Gears of the City (51 page)

Suddenly the Beast slipped through the flap and outside. It stalked across the quarry, and up and around the broad path out of the quarry’s depths.

It talked as it went. Ruth, clutching a scarlet sheet around her shoulders to ward off the cold, followed.

…
our endless struggles. Our schemes and murders. What did we fight over? What else could it be? The Mountain.

What is the Mountain?

I have never seen it. I do not precisely know. Secrets upon secrets.

It is not a Mountain. That is a veil it wears.

It exists in every part of the city, in every Age. An anchor that holds the sea together. Sometimes it is close, more often it is far, far away. Here it is very close. Here, we are always on its threshold. Kings have given up their kingdoms just to come this close.

It has an unusual relationship to time. Shay rules it now, having stolen it, and it has always been the case that Shay rules it.

It is a kind of machine. But perhaps I only say that because I am a kind of machine, and that is how things seem to me.

Those who built the city made it. I don’t mean the vague energies your kind calls Gods. Nor the pioneers and first fathers and stout burghers who laid down the foundation-stones and built bridges over the river and made pompous statues of themselves. I mean those who, from the outside of things, laid down the conditions for the city’s impossible flourishing.

I have no names for them. Call them the Builders; everything is defined by its function. I like to think they made the city as a kind of prison, but perhaps I only say that because I have spent so long in cages.

The energies of the Mountain spin out time and distance. The Mountain is the engine of creation. The Gods are its fuel, its energies, its agents. Its hands and its knives and its fire, to cut and burn and
shape the city. On the Gears of the Mountain the city spins. He who rules the Mountain rules everything below it.

We were not meant to approach it. The Builders of the city created defenses around it. They locked us out. Approach the Mountain’s slopes: the streets become a maze. Shadows fall. Memory and awareness falter. The way is trapped. I have never dared come any closer than this
—
my own existence is tenuous enough already.

The first makers set the machine into motion, spinning out time and possibilities. How many thousands of years ago? What impossible energies poured through the Mountain? Vast and out of control, the piling up beyond reason of time and complexity, the impossible weight, always growing, the awareness of which burdens everything we do. No wonder in these last days the Mountain has gone dark.

The Builders set it into motion, then they left us alone. Perhaps we disgusted them. Perhaps they will return for us when our sentence is up.

For millennia the Mountain existed alone, working according to its own mysterious design. Then Shay stole it.

Not my master
—
oh, not my master! My master was only a second-rate shadow. I believe the Shay who fought through to the Mountain was the same who first fought his way free of the routines of ordinary life, and learned to walk in the city behind the city. Not that it matters which it was, in the end.

Shay stole the Mountain. He grew old there. What does he do with it? Nothing. With the Mountain he could do anything. The airships are the least of the tricks he can work with it. Yes, of course the airships are his
—
a cheap nasty trick
—
pay attention. He could make the city a paradise
—
a thousand different paradises. With the Mountain, the Gods are at his beck and call
—
he could light every street with them. He could fill every moment with meaning and beauty. He could make the dead walk, he could make brutes speak, he could make every hovel a palace, and float them on a cloud. Instead he hid, and hoarded his treasures, and worked on his defenses.

He has
always
been an old man, hoarding his treasures, in the Mountain.

He made the city at the slopes of the Mountain into this … wasteland. The Know-Nothings. The pointless factories. The ugliness of it. That was his work. He wanted no visitors, no tourists. With the Mountain’s engines he stole and hoarded the city’s Gods, like a lesser miser would hoard gold.

He hides in the Mountain. And his countless shadows scheme to steal it from him. How they envy him! How he hates himself! He is not a happy man.

His shadows do not dare approach the Mountain themselves. He fears himself more than he hates himself. They work through surrogates, agents, dupes, patsies.

What kind of madman would go up on the Mountain? Ruth, the city is full of madmen. Your friend Arjun
—
one of Shay’s shadows set him loose from the confines of the city, and no doubt meant to set him on the path to the Mountain. What was Arjun looking for? Has he told you? Are you in on that secret? For all I know it may be on the Mountain, whatever it is. Or it may not. But I can tell you that if, by some unlikely chance, Arjun were to fight his way onto the Mountain, and kill the old man who rules it, then Shay’s shadows would be close behind.

That fat idiot Brace-Bel, who was at the Museum
—
one of my master’s shadows recruited him, once. I could smell it. Brace-Bel may try to refuse the call, but he will always dream of the Mountain, now. One day he will return there. Will
he
be the one to kill the old man? Not likely. But perhaps.

I remember how my own particular master found a handsome psychopath named St. Loup, and lifted him out of his daily existence, and set him on his way. I whispered in his ear: I told him the power he craves is on the Mountain. He will kill anything that gets in his way.

St. Loup has never yet found his way to the Mountain. Will he ever? If he does, how will we know? If he wins through, will everything change at once? I don’t know.

When my master finally tired of me
—
oh, this is hard to say. I was too fat to sit on his shoulder. Swollen on lies and secrets and crimes. His plans no longer included me. He had another use for me. He traded me away, Ruth, to the Archbishop Pnoffi in return for… Never mind. Firm hands clutched me, thrust me into a sack, from which I was decanted without dignity into a cage.

