Gears of the City

by Felix Gilman

“I don’t think he’s very good at it,” Ruth said. “The surgery. All of these creatures are dead.”

  There was a table in front of them. The bulb now dangled directly overhead and cast a stark light on the table, and on the anatomy of the creature that lay, flayed and shackled and inert, on the table’s bloody surface.

  It resembled a child at least as strongly as it resembled an ape.

  It had one saucerlike eye, wide and dull as a doorknob. The other eye was an abscess of exposed nerves and fluids. Its throat—its vocal chords—had been opened. Twined in among the red tendons and blue veins were fragments of bright metal that might have been surgical clamps, or discarded instruments, or might have been devices for speech, or …

  Dust had settled on the table, on the instruments, on the creature’s matted fur.

  “He lost interest,” Ruth said. “Left it unfinished.”

  She brushed flakes of fallen rust out of its fur.

  Arjun inspected the instruments. “Do you think these are remarkable in any way?” He handled them carefully, lifting them up to the light.

  “Do you mean, are they dangerous? Are they useful?”

  “Yes. They only look like knives to me.”

  “How am I supposed to know? We can ask Ivy.”

  The bulb buzzed and flickered. For a moment it was dark and Arjun nearly dropped the knife in his hand. When the light returned again the creature’s mouth was open, exposing sharp teeth, a bloody stump where a tongue should have been.

  “Was its mouth open before?”

  Ruth said, “Never mind that—where was the door?”

  Outside the circle of electric light everything was vague and looming shadows.

  “This way?”

  “That way.”

  The murmuring resumed; a multitude of feeble confused voices. Something in the room was singing—a low wavering growl that sometimes whined up the scale into music, and dropped back again as if ashamed.

  “No; I circled once around the table, so …”

  “Something’s alive in here.”

  “Everything’s alive in here,” Arjun said. “Nothing dies here unless he wants it to.”

  A voice from behind his shoulder repeated nothing dies. Another voice from somewhere to his left took it up, and another. Nothing dies here nothing dies here.

  “Run to the wall,” Ruth said. “Work our way round from there. Don’t touch anything.” And she set off running into the shadows. The moment she stepped out of the electric light something huge and swollen lunged from the hulking shadow of a broken cage and knocked her to the floor. There was a row of spines all along its—its back? Its arm? It pressed her to the floor and groaned in tones of pleasure and agony nothing here dies of pain or making unmaking reduction increase joining nerves unstitched unmapped division our cruel father our keeper knives and toys and nightmares so long no love or kindness among his children he botched us all. Its voice was crude and vile, half senseless, unfinished. Ruth’s sudden scream of rage and pain was half animal, too. She struggled beneath it. Arjun charged it brandishing one of the vicious little surgical knives and it half ran, half leapt back into the shadows.

  Ruth was on her feet and running. Arjun followed. She stumbled, banging her hip against a low table, and he overtook her. He ran nearly face-first, full tilt into the wall—he banged against it with his outstretched hands and the whole shed clanged and shook.

  Ruth fell into his arms; there was slick blood on her shirt. She turned left and ran brushing her hand against the thin corrugated-iron wall, so that it rattled and clanged and the shed echoed. Arjun ran after her. Something seized the back of his trouser leg and he fell onto the concrete floor. The thing that hunched its damp and sweaty weight over him spoke nonsense in numbers and shrieks. He struggled to stand and it brought its mumbling mouth next to his ear. Its breath smelled strangely of flowers.

  Ruth stumbled against the wall and ran into a concrete and iron block on the side of which was a large rusty switch. Screaming and throwing all her weight onto it she dragged it down—it clicked and wires sizzled and hummed, and suddenly a dozen more bulbs flared into life and the shed was brightly, blindingly lit.

  There was a hiss and a scrabble of claws and the thing on Arjun’s back lurched away. When he rolled on his back to catch a glimpse of it it was gone, and the shed was silent.

  Ruth’s dark curled hair was lank with sweat, despite the cold. She was breathing wildly. The worn linen of her shirt was torn at her left shoulder, and she was bleeding.

  In bright light the shed was like a disused slaughterhouse. In the starkly lit corners of the cages there was nothing but bone, dried blood, scraps of fur, and half-rotted carcasses.

