Gears of the City
Page 24
Ruth
Ruth walked Mrs. Rawley home after the meeting, through a cold rain, under the moonlight. The old widow was terribly fat, and she had a bad leg; she wheezed with every step over Carnyx Street’s wet cobbles. “You’re a good girl,” she said. “Very kind.” A factory over toward 120 vented steam and grit, and the sour smell of dust. “Streets aren’t safe these days.” There was a storm brewing over the Mountain, and distant lightning nickered in the night. Rawley swigged whiskey from a hip-flask and cursed. The only thing she feared more than ghosts were the Know-Nothings who were supposed to protect against them; she was drunk, and lonely, and full of vague fears.
She slipped on a drift of wet leaves and nearly pulled Ruth down with her. She sat there cursing and laughing. Ruth sat cross-legged beside her. Her skirts quickly soaked with foul water, and she shivered.
“You’re a good girl, Ruth. Strange, mind.” Rawley sighed. “Forget about that thing. Nothing we can do about it now. Keep chasing after that sort ofthing and you’ll end up like your father.”
Ruth stiffened. Rawley shook her head, mumbling, oh, sorry, sorry dear, I didn’t mean to say that, it’s the drink …
“I want to talk to the Black Masks, Mrs. Rawley.”
The old woman shut her mouth. A shrewd expression crossed her face. “What would I know about that?”
The Black Masks—like the Know-Nothings, they were everywhere in the city, from the slopes of the Mountain south to the unimaginable borders. Like the Know-Nothings, they had their badges, their rituals, their meeting places, their secrets and schemes. Like the Know-Nothings, they were something to do in the cold evenings. In ordinary times Ruth didn’t think much of any of them—they were all stupid boys.
Unlike the Know-Nothings, they operated from hiding, in masks, under false names.
They said they stood for the workers. They said they stood for freedom. Every so often they shot an executive, or kidnapped an executive’s wife. Sometimes they blew things up—factories, warehouses, Chapterhouses, executives’ motorcars. Their weapons were the suspiciously laden horse-drawn wagon, left inconspicuously beside Company buildings, stuffed with stolen dynamite and iron scrap; the letter bomb, wrapped in pamphlets; the sniper rifle.
They had no demands. If they had any particular goals, Ruth didn’t know what they were. They’d been around for decades, and they never seemed to accomplish anything much. She’d heard that they were spies and saboteurs for the Mountain; she’d heard that they had leaders down south, in a zone where the Combines held no sway. More likely, she thought, they had no real leaders at all.
Ruth thought of them as a kind of escape valve. When the grinding pressure of the city got too great, it was time for the lads to put on the Masks, and go start a fire; and the great machine kept rolling …
In ordinary circumstances, she thought they were useless at best, and maybe dangerous. But this was an emergency. For the first time in her life she was almost desperate and frustrated enough to put on the Mask herself.
Ruth knew, because Marta knew, because Rawley had blurted it out once, drunk and drowsy with medicine, that Rawley’s younger son, who worked by day shifting cargo at the Terminal, was a Masker.
“The Masks,” Ruth said. “If we’re going to get anything done, we need someone who’s not scared of a little—you know.”
Rawley shook her head. “Who says I know anything about the Masks?”
The Mountain loomed. A harsh rain was blowing down.
“Your son, Mrs. Rawley. Henry—I know.”
Mrs. Rawley was silent for a moment.
“This city isn’t right, Ruth,” she said. “It’s all broken.”
“I know.”
“It’s hard on families—you know that.”
“Tell Henry I need to talk to the Masks, Mrs. Rawley.”
“All right, Ruth. All right. You’re a good girl to care. Help me stand, will you?”
Arjun
In Cendylon Arjun met an old acquaintance. The waters below bloomed with rust-flowers; the iron bridges were twined with ivy and magnolia; the domes above them were copper-green and the torchlight golden; in the fragrant and lazy air the Mountain was the deep green of something sunk beneath tropical waters. As they passed by the flowered archway of the Traitors’ Garden, where spectators and tourists watched the condemned men hang and writhe in the embrace of strangling vines, a man stepped out of the gloating crowd and called, “Arjun!”
