Gears of the City

by Felix Gilman

  One of St. Loup’s men placed a glass box on the ground and flipped a switch. The box crackled then poured out a cold white light—like the light of the airships. It filled the quarry with a chessboard of shadows, it picked out every line on St. Loup’s face, it banished all mystery from the night.

  “I came prepared,” St. Loup said. “After all, there’s no way back. Most of this stuff may be junk but you never know. By the way, Father Turnbull’s dead. I gouged out his eye and slit his throat with my very own hands, and wouldn’t it be hilarious if he wakes in the next world at the feet of his God? So I’m in the market for a sidekick if you’re interested, Arjun. Ruth, I don’t know what I’m going to do with you, but I’m sure I can think of something. Beast!” He raised his voice. “Come out! I have questions!”

  The Beast didn’t put up much of a fight. Somehow it made Ruth sad to see it.

  The tent shifted, its fabric seeming to swell, and there was a sound of slithering—heavy breathing—the scrape of claws and the dragging of a great tail—and St. Loup said, very loudly, “Tut tut.” His men hefted their icons and talismans. The crystal on the cane pulsed. The mysterious box of valves and dials emitted a low warning throb. Three rifles were cocked.

  The noises from within the tent subsided.

  A few moments later the Beast emerged.

  It came sheepishly out of the tent and into the light. It had some new and some old scratches and bruises, hair wild and sweaty, clutching a red silk sheet around its body. A half-naked middle-aged man, under arrest. St. Loup’s men brandished their strange weapons and the Beast cringed. With a nervous grin it said, “Who are you? My name is Wantyard, sir.”

  “Stop that.” St. Loup rolled his eyes. “I have listening devices. I heard every word you said. Psychopath, am I? We’ll see.” He gestured to his men. “Tie it up. Truss it.”

  Arjun said, “St. Loup, did you hear what it said?”

  “I just said so, didn’t I? Bloody hell, look at it. First time I saw it was a thousand years ago and it was the prettiest little snake in Shay’s pocket. Come with me, Shay said, I’ve got something to show you. Something money can’t buy. And this thing flickered its tongue, I remember distinctly. Ah, none of us have aged well.”

  Ruth edged toward the motorcars. Three of them stood scattered odd-angled on the quarry’s ground. No one seemed to be looking at her.

  “St. Loup, did you listen to what it said? We’re just pieces in a game Shay plays with himself. All of us, we’re just weapons. We’ve been lied to.”

  “So? I’m not going to stop. Are you going to stop? I didn’t think so. Whatever made you think the game wasn’t fixed? Sometimes I forget you grew up in a monastery.”

  How did you operate a motorcar? Ruth had no idea. How did you even open their doors? Ruth had never touched a motorcar before—they weren’t for her kind of people. It was open-roofed, and the interior was a forbidding underbelly of wheels and dials and pedals and levers sticking out like the legs of a beetle on its back.

  St. Loup’s men shoved the Beast to its knees, tore away the silk sheet, tied its hands behind its back. St. Loup glanced at the wound beneath its legs and winced. “I liked you better before. Now you’re mine, can I change you back?”

  The Beast growled. “I’m no one’s.”

  “Of course you are. You’re a thing, a tool.”

  Arjun stood next to St. Loup, as if they really were old friends. “We’re all tools,” he said.

  “Yes, but some of us are more important than others. So was it this thing that bit your hand? You can tell me now. Would you like me to cut its fingers off?”

  Arjun shrugged. “I’d rather you didn’t.”

  Ruth leaned slowly against the shiny black door of the nearest motorcar. Was it locked? She fumbled blind, behind her back, trying to be unobtrusive, while her eyes watched St. Loup as he circled the Beast, grinning and running his hands through his hair in excitement.

  “You’re mine,” St. Loup said. “The key. I don’t care if Shay wanted me to find you, I don’t care about his stupid plans and schemes. I’m past scheming now. I win. Tell me the way.”

  Who was St. Loup? For that matter who was Arjun? He seemed to have forgotten about her. And who was she? Ruth’s head spun and her fingers, fiddling with the door, were numb. Was she one of these people? Was this her world? Ivy would have been at home here. Ivy would have been in charge of the situation. Ruth didn’t know what to do or say or even who she was or why she was there— she wanted to crawl away and hide. She wanted a cigarette.

