by Felix Gilman
They’d left him, the Lamplighters, his army, his flock, his fellows, his acolytes, the last of his lovers. So quickly they’d turned on him, so cruelly! The look in their eyes as they walked away—it was the look of every pretty young thing who’d ever told Brace-Bel: “I don’t need you anymore.” Of whom there had been many. Disappointment. Disgust. Laughing at him … What had they expected? He was a man out of his time. He did not belong here. Why would they have looked to him of all people to give their squalid lives meaning?
Only a few days ago—it seemed like a lifetime now—the Lamplighters had clashed one last time with the great adversary, the Night Watch, among the mansions of Provins Hill. A splendid blaze, a crown of fire, atop the Hill! The Lamplighters rushing away, hurtling down the Hill, arms full of salvaged treasures, gold and silk, flutes, mirrors, jade vases; down into the dark streets where the Night Watch waited, ready like customs officials to confiscate and smash those beautiful things; a deadly game of cat and mouse in the bloody shadows. A victory! Most of the Lamplighters escaped the cordon. (The Watch’s numbers were declining. Their hearts weren’t in it anymore. The truly dedicated had mostly killed themselves.) “Scatter the treasures!” Brace-Bel commanded. “Beautify the ruins!” And his followers, who he could not help but admit were hungry, and ragged, and sickly, wanted to sell the stuff for food.
A philosophical disagreement ensued. Brace-Bel said some unkind things. It wasn’t their fault! They were creatures of their time, as he was a creature of his. Their worlds were incommensurable. His dreams, forced on their city, could only end in absurdity. He had screamed at them as they left. (They went south, to beg for shelter in Fosdyke; they went west, and east. How sadly they shuffled away!)
“Alone, alone, alone!” He wasn’t suited for solitude. He talked to himself. He had unsound ideas. It seemed that the shadows in the Ruined Zone were haunted by silent and unhappy men with stranglers’ hands—he was not entirely sure whether they existed outside his own head. He saw St. Loup, he saw Turnbull, he saw monstrous birds and reptiles and apes. The Mountain loomed. The city was becoming increasingly unreal to him. He dreamed of light, he dreamed of darkness, he turned inward, into his memories. He considered violence against his own person. No one to love or hate but himself. Everything he had turned his hand to had failed; if only he’d lived an ordinary life he might have been happy. Was that how it felt to be Shay?
Brace-Bel had nodded off, on the back of the wagon, amid barrels of lamp oil and home-brewed spirits. Hunger and fumes. These days his waking life seemed much like a dream anyway. When he woke the stars were out, shining like knives, like the gears of unspeakable machines. He’d slept clutching his cane for self-defense. He noticed that one of his shoes was missing. “Thieves!” he muttered. Or perhaps he’d lost the shoe a while ago. He wasn’t sure.
“Good evening, good evening.” The street stank of oil and sulphur and alcohol. Moonlight picked out a glistening trail behind him. “Good evening!” The street was silent. Even the birds had the good sense to steer clear, it seemed.
“Torches and tinder, torches and tinder, sparks, the lightning,” he said, getting to work.
He was utterly alone. The city of his birth was gone; where could he go now? He was a man out of his time, a joke, a failure. Back to Fosdyke? They might be kind to him, they might forgive his trespasses (the Lamplighters had, if he remembered correctly, gone to war with Fosdyke to some extent). They would not let him join in the Rebuilding because he was not suited to the task, but they might lock him safely away for his own good and feed him and care for him in his madness. He would rather die.
Even his memories had abandoned him—he was no longer sure who was real and who was not. Turnbull and St. Loup were plainly impossible. The Lamplighters were all too real, he remembered them all too clearly, the ingrates. Shay? The Beast? Arjun? Maybe, maybe not.
Ivy! He was quite sure Ivy was real. To deny her, even in extremis as he was now, would be a kind of blasphemy. Even now Ivy struggled on the Mountain, enduring dangers and hardships and tortures and terrors that made Brace-Bel’s bowels run cold to imagine them. (He imagined them frequently.)