It was St. Loup. Arjun recognized the man at once, and tensed.
“Ready your weapons, Brace-Bel,” Arjun whispered. Then he smiled and shook St. Loup’s hand.
St. Loup’s smile, as always, was dazzling. At the moment it seemed he wore long and snakeskin-colored robes, like the locals. When he could be bothered to use it, St. Loup had a gift for looking as if he belonged. His glasses were round, gold-rimmed, and bright; his long blond hair, oiled and elegant. He was a little older than he’d been when Arjun saw him last—there were the beginnings of crow’s feet around his eyes, a certain hardening of the skin.
“How long has it been, Arjun? Since the Hotel? Since the Annihilatori Were you there at that Coven in … ? May I ask who your friend is? Is he new to our peculiar brotherhood? Shall we have a drink? Oh come on.”
In a half-lit underground bar they drank pungent aniseed liqueur out of tiny brass cups. Not the bar St. Loup first suggested—Arjun insisted on choosing the spot. St. Loup was charming but he was not above the use of poison.
“How goes the search for your God?”
“Not well, St. Loup. And your own search … ?”
“Sad, sad; no happy news.”
St. Loup—who was he? Who had he been before he’d Broken Through to the City Beyond? It was impossible to be sure and it hardly mattered. At various times he had told Arjun that in his former life he’d been a prince, or a university instructor, or a prisoner in a mental institution; once he’d claimed to have lived in a part of the city full of tall buildings and motorcars and television advertisements, and worked in investment banking. One day he’d walked through a crowded department store and stepped between two bright mirrors, and in each mirror, over the heads of the surging and squabbling crowd he’d seen the face of the most beautiful woman in the world, walking away, left and right, and into a maze of gold-lit reflections. And he’d followed; and he’d followed her ever since, and never found her. Sometimes he said that she was a Queen, and she must be on her throne, on the Mountain, in the perfect golden light of the upper air; sometimes he said that she was too beautiful to be allowed to walk the streets freely, and that she must be held a prisoner in the harems of the Mountain’s rulers, and it was his desperate dream to steal her away …
Was any of that true? Probably not. St. Loup never seemed much of a romantic. At other times he’d claimed to be searching for the secret of eternal youth, or for money. Once—with the air of a man confessing to a shameful secret—he’d told Arjun that he’d been lying on the dirty bed of an anonymous hotel and dying by his own hand of an overdose of pain medications, when the old man Shay had come to sit by his bedside, and had made him an offer …
It was certainly true, however, that for St. Loup the path through the city was marked out in mirrors, light, diamonds, clear puddles, bright eyes—and that he liked to surround himself with beautiful women. Every so often Arjun crossed his path—they chased the same rumors of the Mountain through the same strange places. Sometimes older, sometimes younger—it was confusing at first, then one stopped caring, became indifferent. In the Meta-context, people were split from their own lives’ narratives, they neither progressed nor regressed; the only thing stable about them was their particular obsession. For a year or two Arjun and St. Loup had had a partnership of sorts, back at the Hotel, that had ended in acrimony after one betrayal too many—not all of them St. Loup’s. Theirs was a small community, and not a close or friendly one. St. Loup was prone to suicide attempts and murders. He was quite mad. Perhaps they all were.
Brace-Bel sighed and didn’t answer.
“You’ll go mad out here without a purpose,” St. Loup said. “Pick a God to worship, any God. Your friend here has an obsession with a God of music. Has he mentioned it to you? At the Hotel he rarely talked of anything else.”
“St. Loup …”
“No offense. We can all be the most frightful bores. Arjun, I saw Potocki recently—he has commissioned the construction of yet another flying machine. A kind of complex screw-thing, all wings and vanes. Gyroscopes. Can’t be blown off course, he says. Not this time. Not this time. He intends to launch himself at the Mountain.”
“Again,” Arjun said.
“Again,” St. Loup agreed. “Always the same strategy. He’s like a stopped clock, or a jammed gear, or some horrible thing. Machines, machines. I may be a monomaniac, but at least I display a little variety in execution.”
