Authors: Felix Gilman
Arjun stood.
They appeared to be in a park, on beautifully manicured lawns, at the edge of a steep grassy bank. They’d come through the open door of an unmanned information booth. A handful of brightly colored tourist brochures had spilled through after them—according
to which they were in some place called Quinet Green. He’d never heard of it.
On the far horizon there were barely visible kites. Behind them were the hazy phantoms of a city skyline. Otherwise they were alone.
They were far from the Mountain.
He helped Brace-Bel to his feet. The fat man regarded him warily. “I propose a truce, Mr. Brace-B—”
Brace-Bel swung his stick for Arjun’s knees, and Arjun, who’d seen the spark of cunning in Brace-Bel’s bloodshot eyes, and was ready, stepped in to wrestle the stick away. They fell together and rolled down the grassy bank, to land in the sand trap of an empty golf course.
“A truce!” Brace-Bel said. “Let me stand! A truce!”
Arjun held the stick. He examined the crystal on its tip. “How does it work, Brace-Bel?”
“I paid dearly for that knowledge, Arjun—why should I give it to you for free? Take me home.”
“No, Brace-Bel. For one thing, I don’t think I remember the way back. It’s been so long.”
“Then leave me alone. This time is good enough for me. There are flowers; there is beauty.”
“You have to come back with me, Brace-Bel.”
“To that ugly Age? To that fear, that darkness? Don’t be absurd.
You
go face your death on the Mountain, if you must—I shall remain here. This time will do well enough for Brace-Bel.”
Arjun tossed the stick back to Brace-Bel. “What else do you carry, Brace-Bel? What other weapons have you got in your pockets? Your rings, that necklace—too vulgar to be jewelry. Did Shay give them to you? Are they
devices}”
Brace-Bel’s hand went involuntarily to his necklace.
“Brace-Bel, I must free the Beast. It’s well guarded. Ivy, too, wherever she is. I need your weapons. I think the Beast sent me to you so that we could save it. And you—I thought you loved Ivy. Don’t you want to save her?”
“She needs no saving, Arjun.”
“Come back with me, and I promise when we’re done, before I go up the Mountain, I shall take you home.”
Brace-Bel sighed. “Very well.” He reached out, shook Arjun’s
hand, and, grunting with sudden effort, pushed him over; then he ran panting and sliding up the bank.
Arjun got up, gave chase. Ahead, Brace-Bel clambered up over the edge of the bank and was framed for a moment against the blue sky. The swallows of the Green swooped and fluttered by in the warm breeze. There were no birds so beautiful in the city of the Low sisters, in the shadow of the Mountain. They reminded Arjun of something; they gave him an idea. They scattered as he ran after Brace-Bel.
Ruth
The spoliation of the Museum began. It was a few days behind schedule, but once it got under way the Know-Nothings threw themselves into it with savage enthusiasm. They transferred in reinforcements, warm bodies, extra hands and backs. They requisitioned cranes and cables and teams of dray-horses and motorized, smoke-belching hauling-engines, and they began dragging the dusty and forgotten relics of the abandoned Museum out into the light to be destroyed. They lashed heavy cables round statues of ancient Gods, and dragged them down the steps. Sometimes the statues fell and marble arms and heads shattered, and they gave a raucous cheer. They broke the frames of paintings and threw the canvases on the fire—portraits of ancient queens or long-dead whores, street scenes of forgotten parts of the city, magnificent or squalid, dreamlike or nightmarish, fanciful or dourly naturalistic—all burned. Ash blew down the streets, and scraps of butterfly-bright colors.
Glass and electronics could be stamped underfoot, the jeweled shards swept into the corners. In the case of stone statues, sledgehammers were employed. The gold stuff they melted—the local Holcroft Municipal operation donated engines from the forges to the cause. Harder metals, ceramics, and plastics—that stuff they hauled away to the big fire-pits in the factories. The scrap would serve the War effort, in the event of War. A man from Patagan Sewer & Piping had given a confused and vaguely threatening speech to that effect, and swung the first hammer.
It went on and on. Morning shift, afternoon shift, night shift. Day in, day out. The Museum predated all living memory. Who knew how much
crap
there was in it?
