Gears of the City

by Felix Gilman

  “I’m very glad,” Arjun said.

  They sat for dinner. There was a small circular table, on which elbows touched in accidental intimacy. Three chairs, three settings; Arjun wondered whose place he had taken. Ivy’s? There was a vague sense of absence, of incompleteness, which the sisters filled with talk.

  Marta worked out of No. 29, she explained. She sold herbs, remedies, poultices, treatments. As she described her work, Arjun had a vague recollection of various wise women and cunning men he’d dealt with in the past, in other parts of the city. He recalled a sinister man in a room full of gimcrack stars; he recalled an old alchemist in a gold-and-black skullcap, in a high airy room full of brass birdcages. Ashmole? He recalled holding that old man’s velvet-sleeved wrist and demanding, I need something to make me hear. Something to open my senses. Even if you must blind me in recompense. He did not recall the alchemist’s answer.

  And anyway, there was nothing of those uncanny folk in Marta, who ladled out cabbage soup into three clay bowls and sat down to eat, vigorously, methodically.

  Every morning, Marta said, she went out at dawn and gathered weeds from the waste grounds, moss from the canal sides, mold from the timbers of old sidings and sheds; whatever grew in the soot and smog of the factories, like the Dad taught her; mixtures for women in family trouble, salves for the raw wounds left by the loose rusty teeth of the factory machines. Cures for accidents of one kind or another. “Like yours, poor old ghost.”

  “It was no machine that wounded me.”

  “So you said. Lots of the ghosts that come down from the Mountain are missing something. Fingers aren’t so bad. You can still do most work. Do you remember who did it?”

  “No. That is, yes; I remember. No, it was not on the Mountain. It was here, in Fosdyke. It was not quite a who, but a what. I was in the Museum—I think it was a Museum.”

  Arjun paused to eat. He fumbled—his hand made him clumsy. It embarrassed him. He flushed and spoke too quickly. “Not so far from here. I ran for a while but not so far or for so long. Is there a museum here? I came to myself in the cellars, underground, in a storeroom or a prison room. There was a creature in there with me, in a cage; a kind of lizard, a kind of reptile, maybe, scaly and yellow-eyed, much, much larger than a man. Heavy and ancient and I thought slow until”—he raised his hand bitterly. “It spoke to me. It told me what my name was. It told me that this part of the city was called Fosdyke, and you agree, which is how I know that it was not a dream, unless you sisters are also a dream. It said that it could tell the future. It said that it was a kind of God. I think it wanted me to worship it, or at least to marvel at it, but I’ve seen more wonderful things, though I may not recall them just now. It smelled bad; it lived idly in its own waste. Its scales were dull. It looked stuffed until it moved. It was an ugly thing. Maybe it was wonderful once, long ago. It promised to tell the future if only I would touch it; to tell me what I was looking for, who I am, what’s missing from me; what sent me up onto the Mountain, if that’s really where I fell from, as you seem to think. I needed it so badly. I felt sorry for the creature. I touched it. It did this to me. I think it started to speak, then, but men came—the men who were holding it, perhaps—and I ran. It told me to run. I paid a price for my prophecy and I was cheated. Does this sound mad? I don’t know this part of the city. Low sisters, what should I do?”

  Ruth’s eyes glittered as Arjun spoke. She’d risen from her chair and put music on the contraption in the corner, and wound it up without taking her eyes off him; now the sound of a dusty and distant piano crept into the room. She sat again with her hands folded under her chin.

  “I remember that museum,” Ruth said. “The Dad took us there. Years ago. Before the Know-Nothings locked it all away. When we were very little, and the city was so different. There were wonderful things there, from all over the city. From all kinds of places that don’t exist anymore. Marta, do you remember, there was a great blue silk flying-machine up on the roof, under glass? There was that painting of the woman weaving her hair into a golden map … I haven’t thought about the Museum for years.”

  Marta shrugged. She’d produced a little leather pouch from somewhere under her dress, taken three loose pinches of something sticky and black out of it, and was rolling a cigarette. “There was no bloody talking lizard in it.”

