by Felix Gilman
She scrutinized him with compassion and curiosity; she was not persuaded. She said, “I’m not very musical.”
“Shay poisoned the god. Shay broke it. Shay introduced an imperfection into it. When he stole a fragment of its power, and made that fragment into a toy, a creature, a pet. For whatever kind of disgusting man might want to make something like that his plaything.”
“Holbach has his doubts about that, now. Actually, he thinks Shay was a fraud, that he tricked you. He told me not to tell you this, because he still feels guilty about sending you there; but I think it’s better you hear it.”
She put a hand on Arjun’s arm. Behind her Mochai idly flicked through the newspaper clippings. “He talked with Branken about the heliotype, the machine you described. He’s had people look into it. It doesn’t make any sense. Everything Shay said was only patter. You have showmen and patter even out in the wilderness, don’t you?”
“Yes! I mean yes, I am not a fool, and no, it was quite real. This is what happened, Olympia. Shay stole something from the god, and changed it, molded it, made it into something human. Is it my fault if that’s impossible? The world is as it is. I was stupid enough to return that fragment to the god, and now the god is sick with it. Poisoned with it. Full of imperfections. I felt that the moment when it turned its eyes on me. I think I was the first thing it ever saw, the first thing it ever knew. Now it knows how to hate. If I had been torn away from perfection and made to see the world as people see it, I’d be full of hatred, too.”
She looked at Arjun for a long time. Mochai, behind her, consulted his pocketwatch again, and sighed.
She asked, “Why don’t you leave?”
“I’m sorry?”
“If you believe all this, why don’t you leave the city?”
“I don’t know.”
“What happened to the Voice you came here to find?”
He realized that he had not thought about the Voice for weeks, not since he’d heard that echo of it in the music at Norris’s gravesite. Olympia’s eyes flashed—she’d scored a point.
“You’re a great deal more charming when you talk about music,” she said. “Instead of rivers and drowning and death.”
“I imagine I am.”
“It’s a hard city, Arjun, life’s easier if you’re charming.”
“I’m sure that’s true. Olympia, I asked you if I could read Brindley’s writings on the canals. You said you had to think about it.”
She sighed, and stepped away from the desk. Mochai smoothly fastened her cloak around her shoulders.
“You’re no danger,” she said. “All right.”
She stopped at the door. “Music that improvises as it goes along?”
“I only meant to illustrate a point.”
“We have something like that. Something like that exists. One day if you have time you should go northwest up to Moricand and stop in the bars there. It might do you good.”
S he came round personally, two days later, to deliver the Brindley. She brought three slim volumes, wrapped in a red cloth. For obvious reasons, she said, she couldn’t trust them to a messenger-boy. He had no idea what she meant.
Each volume was bound in white, and plainly printed, in a dense type that marched in blocks down the pages, crowded with wild enthusiasm around illustrations, diagrams, formulae, musical notation, and above all maps, maps, and more maps. The myriad subjects seemed to be organized by no principle Arjun could see; it was not alphabetical, or at least not in any alphabet he recognized. According to the stark white covers, he now possessed volumes three, nine, and thirty-one of the third edition of the Atlas of Nicolas Maine and company.
This time Olympia was accompanied by Hoxton, who impressed on Arjun, with a kind of genial menace, the importance of never being seen reading those volumes outside the flat; keeping them under wraps when visitors came; bringing them safely back to the mansion when he was done.
“I rarely go outside anyway,” Arjun said, flipping through volume nine to find the bookmarks Olympia had placed at entries titled Locks and Inclined Plane Engineering and Curiosities of the Canals of Our Forefathers, both signed —B., which Arjun took as standing for Brindley. “It rains too much,” he explained.
“Get a cloak,” Hoxton said.
“I had a cloak from the basement of Klozny & Klozny. It was stolen.”
“Get a decent cloak,” Hoxton said. “I get mine at Tito’s, on Ashcroft Street.”
“Well,” Olympia said, “I hope this helps. I can’t keep coming around here.”
“Tell Tito I sent you.”
B rindley’s writings were no help at all.
Brindley had written in great and densely mathematical detail on the blasting of tunnels, the design of bridges, and the engineering of locks and planes; on the suitability of various kinds of soils and clays and bedrock, and what to do in the event that the area of the city through which one wished to drive a canal was one in which the earth below had long since been developed into sewers and cellars and catacombs; on towage and earthworks. Olympia had also marked Brindley’s long, obscure analysis of the Political Economics of Coal-Transportation, which sat improbably between a wittily unkind entry on Modern Melodrama and a foul-mouthed tirade against Corn Laws. Brindley’s breezy little essay on Curiosities of the Canals of Our Forefathers appeared, for no particular reason Arjun could understand, in the annotations to a comprehensive map of the district of Grafton.
