Gears of the City

by Felix Gilman

  Arjun put a hand on the man’s skinny arm. “Wait,” he said. “I may be able to …” His voice trailed off. He wasn’t sure how to explain without saying too much. “I can take you somewhere far away from this. Your children …”

  A look of mingled hope and fear and disgust passed over Fallon’s face. He shook his head. “Ghost tricks? Your city? No thanks. We’ll stay in ours. Things are bad enough as they are. Keep whatever tricks you’ve got to yourself, all right?”

  He must have seen the look of hurt and confusion and rising guilt on Arjun’s face, because he softened, put a hand on Arjun’s shoulder, and said, “Anyway—down south, they’re Reclaiming. That’s work worth doing.”

  Later, Arjun sat on the edge of a hill, chewing dry salty meat, wishing for water, watching night fall over the city.

  No airships. No bombs. Not tonight. All the vast expanse below was dark, and he was alone on the hill.

  … no; it wasn’t all dark. There were occasional glimmers of fires. Somewhere in the ruins behind him, Fallon and his family must have been camping—which one was theirs? There were lights in the distance, still, that gentle nebulous haze on the horizon that the city always made; perhaps the bombers had not yet reached out that far.

  And in the ruins below, there were distant trails of ghostly light that crept through the darkness of the city. To the southwest something progressed through the streets that was sometimes blood-red and sometimes the color of orange peels, and sometimes faded to gold. To the southeast something drifted over an open moor that was the deep blue or green of undersea life, and moved with indifferent undersea grace. Lights in the darkness! A pattern of slow sacral processions. It seemed the lights might interweave but they never did; they remained aloof from each other.

  They must have been very distant. From the side of the hill, Arjun could not make out their details. If they were Gods, as he suspected, they would have certain accidents and incidents; they would be symbols of something or other. The city would shift and change with their passing. Perhaps flowers would grow from the rubble. Perhaps even the weeds would die. There would probably be a crowd following after them in the dark, chanting or clanging bells or whipping their bloody backs or whimpering in fear, dreading the presence but unable to turn their backs on it, and at last scurrying closer to touch it and be driven mad.

  If the Gods had returned they’d have brought all that back with them. Arjun remembered it well. But from the hillside all he could see was the distant crawling glow, and maybe he misunderstood what it signified.

  In the morning he began to try to open doors into the City Beyond, hoping to cut short the trek back to Carnyx Street—and hoping to remind himself that there was still a city of infinite life and variety beyond those ruins.

  A blackbird settled on a broken tree and sang, and there was a door in the mouth of the alley beside it.

  The wind made chimes out of a broken fire escape, and there was a door in the muddy oozing crater in the street below.

  But neither opened anywhere outside the confines of the city in which he stood, the ruins in the shadow of the Mountain, after the War. They spanned distance, but not time. He could feel it.

  It was as if there was some dull obstacle in his path—a wall of grey muffling shadows. As if somehow every door out of the city had been locked. As if the gears were jammed. As if some unimaginable mechanism had shifted beneath this aspect of the city and wrenched it out of alignment with the brighter possibilities beyond. What St. Loup had said had been true: there was no way back.

  Had the Mountain done this?

  Among the handful of madmen and seers and obsessives and paranoids who shared Arjun’s gift, who’d learned how to pass Beyond, there were a thousand rumors about the Mountain. They called it a machine, a weapon, a great sorcery discarded by the city’s makers … Could the Mountain do this?

  It was irrelevant, for now. He was far from the Mountain, and there was nothing he could do about it. Meanwhile there was no avoiding the stark fact of the world around him. The City Beyond was out of his reach again. The City-to-Hand would have to be reckoned with.

  He found a door in the ruins of someone’s home, where the broken pipes whistled and sang. It was a valuable shortcut; it took him out of the silence and devastation of the South Bara Ruined Zone, and a couple of days’ walk north. He stumbled out into the heart of a busy drunken market crowd, at evening, under torches, and black and scarlet flags, and the din of a half-dozen competing buskers. For a moment he thought he was elsewhere—but then he looked around, and he saw that on the wall behind him there were old Know-Nothing posters, be vigilant! and we’re all in this together. And above him, above the rooftops where riflemen stood on watch for airships, there was the Mountain.

