by Felix Gilman
He remembered searching for the way to the Mountain. For years. He remembered his childhood in the far south, beyond the walls of the city, in the Choristry, that cold and serene monastery. It had been made of stone and glass. They had kept goats, libraries, quiet young men, and severe pious young women. His God had lived there, in the high spires. Then it had vanished and his world had fallen apart.
He remembered the trek north to the city—to Ararat, City of Gods and heart of the world. It had taken him a year, summer to summer, across plains and deserts and rivers and seas. He remembered how the crowds at the docks had swallowed him, the haze of sweat and salt and spice that enveloped the harbor.
He remembered the moment he decided that his God, which had fled for the city, had now left the city for the Mountain, and that he, too, had no choice but to go deeper into the heart of things. He’d been reading a newspaper, sitting in a railway carriage, when he’d caught a glimpse from the greasy window of the shadow of the Mountain and thought, as if out of nowhere: of course. They’re right, of course. They’ve been right all this time. The Mountain.
He remembered his years in the WaneLight Hotel.
He could not remember going up. He could not remember falling down.
There were still holes in his memory, still shadows.
They’d come in time. He decided not to force the matter. The music slipstreamed, a chromatic glide, an awakening theme, and he remembered Olympia again, the flat in Foyle Square, the theaters …
Years. And he’d never found his God. Rumors of the Mountain at every step. Years …
… Shay. Arjun remembered his apprenticeship to that unnerving man. He remembered a thin elderly man with straggling dirty white hair and a worn suit, a sneer, a peevish snarl; not the strong laughing young man Brace-Bel spoke of. And he remembered that sometimes Shay had called himself Lemuel, and sometimes he’d heard rumors of a man who must have been Shay who called himself Cuttle, or, or …
Brace-Bel’s story was disturbing, and strange. Shay, it seemed, had wanted Brace-Bel for something, had armed him and pointed him at the Mountain. It made Arjun wonder what purpose Shay might have had in teaching him, in bringing him out of the city and into the secret paths behind the city. Among the uncommunity of the travelers in the City Beyond—and now Arjun began truly to remember smiling St. Loup, sour old Father Turnbull the defrocked, the mad Engineer Potocki, Longfellow the penitent, Abra-Melin of the shaking staff, so many dozens of others—Shay was special. Ubiquitous, apocryphal. Uniquely deadly, because he was first, and his plans were laid before yours and around yours. Always absent— wherever you were, you always just missed him. Rumors of sightings of him sold for gold, blood, kingdoms. St. Loup had once confessed (lied?) that it was Shay who first brought him through. Turnbull admitted it casually: “Actually at first I rather thought, ha-ha, that he might be the devil. But we were all young once, and na’ive. I followed him anyway, of course.”
It began to worry him; Arjun couldn’t grasp the shape and scale of that great machine … and he found that he’d nearly forgotten the precious fragment of music. His back ached. He felt restless, full of energy, fresh strength. A flash of sun through the curtains stung his eyes and he realized that it was nearly noon. Perhaps he had slept a little, after all. He could hardly be blamed if he had trouble distinguishing dreams from reality. It was nearly noon, and Ruth would be wondering what had happened to him, whether he had failed, like all the others. He had a sudden powerful urge to move, to act, to begin again.
He had his memory again. The last few gaps would fill themselves soon enough. Maybe in time he would remember what happened on the Mountain! In a peculiar way, the Beast had led him to Brace-Bel, to where he needed to be.
He looked at his maimed hand, still strange to him, still sometimes sore. He didn’t consider the debt paid. There was more that the Beast could tell him—it had begun to tell him what happened on the Mountain. It had begun to tell him the way back up.
Somehow, he had to free it from its captors.
He twitched the curtains and looked out over the green and sunlit and deadly garden. Perhaps Brace-Bel’s weapons might prove useful.
First things first. He had made a promise to the Low sisters, who had saved his life. He got up, bones creaking, and went in search of Ivy.
The Bird stood in the hallway outside, perched prettily on a stepladder, wiping the windows with a wet rag.
