Gears of the City (46 page)

“Fuck answers,” Maury said, with finality—and Arjun, who’d found a passably sharp pen on the desk, and palmed it in the dark, readied himself to strike at the Inspector and run. “Fuck answers,” Maury repeated. “It’s too late for answers. The city’s dead. I want revenge on whoever did this. Not
my
fucking fault.”

Maury stretched out his hand. They shook on it.

“First we find the Low sisters,” Arjun said.

Maury sneered, looked sick, but didn’t say no.

Arjun felt himself sag with relief—had he ever in his life been so tired? He added, “And I need somewhere to sleep tonight.”

Brace-Bel

And what had happened to Brace-Bel? He wasn’t dead, not yet; in fact he was very happy to say that he was more alive than ever. He had landed in the aftermath of War, and found beauty in the ruins. He’d personally shot and killed at least three or four people and the men under his command had detonated a number of bombs, and he had a new appreciation for the speed and power and thrilling aesthetic purity of rifles and bullets, the glories of rockets. It occurred to him from time to time that he might have lost his mind, but could he really be blamed for that?

What
had
happened to him? He’d been dragged from the bolt-hole on Carnyx Street, drugged, transported
elsewhere
in a packing crate like a slab of meat—slapped awake, strapped to a chair in a bare white room, subjected to Father Turnbull’s strict inquiries, to St. Loup’s aimless sadism. Brace-Bel had roared and spat defiance and dared them to do their worst, which perhaps wasn’t the wisest way to handle them, but Brace-Bel was what he was. They questioned him. He didn’t understand anything they said. It wasn’t in his nature to admit ignorance so the questioning went on and on.
St. Loup tortured him with cigarettes, Turnbull with poisons and fevers and hallucinogens.

“This is a waste of time,” Turnbull said.

“He’s nobody and he knows no one,” St. Loup agreed.

“How dare you,” Brace-Bel said. “I am Brace-Bel, my crimes are legend, how dare you, you specters, you nameless drifters.”

“Gods, can’t we just shut him up?”

“Fat little fish,” St. Loup said. “We’re throwing you back where you came from.”

They ejected him from the backseat of a black motorcar as they sped down a narrow twisting street. The scenes from the car’s windows had been monstrous, unnatural. A sprawl of slave markets, idols and minarets, the shores of a hot and blue lake, tall golden glass buildings, ruins. Gods crossed their path like cattle—many armed, refulgent, tenebrous, beautiful, hideous, howling or drumming or resounding like a clash of cymbals. St. Loup tapped his gloved finger on the steering wheel as he waited for them to pass. Factories, smokestacks, concrete. Grey skies. Color bled from the city. “Out, here.” And the door opened and someone shoved Brace-Bel, hard.

Free again! In a manner of speaking. He rolled and rolled, and ended spread-eagled on his back in a puddle, in the gutter. The car roared away, into better futures, gentler pasts. Brace-Bel lay shivering in the rain, back again at the end of time, in the shadow of the Mountain.

They had stolen his remarkable stick, with its precious crystal.

He lay there for some time. He had no particular inclination to move. He was weak, exhausted. His veins were full of Turnbull’s drugs and his head still buzzed and hummed. People stepped over him. His left eye, which St. Loup had mistreated, went dim and then blind. Oh well, he had another, and he’d always been ugly. He crawled into an alley and drank rainwater. A day passed, and another. Night fell. A droning sound filled the world, and at first he thought it was in his head, and that he was dying at last. Then stark white light broke over the rooftops, and it was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. An airship passed overhead and bombs started to fall.

B
race-Bel’s memories of the following days were hazy. He was not well. He remembered standing in bread lines. He remembered being turned away from the armies that went up on the Mountain, for his flat feet and his blind eye and his fat gut and his other deficiencies—physical, moral, and hygienic. He could not remember volunteering. He remembered the girls throwing flowers after the soldiers as they marched, off to their doom in the shadows. Red roses in the gutter. Where did they get roses?

The soldiers didn’t come back. The bombers came again, and again. The world fell apart. There were riots, starvation. New wreckage sprung up every morning. Ash and dust made everything grey. Thousands and tens of thousands died, but Brace-Bel survived. He saw chaos, hunger, despair. He formed plans.

As it happened, Turnbull and St. Loup had discarded Brace-Bel not far from Jubilee Hill, where numerous executives of the Patagan, Holcroft, and Blackbridge Combines had kept their mansions. And though the Combines were gone now, and Jubilee Hill was fallen far from its former glories, still Brace-Bel naturally gravitated upward. The memory of wealth and luxury called to him.

The place was in a dreadful state. It had suffered terribly in the first wave of bombing—the enemy, it seemed clear, had struck hardest at the city’s head. Mansions lay in ruins. Trees were blasted and burned. Marble statuary was scattered limbless and headless across lawns that were now wastelands of mud. The Combines were gone. Looters prowled, and lapdogs had gone feral. There was no security anymore to stop Brace-Bel simply wandering up the Hill’s once-exclusive avenues, across its formerly lush lawns, into what was left of its stately structures.

What he found, huddled in the hollowed-out wrecks of their homes, were executives’ wives, executives’ children. Nonessential personnel, they had not been evacuated. Though a few still wore pearls or furs, the women were haggard and unwashed and rake-thin. The children were already starting to look like animals. Many of them still wore tennis whites, blotched with mud and blood. They took Brace-Bel for a looter at first, and screamed. The children hid beneath rain-warped dining tables and grand pianos, the wives brandished carving knives and letter openers and candlesticks. Their eyes were blank, confused. The world had moved on, and there was no place for them in it.