  He was in a place called Clay. (“I’m looking for work,” he told people. “I’m a refugee from the Ruined Zone.”) Before the war Clay had been dominated by the Burgess Ironworks. Now the Ironworks were in the hands of deserters from the Know-Nothings, and a committee of the workers, and former members of the Black Masks; and this makeshift Court was ruled by a makeshift king, a recently promoted stable boy, a big lad in a heavy iron crown. The machines pumped out crudely mass-produced swords and spears, now. Clay was at war with the cultists of the Horned Man, who held the next district over, in Salisbury. At stake were the breweries in the disputed border zone. And in the northwest and the east there were rumors of aggressors called Hollows …

  The crowd cheered and drank and shouted with the mad energy of people who were making the world new. A huge bare-chested man with a blacksmith’s build and burn marks all over his back held Arjun’s shoulder and said, “You want work? You think you can handle a weapon? Swords, like in the old stories—that’s what it’s come to.” He seemed happy enough at the prospect. “Beats working in a fucking factory!” He slapped Arjun on the shoulder hard enough nearly to knock him over, and laughed. “You want to join up?”

  “I’ll certainly think about it,” Arjun said. And later, when no one was looking, he ran. He went north through Salisbury by night, where the cultists of the Horned Man banged a wild echoing rhythm on the broken-down machines of what used to be motorcar factories. In the morning he crossed the cratered wasteland that was the Walbrook Ruined Zone—no sign of Reclamation there yet, only looters, bandits, refugees. In the evening he stood on a hill and looked down over Fosdyke.

  Fosdyke’s factories were silent. The buildings, however, were largely intact—though here and there he saw a gap in the skyline, a street wiped from the map. Away across the uneven rooftops Arjun recognized the Fosdyke Museum of History and Natural Wonders. Still standing! The angelic statue that stood atop its dome caught the red light of fires in the Square below, and turned demonic. When Arjun first saw it he thought for a moment it might be a God. Beyond it he could make out the roof of the Know-Nothings’ Chapterhouse, which was irregularly shaped, as if a bomb had ruined its upper floors. Shadowy things like flags or ravens fluttered on its rooftop, and made him uneasy.

  The streets were quiet, but there were lights in the windows, and in places there were dark clouds of chimney smoke. The bombers had shaken Fosdyke but not destroyed it. Life of some kind went on.

  Where was Carnyx Street? What sort of condition was it in? Arjun couldn’t quite make it out. He couldn’t exactly remember where it was. Had the streets changed—had the bombs rearranged them—or were his memories uncertain again? He decided to make for the Museum, and retrace his steps from there back to Carnyx Street.

  No one challenged him. He slipped through the shadows of unlit streets. He was aware of being watched from the windows. No flags, no banners, no signs—there were no marks of territory. Who controlled Fosdyke, now that the Combines were gone? What kind of place was it now?

  He passed an empty fenced lot behind a dark factory, and set two dogs behind the fence to barking madly. He walked briskly away before the noise attracted attention. Had he caught a glimpse of vegetable gardens? The sparse begin
nings of farmland?

  In the quiet red-brick streets old men sat out on the porch as the light died. From the door of what looked like a warehouse there was light, and laughter. A fragile illusion of normality—if not for the silence of the factories, Fosdyke might have seemed unchanged by the War. If not for the fires in the Square.

  Once Arjun stepped onto Holcroft Square, he could see that it had in fact been hit by the bombs. The Museum had lost its west wing, and something had taken a bite out of the side of the dome, leaving the angel’s position precarious. There was a crater in the middle of the Square, half flooded with dark rainwater that flickered red in the light of the bonfires that were stacked high around the edge of the Square and on the steps of the Museum. High on the steps there was a kind of statue—made out of wood and lead pipes and bedsheets—of an immense bird. Beside it was another statue, of an equally immense lizard. Two dozen people stood or kneeled before the great idols.

