgotten his wound.
His face was down, his eyes not visible. That made it easier.
She put her hands on his shoulders as if she were comforting him as he cried. His body was warm, solid, real. She leaned her weight on him. It was that easy; she didn’t even have to push. She did it without thinking. His face went into the green water. His knees scrabbled for purchase on the slimy floor. It took too long, and she had time to think. Time to gasp in sympathy with his pained thrashing. But she didn’t let up until he stopped moving.
Not real. That was what she decided to believe. Nothing in that house was real. It was all just moves in an unpleasant game.
Ruth retraced her steps. Brace-Bel’s body was gone, though smears of blood remained.
She groped under the bathtub, and recovered the crystal.
Where was the monkey, her guide? Vanished. She was alone. All around her the house creaked and strained, pulled this way and that by incomprehensible machinery.
She wandered through the house, the crystal held out in front of her like a lantern. Its light waxed and waned unpredictably. Whispers and murmurs followed behind her. Shadows leaned from the walls, taking brief form, watching her go past. Cobwebs shook themselves and became pale servants, their fingers reaching tentatively for her, only to be stung by the light; they stared after her resentfully.
Oh, everything was so terribly familiar! That was the worst thing. She walked through her own memories. She might have been dreaming. The house she’d grown up in, endlessly repeated, made nightmarish. That mantelpiece stood in the drawing room—the paint was faded where the sunlight hit it. That was the door to the kitchen—the knob rattled loosely, ever since … That corner where a conflux of roof beams made odd angles—that was in the bedroom she’d once shared with Ivy, and shadows had always gathered there.
Her father had made the Mountain this way—this was a mask that he’d hung on its true unthinkable form. All the things her father must have seen, all the places he’d been! But in his old age he returned to his beginnings—and not happily, not fondly, but bitterly, full of shame at his own failure.
She thought of Arjun. Was he still alive? She wished she’d never brought him with her. She was ashamed to have him see this.
The crystal had sharp points. She used it to scratch her name on the plaster of the walls; maybe he’d see it, maybe he’d find her, maybe they could save each other.
A radio. Creeping, shivering, the sound of static, carried strangely through the thin walls, the pipes, the wires. Were those voices? Not exactly. Certainly not music. Information of a kind Ruth would never be able to understand. Its source was unclear. It bounced, echoed, refracted in shadow.
A man coughing, swearing. Bloody woman. Cow. What’s she done this time?
The noise came from the corridor to Ruth’s left, past glowering gaslamps, and a bare wooden door. The door to the old back room, at the Low house, where her father had kept his accounts.
All right, then. All right.
She knocked on the door. The radio went silent—no other answer.
She pushed it open.
There he was. Sitting, watching the door, in an armchair, the radio and a knife and a clock with spiderish hands on the low table next to him. A frail and sunken man, dressed in a slate-grey suit, his white hair a ghostly nimbus around a withered face. The room was ill-lit, densely crowded with paintings and mirrors and photographs and dusty treasures.
He stood, slowly, creaking and unfolding, and she knew that he was real.
“You got so old,” she said. “What happened to you? Where did you go?”
He looked her up and down, his bloodshot eyes wide with shock, and for a moment he appeared close to tears. Then his eyes narrowed again, and he sat back down. A sneer twisted his face. “So which one are you? It’s like a bloody bus station in here these days. Why did you come here? Why can’t you all leave me alone?”
She crossed the floor. The carpet, ash-scarred, ancient, was a map of something abstract. She swept the clock and the knife off the table, leaving tracks in the dust, and sat down by the side of the old man’s chair. He winced at the noise. She put her hand on his arm. “Haven’t you been alone long enough?”
He squeezed her wrist with bony fingers, hard enough to hurt. “Your young man was just here,” he sneered. “He didn’t ask after you. If you came for my blessing you can fuck off.”
He laughed until he started coughing again.
The Demon King-Father and
Daughter-Haggling
Arjun
The servants had dragged Arjun up the stairs, out of the cellars. Frozen by their touch, he couldn’t resist. His feet dragged numbly in the dust. Shay followed behind, his cane clicking, cursing. Why won’t you leave me alone? What do you want? You can’t have it. I rule alone here.
