Gears of the City (59 page)

He lit the torches, the trails of powder. Panting, he ran down the street, striking sparks, leading the fire behind him. Were his calculations correct? He couldn’t be sure. Calculation was never his strong suit. One by one the houses exploded into flame. Windows shattered, timbers crashed. A wild roaring filled the air. Black smoke—would smoke swallow the message? He couldn’t be sure. It was hard to breathe. Ivy! She was on the Mountain; she had access to its devices; the city was clay in her hands. If she chose to, she could save him.
If the
message was visible! The skin of his face stung with the heat; red light pulsed through the walls of the houses, enveloped the street, enveloped all the streets for a half-mile around. The fire had gone wild. The city had been transformed into light and heat. But if he’d calculated correctly, a big if,
if
then for a brief moment the fire had spelled out, in letters made from the streets of the abandoned city, in letters visible from the air, the stars, the Mountain, her name: IVY. Now there was smoke everywhere, and nowhere left
to run. A wall fell, bricks glowing like coals, and it seemed to him that behind it there was a door.

Arjun

They saw the fire—Arjun and Ruth, who sat on the still-warm hood of the car, looking down from the hills over Fosdyke, past the dark angel on the dome of the Museum, past the new fields, past the rooftops where the guards patrolled through a forest of flags, and out over the darkness of the Ruined Zone. They watched the smoke rise, a black and shifting mass to rival the Mountain. Fire crawled over the ruins, and for a moment it seemed to spell …

The car was stuck. It had slewed wildly, and at speed, into a bomb crater in the middle of an abandoned street, and now its wheels were buckled and sunk in mud. Ribs and elbows had been bruised but unbroken. Ruth had laughed and laughed as if drunk. Her door wouldn’t open. They had climbed out in each other’s arms.

She patted the dented metal. “Poor thing—it’ll rust up here. Maybe birds’ll live in it.”

He asked her, “What shall we tell your sister?”

“Which sister?”

“Marta.”

“Of course Marta. I know what you meant. I don’t know. I don’t know what’s best. She’s not as strong as she seems. I’ll think about it. Don’t say anything, will you?”

He nodded. Another layer of lies and secrecy and conspiracy. This at least was kindly meant.

She said, “Do you think she’s all right up there?”

“Ivy?”

“Of course Ivy.”

“I don’t know. I only met her briefly. She seemed very clever. Very cold. She seemed to take after her … I’m sorry.”

“That’s all right.” She stared across the city, at the Mountain. It was still and dark. What was she expecting, signs of struggle? Lightning, fires, earthquake, roiling clouds, volcanic eruption? There was nothing like that.

“I hardly remember him,” she said.

“Really?”

“No, actually. I remember him very well. I don’t know. It’s hard to picture. He wasn’t all bad. Something terrible must have happened to him. He did something terrible to himself. He isn’t really a person at all, anymore, is he? He used to be funny, sometimes. He wasn’t like anyone else.”

Arjun thought it best to keep silent.

She said, “I never asked—did you have a family? Before, you know, you … walked away from things.” There was a tone of reproach in her voice. He told her
no
, and she nodded, and didn’t ask any more questions. For a long while they watched the fire rise and fall.

“The Beast told me things,” she said. “It told me how the world works.”

“It lies.”

“Not about everything.”

“Shay made it.”

“So? He made me.”

Arjun didn’t know what to say. Below, the fire scrawled itself across the city in letters of light, immense, unreadable.

She said, “Do you know why you went up on the Mountain? Because he
wanted
you to. You and St. Loup and all the rest. The Beast told me. My father—his shadows, his copies—they all want the Mountain for themselves. They find people like you—mad people, broken people, dreamers—and they lift you out of your lives, and they point you at the Mountain. They’re scared to go themselves. There are traps, there are defenses, it’s too high, the air’s too thin, you go mad. They send people like you. I don’t know what to call it—scouts, cannon-fodder. They’re just waiting for one of you to make it through. But you never do. You die. You fall back as ghosts.”

“I know. I heard.”

“Are you listening?” She put her hand on his and squeezed, as if she were a doctor, breaking the news of a death in the family. “This is important. Everything they ever told you was a lie. They told you your God was on the Mountain. That’s a lie. They only did that so you’d go up there. So that they could follow. They cheated you. They spoiled your lives. Everything they said was a lie.”

“Maybe not everything.”

“The Beast told me what the Mountain is. It’s a machine. The people who came before us made it, to make the city. The things you call Gods are only, I don’t know, fuel. Parts of the mechanism. The Mountain sends them out to make things and take things away and open and close valves and …”

“I’ve heard that theory before. I’ve heard a lot of theories before. In the scientists’ communes of Zubiri they say the Gods are just what they call anomalies. The mechanism of the city breaking down. Cracks in the facade. Points of fracture. Places where you can see through from where you’re standing to somewhere
else.
Different lights, different skies, different noises. Somewhere better or worse. The lights are cars or fires or television or advertising billboards. You think you’re looking at God but really you’re looking at the future.”

“Is that true?”

“I don’t know. It’s just something people say. I never know what to make of it. Does it matter?”

She looked at him for a long time. Then she gave up.

What had the fire said? Now it had no shape. It was advancing wildly on all fronts. It was out of control, swallowing everything in its path.

She let go of his hand with a sigh.