On closer inspection it turned out to be a thin young woman in feathers. It was not Ivy. Though she’d worn the Bird costume the night before, it had apparently been passed on to another member of the household—a pale girl on whom it hung loosely and ridiculously. In the daylight the costume was more grey than white, and the patches of tape and string that held it together were painfully obvious. It barely covered the bruised bony thighs of the girl on the ladder.
“Morning,” she said.
“Good morning. My name is Arjun.”
“I know. That was a strange business last night. We weren’t expecting it. Was it rehearsed?”
“No. Brace-Bel was not expecting me either. I broke in. Our fight was an impromptu performance.”
“Shit.” She frowned. “Then I lost money on you.”
“I’m sorry.”
The girl shrugged. “Never mind.”
“Last night Ivy Low wore your costume.”
“She wears it at night,” the girl explained. “The Bird’s Mr. Brace-Bel’s favorite. So’s Ivy.”
“You wear it during the day?”
“Looks like it, doesn’t it?” She stepped down from the ladder and wrung out her rag into a greasy bucket. She met Arjun’s eye. “Don’t ask. The boss says, it’s part of it, same as the whippings and the you-know-what. Bringing the Gods down to do housework.” She imitated Brace-Bel’s ranting voice—”Breaking down the barriers between the mundane and the miraculous”—and laughed. “Better than most jobs.”
“I wasn’t going to ask.”
“Ivy doesn’t have to do it. The housework. She does whatever she likes all day and she never has to work. She’s so pretty and clever. No one said the boss had to be fair.”
“No one said anyone had to be fair,” Arjun agreed.
“My name’s Stevie.”
“Good morning.”
She smiled, showing bad teeth, pauper’s teeth, and selfconsciously frowned her mouth closed again. She said, “If you’re going to stay he’ll dress you up, too. Some of the girls say it’s no job for a man but I say that’s no one’s business, and you wouldn’t be the only one.”
“I don’t plan to stay.”
“Where are you from?”
“That’s hard to explain. A long way away.”
“Some people say everyone who’s a little bit odd is some kind of ghost, who drifted down from the Mountain. I say some people are just a bit odd. My uncle got hit in the head with a steam shovel and he never remembered my aunt’s name after that and he had to write down his own house number, but he wasn’t any kind of ghost.”
“In the general case, you’re probably right to be skeptical,” Arjun said. “But I really have come down from the Mountain. And before that from somewhere very different from here. And before that, from outside the city, even.”
She gave him a long calculating look, as if waiting for him to try to sell her something dubious. He shrugged.
“So,” she said. “What about Brace-Bel? Is he really from somewhere else? Was there ever really a Bird, or God of lights, or … ? Or is he just mad? Knocked on the head? Too many drugs?”
“Do you have money on that, too?”
“Yeah.” She gave a yellow-brown smile.
“Well, good news, then. Help me find Ivy, and I’ll tell you a few stories.”
She thought about it for a moment, then threw the rag with a wet ringing slap into the bucket and said, “Fuck it. Brace-Bel doesn’t notice if the place is clean or filthy. I don’t know where Ivy is. She gets into odd places. Come on, then.”
/> No idea.”
In Brace-Bel’s shadowy kitchen an old woman chopped pale white tubers with a heavy cleaver and ladled them into the soup. Her costume’s arms and legs and bristly protuberances rattled the pans overhead and dragged in the soup and nearly caught fire on the stove. She was either a spider, or a beetle, or a threshing machine, or perhaps a many-wired telegraph switchboard. As she moved the costume’s complex elaborations slipped in and out of shadow and steam and Arjun could not quite comprehend them.
“No idea,” she repeated.
“Come on,” Stevie wheedled. “You haven’t seen her all day?”
The face underneath the costume was round and grey, cracked and lined in the stove light. The old woman gave her name as Mrs. Down. She looked at Arjun and Stevie with frank contempt. “Probably still in bed,” she said.
Arjun sniffed the air, thick with meat-smells, and nearly salivated. “Mrs. Down, may I … ?”