“None of us are any closer to the Mountain, though,” Arjun said. “Perhaps Potocki has the right approach? He’s good at making flying machines. Why not stick with it? He’s patient.”
St. Loup shook his golden head. “You’re too kind.”
“So did you steal his plans?”
St. Loup grinned. “I tried.” He knocked back his drink and ordered another. “He’s beefed up security since the old days. Do you remember? Never mind. Old news. What else? I heard that the famous Mr. Shay had been seen in Kovno, at the shipyards, doing business under the name Cuttle.” He sighed. “But when I investigated I found that the yards had been burned over, and the waters were black with oil. What about you—any interesting news?”
“Nothing much.”
“It’s been a long time. You look older—you’ve acquired a couple of interesting wounds. Where’ve you been? You know, your absence has been noted for a while now.”
“I’ve been sick, St. Loup.” Arjun held up his wounded hand. “A black dog bit me. What brings you to Cendylon?”
“I was here to hear the last words of a heretic, in the garden of vines.” It was probably a lie; most of the things St. Loup said were lies. “You are passing through?”
“From nowhere in particular, to wherever the music leads me,” Arjun said.
“We are returning to the most hideous place in the city,” Brace-Bel complained. “In the shadow of the Mountain, because of a mad dream of a talking Beast …”
Arjun kicked Brace-Bel under the table and he howled. St. Loup’s eyes lit up.
“It’s always a pleasure, St. Loup,” Arjun said. “But we must be going.”
“One more drink, Arjun. Why not? It’s a lonely city out there. Let’s welcome Brace-Bel to our brotherhood.”
But of course there was no brotherhood—none of them could be trusted, as St. Loup well knew. Everyone who Broke Through did it alone. They were all at least a little mad. Arjun sometimes liked St. Loup, but trust was impossible. And as it turned out, St. Loup had two thugs waiting to grab Arjun in the street outside— big brutal men with round pale faces, not local—so Arjun and Brace-Bel had to flee through the kitchens, and out across the bridges. St. Loup laughed, and called after them: “Always a pleasure! When shall we meet again? We must have lunch!”
Arjun swore and clenched his fists in frustration. Now they had to take a circuitous route, lurching wildly back and forth across Time and the city, so that their trail was too confused for St. Loup to follow. A waste of valuable time—but the last thing Arjun needed was St. Loup competing for the Beast’s secrets; and besides he’d already brought more than enough danger into Ruth’s life …
One obstacle after another!
Slowly, slowly, they drew closer to the Mountain.
Ruth
So Ruth met Henry Rawley, in the shadows of an alley out the back of the Terminal, on his shift break. He smoked ferociously and shook his head. “My bloody mum and her bloody mouth …”
“Will you help?”
She waited another day.
They came to her at night, throwing stones up at her window like little boys. Six of them, out in the street, masked and dressed in black. Despite the masks, she recognized two of them—Pieter from the sewage reclamation plant, Goodge from the refinery—local lads. The others were strangers. Henry wasn’t among them.
She went down into the street. She dressed in black; it seemed to be the thing to do.
They said nothing. They put a blindfold over her eyes. They spun her around. They led her through the streets.
There was some theatrical business with beggars and whispered passwords; with signals rapped on iron doors, messages left under bricks. They went in and out of alleys, up and down stairs, into tunnels, over wasteground. Weeds and rusty junk under her feet. Someone challenged them; they responded. Secret words—the names of Combines pronounced backward, she realized. Secret handshakes. They addressed each other as brother or comrade, and named themselves after explosives, or knives, or night-birds, or stars. They spun her around again. They led her up a rattling fire escape, onto a high roof, into a cold night wind. Someone whispered in her ear, “Can you keep a secret? Whose side are you on, Miss Low?” Someone else drew a knife. “What’s your business with the Black Mask?”
She said, “Knock it off, Pieter. I know your mum.”
It was all pointless play-acting. That was how the Black Masks did business. Whatever real and hard-edged purpose the Masks might have had was encrusted under a vast impractical weight of fanciful nonsense.
