Gears of the City (64 page)

They followed the monkey through room after room of bathrooms: claw-foot tubs, slippery tiled floor, cold stagnant air, and the choke and hiss of overburdened plumbing. Mildewed doors swung, faded curtains rustled. The pattern on the tiles was green and yellow, like moss.

Ruth said, “Are you happy here, Brace-Bel?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Are you happy? You seemed so proud, when I met you before.
You thought you were so clever. You were, too, you really were, though I didn’t like you much. You can’t be happy serving my sister, in this horrible place, not understanding anything.”

Brace-Bel turned to her. His head was framed by rusting pipes, and he stooped beneath them. His burned face wore an expression of genuine surprise. “Why do you ask?”

“I don’t know, Brace-Bel. Maybe I’m sorry for you. You didn’t deserve to get caught up in all this, did you? You were probably all right in your own place, before we ruined you. Never mind. Never mind. I don’t mean to be rude. Let’s go see Ivy.”

He shook his head. He seemed to be about to say something.

Maury

Shay should have killed her at once, the bitch Ivy, killed her when she’d first set foot on the Mountain. That was what Maury thought. That was what Maury thought because that was what Shay had said, muttering, snarling, all through the operation, and during the grey days that came after, when Shay hunched in his chair and Maury scuttled around at his feet, cleaning, fetching, serving, adjusting the wheels and the levers of the machinery. Now, as Maury skulked and spied through the corridors of the terrible house, the old man’s words echoed in his head, scraped his skull.
I should have killed her.
He should have hollowed her out, stolen her memories, thrown her back down. He could have done it then, when she was new, when her position was vulnerable. But he’d been soft. He’d been sentimental. Now it was too late—now she had servants, she had control of the machinery. That was the problem with family, with women; they made you weak. Often at that point Shay started to weep, and Maury turned his scarred face away in embarrassment; but the old man’s point was basically sound, Maury thought. And when he saw the new woman, that little copy of Ivy, creeping around the house, he knew there was no room for delay. The thing had to be done
now.
So he followed her, and the fat man. He could go where the Hollows couldn’t. He didn’t know why. And he waited for his moment, and he drew his knife—Shay’s servants had armed him with a meat cleaver from the kitchens, very useful, very nice indeed—and stepping from the shadows he buried it in the fat man’s back. The fat man’s words were replaced with blood.
Was
he happy? Was he fucking
happy? Who cared? They were all beyond happiness or unhap-piness now. They were dead, at the end of the world. Nothing left but strength and fear. He worked the knife loose from the wound. The woman was screaming, running. The Inspector’s new eyes were particularly good at watching
prey.

Ruth

Brace-Bel, jerking, bleeding, lifted the glittering crystal and waved it vaguely under his attacker’s nose, as if trying to tempt him with sweets. The attacker, all too substantial, ignored it. The cleaver struck again and the crystal rolled off under a bathtub.

Ruth ran.

The murderer’s face had been terribly wrong—the scars, his yellow monstrous eyes. He wore torn leathers, rags, what appeared to be an old bedsheet. His left arm was a stump that jerked spastically.

The Inspector—Maury—was it possible? Was he real, or a creation of the machines, her father’s will, Ivy’s mean streak and vivid imagination?

She ran and slid on the wet tiles. Nearly falling, she pulled herself upright on a cold pipe, threw doors open, pushed through damp curtains. Boots stamped behind her. She panted, moaned. He was silent.

A long room of wooden wash tubs, in ranks along the walls. Green-black water. Air that choked. The floorboards thick with moss. Her feet slipped and she regained her balance, at the cost of a shooting pain in her calf, a stab of sick-making adrenaline. She froze, too scared to go further.

Behind her the Inspector stamped, grunted, slid with a sad flatulent squeak, and landed with a thump and a crack.

She turned. He’d caught his head on the edge of one of the wash-tubs. He was kneeling, trying to stand; his missing arm flailed for purchase, as if he’d forgotten his wound.

His face was down, his eyes not visible. That made it easier.

She put her hands on his shoulders as if she were comforting him as he cried. His body was warm, solid, real. She leaned her weight on him. It was that easy; she didn’t even have to push. She did it without thinking. His face went into the green water. His knees scrabbled for purchase on the slimy floor. It took too long, and she had
time to think. Time to gasp in sympathy with his pained thrashing. But she didn’t let up until he stopped moving.

Not real.
That was what she decided to believe. Nothing in that house was real. It was all just moves in an unpleasant game.

R
uth retraced her steps. Brace-Bel’s body was gone, though smears of blood remained.

She groped under the bathtub, and recovered the crystal.

Where was the monkey, her guide? Vanished. She was alone. All around her the house creaked and strained, pulled this way and that by incomprehensible machinery.

S
he wandered through the house, the crystal held out in front of her like a lantern. Its light waxed and waned unpredictably. Whispers and murmurs followed behind her. Shadows leaned from the walls, taking brief form, watching her go past. Cobwebs shook themselves and became pale servants, their fingers reaching tentatively for her, only to be stung by the light; they stared after her resentfully.

Oh, everything was so terribly familiar! That was the worst thing. She walked through her own memories. She might have been dreaming. The house she’d grown up in, endlessly repeated, made nightmarish. That mantelpiece stood in the drawing room—the paint was faded where the sunlight hit it. That was the door to the kitchen—the knob rattled loosely, ever since … That corner where a conflux of roof beams made odd angles—that was in the bedroom she’d once shared with Ivy, and shadows had
always
gathered there.

