by Felix Gilman
Also by Felix Gilman
THUNDERER
To my parents
Acknowledgments
Thanks again to Howard Morhaim, Juliet Ulman, and Sarah for their help and advice, and thanks to all at Bantam.
Rumors
For six months, give or take, he lived with the people of the Bright Towers, and he was happy enough there. He drifted from tower to tower, as the music led him. He slept out under brilliant stars on bridges of glass. He learned how to coax melody out of shimmering crystal spar. He picked up bits and pieces of the local language, a clear chiming echoing noise. He joined in the worship of strange temples—he was never happier than when he was at worship. For days at a time he forgot to eat. The city was young and full of potential. He felt his God was near.
The locals gave him a name—a carillon sound, three minor tones, descending. He was quite surprised when he learned what it meant. The dark man.
“Dark?”
They shrugged, and told him that he seemed unhappy.
In the time of the Bright Towers, the city’s spires were crystalline, vibrant, thin and delicate as blades of grass, and impossibly, point -lessly tall. It was impossible to imagine that they were built. They seemed to grow wild. The sun nourished them.
The towers’ people shone, too. Their skin was like gold. With his black robes, his brown eyes, the dark man stood out among them like a crack in a mirror.
Those towers—he shuddered just looking at them. They were too beautiful to last. A hard wind or a cruel word might shatter them, raining down green-golden glass on the streets. The towers were a thousand years old, and coal-black cracks were appearing. The dark man had walked in the times that came after, he came to the towers backward through the secret ways—insofar as backward and forward meant anything in the city’s secret ways—and he knew that hard days were coming.
The sunlight was different, too, brighter, primal, like the first hot stars, and mirrored and refracted through a million panes and flutes of gemlike glass. Beautiful and in fact almost intolerable— blindness was common among the people of the towers. The blind wore bright silk scarves around their eyes, and navigated by the creak and chime of the glass, the fluting of the wind, subtle distinctions in the warmth of the mirrored light on their faces. The dark man wrapped his head in black rags, torn from his robes.
The people of the Bright Towers had a different relationship to light and weight and distance from the people he was used to. They had a different relationship to violence. When they saw the whip scars on his back, the bruises he carried, they were simply unable to imagine the slave markets, the pirates, the inquisitors, the ghouls, the cannibals, the policemen—the violence that he’d done and that had been done to him. The concept was unfamiliar—though sometimes one of the people climbed too high into their towers, aiming for the peaks where they believed that their Gods dwelt, and they bloodied themselves on the wild-growing glass of the uppermost untended levels.
Was he a holy man, too, they asked? In a manner of speaking, he said. He was harder now than when he’d come to the city, and colder, but he remained devout. Devotion was the one constant in his shifting world, the one solid thing he had to cling to. He told them of his God, and its distant temple, and its music, and they listened politely, but not quite comprehending. They had a different relationship to Gods, and to music.
They fed on light—there was engineering in their bloodline, or a miracle, because they fed on light, and their golden skin was traced with jade. Their world was translucent, complexly refracted. They lived in the towers, owned nothing, built nothing, made nothing but music, by which they were surrounded—the wind in the towers, the glassy echo of their voices. They were the gentlest people the city had ever known, or would ever know again. In later times those people would be myths.
St. Loup came to visit him. Well—St. Loup called it a visit. It was in fact a polite form of interrogation. St. Loup was a madman and also a murderer a dozen times over, but his manners were excellent.
“You’ve found a nice place here,” St. Loup said. “A vacation?”
“Where did you come from, St. Loup?”
“Through the same doors as you, I expect. We’ve missed you at the Hotel.”
“Have you? I haven’t missed the Hotel at all.”
“Oh, you always say that. The place wouldn’t be the same without you. Father Turnbull is scheming behind your back, I should warn you.”
“And you’re here scheming to my face. I don’t know anything useful to you, St. Loup.”
St. Loup smiled. His eyes were hidden by expensive sunglasses. “So what is it this time, then? What brings you out here?”
