Gears of the City (48 page)

A
man came walking down the road toward her. He clambered over wreckage. She trained the rifle on him, but he didn’t seem to be bothered by it. When he got closer he waved. Was he real? He was the first living person she’d seen in days. Certainly he was peculiar enough to be a hallucination.

“Good afternoon! You look a long way from home.”

His voice was confident, friendly, cultured—an unusual but pleasant accent. He had a tan. Long blond curls spilled down his shoulders. He wore dark glasses, a crisp white shirt, and linen trousers. He carried no weapon, and apart from some neat stitches and a purple bruise on the side of his head he was incongruously clean and healthy looking.

“That’s close enough. Who are you?”

He shrugged and sat on the steps of a ruined house. “No one in particular. Who are you?”

“Ruth Low. What’s your name?”

“Ruth Low. What brings you out here?”

“Maybe I’m from here. Who are you? Why are you here?”

“I’m a bit lost, actually. That’s the honest truth. There’s somewhere I need to be but in the meantime here we both are.”

“Have you been following me?”

“No.” He smiled. He was lying. “Why? Are you the kind of person who gets followed?”

“I didn’t think I was but maybe I am. I don’t have anything worth stealing.”

“Of course you do. But I’m not a thief.” He leaned back, legs crossed. “Would you like company? I find myself with time on my hands at present. I used to have a job and a life in the world before this one but now I’m the most awful sort of idler. I could go with you.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“Nor am I! Just circling and circling.”

He focused his smile on her again. It was strikingly handsome, and would have been charming had it seemed less practiced. In any case she had no intention of being charmed by handsome smiles. “I’d rather be alone.”

He frowned, comically. “How sad.”

“Who are you? Are you a ghost?”

“Very much alive. Well,” he looked thoughtful, “more or less.
Good-bye, Ruth Low. Don’t keep going the way you’re going. There are some unpleasant people ahead of you. Bandits. Cannibals. Sad, really. Take a detour. I’d like to see you get wherever you’re going. Good-bye.”

He walked away.

“Stop.”

He kept walking.

“Come back.”

He turned a corner, and was gone.

After some thought, she decided to take a detour.

So much for solitude. You were never alone, not even now. Was he following her? She couldn’t tell. She didn’t see him again. She didn’t see anyone again for days, and by that time she’d almost forgotten she’d met him at all.

S
he saw them in the far distance, far away over the ruins of the Zone. First their motion caught her eye; then she noticed their smoke. An antlike procession down an empty road between shattered buildings. She couldn’t quite make out the ones who went on foot, or horseback, but the black specks of motorcars were visible if she squinted. The procession that the Beast led through the wasteland, just as Hatch had described it. The buildings around them were tiny as matchboxes, thimbles, scattered dice. There, crawling, was a miniscule flash of red—was that the Beast’s palanquin?

It was days before she caught up with the procession. It moved slowly—rubble blocked the streets and had to be cleared before the motorcars could pass—but so did she. And perhaps she hung back a little—out of fear, out of a desire to prolong her solitude. She went to sleep in the evenings, when she could have pressed on. Once she was on its trail there was no losing it. Now that she knew what she was looking for, the tracks the procession left—cleared roads, rubble heaped at the side of the streets—were obvious. Animal bones and human waste. Oil—one of the cars had a leak. Round and round the procession went, circling the Ruined Zone. If they’d gone south, or west, or east, or north, they’d have found themselves, eventually, in Fosdyke, or Fleet Wark, or any of those places over the horizon where the lights were coming back, where
the city was rebuilding. But they didn’t. They turned back again and again into the wasteland. They passed south out of the Walbrook Ruined Zone, and into Juno, a blasted and barren landscape of quarries and mineshafts. The procession wove through slag and gravel, around the yawning violent chasms of the granite quarries, the stark white glare of the chalk quarries. Round and round. Why? Ruth began to imagine that the procession’s spiraling path through the ruins had some significance—was like some careful surgical procedure, enacted on the wounds of the city. She hung back, waiting to see what would happen. Sometimes, when she climbed the echoing unsteady staircases of vacant buildings and looked out from the broken rooftops, she could see the procession crawling on ahead. Five black motorcars, adorned with flags, skulls, ivy, wire, and groaning under the weight of the excess passengers who sat on the roof, who leaned from the windows. A flatbed truck, bearing a folded scarlet tent—shiny, thick, like a tongue. The shufflers coming behind. Down into the quarries and out again.

When they stopped they erected that scarlet tent—huge, a marquee, like something an executive’s daughter might marry in. It took hours. Tiny men scuttled around beneath it. What were they doing?

That was as close as she chose to come. When she finally made contact it was by accident.

She’d been looking out over the quarries from the roof of an abandoned office block—what used to be an office of the Juno Mining and Mineral Combine. She came down the stairs, where the filing cabinets had shaken open and pointless paper blew in the dust, and out by the back door, where weeds reclaimed the parking lot, and she stopped short in shock.

Two men knelt in a thicket of nettles and ragwort, under the fire escape. For a moment she forgot how to speak.

One of the two men wore filthy rags that might once have been a smart business suit. The other was bare to the waist, and his chest was scarred and badly stitched, in a way that made Ruth think of the Beast’s poor hide. He looked half starved. They didn’t notice her; they were intent on something in the weeds.

“It’s coming toward you! To you, to you!”

“Where did it go?”

