The Inexplicables (Clockwork Century) (5 page)

The conversation above him grew louder.

Both participants were wearing gas masks. Rector could hear it from the muffled hum to their words, and the way their consonants were rubbed off around the edges, but as he came closer, he could pick out the gossip more clearly.

“I just don’t want to hear about it later, that’s all. If Yaozu tries to cuss me about it, I’ll … I won’t be real happy. But if we’re late, that’s what he gets for putting a kid in charge. That ain’t right.”

“Can you install the gears?”

“No.”

“Then you aren’t right for the job. Me either,” the other man added quickly, possibly in response to some threat Rector couldn’t see. “If Houjin knows how, let him. He mess it up, it’s not our fault. He do it right, we look good for helping. See?”

“Yeah, I see,” came the grudging response. “That don’t mean I like it.”

A crackling snap of pleasure or pain—Rector couldn’t tell which—zipped across his vision and was gone, leaving a comet trail of contentment in its wake. He smiled and listened a little longer, until he was absolutely confident that these were workmen and not guards. Almost certainly an older white man and a somewhat younger Chinese man.

Rector took a deep breath and flinched as a pang of tomorrow’s hangover made itself known in the soft spot just behind his ear. He shook it off and stepped away from the wall, but not far enough out to be easily seen or shot at.

“Hey, you fellas up there?” he called, not in a big shout, but loud enough to make it clear that he wasn’t sneaking up on anybody.

The two men above went silent, then the Chinaman called back, “Who is there? What do you want?”

“Rector Sherman here. I want to get inside the city.” It sounded grandiose when he put it that way, but he decided he was all right with that, so he let it stand. “I don’t want any trouble, and I don’t want to bother nobody. I got business inside, that’s all.”

“Business? What kind of business you got in the city? Did Yaozu send for you?”

“No sir,” he said—fast, so the two words ran together in his mouth. “I’m looking for work.”

“How old are you, son?” the white man asked.

“Not sure what that’s got to do with anything. I’ve been selling for a couple of years already.”

After a pause, the other man concluded, “So you want to come on up.”

“That I do, sir. That I do.” He took this opportunity to step out of the wall’s shadow and into the lesser dark of the cloud-covered evening, which left him somewhat less invisible but still quite fuzzy to anyone that far overhead.

A brilliant white shaft of light flared to life. It swiped at the night, curving back and forth as someone up there adjusted a focus-beam lantern. The beam settled on Rector without mercy, blinding him outright and forcing him to close his eyes against the sudden, painful attention. He crooked his elbow and tried to shield his face without hiding it. The last thing on earth he wanted was for these men to think he was up to something … which he was, but it wouldn’t do for them to suspect it.

“You’re a regular ghost of a thing, ain’t you?”

“What?”

“Whitest man I ever see,” observed the Chinaman dispassionately. “His hair … what color you call that?”

“Ginger. Hey, I think I heard about you, boy.”

Rector forced a smile. “Is that right?”

“You’ve been dealing from the orphanage, haven’t you? I heard about a boy so white you could see right through him, with hair the color of rust, besides. Is that you?”

“I reckon it must be,” he confessed.

The Chinaman asked, “You know this boy?”

“I know about him,” the white man said. “He uses Harry, don’t he?” he asked down at Rector, who still cringed against the light. “Harry’s your chemist, ain’t he?”

“That’s right, sir. I buy offa Harry.”
Or at least I used to
. “And Harry gets all his stuff right here, through Yaozu. He don’t truck with Caplan or O’Reilly, so you can trust I’m one of yours.”

The white man snorted as if trust wasn’t something he handed out quite so easily, but Rector knew the lingo and he’d dropped enough names to prove himself.

“Caplan and O’Reilly … Either one of them ever approach you?”

“No sir.” But that wasn’t quite true. He’d met Caplan once in passing, through one of Harry’s rival chemists. Harry’d been laid up with consumption and hadn’t been able to cook, so Rector’d been forced to look up another source. “And if I did, I wouldn’t work with ’em. I know which side my bread is buttered on.”

“All right, then. Hold on. We’ll throw down the ladder. Be careful hoisting yourself up. We don’t care to scrape anybody’s bits and pieces off the rocks, you hear me?”

