Gears of the City (41 page)

“You said there was a Reclamation Project, yeah?”

“Yes. So the banner said.”

“Are there jobs there? Food? They’re rebuilding?”

“I suppose so.” He pointed the way. They walked together for a few blocks, then the women turned left and he turned right. They seemed strangely optimistic. They said
rebuilding
and
reclamation
like the names of Gods. At the crossroads they wished him good luck.

He wasn’t sure what to feel. The women had adapted to life after the War, but the ruins were still new to him—at every street there was a new scene of devastation, and it left him numb and shocked.

At least now he had a goal: to find the Low sisters. If they were still in the city to be found. If they weren’t dead, or on the Mountain, which amounted to much the same thing. Retrace his steps—Fosdyke, the Low sisters, the Beast, the Mountain, his God. Begin again.

The Low sisters! He imagined them dying in a hundred ways. Bombs; fire; falling masonry; looters; madmen. He got his hopes up and cautiously depressed them again. He imagined himself standing over Ruth’s body and being unable to say any suitable words. His nerves froze and he found it hard to keep walking, so he hummed that fragment of the Music that was all he had of his God, and soon enough his spirits lifted. In a little while he found himself, rather embarrassingly, daydreaming how he would find Ruth at the moment of some peril and heroically save her.

Far behind him there was a distant glare—the God of the rope factory? It flickered and burned and faded.

A
rjun walked north, through the South Bara Ruined Zone.

There were whole streets where the bombers had passed over harmlessly, but every building was empty anyway. There were bare blasted fields of broken brick and cratered earth. A few fortunate streets remained intact and inhabited and even well lit. They looked well guarded—he avoided them.

All afternoon he passed through a district of warehouses and storehouses in which every door had been smashed open, every crate and box looted. He stumbled over the rubble of old riots. There’d
been fighting, on a petty scale—squabbles between looters and security guards—and there were still uncollected bodies, half rotted in the doorways, drooping out of broken windows.

He passed a row of grey gasometers, all deflated, their domes close to the ground like mushrooms, their skeletal frames empty. He found them strangely upsetting.

There was a warehouse on 117th Street. It was painted on one wall, in huge red letters, carlyle syndicated NO. twelve. The other wall had been scythed clean away by bombs. When it started to rain Arjun sheltered in the building’s open guts. There he found a case of tinned beef that looters had apparently missed, and a jagged knife of broken piping to open the tins with. The meat was tasteless but not rotten, and the discovery delighted him. The tins were small enough to fit in a pocket; he took four. A fifth was dented, so he threw it away.

When he passed a family going south, he gave away a tin in exchange for information. There were four of them—two children, grubby and ginger-haired. The mother held the children nervously while the father spoke. A slight man, freckled, balding, in a dirty white shirt. He said, “This is the South Bara Ruined Zone.”

“I know.”

“Where are you going?”

“Fosdyke,” Arjun said. “Carnyx Street. I have friends there.”

“Don’t know how things are in Fosdyke. We came from Fleet Wark.”

“Fosdyke might be intact?”

The man shrugged. “Might be, might not be. Bara, here, you’ve seen what happened here. Fleet Wark got off pretty light. It’s a big city. Some places the airships pass over. Some places got fucked. You got an opener for this?”

They levered the tin open with Arjun’s bit of sharp pipe, and the man divided the food among his family.

Arjun asked, “Where are
you
going?”

“South. They say south of Bara there’s a district called Anchor, where they’ve got some local boss, they’ve set things up, got some of the engines running again, they’re Reclaiming things. Fleet Wark—things are falling apart in Fleet Wark.”

“But you said the bombers passed over?”

The man shook his head. “Where’ve you been? What’s wrong with you?”

“I was injured in the fighting, and my memory …”

The man put a hand on Arjun’s shoulder. “Don’t worry, mate. No one cares if you’re a ghost now or what you are or where you’re from. The worst happened already. We’re all ghosts now, that’s what people say. I’m a fucking deserter, so who cares what you are?”

One of the children started crying.

T
he man—his name was Fallon—told a long confusing story about the end of the world and life after the War. The child kept crying, and soon the other one started up, too, so Fallon and Arjun walked a little way away, and sat on a broken wall, and Arjun tried his best to follow Fallon’s account.

