by Felix Gilman
Had Ivy—had Ruth, too, perhaps, and the Beast—had they gone onto the Mountain? Had they caused this, somehow—had they provoked the Mountain into reaction? Or, worse, were these airships under Ivy’s command, or the Beast’s? Were they capable of this?
Was this his fault?
But under the shock and the sick crawling beginnings of terror and guilt there was a part of him that was excited. If the Mountain had reached out to touch the city then it was wounded. No longer aloof, unattainable. They’d opened a pass in its borders. Through every change in the city, every aching turn of its gears, he came a little closer to its heart.
In the morning Arjun met a group of women who lived in what was left of a rope factory. They came out of their hiding places as he passed to tell him to move along, fuck off, their husbands were coming back soon and they’d kill him if they caught him. They said, whether you’re Night Watch or Lamplighters you can fuck off either way. When he asked them who sent the airships, they decided he was a harmless fool, took pity on him, shared some water with him, and a tin of pink unpleasant meat paste.
“The Mountain,” they said. “The airships come from the Mountain. Where have you been all this time?”
“Why?”
“Why? Who knows. There’s a War on. It finally came.”
“Who rules the Mountain?”
They shrugged. He asked them if they knew the name Shay, and they shrugged again. They didn’t know much.
He asked them what the South Bara Ruined Zone was. They said, “Is that what they’re calling us now?” He asked them about the Reclamation Project and they laughed bitterly. They hadn’t been outside their factory much in the last few weeks.
They admitted that their husbands were mostly dead. A bomb had hit the shed where the men worked. The survivors had joined up with the Know-Nothings to go off to the Front. Where were they now? None of the women knew.
He was too full of questions—where to begin?
He ate gratefully. They hovered over him, watching him closely. “I have no news of the outside world,” he admitted. “Perhaps I was hurt in the fighting,” he lied. “I have lost much of my memory.”
He asked them how long the War had been going on. They looked at each other; about three, four months since the airships first came? It was hard to keep track of time—now that the Combines were gone, and the police, and there were no shifts, no whistles and bells, no orders.
Who was winning? They didn’t know.
How had they survived? They glanced at each other, smiled, and said, “Our God keeps us safe.”
“Your God?”
They looked at him pityingly.
“The Gods have returned?” Another transformation in the city! “Do you mean … Have you seen this God?”
“What do you think? Do you think we’ve gone mad?” If he thought they were just a bunch of scared women going mad in the ruins, they said, he had another think coming: they were an Order. They’d seen God, walking down the streets on feet of fire, head wreathed in flames, body pouring smoke like a fabulous engine. Right in the street out the back of the factory! (Where previously there had been a rubbish heap.) The rope factory ruins were His temple.
They got excited, talking about it. They were unwashed and dirty-faced and hungry. Some of them had burns on their raw and bony hands; had they tried to touch their new God?
There were other Gods in the city now, they said, but He was the best. Some of them were just lights. Some were just shadows. A lot of them were just noises. He was Fire—who better to keep them safe from bombs? He was theirs.
The women made Arjun nervous. They had a feverish zeal. They were new to the business of Gods.
“You can stay awhile,” they said. “Sometimes He comes at night.”
“I’m sure it’s a wonderful God. It sounds magnificent. I congratulate you on your good fortune. But I have to move on. I’ve wasted too much time already. I had …” He realized that he had nowhere to go. Another path to the Mountain had failed. Did he have the strength to start again? “I had friends here, before the War,” he said. “In a place called Carnyx Street. Do you know it?”
The women looked at each other, unsure. One of the older ones said, “In Fosdyke, right? Patagan and Holcroft used to own things up there—before the War.”
“Yes!” He leaned forward, eager, relieved. Until then, he realized, he’d not been entirely sure he was in the same city as the one where he’d met Ruth, and Brace-Bel, and Ivy, and the Beast; but if there was a Carynx Street here, and a Holcroft and the rest, then this was still the same place; only time had passed. What had happened?