  The Beast said, “I won’t tell you.”

  “It’s your function. It’s what you’re for.”

  “I’m free.”

  “No you’re not, I’ve got you tied up on the floor.”

  One of St. Loup’s men stepped round the back of the motorcar and grabbed Ruth’s arm. Stunned, she shuddered and went limp. The man shook his head without making eye contact with her. He was twice her size, muscular, scarred along the line of his jaw so the beard grew patchy—there was no point in fighting him. She wouldn’t even know how to begin.

  “Listen, you horrible animal. I pay these men by the hour and they charge extra for torture, so don’t waste my time.”

  “You have no way of sending your men home,” Arjun pointed out. “Are you paying them enough to come with you to the Mountain?”

  The man holding Ruth’s arm grunted in what seemed like surprise.

  “Shut up,” St. Loup said. “Beast, tell me the way.”

  “It’s mine. The Mountain is mine to inherit.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. You’re an animal. Talk or I start cutting things off you.”

  “May I?” Arjun put a hand on St. Loup’s shoulder. “It knows me. It started to tell me the way once before, but we got interrupted.”

  “All right. All right. You’re a good sport, Arjun. When I run the world I’ll make you the best God you could want, you can piss off back to your temple and worship it and we’ll never have to get on each other’s nerves again. Make it talk.”

  “Beast,” Arjun said. “It’s time. You owe me.” He knelt next to it. “How do we get to the Mountain?”

  “I’m free.”

  Arjun put his wounded hand on the Beast’s forehead. “No. You’re not.” He reached out with the other hand and the scalpel glinted as it fell from his sleeve. He drew it swiftly across the Beast’s throat, through its double chin and stubbly growth of beard. Blood gushed and the Beast sighed and slumped on the ground.

  Arjun stood, letting the scalpel drop. St. Loup was transfixed in shock.

  “Now neither of us can have it,” Arjun said. “You can’t have it, St. Loup.”

  The sleek little gun trembled in St. Loup’s hand. He emitted a strangulated whine.

  The Beast was still for a long moment, quite clearly dead. Then without warning it spasmed. It shook on the quarry floor. Its body twisted and jerked. Blood sprayed from its wound. The creature roared senselessly and thrashed with arms that bent backward as if broken. Arjun stepped nervously away from it. St. Loup stepped forward.

  St. Loup’s man let go of Ruth’s arm to reach for his gun. Half-consciously she fell backward through the motorcar’s open roof and into its black leather innards.

  She had a vague sense that one pressed the pedals—which she did, sprawled across the seat, with her left hand—and pulled levers—she kicked randomly at them. St. Loup’s man reached over and suddenly the car lurched—not forward but backward. St. Loup’s man shouted and fell. The car’s wheels threw up gravel and dust. The vehicle slammed against a rock and Ruth bit her lip. She kicked and yanked and operated whatever came to hand and the car lurched again, forward, skidding suddenly sideways. It crunched across the glass light-box and everything went dark again. She yanked at the wheel and the car spun and came to a halt.

  There were screams in the night. The dull red glow of the bonfires lit motion and struggle. Men were running back and forth. Something swelled on the fl
oor of the quarry, something unfolding itself in shadow where the Beast had lain.

  Ruth pulled herself upright. The car had two kerosene lanterns squatting on its hood and something Ruth hit with her elbow caused them to spark into life. She shoved her foot down on the pedals and the car roared forward. It slammed into one of the Beast’s other cars, which in turn slammed into a third, which skidded and knocked over a burning oilcan and caught fire. Ruth reversed, moved forward again, gathering frightening speed.

  Golden hair shone in her lamps. St. Loup stood suddenly in front of her. He raised his gun. The next moment the car bumped and leapt a little in the air as St. Loup fell beneath it.

  Had she meant to do that? She wasn’t sure. She pulled something that caused the car to stop suddenly, its engine screaming, and she fell forward and hit her head.

  The door opened. When she looked up again Arjun was climbing into the seat next to her. It crossed her mind briefly to kick him out.

  “Go,” he said, “quickly! Please.”