  Ruth choked and sobbed and held her sleeve to her mouth as the stink hit her.

  The door was not far away. They ran for it. As they forced it closed behind them, leaning all their weight against its hinges, the lights went out again.

  Arjun assured Ruth that the cuts on the back of her shoulder were shallow. He didn’t know whether that was true or not.

  He held up his maimed hand and smiled ruefully. “It could be worse,” he said. “And at least we know that their teeth are not necessarily poisoned.”

  She shuddered and held her left arm tightly against her side with her right.

  “Did Ivy tell you the light would—would do whatever it did to them?”

  “I didn’t even know the switch would turn on the lights,” she said. “I just thought whatever it was it couldn’t make things worse.”

  “Hah. I picked up this knife.” In the moonlight it looked rusted, dull, and grimy. “It may be worthless.”

  “Be careful with that.”

  He slipped it gingerly into his jacket pocket.

  “All right,” she said. “All right. Come on.”

  It crossed his mind briefly to suggest that being wounded, she should stay behind, but he had the good sense not to say it.

  “No,” she said, as he looked curiously at the sheds off to the right of the path, under the shadows of drooping ash trees. “Now we stay on the path.” From the sheds came the sounds of machinery, and from around the shuttered windows there was a faint cold light. “We find Ivy first. Then you can look for whatever you want to look for. “

  “That’s very wise. Ivy first, and your father.”

  The mansion had no obvious entrance. There was a multitude of dark windows, all out of reach, but no doors. There were black rusting drainpipes, and cornices, and inelegant pillars, but nothing that could be climbed. The drainpipes broke from the wall. The windows remained out of reach.

  It took a long time to walk around the building, to find that it appeared more or less identical from every angle. They turned again and came around the front, if that was what it was, and they walked around it again.

  Ruth jumped for a window and fell short. She swore. “What did you do last time?”

  “… and for all I know the time before that, and before that. But I have no idea how to proceed. I doubt I ever got this far.”

  She shook her head and rested for a moment, leaning against the cold brick of the wall.

  They kept walking. Overhead, a light in a window went out. Another window lit up, and shortly afterward another, as if someone was moving slowly from room to room, carefully switching off each light as he went.

  Ruth stopped to rest again. She sat on a set of low, worn steps. They had passed one like it every few minutes; it led nowhere. She was looking increasingly grey faced and short of breath. She walked more slowly with every step.

  “Let me look at your wound.”

  “I’m fine, Arjun.”

  She let him look anyway, but it was dark, and he still had no real idea what he was looking at.

  He said, “You’ll be all right.” He frowned. “I expect Ivy or your father will have medicine.”

  “Not if we never get inside. Let’s keep moving.”

  They turned the corner again and another flank of the buil
ding lay before them. In the garden there were shadows and structures and occasional noises. There was a brief scatter of rain. They turned another corner. Some faces of the mansion were randomly ornamented with gargoyles; others were not. Drains and gutters and eaves bulked in the dark.

  “If we had a rope …” Arjun said.

  “If we had a rope there would be some other bloody reason why it wouldn’t work. Let’s sit for a moment.”

  They turned another corner, and later another. Though the building seemed to be square, right-angled, Arjun suspected that it was not; that each time they turned a new face of the building unfolded before them. Ruth thought that they were simply going around and around in circles. They left no footprints and they had nothing to mark the walls with; they could not be sure. They turned another corner, and another, and Arjun said that he thought perhaps Ruth was right and they had seen those windows before, those pipes, that cracked molding. Ruth disagreed.

  They turned another corner and there was a door. They nearly walked right past it.

  It was an unremarkable narrow metal door, painted a dark olive green, set down a short brick staircase and apparently opening into a basement. It was ajar.

  “The back entrance,” Arjun said. “I wonder what your father does when he has guests he wants to welcome.”

  Ruth sat on the steps to catch her breath.

  Arjun slowly pushed the door open with his foot. He thought how much he disliked Shay; how he hated the way Shay cheated, and stole, and lied, and hid, and hoarded things that were not his; how everything Shay touched was turned ugly and mean. It crossed his mind to be glad that Ruth was weak and tired; she would not be able to stop him from doing what needed to be done.

