Gears of the City (61 page)

There was a thump and rustling behind them, as if someone had followed them over the fence, but when they turned they saw nothing and no one.

At the far end of the garden—down winding paths, and past a number of hulking dark sheds—stood Shay’s house. The form of the Mountain. A mansion of immense, imposing size.
Wasteful
size—only a handful of windows at the center of the dark mass were lit.

And, as Arjun and Ruth approached, it struck them that the mansion was tremendously ugly; and what was ugly about it was that it was so
repetitive.
It was less like a sprawling and luxurious mansion than like a single, mean, five-story flatblock repeated again and again, stacked and reflected and refracted, but not elaborated or developed. It had no interesting features other than size. It was a failure of imagination, instantiated in brick and iron.

“This isn’t real,” Ruth said. “It’s a mask. This is how he wants it to look. It could be
anything.
The Beast said this was a machine the Builders made, an engine, a factory, a … I don’t know what. He made it this way. This is how he wants to live.”

“This is his soul, Ruth.”

“He wasn’t always like this.”

“Are you sure?”

From the concrete sheds to the right of the path there was the hum and grind of slumbering machinery.

A huge curved corrugated-iron shed stood by the left of the path. There was a rusty half-open door. Sounds of murmuring,
whimpering, hissing emerged. There was a sound of something like tuneless singing.

“Don’t,” Ruth said, as Arjun pulled at the door, making stuck hinges screech. “Don’t. We should stay on the path and go to the house.”

“Is that what Ivy says?”

“I think so.”

“I don’t trust Ivy. I want to look around.”

He pulled. Something snapped and the door opened.

T
he interior of the shed was huge and dark and smelled of rust and blood and muck. A single dim electric bulb dangled and swayed like a suicide from the high ceiling.

Whatever had sounded like singing, or murmuring, it was silent now; perhaps it had only been the creak of the metal, the groan of the pipes, the low hum of electricity.

There were shapes in the shadows—crates, cages, tables, the no-longer organic bulk of dead things.

“We shouldn’t be here,” Ruth said.

Arjun slowly approached one of the cages. “We can’t make him any angrier.” Something the size of a man slumped in the cage, wrapped in what might have been a cloak, might have been shapeless useless wings.

“He has laboratories,”
Arjun said.

Did the shape in the cage move? It was hard to say. The bulb swayed slightly; the shadows twitched and jumped.

“He was always interested in birds,” Ruth said. Arjun turned to see that she stood by a row of shelves, like library stacks, on which stood rusted birdcages, dirty glass cases, wooden perches either empty or holding stuffed parrots and hawks and ravens and other, unnameable birds. “All dead,” she said. “They’re all dead.”

“No one’s been in here for a long time,” Arjun said. “The light—you’ve never seen those lights, have you, electric lights? They burn out. It should have burned out long ago; that door was rusted shut, and the dust … But nothing works here as it should.”

“He was
always
interested in birds. He used to tell us—no, he used to tell
Ivy
, we were just there in the room sometimes when he said it—he used to talk about how free birds were, how lonely, how
the city was all
open
for them. Once I said,
why do you put them in cages, then?
And he just laughed. I thought he was laughing kindly.”

A number of the birds were dismembered in part, flayed and sliced open, nerves and muscles and bones exposed.

“He used to know a lot about how their
eyes
worked. They were too slow, or too fast, or something; how they saw pictures of things.”

“Nothing here rots,” Arjun said. “Why doesn’t it rot?”

“Birds. Oh, it really
is
him, isn’t it? Oh
no.”

“He does worse things,” Arjun said, “to more precious things than birds.”

The sound of shuffling; a slow drip-drip.

There was a row of cages containing dead dogs, dead apes and monkeys, leathery little lizards. Some bore the scars of elaborate surgeries; others didn’t, yet.

“Perhaps at first he
collected
them,” Arjun said. “Creatures like this. Do you think these spoke, when they were alive? Or obeyed his commands? Or the birds—did they navigate for him? I imagine him trading for them—there are places where such surgeries are cheap and commonplace, and places where they must seem like the most wonderful and terrible magic. When I met him, when he went by the name of
Lemuel
, I remember there were birds …”

“Look.” On a low table, covered in dust, there was a row of sharp instruments. Ruth brushed her fingers through the dust, and shuddered.