“Out, the both of you. You’ll eat when Brace-Bel says you’ll eat.”
Stevie led Arjun along the cobwebbed balconies of the third floor, from which much of the garden was visible, but they caught no glimpse of Ivy.
“Horrible old cow,” she muttered.
“Ivy?”
“Mrs. Down. Used to be a madam, can you believe it, in a brothel up north, before Brace-Bel found her. Sick in the head. Wrapped round his fat little finger, she is.”
She leaned over the edge of the balcony, craning her head for a better view of the hedge-maze, scratching her bony hip. “Ivy’s a cow, too, mind you.”
“I’m here to rescue her.”
“That’s sweet.”
“Her sisters sent me. They miss her.”
“Huh. She’s never mentioned sisters. Can’t picture her with a family. Stuck-up and cold. Is she rich?”
“No.”
“Huh.” Stevie poked her head around the door of a room with mosaics on the floor, where two thin young men in rags and jewels sat cross-legged, smoking, sewing uniforms together. Ivy? They shrugged; they hadn’t seen her.
“I always thought she was rich. Hah. She acts like she’s a fucking executive’s daughter or something.”
“How does Brace-Bel keep her here? I promised her sisters …”
“How does he keep her here? He doesn’t keep her here. Arjun, she just about runs this place.” Stevie stepped out onto another un-tended balcony, waved a feathered hand out over the gardens. “All those horrible machines and things? She’s the only one who understands even half of them. What, you thought Brace-Bel knew how to make them work? He can’t even stand up straight half the time, can he? She makes up all the dances and things. Ivy’s clever.”
Stevie grabbed Arjun’s wrist. Her grip was surprisingly strong. There was a nervous smile on her face. “Don’t tell Brace-Bel I said all this, will you? But it’s got to be obvious, right? He’d be helpless without her. She runs this place. I don’t know what she wants out of him, or us, or all this, but. He worships the ground she walks on, you know. He’s like a kind of child. When she gets bored with him he’ll just die, I think. It’s sick. She’s a bit mad, actually. She still thinks all this stuff, the dances, the other stuff, it’s all going to maybe do something, I don’t even know what. Like magic. This is her show these days. You’re going to have to drag her out of here kicking and screaming, I think.”
She let go of Arjun’s wrist. She was panting a little. “So that’s that.”
“Ah.” Arjun leaned against the balcony. The garden below was pleasant and unthreatening by daylight, and there was a cool breeze. For a moment he felt lost. He shrugged. “Then I’ll talk to her. We’ll see. I made a promise.”
They stood in companionable silence for a while, in the gentle sunlight. The treetops around them rustled. Stevie plucked broken feathers from the arms of her costume and let them flutter down.
“So,” she said. “Who are you, then? Where are you from?”
She had bruised and vulnerable eyes—half trusting, half suspicious. Part of her wanted him to tell her that he was a fake, that Brace-Bel was a fake, that Ivy was only mad and the whole thing only a sham; part of her wanted him to tell her something beautiful and strange.
He began trying to tell her about his God. Her mousy eyebrows rose. She lived in a godless Age. She understood the concept only vaguely, first as something the Know-Nothings had taught her to be frightened of, then as something Brace-Bel had— inadvertently—taught her to laugh at. He tried telling her about his monastic childhood in the mountains outside the city, but it was clear that she couldn’t quite believe it or imagine it. The silence, the peace, the simplicity, the music; she was a city child.
He realized that he was turning the little red matchbook from the WaneLight Hotel over and over in his fingers. He held it up to her. “Have you ever heard of this place?” She shook her head. “Well then. It was the most famous and important place in the city once, a long time ago, and I don’t know how far away …”
Far to the south. Back in the old days the WaneLight Hotel stood in a high place, so far south that the Mountain was only a distant grey smudge on the horizon; and even then the Mountain was only visible on the clearest summer days, and only if one went out onto the highest north-facing roofs and teetered on the unsteady tiles.
