by Felix Gilman
After the miracle was over the world was unchanged.
Now the Black Masks came into the Square, from the east and west sides, as arranged, guns at the ready, to demand the Know-Nothings’ surrender.
Ruth wasn’t sure who started the shooting.
She walked forward across the Square. Marta was calling, get back here, Ruth, come back.
On the steps of the Museum the Beast was forcing its way out of its cage.
It was so much larger than she remembered, so much uglier and wilder. Its savage jerking motions as it thrashed at the bars were nothing like the gentle creature of her memories. Only its huge yellow eyes were the same.
Its neck seemed to stretch, snakelike, as it squeezed out into the world.
It terrified her. What would it do when it escaped into the city? What have we done?
Then she saw the scars and stitches that covered every inch of its hide. She saw how badly put-together it was, and she was full of pity for it.
A shapeless black figure approached the monster, stumbling, half on its knees, half upright—Inspector Maury, who it seemed had sheltered from the birds with his long black coat over his head. He knocked aside another Know-Nothing and kept stumbling forward. When he reached the cage he threw the torn and filthy coat aside, and stood up. He barely came up to the Beast’s long scarred throat. He lifted up his hands as if seeking the Beast’s blessing, and its head, madly thrashing, swooped and snapped shut over his left arm—and tore, and twisted, so that Maury jerked like a puppet—and it swung its head and threw him aside, bleeding, broken, to roll down the Museum’s steps.
Ruth stepped over him. She was running, now …
Mr. Wantyard had staggered to his feet. His waistcoat was torn and his belly protruded; he looked like an unraveling scarecrow. He snatched a long rifle from the limp frightened grip of his bodyguard. He sighted and fired into the Beast’s open and slavering jaws. Blood sprayed. He fired again. Before she knew she meant to do it, Ruth found that she’d lifted a truncheon from the belt of the unconscious Know-Nothing at her feet, and run up the slick and feathered steps, and struck Wantyard with all her strength on the back of his bald head.
Wantyard stumbled, cursed, dropped the rifle, and put a hand to his head. He rounded on her, snarling.
Arjun
Arjun’s head rang; he could hear nothing in his left ear but the droning echoes ofthat shot, like an airplane circling in his skull. In his right ear he could hear dim and muted sounds of gunfire, screaming. He felt sick.
He staggered back out of the safety of the alley and into the chaos of the Square. One of the Black Masks had been shot and lay writhing. Arjun couldn’t hear—was he groaning or screaming? At the south end of the Square a group of Masks was accepting the surrender of the last of the Know-Nothings, or perhaps it was the other way around.
Soundless, the scene was unreal, dreamlike, meaningless. The Beast opened its bloody jaws in a silent roar. Feathers still drifted in the air.
Up on the steps a fat man in a torn green waistcoat was wrestling with—Ruth?
Arjun ran up the steps. He slipped on something and fell, bruising his shins. When he got up again, he saw that Ruth and the fat man—Wantyard?—both stood still, watching the door to the Museum, from which Ivy was now emerging.
Behind Ivy there was a faint shimmer in the air—Brace-Bel.
Ivy wore a simple black dress. She appeared quite calm— almost amused at the strange scene before her.
The Beast stilled its thrashing and watched her.
Ivy reached out and took a drifting feather from the air. She examined it, and smiled.
Wantyard let go of Ruth.
Wantyard said something; Ruth said something; Ivy said something. Drone and buzz; silence.
Ivy walked straight past Ruth. She took Wantyard’s hands in hers and whispered something in his ear.
Did they know each other? Apparently they did—because Wantyard attempted to kiss her, and when she stepped deftly aside, he followed her eagerly over to the cage, where the Beast waited.
The expression on Ruth’s face—confused, upset, angry? Arjun moved next to her and held her hand. He pointed at his ears and mouthed, can’t hear. Her eyes were wide.
Ivy and Wantyard stood together before the Beast’s cage. Ivy turned and smiled at Wantyard, whispered in his ear, and he swallowed, leaned forward, and reached into the bars of the cage.
