Gears of the City (13 page)

A
t midnight the omnibus left Arjun at its terminus. The guards shooed the last passengers out through the gates and they staggered away. Those with no homes to go to, and those too drunk to find them, and Arjun, climbed the railings and slept in the graveyard behind the depot.

He woke to shouting. It took him a moment to identify the source of the noise; it was coming from the trees, from the rooftops, from little ugly forms perched along the spikes of the railings. The birds.
Thunders.
Dozens of evil bright eyes caught the dawn’s red light. They honked and hooted, barking and boasting in their nearly human voices.

Four of them flapped their way down among the homeless men. Their flight was ungainly, but their movements were rapid. They closed in on an old man who wore grey rags and a bright red scarf. Three of them tugged at the scarf with beaks and claws, while the fourth—a leader?—hovered close to the man’s face, howling its arrogant greed.

The other sleepers, woken, scuttled away, clutching their possessions. One man had carried a bottle; its green glass was bright enough to attract the birds, and they pecked at his heels and shoulders.

Arjun swung his bag at the birds and knocked the ringleader to the dirt, where the scarf’s owner quickly stamped it dead. The other birds hopped back a pace and hung their grey heads nervously.

Four more landed. With their numbers swollen the birds regained their courage, puffed out their chests, shouted a challenge, hopped in closer.

“I
remember
you.” Arjun crouched in front of them.

The old man grabbed his scarf and ran for it.

The creatures paused, twitching their heads.

They were not quite birds, not quite natural. They were both more and less than birds.

“You used to be something else.”

They shouted nonsense-word curses and flapped their wings.

“In a different place you were different things. I don’t think I ever liked you greatly but you were
better
things.”

They took tiny fluttering steps forward, and tiny steps back. They seemed nervous to approach.

“Do you remember any other speech? Do you have names?”

They’d fallen silent and grave, solemn the way children could sometimes be, like a little grey choir.

Arjun came slowly closer.

“Everything’s changed. Do you remember?”

They came fluttering suddenly at his head, shrieking and screaming in their booming flat voices. He flailed them away. They vanished into the night sky behind him.

A
rjun spent the next morning lost in monotonous identical streets, residential blocks, red-brick, grey-brick, blank windows, roofs high enough to darken the narrow street below but low enough to seem humble and cramped. He asked for directions and received conflicting answers. It was past noon before he found an open lot from which he could see the distant rise of Barking Hill, beautiful and stately—that soft haze on its skyline was not smoke, it was
trees.
It was midafternoon when he reached its foot, where the streets narrowed and climbed sharply.

There was a checkpoint in the street.

Four men stood, hands in pockets of long brown coats, around a small wooden table in the middle of the street. A fifth man sat at the table, leaning back in his chair, drumming his fingers idly.

They looked up at Arjun as they saw him come close. He nodded and turned briskly away down a side street.

He followed around the Hill’s sprawling perimeter. Every street that turned inward—and there were few of them, as the Hill was ringed around protectively with fenced lots and solid flat-blocks— had a similar checkpoint. Sometimes more men, sometimes fewer.

On a street numbered
eleven
he saw three men in worker’s overalls pass; the men at the checkpoint sprung to attention and questioned them thoroughly.

On a street numbered
thirty-three
he saw a black motorcar, sleek and expensive, precious and rare, pull through with a wave and a nod.

Police? Know-Nothings? Some other gang, local to this part of the city? Hired security for the mansions on the Hill? Arjun didn’t dare get close enough to the checkpoints to find out. They slouched and smoked and were unmilitary in their bearing, but they seemed alert, suspicious.

Arjun had had some
trick
, he knew, some
art;
he could almost remember it. Once he’d known how to pass all barricades, all walls, all doors. The knowledge itched at the back of his mind. Scattered and buried fragments. He turned over the dust of his memories with an archeologist’s patient care.

A name, a shard of meaning.
Shay!
The back of Shay’s grizzled, white-haired head retreating through a closing door, and Arjun following, desperate not to lose him in the unraveling maze of the city …

Who
was
Shay?

