by Felix Gilman
Arjun stared frantically at the man’s face, hunting for some sign of a scar on the sallow scalp. But no, that was absurd; the wound he’d given Shay was nothing that could be healed; Shay was dead, beyond doubt. But how could it possibly be anyone else?
“Well, I take it from your look of mental disarray that you’re not here on Cere House business. You’ve heard word of some other business, right? Something special?”
Arjun found his voice again. “Yes.”
“I’d rather you people would come after hours. I have a job here, you know. It’s not as though I expect to keep it for long, but it would be nice to enjoy it for a bit.”
“You remind me very much of someone I once knew.”
“Well, it’s a big city, isn’t it?” Lemuel backed toward a table in the corner of the room, under a thick grey tarp, and began untying the tarp’s knots.
“Do you know a Mr. Shay?”
Lemuel started. “I’ve gone by that name at times, and in places. I don’t think I’ve dealt with you before, though.”
“You have. Under the name of Shay.”
Lemuel pulled back the stiff tarp carefully, winding it under his arm. His wares were underneath, pressing their greasy, ghostly lights against the glass of their cages. Lemuel leaned in close to them, on his haunches, and, in a stagy whisper, said, “Well then, little ones. I don’t like the look on this fellow’s face. He looks like he doesn’t like me. Now, a lot of my customers don’t like me, because they’re ashamed of what they’re here for. But there’s no shame on this man. And he knows things he shouldn’t. So, little ones, does he mean me harm?”
Lemuel put his ear against the glass as the lights buzzed and clicked. Arjun reached under his jacket for his gun.
“Yes. He means me harm. Or…no, he has done me harm. But I don’t think I know him yet. Isn’t that odd?”
Lemuel stood and stared at Arjun, curiously, appraisingly. His left hand was scratching idly at his scalp, just below the hairline, Arjun noticed: was that where the bullet had struck?
“You don’t remember me?”
Lemuel sat and lit a cigarette. “I meet a lot of people,” he said. “Tell me more.”
“Is this a joke? A game?”
“Humor me.”
“You were in the Observatory Orphée. On Laud Heath. With your…things. You were in a room full of false stars, some old machine, that only you understood. You don’t remember this?”
“I don’t think I’ve ever been there.”
“I came to you with questions. There was a mob outside, howling for your head…”
“Ha! That’s life. Mine, anyway. It’s a hard road to walk.”
“I wanted to know how you did it. How you caught these…things. I was looking for a god, a ghost. A Voice from my childhood. I thought you might know how to find it. You told me you had a lot of little tricks.”
“So did this man who looked like me, did he help you?”
“There wasn’t time. The mob was coming. I don’t know whether you would have helped or not. I had nothing left to pay you with. There was an…altercation. You tried to turn those things in the cases, those reflections you steal, you tried to turn them on me.” Arjun drew his gun, and put it on the table before him, resting his hand on it. “I know your tricks. Don’t try it again, Shay. It won’t work. Move away from them.”
Lemuel rolled his eyes, smiling, and scooted his chair a few feet away from the table.
“You turned them on me, and you tried to kill me. I shot you. In the head. You died, Shay.”
“I really don’t think I did.”
“I set them free. Your creatures. One of them…I followed one of them, as it escaped, and it returned to its source. The Typhon. Do you know what’s happening in the city outside, Shay? Do you know what you did?”
“I haven’t been here long, but I’ve read a paper or two.”
“It’s devouring the city, bit by bit. And it’s hunting me. It’s a plague. There’s nothing else like it. Nothing that can stop it from growing, and growing. Did you know that could happen if you set one of these things free?”
“Well, there are always risks, aren’t there? In anything anyone really wants? Besides, the way you tell it, I wasn’t the one who broke the cases. That was bloody stupid of you.”
“Stop fucking smiling, Shay. How many of these things do you sell? How do you know what people might do with them?”
“The people who buy these things cherish them, hoard them. Hold them close, rocking in the dark. They don’t free them.”