Instantly the Beast lunged and clamped its jaw around Wantyard’s arm. Wantyard reared back—and then Ivy was standing behind him, holding his shoulders, and she was shouting something at him, or at the Beast—which bit again, and then again, in Wantyard’s shoulder, in his belly, in his leg, opening shallow precise wounds…
The Beast worked on Wantyard with the delicacy of a surgeon. With a swift slice of its claws it removed the man’s genitals; raking deftly back and forth it opened the man’s throat like an accordion. It was a complicated operation. It seemed to go on for some time.
Ivy stood beside Wantyard, talking, gesturing—as if she was giving the Beast instructions.
Ruth buried her head in Arjun’s shoulder and sobbed. Brace-Bel, visible now, blanched and looked away.
As the Beast worked on Wantyard its own stitches began to open—the scars of the surgery that had made it. At first they bled, a thick black ooze. Then they began to leak dust. They snapped open and dry sheets of hide and scale fell away, exposing wet muscle and bone. The creature’s movements became slow and painful. The light in its yellow eyes faded. Its haunches sagged. At last it slumped to the floor and lay still.
After a long moment Wantyard got to his feet.
He was bleeding from a hundred wounds, small and large. His clothes were torn and he was nearly naked.
He smiled, and his smile was too wide. His eyes had an ugly yellow shine to them. His tongue flickered.
Ivy wrapped Maury’s discarded black coat around Wantyard’s shoulders. Wantyard struggled to get into it, jerking and twisting, as if unfamiliar with clothing. When he was done he smiled again, and began to stroke the coat’s leather, preening himself.
Arjun realized that the hearing in his right ear was returning— his left ear still buzzed and roared. He could hear Ruth crying. He could hear distant alarms.
The creature wearing Wantyard’s flesh stopped its preening, and came toward Arjun. He stood his ground. He was very frightened; but all it did was stand in front of him and look him curiously up and down, and smile, and sniff, repeatedly, obsessively, as if puzzled by the sensory deficiencies of its new body.
It grinned again, and spoke, and Arjun strained to hear the distant buzzing words: “He has laboratories. He made me. I made myself anew. He no longer owns me.”
Ruth still kept her head turned away, as if she couldn’t bear to look at the bloody creature.
Arjun said, “You promised to tell me my past. I haven’t forgotten. How did I find my way up the Mountain? What happened to me there? Did I find my God?”
It said, “He made me and sent me out in the city as a sign. That unkind father Shay. The young one, not the old. I was made to send fools like you to your deaths. Why should I do it any longer?”
“I don’t understand.”
It said, “There is a door on Pandora Street. Once you begin it will be like falling. He will be waiting for you. He is always waiting for his enemies. Now—I have unfinished business with the woman.” And it turned and walked over toward Ivy, who reached out and adjusted its collar, and whispered to it.
The alarms were getting closer. There was the sound of running feet in the alleys. Marta stood at the foot of the steps calling, “Come on, come on!”
Below, in the Square, the surviving Black Masks and the people of Carnyx Street and whoever’d simply wandered by and been curious stood confused and nervous, uncertain of their lines. And the alarms came closer. And Ruth took Arjun’s hand and said, “We have to go—we have to go now.”
Ivy and the Beast ran in one direction. Rut
h ran in another. After a moment’s uncertainty, Arjun followed Ruth. Brace-Bel, huffing and puffing, ran after him.
The Bolt-Hole-Gathering the
Expedition-Good Riddance-
An Act of War
Arjun
Over the next few days the Know-Nothings searched every house on Carnyx Street twice over, and questioned every last man, woman, and child until they were tired and dizzy and desperate. There were beatings; doors got kicked in.
They demanded answers about the “Incident.” There was no monster in the Museum, they insisted, and they took the fact that so many people claimed to have seen it as evidence of conspiracy; or perhaps of some mass-hallucination weapon devised by the unnatural science of the Mountain to aid their assault on the city below. They simultaneously insisted that Wantyard and Maury had not gone missing, that they were perfectly fine, that it was unthinkable that terrorists or saboteurs might have laid hands on such important men—and that they had been murdered, and the people of Carnyx Street were hiding the killers. Their orders and strategies seemed confused.