The narrow street numbered
thirty-three
surrounded Arjun with steep ranks of doors, marching up the hill.

On a whim he darted to the nearest door and tugged at its handle. It remained obstinately locked.

It was a trick of the
will
… A matter of
seeing.
Hearing?

“Oi! What do you think you’re doing?”

… and they were advancing down the street, two men closing aggressively in while the rest waited around the table where their captain sat. There was a tone of almost comical outrage in their voices, as if they simply could not
believe
Arjun’s effrontery.

Arjun took a step back and they sped up, started running, boots pounding down the hill. He considered fleeing, but they had guns, and the street was long and straight and offered no hiding places. He raised his hands.

T
hey dragged him back to the checkpoint.

The man lounging at the table looked him up and down with disgust. He was short, and fat, and dark-skinned, and past middle age. His hair was grey-white and grizzled.

His colleagues, who surrounded Arjun, some glaring, some smirking, were all taller and younger, and most were shaven-headed. They were smart; two of them wore their collars turned up, one wore his short hair oiled and slick, and all of them had shiny, shiny boots.

The man at the desk seemed to have passed beyond such things; he wore his rumpled black suit with an air of elegant, exhausted impatience. His tie was loose. He tapped his pen on the desk and drawled, “Where do you work?”

“Where I can, sir. I have no regular employment.”

A pile of papers on the desk was weighted down with a gun. The man toyed with it as he spoke.

“Where are you from?”

“Northeast of here, sir. Carnyx Street, in Fosdyke.”

“Carnyx? Never heard of it. Fosdyke’s a shit-hole. Let’s see your papers.”

“I have no papers,” Arjun admitted.

“Big surprise. What’s your business here?”

“I have a message for a man on the Hill. May I pass?”

“No, you may not.”

“You’re policemen?”

“Never you mind what we are.”

“Know-Nothings?”

“That’s the Civic League to you. It has a proper name. Only malcontents call us what you just said. Who’s been talking to you about Know-Nothings?”

“My apologies. The Civic League, of course.”

“What man who lives on the Hill?”

“I would rather not say.”

“Who cares what you want? What man on the Hill?”

“A Mr. Brace-Bel.”

The man at the table smirked. The men around him nodded grimly; they seemed oddly nervous.

The man at the table said, “You’re one
of his.”

“I am not one of his anything, sir. I have a message. I take work where I can find it and I was well paid to carry this message.” Arjun opened his wallet. “See, sir, there’s money to spare on this job.” He left it hanging suggestively open.

The man at the table rolled his eyes. “Put that away.”

Arjun flushed. “Of course.”

“Let’s hear the message.”

“I can’t, sir. I’m sworn to secrecy.”

“That fucking pervert. Brace-Bel. We’re very interested in him.” The men around the table nodded again, closing in. “What’s he up to, then?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“He doesn’t belong here. He’s not natural.” The man tilted his chair back. “You say
Know-Nothings.
People mean it like a curse,
but it’s not. Do you know what the League means? It’s not about this job, son. It’s not about guarding rich men’s houses, or factories, or breaking strikes, or kicking in heads. Do you think we like that? Of course not; it’s just a job. Everyone has to make compromises. The real work we do—it’s about things men aren’t supposed to know. Things we’re supposed to forget. The bad old days when the city was haunted. The evil things they do up on the Mountain. All those ghosts like you who come down and say there’s a War coming, and it’s going to be bad.
We Know Nothing Of It.
See?”

Entirely confused, Arjun said, “Certainly, sir.”

“Maury
, son. Call me Inspector. I know what you are.”

“I’m a messenger, Inspector.”

“Somehow that ghost Brace-Bel comes wandering into town. Normally when ghosts come down off the Mountain, or they slip in through the cracks in the city, we pick ‘em up off the street and we
dispose
‘em. Like stray cats. Lost things. And the bosses, the council-men, they tell us,
good job.
Ghosts upset people; you’re bad for business. But this one’s different. This one’s got money, and he’s made powerful friends. How’d he do that, eh? Fucked if I know. He’s a clever one. He’s got tricks and devices, uncanny stuff. He’s doing all kinds of black magic up there. But we’re not allowed to touch him. We’re not even allowed to get close to him. What are we going to do about that?”