“Do not despair,” he told them. He stood with his arms outstretched. His voice echoed in the ruins, sonorous, commanding. “The world has changed, that’s true. All your lives you took the way the world was for granted, you thought you were blessed. Now you know that no one is blessed, that nothing can be relied on, that the cruel engine of the city does not care who it grinds. I had to learn the same lesson once. And then again, and then over and over again. Like you I was cast out, left behind, purposeless, ridiculous. I remade myself. You will, too. Dark and ugly and impoverished and mean-spirited times are coming. The city will need those who can appreciate beauty.”

They stared at him. They were too desperate to laugh.

“Bring me light,” he said. “And wine, if you have it.”

One of the ragged children ran wordlessly up the stairs.

“And a patch,” Brace-Bel said, prodding his swollen eyesocket. “Silk, if you please.”

W
ithin a few days he was the undisputed master of Jubilee Hill. He could not have fascinated the children more if he had been an actual ogre. He was pleased to welcome a number of the wives into his bed (he had taken over a master bedroom that once belonged to a senior vice-president of the Blackbridge Combine). He dressed in very expensive suits that did not fit him, accented with a red silk eyepatch and scarf, and a substantial amount of gold jewelry.

His motives were not selfish—or rather, he pursued a higher form of self-indulgence that, he believed, was rather like altruism, only less dour. The people of Jubilee Hill needed someone to organize them, to shock them out of their stupor. A living spirit. He secured food and guns from the emergency supplies at the peak of the Hill. He arranged repairs of some of the more beautiful buildings. He had the fireplaces stoked with broken furniture and dead trees, he put lanterns in the windows. “Warmth! Light! Let us blaze, let us be a beacon to the city below!”

The city below went mad. Cults and scavengers and bandit mobs took the place of the Combines. Ordinary people hid in their homes and waited in despair for the bombers. It was clear to Brace-Bel that the city craved leadership. Accompanied by women who were beautiful again, by children who were strong and pink-cheeked (not to
mention well armed), Brace-Bel went down into the low places. He went into the Ruined Zones, into the places where dour committees of local busybodies and do-gooders imposed rules and rationing and the dull slog of rebuilding; there he gathered to him people who’d never known luxury or beauty, but hungered for it. Down in the low places the Night Watch and the committees and the local bully-boys said:
put out your lights
—
the airships will see you.

Brace-Bel quickly diagnosed the city’s problem as: darkness. Darkness, fear, and a meanness of spirit.

“The city is ours to create anew,” he told his followers. “The question is, are we to cower in the darkness like mushrooms, always in fear, always cold, building nothing, writing nothing, singing nothing, abasing ourselves, or shall we blaze to the heavens? Let us say,
damn
the airships and
damn
the Mountain, let us shine! Let us be beautiful! Let us be no longer prisoners of fear! If the bombs come they come! And what do we care, so long as …”

The Mountain, or whoever or whatever sent the airships, had decided to bring death to the city. Out of sheer bloody-mindedness Brace-Bel decided to defy it with
creation.
He would work in the medium of light—which was to say, generally, fire. Occasionally, bright paint, wine, shattered glass. His followers, who became numerous, too numerous and far-flung for him to count, came to be called the Lamplighters.

The mania spread. New cells formed. Signals and emblems and secret codes, not all of which even Brace-Bel understood: lamps in windows, bright flags, drunken half-naked dancing around night-fires in the ruins. The Lamplighters were a kind of loose and louche army, formed from malcontents, suicides, teenagers, the reckless. The world was ending: they wanted to be drunk.

In the Night Watch the Lamplighters found their perfect opposite—their reason for being. The mean-minded thugs of the Night Watch, most of them, frankly,
policemen
, whose fear of the airships had driven them quite mad, who kicked in windows and smashed down lamps and put out fires and crushed all efforts at rebuilding. They had splendid battles!

“A man should be involved in the struggles of his Age,” Brace-Bel told the beautiful women. They were mostly formerly rich widows. He forgot their names. He addressed them all as
Ivy.
He liked to imagine that she was watching, up on her Mountain—that she
was giving meaning to what appeared, he had to admit, to be somewhat meaningless actions. Sometimes he worried that he was a little mad, sometimes he felt that he was caught up in the gears of a great machine and his actions were not quite under his control, but he kept talking and talking and the doubts went away. “The struggle between darkness and light, surrender and resistance, fear and joy, Night Watch and Lamplighters, is the denning contest of our age. A man who abstains from such contests is something less than a man. The passionate grapple of ideas is what it is to be human! What can we make of a man who walks unconcerned through the battle, eyes fixed on the Mountain, ears full of music … ? In a former life I wasted my time trying to fight the battles of the long-forgotten Age of my birth—uttering blasphemies against long-dead Gods. I was outrageous and daring and no one very much cared. Broken free from the prison of my life, I set laboriously about reconstructing it, so that I might reenact my rituals of escape. My escape was my prison; I made it myself. I did not see freedom for what it was.”

A series of skirmishes culminated in a great battle between bright-clad Lamplighters and the grim Night Watch at the Hogue Point glassworks. The Night Watch had guns, but the Lamplighters had numbers, ingenuity, and broken bottles—not to mention they had dug up a half-dozen unexploded bombs, which they deployed with a combination of cunning and gusto. And the dismal forces were routed. Brace-Bel received a flesh wound. At Forty-ninth the Watch routed the Lamplighters in turn and another happy street went dark.

“The one pleasure I never tasted in all my long life,” Brace-Bel said, “was the pleasure of
Warl
I may never pick up a pen again.”

Closing Time-The Battle at the
Elton Street Brewery-Under
Observation-Silence