The city’s vestigial official police force poked around briefly, until the Know-Nothings chased them off.
There were only two casualties. When the Know-Nothings barged into Thayer’s dank room, shoving his old mother aside, and accused him of being in league with Brace-Bel and whatever uncanny powers backed him, Thayer became violent. A Know-Nothing was hurled from the window and broke his back on the potting sheds below; Thayer got shot. His mother, distraught, was sedated with Marta’s herbs and installed in the bed in the Low sisters’ attic.
The Thunderers came and went in the skies, and perched on the washing-lines shifting uneasily. They no longer stole or menaced. They called out plaintively. They seemed unsure what to become.
All this was related to Arjun and Brace-Bel in whispers, by Mrs. Rawley, through the cracks in the hidden door to the secret room behind the barrels in the cellar of Rawley’s public house. She came down to share the gossip every evening. Otherwise they were alone.
Of course Arjun had tried to flee—to open a door into some safer part of the city. He’d led Ruth and Marta and Brace-Bel and Rawley and Zeigler out into the streets, saying, Come with me. No one has to stay here for this. Then he’d spent an hour blundering down alleys and shoving at locked doors. His hearing—his hearing was still a mess. The buzz and drone had subsided a little, but now he heard everything as if from a great distance, through a thick wall. All music sounded like the same dull tones—he was trapped. He rapped at windows and yanked at rattling wire fences and kicked on corrugated iron walls; nothing. It became humiliating. Eventually Marta said, “We need to hide you. Rawley’s place, Ruth, what do you think?”
So Rawley’s place it was, then. A tiny and increasingly unpleasant bolt-hole that some previous owner had apparently once used for hiding contraband, and that Rawley used for hiding ghosts.
Rawley came in the afternoon, slid the door back, shoved in a tray of food. “You stay there, you two, another night. This new Inspector’s a bastard. He’s not going anywhere yet.”
Arjun, shamefaced, handed over the waste-bucket. She took it without embarrassment.
He said, “Where are Ivy and the Beast?”
“Don’t know. Clever girl, that one. She’s found a nicer hiding place than this, I bet. Hah! We do our best.”
“Is Ruth still safe?”
“They questioned her again. She’s all right. Bit shaken.”
“Does she have a message for me?”
Rawley shook her head. “You get some sleep, now. I have an appointment. I’ll be back soon.” She slid the door closed again.
Ruth
In the evening Ruth slipped away from the shop, and away from Carnyx Street. The patrols were starting to get lazy—they didn’t notice her. She cut across gardens to avoid the checkpoints. It began to rain lightly, and she hunched into herself. She slipped past the stables, past factories, through a tangle of little houses, down by the edge of a black and freezing canal, and across a little waste of muddy ground to the half-open door of an old concrete slate-roofed building.
The windows were broken, and the door was rotten. There were soft lights behind it. Cold water dripped and gurgled. A rusted sign read patagan sewer & piping—pumping station 300.
She knocked on the door. Voices inside went silent.
“It’s me. I’ve brought food.”
Inside, amid rusting machinery, in the light of stolen gas lanterns, Ruth and the Beast held court.
They sat on half-rotten furniture. Dead valves and pumps loomed behind them. Ruth wore black. The Beast wore an old coat, and nothing much underneath except bandages. Its wounds were still raw and seeping. Its eyes were bright.
A half-dozen people sat around them on the floor. The Beast was telling them a story, something unpleasant about a Hotel and various scheming madmen.
Ivy waved Ruth over. “Good. Here. Did you bring paper and ink?”
“Yes. That, too, Ivy.”
Ivy had scattered maps and calculations all over her hiding place, her notes of the Beast’s mad stories and prophecies.
“There aren’t as many patrols today. You can come home soon.”
“Don’t be silly, Ruth.”
Someone in the Beast’s audience hissed at Ruth to be quiet.
