by Felix Gilman
By the time Arjun came into the Square, Maury’s men had finished with the paintings and were moving on to rocks—Moon Rocks, Mysteriously Carved Rocks, Highly Magnetic Rocks, Miscellaneous Rocks—which they sledgehammered to powder.
Half of Carnyx Street turned out to swell the protesters’ numbers. Rumors had spread.
“Zeigler,” Ruth sighed. “Can’t keep his mouth shut.”
Arjun stood at the back of the crowd, his face obscured under a borrowed hat. Marta moved among the crowd and led the children away, and the elderly.
The stone fingers of petrified saints, the ebony eggs of the phoenix, radioactive core-rods—all shattered and swept into the corner.
And by the time that was done, a man from Holcroft Municipal Trust was there. He wore a well-cut black suit, a bright green waistcoat, and gold-rimmed spectacles. He affected heavy black boots in a show of solidarity with the working Know-Nothings. He strutted back and forth giving orders and encouragement for a while. He took a couple of swings with the hammer, and received obligatory applause from the men. He kicked and swore at the handful of ugly ragged thunderers that came to squat on the rubble and peck for shiny remnants. Then he settled back to stand beside Inspector Maury at the edge of the Square watching the proceedings with a sour expression. Every few minutes he glared over at the protesters and muttered something to Maury as if calculating the costs and benefits of a massacre. On the one hand he would clearly be happy to silence the protesters; on the other hand he clearly wanted an audience for his very public display of destruction, and these dregs were all that was available.
“That’s Wantyard,” Ruth whispered. “He gave a speech a few days ago. He’s a big man at Holcroft. I don’t know why he’s still hanging around here.”
The Know-Nothings had reduced the rocks to dust and were starting to carry out the Museum’s great heavy brass abaci and calculating-machines. Arjun’s heart clenched as he saw Wantyard lean in to talk to Maury again. The two of them seemed to reach an unpleasant agreement. Maury called three of his men over and gave orders. Wantyard settled back against the wall of the Chapterhouse, and smiled in eager and bitter anticipation.
“They’re running out of things to break,” Ruth said. “They’ll do the Beast soon. Now that we’re all here to see.”
“Yes.”
“Then it’s time.” She was more confident than he was.
“It certainly is!”
They both started at the sound of Brace-Bel’s voice. He stood behind them, fat and sagging in his borrowed brown overalls, but the expression on his face was resolute.
Ruth shoved his shoulder. “What are you doing here? Don’t you mess this up, Brace-Bel.”
“Just stay out of the way, Brace-Bel.”
“I will not. I do not shrink from conflict or crisis. And I do not trust your mumbo jumbo. My precious Ivy’s life is at stake. I shall search for her myself.”
“Brace-Bel …”
Brace-Bel elbowed his way sideways through the crowd and a moment later was gone from sight, as if he’d vanished.
“I hate that man,” Ruth said.
“Another reason to move quickly. Before he does something to give us away. “
“Wish me luck, then.”
Ruth crossed the Square, stepping through ashes and rubble. The Know-Nothings dropped what they were doing and watched her warily. She unwound her green scarf nervously from around her neck as she walked, and raised her hands to show they were empty.
Arjun watched her approach Maury and Wantyard. She’d wanted to give them one last chance. He couldn’t see her face as she spoke. He saw Maury telling her to get lost. As she walked away her eyes met Arjun’s and she shrugged.
Arjun turned away from the crowd and headed down the alley behind the building to the south of the Chapterhouse. He climbed up on boxes and up onto the rusting fire escape. He turned around and around up the iron stairs and ladders until he was out on the broad flat roof, which was like a thick forest of grey feathers and beady eyes. The chimneys and the ancient wire aerials groaned under the weight of the birds. The floor seethed and churned with them.
