Gears of the City (40 page)

“Nothing.”

“What do you mean,
mei
What have you been telling Turnbull?”

S
t. Loup and Turnbull turned on each other with satisfying inevitability. They were paranoids, obsessives; cunning but predictable. Having never been able to work out which thug belonged to which man, Arjun wasn’t entirely sure who would strike the first blow, but otherwise it happened just as quickly and surely as he had expected. As St. Loup was questioning him one morning Arjun stood, shook his head, and said: “That’s enough. All right. All right. I’ll help you. Better you than Turnbull. I’ll tell you what I saw on the Mountain …”

And on that cue the thug dressed as a janitor lunged with a knife for the thug dressed in a cheap suit; but cheap-suit was ready, and took the blade glancingly on his arm and grappled for the other man’s throat, and the two of them went down. Presumably then the janitor was Turnbull’s man, and he had been instructed to act quickly in the event that Arjun seemed about to let valuable information slip to St. Loup. Maybe it was the other way around. Not that it mattered. St. Loup turned to look at the wrestling men on the floor, then turned back, and Arjun hit him in the head with a telephone, breaking his sunglasses and bloodying his golden curls, and took the key from his hand.

Arjun was out into the corridor moments later, and even as
Turnbull emerged from the adjoining suite and blinked in shock and put his spectacles on and fumbled for his gun, the elevator doors were already closing behind him.

I
t was easy to move away from that place, out into the Meta-context. He had his hearing again and the subtle keys and paths through the city’s music were audible to him again. He found a clothes-store playing cheerful repetitive muzak and stepped through the dressing-room doors onto a distant Square full of brass bands and equestrian statues. If Turnbull and St. Loup were following him, he saw no sign of them. With a bit of luck they’d decided to kill each other instead. From the Square he went forward, and forward again, until he found a music he recognized—a funeral march down a narrow wooden street—and from there he worked his way forward again, toward Ruth Low’s city.

It
was
hard to find his way back. St. Loup hadn’t been lying about that. There were fewer and fewer doors as he came closer. There were dead ends, and obstructions, and paths that curled back on themselves. He probed and pushed for hours, maybe days, insofar as days meant anything where he was. Frustrated, he sat on a stone bench by the banks of a river full of gliding swans and striking phosphorescent jellyfish, and considered giving up. He sat there long enough for more than one passerby to throw him some change.

Was what St. Loup said about the war true? What had happened to the city? What had happened to Ruth, and Marta, and Ivy?

If he found a way through, would he ever be able to come back?

Was the way to his God closed to him now?

The prudent thing to do would be to wait, to prepare, to plan and research and gather his forces. But he never was prudent.

One of the swans came too close to a jellyfish. There was a soft splash. The bird’s long neck went limp and it turned over slowly in the water like a sinking ship.

Arjun gathered the small change off the ground and bought himself a sandwich. He kept looking for a way through.

The Ruined Zone-Searchlights-
The Order of the Rope Factory-
The New Territories-Captured

Arjun

N
O building Stood
unbroken anywhere in sight. He stood on an open waste of shattered concrete and brick—residential flat-blocks blown open by bombs. All this had happened days, maybe weeks ago—the rubble was cold. The ground was carpeted with dust and ash and plaster. Underfoot were dented pots and pans, twisted bedframes, torn sheets fluttering ghostlike and grey. Strange metallic growths sprouted, twisted and molten—exploded bombs? Beggars and blank-eyed children sat in the rubble. Collapsed chimneys lay across the edge of the Square like storm-felled trees.

What had happened to the city?

If there had been a war, as St. Loup had said, it was over now. This was the aftermath of war. This was defeat.

T
his wasn’t Fosdyke—thank the Gods for small mercies. It was the closest place Arjun had been able to find to Fosdyke, somewhere off to the south. He was unsure of the date. It was probably weeks, at least, since the events at the Museum. It felt like a hundred years. Long enough for a civilization to fall to ruin.

There was a kind of market nearby, in a vacant lot. Men at work.
Someone had hung a great red banner over it: SOUTH bara district RUINED ZONE reclamation project. What had been homes and factories were now waste-ground, what had once been empty ground was now a center of activity. Armed men stood on watch at the corner, on the broken rooftops. There were refugee tents, and a smell of cabbage, canned beef, bad beer. Arjun went the other way. He’d had enough of armed men for the time being.

I
t was night before he knew it. The sun set behind the Mountain, and for a few minutes that dark mass was limned in fire, like the light creeping around the edge of a locked door. The clouds around the Mountain’s peak seemed to blaze. Then the city was plunged into moonlight. The sky was full of sullen black clouds; the Mountain was only an absence of stars.

Something rose from the Mountain and approached.

At first they were specks, and Arjun thought perhaps they were clouds. Then, adjusting his sense of perspective, he thought they were birds—their progress was too rapid and too purposeful to be clouds. There were at least a dozen of them. As they approached the city they grew farther apart from each other, so that it seemed that they were setting out on divergent courses, like the spokes of a wheel, like the thorns of a crown. If that were the case, some of them must have been very far away, and therefore very large; not birds, then. Dragons, or Rocs, or some other exotic creature from remote Ages of the city?

Some of them were coming closer and he began to make out their shape; something rounded and immense that made him think of whales.

The slow outward radiation continued. Then all of the dark shapes at once began to sparkle like stars.

As the nearest shapes came closer, Arjun realized that there was a column of light depending from each of them, flickering down on the ruins below.
Searchlights.
He began to get nervous.