For days now, people from Carnyx Street had been slipping down to the ruined Station, by ones and twos, under cover of darkness. They came to see the Beast, to listen to its stories. They came to hear about the Mountain. Ruth recognized two of the Black Masks. She recognized Mrs. Rawley, sitting on an old box in the corner.
“Mrs. Rawley? What are you doing here?”
Rawley shrugged. “I’m an old woman, Ruth. There’s nothing left for me down here.”
Ivy’s hiding place was becoming an open secret. It was only a matter of time before someone gave it up to the Know-Nothings. But Ivy didn’t seem to care about the Know-Nothings anymore. Her attention was fixed on the Mountain.
“Marta says …”
“Marta can come herself if she wants to talk. “
Ivy dipped her pen and began scratching again—numbers, maps, geometry. Designs like the gears of a great machine.
“Don’t go, Ivy. You won’t come back.”
“I certainly hope not.”
The Beast was lying with gusto about mad Gods called Builders, who hated humanity and made the city as a cage. Its audience shuffled closer. Ruth noticed Zeigler among them, listening with a little smirk of fascination.
Ruth whispered, “You’re not going to take these people with you, are you, Ivy? They’re not like you.”
“They might be useful.”
“I forgot what you were like, Ivy.”
Ivy kept writing. “You fooled yourself, then, Ruth. You wanted to believe we were happy once, I expect. That was always important to you.”
“You’re like him.”
“We’ll see about that, won’t we?”
The Beast stood and clapped its bandaged hands. “And that is the truth of the Mountain.” It looked Ivy’s way. “Are we done here? Is the debt paid?”
Ivy nodded. “I have all I need.”
“Enjoy the Mountain, then. Give my regards to you-know-who. Oh won’t he be surprised to see you? Oh this will hurt him. It almost makes me want to go with you. But I have a life to lead. At long last, I have a life to lead. I think I shall find a mate …”
The Beast walked toward the door, talking over its shoulder.
“Aren’t you coming? Sir?” Rawley called after it. “Aren’t you coming with us? You know what it all means.”
“All you need to know, old woman, is that you will die on the Mountain. The old man’s defenses will tear you apart and hollow you out. You will get as far as the gates of his house and a shadow will descend from black skies and you will not see it coming. I expect it will hurt. Good-bye.”
Then the Beast was gone.
Ruth leaned forward, putting h
er hand on Ivy’s papers, stopping her pen. “Don’t go.”
Ivy forced a smile. “I’m not ready yet anyway. Come back tomorrow. We can talk then.”
Arjun
They had Brace-Bel’s crystal for light. It filled the bolt-hole with a wavering honey-colored glow. Brace-Bel, cross-legged, held the stick in the crook of his elbow, clutching paper and pen in both shaking hands, scribbling endlessly. Meanwhile Arjun sat in the shadows and turned over his memories.
Pandora Street? That meant nothing to him. How had he approached the Mountain before? Perhaps there were as many routes to the Mountain as there were facets to the city.
Brace-Bel shifted and adjusted the stick. The light brightened a little, and darkened again.
Shay, the Beast had said. The young one, not the old—as if there were two of him. And the Beast spoke of Shay as if he were not only the Beast’s maker, but also the ruler of the Mountain. Brace-Bel had believed that Shay wanted him to assault the Mountain. And then again when Arjun met the man—as Shay, and then again as Lemuel—he’d been the ruler of nothing, only a wanderer, a schemer, a crook, a snake-oil salesman …
Who ruled the Mountain? What was it? What did Shay have to do with the Mountain, what did the Mountain have to do with his God, with the city, with Ivy and the Beast, with Ruth, whose dreams, like his own, were simple and innocent, who did not deserve to be caught in this web of madness and cunning and cruelty …
He had no head for puzzles and paradox. He craved simplicity, and the peace of music and worship. It made him angry—the city was perversely constructed. He wallowed in self-pity for a while, he worried about what might be happening up above to Ruth, he banged his head against the impossibility of the Mountain, and he was full of self-pity again, and again, until suddenly Brace-Bel interrupted.
“My musical friend! Give me a word for the continuance of a theme in restricted circumstances. Something that speaks of resilience, persistence, if you please.”