Gears of the City (58 page)

“Don’t look back, Ruth, keep going, keep
going.”
She threw the lever forward and the car moved again.

Arjun

“Keep going.”

“I
am
going.”

“We don’t know if it’s dead.”

“I know. I hit St. Loup.”

“I know. I hope he’s dead. Keep going.”

She accelerated. The road thrummed beneath the wheels. Unused industrial machinery rattled past to left and right.

Arjun sat back in the thick leather of the seat. He watched Ruth work the levers and pedals. It reminded him of a kind of church organ.

He’d offered to drive—not that he really knew how himself—and she’d told him to go to Hell. He’d offered to open a door for them but they had nowhere in particular to go. Why not drive? She seemed happier that way—the speed seemed to calm her.

She was learning fast. At first she’d been tentative, white-knuckled, jerking and braking, cursing raggedly under her breath.

“Ah, Ruth, you can take your foot off the pedal …”

“Don’t talk to me.”

“All right.”

“I said don’t talk.”

By imperceptible degrees she’d gained confidence and speed. Now she swerved, accelerated, worked the device like a virtuoso. She was reckless in the dark. The car’s leather roof was folded bat-winged back and her hair blew wild around her.

How thin she was! Her hair was lank and mad. Her cheekbones protruded. Her skin, her eyes, shone like a fasting saint’s. Had she starved in the wilderness?

They drove in silence. She didn’t want to talk. He wanted to talk—he had, just half an hour ago, quite deliberately attempted to kill the one creature in the world that could lead him to the Mountain, to his God, simply to keep the secret out of St. Loup’s grasp. Altruism, or spite? A little of both. He wanted to talk about it but she had problems of her own.

He supposed she was taking it well. She seemed less frightened than angry.

Juno’s quarries and mines fell behind them. The ruined factories of Walbrook’s Zone loomed ahead. The city was a blur; the stars above were still.

She said, “How much did you hear?”

“Everything,” he said. He shrugged. “The door was jammed. Anyway, I wanted to hear what it had to say.”

“Did you know?”

“What?”

“About my father, of course. How long have you known about my bloody father?”

“Ruth, I didn’t know—I didn’t. Not until tonight. Not until— I read it in his file. I came looking for you. I knew you’d be in danger, though I didn’t think—”

“You mean you wanted to use me.”

“That’s not fair.”

She braked, too hard, making the car’s wheels slide, loose stone spray, steam burst from the hood.

“Who was that man? What files? Who was my father? Who else knows about this?”

H
e told her about St. Loup, and the Hotel. That was the easy part. Her father—that was harder to explain.

He hadn’t brought the files with him. Maybe he should have. Now that he tried to tell her what he’d learned he found his memories were vague and confused. So many names, so many rumors, the Know-Nothings’ secret codes, Shay’s own scheming. Groping through a forest at night.

How much could he, how much should he tell her? A fifty-year-old file marked
Winwood, D.
, for instance, had contained a report on the case of the mass murderer Winwood, who, according to one investigator,
had been seen in the company of a Mr. Lemuel, a white-haired old gentleman, who it seemed had provided Winwood with the unusual guns that he had used in a subsequent apparently notorious massacre … The file had contained a list of the dead. The lead on Lemuel had gone cold. Horrible—was that the sort of thing he should tell her?

He told her.

Tears in her eyes, or the cold wind, the grit of the road? Her hands, her face, were so tight and drawn anyway—how was she taking it?

An investigators’ report appended, with a rusty paperclip, to the
Shay
file: forty years ago a series of explosions in the gas pipes had leveled four streets in East Bara, and a factory, killing over one hundred people, including a visiting executive from the Holcroft Company, and his two daughters. The engineer responsible for the recent alterations to the pipes had been called
Shay
, and after the incident his papers turned out to be fake, and he escaped the investigators’ dragnet.