They fixed their eyes on him. As he stepped onto the roof they hopped aside to clear a path. They began to shout and babble. It was nearly human speech. Their aggression had been replaced by a desperate need. Their harsh throats piped; they tried to sing that Music he’d taught them. They made a dreadful cacophony. They fluttered around him adoringly as if they expected him to teach them something vitally important. What were they remembering? They reminded him more than ever of lost children.
“Are you ready?”
A shudder passed across the shrieking mass. Some of them took to the air and circled.
“Do you remember what you were? What you could be?”
The mass rose slowly, swelled into a dark cloud. There were distant cries of alarm from the Square below.
One of the birds hung in front of Arjun’s face. Its ugly wings were hardly beating; whatever held their twisted bodies aloft was not natural. It held something sharp and bright in its grubby claws. Arjun was suddenly afraid; he had no control over the process he’d started. They had begun to remember their other selves—and there were places in the city where these dangerous creatures were better, but there were places where they were so very much worse, and who knew what they might choose to recall?
It cocked its head and made a hissing noise that sounded like Silk. Then the swirling mass carried it away.
Arjun looked down over the edge of the roof.
Far below, the Know-Nothings emerged from the Museum’s towering double doors, dragging on ropes a wheeled pallet, on which the Beast’s immense cage rested. It emerged agonizingly slowly. It must have weighed a ton; Arjun had no idea how they would get it down the steps. Inside something heavy and coiled flinched from the sun. In sunlight its scales were the hideous green of rot or mildew, of rusty pipes and flaking paint. A single great yellow eye stared out. It seemed to catch Arjun’s gaze. He couldn’t read its animal expression.
He shouted, “There’s the cage! There’s the prisoner. There are the gaolers!”
He gestured like the conductor of an impossible orchestra and the birds descended.
Frirst they circled the air over the Square like leaves caught in a whirlwind, calling out to each other, sometimes breaking and recir-cling against each other in waves and sudden squalling back-drifts. They gathered numbers. They gathered speed. They seemed to be gathering their memories. They were still unsure of their purpose and some of them shrieked out affirmations and others negations. They scattered tattered shadows on the Square below. Their grey feathers caught the sun and sparkled. Many of them clutched scraps of bright fabric and metal—their knives and razors. They were a carnival crowd. Some of their shouts and caws were something like laughter.
Arjun turned and turned down the fire escape. He was still on the other side of the Hall of Trade when the first shot rang out, and he didn’t see who fired. At first he thought the noise was the percussive clanging of the stairs under his own feet. Thoughts about memory and perception and magic and power occurred to him but he had no time to entertain them. He dropped into the alley from the foot of the fire escape and nearly broke his ankle.
When he came out into the Square again it was like looking into a blizzard, or into a kaleidoscope. The birds flocked to and fro brighter and brighter, and the Know-Nothings and the Museum were both barely visible.
The protesters had fled the Square; they sheltered in the alleys and watched in awe.
The birds called out in joy and surprise at their own beauty and strength and numbers. More birds joined the flock every minute as their brothers and sisters shrieked to them of freedom and memory and beauty.
Almost as an afterthought they tore into the Know-Nothings, they beat against the bars of the Beast’s cage. The cage! The gaolers! They shrieked with righteous hate.
They flocked thickly past Arjun and shouted in his face but they didn’
t harm him. He shivered at the touch of their wings. He was thrilled and afraid; the perfect moment of recall could not last forever.
… and suddenly it was over. The birds broke apart like a reflection of the city in a dirty puddle, shattered in waves by a single step; when the moment passed it passed utterly. They scattered, as if suddenly embarrassed, into ones and twos, patternless, purposeless, squawking and shitting. They were too badly debased. Unable to bear the vision of what they might have been, they fled; down alleys, behind chimneys; they vanished over the rooftops, filling the sky for a second with strange clouds. It hurt to watch them go. Arjun thought: if I were stronger, if I were wiser, I might have brought them fully through …
Then they were gone, leaving the Square bloody and mucky and feathered; leaving the job half done and the prisoners not yet liberated.
