Gears of the City (21 page)

I inspected him closely, as servants do their masters. He was not so young as I had first thought—a man in early middle age, a little tired sometimes when he thought my eyes were not on him—when he forgot that I was a
man
, not a possession. I had mistaken energy and pride for youth.

Many of his devices were terrible weapons. Those Shay took with him when he went. I let his creatures go when he left and I imagine they starved in the concrete hideousness of this city. I am left with the dregs of his collection.

We did not often go outside. Why would we? I looked out from the high windows over the rooftops and it made me shudder. This is an
ugly
time.

I asked him what was on the Mountain, of course, why he meant to assault it. And
how.
In the old days of the Atlas, sometimes our explorers went north to the Mountain. Always it ended in madness—if they came back at all. The Mountain has always been an evil thing. Shay would not answer me. He told me it was not my place to ask.

I cooked for him, and cleaned. The monkey and I developed a jealous mutual dislike, one servant to another.

One day Shay went away and did not come back. That is to say,
one morning I woke, and he was not there; and by nightfall he was
still
not there.

I reasoned carefully.

Suppose that those who inhabit the Mountain had spied out Shay’s intentions—which is hardly improbable, for any denizen of this dejected and fearful Age will tell you that the Mountain spies on them constantly, and they surely must be at least half right. Suppose that the Mountain’s servants had stolen Shay away, or killed him. Yet they had left me unharmed, as if I were beneath their notice. Were that the case then I was free, though I was lost in a strange and hideous time. I certainly had no intention of revenging my erstwhile master; let the Mountain have him!

Or suppose that Shay had gone up the Mountain without me; then it would be wise to flee before he returned.

Suppose that Shay
never
intended to go up the Mountain. He was a brilliant man, the most brilliant I have ever met, and the most remarkably well traveled. He had a number of striking scars. He was a man who’d survived much. Perhaps, rather than face the terrors of the Mountain himself, he brought travelers, adventurers, madmen, obsessives, daring and dangerous men, all would-be visionaries, into his orbit, and into some small part of his confidence; and he hinted to them of the Mountain, and the wonders hidden there—let
them
go! Let
them
face it first! Well, I said, if that’s the case, you may fuck yourself, Mr. Shay; I am no one’s pawn, no one’s monkey. I have seen what the Mountain does to people.

For instance look at you, poor ghost.

I considered other possibilities; I have never learned the truth. Nor do I care to. Is Shay dead? Well, that’s a nice question, isn’t it. Even if he’s dead here there are times in the city when he may be alive, and what’s time to Mr. Shay but a flimsy veil? One day he may come for me. Or he may not. I intend to enjoy what time I have, regardless.

I
do not like the dawn. Ha! In the play of Mr. Liancourt that brought down the wrath of the Countess and doomed the Atlas there was a very silly hymn to the dawn. A pretty tune but idiotic words. What a thing to die for!

Dawn is so ugly here. Look how the factories poison it. Those rosy fingers are nicotine-stained and filthy They paw the horizon like they’re picking its pocket.

An ugly time. They talk daily here about war; ever since I arrived there have been rumors of war, from some quarter or other; from the Mountain if no mundane enemy is available. I think they cannot bear to live in this time. They long for the end. They know these are the last days.

Dawn brings sobriety. I do not like to be sober.

We have talked all night. My servants will be waking now, and doing the housework.

Once I thought, by my rituals, to pierce the veil of reality; to see the city as the Gods see it, mutable, infinite, miraculous; to break the walls of the city down and force my way into …

Never mind. Do you know why I keep up my rituals? This tired charade? Because I cannot bear the thought that I might die in this time. I cannot bear to be stranded here.

Sometimes when I performed my rituals I felt that I was close, so very close …

I hope to bring the Gods back. To call them back into being ! To open the way. To follow them home. If I
provoke
them, if my little performances outrage them, if they come in
anger
, so be it. I will still have opened the way home.

