Gears of the City (55 page)

He breathed a sigh of relief. Then he went back to courting the owl, which looked down at him with every indication of loathing and contempt. Its black eyes studied his fingers like prey. It said,
Where’s there? Near?

“Here,” Ruth said. “Flitter, do you mind if I …”

“She won’t come to you, miss, she doesn’t even know you. You have to know her moods …”

“Just a moment, Flitter.” Ruth stood beneath the crane. She lifted up her arms, and before she could even open her mouth the owl had descended into them.

Its claws gently clutched her forearm. It was heavy—as if beneath its soft feathers it was made of stone, or steel. The eyes—the
eyes could not be natural. They were like gems. Perhaps they
were
gems. Could it see? It said,
Who’ll will the whorl of the walls of the world?

“You’ve got a way with her!” Flitter said. “Oh you’ve got a way with her, all right! Look at you both! You’d be beautiful friends together, when the Beast’s made you …”

He reached to pet the bird’s head. Its beak struck off the tip of his index finger. Then it screwed its head around, and around, and emitted a long hooting sound that turned into a mechanical screech like a train running off its rails. Then it ceased to exist.

Ruth’s arms were empty; she stumbled.

Flitter’s finger stump bled all down his bony wrist.

“You should get that looked at,” Ruth said. Then she walked over to the Beast’s tent.

T
he Beast was gone. The tent was empty. The haunts of half-dead strays drifted among the cushions, the cabinets, the sundials, the statues.

Outside, an indifferent guard sat by the tent’s open flap, drowsing in the sun, whittling a bit of wood into a spear-point. “Not there, is he?”

She sighed, “No.”

The guard pointed with his knife at the circle of motorcars. “Took a car. First thing this morning.”

“Is it—is
he
gone? Why? Where?”

“Calm down, miss! He’ll be back. He wouldn’t leave us. You’ll learn if you stay with us—you’ll learn his little ways. He gets all excited in the mornings. It’s the sun. He says he never used to get sun, where he was before, back in the old world. He likes to take the cars and go for a drive. Roaring round and round and laughing. The streets are empty these days and you can go as fast as you like.”

Feeling lost and deflated, Ruth sat down. She closed her eyes and felt the sun on her face. “Sounds nice,” she said.

“I wouldn’t dare,” the guard said. “Too fast for me. Those things terrify me! He’s a brave one, the Beast.”

“It sounds like you love him very much.”

The guard hummed cheerfully as he whittled.

R
uth wandered the camp. The Beast’s followers shared their food with her, and told her their stories. She didn’t really listen. Everyone had some reason for following the Beast, some chain of coincidences and tragedies and epiphanies that had dragged them there. It was all the same, in the end.

In the afternoon, the owl came and settled beside her. It came back into existence half shyly, like a missing cat slipping in by the back door. It puffed its breast and shuffled its claws. It seemed to enjoy her company. She felt like she, too, was a provisional and incomplete creature. Its feathers glowed in the sunshine with their own inner light—it shone like a dirty puddle. Sighing, she stroked its head; her fingers tingled. It faded in and out of visibility. It muttered nonsensical questions. Flitter watched jealously, pleadingly, and tried to catch Ruth’s eye.

Was it possible? Yes—no—maybe. What a cruel joke!

Sunset filled the quarry with light the color of roses. Darkness followed behind. The Beast’s followers lit bonfires in trash bins and old oilcans. A dull roar of engines echoed over the edge of the quarry—and with its horn honking, its wheels spitting gravel, its kerosene headlamps slicing the night, the Beast’s black motorcar came hurtling recklessly down-slope. It slammed to a halt and the Beast leapt from it. Steam hissed from the car’s hood, and the engine rattled in distress. “Ruth Low,” the Beast beamed. “Still hungry? You have more questions?”

S
he followed the Beast into the tent. It lit two lamps, then sank with a sigh into the cushions. “Speed, sunlight, danger,” it said. “Clear the mind.”

The lamps cast strange shadows, some of which were animate, haunted. Outside, the engine still hissed. The cooling metal of the car’s black cowling popped and clanged, a series of notes, descanting, clear as a bell, and the quarry echoed with it. There was a thump from the corner of the tent, which made Ruth start, and one of the tall lacquered cabinets seemed to sway. Far overhead, the owl cried out. The Beast toyed with a knife. “You have questions, Ruth Low?”

“Only two.”

“Only two? Frugal. Go on.”

“Can we save the city? Can we rebuild?”

“No. The Hollows will keep coming. The airships will keep coming. Shay is bloody-minded and unsympathetic—he will not change course. He has clearly decided that you are—this part of the city is— an unacceptable weakness; he must cut you out. And he will. He controls the machines of the Mountain. Things down here will happen as he wants them to happen. Your stores will run out. Your farms will fail. You will win only temporary victories, and not enough of them. A long dark Age is coming. Shay will be alone, and there will be no one left for him to fear for a long time. There is no way back to the Mountain. Did you come here hoping I would tell you the way? Oh, Ruth, the routes I was taught have all vanished. The airships leveled those streets. Shay has changed the locks.” The Beast paused, as if waiting for a response.

“I … I understand.” What else was there to say?

“Remember, Ruth, I am not a prophet. But this is how it seems to me. I’m sorry. You had another question?”

How to ask it? She couldn’t come out and say it straight—she had to circle around it, like the narrow streets that circled the Mountain, as if an answer was the last thing she wanted, a ghost in the room that must not be acknowledged … “Ivy,” she said. “My sister.”

“I remember her well. She is very, very clever.” The Beast admired its own scarred arms. “Look at the suit she helped to tailor for me! I could not have done it without her.” It glanced over at its operating table, and frowned. “Look at all my failures.”