“He must have learned it somewhere. He must have learned all kinds of things. I walked in his paths for years and I never learned very much of anything.”

“He’s much cleverer than you.”

“My attention was focused elsewhere. Now I feel I’ve wasted my time. I am afraid to face him.”

“I don’t think he’s very
good
at it,” Ruth said. “The surgery. All of these creatures are dead.”

There was a table in front of them. The bulb now dangled directly overhead and cast a stark light on the table, and on the anatomy of the creature that lay, flayed and shackled and inert, on the table’s bloody surface.

It resembled a child at least as strongly as it resembled an ape.

It had one saucerlike eye, wide and dull as a doorknob. The
other eye was an abscess of exposed nerves and fluids. Its throat—its vocal chords—had been opened. Twined in among the red tendons and blue veins were fragments of bright metal that might have been surgical clamps, or discarded instruments, or might have been devices for speech, or …

Dust had settled on the table, on the instruments, on the creature’s matted fur.

“He lost interest,” Ruth said. “Left it unfinished.”

She brushed flakes of fallen rust out of its fur.

Arjun inspected the instruments. “Do you think these are remarkable in any way?” He handled them carefully, lifting them up to the light.

“Do you mean, are they dangerous? Are they useful?”

“Yes. They only look like knives to me.”

“How am I supposed to know? We can ask Ivy.”

The bulb buzzed and flickered. For a moment it was dark and Arjun nearly dropped the knife in his hand. When the light returned again the creature’s mouth was open, exposing sharp teeth, a bloody stump where a tongue should have been.

“Was its mouth open before?”

Ruth said, “Never mind that—where was the door?”

Outside the circle of electric light everything was vague and looming shadows.

“This way?”

“That
way.”

The murmuring resumed; a multitude of feeble confused voices. Something in the room
was
singing—a low wavering growl that sometimes whined up the scale into music, and dropped back again as if ashamed.

“No; I circled once around the table, so …”

“Something’s alive in here.”

“Everything’s
alive in here,” Arjun said. “Nothing dies here unless he wants it to.”

A voice from behind his shoulder repeated
nothing dies.
Another voice from somewhere to his left took it up, and another.
Nothing dies here nothing dies here.

“Run to the wall,” Ruth said. “Work our way round from there. Don’t touch anything.” And she set off running into the shadows. The moment she stepped out of the electric light something huge
and swollen lunged from the hulking shadow of a broken cage and knocked her to the floor. There was a row of spines all along its—its back? Its arm? It pressed her to the floor and groaned in tones of pleasure and agony
nothing here dies of pain or making unmaking reduction increase joining nerves unstitched unmapped division our cruel father our keeper knives and toys and nightmares so long no love or kindness among his children he botched us all.
Its voice was crude and vile, half senseless, unfinished. Ruth’s sudden scream of rage and pain was half animal, too. She struggled beneath it. Arjun charged it brandishing one of the vicious little surgical knives and it half ran, half leapt back into the shadows.

Ruth was on her feet and running. Arjun followed. She stumbled, banging her hip against a low table, and he overtook her. He ran nearly face-first, full tilt into the wall—he banged against it with his outstretched hands and the whole shed clanged and shook.

Ruth fell into his arms; there was slick blood on her shirt. She turned left and ran brushing her hand against the thin corrugated-iron wall, so that it rattled and clanged and the shed echoed. Arjun ran after her. Something seized the back of his trouser leg and he fell onto the concrete floor. The thing that hunched its damp and sweaty weight over him spoke nonsense in numbers and shrieks. He struggled to stand and it brought its mumbling mouth next to his ear. Its breath smelled strangely of flowers.

Ruth stumbled against the wall and ran into a concrete and iron block on the side of which was a large rusty switch. Screaming and throwing all her weight onto it she dragged it down—it clicked and wires sizzled and hummed, and suddenly a dozen more bulbs flared into life and the shed was brightly, blindingly lit.

