Gears of the City (14 page)

“We kill things like that, ghost. We don’t keep ‘em.”

“I saw it. It spoke to me.”

Maury looked long and hard at him.

“Well, we’ll see about this.”

“What do you mean?”

“None of your business.”

Arjun panicked. “Don’t harm it. Please, I need to speak to it again.”

“Mind your business.” As Arjun started to stand, Maury’s men
closed in around him; he sat back down. Maury took out a pen— shook it violently to make the ink move—and scribbled something down on the papers at his table.

“Going to be a cold night, eh? Shift changes in an hour. Then you can come along back to the Chapterhouse with us.”

J
ust as the sun set behind the Hill there was an explosion.

“Fuck!”

A series of aftershocks echoed down the Hill as Maury jumped up from his chair. Black smoke jotted an exclamation over the top of the hill.

Maury’s men gathered around him, shielding their eyes and staring up the road.

“The Odradek estate?”

“Harrington, more like.”

“There was a riot at Odradek’s textile works.”

“Fuck. Black Mask have been putting bricks in the windows of Harrington’s offices for months.
Fuck.”

“We caught Maskers trying to blow up Odradek’s wife’s motorcar last fucking week.”

“Shit.”

“I knew there was something in those barrels …”

“Oh no, it did
not
fucking come past
us
, shut your fucking mouth, Colfax …”

“Shut up, all of you,” Maury yelled. “Colfax, Burke, with me. Let’s see what’s left. Ah, shit, Harrington had his kids there … Lewis, Waley, stay here. No one passes.
You.
“ He rounded on Arjun, “Did your lot fucking do this?”

“I can hardly be a ghost
and
a revolutionary, Inspector. Where would I find the time?”

“Aren’t you fucking clever?”

There was another, quieter explosion—or perhaps the sound of walls crumbling—and a cloud of dust.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck …” Maury started running, stiff-legged and wheezing. Colfax and Burke followed. Maury called over his shoulder, “Lewis, get rid of
that
shit.”

L
ewis handed his half-smoked cigarette to Waley—the job wouldn’t take long, that gesture said—and drew his gun.

“Let me go,” Arjun said. “I’ll disappear. I don’t belong here; this was a mistake.”

“Shut up. Turn around.”

“I can show you wonders.”

“Turn around.”

“Not on the street,” Waley said. “There’s children live here, they shouldn’t have to see it. Down the alley.”

“Let me go and it’ll be like I was never here.”

“Turn around.”

Arjun turned around. He fumbled in his pockets. He had no weapon; not so much as a penknife.

His fingers brushed the glossy paper of the matchbook from the WaneLight Hotel. A small miracle; a matchbook from a hotel that existed only in another world.

He withdrew the matchbook, readied a match to strike, and turned back again.

“What’s that supposed to be?”

“It’s a matchbook, Mr. Lewis.”

“Last cigarette?” Lewis asked. “Don’t see why not.”

“If it seems unfamiliar in design,” Arjun said, “it is because it comes from another city. A better and more beautiful city. Do you want to hear about the luxuries of the WaneLight Hotel? Every prince and potentate in that Age of the city stays in the WaneLight Hotel.”

“Shut it, ghost.”

“Then do you want to hear what these matches can do?”

Lewis lowered his gun, an uncertain look on his face.

“If I
strike
this match, what will happen to you?”

“Nothing.”

“The WaneLight Hotel protects its guests, Mr. Lewis. This is a ghost trick, Mr. Lewis, this is an uncanny device. If I strike this match you burn.”

Lewis lifted the gun again and Arjun raised the matchbook, tensed his elbow as if to strike.

“Ghost tricks, Mr. Lewis. You’re right to fear us.”

For all Arjun knew it was true. What was the Hotel? Where was it? He had no idea. He remembered only enough to know that
it was uncanny, and unpleasant. Maybe its artifacts
were
deadly, maybe its name
was
a curse. Who knew?

Lewis neither raised the gun nor put it away. Waley screwed up his face and advised Lewis that Arjun’s story was bollocks, but made no move to draw his own weapon. Arjun’s tensed arm began to ache.

T
here was a noise of crashing and running feet from the crest of the Hill. Over Lewis’s clenched shoulders Arjun watched four men come running down the road. They yelled as they ran and waved their arms, in which they held pistols and knives. What appeared at first to be evening shadows on their faces turned out to be black masks, oil-black rags covering their mouths and noses, leaving only wild eyes and dirty hair visible.

They’d sent barrels rolling downhill before them; that was the crashing clanking sound. The barrels spun and sparked. Metal rims struck cobbles with a deep church-bell peal and the barrels bounced and leapt downhill. Some of them were in flames.

Lewis and Waley turned, swore, and fired wildly at the approaching spectacle, and the black-masked men behind it.

As Lewis swore, fumbled in his pockets, cracked open his weapon, and began to reload, Arjun jumped on his back and grappled for his arm. Lewis dropped the gun.

The barrels went bouncing again, and Lewis was kneeling on the ground, reaching back for Arjun’s eyes, as Arjun held his elbow tight around Lewis’s neck …

The barrels struck a crack in the cobbles and bounced
again
— one of them burst, spilling flaming timber and hot ringing metal down the street—and Waley was pointing his gun at Arjun and shouting …

Then the barrels came thundering down on them, and they all tumbled out of the way as best they could.

When Arjun looked up from the gutter he’d thrown himself into, the black-masked men were there.