The technical entries were dry and incomprehensible and irrelevant. Curiosities seemed promising at first, but Brindley doggedly discussed only pleasant matters: boat-races, famous marriages on the pleasure-canals, the tremendous gentle swans that had supposedly existed in an age when it had been possible to engineer such creatures (which Brindley considered apocryphal but charming), the scattering of flowers on the waters in the summer in Abbagnano, et cetera. Brindley made no mention of sacrifice or death or tragedy. In fact Brindley’s good cheer was so relentless that it became suspicious. There was something in it that seemed like nervous flattery. Slowly Arjun began to suspect that Brindley was deliberately concealing some horrible truth; that he was willfully refusing to name that dreadful Name, for fear of angering it. Brindley offered an aside on the failure of experiments, at the turn of the previous century, with steam-powered barges, and Arjun thought: Of course. The god would not allow it.
Brindley’s entries cross-referenced other interesting discussions—notably Rituals of the Old River, and Characteristic Diseases of the Bargemen—but those seemed not to be contained in the volumes Olympia had given Arjun.
When she came around again, a few days later, on the way between urgent appointments, Arjun asked Olympia for those volumes and she promised maybe. She was still flushed with excitement after her court appearance of the morning, in which she had done something daring and brilliant that Arjun was unable to understand, but that had somehow resulted in the release from gaol of the scandalous advocate of free love, Mr. Brace-Bel; a triumph, apparently. She wanted to talk about Arjun’s god. “Forget Shay. Forget the River. It’s a big city. You have to learn to forget things.” He told her that he remembered very little about it now. They talked instead about music, until Hoxton shouted up from the street to let Olympia know she was running late.
A rjun went back to Shutlow, again, to see Haycock, again.
It was an unnerving journey. Shutlow was close to the River, in the damp bend of the west bank; it lay in a depression where mist collected and stale water puddled in the streets. Arjun was able to face it only by leaving on an unusually clear afternoon, immediately after one of Olympia’s visits. He had been able truthfully to tell Olympia that he had nearly a week’s work to show for the past week. They had talked about music, again, and gods, and politics, which Arjun had not understood. His mood was good when he set out; by the time he reached Moore Street he felt nervous and hunted again, and he remembered: It knows you were in the Cypress. It trailed you there. It took Norris there.
A
rjun paid a boy a quarter-rial to run down the street and extract Haycock from the Cypress. The boy did not come back. Arjun did not panic—it would have been both irrational and pathetic to panic—but instead promised a grubby-faced girl a quarter-rial of her own if she came back with Haycock in tow. She came running back shouting, “The old lady Duffer says Haycock’s at his stall in Seven Wheels that still counts you owe me my money you fucking owe me my money”—which Arjun thought fair.
He found Haycock at his stall in an empty and desolate part of Seven Wheels Market, in the shadow of one of the great stones, on what was turning into a drab and damp late-winter afternoon. Haycock’s stall was heaped with moldering books, their paper yellow, their covers fading to the shades of spoiled fruit.
“Holbach says he’s worried about you,” Haycock said.
“That’s not important.”
“Makes me look bad; that’s not important?”
“I’m sorry. I have business for you.” Before Haycock could say anything further, Arjun began his story. He told Haycock everything about his meeting with Shay, his vision in the canal-tunnel, his fears, his theories about the god’s extraordinary condition. Haycock nodded and grunted, huh, huh, without great interest. Arjun tried to describe the dread; he said it was like drowning, it was like being held under by weeds, whenever one saw the face of the creature form out of the rain, or drift shifting in shapeless expressions of agony across the filthy surface of a puddle, whenever one felt, in the stink of the sewers and the stale water, the pain it was in, the hate it had…
“Then why aren’t you dead already?” Haycock interrupted.
“I’m sorry?”
“If the god’s hunting you, why aren’t you dead already? If I wanted to kill you, I’d have bloody well done the job by now.”
“It’s not like that, Mr. Haycock. Part of it’s poisoned by humanity, now; part of it is thousands of years old. Older than the city, maybe. What does it care if it waits a few months?”
Haycock grunted.
“And imagine how confused it must be, how upset it must be, how sick it must make it to be what it is now. To be imperfect.”
Haycock just shrugged. In fact Haycock’s question had been one that Arjun had not considered, even for a moment, all winter long; his surprising facility in answering made him doubt his own words. He said quickly, “I will pay for books, Mr. Haycock, on the Typhon. Or I suppose on Shay, if there are any, or anyone doing Shay’s business, whatever it was. Or whatever you think suitable. I have to go. It’ll be dark soon.”
He took a carriage back to Stammer Gate. The driver went too close to the water, but Arjun held his tongue. Night fell. The carriage passed briskly by a long lonely street to the left of the main thoroughfare, and down the brick terraces and railings and weeds of the street it was possible to see the edge of the River, and an unhealthy light playing across the heavy water, and by that light for an instant Arjun saw the tiny figures of a man and a child down by the water. Arjun said nothing, and felt terribly ashamed.
T hree days later Haycock brought Arjun a sackful of books.
There was a nasty and sadistic fiction called The Murders of Doctor MacLaglan, in which a repellent man who lived in a narrow dark house whose unwashed windows opened over the river carried out a series of lovingly described murders, by strangling, or drowning, or poison, all at the command of a gurgling voice that rose up from the cold water every night and called itself Timon. First MacLaglan murdered neighborhood street-children, and then his nieces, then a succession of prostitutes, then his own beautiful sister. He did it joylessly, resolutely. One by one he brought the bodies down to the water.
