Gears of the City (65 page)

“Maybe. Maybe. I have machines here that can do that. I’ve collected a lot of interesting machines, over the years. Sometimes I find it useful to acquire those energies. They make good fuel. They make good bargaining chips. Do you know what the Gods are?”

“I don’t care to hear your philosophies, Shay. Is it here?”

“This isn’t philosophy, it’s cold fact. Do I fucking look philosophical?
Energies of creation, that’s just what they are, that’s how the Builders made them, this Mountain commands them, spins and weaves them, sparks from the friction when the city’s angles rub together, oil for the Gears, little fragments of making …”

“I don’t care, Shay. I prefer not to believe what you say. Can you blame me? Why won’t you answer my question? Is it here?”

“Maybe. I’ve hoarded a lot of treasures over the years. Anything that wanders too close to the Mountain goes in my nets. I don’t need them making trouble, opening doors where there shouldn’t be doors. That bloody daughter of mine let a lot of them loose when she started fiddling with the machines—yours wasn’t one of them? No? Well.
Well.
I can have a look for you, if you like.”

“That’s very generous of you, Shay.”

“Rummage in the attics.” Shay didn’t smile.

“Will you?”

“If we can make a deal.”

“Why would you make a deal with me?”

“My daughter, you fool. She’s ruining everything. Too clever, too clever, I always was afraid of her. Should have strangled her in her bed. Wards and sigils and locks. She’s taken over half the bloody Mountain. If this goes on the whole thing might fall apart. I need your help. I need you to go to Ivy. I
need
your help—I’m admitting my weaknesses here, you little shit of a thief. Take it as an earnest of good fucking faith! Take her a little present. Help me, and we’ll see about a deal.”

“Ivy brought me here. I think I was supposed to help her against you.”

“So? Renegotiate. You left loyalty behind long ago. Our kind has none of the ordinary virtues. Cultivate flexibility instead.”

They haggled. Shadows gathered. And as Arjun left the room, it seemed that Shay sagged, and paled, and only his servants held his thin head up, as if the haggling had taken the last of the old man’s strength. He left Shay in the dark, listening to the empty noise of his radio.

Ruth

“What did you do to him?”

Shay bent almost double in his chair, wheezing, groaning. He
dabbed at his mouth with a stained handkerchief. His spine protruded through the worn fabric of his jacket, curved like a dog’s, frail and painful. It hurt to look at him, so Ruth turned away, and looked all around the room. On one wall there was a large and dusty mirror—she recalled Brace-Bel’s warning, and looked away from it. The rest of the room was cluttered with trinkets and devices. Low tables stood at angles like fortifications, carrying weapons, charms, machines. He seemed to have a fondness for fertility idols, dull-pointed weapons, tin soldiers, dirty postcards, stuffed animals in postures of terror or rage. Everything was close to hand. How long had he sat here? His bony fingers had worn tracks in the dust, his shuffling feet had worn shiny trails across the carpet. He was present timelessly in the room; she could almost see the years of his operation of the room’s devices. Somehow he controlled the Mountain from that chair. He maintained his defenses, he hoarded his treasures, he took his revenge. The room stank of fear and madness. It was the center of the world, the center of her memories and nightmares.

“He works for you?” Shay said. She started, turned back to him. He still wouldn’t meet her eyes. “He works for me now. We made a deal.”

“You shouldn’t have. He’s naive.”

“Why did you come here?”

She put a hand on his bent shoulder, more out of curiosity than sympathy—he was dry, weightless, fragile.

“I wanted to see you. I wanted to know if it was true.”

“Now you know.” He shuddered. “Now you know.”

“Yes.”

“You think it would have been better if I’d taken you with me? Think you could have lived this way? Is that what you think?”

“I don’t know what I think. It’s too late, isn’t it? You’re not really a person anymore, are you?”

“You don’t know how hard it is. The things I had to do, the deals I had to make. It’s not easy, is it? It’s never easy. One thing leads to another.”

“I know.”

“You lose bits of yourself. You get caught up in your own lies. All over the place. It’s like being sick. It’s like a cancer, eating at you. Hundreds of them, thousands of them, scheming against me. All I do is hide. It’s horrible to be your own worst enemy.”

