Gears of the City (62 page)

They turned another corner and there was a door. They nearly walked right past it.

It was an unremarkable narrow metal door, painted a dark olive green, set down a short brick staircase and apparently opening into a basement. It was ajar.

“The back entrance,” Arjun said. “I wonder what your father does when he has guests he
wants
to welcome.”

Ruth sat on the steps to catch her breath.

Arjun slowly pushed the door open with his foot. He thought how much he disliked Shay; how he hated the way Shay cheated, and stole, and lied, and hid, and
hoarded
things that were not his; how everything Shay touched was turned ugly and mean. It crossed his mind to be glad that Ruth was weak and tired; she would not be able to stop him from doing what needed to be done.

He helped her stand and they stepped into the darkness of the basement.

T
he room behind the door was heaped with refuse. It reeked of mold and rotting food. Against the near wall slumped a mass of black rubbish bags. There were slimy and sticky things underfoot. There were angular piles of old furniture, and the swollen valves and rusty levers of old machines; there were yellow drifts of discarded books.

They crossed the room, holding their breath. There were a number of doors. They chose the nearest.

After that they couldn’t agree which way to go next. The drab concrete corridor ran left, toward what appeared to be an immense boiler room, full of a tangle of pipes hung with fat sinister valves; and it ran right, into the shadows, lined with closed unmarked doors. Arjun said
left
, in hopes of finding something vulnerable in Shay’s machinery. Ruth said
right
, because if the machines were important, then they were surely trapped. Arjun didn’t know what to do—his instincts couldn’t be trusted in Shay’s house—but that only made him more determined to dig his heels in. He saw the same resolute uncertainty on Ruth’s face. In the end they tossed a
coin;
heads
meant
right.
It came up heads, and Ruth immediately said
maybe we
should
go into the boiler room
and Arjun said
no, you’re right
—
no diversions.
But then after they’d walked only fifty feet down the corridor his curiosity suddenly got the better of him and he opened one of the doors.

It opened onto the boiler room.

The huge room clicked and clanked, whistled and moaned. Heavy iron pipes twisted at painful angles all around Arjun’s head. Wheels protruded. Valves attached themselves like leeches to the room’s iron veins; their dials ticked patiently away. Everything was covered in a thick layer of dust.

Ruth stepped into the room after him. “Do you understand any of this?” He shook his head and put a finger to his lips; there was motion in the depths of the room.

Every dial and pressure gauge that Arjun could see fluttered in the red, or hung inert and empty. The machinery appeared to be balanced finely in a constant state of crisis. Something
tense
in the creak and clang of the pipes … He whispered, “This may be easily broken. I wonder what would happen if…”

Ruth drew in her breath and squeezed his arm.

Shadows crept over the pipes, coming closer out of the depths of the room. Something bright glinted—blinked—something opened a mouth of tiny, bright, needle-sharp teeth.

A dozen little grey monkeys approached, hand over hand along the pipes, blinking bright round camera-shutter eyes.

One leapt from a pipe near to Arjun’s head and he ducked, but it flew past him to land clattering on a valve. It wiped the grime from the face of the dial with the ragged fur of its forearm; then it chewed its wrist and muttered to itself. Its back was a mess of purple scars. It cocked its tufted head as the pipes clanged. It shuddered and leapt. Arjun lost sight of it among the plumbing.

Ruth shrieked as another monkey leapt from a pipe to her shoulder up onto a wheel valve, which it turned a tiny notch. The pipes whistled and all of the monkeys shrieked and shook themselves.

Something banged and echoed off in the shadows. The monkeys hunched and looked up in terror; then they went racing off to fix it, brachiating recklessly across their iron jungle.

Suddenly the thought of damaging that complex, incomprehensible
machinery seemed utterly terrifying. There was no telling what it might do to the Mountain, what it might do to the city.

Ruth had slumped against the door and was sitting with her head against a cool pipe. Arjun helped her stand and together they walked back out into the corridor.

T
he corridor ran endlessly, around countless sharp corners, past unmarked doors. Sometimes it was lit by bulbs; sometimes they had to walk in darkness, Arjun feeling his way along the wall with his hand.

Ruth held his arm and rested her head on his shoulder. For a long time she was silent, and he thought everything was all right. Then she mumbled,
thank you, Marta, thank you for helping me, you’re very kind
, and his blood froze. “Ruth, it’s me.”

She said, crossly, “I know.”

Silent again. He tried to keep her talking; he tried humming and encouraging her to hum along. Later she addressed him as
Dad.
He said
no, no I’m not
, and she moaned and pushed him away. Her legs buckled. He looked back. Fifty feet away the corridor turned a sharp corner and beyond that continued … endlessly?

If he left her behind he would never find her again; he was quite certain ofthat. He was lost; he did not understand the machine. He helped her stand again. Her eyes were bloodshot, her scalp sweaty, her breath foul.

Oh, look at it all
, she said.

Sometimes she staggered and looked down at the concrete floor as if swaying over a great abyss, and clutched weakly at his arm. Sometimes she shuddered with what seemed to be dread. Sometimes she laughed, bitterly.

Once she addressed him as
my musician
, and he said,
yes, Ruth, yes, that’s right.
He thought most likely it was right; how many musicians could she have known?