The War! It was too large and terrible to imagine.

One night, six months ago, there had been a terrible lightning storm over the Mountain. Thunder and driving rain had woken everyone for a hundred miles. Windows shattered, laundry whipped loose, cellars flooded. The next night, and for the rest of the week, it happened again. If you asked the foremen or the Know-Nothings what was happening you got a clip round the ear: the official story was that there were no storms. But in the night the Know-Nothings could be seen massing at their Chapterhouses and drilling in the backyards and readying as if for War …

“Strangest thing,” Fallon said. “Strangest thing—you don’t have a cigarette, do you? No?—was that sometimes it looked like it wasn’t really lightning. It looked like it was the Mountain shaking, sort of flickering, like a candle—and there was this light escaping. Like a broken furnace with the door banging open. Don’t tell the wife I said that, she’ll say it’s mad.”

One night the storms stopped. The Mountain sat there, still and dark. One week later the airships came.

At first they came every night, and they reduced whole districts to rubble. Now they came only occasionally, and their bombing was haphazard, casual, desultory. It seemed they’d made their point, they’d satisfied whatever urge for blood had driven them.

“What if,” Fallon had said. “What if the storms were the folk
on the Mountain fighting—what if they’re only people, too, like us, they have their own Combines and things at each other’s throats, and there was a fight, and whoever won decided it was time to get rid of us down here? Change of policy sort ofthing.”

Arjun had shrugged. “Perhaps.”

“It couldn’t be anything we did.”

“Perhaps not.”

In the first two weeks Holcroft and Patagan and Carlyle and Burgess and Frick and all the other Combines collapsed. It was unthinkable, but they simply ceased to exist. They were only ever paperwork, a shared delusion. The airships destroyed their offices, broke their supply chains, scared the workers away from what was left of the factories. “One good smack and they burst like balloons,” Fallon said. “There never was anything in ‘em but hot air.”

And it wasn’t just the physical shock of the bombers: the Combines devoured themselves from the inside. In the last days there were conflicting and nonsensical orders, shutdowns and lockouts, supply chains tangled, warehouses thrown open and others burned down, as if the owners had gone insane, as if some malign influence at the top of the chain of command were determined to drive the great corporate organisms mad. When no one took them seriously anymore they ceased to exist.

“Now instead we’ve got
Gods,”
Fallon said. “Like in the legends, like in the old days. You, in the city you’re from, were there Gods?”

“There were.”

“How did you not go fucking mad?”

“Hah. I’m not the best person to ask about that.”

At the end of the first week the Know-Nothings went to war. “I always used to hate them,” Fallon said. “But they did good back then. We didn’t know, you know—we didn’t know which side they’d be on. Us or the Mountain. We weren’t sure. But they did their best. It didn’t do any fucking good, mind you.”

Four hundred Leaguers met at the Omnibus Terminal in Fleet Wark North. Fallon had heard that another four hundred met at the Terminal in Rookgate. If their wives and kids were still alive they said good-bye to them there. They carried rifles and packs and wore grey-black camouflage, from emergency stores. They packed themselves on the back of buses and whipped the horses north.

“I know they were seen as far north as Kellham,” Fallon said. “Still going strong, singing a song. The streets were all fucked up there by bombs so they had to march. North. Never came back. The airships kept coming.”

“It’s always dangerous to approach the Mountain without knowing the path.”

Fallon looked at Arjun suspiciously. “There are legends of the Mountain everywhere,” Arjun said.

“Ah.” Fallon sighed. “It’s a big place, the city, isn’t it? I never spoke to one of you before. I never dared. I’m not brave—I’m a bloody deserter. We sent
more
men, you know. From all over. You don’t realize how big the city is until … You live in your own little parish with your own chapter or your own street or factory or whatever, you know, and you do your job, and you don’t know how much of a city there is out there, you don’t know what forces the men running it can bring to bear, when they get all the gears up and running. They gathered another four hundred men in the Seventeenth, I heard, and they lost them, too. And three hundred at Quay Street. They ran out of regular Leaguers, so they sent the Junior Auxiliary, and the Veterans’ Lodgers. They sent the cripples and the mental defectives. They recruited regular people, let them have guns—I mean by the third week all the old differences had broken down, Know-Nothing, civilian, who cares?
All in this together
, right? Like those old posters. I never went—wife and kids, you know? Sent ‘em up and they never came back. Hundreds.
Thousands.
They all went up by different routes but it doesn’t look like anyone ever found a safe one. By the end they weren’t sending up the big forces, they were just taking tiny little stabs at the Mountain: twenty men, ten men, five men, one man. Nothing.”