  He helped her stand and they stepped into the darkness of the basement.

  The room behind the door was heaped with refuse. It reeked of mold and rotting food. Against the near wall slumped a mass of black rubbish bags. There were slimy and sticky things underfoot. There were angular piles of old furniture, and the swollen valves and rusty levers of old machines; there were yellow drifts of discarded books.

  They crossed the room, holding their breath. There were a number of doors. They chose the nearest.

  After that they couldn’t agree which way to go next. The drab concrete corridor ran left, toward what appeared to be an immense boiler room, full of a tangle of pipes hung with fat sinister valves; and it ran right, into the shadows, lined with closed unmarked doors. Arjun said left, in hopes of finding something vulnerable in Shay’s machinery. Ruth said right, because if the machines were important, then they were surely trapped. Arjun didn’t know what to do—his instincts couldn’t be trusted in Shay’s house—but that only made him more determined to dig his heels in. He saw the same resolute uncertainty on Ruth’s face. In the end they tossed a coin; heads meant right. It came up heads, and Ruth immediately said maybe we should go into the boiler room and Arjun said no, you’re right—no diversions. But then after they’d walked only fifty feet down the corridor his curiosity suddenly got the better of him and he opened one of the doors.

  It opened onto the boiler room.

  The huge room clicked and clanked, whistled and moaned. Heavy iron pipes twisted at painful angles all around Arjun’s head. Wheels protruded. Valves attached themselves like leeches to the room’s iron veins; their dials ticked patiently away. Everything was covered in a thick layer of dust.

  Ruth stepped into the room after him. “Do you understand any of this?” He shook his head and put a finger to his lips; there was motion in the depths of the room.

  Every dial and pressure gauge that Arjun could see fluttered in the red, or hung inert and empty. The machinery appeared to be balanced finely in a constant state of crisis. Something tense in the creak and clang of the pipes … He whispered, “This may be easily broken. I wonder what would happen if…”

  Ruth drew in her breath and squeezed his arm.

  Shadows crept over the pipes, coming closer out of the depths of the room. Something bright glinted—blinked—something opened a mouth of tiny, bright, needle-sharp teeth.

  A dozen little grey monkeys approached, hand over hand along the pipes, blinking bright round camera-shutter eyes.

  One leapt from a pipe near to Arjun’s head and he ducked, but it flew past him to land clattering on a valve. It wiped the grime from the face of the dial with the ragged fur of its forearm; then it chewed its wrist and muttered to itself. Its back was a mess of purple scars. It cocked its tufted head as the pipes clanged. It shuddered and leapt. Arjun lost sight of it among the plumbing.

  Ruth shrieked as another monkey leapt from a pipe to her shoulder up onto a wheel valve, which it turned a tiny notch. The pipes whistled and all of the monkeys shrieked and shook themselves.

  Something banged and echoed off in the shadows. The monkeys hunched and looked up in terror; then they went racing off to fix it, brachiating recklessly across their iron jungle.

  Suddenly the thought of damaging that complex, incomprehensible machinery seemed utterly terrifying. There was no telling what it might do to the Mountain, what it might do to the city.

  Ruth had slumped against the door and was sitting with her head against a cool pipe. Arjun helped her stand and together they walked back out into the corridor.

  The corridor ran endlessly, around countless sharp corners, past unmarked doors. Sometimes it was lit by bulbs; sometimes they had to walk in darkness, Arjun feeling his way along the wall with his hand.

  Ruth held his arm and rested her head on his shoulder. For a long time she was silent, and he thought everything was all right. Then she mumbled, thank you, Marta, thank you for helping me, you’re very kind, and his blood froze. “Ruth, it’s me.”

  She said, crossly, “I know.”

  Silent again. He tried to keep her talking; he tried humming and encouraging her to hum along. Later she addressed him as Dad. He said no, no I’m not, and she moaned and pushed him away. Her legs buckled. He looked back. Fifty feet away the corridor turned a sharp corner and beyond that continued … endlessly?