Ivy! He would fight for her, if she’d let him. If she still needed him, he had a reason for being. Together they would claim the Mountain. She would comprehend the machines, and he would make beauty with them. Her cunning, his vision. Together they would open all the cages, reconcile all opposites … And if she didn’t need him, she would let him die in the fire. He would burn. And that would be sweet, too. He would become light, heat, sparks on the night wind, free of the flesh.
He lit the torches, the trails of powder. Panting, he ran down the street, striking sparks, leading the fire behind him. Were his calculations correct? He couldn’t be sure. Calculation was never his strong suit. One by one the houses exploded into flame. Windows shattered, timbers crashed. A wild roaring filled the air. Black smoke—would smoke swallow the message? He couldn’t be sure. It was hard to breathe. Ivy! She was on the Mountain; she had access to its devices; the city was clay in her hands. If she chose to, she could save him. If the message was visible! The skin of his face stung with the heat; red light pulsed through the walls of the houses, enveloped the street, enveloped all the streets for a half-mile around. The fire had gone wild. The city had been transformed into light and heat. But if he’d calculated correctly, a big if, if then for a brief moment the fire had spelled out, in letters made from the streets of the abandoned city, in letters visible from the air, the stars, the Mountain, her name: IVY. Now there was smoke everywhere, and nowhere left to run. A wall fell, bricks glowing like coals, and it seemed to him that behind it there was a door.
Arjun
They saw the fire—Arjun and Ruth, who sat on the still-warm hood of the car, looking down from the hills over Fosdyke, past the dark angel on the dome of the Museum, past the new fields, past the rooftops where the guards patrolled through a forest of flags, and out over the darkness of the Ruined Zone. They watched the smoke rise, a black and shifting mass to rival the Mountain. Fire crawled over the ruins, and for a moment it seemed to spell …
The car was stuck. It had slewed wildly, and at speed, into a bomb crater in the middle of an abandoned street, and now its wheels were buckled and sunk in mud. Ribs and elbows had been bruised but unbroken. Ruth had laughed and laughed as if drunk. Her door wouldn’t open. They had climbed out in each other’s arms.
She patted the dented metal. “Poor thing—it’ll rust up here. Maybe birds’ll live in it.”
He asked her, “What shall we tell your sister?”
“Which sister?”
“Marta.”
“Of course Marta. I know what you meant. I don’t know. I don’t know what’s best. She’s not as strong as she seems. I’ll think about it. Don’t say anything, will you?”
He nodded. Another layer of lies and secrecy and conspiracy. This at least was kindly meant.
She said, “Do you think she’s all right up there?”
“Ivy?”
“Of course Ivy.”
“I don’t know. I only met her briefly. She seemed very clever. Very cold. She seemed to take after her … I’m sorry.”
“That’s all right.” She stared across the city, at the Mountain. It was still and dark. What was she expecting, signs of struggle? Lightning, fires, earthquake, roiling clouds, volcanic eruption? There was nothing like that.
“I hardly remember him,” she said.
“Really?”
“No, actually. I remember him very well. I don’t know. It’s hard to picture. He wasn’t all bad. Something terrible must have happened to him. He did something terrible to himself. He isn’t really a person at all, anymore, is he? He used to be funny, sometimes. He wasn’t like anyone else.”
Arjun thought it best to keep silent.
She said, “I never asked—did you have a family? Before, you know, you … walked away from things.” There was a tone of reproach in her voice. He told her no
, and she nodded, and didn’t ask any more questions. For a long while they watched the fire rise and fall.
“The Beast told me things,” she said. “It told me how the world works.”
“It lies.”
“Not about everything.”
“Shay made it.”
“So? He made me.”
Arjun didn’t know what to say. Below, the fire scrawled itself across the city in letters of light, immense, unreadable.