The Know-Nothings sprawled on the ground, crouched with their arms over their heads, huddled together as if for warmth. Their hands were bloody and torn. Their faces bled, some from scratches, an unlucky few from blinded eyes. They stumbled as they rose. Some were still screaming. I’m so sorry, Arjun thought, not again; and please forgive me; and he felt sick at his own hypocrisy, because he remembered now that he’d done cruel things before on his path through the city, and always forgotten them and moved on.
And then he forgot his guilt, seeing the Beast thrash in its cage. The birds had somehow, between them, in their vast surging numbers, bent the bars, in an attempt to break the cage. It seemed they’d half lifted and then dropped it. It now lay on its side, halfway down the Museum’s marble steps. The Beast was forcing its huge head through the bent bars. The Beast’s huge shoulders violated the cage’s unhinging structure and the metal groaned and snapped. The creature’s jaw hung open and it made a constant hissing sound like steam escaping from an engine. Its long red tongue lashed the air hungrily. The creature was much larger and leaner than it had seemed in the cellar. Its thick neck stretched revoltingly and bulged with the effort of expansion and birth. Another bar broke noisily loose.
Brace-Bel
Later, as Arjun and Brace-Bel hid in the darkness of their bolt-hole, Brace-Bel would breathlessly recount his adventures in the Museum. He explained that he had always, in his strange life, been the villain, or worse, the laughingstock; but he’d ventured into the enemy’s lair in search of his true beloved like a hero of the highest and most chivalrous romance. His purpose had been pure as the purest knight’s, because he expected nothing from Ivy, nothing at all. He became what he was always meant to be. It was laughable, humiliating, but also superb …
So Brace-Bel wandered the dusty halls of the Museum. His feet scuffed the dust, which reassured him that he truly existed, notwithstanding the fact that he could not see his own feet. Whenever he looked down he felt as though he should fall. He touched his own face compulsively. He could not see his fingers. In fact he could not see any part of himself, nor could he (so far, touch wood) be seen by others.
He’d inherited no fewer than three invisibility devices from Shay. He’d kept them on his person and they’d survived the destruction of his household. One, which hung from a chain around his neck, was a grey pigeon’s feather, which smelled of dry blood and smoke, and was distressingly cold to the touch. Shay had said that it held the power of a God of the city’s unwanted and friendless and elderly, and imparted that God’s gift of being forgotten. A second, clipped to Brace-Bel’s belt and humming softly, was a little box of circuits and diodes that might one day be invented somewhere, but never here. Shay had explained—as if it “explained” anything!—that the box created a field that bent and scattered light. And last there was an inky black stone, shiny but unreflective, massy and somehow ancient-feeling, that Shay had refused under any circumstances to discuss. Brace-Bel kept it in his pocket and tried not to touch it.
He had no idea which of the three devices did the work of hiding him. Perhaps all of them did! He felt terribly uneasy. He felt remarkably brave and pleased with his own bravery and ashamed that in these last days, this alien city, he had been reduced to being proud of such nonsense. He wiped his brow and felt sweat that he could not see.
Because he was a scholar, and had had conversations with the leading students of optics of his day, he wondered how he was not blind. If he could not be seen it seemed to him that he should not be able to see. A puzzle. It was sad to think that he knew no one with whom he could share it.
Over the sound of the thrashing of wings he could hear men outside in the Square screaming. A little shiver of delight ran down his spine.
He had a device like a tin whistle that could throw, like a ventriloquist, various noises, and he used it to distract the Know-Nothings when he needed to pass. He had a device like a monocle that did something to people that left them sitting on the floor staring vacantly through their own pouring tears.
He found Ivy on the second floor, the only object in an emptied room, standing still at the window, watching the birds circle. She stared with a fierce curiosity as if trying to calculate their chaotic interweaving trajectories. She did not seem to be anyone’s prisoner.
“If every beautiful thing in this Museum were destroyed,” he said, “and you alone remained, this would be no less a storehouse of wonders.” He was at least half sincere, which delighted and confused and appalled him.