“So what are you going to do now?”

He shrugged. “What can I do? Go down into Fosdyke. Get a job. See how long things last. When he sent the airships, when he sent the Hollows, Shay—sorry—he locked all the paths out of this time. I’m stuck here.”

“Your God. Your whatever it was, quest, pilgrimage.”

“No one can say I didn’t try.” He laughed.

“Unless you find a way back onto the Mountain.”

“Unless I find a way back.”

“Then you’ll go, again.”

“I suppose so. It’s a bit late to stop now, isn’t it? What would I do with myself if I stopped?”

“Would you kill him?”

“I’d probably try.”

“Fair enough. I think I might, too.”

The fire engulfed a fuel depot; an explosion shook the city. They both sat still while the echoes rang in their ears.

“I
might,”
she said, “just want to ask him
why.
I mean, it isn’t fair, is it?”

“Not really.”

“The funny thing is,” Ruth said, “that this is always how I dreamed the world works—really, deep down, this is what I always expected.”

“Really?”

“You know how it is when you’re young.”

“Yes? I don’t know. It was a long time ago, and very far away.”

“Right, right. So imagine finding out the city really is the way it seems when you’re young; your father really is the most important man in the city. Everything in the world revolves around your little family squabbles. The city is the way it is because of the way you are. Your codes and secrets and stupid cruel jokes, all those family stories, are the most important things in the world.”

“It must be very strange.”

“Sometimes it seems it’s not so strange; I always really thought the city worked like this. I was only pretending to be a grown-up. You know?”

“I suppose so.”

“Imagine all that, and you’re still left out of the big secret. Imagine how that fucking feels.”

Were those distant lights, on the Mountain? Or sparks drifting in the wind?

“This world is coming to an end,” Arjun said. “I tried to stop the Hollows but we can’t. People tried to stop the airships but they couldn’t. Shay has the Mountain. He’ll roll up this part of the city and put it away as if it was just a mistake in the first place.”

“I know.”

Far below, the fire crawled south, through the ruins, toward Fosdyke. Ruth said, “Don’t worry—it’ll stop at the canals.” And it did, so that was all right.

Maury

And down below, off on the other side of Fosdyke, Maury stumbled through the ruins. Perhaps he heard the explosions, away over the rooftops, a few miles away. He heard explosions all the time now: the sound of the airships overhead haunted his dreams, intruded
into his waking hours. The scream of the bombs. The totality of his failure. He’d tried to protect the city; he’d tried to warn them; he’d failed. All over now. All fucking over now, very soon. Perhaps he saw the fire blazing over the horizon. His vision was failing, and full of blood.

He’d stumbled alone out of Fosdyke, pursued by what passed for the law these days. Why were they chasing him? What had he done? He couldn’t quite remember. His memory was going, old age and stress—and also when they’d chased him they’d fired guns after him, and children had chased him throwing rocks, and a bullet or a rock or something had bloodied the back of his head, and the wound, untreated, throbbed and itched. What had he done? Something horrible, something stupid, some vicious impulse. Like once when he’d snapped and given the wife a bit of a slap, shouldn’t have done it. Once or twice. He didn’t trust himself. What side was he on?

He’d been messed around in ways that weren’t fair. His life was all wrong.

The first night the airships passed over. He feared them; he cheered them on.

The second night he saw, over a hill, the Night Watch on maneuvers. It hardly even crossed his mind to rejoin them. They probably wouldn’t have him, anyway.

The fourth night he trapped a dog in a sunken pothole, broke its neck in the crook of his remaining elbow, ate it raw.

The fifth night he saw a light gathering over an empty lot, sparkling off the broken windows, and he approached, thinking it might be firelight, the light of a camp, and he could—what? Ask for shelter? Murder them in their sleep? He wasn’t sure. In any fucking event it turned out to be one of those spirits, one of those Gods, one of those awful things that had spilled out into the city in the wake of the War. A vast and spinning arrangement of lights, performing in the empty ruins, for no one but Maury, who didn’t care, who hated and feared it, who spat, and closed his eyes, and walked away.

Now his eyes weren’t working right. Day by day his vision dimmed. There was blood in his left eye; it ached. He must have looked too long at the lights. He had a fever, and his head wound bothered him. He couldn’t see much, anymore, except fire, stars,
and the searchlights of the airships. Everything was shadows. Soon he would be blind, and then he would die.

Vaguely he stumbled toward the redness in the sky. He staggered into a lamppost and spun, a dull ache in his shoulder. For a moment he looked up at the stars. Then he fell on his back in the gutter. He slid in the mud—a bomb crater. He lay on broken bricks. A stink of smoke blew across his face. The stars dimmed.

Someone leaned over him. He heard murmuring—a conversation in something that was not quite language.

Hands held him, under his arms. He was lifted as if weightless. Cold fingers prodded him, hooked his lip and tugged at it as if he was a horse, and they were checking his teeth. He felt the shame that the Hollow Servants radiated; it made his skin crawl.

He expected them to kill him. Instead they carried him on their shoulders, north, up and up through the streets. The air thinned, smelled of dust, electricity, rust, oil, and machinery. A plodding ascension. The Mountain? He didn’t struggle.

The Storm-Private Languages-
Back Alleys-The Atrocity Sheds-
The Guts of the Machine-”
You
Again”

Arjun