“I don’t know,” Arjun said. “I don’t know why he would …”

Her hands still clutched the wheel. Her eyes were on the road— her beautiful green eyes.
They must come from her mother
, Arjun thought—Shay’s eyes were hard and flinty. The thought of Shay, married, a young father, was more than Arjun could imagine. He had a sudden ridiculous picture of Ruth, a little girl, sitting on Shay’s knee, Shay smiling that unpleasant smile of his—what was he thinking? Was he scheming even back then? Could he have been an ordinary man, once?

Twenty years ago, investigating a man who went by the name of Swinburne, the Know-Nothings had found a laboratory in the sewers beneath Mille rand Hill. The report said,
Contents: Lights. “Animals. “ Machines.
The report said,
Disposition
—
Fire.
In the margins someone had written
Fucking “Shay” again? Yes/No?

Arjun faltered. “Keep going,” Ruth said. “No, keep going. I want to know.”

Two hundred years ago a man called Shay had been charged with Fomenting Unrest Against The Mountain. The Chapterhouse where he’d been held burned down. The arresting officers were found with their throats slit. Most but not quite all records were destroyed.

Should he hate her? He made himself stop looking for signs of her father in her face. It would only upset him.

Fifteen years ago an investigator in Fosdyke, who’d been keeping notes for years on an undesirable, a suspicious character named
Low
, of Carnyx Street, had received a communique from the South Bara Chapterhouse, about a closed investigation into a dealer in forbidden goods and heresies called
Lemuel.
The artists’ impressions in the files were an uncanny match, separated only by a few years, a hardening around Lemuel’s eyes. Before an arrest could be made, Low vanished. A handwritten note to the file suggested:
Keep an eye on the girls. Bad blood there.

Bad blood! The world lurched, closed like a trap.

As soon as Arjun read that, he’d dropped the files, come running, all across the city. Now he wasn’t sure what to say to her.

She accelerated, pushing the car past its limits, annihilating the city with speed and noise. Over the roar of the wind, could she even hear what he was saying?

What Happened to Brace-Bel-What
Happened to Inspector Maury-
What Happens Next

Brace-Bel

G
o then! Go!” Brace-Bel, stomping through the ruins, in and out of empty buildings, heaving the sloshing barrels, talked to himself, dropped the barrels, and gestured wildly, yelled and surprised himself with echoes:
Go … go … go …

“Would that I could! Where? Where?”

…
where … where …

He tired ofthat game quickly enough. For a while he worked in silence—not for long. “Go then!” he yelled. “Leave me!”

He was drunk on spirits brewed in a still constructed largely from the bathtubs in an abandoned poorhouse. “Is this what I’ve come to?” What’s more, the fumes from the oil barrels were making him light-headed. He had not eaten in more than a day—maybe two.

“After I saved you from the wreck of your city! After I raised you from the dirt!”

The front door of the next house down the street was locked. Locked? With his shotgun—a beautiful lacquered collector’s piece—he blasted the door open, and only as he stepped into the thick dust and staleness of the interior did it occur to him that the house’s occupants had probably died inside, upstairs, in bed, of one
of the fevers that followed the War, and the choking air was very possibly deadly. Too late now! “I, too, once had a fever. Seven years of every ten in gaol, I am not unfamiliar with sickness and madness. Molder no longer in your beds, sir and madam, fire will free you!” He splashed the oil on the walls with an artist’s abandon. A garnish of gunpowder! “At last your sluggish bodies will approach to the condition of light! A message, a poem.”

Outside, Brace-Bel slumped on the doorstep. It was evening; the sky was the color of spoiled meat; shadows gathered. The little hand-drawn wagon on which he bore the oil barrels and the powder kegs sat in the middle of the street, taunting him, obdurately heavy, stiff-wheeled. Was he a beast of burden? It seemed he was. “Alone, alone, alone,” he muttered as he jerked the stubborn thing another few yards down the street, and went to work on the next house along. “I was not made to be alone!”

They’d left him, the Lamplighters, his army, his flock, his fellows, his acolytes, the last of his lovers. So quickly they’d turned on him, so cruelly! The look in their eyes as they walked away—it was the look of every pretty young thing who’d ever told Brace-Bel: “I don’t need you anymore.” Of whom there had been many. Disappointment. Disgust.
Laughing
at him … What had they expected? He was a man out of his time. He did not belong here. Why would they have looked to
him
of all people to give their squalid lives meaning?