“Hundreds of people have gone up the Mountain—you said that, right?”

“Thousands! Hundreds of thousands! More than an ordinary mind can count.”

“And I … And this time, things were different. With the airships and everything. Shay’s gone mad, or something. Right?”

“Apparently.” Something thumped in the recesses of the room. The Beast hissed and the strays went shadowy.

“Someone who went up this time did something different, or was something different. Arjun? I don’t think it’s Arjun.”

“No. He could not do this. By the standards of madmen and seers, he is remarkably ordinary. Far deadlier men have gone up. I am surprised he ever made it as far as he did, frankly.”

“Ivy, then.”

“Are you trying to tell me something? Would you like me to listen to your story? Six hundred years ago the Church of the Spine of Heaven chained me in a golden cage in their sacristy. I listened to confessions. I swallowed sins, supposedly. I listen well, Ruth.”

“This isn’t my story.”

“How sad. I rode on a man’s shoulder. I was left behind in a cage. I am a king of madmen in the wasteland. I know what it is not to matter.”

“Beast, have you ever left the city? Have you ever been to the borders?”

“No. I have never dared. I am a patchwork thing. I might fall apart. Have you?”

“No. Ivy has, though. Do you want to hear about it?”

S
lag. Heaps of it. Rusted metal. Spoil and tailings, in mountainous dunes, flat and lifeless plains. Forever, into the void. That was what was at the edge of the city. In other Ages
—
so Ruth’s books and old paintings said
—
there were walls, or rivers, or fields. Steaming waterfalls over an abyss of stars; the shores of a bright sea. Storybook stuff. Here, now, there was shadow, waste, and nothing. So Ivy had said.

A
s Ruth talked, the Beast leaned in closer. The maimed and shadowy strays clustered around. Something rattled in the darkness. The Beast licked its lips.

“It’s more funny,” Ruth said, “than it is sad. Really. When you think about it now.”

O
ne day when all the Low sisters were only children
—
Marta was perhaps fourteen and going with the boys from the printworks; Ruth twelve, bookish and shy, Ivy ten, eleven, precocious and cunning
—
the Dad came home rain-soaked from a business meeting and swore
bastard
and threw his battered briefcase against the wall so hard that it burst open and scattered papers
,
maps, devices
—
whatever it was he was selling at the time
—
all over the floor. And the cabinets shook open and the best plates fell out and shattered, and the Lows could not afford to lose their good plates.

Ruth remembered this because Mr. Low was generally a cheerful man, and if he was a little distant, a little remote, it was only because his fascinations, his enthusiasms, his
genius,
distracted him; and his rages were infrequent, and happened only when he had been thwarted, when he had been
cheated.

What was he? He was an independent operator
—
an inventor
—
an explorer
—
a wheeler and dealer
—
a crook, from time to time. Too proud to work in the factories. Too difficult and strange to rise in the ranks. Always at odd angles to the world. The city was a hard place for independent operators, even back then.

Ruth remembered how while she and Ivy waited nervously at the top of the stairs, Mr. Low tore off his tie, loosened his belt and let his round belly sag, rolled up one of the special cigarettes that he used to say, winking, brought visions of
how things really are;
and then he settled into an evening at the kitchen table sorting through his papers and making notes and tearing things out and swearing and cursing to himself
—another failure another failure another fucking failure, bastard that bastard.

Ruth stayed at the top of the stairs. Ivy went and sat across the table from her father, and Ruth couldn’t hear what they talked about. Marta didn’t come home until the early hours of the morning, by which time the Dad’s mood had improved greatly, and Ruth, relieved, had gone to bed.

T
wo days later Mr. Low announced over the breakfast table that he was
taking a trip.
Since the girls’ mother died he had limited his explorations to the near environs of the house on Carnyx Street, which circumscribed his investigations greatly. There was nothing to see there, and no one knowledgeable to talk to or deal with, and the bloody Know-Nothings were on every street corner making trouble and always questioning Mr. Low about his
means of support.
And in Mr. Low’s view the girls were old enough now to look after themselves for a bit, with the possible exception of Ivy, which was why he was taking Ivy with him.

He would be back soon, he said. In the meantime he had made arrangements with Mrs. Rawley from the Tearoom down the street; she’d look in on them from time to time, and make sure that they were fed, and bathed, and schooled.

Mr. Low left that afternoon. As promised he took Ivy, who looked very grave and serious in the grey raincoat he found for her
—
which was to say
, Marta’s
raincoat.

Mr. Low’s promises regarding Mrs. Raw ley unfortunately turned out to be false. It turned out that he’d told her he would be away for two nights, maybe three, and she was entirely unprepared for his long absence
—
which stretched out into a week, two weeks, a month, two months, and still there was no word from him, or from Ivy. After two months Mrs. Rawley passed the girls off to Mrs. Guip, who one month later handed them into the care of old Mrs. Thay er, and so on, all down Carnyx Street, until after six months had gone by, Marta insisted that they were quite capable of looking after themselves, and they returned to the drafty and dusty old house Mr. Low built.

By that time, Ruth’s evening schooling was finished, and she and Marta both worked making boots; and Marta had decided that the Dad was clearly dead
—
no matter how Ruth cried, Marta said, the fact was that the Dad was clearly dead. It was
better
if he was dead than if he’d just decided to walk out. Less hurtful. And Marta had ideas about how, with all the strange stock the Dad had left behind, heaped in boxes in the cellar and the attic, it might be possible to keep some of his odd little businesses going…

Eleven months after he’d walked out the door Mr. Low returned. He sauntered in through the kitchen door while the girls were eating, and at first they took him for a Know-Not hing or a burglar and Marta reached for the shotgun over the mantelpiece, but then they saw Ivy with him.