Fallon’s eyes were distant, haunted; he stared vaguely north. The Mountain was hidden behind tall buildings.

“I read a book once,” Fallon went on. “About all the battles in the bad old days of kings and princes and dukes and all that. Against the law but I found it and I read it anyway. In the old days they drew lines in the city and said, this is mine and this is yours, and sometimes they sent soldiers. There was a
line
where the soldiers fought. A
Front
, they called it; you could say, these streets, this park, here on the map, this is the Front. But not this time: there was no Front. Just shadows.”

“I’m sorry,” Arjun said. It was too much to take in; it was like
reading a historical account of some long-forgotten war. Was it his responsibility—had he somehow provoked the Mountain to this? It was impossible to imagine. “Is anything left?”

Fallon shrugged. “Like I said. Fleet Wark’s not done badly for itself. Bara
got fucked
, but south of Bara, in Anchor, they say they’ve got order, water, power, they’re Reclaiming things. That’s where the survivors are going. All packing together, leaving these Zones empty. Don’t know what happened to Fosdyke. The Combines are gone, and the Know-Nothings, but there are all these new things now. New ways of running things. Like the cults—the temples— the Orders and things. With all these new Gods, there’s a whole lot of churches. I don’t like them much myself, any of them. In Fleet Wark there’s a man called Berkman, calls himself the Mayor now, used to be an executive for Patagan—he runs Fleet Wark. I’ve heard in some places there’s Workers’ Councils, or little people like us running things—committees and things. I don’t trust them, frankly—I don’t trust people like me to run anything. The whole city’s a bloody mess.
Territories.”

Fallon laughed. “You know what they do—here in the Ruined Zone it’s all empty now, but if you go north you’ll see—they cut up old bedsheets and they
make flags.
Like in the old books, fucking flags, hung over every street. Green or red or blue. What’s that, painted on it, looks like a deformed cat? Right? You’re in Church of the Dog territory now, better say your prayers. Look, someone’s painted a green line on the road, well, you’re on the Seventy-seventh Street Committee’s turf, better not make trouble. Better pay your tolls, or your taxes. Who runs anything? Who bloody knows. None of it makes sense anymore.”

Fallon scratched his nose. His pale skin flushed. “Well, you know. Things are weird, now.”

“Why did you leave Fleet Wark, if Fleet Wark’s still intact?”

“The Hollows,” Fallon said. His voice dropped, chilled.

“The Hollows?”

“You don’t know that either? After the airships—at night— there’s still fighting, and I’m bloody sick of it. The Hollows …”

Fallon’s wife called out to him. “It’s getting dark. The kids are hungry. Get a move on.”

Fallon got stiffly to his feet. “Thanks, ghost. Steer clear of Fleet
Wark, that’s where the fighting is. Hope the Hollows aren’t attacking Fosdyke. Go back to your own city, if you can. I’m moving on.”

Arjun put a hand on the man’s skinny arm. “Wait,” he said. “I may be able to …” His voice trailed off. He wasn’t sure how to explain without saying too much. “I can take you somewhere far away from this. Your children …”

A look of mingled hope and fear and disgust passed over Fallon’s face. He shook his head. “Ghost tricks?
Your
city? No thanks. We’ll stay in ours. Things are bad enough as they are. Keep whatever tricks you’ve got to yourself, all right?”

He must have seen the look of hurt and confusion and rising guilt on Arjun’s face, because he softened, put a hand on Arjun’s shoulder, and said, “Anyway—down south, they’re Reclaiming. That’s work worth doing.”

L
ater, Arjun sat on the edge of a hill, chewing dry salty meat, wishing for water, watching night fall over the city.