Read Online Gears of the City by Felix Gilman - Free Book Online

had put the red vase in his upper window, which meant that he’d learned, probably from Mrs. Rawley, in whose boozy Tearoom the Know-Nothings sometimes drank, that they were on their way down-street. Ruth banged on the walls to make sure Marta knew; then she hid the maps, and the forbidden books, and told Arjun to hide upstairs. “The bosses’ men,” she spat, as if that explained the matter. “The fucking filth.
Hide.”
    He waited at the top of the stairs, listening. For a moment he remembered bad years in a cold school far away, hiding from angry Masters; he had an image of cold iron staircases, and high rooms made all of glass. He fished for a memory of
family
and came up empty-handed.
    There was shouting from across the street, harsh ugly boomingvoices. Ruth stood behind the counter downstairs, waiting, a blank expression fixed on her face. But they passed Ruth’s shop by and swaggered on down the street.
    Ruth untensed and lit a cigarette. “Poor ghost,” she said, exhaling. “Poor ghost. We won’t let them catch you.”
    “Why would they want to catch me?”
    “Because they’re stupid, frightened little men. They say there’s a War coming.”
    “What?”
    “Look, I don’t want to talk about it, all right? It gives me a headache. I don’t want to talk.”
    For lack of anything better to do, Arjun started sweeping.
    T he others—his more terrible pursuers—came after sunset.
    There were bars on Carnyx Street, and laughter and shouting and music echoed all evening from a half-dozen directions. Shortly after sunset, in one sudden moment, all sound hushed at once, as if the whole street was struck with a surprising shame. The drunk in the street faltered, midsong, and shuffled off in silence; a screaming fight in the garden of No. 15 subsided into grumbling and curses. The little bells over the shop door chimed, and then there was a precise
clack-clack-clack
of footsteps.
    “Stay here,” Ruth told Arjun, and she left him at the table and stepped out into the front.
    She’d been applying the ointment and changing Arjun’s bandages. She’d been tracing the lines on his palms with her silver-ringed fingers. She’d told him she was a fortune-teller, and laughed at his expression and said
No, not really.
There were a number of scars; the Beast was not the first thing in the city to have wounded him. There were calluses on his remaining digits, some of which were scribes’ calluses, some of which he thought were from musical instruments. He lied to her; he pretended he could tell which instrument had produced each one, and rattled off a list of instruments she’d never heard of: dulcian, cittern, setar, clavichord, theorb … The carnyx was a kind of harsh and doom-laden war-horn. Perhaps the street was named for it because they shared the same curve. He lied; he told her he remembered blowing it. The dissimulation gave him confidence and he’d begun to enjoy himself.
    Ruth stepped out into the shop front and Arjun heard her say … nothing.
    The bells were attached by cords to the shop door, so that they sounded when anyone passed through; it suddenly occurred to him that though the bells had begun quietly to chime, and indeed were somehow still chiming, in quiet dull persistent tones, he had not heard the door open or close.
    Arjun heard their footsteps, again—
clack-clacking
around the shop. He knew the shine of their shoes. The
clack-clack
of their boots echoed dully, as if the noise fell into a great blank hole in the world.
The Hollows
, he thought,
the Hollow Servants.
There were two of them, always; he remembered that. They would be busy for a while there. Maps and paintings and photographs confused and upset them; he remembered that, too.
The Failed Men …
    There were two cats in the room. One fled beneath a chair and hunched there hissing in flat-eared terror. The other squirmed on its back in an ecstasy of submission.
    Two men. Arjun remembered fleeing them, tumbling headlong down the