Gears of the City (20 page)

I was not patient, or quiet. I have always lacked self-government.

They pursued me silently through white-walled halls. I have never been a strong man. I wheezed and sweated. I was close to despair, close to lying down and letting them work their corrections upon my flesh, which I could hardly deny was imperfect—when Shay appeared before me.

He was short, and thin, and strutted. That laughing young man—his hair long, and white, and bound in a vain tail, thick and greasy. Sheep’s wool snagged on a wire fence. His thin smile—his dreadful pride.

He came stalking past me, past where I knelt gasping. At first I took him for one of my pursuers, and I thought they had flanked me, and I hung my head and submitted to the stab of his instruments; but his long coat was black, not white, and bulged with his various devices.

I closed my eyes, and I heard him converse with my pursuers. The sound was like insects’ wings; like mathematics; like the scrape of knives on bone.

I did not hear them go. But one moment the corridor echoed and buzzed with their conversation, and the next all was silent. I lifted my head to see that strange young man close and button his coat; in its lining I saw the sharp glitter of certain
instruments.

“A fellow explorer,” he said, and helped me to my feet. He was short, a little plump—older than at first I had thought, but vigorous. The strong sure hands of a burglar or grave robber. “The Doctors of Marfelon are dangerous but they don’t mind doing business. Fresh knives! I once learned some very useful techniques from them. I bought you, too, but don’t feel obligated to me.”

I disliked his sneer; I mistrusted him.

A golden-black monkey ran around his feet. A singed and scarred little thing. Extraordinary claws clattered on the tiled floor. It had uncommonly intelligent red eyes and it seemed to
whisper.
He picked it up as he had me, as if it were weightless, as if it were a toy; and all together we went down the hall.

See? This, here, in the grass, is another of his toys; a little piece of devilish circuitry. Hah—
that’s
a word I was not born to know! If you step on it it will burn off your foot. You, too, are a very determined explorer to have come through my garden unharmed.

W
e walked together, just as you and I are walking.

Shay was a vigorous man; a man of animal spirits. The monkey curled round his shoulder and burdened him not at all. I scurried to keep pace with him.

He led me on a path through doors I’d hardly noticed, each of
which opened to his touch, up ladders and down stairs and through tunnels in between walls, and he led me out into the fresh night air.

No delight in this life has ever compared to those first breaths of cold air.

“That,” Shay told me, “is the last free thing I will do for you.”

He pointed out over the city. From where we stood—atop the Rose’s topmost tower—I could see the Mountain, in the far north, squatting over the horizon like a beast over its felled prey. That was where he pointed.

“Come work for me,” he said. “I’ve been watching you,” he said. “I like your style, but you’re going nowhere the way you’re going.”

A barbaric and insolent manner of speech!

“You’re nowhere near strong enough,” he said, “for what’s under the Rose. Not alone.”

He gave me to understand that he would show me the secret ways under and behind the city, if I would be his servant, his admiring servant. “It’s a lonely business I’m in,” he said. “There’s a lot of lonely years ahead of me. I like the way you keep house, Brace-Bel. Come work for me.”

He wanted me, in other words, for his majordomo, his butler; his pander; as they say here, his
pimp.
He maintained a number of properties, here and there, about the city, and they were in disrepair; and perhaps he was lonely. I would serve him, and in return he would show me how to master those properties of the city that had so nearly devoured me. He would show me the Mountain. Of course, he said nothing in so many words. He made
implications
, and smiled his teasing smile. I told him to go to Hell! Brace-Bel is no man’s servant, except in play. I would find my way to the other side by my own methods or not at all. It would be
my
triumph; I would not haggle for it. I said other proud foolish things.

He simply shrugged. “If you change your mind,” he said, “you know my name.” He lit a cigarette, and he stepped behind a chimney.

I followed, of course. The smoke lingered; he had vanished.

Don’t ask how I got down from the tower. Don’t ask. I had no fear of heights before that night; now I shudder to climb the stairs.