He unrolled a long ladder; it unfurled like a flag, in a great lurching arc that hit the ground mere inches from Rector’s toes. He jumped back with a start.

“You see it?” the Chinaman prompted.

“Sure enough, I do. Say, could you maybe aim that light somewhere else? I can’t see with it shining down in my face. You said you don’t want to scrape me off the rocks, and well, I’d rather not require that service, either.”

The light wobbled, wavered, and the beam shifted a few feet to the right.

Once Rector’s eyes stopped swimming with bold white orbs that obscured all the evening’s details, the remaining glare was enough to see by—so long as he didn’t need to see anything directly in front of him. But the glowing white ghosts seared into his vision refused to disperse entirely, so he held out his arms and relied on his peripheral vision until he could swat the rope ladder into his hands.

He climbed its loose dowel footholds by feel, bracing himself against the wobble of the unsecured steps; one hand over the other, and then one foot following the next, he scaled it slowly, uncertainly, and suddenly quite glad that the light was off his face but pointed too far away for him to see anything if he were dumb enough to look down.

He looked down.

As predicted, he saw nothing, except for a big circle of vivid brilliance cast by the lantern above. It hit the ground someplace below, illuminating only grass, gravel, and the edge of a fire pit that hadn’t seen any cooking action in years.

His stomach did a quick lurch, but there was nothing inside it to slosh or heave, so he didn’t even burp at the sudden realization of how high up he’d come, and how quickly. Was he climbing so fast? It was hard to tell. His hands and feet guided themselves, or maybe what was left of the sap churning around in his head was shielding him from the facts of the matter.

Forty feet or more. Straight up. A gate into someplace like hell.

He was half that distance before the Chinaman called down, “You got a mask?”

“Yes, I got a mask,” he panted.

“You put it on. The seal here not so good.”

“I will. Put it on. When I get. Closer.” He puffed out the words in time to his climbing.

“You put it on
now
. There gas up here. You smell it?”

“Sure, I can smell it,” Rector admitted. You could almost always smell the gas if you were within five miles of the city and if the wind was canted just right. It was easy to forget the low-level stink because you never smelled anything else.

But this was worse.

There was a leak, as though someone had drilled a hole in a barrel and the contents were oozing free. It came from above, from the gate. It drooled down onto his head and up his nose, the yellow-fire stench of Blight slipping through the compromised wall.

Briefly Rector wondered who’d ever thought it’d be a good idea, this gate cut into the place where poison billowed and spilled day in and day out.

“Three cheers for bad ideas,” he wheezed, knocking his forearm against the next rung and wincing hard as the closest rope dragged a thick red mark along his wrist. He seized the knots, got a better grip, and kept climbing. His palms ached from the squeezing, the dragging, and the slivers of hemp and twine wedging themselves into the small wrinkles and cracks of his hands.

But he was almost there.

Maybe another dozen feet. That’s all he needed. He braced himself with one knee locked and crooked around the rope and one arm twisted and holding likewise, and he withdrew his mask from the blanket-bag. One-handed and gracelessly, he yanked it over his head and kept on climbing.

The light swung back around and caught him in the eyes once more. He yelped and cried out, “What are you doing, man? I can’t see when you point that thing right at me! You trying to make me fall?”

“Naw, sorry. Just looking at your progress. You’re almost here.”

Before Rector could wonder about the particulars of “almost,” a hand jutted down into his face, smacking him between the eyes.

“Here, come on. Get up here, would you?”

“Yes sir,” he said, flailing about until he’d successfully snared the hand. A combination of his own wobbly inertia and the man’s help got him up onto a wood platform that felt rickety, looked rickety, and sounded rickety when it groaned under the added weight of Rector’s body. He stayed on his hands and knees until he shook off enough of the vertigo to stand. When he did, he was very, very careful to make eye contact with the gatekeepers. It was better than looking down at the ground.

He was right: Both of them were wearing gas masks—the slim-fitting kind that hugged the face without a lot of unnecessary valves, cogs, filters, and levers. These were lightweight, practical devices that wouldn’t help anyone survive long inside the city—the filters would clog in a couple of hours down at street level—but up high and half outside, they’d suffice.