I long for the comforts of home. The city I grew up in seems unbearably beautiful to me now. Even its priests, even its judges, even its cruel princes. Their robes and finery and arrogant display had a certain … richness. Life in the last days is thin and grey. I would happily go back into my little cell, if I could look out of the window over the towers of old Ararat.

I, Brace-Bel, the great libertine, the great debaucher, the great hater and despoiler of the good and the pure! Like a toothless old woman mooning after the days of her childhood. Sentimental in my old age, and I am not yet an old man. Shameful. And yet there it is.

When I first recognized you, I thought:
at last my rituals have succeeded.
I have called up a phantom from the old days. I have opened the door. I have fucked into being a miracle. I have scribed the spell with my whip! Oh, how wonderful! No wonder I could not sleep. Ah, but you recall nothing, do you? I have watched your face closely for hours and you recall nothing.

It is pure accident that brings you here. You came for Ivy, and not for me. You told me that but I did not believe you at first.

Leave me alone, will you? Let me watch the dawn. Go to bed, go to bed.

L
iancourt’s little song about the dawn. I was never musical, but sometimes music awakens the memory, it transports us home. How did it go?

Now
I remember you, Arjun. You worked with Liancourt on that silly play He did the words and you did the music. I remember you beavering away in the conservatory. Stay a moment. How did it go? Tumpty-tumpty-tum-tum-tum-tum. No, not quite. La-la-la-la-la …

What? You look quite stricken! Your eyes … Steady, steady; what’s come over you?

Music and Memory-Housework-
“Ivy’s Clever”-The WaneLight
Hotel-Doors

Arjun

B
race-Bel Slept
late. Even in sleep the words kept pouring out of him. He muttered; sometimes he shrieked. It echoed down the stairs. The household was apparently used to it.

Arjun didn’t sleep at all. The “bed” Brace-Bel’s servants had made for him was a velvet-covered loveseat. To sleep on it one had to curl like a bent note. Arjun ached where Brace-Bel had struck him, and his wounded hand throbbed again, and his head thronged with memories. Memories returned one by one like birds coming to roost.

That
song
—the few notes Brace-Bel had sung in his tuneless grating voice. That was the heart of it; the heart of
him.
Everything else wove in and around the bright thread of that song. Gad, his home in the far southern mountains, the Choristers, his God, and the absence of his God, which struck him all over again now as a fresh wound, a loss that left him gasping; the long trek north, by horse, by cart, on foot, by train, by slow barge, across deserts, plains, hills, the sea, into the city, Ararat, the impossible, legendary, infinite city, in search of his absconded God; the day—the music, his memories, looped back again, he snatched a moment of his childhood from the stream—when he first sang in the Choir, the gypsy girl, a faded scent-memory of his mother, before the Choristry took him from his first home; then an
accelerando
of violent
and terrifying and wonderful city-memories, assaultive, confusing, like the first moment he stepped off the boat and into the surging crowds of the docks. The Atlas; Olympia; the boy Silk; the monster of the canals;
Shay …

The song was the key to himself. It was unfortunate, then, that Arjun knew it only from Brace-Bel’s half-hearted and unmusical rendition. As he lay awake struggling to order his memories, part of his mind was trying to weave the music back together—to remember the next notes. There were laws and principles of composition floating in his head according to which it should have been possible to reconstruct, to develop, to reanimate the scrap of music Brace-Bel had half remembered; he couldn’t do it. It far surpassed his talents. It hovered on the edge of awareness like an angel. It was not merely music; it was
Music.
But naming it brought it no closer, in fact perhaps only drove it away. He twisted and turned on his side; the arm of the loveseat poked his spine.

