Gears of the City (16 page)

“I should be getting going,” Ruth said. “If you’re here some other night I should bring you something to drink, maybe.”

“Someone’s always here, Ruth. A little thank-you’s always appreciated.”

T
he next day she was in an unaccountably good mood. It was a good day for business; the bell rang and customers crept in, opened their wallets, walked out with forbidden books stuffed in their coat pockets. She had a sense that things were moving again, unfreezing, stirring from the dust: Ivy would return, Arjun would bring her back, the mistakes of the past would be wiped away …

The picture book she’d picked up at last night’s market turned out to be charming. It dealt with a young wizard—who dressed very oddly, in what she could only think of as a dress and a kind of sparkly tea towel wrapped around his head—who set out to rescue a princess from the headquarters of a wicked Combine, who had the remarkable power to open quite ordinary doors and manholes and pass through them into far-off parts of the city, or draw through them monsters, genies, storms, flying horses, golems, dancing-girls. The bright pages were brittle with age, and she turned them slowly, carefully, admiring the details, the colors, the vibrant exotic vines that curled around every structure in that long-forgotten city.

It struck Ruth as a good omen. It made her laugh. But she hid it every time the doorbell rang, because it was most certainly forbidden, and if the wrong person saw it …

The book made her think of Ivy.
Doors.
Before she left, Ivy had been obsessed with
doors.
With gates, gratings, bridges, and tunnels—with distances and measurements and the spaces between things. They’d had a game when they were girls, and Ivy had taken it too seriously—
doors.
Same as the Dad, before what happened to
him.
Ivy would have laughed at the little picture book, called it a childish fantasy, whereas
her
investigations were scientific, were not about escape, but understanding, and control. Ruth vividly remembered the screaming row the sisters had had, shortly before
Ivy—frantic and depressed as her experiments and explorations one by one failed, her mathematics refused to work out, and she was trapped and unable to break free from the city—was desperate enough and unwise enough to go off with that unpleasant Brace-Bel creature. Ruth remembered—all three of them standing in that same cluttered shop front, picking up and throwing fragile books and records, sneering and crying and snarling, arguing over whether Ivy needed her sisters, whether they were holding her back, or whether Ivy was, as Marta said, a bitch, heartless, worse than their father … The room still seemed to echo with it. Ruth refused (it was a sunny day; warmth slanted in through the thick windows) to be upset at the memory. Ivy would be free soon, home again, happy to see her sisters; they could apologize and begin again, together, through dreams, cunning, patience, science, to unlock the puzzle of the city and pass beyond it into better and brighter times. Up the Mountain, into the clouds, down into the warmth of memories; it didn’t matter.

I
n the evening—as Arjun, miles to the south and east, climbed over Brace-Bel’s low fence—Ruth went walking, hands in her pockets, down the street, meaning to check on Thayer and his poor mother, and noticing how the clouds behind the roofs and the chimney-pots were like blood and grey feathers. Like when Marta’s cats got hold of a pigeon. She was never sure whether to take clouds as
significant
or not. The Dad had briefly had a period of fascination with clouds, which he theorized were a kind of abstract and roiling map of the city below, color-flattened, like one of his “photographs,” and which might, if you studied them in the right way, offer
directions
, expose secret paths not visible in the solid world below—but Ivy had said all that was nonsense, evidence of early senility; clouds were only clouds. Ruth had no idea who was right.

She was shocked out of her thoughts by the sound of shouting and running feet. Instinctively she ducked into a doorway and tried to look inconspicuous.

A man came running down the darkening street, darting in and out of the slants of window light, so that his motion seemed stiff, jerky, hectic, helpless. The first thing Ruth noticed about him was his eyes; they had the frightened and lost look that said that he didn’t
know where he was, that he’d come tumbling down the Mountain with his memory ruined and found himself in some alien city. The second thing she noticed was that he carried a rifle, clutching it in his arms like a baby, and wore a grey-black military-looking uniform, torn as if by sharp wire, and that he seemed vaguely familiar, as if she’d met him before under better circumstances. He was shrieking something incoherent. Behind him people were shouting, “Stop, you idiot!” and, “Just wait a moment!” and, “Keep that fucking noise down, or the Know-Nothings’ll be here!”

Ruth stepped out into the street in front of the running man, her arms spread wide to show she wasn’t an enemy, trying to say something to calm him; but he simply crashed into her, knocked her aside, and kept running.

As he staggered away he was calling out something about a war, about his lost men, about the airships.

One of
those
, Ruth thought. One of the ones from the War. (What War? Against the Mountain, presumably. When? Why? No one knew, yet. Lost soldiers like him came through every so often, and upset everyone with their ranting.)

The man turned into an alley and his shouting—
this is all ruins, where am I, who are you people
—echoed dully and faded.

Zeigler helped Ruth to her feet. Her hip was bruised where she’d fallen in the gutter. “I’m all right,” she told him. “I’m fine.”

He offered her a handkerchief; there was dirt on her face. “Poor man,” he said. “One of
those.”

Her hip hurt abominably. “Most of them manage not to break my bloody leg.”

“Oh dear, is it really … ?”

“I’m only showing off, Mr. Zeigler. I’m fine.”

Zeigler cupped a hand to his ear and craned his head, but the soldier was gone from earshot. He shook his head. “Ghosts, I’ve always said, are like the omnibus; you wait and you wait and two come at once.”

Ruth sighed, smiled. “That’s true, Mr. Zeigler. That’s quite good.”

They went looking down the alley for the soldier, but he was gone, vanished into the night as if cleaned away by patient, silent street sweepers.