She said, “Do you know why you went up on the Mountain? Because he wanted you to. You and St. Loup and all the rest. The Beast told me. My father—his shadows, his copies—they all want the Mountain for themselves. They find people like you—mad people, broken people, dreamers—and they lift you out of your lives, and they point you at the Mountain. They’re scared to go themselves. There are traps, there are defenses, it’s too high, the air’s too thin, you go mad. They send people like you. I don’t know what to call it—scouts, cannon-fodder. They’re just waiting for one of you to make it through. But you never do. You die. You fall back as ghosts.”
“I know. I heard.”
“Are you listening?” She put her hand on his and squeezed, as if she were a doctor, breaking the news of a death in the family. “This is important. Everything they ever told you was a lie. They told you your God was on the Mountain. That’s a lie. They only did that so you’d go up there. So that they could follow. They cheated you. They spoiled your lives. Everything they said was a lie.”
“Maybe not everything.”
“The Beast told me what the Mountain is. It’s a machine. The people who came before us made it, to make the city. The things you call Gods are only, I don’t know, fuel. Parts of the mechanism. The Mountain sends them out to make things and take things away and open and close valves and …”
“I’ve heard that theory before. I’ve heard a lot of theories before. In the scientists’ communes of Zubiri they say the Gods are just what they call anomalies. The mechanism of the city breaking down. Cracks in the facade. Points of fracture. Places where you can see through from where you’re standing to somewhere else. Different lights, different skies, different noises. Somewhere better or worse. The lights are cars or fires or television or advertising billboards. You think you’re looking at God but really you’re looking at the future.”
“Is that true?”
“I don’t know. It’s just something people say. I never know what to make of it. Does it matter?”
She looked at him for a long time. Then she gave up.
What had the fire said? Now it had no shape. It was advancing wildly on all fronts. It was out of control, swallowing everything in its path.
She let go of his hand with a sigh.
“So what are you going to do now?”
He shrugged. “What can I do? Go down into Fosdyke. Get a job. See how long things last. When he sent the airships, when he sent the Hollows, Shay—sorry—he locked all the paths out of this time. I’m stuck here.”
“Your God. Your whatever it was, quest, pilgrimage.”
“No one can say I didn’t try.” He laughed.
“Unless you find a way back onto the Mountain.”
“Unless I find a way back.”
“Then you’ll go, again.”
“I suppose so. It’s a bit late to stop now, isn’t it? What would I do with myself if I stopped?”
“Would you kill him?”
“I’d probably try.”
“Fair enough. I think I might, too.”
The fire engulfed a fuel depot; an explosion shook the city. They both sat still while the echoes rang in their ears.
“I might,” she said, “just want to ask him why. I mean, it isn’t fair, is it?”
“Not really.”
“The funny thing is,” Ruth said, “that this is always how I dreamed the world works—really, deep down, this is what I always expected.”
“Really?”
“You know how it is when you’re young.”
“Yes? I don’t know. It was a long time ago, and very far away.”
“Right, right. So imagine finding out the city really is the way it seems when you’re young; your father really is the most important man in the city. Everything in the world revolves around your little family squabbles. The city is the way it is because of the way you are. Your codes and secrets and stupid cruel jokes, all those family stories, are the most important things in the world.”
“It must be very strange.”
“Sometimes it seems it’s not so strange; I always really thought the city worked like this. I was only pretending to be a grown-up. You know?”
“I suppose so.”
“Imagine all that, and you’re still left out of the big secret. Imagine how that fucking feels.”
Were those distant lights, on the Mountain? Or sparks drifting in the wind?
“This world is coming to an end,” Arjun said. “I tried to stop the Hollows but we can’t. People tried to stop the airships but they couldn’t. Shay has the Mountain. He’ll roll up this part of the city and put it away as if it was just a mistake in the first place.”
“I know.”
Far below, the fire crawled south, through the ruins, toward Fosdyke. Ruth said, “Don’t worry—it’ll stop at the canals.” And it did, so that was all right.