Only a few days ago—it seemed like a lifetime now—the Lamplighters had clashed one last time with the great adversary, the Night Watch, among the mansions of Provins Hill. A splendid blaze, a crown of fire, atop the Hill! The Lamplighters rushing away, hurtling down the Hill, arms full of salvaged treasures, gold and silk, flutes, mirrors, jade vases; down into the dark streets where the Night Watch waited, ready like customs officials to confiscate and smash those beautiful things; a deadly game of cat and mouse in the bloody shadows. A victory! Most of the Lamplighters escaped the cordon. (The Watch’s numbers were declining. Their hearts weren’t in it anymore. The truly dedicated had mostly killed themselves.) “Scatter the treasures!” Brace-Bel commanded. “Beautify the ruins!” And his followers, who he could not help but admit were hungry, and ragged, and sickly, wanted to sell the stuff for food.

A philosophical disagreement ensued. Brace-Bel said some unkind things. It wasn’t their fault! They were creatures of their time, as he was a creature of his. Their worlds were incommensurable. His dreams, forced on
their
city, could only end in absurdity. He had screamed at them as they left. (They went south, to beg for shelter in Fosdyke; they went west, and east. How sadly they shuffled away!)

“Alone, alone, alone!” He wasn’t suited for solitude. He talked to himself. He had unsound ideas. It seemed that the shadows in the Ruined Zone were haunted by silent and unhappy men with stranglers’ hands—he was not entirely sure whether they existed outside his own head. He saw St. Loup, he saw Turnbull, he saw monstrous birds and reptiles and apes. The Mountain loomed. The city was becoming increasingly unreal to him. He dreamed of light, he dreamed of darkness, he turned inward, into his memories. He considered violence against his own person. No one to love or hate but himself. Everything he had turned his hand to had failed; if only he’d lived an ordinary life he might have been happy. Was that how it felt to be Shay?

B
race-Bel had nodded off, on the back of the wagon, amid barrels of lamp oil and home-brewed spirits. Hunger and fumes. These days his waking life seemed much like a dream anyway. When he woke the stars were out, shining like knives, like the gears of unspeakable machines. He’d slept clutching his cane for self-defense. He noticed that one of his shoes was missing. “Thieves!” he muttered. Or perhaps he’d lost the shoe a while ago. He wasn’t sure.

“Good evening, good evening.” The street stank of oil and sulphur and alcohol. Moonlight picked out a glistening trail behind him. “Good evening!” The street was silent. Even the birds had the good sense to steer clear, it seemed.

“Torches and tinder, torches and tinder, sparks, the lightning,” he said, getting to work.

He was utterly alone. The city of his birth was gone; where could he go now? He was a man out of his time, a joke, a failure. Back to Fosdyke? They might be kind to him, they might forgive his trespasses (the Lamplighters had, if he remembered correctly, gone to war with Fosdyke to some extent). They would not let him
join in the Rebuilding because he was not suited to the task, but they might lock him safely away for his own good and feed him and care for him in his madness. He would rather die.

Even his memories had abandoned him—he was no longer sure who was real and who was not. Turnbull and St. Loup were plainly impossible. The Lamplighters were all too real, he remembered them all too clearly, the ingrates. Shay? The Beast? Arjun? Maybe, maybe not.

Ivy! He was quite sure Ivy was real. To deny her, even in extremis as he was now, would be a kind of blasphemy. Even now Ivy struggled on the Mountain, enduring dangers and hardships and tortures and terrors that made Brace-Bel’s bowels run cold to imagine them. (He imagined them frequently.)

Ivy! He would fight for her, if she’d let him. If she still needed him, he had a reason for being. Together they would claim the Mountain. She would comprehend the machines, and he would make beauty with them. Her cunning, his vision. Together they would open all the cages, reconcile all opposites … And if she
didn’t
need him, she would let him die in the fire. He would burn. And that would be sweet, too. He would become light, heat, sparks on the night wind, free of the flesh.