How long ago? Long enough ago that it had been forgotten by Stevie’s time, but long after the time of the Atlas-makers and Olympia and Silk and the rest. Time had meant very little to Arjun in his years of searching up and down the city for his God.
It was a place where people traded and schemed and murdered for, among other things, secrets. He had gone there in search of the secret path to the Mountain.
Far to the south, and high. Far from the haunting presence of the Mountain. On the south side the roof was colonized by elegant little cafes and observatories and glass-canopied hothouses and aviaries. On the north it was unadorned industrial space: vents and chimneys, antennae and pylons. To see the Mountain from the WaneLight Hotel one had to creep through that swamp of iron and wire and out to the edge. The roof curved and angled and swooped at odd angles like something organic, like a complex and chaotic equation, in a way that was soft and seductive when viewed from the ground, far below—and to sophisticated sensibilities it was even erotic—but was merely frightening and nauseous to those who worked on the roof.
To stand safely on the edge one had to clutch at nearby reedy antennae or the mushrooming vent-pipes for comfort. Then one felt the crackling subtle power of the WaneLight Hotel’s communications and signaling arrays rush through one’s skin, and could almost hear in the stridulant hiss the whisper of powerful secrets of business, politics, crime, religion. If one clutched the vent-pipes instead one’s skin sweated with the dreadful demonic heat rising from the Hotel’s belly and one felt sick and ashamed. But those were necessary compromises if one wanted to lean out over the edge into blue vertiginous sky—not looking, trying not to look, at the great sweep of flags and parapets below, the windows from which music spilled, and laughter, and shouting, and screams, and weeping, for the perfect and significant number of ninety-nine floors, and below that the motorcars circling the Hotel tiny as toys with touching hectic speed—if one wanted to look out over the edge and see the faintest suggestion in the infinite distance of the Mountain. On cloudy days even that was impossible.
The WaneLight Hotel would countenance no competition; therefore it was placed as far as it was possible to get from the Mountain, while still being nowhere near the city’s walls and somehow deep in the city’s heart. It was complex and paradoxical but its builders had been very clever indeed.
When Arjun came to the Hotel it was already so old that its builders were long forgotten. Ownership of the Hotel itself had changed hands a hundred times. Occasionally a controlling interest had been acquired by outsiders; more often alliances and consortia formed among the wealthier and more connected of the long-term guests, who found that there were certain advantages of access and communications
to being owners of the Hotel’s various infrastructures.
When Arjun began working there, management of the Hotel was in the hands of something called Bodley Estate Investments & Properties, and Arjun was interviewed in a windowless white-walled office just off the lobby by a young tie-wearing Bodley. The regular staff called all representatives of Bodley EI&P Bodleys, and there was indeed something blandly interchangeable about them. It was common knowledge among the staff that the Bodleys were only a front for a combination of owners led by Mr. Monmouth, whose gambling operation now brazenly spanned the entire East Wing of the twenty-fifth floor. It was also common knowledge among the staff that all common knowledge about the Hotel was wrong.
When Arjun first approached the Hotel he came to it too late. He followed rumors of it back from a later more degraded Age, through twisting alleys of time, relying on harsh music as his guide. When he first found it, it was after a fire had ruined the beautiful south face, and the structure seemed twisted, melted, deflated. The rooms were half empty and the guests were a seedy bunch who sold drugs, or guns, or whores, or slaves, and had no secrets worth paying for. He stayed for one week before realizing his error: no one in those latter days of the Hotel would know the secret path to the Mountain. So he went through the Hotel’s nightclubs where a thin repetitive jazz was playing—and through the kitchens where hood-eyed immigrant workers sang something deeply self-pitying as they chopped and slit and garnished poison squid and lurid spiny anemones—and opening a door on the other side of which a suicidal guest warbled feebly in her bloody bath—and through a door on the other side of which he found a way back into the institution’s glory days. He emerged into a summer day of wild wet heat and searing blue sky. A profusion of bright flags and crystal and lights and laughter greeted him. The ostentatious extravagance of suits and dresses and black sunglasses all around told him: this is the time, these are the days!