“Nothing useful to you.”
They stood on a glass bridge. St. Loup had accosted him there, on his way between towers. Now St. Loup gestured out across the Bright Towers, across fields of crystal and crowds greeting the dawn with song. He wore a red silk shirt, with ebony cuff links. Long golden curls spilled over his collar. He said, “Who are these awful people? Why won’t they shut up?”
“Go home, St. Loup.”
“What can these people possibly know about the Mountain?”
“There’s nothing for you here. No secrets, no information.”
“Is it your God again? Is that it? You think it’s here?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“Well, best of luck,” St. Loup said, insincerely. “So, anyway, the big news is that Potocki is planning another assault on the Mountain. You’ll want to come back for that, once you get bored here.”
“I’m not coming back, St. Loup.”
“You always say that. Look me up when you check in again. I have plans.”
St. Loup stepped sideways through shafts of refracted rainbow light and was gone.
The Bright Towers had no doors. Their people lived in seamless extrusions of crystal and glass, immaculate, near shadowless. It had been hard for the dark man to find a way through. He prowled through Time around them like a thief. He was there when the first crystalline tower-seeds were formed, dense and frozen, no larger than a house. He was there in the ruins, after. He read about them in the history books, he watched the movies. They had a music that no later scholar or documentarian would ever be able to reconstruct. That was irresistible to him. But they had no doors; how, then, was he supposed to open a path to them?
In the end, he came through the cracks.
In their last days the towers began to crack under their own weight. Their first tiny crystalline imperfections had never been resolved, only deferred, as the towers elaborated themselves, stretched into the sun … The fissures appeared first as delicate marks, like dust, fingerprints, fine hair, shadows of the sun that disappeared when one blinked. They quickly grew jagged and dark, like bruises, like old age, metastasizing. There was one in every chamber and valve. The warm smooth floor underfoot began to splinter. The fluting and chiming of the wind in the towers became ugly, arrhythmic. The people of the towers saw that their end was coming, and began to put their affairs in order. They saw their culture as a musical one, a hymnal one, and they began to attempt a coda for it—a fitting resolution of their theme and essence.
He came through into a high chamber where some two hundred of them were gathered, cross-legged on the floor, humming and murmuring, brushing and sweeping. A geodesic temple, pillars and shafts of crystal, glass organs and pipes. He came through the darkness and mysterious angles of the cracks in the wall, and the glass shattered behind him. He fell to the floor bleeding.
They never asked his name. The people of the towers had no names.
Briefly they entertained the idea that he was there to save them from the decay of their towers—but only briefly. He preferred not to lie to
them. He told them with signs, and later with a little of their language—he was good with languages—that he was only passing through. He had come to hear their music. There would never be anything else like it again. He couldn’t bear for it to be lost. Too much was lost and forgotten, swallowed in the rolling ten-thousand-year din of the city. He promised to remember them. They seemed to find the offer more pleasing than not.
He sat silently, blindfolded against the glare, and he listened to their slow and careful harmonies.
The song of their ending: it might take them a hundred years. He wasn’t sure how long they lived, whether they were immortal or not. He was not.
St. Loup had guessed correctly. He had come here in pursuit of his God. He was a kind of priest, a kind of pilgrim. A devotee of a vanished God, the God of his childhood, a God that had abandoned him. He had chased it across the world, and deeper and deeper into the city, through its temples and sacred spaces. For his God’s sake he had spent more years than he liked to remember among the madmen of the Hotel, trading secrets and rumors of magic.
His vanished God was a God of music. The Age of the Bright Towers was an Age of forgotten and beautiful music, and he’d hoped … But it wasn’t there.
For six months he was happy enough. Each tower housed a dozen temples or more, and each temple had a different music, and he drifted from temple to temple. He joined the music-making, clumsily at first, soon with greater skill. He joined their ceremonies. After ten years in the City Beyond he was used to strange and unfamiliar rituals.
He felt the presence of Gods. But they weren’t his God.