They’d thrown Arjun on the floor at the foot of Shay’s armchair. Warmth had slowly returned to his limbs. He’d stood, shaking like a newborn calf. The room was unlit, as if everyone in the house had gone to bed. The old man had pointed his cane again. I’ve been here before, Arjun thought. The mirror is a trap, everything is a trap, or a device, or a weapon, or an implement of torture …
Shay, again, and perhaps for the last time. This one was an elderly man, withered down to bones and bitterness. His cheeks were hollow and his yellow teeth, which he bared as he sneered, were abnormally thin and sharp. A broken nose. A grey suit, a faded handkerchief in his pocket. The skin of one hand was burned. The skin of the other was liver-spotted and thin and grey as death. His eyes were bloodshot. For a moment Arjun felt a kind of pity for the man. There was something ingrown, bitter, and unhappy about him that was both embarrassing and pitiful. Then he saw the hollow and shadowy servants that hovered behind Shay’s chair, brushing their fingers gently through his spiderweb hair, smoothing down the shoulders of his suit, murmuring in his ear, awaiting his orders. The man was a monster. The yellow smile and twisted features of a demon king.
Was this the first—was this Mr. Low? —or was it a copy?
Did it matter?
“Don’t do anything stupid,” Shay said. “I know that stupid look in your eye. Don’t get heroic notions. You people! Where do they keep finding you people?”
“You have to die, Shay.” The Hollows perked up their pale heads.
“Maybe! Maybe! But it won’t be you who kills me.”
“You sent the airships. You sent your servants. You murdered the city.”
“What? Oh. Yes. You didn’t leave me much choice, did you? Bringing that woman here. Ruining everything. I’d been too kind for too long. Ti
me to clear the rubbish away.”
“I’ve killed you before, Shay. I can do it again.”
“Not me. Not me. Very inferior copies. A hazard of too much travel, overcomplex affairs, is that you collect shadows. You killed a few? Excellent. Thins the herd. Fewer to make trouble for me. Sit down. Sit down. No, on the floor. Don’t make me tell my servants … Thank you.”
Cross-legged on the carpet. The carpet’s pattern was abstract, intricate, mechanical, a snarl of dark threads.
“Who sent you here?”
“No one. Ivy showed me the way. I came alone.”
“Why did you really come here? You don’t look quite stupid enough to be taken in by my daughter’s poor-little-princess-please-save-me routine. And don’t pretend you care what I do to that slum down below.”
“When I was a boy, long ago, I lived in a town in the mountains, far to the south. We had a God of music, and it ordered our lives, gave meaning and beauty to our days. One day it vanished. I chased it all this way, to the city and beyond. Is it here? Did you steal it, Shay?”
“Maybe. Maybe. I have machines here that can do that. I’ve collected a lot of interesting machines, over the years. Sometimes I find it useful to acquire those energies. They make good fuel. They make good bargaining chips. Do you know what the Gods are?”
“I don’t care to hear your philosophies, Shay. Is it here?”
“This isn’t philosophy, it’s cold fact. Do I fucking look philosophical? Energies of creation, that’s just what they are, that’s how the Builders made them, this Mountain commands them, spins and weaves them, sparks from the friction when the city’s angles rub together, oil for the Gears, little fragments of making …”
“I don’t care, Shay. I prefer not to believe what you say. Can you blame me? Why won’t you answer my question? Is it here?”
“Maybe. I’ve hoarded a lot of treasures over the years. Anything that wanders too close to the Mountain goes in my nets. I don’t need them making trouble, opening doors where there shouldn’t be doors. That bloody daughter of mine let a lot of them loose when she started fiddling with the machines—yours wasn’t one of them? No? Well. Well. I can have a look for you, if you like.”
“That’s very generous of you, Shay.”
“Rummage in the attics.” Shay didn’t smile.
“Will you?”
“If we can make a deal.”
“Why would you make a deal with me?”
“My daughter, you fool. She’s ruining everything. Too clever, too clever, I always was afraid of her. Should have strangled her in her bed. Wards and sigils and locks. She’s taken over half the bloody Mountain. If this goes on the whole thing might fall apart. I need your help. I need you to go to Ivy. I need your help—I’m admitting my weaknesses here, you little shit of a thief. Take it as an earnest of good fucking faith! Take her a little present. Help me, and we’ll see about a deal.”
“Ivy brought me here. I think I was supposed to help her against you.”
“So? Renegotiate. You left loyalty behind long ago. Our kind has none of the ordinary virtues. Cultivate flexibility instead.”
They haggled. Shadows gathered. And as Arjun left the room, it seemed that Shay sagged, and paled, and only his servants held his thin head up, as if the haggling had taken the last of the old man’s strength. He left Shay in the dark, listening to the empty noise of his radio.
Ruth
“What did you do to him?”