She turned from the window. “Brace-Bel,” she said. She did not seem surprised at his presence, or his invisibility. She sighed and said, “I might have known you’d interfere.” Unable to think of anything intelligent to say, instead he went down on one knee, where he wobbled slightly, then cursed as he realized that she could not see him, and fumbled in his pockets for the relevant devices, which he was not sure now how to deactivate, and his hands were soaked with sweat.
She helped him stand, saying, “Never mind, never mind. Too late now. Let’s go talk to the Beast.” She gave him her arm and permitted him to lead her to safety.
Arjun
Outside in the Square the Know-Nothings got to their feet. Some of them were still in agony or in tears; two ran away into the alleys behind the Museum. The rest drew their weapons. They were scattered and panicked and confused; their clothes were torn and they looked like bloody scarecrows. Maury moved among them calling for order and it seemed to Arjun that he was telling them to stay calm and in control and knocking their guns from their hands. But in fact there was no one obvious to shoot anyway. The protesters had fled.
Where was Ruth? Was she safe?
Arjun peered from around a corner and as far as he could see the Know-Nothings hadn’t yet noticed him.
There were only half a dozen of the Know-Nothings standing. It seemed like more, but he counted carefully.
One of the Know-Nothings aimed his gun at the Beast, still struggling out of its cage and into the city.
It was a violent birth; the broken bars gouged into its scaly hide. Blood oozed from the wounds in its throat.
Maury wrestled the gun from the man’s hand, as if he’d decided now to save the Beast. (Was it Maury? Whoever it was still wore his torn and filthy black coat over his head as a shield against the birds.) The Beast’s would-be executioner decided to run for it, slipping and sliding on bloody feathers. Maury—if it was Maury—sat on the steps, wrapped in torn black, and watched the Beast emerge.
There was a terrible explosion of noise in Arjun’s ear, and he stumbled. His face was warm; he put a hand to it and felt blood, dust.
A bullet had hit the wall next to his head, sprayed him with fragments of brick. His ears rang with noise and shock. Who’d fired? He couldn’t tell. He stumbled back into the alley, hunching for cover.
Ruth
As the storm of birds descended Ruth sheltered in an alley just off the Square. Marta was there, clutching Mrs. Anchor’s frightened snotty children by their collars—where was Mrs. Anchor? Zeigler was there, an expression of utter rapture on his face. The alley was heaped with stinking refuse, broken crates. Mrs. Rawley was there,
sitting on a crate, swigging from her whiskey-bottle, cackling. Schiller the dogcatcher peered from the shadows, baring his broken teeth into a snarl of joy. “Take that! Fucking Know-Nothings!” Shriveled old Mrs. Thayer leaned on her huge pale damaged son, who’d left his bedroom for the first time in years to see the miracle for himself, and was maybe bellowing, maybe laughing, and either way his round face was bright with tears.
At the back of the alley was a wire-link fence, at the foot of which were heaps of garbage, rank stands of weeds; over the top of which hung half a dozen children, fingers knotted in the wires, watching the miracle.
At the mouth of the alley the Square, the city, the sky were all utterly transformed. The beating of wings was loud as a train. Nothing was visible but bright feathers, flashes of color and light—and sometimes the chaotic thrashing stilled, and for a moment it seemed every bird swooped together, like a single white wing beating slowly. It was impossible to imagine that the world would ever return to normal.
Ruth stepped out into it with her eyes wide open. She heard Marta’s voice calling stop … and then she could hear nothing but the thrashing of wings, the cries and song of the birds. They left her unharmed. They resembled illustrations of angels torn from an old book, set loose on the breeze. She couldn’t stop laughing …
… until suddenly they rose, all at once, their song tapering off into cries of dismay and confusion, their flight becoming unsteady and uncertain. She reached after them; they were gone.
The Square was a bloody, filthy mess. A Know-Nothing with his eyes torn from his face staggered past her, fell at her feet. At the far end of the Square the surviving Know-Nothings were regrouping.