  Ruth said, “No, Marta, wait; there were lizards down there. I mean, stuffed. Big cats and lizards. Oliphaunts. Chimerae. Monopods—those great hairy things like mushrooms. Down in the basement, remember? All musty and mangy. From some old prince’s menagerie, or something.”

  “I remember. You got lost down there and I had to come and find you.” Marta inhaled deeply and passed the cigarette to Ruth. It smelled sweet and thick.

  “It was so dark down there. They hardly bothered to light it. No one went down there, even then. I remember feeling so sorry for all of them. Poor dead things. So far from home. Things out of time. No one ever cared for them. No one ever dusted them or polished their plaques or cleaned the glass, if they were in glass. I mean maybe someone came at night, but you never saw them do it. I could never imagine who brought those things there in the first place. Who’d sat down and decided where they should go, who’d carried them in, those huge great monsters? Who’d dare? It was like they’d settled there themselves, to go to sleep, when they’d gotten tired of the world.”

  Ruth held the cigarette delicately; she took short breaths on it and stared into the table’s candles.

  Marta shook her head. “It was all roped off, Ruth. All those corridors. They were supposed to be forgotten. You shouldn’t have been down there. I had to come and find you. The Dad had wandered off somewhere, too, to look at old clocks or telescopes or meteorites or something. He always was impatient, even then. His mind always wandered. I found you all curled up under some great hairy monster on its hind legs they called a bear. You were hard to wake.”

  “I don’t remember that. I don’t remember sleeping down there.” Ruth passed the cigarette across the table to Arjun. He took it and breathed the smoke in, thinking only as it was too late that he should have asked what was in it.

  “You slept all the time back then,” Marta said. “The Dad thought you were sick. I said you were just dreamy.”

  There was a sudden buzzing in Arjun’s head and he coughed, once, quietly; then the coughing echoed back and repeated and he was soon doubled over hacking. He dropped the cigarette in his bowl. The sisters politely ignored him. He heard Ruth say, “Maybe it was a dream, then, but I remember I went down there because I heard a whisper. It was like there was something down there talking to me.” He heard Marta say, “No you didn’t. You only think you remember it because of what he just said. You know what you’re like, Ruth.” And he heard Ruth say, “It was saying something about Ivy, about ghosts, I remember it,” and he heard Marta snort. After that the argument became too fast and too obscure and too personal for him to follow—it was all no wonder the Dad… and no wonder Ivy …

  The cigarette had left Arjun slow and hazy. Had the sisters been talking about the Beast? It seemed they’d been talking about some statue, some dead and stuffed and stitched-together thing—not the breathing and all-too-real monster that had maimed him. He looked back and forth from face to blurry face in the candlelight and said nothing, afraid of making a fool of himself, until finally Marta stood up to go to bed, when he attempted to say good night, but to judge from her raised eyebrow perhaps said something else entirely. Shortly afterward Ruth retired, too.

  Arjun did not know what to do with the dishes. He decided to ignore them.

  “It was there,” he said to the candles. “It did speak. The Beast owes me answers.”

  Arjun took the candle over to a bare table out in the shop front, and began studying his maps. The unfamiliar drug was still in his head and at first his vision blurred and redoubled, and the map-lines seemed to multiply and stand clear of the page, to cast intricate shadows, to vibrate with a pent-up urge to c
ollapse into a single coiling scrawl at the center of the page; but he found that if he covered his left eye with his bound-up left hand, the effect diminished greatly, and after a while disappeared.

  He identified the Fosdyke Museum. A little more than a mile from Carnyx Street, on the south side of a space marked as Holcroft Square. That must have been the market he’d stumbled through. Its neighbors on Holcroft Square were a university and a Hall of Trade. He remembered staggering in the darkness past several huge, boarded-up, unlit buildings.

  Arjun tried to commit the route to memory.