“One last job,”
he whispered to me.
“You ugly thing. Endure. Be a sign. I made you fascinating. They will keep coming to you. Show them the way.”

I endured for a thousand years. I told fortunes, I awed crowds. I gathered dust. I whispered into the ears of those who would hear the way to the Mountain.

Not out of loyalty. Out of spite, Ruth.

They go up in their hundreds, their thousands, onto the Mountain
—
the madmen of the city. Arjun, Brace-Bel, St. Loup, a thousand others. This is a vast city, and it has endured for millennia, and my master and his shadows have always fought over it. The madmen
—
my master and his shadows dangle dreams before them, myths, Gods, visions, answers, empty promises. They unveil the Gears of the city for them. They teach them just enough tricks to get by. So many mad people in this city! Sooner or later they find their way to the Mountain. They go up chanting, or scourging themselves, like pilgrims. They go with swords, or guns, and scarlet banners, roaring barbaric defiance. They steal in like thieves, like cockroaches. They fly their splendid machines, trailing rich plumes of smoke. They don’t know that Shay’s shadows are watching close behind, waiting to see if they break the Mountain’s defenses. Waiting to follow them home.

But none of them have ever succeeded.

Some of them, the old man catches. In his traps, in his nets, in his mirrors, in his paradoxes. His mirrors are prisons
—
an old technique. What do they make of him, when they see him? They thought the Mountain was ruled by demon princes, bright angels, glittering mechanical Minds. Those are the lies I told them. What do they think when they see that nasty and withered old man?
“Not again,”
he says.
“Why won’t you leave me alone? It isn’t fair.”

He applies his surgeries to them. A cut, a slice, a fold
—
unstitched from time
—
he makes them into his Hollow Servants. Have you ever wondered why they stink so of failure and shame?

Those who escape
—
they
fall,
their minds shredded by the Mountain, by the old man’s defenses. They fall at the foot of the Mountain. They stumble through your world like ghosts. They never escape for long. Soon enough the Hollows catch them, or the police.

You have loved a few of those fragile ghosts. They were doomed from the start. You have loved me, and I have always been a monster. No ordinary life is possible in the shadow of the Mountain, in the killing fields of Shay’s war on himself.

I thought your sister might finally be the one to kill the old man. At least that would be a change! I dreamed she might destroy the Mountain. What would happen to the city then? It could hardly be worse. Without that darkness on the horizon we might lead real lives.

A
s it talked, the Beast walked up and around the slopes of the quarry’s walls. It set a punishing pace, and Ruth struggled to keep up. With every turn they approached the stars, and the Beast unburdened itself of another secret. The sky paled with the dawn. The quarry filled with cold mists, and the Beast pressed on into the grey, its voice hollow and distant. At last they reached the top of the path, where the signs warned of blasting IN PROGRESS and NO TRESPASSING and the wagons were parked. The Beast was gone, and Ruth was alone. The Mountain darkened the horizon.

The Missing, After the War-The Hero
of Fosdyke-Secret Files-More Flags-
The Choir

Arjun

C
arnyx Street lived!

A couple of houses were in ruins, in whole or in part— cracked gaps in its defiant grin. Otherwise it was intact. Windows still caught the morning sun. Laundry hung like pennants. The street breathed—front doors were open and people went from house to house. The wild scrub behind the houses had been repur-posed into fields; green was starting to show through the black earth. Arjun and Inspector Maury came across the fields, one smiling, the other scowling.

Who watched them? Two men worked in the fields, bare-chested in the warmth of the morning—a third stood guard. The guard carried a rifle and a bell round his neck. For a moment, seeing the newcomers approach over the fields, he looked frightened, raised his gun—then he lowered it again. Whatever he’d been frightened of, Arjun and Maury weren’t it. He watched them go by carefully, but without fear—almost with a kind of cautious welcome. Of course, Arjun thought, Carnyx Street
would be
welcoming to refugees. He smiled and showed his hands were empty.

He’d made Maury throw away his long black coat—it identified him as a Know-Nothing, a Night Watchman, a dangerous man. Without it Maury looked, and apparently felt, naked. Stripped of his
last vestiges of authority, he hunched like a snail. The sun made him squint.

The Low sisters’ house still stood.

Arjun bounded the last few yards to the door, banged on it, peered in through the smoky windows of the shop, calling, “Ruth, Ruth, are you in there?”

A stranger answered the door, and the smile vanished from his face.

They both said, “Who are you?”

The man at the door was tall, pale, grey-haired. Behind him, the shelves and tables of Ruth’s shop had been cleared away—the books and maps and records and paintings were gone—four young women and one man sat in a circle stitching something together out of canvas—sails? Coats? Tents? The floor was littered with off-cuts and needles. Lamps burned. They’d thrown out all Ruth’s wonderful and mysterious treasures and put a workshop in their place! She was gone. Dead? Gone to the Mountain, with Ivy? He’d known she might not be there when he returned, but he hadn’t
believed it.
His mouth hung open. He forgot why he’d come back. His blood ran cold.