Arjun was unable to finish the book. It seemed inevitable that either the protagonist would prosper without consequences for his murders, or he would be devoured himself by the monster. Either outcome would be unbearable to imagine. Arjun was not surprised when Haycock told him that the book had been banned as blasphemous, and for the most part destroyed, and that was why Haycock’s expenses for the book were so great.
Along with Doctor MacLaglan, there were two histories of the River. One alluded vaguely to the rituals of the Bargemen, back in the hard old days, who would gather at midwinter in the tunnels and draw lots to determine whose child would be offered to the water that year, so that the Bargemen might be spared drowning or sickness or loss of business. Another noted casually, as if it were something everyone knew, that “of course, the first bridges had bodies in their foundations.” Both referred in passing to the Typhon, but there were a dozen other gods of the River and they dwelled on those instead.
There was a short, poorly written Memoir of the Life of a Bargeman. It began:
I was born into a hard life, my mother said I came early in the Cut under Tyn Wald and the lanterns had burned out and every bargeman knows how in the tunnels the day at the end is only a speck, it gives no light, to see by. In the dark the horses panicked along the narrow towpath when she cried out in her labor and my father, who was slow sometimes she said because of the ague, tangled his foot in the towropes and fell in, and though my uncles came back with poles and lanterns to look for him he was never found. We say, another for TYPHON’s coils, when that happens, and that is how a Bargeman goes, or by the ague. Father was taking coal from Unger to the Wald for the heating of Baths, by contract to the HOLCROFT Combine, who never paid a penny for the death of him because they said, the GOD willed it. So when I could first walk I had to become a Bargeman my own self.
The Memoir, too, had been banned, for injudicious remarks about the Holcroft Combine and its ultimate owner, the Gerent of Stross End.
Those four exhausted Arjun’s budget; Haycock packed up the rest of his books with a shrug. As he was leaving, Haycock stopped to offer a range of charms and amulets against evil and drowning, purchased, he said, from secret but impeccable sources. Arjun bought two of them, which he could not afford to do. He spent the rest of the day wearing a bracelet of white feathers and a dull pewter ring with a paste gem and feeling increasingly ridiculous. The books answered none of his questions.
His purchases left him almost without money for food for the rest of the week, and so when Olympia came by three days later and suggested they go to a café, he was delighted to say yes. She had Hoxton take them to a snug and warm and smoky place full of students. Olympia drank heavily and cheerfully, and Arjun drank, too, until his head reeled. When Arjun wondered out loud what had happened to that painter, that “Mochai, was it?” she laughed and said, “We had a disagreement. No more Mochai!” and his spirits rose immensely. The students at the next table sang a drinking song that used part of the melody that was the Voice for its chorus. For the next two days Arjun’s mood was good, and he was productive and happy, and noticed music again; on the third day it rained and the fear washed filthily back over him.
W inter dragged on. It seemed to Arjun that it lasted for an uncommonly long time, as if slowly gathering its strength; no one else seemed to find it unusual. Two more students drowned, an apparent suicide was found floating in the Calder Canal, and there was an outbreak of Black Lung in the Missionary Shelter at Hailie Circle.
J ack did not go back to Shutlow at once. It would have seemed like a waste of the gift he had been given. He set out wildly over the city, slicing great arcs across its map. The whole sky was his. He shared it with smoke and startled birds. Sometimes he saw the Thunderer on the horizon, but he kept his distance.
He decided to go out, as far as he could. He faced west and went forward. For every acre of city he put behind him, there was another ahead on the horizon. And as he moved away from the River and the Mountain, the effort required to keep his balance grew more exhausting. He gave it up around evening, afraid that if he kept going he would find his power failing in midair.
He came to rest on a flat roof in a part of the city where huge standing mirrors flashed at each other across the rooftops, and rested for a time. Then he came back in toward the River, navigating by the Mounta
in’s great starless shadow. It seemed that he didn’t need to sleep, as if flight took the place of sleep. He wondered several times if he was in fact dreaming.
At first he felt a strong urge to treat this gift reverently, to make it an act of worship, although he was not sure to whom or what, so he kept a solemn face and tried to think deep thoughts. He couldn’t keep it up for long. He went up to Goshen Tor, and drifted among the high windows of the banks, scaring the pigeons off the ledges. He rapped on the windows, then fell laughing away when the clerks turned to look. He found a plush office at the building’s peak, and knocked on the window and called, “Excuse me, sir, shine yer shoes, sir? Sir? Buy the Era, sir!” A pale fat man in a brown suit gaped at him; Jack stared wide-eyed and innocent back, then laughed and fell back into the air. That sort of thing amused him all afternoon.
Since he was on the Tor, he drifted up to the temple of Tiber, where he had hidden months ago, and sat for a while, thinking, Catch me now, you bastards! But no one came for him.
He sat on a north-facing slope of cold tin. As the winter evening darkened, a red light waxed on the horizon. The Pillar of Fire. The god of his gaolers. It was always there, a faint glow on vision’s edge by which one could navigate at night, but he had never been there. He ran to the edge of the roof with quick steps and threw himself into the air, going north.