What if Ruth was dead?
“How do I get there from here? North or south? I have to find them.”
They told him, north—northeast. He thanked them and moved on.
Five minutes and a few ruined blocks away from the rope factory, he noticed three of the younger women following him. He stopped to let them catch up.
“You said there was a Reclamation Project, yeah?”
“Yes. So the banner said.”
“Are there jobs there? Food? They’re rebuilding?”
“I suppose so.” He pointed the way. They walked together for a few blocks, then the women turned left and he turned right. They seemed strangely optimistic. They said rebuilding and reclamation like the names of Gods. At the crossroads they wished him good luck.
He wasn’t sure what to feel. The women had adapted to life after the War, but the ruins were still new to him—at every street there was a new scene of devastation, and it left him numb and shocked.
At least now he had a goal: to find the Low sisters. If they were still in the city to be found. If they weren’t dead, or on the Mountain, which amounted to much the same thing. Retrace his steps—Fosdyke, the Low sisters, the Beast, the Mountain, his God. Begin again.
The Low sisters! He imagined them dying in a hundred ways. Bombs; fire; falling masonry; looters; madmen. He got his hopes up and cautiously depressed them again. He imagined himself standing over Ruth’s body and being unable to say any suitable words. His nerves froze and he found it hard to keep walking, so he hummed that fragment of the Music that was all he had of his God, and soon enough his spirits lifted. In a little while he found himself, rather embarrassingly, daydreaming how he would find Ruth at the moment of some peril and heroically save her.
Far behind him there was a distant glare—the God of the rope factory? It flickered and burned and faded.
Arjun walked north, through the South Bara Ruined Zone.
There were whole streets where the bombers had passed over harmlessly, but every building was empty anyway. There were bare blasted fields of broken brick and cratered earth. A few fortunate streets remained intact and inhabited and even well lit. They looked well guarded—he avoided them.
All afternoon he passed through a district of warehouses and storehouses in which every door had been smashed open, every crate and box looted. He stumbled over the rubble of old riots. There’d been fighting, on a petty scale—squabbles between looters and security guards—and there were still uncollected bodies, half rotted in the doorways, drooping out of broken windows.
He passed a row of grey gasometers, all deflated, their domes close to the ground like mushrooms, their skeletal frames empty. He found them strangely upsetting.
There was a warehouse on 117th Street. It was painted on one wall, in huge red letters, carlyle syndicated NO. twelve. The other wall had been scythed clean away by bombs. When it started to rain Arjun sheltered in the building’s open guts. There he found a case of tinned beef that looters had apparently missed, and a jagged knife of broken piping to open the tins with. The meat was tasteless but not rotten, and the discovery delighted him. The tins were small enough to fit in a pocket; he took four. A fifth was dented, so he threw it away.
When he passed a family going south, he gave away a tin in exchange for information. There were four of them—two children, grubby and ginger-haired.
The mother held the children nervously while the father spoke. A slight man, freckled, balding, in a dirty white shirt. He said, “This is the South Bara Ruined Zone.”
“I know.”
“Where are you going?”
“Fosdyke,” Arjun said. “Carnyx Street. I have friends there.”
“Don’t know how things are in Fosdyke. We came from Fleet Wark.”
“Fosdyke might be intact?”
The man shrugged. “Might be, might not be. Bara, here, you’ve seen what happened here. Fleet Wark got off pretty light. It’s a big city. Some places the airships pass over. Some places got fucked. You got an opener for this?”
They levered the tin open with Arjun’s bit of sharp pipe, and the man divided the food among his family.
Arjun asked, “Where are you going?”
“South. They say south of Bara there’s a district called Anchor, where they’ve got some local boss, they’ve set things up, got some of the engines running again, they’re Reclaiming things. Fleet Wark—things are falling apart in Fleet Wark.”
“But you said the bombers passed over?”
The man shook his head. “Where’ve you been? What’s wrong with you?”