  Behind her two of the cars were burning and the tent seemed to have caught fire, too. Something thrashed in the flames—long, serpentine, many-legged, a body like a train, a mouth like an industrial excavator.

  “Don’t look back, Ruth, go faster.”

  She pulled the wrong lever and the car’s gears ground and screamed and the vehicle halted. Behind them the two burning cars exploded, one then the other. In the mirror, something immense writhed in greasy names. Men fled in all directions. A little grey bird burst from the tent and took to the air, beating strong shadowy wings, hooting in triumph.

  “Don’t look back, Ruth, keep going, keep going.” She threw the lever forward and the car moved again.

  Arjun

  “Keep going.”

  “I am going.”

  “We don’t know if it’s dead.”

  “I know. I hit St. Loup.”

  “I know. I hope he’s dead. Keep going.”

  She accelerated. The road thrummed beneath the wheels. Unused industrial machinery rattled past to left and right.

  Arjun sat back in the thick leather of the seat. He watched Ruth work the levers and pedals. It reminded him of a kind of church organ.

  He’d offered to drive—not that he really knew how himself—and she’d told him to go to Hell. He’d offered to open a door for them but they had nowhere in particular to go. Why not drive? She seemed happier that way—the speed seemed to calm her.

  She was learning fast. At first she’d been tentative, white-knuckled, jerking and braking, cursing raggedly under her breath.

  “Ah, Ruth, you can take your foot off the pedal …”

  “Don’t talk to me.”

  “All right.”

  “I said don’t talk.”

  By imperceptible degrees she’d gained confidence and speed. Now she swerved, accelerated, worked the device like a virtuoso. She was reckless in the dark. The car’s leather roof was folded bat-winged back and her hair blew wild around her.

  How thin she was! Her hair was lank and mad. Her cheekbones protruded. Her skin, her eyes, shone like a fasting saint’s. Had she starved in the wilderness?

  They drove in silence. She didn’t want to talk. He wanted to talk—he had, just half an hour ago, quite deliberately attempted to kill the one creature in the world that could lead him to the Mountain, to his God, simply to keep the secret out of St. Loup’s grasp. Altruism, or spite? A little of both. He wanted to talk about it but she had problems of her own.

  He supposed she was taking it well. She seemed less frightened than angry.

  Juno’s quarries and mines fell behind them. The ruined factories of Walbrook’s Zone loomed ahead. The city was a blur; the stars above were still.

  She said, “How much did you hear?”

  “Everything,” he said. He shrugged. “The door was jammed. Anyway, I wanted to hear what it had to say.”

  “Did you know?”

  “What?”

  “About my father, of course. How long have you known about my bloody father?”

  “Ruth, I didn’t know—I didn’t. Not until tonight. Not until— I read it in his file. I came looking for you. I knew you’d be in danger, though I didn’t think—”

  “You mean you wanted to use me.”

  “That’s not fair.”

  She braked, too hard, making the car’s wheels slide, loose stone spray, steam burst from the hood.

  “Who was that man? What files? Who was my father? Who else knows about this?”

  He told her about St. Loup, and the Hotel. That was the easy part. Her father—that was harder to explain.

  He hadn’t brought the files with him. Maybe he should have. Now that he tried to tell her what he’d learned he found his memories were vague and confused. So many names, so many rumors, the Know-Nothings’ secret codes, Shay’s own scheming. Groping through a forest at night.

  How much could he, how much should he tell her? A fifty-year-old file marked Winwood, D., for instance, had contained a report on the case of the mass murderer Winwood, who, according to one investigator, had been seen in the company of a Mr. Lemuel, a white-haired old gentleman, who it seemed had provided Winwood with the unusual guns that he had used in a subsequent apparently notorious massacre … The file had contained a list of the dead. The lead on Lemuel had gone cold. Horrible—was that the sort of thing he should tell her?

  He told her.

  Tears in her eyes, or the cold wind, the grit of the road? Her hands, her face, were so tight and drawn anyway—how was she taking it?