… and after
Shay
, how he’d traveled
beyond
the city, and into its hidden places, and past and future times, and seen things he could hardly, now, make sense of. He remembered how Shay had taught him to open the city’s secret doors, and then … Memories flickered across Arjun’s mind like unspooling film. The moving pictures, the cinema; that was something he suddenly remembered. Gods, how long had he wandered? There had been traces of his God everywhere, like a trail marked for him through the city, but he’d never found it. The Martyrs of the Bloody Scalp. Gradek’s Academy. The slave market on Caspar Street. The river-pirates of the Flood Years. (The faded lash-scars on Arjun’s back began to itch like a bulb’s filament burning at the flick of a switch.) The Unlicensed Operators who gave up their bodies to inhabit the city’s wires and mathematics and flickering screens, and guided him on through a dark time. (He wanted to share the news with the Low sisters.
This is a bad time but there have been worse; this is
not
the end of things.
Was it good or bad news?) The incident of the duel on Hawker’s Common. (He remembered learning to fence, and a number of occasions on which that skill had saved his life; he suddenly, childishly, itched for a rematch with Brace-Bel.) The monomaniacal Replacement Men of Ako, who took the place of their sleeping masters, and lived un-comprehendingly half-existences. The Glorious Revolution—one of many. The Bank Theater and the spies among Lord Wolfe’s
Players. The WaneLight Hotel! He searched in his pockets and drew out the matchbook and turned it over and over in his hands. He remembered his years at the Hotel, digging into its secrets, hunting for clues, bartering for rumors …

He remembered searching for the way to the Mountain. For
years.
He remembered his childhood in the far south, beyond the walls of the city, in the Choristry, that cold and serene monastery. It had been made of stone and glass. They had kept goats, libraries, quiet young men, and severe pious young women. His God had lived there, in the high spires. Then it had vanished and his world had fallen apart.

He remembered the trek north to the city—to Ararat, City of Gods and heart of the world. It had taken him a year, summer to summer, across plains and deserts and rivers and seas. He remembered how the crowds at the docks had swallowed him, the haze of sweat and salt and spice that enveloped the harbor.

He remembered the moment he decided that his God, which had fled for the city, had now left the city for the Mountain, and that he, too, had no choice but to go deeper into the heart of things. He’d been reading a newspaper, sitting in a railway carriage, when he’d caught a glimpse from the greasy window of the shadow of the Mountain and thought, as if out of nowhere:
of course. They’re right, of course. They’ve been right all this time. The Mountain.

He remembered his years in the WaneLight Hotel.

He could not remember going up. He could not remember falling down.

There were still holes in his memory, still shadows.

They’d come in time. He decided not to force the matter. The music slipstreamed, a chromatic glide, an awakening theme, and he remembered Olympia again, the flat in Foyle Square, the theaters …

Years.
And he’d never found his God. Rumors of the Mountain at every step. Years …

…
Shay.
Arjun remembered his apprenticeship to that unnerving man. He remembered a thin elderly man with straggling dirty white hair and a worn suit, a sneer, a peevish snarl; not the strong laughing young man Brace-Bel spoke of. And he remembered that sometimes Shay had called himself Lemuel, and sometimes he’d heard rumors of a man who must have been Shay who called himself Cuttle, or, or …

Brace-Bel’s story was disturbing, and strange. Shay, it seemed, had wanted Brace-Bel for something, had armed him and pointed him at the Mountain. It made Arjun wonder what purpose Shay might have had in teaching
him
, in bringing him out of the city and into the secret paths behind the city. Among the uncommunity of the travelers in the City Beyond—and now Arjun began truly to remember smiling St. Loup, sour old Father Turnbull the defrocked, the mad Engineer Potocki, Longfellow the penitent, Abra-Melin of the shaking staff, so many dozens of others—Shay was
special.
Ubiquitous, apocryphal. Uniquely deadly, because he was
first
, and his plans were laid before yours and around yours. Always absent— wherever you were, you always
just missed him.
Rumors of sightings of him sold for gold, blood, kingdoms. St. Loup had once confessed (lied?) that it was Shay who first brought him through. Turnbull admitted it casually: “Actually at first I rather thought, ha-ha, that he might be the
devil.
But we were all young once, and na’ive. I followed him anyway, of course.”