There was a hiss and a scrabble of claws and the thing on Arjun’s back lurched away. When he rolled on his back to catch a glimpse of it it was gone, and the shed was silent.

Ruth’s dark curled hair was lank with sweat, despite the cold. She was breathing wildly. The worn linen of her shirt was torn at her left shoulder, and she was bleeding.

In bright light the shed was like a disused slaughterhouse. In the starkly lit corners of the cages there was nothing but bone, dried blood, scraps of fur, and half-rotted carcasses.

Ruth choked and sobbed and held her sleeve to her mouth as the
stink
hit her.

The door was not far away. They ran for it. As they forced it closed behind them, leaning all their weight against its hinges, the lights went out again.

A
rjun assured Ruth that the cuts on the back of her shoulder were shallow. He didn’t know whether that was true or not.

He held up his maimed hand and smiled ruefully. “It could be worse,” he said. “And at least we know that their teeth are not
necessarily
poisoned.”

She shuddered and held her left arm tightly against her side with her right.

“Did Ivy tell you the light would—would do whatever it did to them?”

“I didn’t even know the switch would turn on the lights,” she said. “I just thought whatever it was it couldn’t make things worse.”

“Hah. I picked up this knife.” In the moonlight it looked rusted, dull, and grimy. “It may be worthless.”

“Be careful with that.”

He slipped it gingerly into his jacket pocket.

“All right,” she said. “All right. Come on.”

It crossed his mind briefly to suggest that being wounded, she should stay behind, but he had the good sense not to say it.

“No,” she said, as he looked curiously at the sheds off to the right of the path, under the shadows of drooping ash trees. “Now we stay on the path.” From the sheds came the sounds of machinery, and from around the shuttered windows there was a faint cold light. “We find Ivy first. Then you can look for whatever you want to look for. “

“That’s very wise. Ivy first, and your father.”

T
he mansion had no obvious entrance. There was a multitude of dark windows, all out of reach, but no doors. There were black rusting drainpipes, and cornices, and inelegant pillars, but nothing that could be climbed. The drainpipes broke from the wall. The windows remained out of reach.

It took a long time to walk around the building, to find that it
appeared more or less identical from every angle. They turned again and came around the front, if that was what it was, and they walked around it again.

Ruth jumped for a window and fell short. She swore. “What did you do last time?”

“… and for all I know the time before that, and before that. But I have no idea how to proceed. I doubt I ever got this far.”

She shook her head and rested for a moment, leaning against the cold brick of the wall.

They kept walking. Overhead, a light in a window went out. Another window lit up, and shortly afterward another, as if someone was moving slowly from room to room, carefully switching off each light as he went.

Ruth stopped to rest again. She sat on a set of low, worn steps. They had passed one like it every few minutes; it led nowhere. She was looking increasingly grey faced and short of breath. She walked more slowly with every step.

“Let me look at your wound.”

“I’m fine, Arjun.”

She let him look anyway, but it was dark, and he still had no real idea what he was looking at.

He said, “You’ll be all right.” He frowned. “I expect Ivy or your father will have medicine.”

“Not if we never get inside. Let’s keep moving.”

They turned the corner again and another flank of the building lay before them. In the garden there were shadows and structures and occasional noises. There was a brief scatter of rain. They turned another corner. Some faces of the mansion were randomly ornamented with gargoyles; others were not. Drains and gutters and eaves bulked in the dark.

“If we had a rope …” Arjun said.

“If we had a rope there would be some other bloody reason why it wouldn’t work. Let’s sit for a moment.”

They turned another corner, and later another. Though the building seemed to be square, right-angled, Arjun suspected that it was not; that each time they turned a new face of the building unfolded before them. Ruth thought that they were simply going around and around in circles. They left no footprints and they had nothing to mark the walls with; they could not be sure. They
turned another corner, and another, and Arjun said that he thought perhaps Ruth was right and they
had
seen those windows before, those pipes, that cracked molding. Ruth disagreed.