It reminded Ruth of her precious books. In the history books, yellow and fragrant with age, fragments of history themselves, there were accounts of all the cults and assassins’ guilds and revolutionaries and anarchists and heretics and secret societies of the past—in fact she owned a single volume of the Atlas, dimly remembered as the work of a terrible cabal of radicals and sedition-ists, and though it looked dull enough to her, she kept it hidden away from the prying eyes of Know-Nothings.
It was a large and paranoid city and full of passwords and blindfolds and secrets. There was a terrible weight of history behind everything everyone ever did. The Black Masks, it seemed to Ruth, behaved the way they did because they sensed it was the way for a secret society to behave. Who knew where they’d absorbed the notion? Maybe in a dream. A conversation heard through the walls. Something that trickled down through the city.
She sighed. Nothing in the city worked the way it was supposed to. The dust of Ages settled on everything. Everything that should have been beautiful or purposeful was ugly and futile. Were these stupid young men really the only help she could hope for?
She tore off the blindfold—the Maskers gasped, one of them said, Ruth, hang on, not yet!—and from the top of the high roof she could see the yellow moon, and the vast shadow of the Mountain.
The Return-Playing the Magician–
Red Wine–Dawn Shift–Five Impossible
Devices–”He Has Laboratories”
Arjun
With an immense thump that echoed across a dozen streets and stopped all conversation, a blockage in the north chimney of the Patagan Sewer & Piping Thirty-first Smelting Plant finally crumbled, allowing a cloud of smoke and grit and ash and rust and feathers to burst out over Fosdyke. It smelled like the death of machines. There was cheering from the Plant, followed by shrieks and groans from the houses below. The cloud surged down the hill and flooded the streets, blacking out windows, ruining the laundry. It broke at the edge of Carnyx Street. Two men staggered out of the grey, one fat, one thin, both coughing and reeling. Their faces were painted with dust, their hair was thick and bushy with it; they looked like tragic clowns.
“Fuck you,” Brace-Bel spat. “May you be fucked to death by minotaurs. May you be torn to shreds by drunken harpies. Why have you brought me back to this terrible place?”
Arjun clutched a lamppost for support and beat at his filthy clothes with his free hand. All around them the curtains were twitc
hing; they were being watched.
Th ere was a cheaply printed poster on the inside of the smoky windows of Ruth’s shop. It said:
DON’T LET THEM DESTROY OUR MUSEUM
PRESERVE OUR …
MEETING TOMORROW AT THE …
And it said some other things, too. But behind it, Arjun saw, emerging from the shadows, Ruth’s face. She pulled the poster down so that she could see more clearly through the glass. She looked amazed, confused.
The face disappeared. A moment later the bells rang and the door opened and she ran out into the street. She wore trousers and a worn black shirt—work clothes. Her hair was tied back and she looked tired and red-eyed, as if she hadn’t slept. She took his hand, gently, nervously. She seemed surprised to be able to touch him, as if he might only be something glimpsed in a mirror.
Arjun shrugged. “I came back again.”
“I thought you’d … I don’t know. Vanished.”
“I nearly did. I had help.”
She blinked wet eyes as if sun-dazzled, and she looked suddenly full of hope—then her eyes narrowed and her smile turned into a scowl, as Brace-Bel stepped out from behind Arjun. “What’s he doing here?”
Brace-Bel was disguised in brown overalls, and Arjun had cut his hair short, and his various glittering rings and amulets were hidden in his pockets. His face hovered uneasily between a sneer and a smile of ingratiation.
Behind him the neighbors leaned out of their windows, watching curiously. A crowd was gathering. Mothers held curious children back at their doorsteps. The street remembered Brace-Bel all too well.
“May we come inside?” Arjun said.
There was no falling into each other’s arms. No kiss. After that first nervous brush of Ruth’s fingers across his hand that confirmed his reality there was no further touch at all, and she sat across the table from him and there was a great uncertain distance between them. It seemed unfair. Arjun felt somehow cheated and ill-used.