There was a cheerful atmosphere in the Square among the Know-Nothings. Overtime pay for interesting work in the open air! The Holcroft people put out food and beer at long trestle tables. Good times. Everything they saw was something to tell the grandkids about. And the things they dragged out were so preposterous you couldn’t help but laugh as they smashed, so awful you couldn’t help but shudder and cheer as they burned.
What kind of people had worshipped those squirming steel snake-Goddesses, those ox-headed fat boys?
What kind of madmen painted those unnerving chromatic abstractions, those many-angled women?
Who’d dare the skies in these flimsy machines, who’d pierce their skin with this squirmy insectile jewelry?
You wouldn’t want to know. Swing the hammers!
F
or the first couple of days, a large crowd showed up. The district’s Holcroft and Patagan factories ended shifts early to let the locals watch the spoliation. There were scattered cheers and applause. “About time, about time!” The things in the Museum were
horrors.
“Smash it! Fucking
smash
it! Good lads!” But by the third day the brutality of it, the monotony of it, began to wear on the audience. For nearly everyone there was a moment, a sudden moment, when something so beautiful was dragged out into the light that their hearts clenched and they were unable to bear seeing it destroyed— a winged angel in sandstone, a painted sunset catching the actual sun, a dress on a mannequin, a sword, a delicate machine. Slowly the crowd drifted away.
Now, at the edge of the Square, there was a small perpetual protest. Half a dozen to a dozen men and women, standing solemnly, watching the burning. Bearing witness.
Generally Ruth was among them.
Nothing living had been dragged down those steps. She panicked every time she saw some stuffed monster or four-legged statue hauled out—but so far there’d been no sign of the Beast. Perhaps they were saving it for last.
It was an awkward and diffident kind of protest—no one dared go too far. The Know-Nothings could get violent. The protesters stood in silence and radiated disapproval and sorrow. Oddballs,
weirdos, dejected idealists, the underemployed, the borderline paperless. On the first day they’d brought a banner—save OUR museum—but a bunch of drunken Know-Nothings had taken it and thrown it on the fire. Some people brought their children, who picked their noses and sometimes laughed and swore and sometimes started crying when the Know-Nothings yelled at them to
fuck off
They were mostly from Carnyx, or neighboring streets. In times of emergency—depression, disease, factory closings—Carnyx Street’s householders formed Committees. Marta was a leading organizer. At Ruth’s urging, Marta had visited their neighbors, called in favors, and convened a Temporary Action Committee. It met in the back room of Ruth’s shop. After long debate the Committee had organized this protest; this pointless, futile protest. It made Ruth want to scream.
I
t isn’t enough,” she said.
Marta shook her head. “What do you expect, Ruth?” It was late in the evening. Over in the Square the Know-Nothings had knocked off for the night. Around the table in the Low sisters’ back room sat Ruth, Marta, and the rest of the Committee. The room was half lit and they spoke in low voices. There were too many people in the room, and they banged elbows and rubbed against each other whenever they sat forward or back; the conspiratorial atmosphere kept collapsing into awkward laughter.
Zeigler was there. Next to Zeigler’s skinny body loomed Mr. Frayn—who was one of the foremen at a Holcroft slaughterhouse, and resembled one of his bulls, fat and pale, dressed in a too-tight grey sweater. Next to Ruth sat Mrs. Rawley, widowed proprietor of the Tearoom, one of the local public houses. Across from her sat blinking bespectacled Thorpe from the glassworks, who wrote poetry in which everything in the world was compared to either mirrors or window glass. Durrell, the sign-painter, sat beside him. The thin and feral Schiller, who lived on the south end of Carnyx Street, paced around the room. Schiller worked freelance putting stray dogs to death. He played the violin surprisingly well. He eyed Marta’s refugee cats with professional interest.
These were the pillars of the local community.
Ruth had Zeigler’s sympathy—he shook with excitement at the thought of the creature hidden in the Museum, he moaned with horror whenever he saw another treasure dragged out and wrecked. Mrs. Rawley was on Ruth’s side, too—no one hated the Know-Nothings like Mrs. Rawley. They threw their weight around and made trouble in her pub, and once, long ago, they’d
questioned
her for consorting with ghosts; she blamed them for the death of her husband; she’d disowned the son who’d joined them.
