Authors: Felix Gilman
He oriented himself by the Mountain—there it was, looming on the skyline, marking the north pole of the city. The high dome of the Museum, off to his right, was tiny by comparison.
The Mountain! Unshakable, unchanging. There was so much he was so close to remembering.
There were old tricks; ways of triangulating between two landmarks—one, the Mountain, permanent, perfect, the same from Age to Age; the others purely local, ephemeral. Rivers came and went, flags and signposts couldn’t be trusted, golden pillars and copper roofs got stolen, even marble crumbled; but the explorers of the City Beyond had their tricks. There were no maps, but a smart traveler was never lost.
Arjun remembered Shay snarling:
that way, north, you idiot, can’t you see it? Never forget it. Never turn your back on it.
That was a thousand years ago.
In a flash, he remembered another time, another place: golden-haired St. Loup, shimmering in sunglasses, scarlet snakeskin jacket, silk shirt, and shined shoes, checking his watch and smiling, saying:
here comes the storm, chaps.
St. Loup had been a rich man back in real life, something in business or banking or aristocracy. Over his razor-sharp collar spilled golden curls so perfect they seemed to conduct light.
See
—
it starts on the peaks.
Gesturing north with a wave of a manicured hand.
Lightning, fire. Set your watch by it. Only here, only now, only in this dreary little district.
Arjun couldn’t remember the district, he couldn’t remember the place. They’d been on a rooftop? Haifa dozen of them, watching the skies. Blood-red and snake-green flashed over the Mountain.
A crack
in the armor
, St. Loup had suggested,
the gears grinding, the fires of creation, fireworks and jubilation among the lords and ladies of the Mountain? One hell of a show. What do you think? Useful intelligence? Gentlemen, what do you propose?
Abra-Melin, shaking, with his gnarled staff and black skullcap and dirty beard, had boomed:
the Gods are angry, you fool.
His huge frame was sagging with age like a condemned building.
The angels make war.
His robes were like a heap of old laundry.
Turnbull had shaken his head:
God is dead.
A plain suit, glasses, an egg-shaped head, the manner of a middling academic or an unbelieving priest. A pedantic little shrug.
God is dead. The Mountain is empty. Sometimes a storm is only a storm.
Where had this happened? When? Who were these people? Arjun couldn’t remember. He couldn’t place them. Maybe they
had
no place, no context. Half a dozen madmen on a roof in a storm, talking nonsense. Most or maybe all of them were murderers. Drawn from a half-dozen different Ages, wanderers in the City Beyond, united only by their shared obsession. A clownish variety of clothes from a half-dozen cultures and Ages—all hid knives, guns, poison needles. Uneasy in each other’s company, contemptuous of real people and real life. Paranoia was simply common sense among these men—they’d all glimpsed the City Beyond the City, the huge and hostile structure in which other people’s ordinary lives were suspended. These were the men who chased the Mountain.
Someone had said:
Why did you bring us here, St. Loup? What do you want for this information? Is this a trap?
Arjun couldn’t remember who’d said that. Maybe it was him.
The dust venting from the chimney was thick, drowsy. It smelled of age, exhaustion, old fires, stale food. Arjun swayed with hunger. A sudden explosion of birds from behind the chimney made him duck. Two dozen black beating shapes, tiny machines, rose past his head, through the fog, and out north across the sky, their pattern loosening and tightening again, their forms quickly becoming invisible against the darkness of the Mountain. It made him remember …
Another time. Later, earlier?
Elsewhere.
Another rooftop—on top of Potocki’s vast factory, south of the Mountain, above streets clogged with cars and noisy intershuttling trams. The madmen of the City Beyond returned again and again to high places.
Arjun remembered: a wide rooftop, a broad concrete plain under a bronze sky, gorgeous with strange pollution. Complex steel machines littered the rooftop, humming and grinding their wheels; delicate wire-mesh mouths sifted oils and grit from the air, to be processed below into food and materiel. The waiting aircraft flexed white plastic wings. Electricity crackled from pylon to pylon. Potocki the Engineer lived in a nest of machines. And there he was,
dressed in oily rags, scraggle-bearded, hunched and swollen like a gigantic mole, dragging his lame left leg around the rooftop in circles, conducting his servants, bellowing:
Now! Now! Now!
Arjun had arrived at Potocki’s rooftop too late. He’d taken a taxi to get there, down strange and shifting roads, skidding and swerving forward through history, from the honking jostling ranks out the front of the WaneLight Hotel.