It was the wrong music. It was the wrong place, and the wrong time. For one thing the vanished God of his childhood had been a perfect and peaceful and timeless music, while the music of the towers was slowly disintegrating. The towers cracked. Discord crept in.
He had come too late. If his God had ever passed this way, it was gone now.
He went up into the highest chambers and cut himself on the wild glass, and burned his skin in the brilliant light, thinking that in the high winds up there who knows what memories or Gods or music might blow, be caught, pinned against the sky: nothing. Only the winds.
He went down again. The cracks darkened the glass like storm clouds.
He tried to explain what he was looking for to a green-eyed girl of the tower-people. He thought it was a girl, he found their sexes hard to distinguish. There was a language barrier, and a deeper barrier to comprehension. They were fatalists; they strove for nothing. Gone is gone, she said. Things end, they blow away. She illustrated her point with a figure of speech he failed to understand, to do with light.
He offered to save as many of her people as he could—to evacuate them into a safer time. There were paths, he said. He always told himself he wouldn’t do that, he wouldn’t meddle, that past times were gone and should be left that way; but he was soft-hearted.
She said no. People generally did, he’d found.
She took him to see a wise man, in a chamber full of mirrors, scattered with cracks like the wrinkles on his eerie face, who said: let it go. He couldn’t. The wise man sent him to a woman who lived in the high chambers, up flights of pearlescent stairs curved like twining ivy, through forests of wild glass. A little old woman who knew Gods, a woman who pointed out across the tops of the towers, flashing green and gold in the sun, and north to the distant shadow that was always there on the horizon, in every Age of the city, in every place—the Mountain.
There. I have thought long and hard about the nature of light. If you have lost something, look in the shadows.
The dark man winced, shook his head. He said, yes, but… He sighed, scratched his beard.
It wasn’t the first time he’d been told that. In fact he’d heard it so often he was sick of hearing it. Wherever he went in the city the final answer was always—in a hundred different languages, for a hundred different reasons—the Mountain.
In the Temples of the Prime Mover they said it was the body of a dead God, the first, petrified, and all lesser and subsequent Gods burrowed in its tunnels like maggots. In Croix they said the Builders, whoever or whatever they were, had made the Mountain to lock away the last of the city’s secrets. In the Hotel every conversation turned to the Mountain.
He wasn’t ready for the Mountain. That terrible cold absence in the city—that wound, that flaw, that inexplicable mystery in even the most enlightened Ages of the city. There was no safe path to the Mountain. All those mad enough or daring enough to attempt it came back ruined, mad—or not at all. He wasn’t ready.
The Mountain? Are you sure?
The Mountain. Yes.
How do I go there?
No answer. There was never any answer. So he went back down the crumbling tower and sat out in the sun and listened to the music.
St. Loup was spying on him. He saw St. Loup hiding among the golden crowds—or looking for shadows to lurk in, scattering his cigarette butts on pristine surfaces—or, as he was now, watching through telescopes from high places.
He waved St. Loup over and the man came smiling.
“If you plan to attack me, St. Loup, would you get it over with?”
“Perish the thought! Perhaps I’m concerned about you.”
St. Loup was an acquaintance, a contact, not a friend. Nevertheless they knew each other horribly well. Among the hidden and irregular communities of madmen, paranoids, sorcerers, those who had Broken Through to the city behind and above the city of their births, there was a certain community or anticommunity, there was a guarded and untrustworthy exchange of information. They were the wanderers of the City Beyond, the Via Obscura, the Thousand-Fold Path, the Metacontext, die Träumenstadt, the Gears, the Slew, Time Itself, whatever you wanted to call it. (From time to time he’d suggested the Song, or the Chorus—neither caught on.) They bartered maps and keys and rumors of the Mountain.
Every one of them had his own private obsessions, and each one pointed, in the end, to the Mountain; the impossible, unattainable Mountain. For the dark man it was his God. For St. Loup, if St. Loup could be believed, it was a woman.
“Go home, St. Loup. Leave these people alone. They don’t know anything. They don’t know the way.”