  Arjun sighed. It was all beginning again. In ten years, if the city survived the airships, there’d be temples everywhere. The usual cacophony.

  From the end of Holcroft Square opposite the steps was the alley past the ruined Chapterhouse, and a left turn at the end of that would put him on the route back to Carnyx Street, and then, and then …

  He hadn’t taken two steps down that alley when four armed men stepped out of the shadows around him, and a firm hand grabbed his shoulder. An ugly face shoved into his demanded, “How many times have we told you idiots about those fires?”

  He tried to remain calm. “I’m not with the people in the Square. I’m lost. I came here out of the Ruined Zones looking for work …”

  The man holding him wasn’t listening. He was looking closely at Arjun’s face, as if he recognized him.

  Arjun’s heart sank. What if these men were Know-Nothings, what if they recognized him from the incident at the Square? He prepared himself to twist and run.

  The man turned Arjun’s wrist to get a closer look at his hand— his maimed and marked hand. The other three stared at it, too. Apparently the wound had some significance for them. Arjun consulted his memories; what cults in the city attached significance to wounded hands, missing fingers? Too many, too many. The Order of the Plough and the Worm. The Scriveners of Tagore. The Maimed Servants of Saint …

  “Hey, you. Do you know a man called Maury?”

  “No.” He said it too quickly, too firmly—the man clearly didn’t believe him.

  “He said, a dark little bugger, missing fingers. Arroon, right? That your name? Something like that?”

  “No. You have the wrong man.”

  “Do we? Do we?”

  They whispered among themselves. He heard expressions of surprise and disbelief. Then they reached a decision.

  “We’re the Night Watch. You’re coming with us. The Inspector’s been fucking dreaming of getting his hands on you.”

  The Blast-The Closed Circle-

  The Committee for the Emergency-

  King of This City-The Jealousy of

  Shadows-A Monster Story

  Ruth

  Having been left behind, again, Ruth had been there to see the first bombs fall. Even now, months later, she still woke sometimes and thought: had that really happened? The blast. The shaking of the earth, the breaking of windows and mirrors. The noise, the fire, energies unleashed into the city that seemed creative and destructive at once. She had pulled out her coat and run out into the streets to see what had happened, maybe to see if there was anything she could do to help. The searchlights had drifted over her head, and for a moment the city around her was bright, and frozen, stark white and beautiful. Then the bombers passed over. As it turned out there wasn’t anything she could do.

  What had happened? The south end of Ezra Street was in ruins. How many dead? Too many. The sewage treatment plant on Forty-ninth was gone, too. Rumors flew in the night: it had been worse to the south, in Walbrook. The airships had come from the Mountain. The War had finally begun.

  The Know-Nothings formed fire-fighting teams as if they’d been drilled for this, as if they’d always half expected it. They told her, “Move along, Miss Low, move along—we’ve got this under control.” They seemed almost relieved; after the humiliation of the incident at the Museum, they were glad to throw themselves into work. They were glad the War had finally come. Confident and competent—Ruth had never seen them that way.

  No one went to work the next day. Men stood out in the streets in the afternoon sun, as lost and confused as lifers released from prison. They scanned the skies for bombers. They swore and cursed the Mountain. They got drunk. Their wives waited nervously indoors for them to come home reeling and fall into bed. In the evening there was music and dancing in the streets, and a great mad joy—the world had changed, at last. In the night the bombers drifted over again and cratered the Square out front of the Museum, and wiped out the factories all along the Walbrook border. John Beecher, from the house on No. 47 Carnyx Street, hungover, hysterical, killed himself and his wife and his three children, and left a note saying: the end’s come for us all. He wasn’t the only one.

  Ruth didn’t know what to think. It was unreal. She no longer belonged here. She waited skeptically for the next revelation as if she was watching a stage magician’s show.