I returned to my home. At the time I lived in Faugere; you could see the lights of the Arcades from my library windows, a constant temptation away from reading and toward drink and laughter, just as I liked it. I kept few servants. Respectable servants
would not work for the notorious Brace-Bel. My butler was a man I met in gaol, who once strangled his wife. Enormous
hands;
like a brace of squid. He welcomed me home; my servants were used to my long absences and sudden returns. I slept in silk sheets. I sent Hands to market to buy coffee and tobacco.

In the morning I went to visit my colleagues of the Atlas. I’d seen wondrous things; I wished to discuss them. I feared, I think, that I might forget what I’d seen if I did not share it. It might vanish like a dream.
Holbach
, I thought: if a thing’s shared with him it
cannot
be imaginary; it must be very much a part of the workaday world. He will publish the wonder in the learned journals and pin it like a butterfly to the stuff of the real. Good old dull Holbach. But I found his house deserted.

I made inquiries.

Does none of this refresh your recollection?

Holbach had been arrested, I learned, and held in the Iron Rose. There were rumors that he had escaped and fled north. The rest of our colleagues had been arrested, also, on the orders of the Countess Ilona, or forced into hiding. Liancourt the playwright they had
beheaded.
That silly musical play had got him into trouble. The Atlas was constantly in trouble, of course, with censors or priests or angry mobs, because this city has always feared free thought; still, this had the air of finality. Maine had returned from exile and was dead, perhaps poisoned. There were riots. There were rumors that the whole ugly business was the scheme of some rival of the Countess—Red Barrow, perhaps, or the Parliament, or Mensonge, or Cimenti. I don’t know. I hoped you might … ? No?

That was far from the worst of it.

I questioned further. In those days in the city there were subtle webs of confidence and trust between the highest and the lowest people. Holbach prostituted his science to the Countess, and was— before she turned on him, that dangerous woman—in her highest councils. I corresponded with Holbach on matters theological. My investigations and my pleasures required the services of panders and whores, and I was often seen in vile places. In the company of whores there were men and women who served the Countess as spies and agents—the wheel spun, the heart pumped, and the blood circulated. Now the city is like a dead thing, stiff and silent and cold.

I questioned further, in vile places. It seemed my own escape from the Rose had not been noticed, for there had been a general riot at the Rose and indeed over all of the Countess’s districts, and elsewhere. But my association with the Atlas was well known, and I feared the Countess’s men might be looking for me. I adopted an assumed name, like a spy in my own city. And I skulked, and I
listened.

Rumors swirled around the Atlas like carrion-crows. Those men and women of the Atlas who’d not been beheaded, it seemed, were all dead. Maine first, then others. In the city in those weeks there was a plague, plague wrestled with riot to see who should prey on the city’s poor flesh. A choking foul blackness of the lungs. It rose from the rivers and from dark places. Rumor had it that the plague had begun with Maine’s death, and that it pursued all those who’d had dealings with him, or the Atlas. I snorted. I was skeptical.
I will not pay for these fancies
, I said, and sometimes there was an
altercation
, and then there was one more drinking-establishment in the city where Brace-Bel was not welcome!
Fancies
—for it was
always
the case, when there was sickness, that some preacher or other would blame the makers of plays or the writers of forbidden books, and the mob was always eager to believe them.

Yet on further investigation it appeared that the mob was quite correct.

I counted the dead. Lauterbach, dry dull economist; Vannon, the etymologist; Marlowe, one of our pet radicals, theorist of revolution; Aumont, the architect; Helvensi, armchair general, who wrote on horsemanship and siege-engines and the sniper-rifle; credulous Bayley, who offered us his theories on the werewolf; Lycian, Dumont, Gilfoyle, hardened explorers, carriers of theodolites, astrolabe, and pistol; too many, too many others, all dead of the plague. It was a bad plague but it did not strike the common folk near so bad as it struck those of us of wit and learning.

There was something haunting the streets in those days. A blackness in the fog. A stink in the gutters. Rumor had it that some God had gone mad.
Beware the water
, people said.
Do not go out of doors. The River-God is hungry.

In my house, now, the River-God is played by a young man named Marley. It frightens me terribly to touch him, but I steel myself to it. The drugs help.

I
felt
it. I felt it pursuing me.

A shiver passes across your face, Arjun. I wonder if you are aware how eloquently your face speaks. Your voice is silent, but your body remembers, and shudders.

You
remember
this.