Luxurious, immense—the memory of the Hotel pressed itself into Arjun’s mind, too huge to grasp. Bright yellow-black taxis leaving the Hotel like a swarm of greedy wasps, homing in on a rumor:
Potocki’s got another prototype. He launches today …
The horde descended, armed with cameras, bribes, knives.
Me too, take me with you …
Everything began at the Hotel in those days—everyone’s schemes were hatched there. If the vastness of the city had a center, it was the Mountain—but if its impossible geometry allowed for a
second
center, that would be the Hotel. Power and influence and fame gathered there, connections were made, secrets were bartered. The secrets of power; the secrets of the Gods and the city; the secrets of the Mountain. Years of Arjun’s life spent penetrating the mysteries, ingratiating himself with the right people, watching his back, listening for rumors. Gossip at the bar. A note pushed under the bedroom door. A phone call, untraceable, at dead of night, spilling secrets. A whisper overheard in the casinos. Surveillance and countersurveillance systems constantly breaking down, hissing and crackling, leaking information, leaking plans.
The conspirators—the explorers—the secret-hunters—had met in the Bar Caucasus. It was on the south face of the Hotel’s forty-fourth floor—a forest of potted palms, a shrine of vulgar brass. There was the scent of a rumor in the stale air. Turnbull was there, and St. Loup, Longfellow, and Monmouth. St. Loup was stylish as ever, golden-haired, in trousers of sapphire-blue leather and a white shirt with a red snake logo. He leaned on the bar and toyed tensely with his drink, which he held like a weapon. Longfellow looked hot and itching in his long black coat. Probably he was wearing his hair shirt again—the pious Longfellow believed the Mountain was the house of God, and hoped to find forgiveness there for unspecified but presumably dreadful sins. Arjun himself was recently returned from one of his futile trips to primitive districts in search of his own God,
and still wore pilgrim’s robes. The mage Abra-Melin looked out of place in a corner, clutching his ornate staff, glowering at cocktail waitresses. The collector Lord Losond showed off three sleek amber wildcats, sprawled on the bar, chewing their silver leashes. Someone measured out drugs in the back of the room—there was a new
xaw
dealer at the Bar Caucasus, and the air in those days was greasy with the stuff. Wreathed in furtive purple clouds, there was Cantor, there was Karatas, there was Muykrit …
All the usual crowd. They said:
Is it true?
Potocki? He’s cracked it?
Shut up
—
shut up. Who’s heard what?
Where? Where?
They had raced each other downstairs, squeezing into elevators, sliding down fire escapes, taking secret routes through the staff quarters. They stumbled and slid over each other in the lobby. Muykrit stuck out a muscled leg and tripped Cantor. Losond tripped on his cats’ tangled leashes and they savaged his cape and his balding scalp. Abra-Melin stood in the glass doorway making occult gestures that did nothing—then suddenly swinging his staff he cracked Longfellow on his bald head, taking the penitent efficiently out of the running. The mob bowled Abra-Melin over, and surged out into the street. Tourists and scarlet-jacketed porters looked on curiously.
Taxi! Taxi!
Arjun had shared the backseat of a yellow taxi with St. Loup, who sat reading a glossy magazine, pretending to be calm while his hands shook with eagerness and fear. At the time Arjun and St. Loup had had a sort of alliance—something less than friendship, more than mere detente—which usually resulted in Arjun carrying St. Loup’s bags, running to keep up, waiting for scraps of information.
Faster, driver
, St. Loup drawled,
if you don’t mind.
The roads were strange—it was day, and then night, and then day again, along the route St. Loup picked—and the driver was nervous. The scenery shifted, fashions changed, the skyline rippled. Green raindrops and fat foreign insects blatted against the windscreen. Traffic lights strobed through the night—so, too, did Gods. They were driving down newly made paths through the city, and Gods strutted and blazed beside them, taller than towers, brighter than stars, many-limbed, radioactive;
reshaping the city as they passed … St. Loup lunged forward and leaned on the horn.
Out of the fucking way!
The driver started to cry. Neon advertisements in alien languages reflected on the windshield. The skyline was made menacing by ziggurats and fires.
Fucking go faster!
St. Loup shrieked, with his gun against the back of the driver’s neck.
We’re going to be too late!