  “The cellar,” Marta said. “The Dad’s cellar. We need shelter.” So Ruth and Marta spent the day clearing out the old junk down there—the radios, the maps, the exotic taxidermied birds and street vermin. Everything was covered in a thick layer of dust. Unusual experimental molds still grew down there, in the cracks in the walls. Painful memories—it was always painful handling the Dad’s stuff. The dust recorded the years of his absence. These were the things he’d abandoned, and now they were broken. “About time we got rid of this shit,” Marta said.

  But there were happy memories, too—under the pipes in the south corner there were the Dad’s old charts and maps and models of trains and trams and tracks. Ruth had been maybe nine years old when he’d turned his attention to the trains. He’d built the tracks and drawn up the charts to puzzle out the mystery of the inputs and outputs of the city’s factories, to determine what kind of business the city did with the Mountain. Of course, Ruth hadn’t understood much of what he was doing; but he was jolly about it, as he sometimes was when he was on the edge of a breakthrough. He laughed and encouraged the girls to admire the little trains, which he made himself, and to come with him on weekends to spy across wire fences and weed-strewn lots at the hidden railway sidings. An adventure! Ruth remembered how they’d once run away hand-in-hand from the station guards …

  And the clocks, heaped in the corner! Ruth remembered how the Dad’s fascination with the times of trains and trams had given way quite naturally to a fascination with time itself. He’d scavenged quite a collection of old timepieces, which Ivy proved to have a talent for repairing. The cellar ticked and hummed and frequently buzzed, rang, or chimed. He would sneak around at night, avoiding the Know-Nothings, to nail up his clocks in odd places, at either end of Carnyx Street, and then Fosdyke, and then farther afield; and he checked them nightly and came back to the cellar and made notes of anomalies. That lasted a few months; at its height, Marta had to remind him to eat. When he worked on the clocks he’d been mean and cramped, complaining that the girls distracted him. Time was a burden to him.

  It felt good to clear out the cellar. It was good to sweat, and ache, and work. It was good to be done with the ghosts of the past; it was a new world, now.

  They kept the old stills, and the dusty bottles of home-brew. That night they welcomed their neighbors into the cellar, and they drank together while the bombers went over. In the morning, when they emerged, Mrs. Rawley’s vacant house was reduced to shattered bricks and timbers, and the street was grey with ash and cinders.

  No one went to work, and the factories were silent. The Combines that had dominated everyone’s lives for as long as anyone could remember suddenly seemed irrelevant.
>
  While they huddled in the cellar, Marta said to her neighbors: “This isn’t going to be over anytime soon. We need to fend for ourselves. We need to start stocking up food.”

  Thirty men and women marched on the Holcroft Packing & Bottling Plant on R Street, Ruth and Marta in the lead, Marta carrying a list of demands, and a petition demanding that in light of the crisis, Holcroft recognize the legitimate necessities of the public and release sufficient food from stores to … Ruth expected a tense scene; she was half ready for violence. As it turned out, there was only one guard left at the Plant, and he’d received no orders for days. Marta shrugged: “How are we going to do this, then?” The guard’s face broke into a grin and he unlocked all the doors for them. They left with wheelbarrows full of flour, rice, tinned and dried meat. The guard was so relieved to be told what to do that he followed them home.

  The Museum had been cut in half, its west side smashed open. Its cellars were exposed to the sky, then flooded. No magic left there. Those childhood dreams were erased all at once. Half of the places where Ruth and Marta and Ivy had played were gone. As children they’d reinvented those streets, renamed them, made them fabulous. Now they were broken, reconfigured, and the new map held no meaning for her.

  Ruth could have just walked away and kept walking. Only Marta kept her anchored there.

  Meanwhile the Know-Nothings drilled with rifle and pack in the ruins of Holcroft Square. They’d gotten new uniforms from stores—black and grey, blotched for camouflage. They looked very serious and dangerous.

  They looked happy. Suddenly they were needed; suddenly everyone loved them.

  When some one hundred of them gathered at the Terminal to pack onto the omnibuses and go north, to strike back at the Mountain, even Ruth joined the cheering crowds. She watched them go, trailing off up the hill, the bus rattling and bouncing on the cobbles, the horses straining, and she thought how young the soldiers looked, how handsome.