“No, you idiot, grab it …”

The bare-chested man suddenly lunged, sprawling on his belly in the nettles. Something shrieked.

Grumbling “Bloody thing got me!” he stood. He held a black and white cat by its neck against his scarred chest. Its yellow eyes were wide and it hissed and squirmed.

The man in the suit poked at the creature’s patchy underbelly. “This’ll do. This’ll do.”

The two of them turned slowly, as if suddenly noticing Ruth. Wary eyes regarded her—four bloodshot, two yellow.

The man in the suit drew a knife from an inside pocket—it looked like it had been a gilt-edged letter opener in a previous life.

In the sternest and most scolding voice she could muster, Ruth demanded, “What are you doing with that cat?”

She’d caught them off guard. Blushing, the man in the suit lowered the knife.

“Let it go
at once.
“

The man in the suit glanced over at his bare-chested companion for support—but he was staring at his feet, at the blue sky, his eyes averted from Ruth, and from the spitting mangy thing in his arms.

“Poor thing—it’s scared. What do you think you’re doing?”

The man in the suit finally opened his mouth. “Don’t you know? The Lord of these ruins needs these for his experiments. He’s making …”

“I know what he’s doing with them,” Ruth lied; and she kept lying. “He’s wasting his time. Let that poor creature go. I’ve come to find him. I know who made him—I know what he’s for. That’s worth more than any mangy stray. Take me to him.”

Strays-The Quarry-Theater-Scarlet and Gold-Sisters Under the Skin-Shay’s War

Ruth

T
he two interrupted
hunters of cats were called Flitter and Silt—Silt being the grey-haired man in the ragged suit, Flitter the one whose bare and malnourished chest was now purpling from the nettles and the cat scratches in a way that made Ruth wince to look at it.

In the old world Flitter, as it happened, had been a rat-catcher. Sewer-diver, dark-delver, bloody-handed, and solitary. Silt had been a lawyer at the head of the Claims department of Juno Mineral. Now they were, Flitter said, easily the best and most valuable of the Beast’s servants.

“We are high in his regard,” Silt agreed.

“Fucking right!” Flitter said. He frowned. “He would have liked that cat.”

Cats? Not just cats! Flitter, energetic now, in the tones of a working man delighted to explain his trade, his
craft
, told Ruth how they’d hunted rats, bats, dogs, a tortoise once, some lizards. How, on one memorable occasion, they’d acquired a tawny owl up in the rafters of a ruined office building …

“Spotted,” Silt said. “It was a
spotted
owl.”

…
spotted
, then, and Flitter’d taken a few good scratches getting it in the sack, but he hardly felt scratches those days. And the
Beast had drawn it from the sack with his great scarred hands, and looked the fierce bird in its yellow eyes with his own terrible eyes, and made it afraid; and then with his little knives and his sharp strong nails started cutting and slicing, reknitting guts and veins and muscles and …

“Tendons,” Silt said. “Tendons are very important.” He tapped the side of his nose. “I watch the master work.”

…
tendons
, right, Flitter agreed, and bones, the bones rearranged, even the little fiddly ones in the wings, and the Beast getting his fingers all covered in blood and feathers, and sometimes, when he forgets people are watching, slipping a little bloody bit of meat into the side of his mouth and licking his lips.

And then the
owl fletc.
Remade, it flew on wings of shadow. It was only intermittently visible. It had followed the caravan ever since, flitting in and out of dreams and memories. It asked meaningless questions, in something that wasn’t quite language. The Beast had judged it a horrible failure, and gone into one of his black rages.

The owl, Flitter said, was his proudest accomplishment. He’d never had any children, back in the old world, and the owl was like a daughter to him.

“Mr. Flitter doesn’t understand the theory,” Silt said. “Or the significance of our work. He’s a simple man.”

“Too fucking right!” Flitter laughed. “Fair enough!”

Throughout this conversation, the two men led Ruth through the little grove of office buildings, and out over the stony wasteland of the mines and quarries of Juno. They stood on either side of her. When they thought she wasn’t looking—neither of them seemed very bright—they flashed little hand-signals and eye-signals to each other. They appeared to be under the impression that it was necessary to herd her—as if she hadn’t come hunting for days across the Ruined Zones just to meet their master! They brought her back to the Beast as if she were some kind of exotic stray. It could have been worse. At least they didn’t try to put the sack over her head— though she could see them gathering their nerve for it.

T
he Beast had led its caravan down into a deep quarry. What, in the old days, had the Juno Combine dug up there? Ruth wasn’t sure; the sign at the gate had fallen from its post. The sheer walls of
the quarry glittered in the afternoon sun, rust-red, wine-purple. There was a faint mineral scent of electricity. The far wall of the quarry shifted to blue in the distance.

A broad and steep path spiraled down into the depths. Old earth-moving machines lay abandoned on it.

Down on the flat earth at the quarry’s heart, the Beast’s followers and vehicles were tiny, toylike.

Round and round, down and down. Silt surreptitiously lifted the sack above Ruth’s head, and she slapped him in the face, making Flitter laugh and Silt sulk. Round and down, the Beast’s vehicles and tents and immense crimson marquee growing larger and larger, like a little fairy-tale town in the wilderness.

She walked faster and faster, down unsteady slopes of purple flint. Silt, complaining of a twisted ankle, fell behind, and Flitter stayed tenderly with him. Ruth pressed on alone.