Gears of the City (54 page)

“A choir?” Marta said. She raised an eyebrow and Arjun was
pathetically grateful for her skepticism. “What do you think we are, here? We’re not what you could call
musical.”

But they went ahead with the plan anyway. What other choice did they have?

All shifts in the factories and fields were canceled. Fosdyke assembled in Holcroft Square. Everyone—even the children, even the refugees from foreign districts. They filled the Square and spilled out into the alleys. They formed quietly into orderly lines—they were frightened and desperate and happy to do whatever they were told. Women on the left, men on the right, children at the back. They squinted in the bright morning sun.

Arjun went down the line, testing voices. Hardly anyone was shy. Eager to be part of the resistance, they belted out the fiercest noise they could. “Not so loud.” He smiled, a hundred times. “Not so loud.” Different-colored badges, cut from curtains, pinned to the shirt, identified the different voice ranges. “Stand over there—no, over there.” People stepped on each other’s feet.

Bellow and shriek—those were the two principal varieties of voice, along with grunt, squeak, and quack. Maury turned out to have a powerful baritone.

The music—something simple, something jubilant and demotic. In Arjun’s head, when he created it, the music had had a faint echo of his God; when the vast choir rehearsed, and the Square echoed with their voices, it was distinctly undivine. It sounded like a football chant. It sounded celebratory and defiant.

The afternoon darkened. The rehearsals went on. The Committee for the Emergency had beer brought out, and lit lanterns.

What the music lacked in elegance it made up for in energy. The crowd broke again and again into laughter and foot-stamping— they couldn’t be convinced not to stamp their feet, and eventually Arjun let them have their way. What did it matter? It wouldn’t work anyway.

It didn’t work. As the sun set the Hollow Men stepped out of the ruins and approached the crowd. They winced. They looked upset and embarrassed. They held their hands to their ears, or looked unhappily at their feet. They hated the music and the light, but they came anyway. They clutched each other’s indistinct shoulders for support, they whimpered and complained like neighbors pleading
for the music to be turned down. They touched the edge of the crowd, and they killed with fear and shame. The choir broke and ran.

I
n the morning the choir gathered again. This time they took it seriously. Grimly, with fierce determination, they worked to perfect the music. It didn’t make any difference, when evening came.

The next day the choir was a little smaller, and by the day after that it was a quarter the size, as Fosdyke lost faith and went back to work.

That night the Hollows didn’t come. The next morning the choir’s numbers swelled—and the next night the Hollows came again.

So the days went. Was anything Arjun doing making any difference? He didn’t know. What else could he do? He had no idea.

H
appy news!

On a grey morning when morale was especially low, and absenteeism at the workshops and the guardposts especially high, and the choir listless and mumbling, the Committee for the Emergency made an announcement. For weeks in secret they had been restoring the old pre-War telegraph networks. Now they were in intermittent communication, across the Ruined Zones, with their counterparts in the Rebuilding district of Anchor, far to the south. In Anchor the local Organizing Committee had built, out of a factory chimney, and various steam engines and pumps, a kind of cannon, capable of launching heavy blocks of masonry high into the air at tremendous booming velocities. Two nights ago they’d fired on an airship as it passed over, silent and murderous, and they’d
hit
it, punctured the immense balloon, causing it to buckle and collapse like a fat man punched in the gut, causing it to tear and flap and burst into lurid green flames in the upper atmosphere, staining the clouds with its oily insect blood. Then it was
gone
, utterly gone, not even enough of it left to settle as ash on the rejoicing city below. The enemy was not invulnerable! Plans were under way in Fosdyke to replicate the device, as soon as the parts could be acquired—so the Committee for
the Emergency announced. The Committee opened Fosdyke’s stores of liquor and beer, and declared a holiday. There was music, unrehearsed and chaotic, and there were bonfires, and dancing, and the Hollows didn’t show themselves that night. Maury, drunk and belligerent, shouted 2/
won’t make any difference, it won’t work
, but no one believed him. They laughed at him. Enraged, he pulled out his gun and shot an officer of the Committee dead in the street, and ran off into the night, out of Fosdyke, into the Ruined Zone. Even that didn’t spoil the celebration. The tide was turning!

When Arjun cornered Marta by the edge of the bonfires’ light and asked her if any of the story was true, she shrugged and said, “Does it matter?”

I
n the morning there were half a dozen drunken Lamplighters to deal with, ranting, making trouble, criticizing Fosdyke’s new color scheme. They’d somehow shown up for the party and wouldn’t leave. They shouted in the street below Arjun’s office, squabbling with the police. Well, Arjun thought, that was fine. New people were good, even mad ones, even annoying ones. Life was better than death. He remembered Brace-Bel, and felt a twinge of sorrow.

Heaped on his desk were the files he’d saved from the Chapterhouse. Finally he had leisure to read them. He shut himself up for the day with biscuits and coffee.

He went through the pile methodically. Shay? Not in this file. Lemuel? Cuttle? Not this file; not that one either. The reject heap grew at his feet. It started to rain outside, and the windows rattled and echoed. Cuttle—yes! That picture, the eerie artist’s likeness! A file for the
yes
pile! Then Lemuel, Hang ley, Swinburne—so many aliases. Some of the Know-Nothings’ files went back a hundred years or more, yellowing, flaking under his fingers. Some had been updated the day before the War. Shay, Swinburne. The rain turned into a storm. He made notes. His door opened and he slowly became aware of someone standing behind him.

“Marta.”

“Plans? Strategies?”