  He raided the shelves. He spent some time staring at a map of exotic and confusing design, lacking legend or label, a black disc depicting the city’s streets orbiting in precise concentric grooves around a central hole, an absence; it was only when he checked the scrawl on the sleeve again—The Pullman & Jones String & Brass Band, Op. 101—that he realized his error; it was music …

  One after the other, Arjun spread out the maps. One of Ruth’s refugee cats at once came stalking across them, trampling the city like a monster of the apocalypse. It was soft-pawed and its fur was a grey so rich it was almost violet by candlelight. Arjun lifted it one-handed from the table and it went off to ambush things in the shadows.

  He returned his attention to the maps, in which he observed a troubling inconsistency. At the top of some pages the rigorous street grid decayed into a dense incoherent scrawl of slums. In others the regular streets continued north to the map’s edge, losing detail, losing place names, but still running rail-straight. Several of the maps ended in arrows pointing north, captioned to the mountain. One was cleverly designed so that the street lines departed from their courses at the map’s edge and converged to form foothills, slopes, a witch’s-hat peak. Another simply stopped dead at an irregular border marked LIMITS OF HOLCROFT MUNICIPAL TRUST CATCHMENT & AUTHORITY; north ofthat was white space, filled with locally interesting demographic and commercial statistics.

  One map—hand-scrawled, with shaking lines, as if it showed some secret and forbidden knowledge—marked the lines of trains, stitched back and forth over the city, tagged with the products they carried: coal? and meat? and roses? and gold. The map appeared homemade; whose work was it? Hypothetical stations were marked with question marks. The lines arced, switched back, converged toward the north, became vague guesses, abstractions, mere arrows pointing north, up, to the Mountain.

  But no map Arjun could find reached more than a few miles north of Carnyx Street. He knew without looking that there would be no maps of the Mountain itself. There never were, anywhere.

  In all the shelves of maps, and books, and music, Arjun saw nothing that wasn’t yellow with age. Was that deliberate? Perhaps Ruth chose to surround herself with old things; she seemed sentimental. Marta was the practical one. That was not quite true, he thought, but true enough that he felt a certain satisfaction in the cleanness and efficiency of the distinction. He was learning to understand the world again!

  But perhaps all those things were old because there was simply nothing new being made in the city. The Beast had said these were the last days, and in the glimpse Arjun had had of the city it had struck him as an uncultured place … A tired place. His mood soured again.

  Shortly before Arjun fell asleep, head on the table, it occurred to him that he could read. Many people in many districts couldn’t. That was a thing worth knowing, too.

  The candle burned down. In the mornine Ruth winced and bit her lip at the waste of it but said nothing.

  It rained all day, alternating between a thin cold spittle and savage sheets of water that forced their way into the shop and leaked from the cracks and spread dark stains across the ceiling plaster. Arjun helped move the furniture and cover the books and empty the most exposed shelving. It was difficult work, one-handed; he dropped things; he was afraid he was getting underfoot. Ruth and Marta moved deftly around him as if he wasn’t there.

  Ghost, they’d called him. He stopped Ruth and asked her, “How can I pay you? Why are you helping me?”

  She shrugged. “I told you; we get a lot of ghosts down from the Mountain. None of you last long. It’s all right.”

  Marta said, “Mrs. Rawley, who runs the Tearoom, had a man last month. She called him Woodhead after the beer, because he said he remembered drinking it wherever he came from, and didn’t remember much else. He kept talking about the War that’s coming. It scared her. She sent him over to us because she knows we don’t mind.”

  “Can I speak to him?”

  “Vanished somewhere between here and there. Between No. 96 and No. 27. Ruth sat up waiting for him but he never came. He was a strong one, too, Mrs. Rawley says, a soldier, could have been useful.”

  “So it’s all right,” Ruth said. “I like having you around. Even if you can never tell me what you saw.”

  “Bandages off, in a day or two,” Marta said. “Then we’ll talk about payment.”

  In the afternoon the Know-Nothings came. The rumor was passed all down Carnyx Street. Ruth observed that Mr. Zeigler had put the red vase in his upper window, which meant that he’d learned, probably from Mrs. Rawley, in whose boozy Tearoom the Know-Nothings sometimes drank, that they were on their way down-street. Ruth banged on the walls to make sure Marta knew; then she hid the maps, and the forbidden books, and told Arjun to hide upstairs. “The bosses’ men,” she spat, as if that explained the matter. “The fucking filth. Hide.”