One of them kicked Lewis back down into the gutter.

Another shot Lewis, and then Waley, in the back of their heads, spattering gore on the cobbles. He bent to pick up Lewis’s and Waley’s guns, and wiped them clean on the back of Lewis’s coat.

A third approached Arjun, and Arjun tensed himself again for flight, but the man put his gun away and pulled off his mask. Underneath was a handsome young face, sweat-soaked and soot-streaked, beaming a smile full of crooked teeth. The man extended a hand to Arjun and said, “Thanks.”

The hand was missing an index finger. He seemed to be offering it not to shake, but to be
seen.
Arjun raised his own maimed hand in response and the man’s smile widened.

“You’re welcome,” Arjun said.

“Are you coming, then?”

“I have business on the Hill.”

“Business is done, mate.”

“Not mine.”

“Good luck, then. Your funeral. Look out for more of these filth.”

The handsome young man pulled his mask back on and ran off after his fellows, who were already vanishing into the evening fog that filled the low places of the city.

For now, the crest of the Hill was bare of enemies. Arjun went up it at a run.

B
lack smoke rose over the Hill. There was a noise of men shouting, bells ringing. There was a clatter of buckets and ladders, ropes and axes, perhaps hoses. It was all far away on the other side of the Hill, and Arjun kept his distance. He wandered among tree-lined high-walled streets, in and out of pools of gaslight and shadow. Dogs barked and howled their outrage at the invasion of their peace, but even they eventually settled again. The trees and the fences muffled the noise and soon Arjun was out of earshot of it all.

He counted off numbers and addresses. The estates on Barking Hill sprawled. Through the iron gateposts he saw rolling lawns, orchards, a painstaking and manicured facsimile of nature; and another, and another, until it came to seem quite monotonous. Another lawn, another stand of oaks, and behind them, those white marble mansions, lights in the windows, faceless and repetitive in their mathematical perfection.

In the silence Arjun’s thoughts turned inward, and he wondered at his own calm. He’d been within moments of death; he’d
seen two men murdered at his feet; he remained unclear as to who exactly the Know-Nothings and the Black Masks were, and what the point of the violence might have been. Any of the people behind those fences, in those beautiful mansions, would have been reduced to shaking and sobbing by the day he’d had; how could he be so unconcerned? Something in his past had numbed him to horror; something valuable and human in him, he thought, had been lost. Maybe he
was
a ghost.

Brace-Bel’s gate had no number, but a plaque bore his name. By the grace of Thayer’s elderly mother and the black-masked terrorists Arjun was there, alive and intact.

Ruth would have eaten dinner, and the house would be dark; would she be able to sleep tonight?

The fence around Brace-Bel’s garden was high, but the trees that grew outside it and stretched over it were so comically easy to climb that the fence couldn’t seriously be meant to keep people out. At most it was a warning; it might almost have been an invitation.

Xaw-Market-Ancient Monsters-
Wizardry-Ghosts of the Coming War

Ruth

T
hrough the Window
of the shop at No. 37, Ruth watched Arjun walk away down the Street. In the thick whorled glass of the windows his body blurred, twisted, was soon a black angular refraction indistinguishable from the trees or the lampposts. The curve of the Street took him out of sight entirely. Seized by a sudden excitement Ruth ran upstairs to the window of the third-floor bathroom, which looked over No. 39’s roof, and allowed a view of a tiny vulnerable figure that might have been Arjun passing south off the Street across the little patch of waste-ground behind No. 92, and under a yellow sky bruised by grey clouds.

The bathroom was, she noticed, appallingly dusty. “Not been up here in
ages.”
Her voice echoed. The Dad had been an overambitious builder; the house was too large, too full of empty spaces, too full of drafts and dust.

Ruth considered cleaning—she was too restless.

Instead she wound up one of the music-machines to play a shimmering soulful number by the Pullman & Jones Band, and smoked one and then another of the pungent
xaw
cigarettes. The music built from minor to major, to a crescendo of trumpets. Her senses sharpened by the
xaw
, it seemed the air filled with sudden brightness. She adjusted the needle and played it again. The afternoon sky darkened.

The room was full of ghosts.

For instance the music-machine, which operated according to forgotten principles, and could no longer be manufactured, had been rescued by Ivy and their father from a rubbish-tip.

Ruth had rescued the music herself; the record had been part of a lot to be destroyed by the Know-Nothings, but she had been friends with one of the guards at school and had been able to persuade him to let her salvage as much as she could fit under her coat. No one remembered who the Pullman & Jones Band was. The record’s sepia-toned sleeve showed a group of smiling young people, mostly black, men in pinstripe suits and women in dark dresses, in a lush park, in front of an unrecognizable city of domed and glittering buildings. She was achingly proud of having saved them from the fire.

The intoxicating synesthetic
xaw
was taken from a virulent purple weed that grew only on certain rusty surfaces. The Dad claimed to have discovered it in his explorations of the city’s waste-grounds. It bore all the marks of having been
engineered
, he’d said after long study, though for what purpose he wasn’t sure—most likely something religious. The name
xaw
came from an old book Ruth had read, where
xaw
was the drug the young wizard used to call on the powers that defeated the King of Shadows … It was probably the wrong name for whatever the weed really was. Certainly smoking it gave Ruth no magical powers. It heightened memory and the senses, it calmed the nerves. Now Ruth and Marta cultivated it in the backyard, on chicken wire and the insides of old machines, and as far as they knew were the only people who remembered it at all.