  An investigators’ report appended, with a rusty paperclip, to the Shay file: forty years ago a series of explosions in the gas pipes had leveled four streets in East Bara, and a factory, killing over one hundred people, including a visiting executive from the Holcroft Company, and his two daughters. The engineer responsible for the recent alterations to the pipes had been called Shay, and after the incident his papers turned out to be fake, and he escaped the investigators’ dragnet.

  “I don’t know,” Arjun said. “I don’t know why he would …”

  Her hands still clutched the wheel. Her eyes were on the road— her beautiful green eyes. They must come from her mother, Arjun thought—Shay’s eyes were hard and flinty. The thought of Shay, married, a young father, was more than Arjun could imagine. He had a sudden ridiculous picture of Ruth, a little girl, sitting on Shay’s knee, Shay smiling that unpleasant smile of his—what was he thinking? Was he scheming even back then? Could he have been an ordinary man, once?

  Twenty years ago, investigating a man who went by the name of Swinburne, the Know-Nothings had found a laboratory in the sewers beneath Mille rand Hill. The report said, Contents: Lights. “Animals. “ Machines. The report said, Disposition—Fire. In the margins someone had written Fucking “Shay” again? Yes/No?

  Arjun faltered. “Keep going,” Ruth said. “No, keep going. I want to know.”

  Two hundred years ago a man called Shay had been charged with Fomenting Unrest Against The Mountain. The Chapterhouse where he’d been held burned down. The arresting officers were found with their throats slit. Most but not quite all records were destroyed.

  Should he hate her? He made himself stop looking for signs of her father in her face. It would only upset him.

  Fifteen years ago an investigator in Fosdyke, who’d been keeping notes for years on an undesirable, a suspicious character named Low, of Carnyx Street, had received a communique from the South Bara Chapterhouse, about a closed investigation into a dealer in forbidden goods and heresies called Lemuel. The artists’ impressions in the files were an uncanny match, separated only by a few years, a hardening around Lemuel’s eyes. Before an arrest could be made, Low vanished. A handwritten note to the file suggested: Keep an eye on the girls. Bad blood there.

  Bad blood! The world lurched, closed like a trap.

  As soon as Arjun read that, he’d dropped the files, come running, all across the city. Now he wasn’t sure what to say to
her.

  She accelerated, pushing the car past its limits, annihilating the city with speed and noise. Over the roar of the wind, could she even hear what he was saying?

  What Happened to Brace-Bel-What

  Happened to Inspector Maury-

  What Happens Next

  Brace-Bel

  Go then! Go!” Brace-Bel, stomping through the ruins, in and out of empty buildings, heaving the sloshing barrels, talked to himself, dropped the barrels, and gestured wildly, yelled and surprised himself with echoes: Go … go … go …

  “Would that I could! Where? Where?”

  … where … where …

  He tired ofthat game quickly enough. For a while he worked in silence—not for long. “Go then!” he yelled. “Leave me!”

  He was drunk on spirits brewed in a still constructed largely from the bathtubs in an abandoned poorhouse. “Is this what I’ve come to?” What’s more, the fumes from the oil barrels were making him light-headed. He had not eaten in more than a day—maybe two.

  “After I saved you from the wreck of your city! After I raised you from the dirt!”

  The front door of the next house down the street was locked. Locked? With his shotgun—a beautiful lacquered collector’s piece—he blasted the door open, and only as he stepped into the thick dust and staleness of the interior did it occur to him that the house’s occupants had probably died inside, upstairs, in bed, of one of the fevers that followed the War, and the choking air was very possibly deadly. Too late now! “I, too, once had a fever. Seven years of every ten in gaol, I am not unfamiliar with sickness and madness. Molder no longer in your beds, sir and madam, fire will free you!” He splashed the oil on the walls with an artist’s abandon. A garnish of gunpowder! “At last your sluggish bodies will approach to the condition of light! A message, a poem.”

  Outside, Brace-Bel slumped on the doorstep. It was evening; the sky was the color of spoiled meat; shadows gathered. The little hand-drawn wagon on which he bore the oil barrels and the powder kegs sat in the middle of the street, taunting him, obdurately heavy, stiff-wheeled. Was he a beast of burden? It seemed he was. “Alone, alone, alone,” he muttered as he jerked the stubborn thing another few yards down the street, and went to work on the next house along. “I was not made to be alone!”