“Is it?”

“I stole this thing. The Mountain. I lied and killed for it. Do you want to know who I took it from, who he took it from, what he took it from, what it
is?”

“Maybe. What’s the price?”

“Oh, you’re clever. You’re a clever one. Which one are you?”

“Ruth, Dad. It’s Ruth.”

“Right. Right.” His head was still bent. “I can’t look at you. Why did you have to come here? Why did you have to remind me?”

Was he crying ?

“You sent the airships. You tried to kill the city. Do you remember?”

“Oh, maybe. Maybe. Your young man was whining about that. What choice did I have? Things look different from up here.”

“I’m sure they do.”

His shoulders shook. Her hand wasn’t far from his scrawny throat. She was inside his defenses. Had he let her in knowingly? What did he want her to do?

She could kill him; he was frail. She should kill him. She heard Arjun’s voice, sounding so stern and serious—
he has to die. He cannot be allowed to keep the Mountain.

His shoulders shook, the way the Inspector had struggled as she held him down.

She couldn’t do it again. Not because he was her father—that had not been true for a long time, she realized—but because he was a human being, and old, and weak, and afraid. After the Inspector, she couldn’t pretend that it would be easy.

She had so much to ask—
What was so important that you had to leave us? Was it worth it?
—but his answers would only be self-serving lies.

She walked away. He clutched at her shirt. “Wait—wait. Where are you going? I need your help. You’re the kind one, you were always my favorite. That Ivy, she’s trouble, she’s too clever, you have to help me … What do you want? What do you want?”

“Oh, be quiet.” She brushed away his hand. “You don’t have anything I want. The two of you deserve each other.”

The servants murmured in awe and terror as she passed through them. She closed the door behind her.

Arjun

Two forces of servants fought at the stairhead. Arjun couldn’t tell Ivy’s from Shay’s. Their numbers were uncountable—they seemed evenly balanced. Surging and retreating, clawing and tearing, grey and flickering. No words, no shouts, no screams—only a noise like wind rattling through the eaves of an old house. Arjun waited at the foot of the stairs until they exhausted themselves. Afterward, the tiles of the stairhead were strewn with scraps of shadow like leaves.

One, two, three; take the fourth corridor on the left. The ladder, the stairs again. Shay’s directions; Arjun had committed them carefully to memory.

He carried one of Shay’s wards, and the servants stayed clear of him. They glared in disapproval. They shook their heads. Did they envy him? There but for his undeserved luck … “Brothers,” he said. “I’m sorry.” They didn’t stop resenting him.

Ivy’s part of the house was marked out by sigils painted on the walls, lines scratched in the floorboards, circles in the dust. There was something infantile about it—a child’s marking out of territory. KEEP OUT. KNOCK FIRST. TOP SECRET. MINE.

He knocked. She answered. He went in.

Brace-Bel

Downstairs, in the darkened hallways, Brace-Bel staggered through a forest of pillars. When he stumbled he pulled himself along by the wires and tubes that knotted on the floor. He wasn’t sure where he was going. It seemed too late, too late to reinvent himself
again;
his small store of genius was exhausted. He thought it would be nice to find somewhere warm to sit, in the sunshine.

The servants followed at a discreet distance, cleaning his blood from the floorboards.

The machinery hummed all around him, and it sounded like music. He thought it would be nice to see fire again, and beauty, before he died.

There were footsteps approaching. He slumped to the floor and took out his little pocketknife, and began sawing weakly at the
cables. The footsteps came closer, and stopped. The cable in his hand snapped, golden coils sprung out, a shower of sparks rose up, and another cascaded from overhead. Small fires ran along the ceiling. As his vision ebbed, the cables in his lap glowed with the red light of a violent birth. His first memory! A perfect circle. Someone stood over him, now, a man, and a familiar voice said, “That’s going to make things a bit more difficult, isn’t it?” Then his head fell forward into his lap, and he felt nothing.

Arjun

Ivy conducted her business from a single bedroom. The room was sparely furnished, but clean. Morning light forced its way through shuttered windows, slicing precise diagonals through the closed space, denning angular shadows. The walls were pinned with maps, diagrams, mathematics, ciphers and codes, sketches of the gears of impossible machines, plans for new languages. Sharp instruments lay in a row on a well-organized desk. Ivy herself, sitting on a plain wooden chair, in a long black dress, her bare arm resting on the desk, seemed for a moment only one of the instruments in the room, only a part of the machine.

