Gears of the City (33 page)

It was certainly true, however, that for St. Loup the path through the city was marked out in mirrors, light, diamonds, clear puddles, bright eyes—and that he liked to surround himself with beautiful women. Every so often Arjun crossed his path—they chased the same rumors of the Mountain through the same strange places. Sometimes older, sometimes younger—it was confusing at first, then one stopped caring, became indifferent. In the Meta-context, people were split from their own lives’ narratives, they neither progressed nor regressed; the only thing stable about them was their particular obsession. For a year or two Arjun and St. Loup had had a partnership of sorts, back at the Hotel, that had ended in acrimony after one betrayal too many—not all of them St. Loup’s. Theirs was a small community, and not a close or friendly one. St. Loup was prone to suicide attempts and murders. He was quite mad. Perhaps they all were.

“What’s your angle, then, Mr. Brace-Bel? What draws you from your home, into the great Beyond?”

Brace-Bel sighed and didn’t answer.

“You’ll go mad out here without a purpose,” St. Loup said. “Pick a God to worship, any God. Your friend here has an obsession with a God of music. Has he mentioned it to you? At the Hotel he rarely talked of anything else.”

“St. Loup …”

“No offense. We can
all
be the most frightful bores. Arjun, I saw Potocki recently—he has commissioned the construction of yet another flying machine. A kind of complex screw-thing, all wings and vanes. Gyroscopes. Can’t be blown off course, he says. Not this time. Not
this
time. He intends to launch himself at the Mountain.”

“Again,” Arjun said.

“Again,” St. Loup agreed. “Always the same strategy. He’s like a stopped clock, or a jammed gear, or some horrible thing. Machines,
machines. I may be a monomaniac, but at least I display a little variety in execution.”

“None of us are any closer to the Mountain, though,” Arjun said. “Perhaps Potocki has the right approach? He’s good at making flying machines. Why not stick with it? He’s patient.”

St. Loup shook his golden head. “You’re too kind.”

“So did you steal his plans?”

St. Loup grinned. “I
tried.”
He knocked back his drink and ordered another. “He’s beefed up security since the old days. Do you remember? Never mind. Old news. What else? I heard that the famous Mr. Shay had been seen in Kovno, at the shipyards, doing business under the name Cuttle.” He sighed. “But when I investigated I found that the yards had been burned over, and the waters were black with oil. What about you—any interesting news?”

“Nothing much.”

“It’s been a long time. You look older—you’ve acquired a couple of interesting wounds. Where’ve you been? You know, your absence has been noted for a while now.”

“I’ve been sick, St. Loup.” Arjun held up his wounded hand. “A black dog bit me. What brings you to Cendylon?”

“I was here to hear the last words of a heretic, in the garden of vines.” It was probably a lie; most of the things St. Loup said were lies. “You are passing through?”

“From nowhere in particular, to wherever the music leads me,” Arjun said.

“We are returning to the most hideous place in the city,” Brace-Bel complained. “In the shadow of the Mountain, because of a mad dream of a talking Beast …”

Arjun kicked Brace-Bel under the table and he howled. St. Loup’s eyes lit up.

“It’s always a pleasure, St. Loup,” Arjun said. “But we must be going.”

“One more drink, Arjun. Why not? It’s a lonely city out there. Let’s welcome Brace-Bel to our brotherhood.”

But of course there was no brotherhood—none of them could be trusted, as St. Loup well knew. Everyone who Broke Through did it alone. They were all at least a little mad. Arjun sometimes liked St. Loup, but trust was impossible. And as it turned out, St. Loup had two thugs waiting to grab Arjun in the street outside—
big brutal men with round pale faces, not local—so Arjun and Brace-Bel had to flee through the kitchens, and out across the bridges. St. Loup laughed, and called after them: “Always a pleasure! When shall we meet again? We must have lunch!”

Arjun swore and clenched his fists in frustration. Now they had to take a circuitous route, lurching wildly back and forth across Time and the city, so that their trail was too confused for St. Loup to follow. A waste of valuable time—but the last thing Arjun needed was St. Loup competing for the Beast’s secrets; and besides he’d already brought more than enough danger into Ruth’s life …

One obstacle after another!

Slowly, slowly, they drew closer to the Mountain.

Ruth

So Ruth met Henry Rawley, in the shadows of an alley out the back of the Terminal, on his shift break. He smoked ferociously and shook his head. “My bloody mum and her bloody mouth …”

“Will you help?”

She waited another day.

They came to her at night, throwing stones up at her window like little boys. Six of them, out in the street, masked and dressed in black. Despite the masks, she recognized two of them—Pieter from the sewage reclamation plant, Goodge from the refinery—local lads. The others were strangers. Henry wasn’t among them.

She went down into the street. She dressed in black; it seemed to be the thing to do.

They said nothing. They put a blindfold over her eyes. They spun her around. They led her through the streets.

There was some theatrical business with beggars and whispered passwords; with signals rapped on iron doors, messages left under bricks. They went in and out of alleys, up and down stairs, into tunnels, over wasteground. Weeds and rusty junk under her feet. Someone challenged them; they responded. Secret words—the names of Combines pronounced backward, she realized. Secret handshakes. They addressed each other as
brother
or
comrade
, and named themselves after explosives, or knives, or night-birds, or stars. They spun her around again. They led her up a rattling fire escape, onto a high roof, into a cold night wind. Someone whispered
in her ear, “Can you keep a secret? Whose side are you on, Miss Low?” Someone else drew a knife. “What’s your business with the Black Mask?”