Once, as I left a whorehouse on Baruch Street, I felt something brush against my face. The next morning I had to ply rotten teeth from that side of my jaw.

When I returned to Baruch Street, the whorehouse had been torched. The plague, they said, had come in the night.

I did not dare attempt to charter passage from Ararat by boat; the docks were always watched by spies, and besides the plague was worst by the water. Instead I fled west. The shadow followed at my heels. I felt it in my dreams. When I woke my sweat stank. Why did it want me? I do not know. Perhaps my daring explorations in blasphemy and perversity had finally angered something more …
ultimate
than the censors and priests who had formerly been my tormentors. Terror mingled sweatily with pride. I had been marked for persecution by the Gods themselves!

For a while I hid in the highest bolt-hole I could find—on the roof of a condemned hotel, among pigeon-roosts. One day I returned from scavenging for scraps to find all the pigeons dead.

No place in the city was safe.

What, then, if I went
beyond the
city?

If you change your mind
, Shay had said,
you know my name.

I called out to him—feeling foolish—as if he were a pantomime devil. He did not appear.

I paid for an advertisement to be placed in the paper. I checked the post-office box but he never responded.

I painted his name on the wall of my hiding place. I spelled it out in candles on my roof. Nothing.

I went into the alley with hammer and chisel and carved it on the wall. S—H—A—Y. Acting on some unclear instinct I appended my name, and the date.

That night Shay came to me.

He wore a grey coat. His head was shaved, a knob of ash-white stubble. Was he older, or younger? He was thinner. I could hardly doubt that he was the same man—not with those cold eyes.

“I was out for a walk,” he said. “A hundred years tomorrow, when what did I see? Under all that ivy. All that graffiti. My own name, and yours. I keep a close eye on my name. Changed your mind, eh?”

He saw my desperation; my terror amused him.

I remember this because it was strange. “The old fool’s gone and let one of his creatures loose,” he said. “This part of the city’s done for. They should put yellow tape round it and call it condemned.”

“So come with me,” he said. “But I would have given you cushy duty last time. Now you won’t get off that easy. I want you with me when I go for the Mountain. You can carry my bags.”

I threw myself on the floor. I kissed his feet. I did not balk when he blindfolded me.

H
ave you noticed how beautiful my house is at night? How lovely my garden?

Shay did not give me those. I earned them with my own wits and charm, and with the devices Shay left behind. I have for instance a die that comes up one, or six, or what-have-you, just as I will it; hold the dots in your mind’s eye and the little thing eagerly jumps to your bidding. A profitable trick. There are others greater than that.

I will always be rich. If I were poor I would kill myself. The city’s mirrors are clouded; its scribes are drunk; in our various translations across time and place the fine details of our selves may undergo change and transformation. Nevertheless our essence persists. It is of Brace-Bel’s essence that he be a rich man. Just as it is apparently of your essence that you be poor, and lost, and confused. My condolences. But we all have something for which to reproach our creators. I for instance have gout. Moreover I have spent seven of every ten years of my manhood in chains.

Shay brought me here. I mean to this time, this place, not to this house. Shay made his home in this Age some way to the north. In an empty warehouse. Do not go looking for it. I stripped it bare of wonders when I quit his service.

I do not recall the route between our Age and this. I was blindfolded. He led me through alleys, up and down stairs. I heard doors
unlock. For a time I thought we were pursued, but he only laughed, and the footsteps receded. If I knew the way I would have followed it back long ago.

We lived in the warehouse. Shay taught me the use of his devices. Amulets. Keys to surprising locks. Cloaks. Charms of concealment and devices of augury. Ah, what
didn’t
he have? What
hadn’t
he collected on his travels? He made machines to suit his whims out of the birds of the air and the rats and lizards of the sewers. Twisted and unhappy things that had been burdened by surgery with something very much like the power of speech. I am a cruel man and a perverse man, but those poor creatures filled me with pity and loathing.
I have laboratories
, Shay said, as if that explained everything. He laughed and called me a very provincial coward and hypocrite. That clawed monkey which he claimed to have purchased in a market in the Under-City of a far-off time guarded our door and was unable to close its poor red eyes. It was scaled in places, part lizard.