Maury
And down below, off on the other side of Fosdyke, Maury stumbled through the ruins. Perhaps he heard the explosions, away over the rooftops, a few miles away. He heard explosions all the time now: the sound of the airships overhead haunted his dreams, intruded into his waking hours. The scream of the bombs. The totality of his failure. He’d tried to protect the city; he’d tried to warn them; he’d failed. All over now. All fucking over now, very soon. Perhaps he saw the fire blazing over the horizon. His vision was failing, and full of blood.
He’d stumbled alone out of Fosdyke, pursued by what passed for the law these days. Why were they chasing him? What had he done? He couldn’t quite remember. His memory was going, old age and stress—and also when they’d chased him they’d fired guns after him, and children had chased him throwing rocks, and a bullet or a rock or something had bloodied the back of his head, and the wound, untreated, throbbed and itched. What had he done? Something horrible, something stupid, some vicious impulse. Like once when he’d snapped and given the wife a bit of a slap, shouldn’t have done it. Once or twice. He didn’t trust himself. What side was he on?
He’d been messed around in ways that weren’t fair. His life was all wrong.
The first night the airships passed over. He feared them; he cheered them on.
The second night he saw, over a hill, the Night Watch on maneuvers. It hardly even crossed his mind to rejoin them. They probably wouldn’t have him, anyway.
The fourth night he trapped a dog in a sunken pothole, broke its neck in the crook of his remaining elbow, ate it raw.
The fifth night he saw a light gathering over an empty lot, sparkling off the broken windows, and he approached, thinking it might be firelight, the light of a camp, and he could—what? Ask for shelter? Murder them in their sleep? He wasn’t sure. In any fucking event it turned out to be one of those spirits, one of those Gods, one of those awful things that had spilled out into the city in the wake of the War. A vast and spinning arrangement of lights, performing in the empty ruins, for no one but Maury, who didn’t care, who hated and feared it, who spat, and closed his eyes, and walked away.
Now his eyes weren’t working right. Day by day his vision dimmed. There was blood in his left eye; it ached. He must have looked too long at the lights. He had a fever, and his head wound bothered him. He couldn’t see much, anymore, except fire, stars, and the searchlights of the airships. Everything was shadows. Soon he would be blind, and then he would die.
Vaguely he stumbled toward the redness in the sky. He staggered into a lamppost and spun, a dull ache in his shoulder. For a moment he looked up at the stars. Then he fell on his ba
ck in the gutter. He slid in the mud—a bomb crater. He lay on broken bricks. A stink of smoke blew across his face. The stars dimmed.
Someone leaned over him. He heard murmuring—a conversation in something that was not quite language.
Hands held him, under his arms. He was lifted as if weightless. Cold fingers prodded him, hooked his lip and tugged at it as if he was a horse, and they were checking his teeth. He felt the shame that the Hollow Servants radiated; it made his skin crawl.
He expected them to kill him. Instead they carried him on their shoulders, north, up and up through the streets. The air thinned, smelled of dust, electricity, rust, oil, and machinery. A plodding ascension. The Mountain? He didn’t struggle.
The Storm-Private Languages-
Back Alleys-The Atrocity Sheds-
The Guts of the Machine-” You Again”
Arjun
This is how it happened.
One week after the two of them came back down into Fosdyke, the messages began to appear.
That was one week after Ruth moved back into the old Low house, into a bare room under the attic, which she said was fine, better than fine, never mind the dust or the draft or the memories; she had a lot to think about; she wanted to be alone for a while longer.
It was six days after Marta summoned Arjun into her office, in the headquarters of the Committee for the Emergency, and demanded to know where he’d been, where her sister had been, what was going on. He said: I can’t tell you. She fumed. She asked if it was about Ivy. He said: what difference does it make? She blustered, fell just short of actually making threats. He looked around her office, at the maps, the papers, the stockpile of oil and food behind the door, the grey sheets on the narrow bed in the corner, and he said: what is it you do here, exactly? I’ve never been sure.
It was five days after he walked north into the Ruined Zone, to the great black scar the fire had left behind, still smelling of smoke and burning, and sat all day on a blackened stone bench, listening to the wind, trying to clear his head with music, gently sifting through simple chords and themes and tones.