  If he left her behind he would never find her again; he was quite certain ofthat. He was lost; he did not understand the machine. He helped her stand again. Her eyes were bloodshot, her scalp sweaty, her breath foul.

  Oh, look at it all, she said.

  Sometimes she staggered and looked down at the concrete floor as if swaying over a great abyss, and clutched weakly at his arm. Sometimes she shuddered with what seemed to be dread. Sometimes she laughed, bitterly.

  Once she addressed him as my musician, and he said, yes, Ruth, yes, that’s right. He thought most likely it was right; how many musicians could she have known?

  For a while she refused to go forward, and Arjun didn’t want to fight her. She saw something before them that terrified her. He asked her what it was, but she was too far gone to answer him. He thought it was her poisoned and feverish imagination—but then there was a terrible grinding noise and all the lights swayed and dimmed, and it seemed the shadows lunged across the wall from side to side and something passed by within them. Ruth said, quick, quick, we have to keep going.

  She muttered as they walked, lost in some sort of childhood argument, which drifted senselessly into a bitter sullen fight over money. She said, why didn’t you tell me? Oh, what a stupid unkind joke. He tried to think of a joke to tell her, thinking it might catch her attention, keep her in the here and now; nothing came to mind.

  She called him my pilot. She kissed his face and her lips were too cold and her breath too hot and too stale. She told him he was beautiful. She said, I never thought you’d come back. She said, you found it at last. Arjun said: yes. She began to shake feverishly. Arjun said: yes, yes, I found it, we found the way. She coughed weakly. He said, we found it, just a little farther. She slumped against his shoulder and said, but it’s so horrible. It’s such a horrible broken machine.

  She stumbled and he let her sit against the wall.

  He said
, “What kind of machine? What do you see?”

  She laughed and her eyes fluttered back in her head.

  Her pulse was weak and unsteady.

  He felt terribly cold and numb and lost.

  In a sudden ecstasy of panic he threw open the nearest door. It led into the same clanging hissing forest of machinery as the last door, and the door before that.

  He seized a valve wheel; it was rusted and painted sloppily grey-white and stuck, and he hung all his weight off it to make it screech sourly and turn a half-revolution. She’ll die, he thought, she’ll die; get someone’s attention! The pipe the valve governed began to shake; an arrhythmic knocking started up, traveling back and forth over Arjun’s head, leaping from pipe to pipe, gear to gear, grinding and thumping and ringing, spreading like an infection.

  The door swung quietly shut behind him. When he threw it open again the corridor was empty; Ruth was gone.

  He didn’t know whether to hope or despair. He didn’t know how anything worked or what anything meant. The corridor echoed to the sound of sick machinery. He kept walking; he wasn’t sure where he was going.

  The corridor curved and sloped. The sounds of the machinery above drifted down like dust. He counted the numbers on the doors, the rungs on the rusting ladders that carried him down, and down, and with every step it was harder and harder to remember why he was there.

  The name of his God!

  Medicine for Ruth!

  Life for the city, death for Shay!

  What was the point? The Mountain was beyond his comprehension.

  The corridor ended in a door. It was marked cellar 222-A. The sight made Arjun unaccountably, uncontrollably angry. He remembered it!

  The door opened with a familiar groan.

  Cellar 222-A was an echoing void. The light was like moonlight, and ebbed and flowed in sinuous waves, and had no clear origin. The floor was concrete, ancient and moss-blotched.

  Now he remembered; he’d been here before. He’d seen it. Cellar 222-A! Here Shay kept his servants.

  Standing in massed ranks …

  In far distant and long-forgotten Red Barrow, the warlike Thanes had traditionally buried themselves with their favorite warriors, standing in stiff phalanxes around the bier, willingly poisoned, rotting in their own armor in the darkness. By the fifteenth generation of the Thanes the vaults beneath that unlucky part of the city held dead and silent legions. Arjun had broken into the vaults in search of a certain key that the Seventh Thane had worn around his bull-like neck … Now the uncountable unmoving ranks of Shay’s servants reminded him of the darkness below Red Barrow. Perhaps the Thanes had had some dim sense of how things were in Shay’s house, and built in imitation—the Thanes admired conquerors and thieves and cruel men.