She said, “Knock it off, Pieter. I know your mum.”

It was all pointless play-acting. That was how the Black Masks did business. Whatever real and hard-edged purpose the Masks might have had was encrusted under a vast impractical weight of fanciful nonsense.

It reminded Ruth of her precious books. In the history books, yellow and fragrant with age, fragments of history themselves, there were accounts of all the cults and assassins’ guilds and revolutionaries and anarchists and heretics and secret societies of the past—in fact she owned a single volume of the
Atlas
, dimly remembered as the work of a terrible cabal of radicals and sedition-ists, and though it looked dull enough to her, she kept it hidden away from the prying eyes of Know-Nothings.

It was a large and paranoid city and full of passwords and blindfolds and secrets. There was a terrible weight of history behind everything everyone ever did. The Black Masks, it seemed to Ruth, behaved the way they did because they sensed it was the way for a secret society to behave. Who knew where they’d absorbed the notion? Maybe in a dream. A conversation heard through the walls. Something that trickled down through the city.

She sighed. Nothing in the city worked the way it was supposed to. The dust of Ages settled on everything. Everything that should have been beautiful or purposeful was ugly and futile. Were these stupid young men really the only help she could hope for?

She tore off the blindfold—the Maskers gasped, one of them said,
Ruth, hang on, not yet!
—and from the top of the high roof she could see the yellow moon, and the vast shadow of the Mountain.

The Return-Playing the Magician–
Red Wine–Dawn Shift–Five Impossible
Devices–”He Has Laboratories”

Arjun

W
ith an immense
thump
that echoed across a dozen streets and stopped all conversation, a blockage in the north chimney of the Patagan Sewer & Piping Thirty-first Smelting Plant finally crumbled, allowing a cloud of smoke and grit and ash and rust and feathers to burst out over Fosdyke. It smelled like the death of machines. There was cheering from the Plant, followed by shrieks and groans from the houses below. The cloud surged down the hill and flooded the streets, blacking out windows, ruining the laundry. It broke at the edge of Carnyx Street. Two men staggered out of the grey, one fat, one thin, both coughing and reeling. Their faces were painted with dust, their hair was thick and bushy with it; they looked like tragic clowns.

“Fuck you,” Brace-Bel spat. “May you be fucked to death by minotaurs. May you be torn to shreds by drunken harpies. Why have you brought me back to this terrible place?”

Arjun clutched a lamppost for support and beat at his filthy clothes with his free hand. All around them the curtains were twitching; they were being watched.

T
h ere was a cheaply printed poster on the inside of the smoky windows of Ruth’s shop. It said:

And it said some other things, too. But behind it, Arjun saw, emerging from the shadows, Ruth’s face. She pulled the poster down so that she could see more clearly through the glass. She looked amazed, confused.

The face disappeared. A moment later the bells rang and the door opened and she ran out into the street. She wore trousers and a worn black shirt—work clothes. Her hair was tied back and she looked tired and red-eyed, as if she hadn’t slept. She took his hand, gently, nervously. She seemed surprised to be able to touch him, as if he might only be something glimpsed in a mirror.

Arjun shrugged. “I came back again.”

“I thought you’d … I don’t know. Vanished.”

“I nearly did. I had help.”

She blinked wet eyes as if sun-dazzled, and she looked suddenly full of hope—then her eyes narrowed and her smile turned into a scowl, as Brace-Bel stepped out from behind Arjun. “What’s
he
doing here?”

Brace-Bel was disguised in brown overalls, and Arjun had cut his hair short, and his various glittering rings and amulets were hidden in his pockets. His face hovered uneasily between a sneer and a smile of ingratiation.

Behind him the neighbors leaned out of their windows, watching curiously. A crowd was gathering. Mothers held curious children back at their doorsteps. The street remembered Brace-Bel all too well.

“May we come inside?” Arjun said.

T
here was no falling into each other’s arms. No kiss. After that first nervous brush of Ruth’s fingers across his hand that confirmed his reality there was no further touch at all, and she sat across the table
from him and there was a great uncertain distance between them. It seemed unfair. Arjun felt somehow cheated and ill-used.

“I failed to bring Ivy back to you,” he said. “The Know-Nothings took her. She was with Brace-Bel willingly, Ruth, and she did not want to come home. She wants never to come home again. She wants to escape from this Time. I’ve known others like her. She’ll never be happy until she finds the way—probably not even then.”

Brace-Bel snorted. “Ivy is worth ten of either of us.”

Ruth looked skeptically from Arjun to Brace-Bel.

“Brace-Bel will help us rescue Ivy,” Arjun said. “He and I have a deal. A man called Inspector Maury took her. Where would she be held?”

Ruth started. Silently she got up and walked to the counter. She brought back a copy of the Know-Nothings’ poster, announcing the destruction of the Museum,
By Order of Inspector John Maury …

“He’s here,” she said. “Maybe Ivy’s with him? Why is he here, Arjun? What did you do?”

He read the poster over twice. “The Museum … ?”

I
remember everything
, Arjun told her—
nearly everything.

She drew in her breath. Brace-Bel shook his head.
Must we listen to your pious lament again?