  He waited at the top of the stairs, listening. For a moment he remembered bad years in a cold school far away, hiding from angry Masters; he had an image of cold iron staircases, and high rooms made all of glass. He fished for a memory of family and came up empty-handed.

  There was shouting from across the street, harsh ugly booming voices. Ruth stood behind the counter downstairs, waiting, a blank expression fixed on her face. But they passed Ruth’s shop by and swaggered on down the street.

  Ruth untensed and lit a cigarette. “Poor ghost,” she said, exhaling. “Poor ghost. We won’t let them catch you.”

  “Why would they want to catch me?”

  “Because they’re stupid, frightened little men. They say there’s a War coming.”

  “What?”

  “Look, I don’t want to talk about it, all right? It gives me a headache. I don’t want to talk.”

  For lack of anything better to do, Arjun started sweeping.

  The others—his more terrible pursuers—came after sunset.

  There were bars on Carnyx Street, and laughter and shouting and music echoed all evening from a half-dozen directions. Shortly after sunset, in one sudden moment, all sound hushed at once, as if the whole street was struck with a surprising shame. The drunk in the street faltered, midsong, and shuffled off in silence; a screaming fight in the garden of No. 15 subsided into grumbling and curses. The little bells over the shop door chimed, and then there was a precise clack-clack-clack of footsteps.

  “Stay here,” Ruth told Arjun, and she left him at the table and stepped out into the front.

  She’d been applying the ointment and changing Arjun’s bandages. She’d been tracing the lines on his palms with her silver-ringed fingers. She’d told him she was a fortune-teller, and laughed at his expression and said No, not really. There were a number of scars; the Beast was not the first thing in the city to have wounded him. There were calluses on his remaining digits, some of which were scribes’ calluses, some of which he thought were from musical instruments. He lied to her; he pretended he could tell which instrument had produced each one, and rattled off a list of instruments she’d never heard of: dulcian, cittern, setar, clavichord, theorb … The carnyx was a kind of harsh and doom-laden war-horn. Perhaps the street was named for it because they shared the same curve. He lied; he told her he remembered blowing it. The dissimulation gave him confidence and he’d begun to enjoy himself.

  Ruth stepped out into the shop front and Arjun heard her say … nothing.

  The bells were attached by cords to the shop
door, so that they sounded when anyone passed through; it suddenly occurred to him that though the bells had begun quietly to chime, and indeed were somehow still chiming, in quiet dull persistent tones, he had not heard the door open or close.

  Arjun heard their footsteps, again—clack-clacking around the shop. He knew the shine of their shoes. The clack-clack of their boots echoed dully, as if the noise fell into a great blank hole in the world. The Hollows, he thought, the Hollow Servants. There were two of them, always; he remembered that. They would be busy for a while there. Maps and paintings and photographs confused and upset them; he remembered that, too. The Failed Men …

  There were two cats in the room. One fled beneath a chair and hunched there hissing in flat-eared terror. The other squirmed on its back in an ecstasy of submission.

  Two men. Arjun remembered fleeing them, tumbling headlong down the Mountain, through strange and hidden doors, and for a moment he thought he could recall the key to those doors, but there was no time, no time; he tightened and tied the bandage with his good hand and his teeth, and he darted from the table and up the stairs.

  On his way out he stole a loaf of hard black bread and some cheese; a few coins; a half-sharp knife from the kitchen. He did it almost without thinking. So that was another fact about himself; he was selfish, and treacherous, in pursuit of whatever it was that he wanted, that he was so desperate to have.

  He climbed out of the attic window. The roof was still slippery from the morning’s rain, and he slid and scrambled down to the edge, where he was able to lower himself down onto next-door’s roof, and from there down onto a jutting window balcony where he stepped carefully among Marta’s plant pots, and from there it was not such a dangerous drop into the alley, considering the alternatives.