Shay bent almost double in his chair, wheezing, groaning. He dabbed at his mouth with a stained handkerchief. His spine protruded through the worn fabric of his jacket, curved like a dog’s, frail and painful. It hurt to look at him, so Ruth turned away, and looked all around the room. On one wall there was a large and dusty mirror—she recalled Brace-Bel’s warning, and looked away from it. The rest of the room was cluttered with trinkets and devices. Low tables stood at angles like fortifications, carrying weapons, charms, machines. He seemed to have a fondness for fertility idols, dull-pointed weapons, tin soldiers, dirty postcards, stuffed animals in postures of terror or rage. Everything was close to hand. How long had he sat here? His bony fingers had worn tracks in the dust, his shuffling feet had worn shiny trails across the carpet. He was present timelessly in the room; she could almost see the years of his operation of the room’s devices. Somehow he controlled the Mountain from that chair. He maintained his defenses, he hoarded his treasures, he took his revenge. The room stank of fear and madness. It was the center of the world, the center of her memories and nightmares.
“He works for you?” Shay said. She started, turned back to him. He still wouldn’t meet her eyes. “He works for me now. We made a deal.”
“You shouldn’t have. He’s naive.”
“Why did you come here?”
She put a hand on his bent shoulder, more out of curiosity than sympathy—he was dry, weightless, fragile.
“I wanted to see you. I wanted to know if it was true.”
“Now you know.” He shuddered. “Now you know.”
“Yes.”
“You think it would have been better if I’d taken you with me? Think you could have lived this way? Is that what you think?”
“I don’t know what I think. It’s too late, isn’t it? You’re not really a person anymore, are you?”
“You don’t know how hard it is. The things I had to do, the deals I had to make. It’s not easy, is it? It’s never easy. One thing leads to another.”
“I know.”
“You lose bits of yourself. You get caught up in your own lies. All over the place. It’s like being sick. It’s like a cancer, eating at you. Hundreds of them, thousands of them, scheming against me. All I do is hide. It’s horrible to be your own worst enemy.”
“Is it?”
“I stole this thing. The Mountain. I lied and killed for it. Do you want to know who I took it from, who he took it from, what he took it from, what it is?”
“Maybe. What’s the price?”
“Oh, you’re clever. You’re a clever one. Which one are you?”
“Ruth, Dad. It’s Ruth.”
“Right. Right.” His head was still bent. “I can’t look at you. Why did you have to come here? Why did you have to remind me?”
Was he crying ?
“You sent the airships. You tried to kill the city. Do you remember?”
“Oh, maybe. Maybe. Your young man was whining about that. What choice did I have? Things look different from up here.”
“I’m sure they do.”
His shoulders shook. Her hand wasn’t far from his scrawny throat. She was inside his defenses. Had he let her in knowingly? What did he want her to do?
She could kill him; he was frail. She should kill him. She heard Arjun’s voice, sounding so stern and serious—he has to die. He cannot be allowed to keep the Mountain.
His shoulders shook, the way the Inspector had struggled as she held him down.
She couldn’t do it again. Not because he was her father—that had not been true for a long time, she realized—but because he was a human being, and old, and weak, and afraid. After the Inspector, she couldn’t pretend that it would be easy.
She had so much to ask—What was so important that you had to leave us? Was it worth it?—but his answers would only be self-serving lies.
She walked away. He clutched at her shirt. “Wait—wait. Where are you going? I need your help. You’re the kind one, you were always my favorite. That Ivy, she’s trouble, she’s too clever, you have to help me … What do you want? What do you want?”
“Oh, be quiet.” She brushed away his hand. “You don’t have anything I want. The two of you deserve each other.”
The servants murmured in awe and terror as she passed through them. She closed the door behind her.
Arjun
Two forces of servants fought at the stairhead. Arjun couldn’t tell Ivy’s from Shay’s. Their numbers were uncountable—they seemed evenly balanced. Surging and retreati
ng, clawing and tearing, grey and flickering. No words, no shouts, no screams—only a noise like wind rattling through the eaves of an old house. Arjun waited at the foot of the stairs until they exhausted themselves. Afterward, the tiles of the stairhead were strewn with scraps of shadow like leaves.
One, two, three; take the fourth corridor on the left. The ladder, the stairs again. Shay’s directions; Arjun had committed them carefully to memory.
He carried one of Shay’s wards, and the servants stayed clear of him. They glared in disapproval. They shook their heads. Did they envy him? There but for his undeserved luck … “Brothers,” he said. “I’m sorry.” They didn’t stop resenting him.