“I was injured in the fighting, and my memory …”
The man put a hand on Arjun’s shoulder. “Don’t worry, mate. No one cares if you’re a ghost now or what you are or where you’re from. The worst happened already. We’re all ghosts now, that’s what people say. I’m a fucking deserter, so who cares what you are?”
One of the children started crying.
The man—his name was Fallon—told a long confusing story about the end of the world and life after the War. The child kept crying, and soon the other one started up, too, so Fallon and Arjun walked a little way away, and sat on a broken wall, and Arjun tried his best to follow Fallon’s account.
The War! It was too large and terrible to imagine.
One night, six months ago, there had been a terrible lightning storm over the Mountain. Thunder and driving rain had woken everyone for a hundred miles. Windows shattered, laundry whipped loose, cellars flooded. The next night, and for the rest of the week, it happened again. If you asked the foremen or the Know-Nothings what was happening you got a clip round the ear: the official story was that there were no storms. But in the night the Know-Nothings could be seen massing at their Chapterhouses and drilling in the backyards and readying as if for War …
“Strangest thing,” Fallon said. “Strangest thing—you don’t have a cigarette, do you? No?—was that sometimes it looked like it wasn’t really lightning. It looked like it was the Mountain shaking, sort of flickering, like a candle—and there was this light escaping. Like a broken furnace with the door banging open. Don’t tell the wife I said that, she’ll say it’s mad.”
One night the storms stopped. The Mountain sat there, still and dark. One week later the airships came.
At first they came every night, and they reduced whole districts to rubble. Now they came only occasionally, and their bombing was haphazard, casual, desultory. It seemed they’d made their point, they’d satisfied whatever urge for blood had driven them.
“What if,” Fallon had said. “What if the storms were the folk on the Mountain fighting—what if they’re only people, too, like us, they have their own Combines and things at each other’s throats, and there was a fight, and whoever won decided it was time to get rid of us down here? Change of policy sort ofthing.”
Arjun had shrugged. “Perhaps.”
“It couldn’t be anything we did.”
“Perhaps not.”
In the first two weeks Holcroft and Patagan and Carlyle and Burgess and Frick and all the other Combines collapsed. It was unthinkable, but they simply ceased to exist. They were only ever paperwork, a shared delusion. The airships destroyed their offices, broke their supply chains, scared the workers away from what was left of the factories. “One good smack and they burst like balloons,” Fallon said. “There never was anything in ‘em but hot air.”
And it wasn’t just the physical shock of the bombers: the Combines devoured themselves from the inside. In the last days there were conflicting and nonsensical orders, shutdowns and lockouts, supply chains tangled, warehouses thrown open and others burned down, as if the owners had gone insane, as if some malign influence at the top of the chain of command were determined to drive the great corporate organisms mad. When no one took them seriously anymore they ceased to exist.
“Now instead we’ve got Gods,” Fallon said. “Like in the legends, like in the old days. You, in the city you’re from, were there Gods?”
“There were.”
“How did you not go fucking mad?”
“Hah. I’m not the best person to ask about that.”
At the end of the first week the Know-Nothings went to war. “I always used to hate them,” Fallon said. “But they did good back then. We didn’t know, you know—we didn’t know which side they’d be on. Us or the Mountain. We weren’t sure. But they did their best. It didn’t do any fucking good, mind you.”
Four hundred Leaguers met at the Omnibus Terminal in Fleet Wark North. Fallon had heard that another four hundred met at the Terminal in Rookgate. If their wives and kids were still alive they said good-bye to them there. They carried rifles and packs and wore grey-black camouflage, from emergency stores. They packed themselves on the back of buses and whipped the horses north.
“I know they were seen as far north as Kellham,” Fallon said. “Still going strong, singing a song. The streets were all fucked up there by bombs so they had to march. North. Never came back. The airships kept coming.”
“It’s always dangerous to approach the Mountain without knowing the path.”
Fallon looked at Arjun suspiciously. “There are legends of the Mountain everywhere,” Arjun said.