A Garden for Paranoids-
“Are You New?”-The Dancers-
The Whip-An Inelegant Combat

Arjun

I
n the violet
light of the evening sky the plants in the garden seemed both exotic and artificial, lush and yet flat. The effect was heightened by the presence among the trees and the bushes and the vines of what were, on closer inspection, only
paintings
of flowers and vines, on the side of the grottos and nooks and marble chambers with which the garden was generously, extravagantly appointed. Those paintings were executed so skillfully that in the uncomfortable and ambiguous light it was easy to take them for real things, until one ran one’s hands over their cold stone surfaces. And after wandering awhile Arjun realized that all of the strangest and wildest plants—the swollen, obscene, and organic things, in lurid shades; the predatory thorns and strangling sinewy tentacles; the funeral-cloth flowers; the asymmetries and improbabilities— were in the paintings, not in life. Only so much could be done to pervert flowers and trees.

There was an obscene hedge maze. Arjun avoided it. The marble structures had their own varieties and eccentricities. Grim sepulchers rubbed shoulders with rose-draped lovers’ nooks; or with hissing fountains; with tall carved needles of stone; with what seemed to be shrines, in which statues of exotically dressed individuals adopted strange and significant poses; or with … but
Arjun steered clear of all Brace-Bel’s buildings and statues. They were, he thought, quite likely to be booby-trapped.

Though they came in a mad cacophony of styles, stolen from a hundred Ages of the city, each of them was quite clearly new construction; fresh stone, clean-lined, and unworn. None of them could be more than a few years old.

There was distant music, coming from the mansion that overlooked the house. Once there was a sound that might have been a shriek, or might have been laughter. No birds; no rustle of vermin; a cold and lifeless un-city Only a faint buzz and click and cold electric whine.

Arjun took a winding route through the garden—the wide graveled path also seemed likely to be rigged, or watched. He trampled the flower beds and shoved through thorny bushes, one eye on the warm light of the mansion’s windows, one on the ground at his feet, in which he detected a number of dangers—everything in Brace-Bel’s garden was ersatz except the dangers.

Some of them were crude and obvious. The flower beds sprouted iron mantraps. Even in the half-light they were impossible to miss—their function was possibly ornamental. Here and there Brace-Bel had strung razor wire at neck height between trees. No intruder with the sense to not run blindly could have been caught by it; perhaps Brace-Bel only wanted to ensure that his guests took the time to appreciate his garden.

There were wires at ankle height attached to shotguns, or bells. Those took more care to avoid. Arjun found that he had a great capacity for patience and caution.

There were traps that could not reasonably exist—not here, not yet. In the branches, in the shadows of the marble shrines, glittered the hard unblinking eyes of
cameras;
devices for which Thayer and Basso and Miller and the rest would have had no name, which they would not, being local folk, have known to avoid. Arjun ducked and crept and hid from their gaze. He remembered, vaguely, a place in the city where every street corner carried one of those little devices like a hidden knife; he remembered he’d gone there to plead with a bank manager for release of a sealed safe-deposit box containing a certain valuable key, and he remembered quite clearly the manager’s insincere smile of refusal and the dull brass of the box, but couldn’t remember what the key opened, or why he …

One thing at a time. Whatever door it opened you must have passed through, because here you are; it’s behind you now. Brace-Bel is the step before you.

On the elegant arch of a little white bridge across an artificial stream Arjun noted two black boxes, one on either side of the walkway, just above ankle height. He knelt close but did not touch them. Their smooth cool material was not quite metal. A wire ran away from them into the grass and up to the house. Between the two boxes was an invisible etheric force—Arjun remembered that without knowing how or why or where he’d seen those devices before—a force that if interrupted would trigger an alarm. Even the empty air in Brace-Bel’s garden was watchful for intruders.

And there were traps that could not reasonably exist
anywhere;
fragments of ancient superstitions, dragged up and nailed up on the trees; things that Thayer and Basso and the rest would not have known to take seriously, even if they’d noticed them, having never traveled in parts of the city where such things were not jokes, or quaint curiosities, but real and deadly weapons in the bitter nighttime wars of gutter-witches and fortune-tellers and madmen and paranoids. Arjun surprised and dismayed himself with his own knowledge of those nasty little tricks. The horseshoes didn’t worry him too much; they were set to catch ghosts and devils, and he was, whatever people said, flesh and blood. Some of the spiderweb constructions of twig and wire and feather and bird-skull hung in the branches were set to catch nightmares, and those didn’t concern him. Others were set to release those nightmares on those who brushed past them. Poor mad Thayer, perhaps, had blundered into something like that—or perhaps there was hallucinating gas, or a needle, if one tripped the wrong wire. Some of the devices glowed, like marsh gas; others blinked a steady electric light, red, green,
tiny
, like distant stars. Brace-Bel’s garden was a contest of light and shadow; shadow was winning.

Arjun ducked his head and watched his step.

A line of salt; a splash of blood; a knot of hair; a severed hand dangling spiderlike from rusty wires; a withered bird—corpse nailed upside down to a tree trunk; all those were snares or wards of one kind or another. Out of the corner of his eye Arjun saw a word of power chalked on the side of a stand pipe—sodom—a curse of judgment and fire, a wicked word to utter or invoke in
any
city, let
alone one of Ararat’s fragile substance—and he spoke the counter-word at once, by instinct, and then couldn’t remember what it was.

Perhaps it was all hocus-pocus and superstition; perhaps not. Arjun took no chances. He made it to the house apparently unscathed. If some curse had been placed on his soul, he thought, it wouldn’t be the first and it would have to fight for its prize. If a camera had caught sight of him and triggered a silent alarm, he’d find out soon.

The lower floors of the house were dark. From the upper windows there was light and music; a fast waltz.