For a while she refused to go forward, and Arjun didn’t want to fight her. She saw something before them that terrified her. He asked her what it was, but she was too far gone to answer him. He thought it was her poisoned and feverish imagination—but then there was a terrible grinding noise and all the lights swayed and
dimmed, and it seemed the shadows lunged across the wall from side to side and something passed by within them. Ruth said,
quick, quick, we have to keep going.

She muttered as they walked, lost in some sort of childhood argument, which drifted senselessly into a bitter sullen fight over money. She said,
why didn’t you tell me? Oh, what a stupid unkind joke.
He tried to think of a joke to tell her, thinking it might catch her attention, keep her in the here and now; nothing came to mind.

She called him
my pilot.
She kissed his face and her lips were too cold and her breath too hot and too stale. She told him he was beautiful. She said,
I never thought you’d come back.
She said,
you found it at last.
Arjun said:
yes.
She began to shake feverishly. Arjun said:
yes, yes, I found it, we found the way.
She coughed weakly. He said,
we found it, just a little farther.
She slumped against his shoulder and said,
but it’s so horrible. It’s such a horrible broken machine.

She stumbled and he let her sit against the wall.

He said, “What kind of machine? What do you see?”

She laughed and her eyes fluttered back in her head.

Her pulse was weak and unsteady.

He felt terribly cold and numb and lost.

In a sudden ecstasy of panic he threw open the nearest door. It led into the same clanging hissing forest of machinery as the last door, and the door before that.

He seized a valve wheel; it was rusted and painted sloppily grey-white and stuck, and he hung all his weight off it to make it screech sourly and turn a half-revolution.
She’ll die
, he thought,
she’ll die; get someone’s attention!
The pipe the valve governed began to shake; an arrhythmic knocking started up, traveling back and forth over Arjun’s head, leaping from pipe to pipe, gear to gear, grinding and thumping and ringing, spreading like an infection.

The door swung quietly shut behind him. When he threw it open again the corridor was empty; Ruth was gone.

He didn’t know whether to hope or despair. He didn’t know how anything worked or what anything meant. The corridor echoed to the sound of sick machinery. He kept walking; he wasn’t sure where he was going.

T
he corridor curved and sloped. The sounds of the machinery above drifted down like dust. He counted the numbers on the doors, the rungs on the rusting ladders that carried him down, and down, and with every step it was harder and harder to remember why he was there.

The name of his God!

Medicine for Ruth!

Life for the city, death for Shay!

What was the point? The Mountain was beyond his comprehension.

The corridor ended in a door. It was marked cellar 222-A. The sight made Arjun unaccountably, uncontrollably angry. He remembered it!

The door opened with a familiar groan.

C
ellar 222-A was an echoing void. The light was like moonlight, and ebbed and flowed in sinuous waves, and had no clear origin. The floor was concrete, ancient and moss-blotched.

Now he remembered; he’d been here before. He’d
seen
it. Cellar 222-A! Here Shay kept his servants.

Standing in massed ranks …

In far distant and long-forgotten Red Barrow, the warlike Thanes had traditionally buried themselves with their favorite warriors, standing in stiff phalanxes around the bier, willingly poisoned, rotting in their own armor in the darkness. By the fifteenth generation of the Thanes the vaults beneath that unlucky part of the city held dead and silent legions. Arjun had broken into the vaults in search of a certain key that the Seventh Thane had worn around his bull-like neck … Now the uncountable unmoving ranks of Shay’s servants reminded him of the darkness below Red Barrow. Perhaps the Thanes had had some dim sense of how things were in Shay’s house, and built in imitation—the Thanes admired conquerors and thieves and cruel men.

Hanging like old coats in a wardrobe …

He walked among them, brushed against them. They were cold. They shifted as if in a breeze and fluttered and it seemed that sometimes two or more stood in the same spot; perhaps an infinite number could stand on a single point.

Like pale reflections in a cracked mirror …

Did he recognize any of them? He wasn’t sure. Their heads hung dismally down. Their faces were all so similar, so vague— Shay’s hollowing process stripped them of their identities. There was sometimes a subtle suggestion of
place
or
time
to them—the dark skin and pronounced brows of the princes of Erigena; a stain across the temples and cheek that might have been one of the tattoos of the thieves of the House of Moth. One of them might have been Mr. Zeigler. Maybe; it was hard to tell, and what were the odds? There were so many. Explorers and adventurers of a thousand Ages of the city … Arjun’s ill-fated peers; his fellow dreamers. Most had probably been men; it was hard to be sure. Their clothes were androgynous, ill-fitting, ill-defined. He
hoped
they were men because when he saw a pale ambiguous face that he believed to be female he found it unbearably sad, he felt unbearably ashamed. He looked for Ruth’s face; he didn’t find her among them.

Like ripples in a moonlit pool …

It was possible that the dim light came from the servants themselves; or that its reflection glowed from their brittle skin, that some part of them was in a place where moonlight fell …

Dusty valves in a monstrous calculating-engine …

A signal went through the room and every head snapped attentively up, and Arjun’s heart seized with terror.

He was in the middle of the room; no exit was visible. Why had he come here?

Because you belong here.

His legs buckled. He sat numbly on the floor. The servants gathered around.

A cane clacked on the concrete. A bent figure approached. The servants stepped flinching aside.

An old man pointed his cane at Arjun’s face.

“I
remember
you,” Shay said.
“You
again. You little shit. You little shit of a thief. Don’t you ever learn? What am I going to have to take from you
this
time?”

Come Home-Tne Pawns-Stalemate-
First Blood-Reunion