There was something flat about her. Her eyes were full of calculation, estimation, contempt. Her charm had deserted her. She was beautiful like a statue. The stress of her struggle had reduced her severely.

She said, “Where’s my sister?”

“I don’t know.”

“You weren’t supposed to come, you know. What use are you to me? There are hundreds just like you, and none of you are worth a damn. I wanted my sisters.”

“I’m sorry if I spoiled your plans.”

“Never mind. Never mind.” She rubbed her temples. “I can make do. I have another sister, after all. What do you want, anyway?”

“Can I sit?”

She waved him vaguely toward the bed. Her fingers were covered in rings and charms. Strange marks were scribbled on her palms.

“He sent me to kill you.”

“Did he now? How were you going to do that?”

“He gave me this,” Arjun said. He took a small black stone from his pocket. “He told me to come to you, offer my services to you, and hide this in your room. I don’t know what it does, how it kills. I imagine it’s horrible.”

“I expect so.”

“I doubt he trusted me. I imagine he hid other weapons on me, things I didn’t know about.”

“I expect so. He’s not as clever as he thinks he is. He was first. That’s really all he’s got going for him. First to Break Through. But that’s just luck, isn’t it? That’s just a matter of wanting it more than anyone else. Doesn’t make him clever.”

“Are you winning?”

“Maybe. Bit by bit. It could take a very long time.”

“Will there be anything left of the city when you’ve won, do you think?”

“Well, I’m not really sure. But I can always make another. If I choose. I expect I will. It will be a fascinating exercise.”

He looked again at the maps on the walls. Their geometries were rigid, unsympathetic. A plan for a tower, coiled, elongated, pierced by bridges, suggested repressed pain, outward cruelty. The scale of her design was both vast and claustrophobic. “I see,” he said.

“What do you want?”

“Will there be music in your city?”

She looked at him with interest for the first time. “I remember. You lost a musical thing. A God. Is that right?”

“Don’t tell me what you think it
really
is—please.”

“I’m very fond of music, too. In my way. What does it sound like? Is it pretty?”

“Yes. Is it here?”

“Maybe. The city runs on music, you know.”

“So I’ve always thought. Others think differently.”

“It depends on your definition of music. Most of it isn’t very pretty at all. It’s a question of what you can find beauty in. What you’re willing to face.”

“Is it here?”

“It may be. There are vaults. Down below. The old man hid things away. Will you be very angry if I say they’re only
things?”

“I won’t be angry. “

“There are keys to the vaults. I know the way. Help me, Arjun.”

“Is that the price? Murder your father?”

“Get rid of him. Get him out of the way. Don’t you think it’s time? Help me and I’ll set your God loose. Fly free, you know? There’s not enough music in the world. I’m on your side, really, and you’re on mine. Help me.”

Her face was flat, monstrous. Her eyes were the dull green of rusted metal. Her voice never wavered, and every word out of her mouth was blasphemy. Arjun was sick of haggling.

“I won’t,” he said. “It’s not worth the price. It never ends.”

As he left, she shrugged and turned back to her desk, without another word, as if she’d lost interest in him entirely.

Arjun

In the corridors outside, the wires in the ceiling pulsed and sparked. The pipes groaned. Cracks opened in the plaster, the drawers in the sideboards fell open, and a fractal stain blossomed on the carpet.

A troupe of Shay’s monkeys scuttled frantically up the stairs, darting in and out of the balusters, scrabbling along the handrail; they leapt and passed Arjun by.

And the servants stepped from shadow to shadow and their long weightless fingers brushed the cracks clear and swept away shattered glass and china.

The strains of Ivy and her father’s struggle, Arjun thought, shaking the Mountain at last.

What would happen when the whole thing fell apart? Would the Gods fly free from the wreckage, make the world anew? Or would they die with it? It seemed there was nothing to do but wait and see.

The sound of straining machinery had ceased; then it started up again. The engines suffered …

“Come in, come in.”