“You have no idea what they do. You know you’ll be well away, though, don’t you? Into other places. You’re a monster, Shay. The most reckless…This is your fault.”
“You seem to be falling into confusion, young man. That wasn’t me. This is a big city, bigger than most people realize; there’s probably a great many men who look a great deal like you out there. At most, the man you met was a way I might have been, had I walked different streets. We’ve never met, Mr….?”
“It was you. It had to have been you. Somehow you survived; you called on those abominations in your cages to save you, or—or—you said you could walk in secret places, open secret ways; you found some way to walk away from your own death and come back unscarred.”
Lemuel scratched his head. “That doesn’t sound likely.”
“I think that’s what you are. And I don’t care if you are a different man, anyway. You’re in the same filthy business.”
“Are you just here to talk rubbish and insult me?”
“No. I need your help. The other one wouldn’t help me. But you will. I have two questions, and you will answer both. I need to know how to destroy the god that’s hunting me. I need to know how to find the god I’m hunting. I need to make the city give up its secrets to me. Tell me, or”—he lifted the gun from the table—“I’ll kill you again, Shay. If you came back once, you’ll come back again. Or, if somehow there are two of you, there must be three, four, a hundred. Either way, I’ll keep killing until I find one who will help me.”
Lemuel leaned back and exhaled smoke from the side of his mouth, and smiled toothily, and said, “Well then.”
The ghost lights pulsed, scattering an oily weave of light across the room, which grew vaster and darker, refracting into strange new angles. Arjun pulled the trigger. Though he had been sure his gun was pointing at Lemuel’s chair, the bullet thudded into a corpse-cloth on the other side of the room. It was hard to see where Lemuel was. There seemed to be a thousand possible paths across the room between him and Lemuel’s chair. Ghost-light trails wove the floor and the walls and made the space all new and puzzling. Lemuel stood, and a dozen Lemuels around the room stood, too. Some of them approached Arjun; some walked away into the darkness, following trails of pale light. Firm hands reached around from behind Arjun’s back and took the gun from him.
Arjun staggered, hands to his head, as some of the Lemuels sat back down in their chairs, and several of them took a moment to calmly reload and prime the weapons.
Each Lemuel uttered a click at the back of his throat, and the trails wound their way back home. Arjun fell to the floor. His head was clear again. The room was still. Singularly, Lemuel sat opposite him, holding the pistol on him with a casual hand.
“That’s to prove a point. I don’t know what happened with this Shay fellow you met. Sounds like a disappointment. But it won’t happen with me. That was one of my tricks.”
He gestured at the cases with his free hand. “These are the weavers of the city. Or, as you put it, reflections of them, which is the next best thing. Fragments of their power. I can unweave and reweave the city’s paths with them. I can tie you in knots you can’t imagine. What I just did was nothing.”
Arjun glared at him from the floor, a humiliating reddening sting behind his eyes.
“I should probably kill you. But I won’t. Do you know why?”
Arjun didn’t answer, not trusting his voice not to shake.
Lemuel went on, cheerily. “Let us suppose I’m not the same as the man you killed; he was merely my shadow, let’s say. You killed the bugger. As I see it, I owe you for that. I don’t need competition. Least of all from someone who may or may not be more or less me. Cunning old bastard that I am.”
He raised a finger. “Now let’s say it was me you shot. Well, I’ve been around a long time and I’ve got a great many tricks. Perhaps you shot me and I came back, or something in me came back, some essence, and I don’t remember. That’s worth something: a chance to start fresh.”
“You didn’t take it. You’re still the same.”
“Well, granted. But then, now I know better what sort of man I really am, deep down, and there’s value in self-knowledge. So either way, I owe you. If you’d asked respectfully, I would have helped you, you know.”
“I don’t believe you, Shay. And I don’t find you funny.”
“Oh dear. Well, what I’ll do instead of helping you is, I’ll discharge my debt by letting you live. So get up, go on. Sit down, like a civilized man.”
There was another chair across the room. Arjun sat in it.