She was soaked from the storm, and she dripped on his papers. She smoked without asking if he minded.

“Not exactly,” he said.

“It’s not over,” she said. “You’re not done yet.”

“Hmm.” He scanned the file of a Mr. Lyall. Dealing in weapons, unlicensed surgeries, a mysterious disappearance from a locked cell. He flipped through another Shay file, and another Cuttle. Rumors of murders and poisoning, insurrection, conspiracy.

“Is there anything in there that can help us?”

“Not yet.”

A heap of irrelevant folders, gathered by mistake: dogfights, drugs, operators of public houses without license, public urinators. A file on a Mr. Lemuel, who—

“What?”

He was standing—swaying slightly in shock. Yellowed papers spilled from the folder in his hand. Dumbly he echoed her, “What?”

“What is it?”

He studied her face. Solid, heavy, dark-browed. Was it possible? Surely not.

“What?”

“I can’t help you,” he said. “I never could. Good luck.”

He walked past her, and down the stairs. She came running after him. “What? What?” He didn’t answer. He couldn’t tell her. He turned the corner and was gone.

The Faces of Ghosts-Flitter’s Owl-
Sunshine-The Borders-
Her Predicament

R
uth Stood on
the cliff above the quarry, among the loading wagons and the low concrete offices and the dawn mists. Too exhausted to face the long walk back down, she lay down in the back of one of the wagons, on a heap of dirt under rough canvas, and quickly fell asleep.

She dreamed uneasy dreams—she walked alone through darkened streets, and faces darted at her out of the shadows. The searchlights of the airships drifted senselessly past. One by one she recalled the ghosts she’d known—the pilot, the astronomer, the sculptress, the soldiers who’d vanished. Even Arjun, who had somehow survived the Mountain and then chosen, unforgivably, to go back. Even Brace-Bel, who now seemed a pitiful figure. Too many losses. A cruel joke.

The strange owl intruded on her dreams, drifting silently on the cold light of the airships, hunting her, and she stood her ground, too furious even to imagine retreating, and told it to piss off, which, hooting sadly, it did.

The dream continued. The faces of the vanished haunted windows that went dark, one by one. She turned over in her sleep, whimpering with anger. Shay—her enemy, everyone’s enemy, she would kill him if she could, and she didn’t even have a face for him.

A face occurred to her.

She woke with a start. A horrible, ridiculous question nagged at her. She set out down into the depths again.

Sunlight flooded the quarry. The stones sparkled. The motorcars gleamed.

The camp was awake and at work. They were cooking a stew of weeds, branches, and what was left of the strays after the Beast had finished with them. No wonder they were so thin! They were decorating themselves, and the cars, and the tents, with the excess bones and teeth discarded by their master. The Beast copied Shay; dimly, pointlessly, the camp followers copied the Beast.
Madness all the way down
, Ruth thought.

Silt sat on a rock, having his head bandaged by a large redheaded woman. “You,” he said, jumping up. “Ungrateful creature—how dare you? Assault! Assault! Utterly uncalled for, I should …”

Ruth walked past him; he spluttered into silence.

F
litter stood under a short rusting crane, making cooing noises at the owl that perched on the cables.

Currently the peculiar creature was solid, tangible, almost fully present in the visible world. It was about the size of a doll, or a teddy bear. Its feathers were grey, thick, like old lace skirts. Its eyes were black stones.

Flitter, raising his cupped hands over his head in offering, presented the owl with a dead mouse. “Here, girl. Good girl. Good morning.”

The owl sank its head into its shoulders, and shifted farther out of Flitter’s reach.

Flitter lowered his hands. He looked so downcast that Ruth felt a moment’s sympathy for him.

He looked up and saw her watching him. He quickly dropped the mouse and put his foot over it, like a schoolboy hiding an illicit cigarette. He smiled broadly. “Good morning, miss! Good to see you up and about! Any …” He made a peculiar gesture, waggling his filthy hands.

“What, Flitter?”

“You know. Any … Like my little girl here. Any … scars? You know. What’s it like?”

“You mean, did the Beast operate on me?”

“Well, yeah.”

“No, Flitter. We talked.”

“Oh.” He shrugged. “Shame.” He indicated some of his own scars and stitched wounds. “One day he promised to do me.”

“You
want
it to … ?”

“Of course!” Flitter looked sincerely surprised. He jerked a thumb at the owl. “Look how pretty she is,” he said. “She’ll live forever. Never hungry.”

He reached up again for the owl, and it jabbed its beak at his hand, drawing blood, which Flitter licked away, smiling.

“No hard feelings about the other night, miss.” He showed her his wrists. “Old Silt untied me, right enough, and no harm done to him—his skull’s gone all hard with all that law in it. Like a stone!”

“No hard feelings? Flitter, you were going to kill me!”

“Not me! Mr. Silt thought it might be best—he’s a very practical thinker. I told him it wouldn’t be kind. You heard me tell him!”

“There was a sack on my head! You were going to give me to the Beast like a present!”

Flitter looked genuinely upset. “You were running away!” His own voice rose shrilly. “You would have got lost! It was for your own good! He’d have made you magical, that’s it, you didn’t look happy the way you were, I
said to
Mr. Silt, she doesn’t look happy, she’s all wrong the way she is …”

“Don’t you dare tell me …” She stopped; she lowered her finger, which had been jabbing at Flitter’s face. The anger flowed out of her at once, and she laughed. Flitter’s lip wobbled. There was no point in arguing with mad people. “All right, Flitter. All right.”