“I don’t know, Inspector.”

“I’ll tell you what we’re
not
going to do. We’re not going to let you see him. Last thing we need is you ghosts forming conspiracies against us.”

“I am from Fosdyke, Inspector, born and raised …”

“Don’t waste my time.”

“… very well.”

“What should we do with you?”

“I have no love for Brace-Bel. Let me pass, let me see him, and I’ll come back to you; I’ll tell you what I saw.”

“Aren’t you a slippery one? You wait here. Colfax!” One of the men nodded at the sound of his name. “Go let the Lodge know what we’ve got here.”

Colfax set off at a lumbering jog.

Maury continued staring Arjun up and down.

Arjun shrugged. His legs were nervous and aching so he sat down in the street.

A brief flurry of rain came and went.

A little later a convoy of three horse-drawn delivery carts came, loaded with barrels of beer and vegetables. The drivers studiously avoided eye contact with Arjun while Maury checked their papers. Then they went on up the Hill, the horses straining at the steep incline and the barrels shaking and sloshing with every slow step.

M
aury’s manner was not unfriendly, now that he’d decided to his full satisfaction who and what Arjun was. He even offered Arjun a cigarette, and shrugged and smiled when it was refused: “Don’t they do this where you’re from, ghost?”

“I don’t really recall.”

“Huh. Of course you don’t.”

They chatted. Though it seemed Maury intended murder, there wasn’t much apparent malice in it; but then, in Maury’s eyes, if Arjun understood the drift of the man’s conversation, Arjun was not so much a person as a thing; or not even a thing, but an illusion or reflection of a thing; an infection of unreality in the solid world.

Colfax came back and whispered in Maury’s ear. Maury nodded. No action was taken.

Arjun said, “There are better places in the city than this, Inspector. There are places where no one need work, where everyone lives a life of leisure and ease. Machines serve them. There are places where men have mastered flight.” Was that true? Arjun wasn’t sure; he hoped only to pique Maury’s interest. “There are places where music plays from every streetlamp and paving stone. There are places where Gods descend among the crowds. If it’s sex or money that interests you there are places where …”

There was an ugly rash on the side of Maury’s bulbous nose. All Maury’s attention went to scratching it.

Maury didn’t listen, but he was quite happy to talk. “Who are the Know-Nothings?” Arjun asked. “I mean the Civic League. I admit it. This is not my city. Who are you?” Maury lit up another cigarette and answered, at length, cheerily, with a long and incomprehensible history and geography of Chapters and Lodges and
Orders; a story of beatings and backroom deals; a slow erratic rise from gang to secret society to mob to hired thugs to party to unofficial to semiofficial police force. Maury claimed to be a person of some importance in the movement, more importance than Arjun thought likely, given his current posting. Perhaps it hardly mattered what lies Maury told to someone who was not real. And as Maury talked and kept talking, never looking at Arjun, drumming his fingers on the table—the day-to-day work of Lodge 32A, which was Maury’s Lodge, the declining quality of new recruits,
et cetera
— Arjun thought:
no, there is hostility in it.
Maury talked as if he thought that by affirming the minutiae and the tedium of his city, his
real
city, he could drive the alien and impossible out of it; he could render Arjun silent and invisible.

Arjun had to repeat his question twice before Maury heard it: “Do you serve the Mountain?”

“What?”

“Or fight it? Who runs this city?”

“None of your business.”

“If war comes, what side are the Know-Nothings on?”

“Who’s been talking to you about war?”

“No one important.”

“Then keep your mouth shut.”

Maury chatted to Colfax about some colleague’s failing marriage; they agreed that it was no big surprise.

“In the Fosdyke Museum you keep a Beast,” Arjun said. “An uncanny creature, from another Age of the city. It should have died long ago. What is it? Why do you keep it?”

Maury stopped smiling. “What
beasti”

“A lizard, a gigantic lizard. I don’t know what it is. It talks. Why do you keep it?”