Her father had made the Mountain this way—this was a mask that he’d hung on its true unthinkable form. All the things her father must have seen, all the places he’d been! But in his old age he returned to his beginnings—and not happily, not fondly, but bitterly, full of shame at his own failure.

She thought of Arjun. Was he still alive? She wished she’d never brought him with her. She was ashamed to have him see this.

The crystal had sharp points. She used it to scratch her name on the plaster of the walls; maybe he’d see it, maybe he’d find her, maybe they could save each other.

A
radio. Creeping, shivering, the sound of static, carried strangely through the thin walls, the pipes, the wires. Were those voices? Not exactly. Certainly not music. Information of a kind Ruth would never be able to understand. Its source was unclear. It bounced, echoed, refracted in shadow.

A man coughing, swearing.
Bloody woman. Cow. What’s she done this time?

The noise came from the corridor to Ruth’s left, past glowering gaslamps, and a bare wooden door. The door to the old back room, at the Low house, where her father had kept his accounts.

All right, then. All right.

She knocked on the door. The radio went silent—no other answer.

She pushed it open.

There he was. Sitting, watching the door, in an armchair, the radio and a knife and a clock with spiderish hands on the low table next to him. A frail and sunken man, dressed in a slate-grey suit, his white hair a ghostly nimbus around a withered face. The room was ill-lit, densely crowded with paintings and mirrors and photographs and dusty treasures.

He stood, slowly, creaking and unfolding, and she knew that he was real.

“You got so old,” she said. “What happened to you? Where did you go?”

He looked her up and down, his bloodshot eyes wide with shock, and for a moment he appeared close to tears. Then his eyes narrowed again, and he sat back down. A sneer twisted his face. “So which one are you? It’s like a bloody bus station in here these days. Why did you come here? Why can’t you all leave me alone?”

She crossed the floor. The carpet, ash-scarred, ancient, was a map of something abstract. She swept the clock and the knife off the table, leaving tracks in the dust, and sat down by the side of the old man’s chair. He winced at the noise. She put her hand on his arm. “Haven’t you been alone long enough?”

He squeezed her wrist with bony fingers, hard enough to hurt. “Your young man was just here,” he sneered. “He didn’t ask after you. If you came for my blessing you can fuck off.”

He laughed until he started coughing again.

The Demon King-Father and
Daughter-Haggling

Arjun

T
he servants had
dragged Arjun up the stairs, out of the cellars. Frozen by their touch, he couldn’t resist. His feet dragged numbly in the dust. Shay followed behind, his cane clicking, cursing.
Why won’t you leave me alone? What do you want? You can’t have it. I rule alone here.

They’d thrown Arjun on the floor at the foot of Shay’s armchair. Warmth had slowly returned to his limbs. He’d stood, shaking like a newborn calf. The room was unlit, as if everyone in the house had gone to bed. The old man had pointed his cane again.
I’ve been here before
, Arjun thought.
The mirror is a trap, everything is a trap, or a device, or a weapon, or an implement of torture …

Shay, again, and perhaps for the last time. This one was an elderly man, withered down to bones and bitterness. His cheeks were hollow and his yellow teeth, which he bared as he sneered, were abnormally thin and sharp. A broken nose. A grey suit, a faded handkerchief in his pocket. The skin of one hand was burned. The skin of the other was liver-spotted and thin and grey as death. His eyes were bloodshot. For a moment Arjun felt a kind of pity for the man. There was something ingrown, bitter, and unhappy about him that was both embarrassing and pitiful. Then he saw the hollow and shadowy servants that hovered behind Shay’s chair, brushing their fingers gently through his spiderweb hair, smoothing down the shoulders
of his suit, murmuring in his ear, awaiting his orders. The man was a monster. The yellow smile and twisted features of a demon king.

Was this the first—was this Mr. Low? —or was it a copy?

Did it matter?

“Don’t do anything stupid,” Shay said. “I know that stupid look in your eye. Don’t get heroic notions. You people! Where do they keep finding you people?”

“You have to die, Shay.” The Hollows perked up their pale heads.

“Maybe! Maybe! But it won’t be you who kills me.”

“You sent the airships. You sent your servants. You murdered the city.”

“What? Oh. Yes. You didn’t leave me much choice, did you? Bringing that woman here. Ruining everything. I’d been too kind for too long. Time to clear the rubbish away.”

“I’ve killed you before, Shay. I can do it again.”

“Not me. Not me. Very inferior copies. A hazard of too much travel, overcomplex affairs, is that you collect shadows. You killed a few? Excellent. Thins the herd. Fewer to make trouble for me. Sit down. Sit down. No, on the floor.
Don’t
make me tell my servants … Thank you.”

Cross-legged on the carpet. The carpet’s pattern was abstract, intricate, mechanical, a snarl of dark threads.

“Who sent you here?”

“No one. Ivy showed me the way. I came alone.”

“Why did you really come here? You don’t look quite stupid enough to be taken in by my daughter’s poor-little-princess-please-save-me routine. And don’t pretend you care what I do to that slum down below.”

“When I was a boy, long ago, I lived in a town in the mountains, far to the south. We had a God of music, and it ordered our lives, gave meaning and beauty to our days. One day it vanished. I chased it all this way, to the city and beyond. Is it here? Did you steal it, Shay?”