“Now then. Maybe I’ll help you anyway, but after that unpleasantness, you’ll have to pay. What can you offer me?”
Arjun thought for some time. Was this the same game, or had the rules changed? “I know the secrets of the Thunderer.”
“Is that that big ugly floating ship? That’s of no interest to me. I’m a man who does his business quietly. I’ve no interest in announcing my presence to all the city.”
Then the game was changed, and Arjun had few cards. “Money, then. Or I can promise you service.”
“You can do better than that. I can see it; there’s something you don’t want to have to promise. Let’s hear it.”
“I know the makers of the Atlas. The foremost scholars of the city. I can share their secrets with you.”
“They don’t have any secrets I want. This is a backward part of the city, my friend, in a backward time. Look how little you know. Look how much you’ve forgotten. None of you here have an inkling how vast the city is. Whatever this ‘Atlas’ is, it’ll be swallowed and forgotten soon. I know more than any sad excuse for a scholar you may have befriended. Do better.”
Arjun clenched his fists. There was one thing left. It was a terrible thing to offer, but he had no choice. Not for the Voice—he thought that to make this offer would be to make such a terrible discord in his soul that the Voice might be lost to him anyway—but for the Typhon. There was nothing he wouldn’t sacrifice to end it. So he said, “I have a final offer. Have you heard of Jack Silk? The anarchist, the runagate, the prison-breaker? The boy who was touched by the Bird, nearly a year ago, now, and who still holds on to the Bird’s power? It’s still growing in him. He can pass it on to those around him. I’ve seen it happen. It’s marvelous. He trusts me, I think. I can bring him to you. Don’t you want to know how his power works?”
Part of Arjun hoped Lemuel would refuse—but he didn’t. He smiled hugely, and put aside the gun, saying, “I don’t think I need this, do I?” and lit another cigarette. “That’s very interesting. I’ve heard rumors about that boy.” He walked over to the caged presences, and whispered to them. They glowed in response. “The Bird’s mark is on you, they say, though weakly. I’m inclined to believe you’ve met this boy. I want your promise, young man, that you’ll bring him to me. If you cross me, I’ll harry you across this city and all others, till you wish you were dead. My curse’ll be on you. I’ll turn every path you might ever walk against you. Do you doubt me?”
“I promise you, Lemuel, Shay, whatever your name is.”
“You know I’ll need to keep him? To make him mine? You know I may not be able to treat him kindly?”
“I promise you. Now tell me: how can I destroy the Typhon?”
“You can’t. But you can hide. Run. Maybe you’ll find your Voice, too, on the way. I’ll teach you the trick of it.”
A rjun did not know how long his apprenticeship to Lemuel lasted.
Following in Lemuel’s footsteps, it was sometimes day, sometimes night, but according to no natural order. Lemuel wove his own pattern of dark and light across the city. Lemuel’s cold rasp was always with him, sneering and snapping when he put a foot wrong. Time could be measured only by the progress of his lessons.
They slept when they were tired. Lemuel could take a turn down certain streets, like so, under certain arches, up a fire escape that led onto a wide white roof where the city was in a lazy tropical summer, where the citizens went shirtless and brown-skinned, and it was possible to sleep blissfully under the open sky, and Arjun woke refreshed. When he wanted night, Lemuel could find that, too; it was always night somewhere.
They ate when they were hungry. Through a maze of alleys, through a stinking tunnel, over a cable-winged bridge of strange design, was a place where Lemuel was known, and restaurateurs ran out from under their awnings to press plates of food on him, for the honor of serving him. Lemuel looked a little shy, as if he had gone too far to impress Arjun, made himself look insecure.
After that, for a while, they ate in parts of the city where meaty fruit grew on the trees by the side of clean streets, to be plucked off by the passing pearl-haired children.
When Lemuel thought Arjun was getting complacent, they started to eat in soup kitchens, among desperate demobbed sailors in mission basements, or laid-off factory workers in grubby church halls, then he made them wait in shambling lines of ruined men, stretching over cratered ground under blasted skeletons of buildings, for scraps of bread handed out by black-armored soldiers with heavy steel guns.