The first explosion sounded a couple of miles away. There was a flash of red flame and a distant
thump.
In what seemed the same instant the searchlight passed over his little corner of the ruins and everything in the world was suddenly blindingly bright like bleached bone. He threw himself to the ground and covered his
head, but the light passed on. There was an explosion nearby and the sound of a building sliding into wreckage, but Arjun was untouched.

As the shape in the sky passed he saw it: an
airship.

An airship of unfamiliar design. He recalled the
Thunderer
, and indeed the airships of another half-dozen eras: all of them had been beautiful things, winged or sailed in one way or another, elegantly curved, brightly painted. Everywhere else in the city, flying things were
sacred
things. But these were almost willfully ugly—soulless and functional. A long grey balloon like a blunted or spent bullet, from which something like a cage hung.

Here and there a crackle of distant gunfire and flashes answered the airships. They drifted on implacably. Serene, untouchable, uncaring.

After a while it was over. The airships turned back, closing in like the fingers of a fist. Their lights went out and they vanished into the shadows of the Mountain.

In all his years wandering the city Arjun had never seen anything like it. The Mountain was always there in the far distance; he’d never seen it
reach out…
He felt violated. It was unnatural. The fact of
contact
scared him worse than the bombs. What had they done?

Had Ivy—had Ruth, too, perhaps, and the Beast—had they gone onto the Mountain? Had they caused this, somehow—had they provoked the Mountain into reaction? Or, worse, were these airships under Ivy’s command, or the Beast’s? Were they capable of this?

Was this his fault?

But under the shock and the sick crawling beginnings of terror and guilt there was a part of him that was excited. If the Mountain had reached out to touch the city then it was
wounded.
No longer aloof, unattainable. They’d opened a pass in its borders. Through every change in the city, every aching turn of its gears, he came a little closer to its heart.

I
n the morning Arjun met a group of women who lived in what was left of a rope factory. They came out of their hiding places as he passed to tell him to
move along, fuck off, their husbands were coming
back soon and they’d kill him if they caught him.
They said,
whether you’re Night Watch or Lamplighters you can fuck off either way.
When he asked them who sent the airships, they decided he was a harmless fool, took pity on him, shared some water with him, and a tin of pink unpleasant meat paste.

“The Mountain,” they said. “The airships come from the Mountain. Where have you been all this time?”

“Why?”

“Why? Who knows. There’s a War on. It finally came.”

“Who rules the Mountain?”

They shrugged. He asked them if they knew the name Shay, and they shrugged again. They didn’t know much.

He asked them what the South Bara Ruined Zone was. They said, “Is that what they’re calling us now?” He asked them about the Reclamation Project and they laughed bitterly. They hadn’t been outside their factory much in the last few weeks.

They admitted that their husbands were mostly dead. A bomb had hit the shed where the men worked. The survivors had joined up with the Know-Nothings to go off to the Front. Where were they now? None of the women knew.

He was too full of questions—where to begin?

He ate gratefully. They hovered over him, watching him closely. “I have no news of the outside world,” he admitted. “Perhaps I was hurt in the fighting,” he lied. “I have lost much of my memory.”

He asked them how long the War had been going on. They looked at each other; about three, four months since the airships first came? It was hard to keep track of time—now that the Combines were gone, and the police, and there were no shifts, no whistles and bells, no orders.

Who was winning? They didn’t know.

How had they survived? They glanced at each other, smiled, and said, “Our God keeps us safe.”

“Your God?”

They looked at him pityingly.

“The Gods have returned?” Another transformation in the city! “Do you mean … Have you
seen
this God?”

“What do you think? Do you think we’ve gone mad?” If he thought they were just a bunch of scared women going mad in the
ruins, they said, he had another think coming: they were an
Order.
They’d seen God, walking down the streets on feet of fire, head wreathed in flames, body pouring smoke like a fabulous engine. Right in the street out the back of the factory! (Where previously there had been a rubbish heap.) The rope factory ruins were His temple.

They got excited, talking about it. They were unwashed and dirty-faced and hungry. Some of them had burns on their raw and bony hands; had they tried to touch their new God?

There were other Gods in the city now, they said, but He was the best. Some of them were just lights. Some were just shadows. A lot of them were just noises. He was Fire—who better to keep them safe from bombs? He was
theirs.

The women made Arjun nervous. They had a feverish zeal. They were new to the business of Gods.

“You can stay awhile,” they said. “Sometimes He comes at night.”

“I’m sure it’s a wonderful God. It sounds magnificent. I congratulate you on your good fortune. But I have to move on. I’ve wasted too much time already. I had …” He realized that he had nowhere to go. Another path to the Mountain had failed. Did he have the strength to start again? “I had friends here, before the War,” he said. “In a place called Carnyx Street. Do you know it?”

The women looked at each other, unsure. One of the older ones said, “In Fosdyke, right? Patagan and Holcroft used to own things up there—before the War.”

“Yes!” He leaned forward, eager, relieved. Until then, he realized, he’d not been entirely sure he was in the same city as the one where he’d met Ruth, and Brace-Bel, and Ivy, and the Beast; but if there was a Carynx Street here, and a Holcroft and the rest, then this was still the same place; only time had passed. What had happened?

What if Ruth was dead?

“How do I get there from here? North or south? I have to find them.”

They told him,
north
—
northeast.
He thanked them and moved on.

Five minutes and a few ruined blocks away from the rope factory, he noticed three of the younger women following him. He stopped to let them catch up.