Rector had heard enough from the chemists about how people rationed their filters and planned their masks. There was a science to it—a science everyone learned eventually, or else they joined the ranks of the shambling rotters down on the roads below. As this thought flickered through his head, he adjusted his own mask so it fit him better and seemed less likely to leak.

“Watch your wiggling,” the white man urged. He was precisely what Rector had expected: average height and size, with ratty brown hair and clothing that had been tied up tight at the wrists and ankles to keep the gas off his skin. The Chinaman was likewise no great shock, except that he was wearing almost the same exact outfit. In Rector’s experience, the Chinese population tended to dress differently, in outfits that had odd, chopped-off-looking collars and lines that white men more commonly wore to bed than out for business.

“I can see that, sir. And I will absolutely watch my step. And my wiggling.” Planting his feet on one board each, he balanced against the slight tilt of the platform and then took note of the gate itself. “So this is it, huh? This is how people are going to get inside and out?”

“Someday, but right now it’s not even halfway sorted. Turned out to be a bigger job than anybody’d expected.”

“How much longer ’til it’s open for business?”

“Two or three weeks, if we’re lucky. Longer than that, if we ain’t.”

The hole was shaped as if it ought to host a drawbridge. It was arched and somewhat unsteady despite the braces of timber and pulleys that held the hole open and clear. Rector imagined he could hear the posts straining against the wall’s weight, another hundred and fifty feet above it—and when he thought about it that way, he went weak. How many tons of rock was that, anyhow? How many thousands of pounds, held up by timbers and stones and the calculations of a despot?

At present, the hole was shielded by a set of curtains fastened behind the buttressing timbers. Rector reached out past the boards and felt for one of the dangling swaths of fabric, rubbing it between his bare fingers.

“You got gloves?” asked the Chinaman. “You need gloves.”

He lied, “I got some. I’ll put ’em on in a minute.”

“Gas burns skin.”

“I know that.” The curtain was several layers of burlap fused with wax, or pitch, or something else to keep it water- and gas-tight. It felt waxy and unpleasant, like the flesh of a cooled corpse. “Pretty good way to hide your work,” he observed.

“It does all right,” the white man said. As if the reference to hiding had prompted him, he adjusted the lantern, shuttering the bulk of its light and turning down the wick so that it gave the weird little way station a dim glow instead of a brilliant beacon. “Nobody much comes around to this side of the wall. Not yet, anyhow.”

Rector had questions, but none of them were very pressing except the obvious: “So, I just go through this hole … and then what? Is there a staircase or something over there?”

The Chinaman laughed, and the white man shook his head. “Not yet. You’ll walk along the temporary steps. They’re not very wide, and it gets a little slick from the gas and the wet—you know how it goes—so watch your step. Go either way you like, left or right. Both of them stop at a set of ladders and rooftops. Go right, and you’ll wind up closer to the Station. Take the left, and you’ll be aimed toward the Doornails’ territory.”

“Is that good or bad?”

“Depends. They got themselves some law, and they don’t much care for the sap. Mostly they leave us alone and we leave them alone, and that works all right, but we stay off each other’s blocks. You never been inside before, have you?”

“No sir, I ain’t ever been inside.”

“You know about the rotters though, don’t you?”

“I do.”

“You got a gun, or anything?”

He lied some more. “Yes sir, in my bag. I’ll fetch it out once I’m in, and I don’t need both hands for climbing.” As he said this, he considered retying the bag so it could sling across his chest. The jar of pickles weighed heavily against his kidneys, and the loaf of bread felt like a stone between his shoulder blades. None of it sat comfortably, but it sat, and he didn’t have to hold it.

If either of the two men noticed that he hadn’t pulled out any gloves, neither of them said anything.

“I reckon I’m as ready as I’m gonna get,” Rector said. He was still high enough to believe it, and to not worry about it half so much as he should have. “Left is toward the Doornails, and right is toward the Station, yes? And I follow the ledge until it dead-ends, regardless.”

“You’ve got it.”

With a small salute that was meant to look brave, Rector pushed the curtain aside—opening a slit to the deadly, stinking world within.