The others were having cold feet.
“We agreed on a dignified protest,” Frayn said. “This is a bad business. This is a bad decision by the bosses. Unwise. No one can say I’m any kind of toady to the bosses. You all know me. Ruth, you know me. I’m old enough to be your dad—sorry, sorry. I know. But I remember the place before they locked it away, is what I’m saying. They had these flying machines there, up on the glass dome on the roof. Beautiful things—I used to dream about them. So I hate this as much as anyone. I don’t see anything wrong with letting the bosses know we’re not happy. But I have a wife and a family and a job, Ruth, and I don’t want to do anything mad.”
“We’ve done all we can,” Durrell said. “We’ve made our point. I say we call off the protests before we push the Know-Nothings too far.”
“Hear, hear,” Schiller said. “How do we know this thing isn’t a figment of your imagination, anyway? How do we know the Know-Nothings aren’t right, maybe it should be killed. Why should we care?”
The argument dragged on. Nothing Ruth said could sway them. She wasn’t even sure what she was hoping for—what did she expect these ordinary frightened people to do? “Facts are facts,” Marta said. “There’s nothing we can do.”
“Then I’ll talk to someone who
can
, “ Ruth said.
Arjun
Arjun made his way back across the city, across Time, through the secret ways. Brace-Bel followed.
They’d reached a kind of understanding. Or at least, the struggle had gone out of Brace-Bel, who now walked in silence, despairing,
sometimes sobbing over the names of his dead servants, over the ruin of his dreams and hopes and dignity. He screamed in his sleep.
At first they both flinched from every shadow, avoided crowds and alley mouths, expecting to be attacked at any moment by the terrible creatures that had pursued Arjun and murdered Brace-Bel’s household. It didn’t happen. It seemed that for the time being Arjun’s hunters had lost his trail.
“Do you never learn? They called
me
incorrigible, Arjun—but I defied no power so dreadful as those Hollow Men. If you go up the Mountain again they will destroy you.”
They were chased by street gangs through concrete streets, under electric lights and obscene advertising billboards. They were menaced by large purple-eyed cats. At night, in cobbled streets slick with sewage, under the shadow of great granite towers, a Vampire took an interest in them. More than one kind of policeman asked for their papers. But those were only the usual risks of going walking through Time, through the infinite urban Metacontext, without a map. And sometimes they passed through gentle and beautiful places, through
musical
places, and Arjun was tempted to stop where he was. They stood at the top of a hill overlooking azure mists and the spires of temples each lit by their various Gods, and Brace-Bel was moved to spontaneous poetry.
At every turn Arjun went north, toward the Mountain, and forward in Time, toward the end of things. As the Mountain loomed closer the horrible sights became more frequent, and the beautiful ones were left behind.
He found and opened door after door. The art of it came back to him. He
remembered
how it was done—how Shay had shown him how it was done. First one found one’s key; for Arjun it was music. The song of birds, the drone of muzak, opera echoing from the theaters, the howling of drunks—whatever the city offered him. Then one had to set aside all distractions, which included Brace-Bel sobbing, or saying,
faster, faster, you fool
, and the shouting of whatever happened to be pursuing them at the time; the roar of vehicles, the fires crackling, dogs barking, factories pounding, flags snapping in the breeze, the noises of markets and engines and football games and cattle and rain and wind …
Ignore all that. Now listen to the music; now listen to the way its echoes spread out and make the city; so that this, now, is the center from which things are made. Now take that infinitely
unfolding city of echoes and
turn
it. This is the indescribable part, and this is the impossible part, because describing it kills it, and that is the hardest thing not to do …
It came back to him quickly, almost easily. Almost exactly like playing an instrument. And at first it was easy to find the way, to open whatever doors he wanted. But as he came closer and closer to the Mountain, to the Low sisters’ city, a kind of gravity overtook him, and the path was harder and harder. He pushed against a strange pressure. Dull and flat notes crept into the splendid music of the city. There were fewer and fewer doors. He began to fear that the Age of the Low sisters was somehow closed to him. He pushed on.
They walked down a grey street, through a haze of diesel fumes, looking for doors—in the clang and drone of the foundries Arjun felt the presence of a door. “How does it work?” Brace-Bel said.