“Ah.” Fallon sighed. “It’s a big place, the city, isn’t it? I never spoke to one of you before. I never dared. I’m not brave—I’m a bloody deserter. We sent more men, you know. From all over. You don’t realize how big the city is until … You live in your own little parish with your own chapter or your own street or factory or whatever, you know, and you do your job, and you don’t know how much of a city there is out there, you don’t know what forces the men running it can bring to bear, when they get all the gears up and running. They gathered another four hundred men in the Seventeenth, I heard, and they lost them, too. And three hundred at Quay Street. They ran out of regular Leaguers, so they sent the Junior Auxiliary, and the Veterans’ Lodgers. They sent the cripples and the mental defectives. They recruited regular people, let them have guns—I mean by the third week all the old differences had broken down, Know-Nothing, civilian, who cares? All in this together, right? Like those old posters. I never went—wife and kids, you know? Sent ‘em up and they never came back. Hundreds. Thousands. They all went up by different routes but it doesn’t look like anyone ever found a safe one. By the end they weren’t sending up the big forces, they were just taking tiny little stabs at the Mountain: twenty men, ten men, five men, one man. Nothing.”
Fallon’s eyes were distant, haunted; he stared vaguely north. The Mountain was hidden behind tall buildings.
“I read a book once,” Fallon went on. “About all the battles in the bad old days of kings and princes and dukes and all that. Against the law but I found it and I read it anyway. In the old days they drew lines in the city and said, this is mine and this is yours, and sometimes they sent soldiers. There was a line where the soldiers fought. A Front, they called it; you could say, these streets, this park, here on the map, this is the Front. But not this time: there was no Front. Just shadows.”
“I’m sorry,” Arjun said. It was too much to take in; it was like reading a historical account of some long-forgotten war. Was it his responsibility—had he somehow provoked the Mountain to this? It was impossible to imagine. “Is anything left?”
Fallon shrugged. “Like I said. Fleet Wark’s not d
one badly for itself. Bara got fucked, but south of Bara, in Anchor, they say they’ve got order, water, power, they’re Reclaiming things. That’s where the survivors are going. All packing together, leaving these Zones empty. Don’t know what happened to Fosdyke. The Combines are gone, and the Know-Nothings, but there are all these new things now. New ways of running things. Like the cults—the temples— the Orders and things. With all these new Gods, there’s a whole lot of churches. I don’t like them much myself, any of them. In Fleet Wark there’s a man called Berkman, calls himself the Mayor now, used to be an executive for Patagan—he runs Fleet Wark. I’ve heard in some places there’s Workers’ Councils, or little people like us running things—committees and things. I don’t trust them, frankly—I don’t trust people like me to run anything. The whole city’s a bloody mess. Territories.”
Fallon laughed. “You know what they do—here in the Ruined Zone it’s all empty now, but if you go north you’ll see—they cut up old bedsheets and they make flags. Like in the old books, fucking flags, hung over every street. Green or red or blue. What’s that, painted on it, looks like a deformed cat? Right? You’re in Church of the Dog territory now, better say your prayers. Look, someone’s painted a green line on the road, well, you’re on the Seventy-seventh Street Committee’s turf, better not make trouble. Better pay your tolls, or your taxes. Who runs anything? Who bloody knows. None of it makes sense anymore.”
Fallon scratched his nose. His pale skin flushed. “Well, you know. Things are weird, now.”
“Why did you leave Fleet Wark, if Fleet Wark’s still intact?”
“The Hollows,” Fallon said. His voice dropped, chilled.
“The Hollows?”
“You don’t know that either? After the airships—at night— there’s still fighting, and I’m bloody sick of it. The Hollows …”
Fallon’s wife called out to him. “It’s getting dark. The kids are hungry. Get a move on.”
Fallon got stiffly to his feet. “Thanks, ghost. Steer clear of Fleet Wark, that’s where the fighting is. Hope the Hollows aren’t attacking Fosdyke. Go back to your own city, if you can. I’m moving on.”