“Everyone has secrets.”
“I don’t know anything either, St. Loup.”
“Then why are you here?”
They watched each other all the time—St. Loup, Arjun, Father Turnbull, all the rest of them. Who would be first to move? Who would be first to take the Mountain? What did they know?
“No reason. It doesn’t matter anymore.”
“Come back to the Hotel. Potocki’s moving and I need allies. I’ll make it worth your while. When I hold the Mountain I’ll give you as many Gods as you like, and a million choirs to praise them, you odd little man.”
“Not yet. I still have other places to look.”
“There’s only one. You know that.”
“Not necessarily. It’s a big city.”
“It’s smaller than it seems. Well, you know where to find me.”
St. Loup vanished one way through the Metacontext, and, sighing, the dark man went another way, and he left the Bright Towers behind for streets of grey cobblestones and brick.
He imagined the towers, after he’d gone, cracking all at once with a sound like a spring rain shower, that whole Age of the city, and its people, too, turned instantly weightless, shards and seeds of light, blowing away on the breeze.
But in Winding Hall, and in Perrabia, and Slew, and Volstat, and on the cloud-high deck of the cityship Annihilator, and on the wires of the City-Signal, and in the haunted crypts under Red Barrow, and in the Houses of the Red Moon, and in the laboratories of the Zubiri Corporation, and everywhere else he went, forward or back, the answer was always the same. The Mountain. In Slew they said the Mountain was like a cage, and it held the failed Gods prisoner. In the Zubiri laboratories they said the Mountain was like a black hole, and it drew all light and music an
d spirit and positively charged energies into its maw—they had charts and data to prove it. In a dusty little shop in the rafters of Winding Hall he purchased a Children’s Miscellany of Fairy-Stories because it had a mountain on the cover. It had a story of a wicked mean old man who came down into the city from a clockwork mountain every night to steal away children’s dreams in his grey sack. The pictures were haunting. The dreams looked like angels. He kept the book.
A fairy story, a myth, a machine, a weapon, a dark palace, the Mountain! There was no hiding from it. And at last his need overwhelmed his fear, and he began to plan the impossible ascent.
And he failed.
And so later, much later—afterward—he came fleeing headlong down the Mountain. Its servants pursued him. He tore his shirt—it caught on a dead tree in the park and a white wing of cloth ripped away, fluttering on the bare branch. He ran and his mind tore away, too. He saw and heard too much and his self and his soul swelled, strained, tore at the seams.
He fled through Time. They were always there, close on his heels. In the café by the reservoir they waited anxiously behind the railings. He threw himself through a door in the kitchen and the name of the city was torn away. At the station they came walking silently down the tracks. He ran through the coal shed and left the names of his lovers in the dust. There were always two of them, his hollow hunters, faces faded like old photographs, always awkwardly about to speak … By the river he crawled under wire, through the muck, and the name of his hunters was left in the mud. He had no father or mother; that fact, too, was torn from him as he tumbled through brass elevator doors and onto rain-slick cobbles. He lost the fairy stories when he lost his jacket, swimming across the freezing and night-dark river—he lost all his stories. That was how it worked: an expansion of possibilities to the limits of the self, and beyond, followed by an inexorable contraction. Shay had not warned him that the Mountain was defended. He was burning himself too fast in his headlong flight. He left Shay’s name on the bloody floor of the butcher’s market. The memory of the Mountain was stolen as he pushed through the parade, through the dancing and music and sequins and flesh. The Mountain’s hollow servants still pursued him, slow and deliberate. How could they keep pace with him? It was impossible. But when he hid in the dark of the theater they crossed the stage toward him, tall shadows in the limelight, and when he tumbled fleeing through the trapdoor his own name was torn away from him. He ran panting and crying up a silver staircase in the moonlight, and their shiny patent-leather shoes clack-clack-clacked up the steps behind him. He hurled himself through an arch of bloody stones and the name of his God tore away and its Song went dumb within him, like a stone in his gut. He fell into darkness and silence.