Potocki, the mad Engineer—born in a ditch full of pigs somewhere, or a tunnel, or the inside of a diesel engine. A genius, a mutant, a monster, made out of mad beard and black grease and bony elbows. He’d raised himself up out of the dirt by his own ingenuity, his gift for invention, and he now controlled a dozen factories, all over the city. He owned a hundred hangars full of slumbering tarpaulined prototypes; full of weapons of civic destruction, hidden from the inspectors in unmarked crates. People said he did business with Shay himself, that even the great and hidden Shay himself purchased Potocki’s machines. Potocki visited the WaneLight Hotel for rumors and business, never relaxation; he never relaxed. He had only ever exchanged one word with Arjun:
primitive.
Potocki’s great obsession was the Mountain. For their various reasons, they were all obsessed with it; that was what brought them together. What did Potocki want with it? Probably he thought of it as some huge machine, probably he wanted to reverse-engineer it. Arjun wasn’t sure. But again and again Potocki constructed machines to breach the Mountain, and again and again he failed.
The first thing everyone learned about the Mountain, when they were first dragged out of their little local neighborhood and into the City Beyond, was that you couldn’t just walk there; the streets turned against you, you circled your steps, if you were lucky you only got lost … No matter how far north you walked, the Mountain remained remote, away over the rooftops. Did the Mountain retreat? Did new streets pour in to fill the gap as it receded? No one was sure. Perhaps it was a kind of hallucination. No telescope could pierce the darkness of the Mountain. The maze was never the same twice. The way was guarded. Time became a trap that could freeze or end you. If there were secret paths through it, out of the city, and up the Mountain—and the Hotel was full of rumors of secret paths—then no one who’d found one had ever returned.
In a thousand years of scheming, no explorer—as far as anyone
could tell—had ever found the secret way to the Mountain. They all tried in the end. Sooner or later their patience gave out, and they went walking …
Potocki once built a bulldozing engine, the size of a house, and sent it bludgeoning its way north. It sank in a deep pond. He once built an enormous corkscrew engine to tunnel under the maze of streets. It drilled through a snarl of subterranean gas pipes and exploded. Now he built flying machines. Every few years he had a new prototype—from huge heavy things like winged whales to remote-operated helicopters the size of hummingbirds. None of them ever reached the Mountain: lightning and fog struck them down. They fished up smashed in gutters a thousand years in the future, or as rusting hulks in primitive rivers, mistaken by barbarians for the bones of Gods.
“Sneaky bastard’s been quiet this time,” St. Loup said. “Well done. Lying low. Well done. Didn’t see this coming. When we get there, you know the plan, right?”
“No,” Arjun said.
“Nor do I. We’ll think of something. You and me together!”
Arjun didn’t smile. St. Loup would sell Arjun to Potocki as a slave in the blink of a glittering eye if he thought it would buy passage on Potocki’s new machines. They both knew it. Arjun was never very good at pretending not to care …
The taxi lurched sideways. A hideous scrape of metal and a burst of sparks. As they barreled north down a great lonely suspension bridge—strung like a silver harp, over a formless midnight river—another car slammed
again
into them. They hit the railings hard and the windows shattered. The other car broke away, swerving right across the empty road, trailing wing mirrors and broken metal, and came sharking back toward them again. Murderous intent was written in its low-slung lines, the one-eyed glare of its headlamps. Its hood, rawly crumpled, pulled back in a snarl. The face at the window, hunched over the wheel, was Muykrit, teeth bared, eyes wide, as he bore down again.
“He’s gone mad,” St. Loup said. “No patience!”
Muykrit—huge, fat, and pale, filed teeth, clammy skin purpled with savage tattoos. A placid manner, except when enraged, which was frequent. He was from some pre-pre-industrial district—wattle and daub huts, down by a marshy untrafficked river. A barbarian
priest-king in the place of his birth, he sacrificed his enemies to crocodiles, or so rumor had it. Ten years ago Shay himself had brought Muykrit through into the City Beyond, which Muykrit conceived of as Hell. He’d been Shay’s muscle. Abandoned by Shay, Muykrit hired himself out. He navigated through the secret ways of the City Beyond by blind instinct, and dreamed of plundering the treasure vaults of the Mountain, and raping its women. He wasn’t sophisticated. He feared electric light the way he still feared lightning. He had no business being behind the wheel of a car. Was he howling? Impossible to tell over the roar of engines, the squeal of abused tires.