Lemuel moved by subtle navigation, tacking across the city in response to certain signs, unweaving and reweaving its map by act of will.
“It’s not will,” he said, apropos of nothing, as they walked across the bay, in a part of the city where the bay was solidly choked with stationary boats, and you could walk across on planks. “Though I may have told you it was. It’s a way to think about it; it gives you confidence. But it’s crap, of course. What’s one man’s will against the city? An infinity of time, an infinity of infinities, has gone into the weaving of it. You know the nature of the entities that weave it as well as any man. Weaving it backwards and forwards, all throughout time and space. Imagine exerting your will against those. You might as well try to fight electricity, or wrestle multiplication.
“No, all we can do is follow in their steps. Look carefully for their signs. For the tangles in the weave. It’s a loose weaving they make, great clumsy proud monsters that they are; it has a great many knots and holes in it. As many as there are streets, or doors, or people. Slip through silently. Cunning, not will. It’s a trick; no magic to it.”
“But, in your office, you forced some change on the room’s angles. Or at least on my perceptions. How did you do that?”
Lemuel looked amused. “Well, there’s tricks, and then there’s tricks. I’ll show you what you can pay for. For now, that’s this. So shut your mouth, follow, and watch, and listen.”
They passed through a great many places. Or, as Lemuel put it, they saw the city from a great many angles. Many of them were very different from the city Arjun was familiar with, which he was coming to think of as the city of the Atlas-makers. No point in trying to put them in any order. Some were in the Atlas’s future, others in its past. Which was which might depend on the angle at which one walked down the street. “It’s all in how you look at it,” Lemuel said. “It’ll all come round again, somewhere, if you wait long enough, or go far enough in.”
On a sunny day, they climbed the wire-mesh steps that spiraled around a gleaming steel needle on a hill. Curious black butterflies, the size of a man’s fist, nuzzled against them. Lemuel pointed out over the steel city. “I grew up in a place not much different from yours. It’s always still a shock to see this much gleam and glitter. Some times shine harder than others. Those are poisonous, by the way; cover your skin. Some
times it’s hard to believe that these places are real, even for me, and I’m used to it. But they are. All no less real than any other. It could all be different, if we had turned left and not right. You know that. But they don’t. Their lives are real to them. Their needs are real. And lucrative, of course.”
The city was the only constant; the city, and its vast northern Mountain. There was an infinite variety of people, and of gods. In some places, they thought they had only one god, insubstantial and abstract; in others, the gods strode about far more brazenly even than they had in the Atlas-makers’ city.
“Why does it work this way?” Arjun asked. “Is it that the presence of so many gods opens up these hidden paths, or is it because the city is built of so many secret places that it gives rise to so many gods? Or…”
“Who gives a shit? Keep your eyes on the path. This way.”
T here was a place where the men of the city, all pale and tiny and nervous, traveled in palanquins born by great apes, trained and bred for the work, caparisoned in their masters’ colors. Packs of the apes broke free and shucked off parts of the uncomfortable armor, and fought and rutted in the alleys. It was a big problem, Lemuel said; they weren’t sure what to do about it, other than breed more apes for protection from the apes they had. He thought it was rather funny.
They stayed in a hotel room the windows of which were heavily barred against inquisitive primates. Lemuel took the bed by the door, and snored remarkably loudly for such a little man. Arjun lay awake in the bed by the window, listening to the jungle sounds of the street. He felt dizzy, vertiginous; the days (weeks? months?) of his apprenticeship fell on him in a rush. He was horribly conscious of the fragility of the city’s stuff; he felt that he could fall through at any moment into deeper and more secret places. Nothing was solid or real.
After a time, he realized that Lemuel was sitting up in the gloom, watching him twist and turn, listening to his ragged breathing. There was a half-visible sneer on the man’s face.
Arjun found his fear quickly burned away by anger. He sat up and stared at Lemuel. “Who are you really? I’m tired of this game. I think you know I beat you, once, and you’re scared to admit it.”