Gears of the City by Felix Gilman Page A

expense, which Marta allowed was very possible. So Ivy left the music, but she had all those other rusting machines packed up in boxes and sent on. Ruth took on Ivy’s remaining stock. Three sisters became two. And Ararat went
bad.
    The factories encroached on Carnyx Street. Ezra Street and Capra Street and Ball-and-Chain Lane and Lewis Circle, all of which had been beautiful once, and free, now belonged to Holcroft Municipal Trust, Holcroft Municipal Trust, Patagan Sewer & Piping, and Holcroft again, respectively. The Know-Nothings settled into those places and shut them down. They closed the Museum, and the theaters, and the meeting halls. They closed the last few long-empty temples and dynamited and steam-shoveled them away. Fewer and fewer customers came to Carnyx Street, to what was left of Carnyx Street; the factories worked them too hard, paid them too little, kept them in company stores, running up company debt, buying company stock …
    Of course, Arjun observed, the Low sisters were still young, and Ivy couldn’t have been gone for more than a year or two, while the city Arjun had gone wandering in had been sliding into exhaustion and drudgery for decades; those towering factory complexes were not built in a day. By any sensible reckoning the process of city-death was very far advanced when Ivy left Carnyx Street. Nevertheless the sisters remained adamant; the rot began with Ivy’s departure, with the breaking of their circle.
    If it were Ruth alone, Arjun might have argued, but Marta was practically minded and did not seem overimaginative or oversensitive, and if both agreed—well, who was he to say how the city appeared to them?
    He asked, “Why did she go?”
    “She was taken,” Marta said.
    “Who took her?”
    “A ghost,” Ruth said.
    “One of you lot,” Marta said. “We can’t touch him. Maybe you can, who knows? Set a ghost to catch a ghost.”
    H is name was Mr. Brace-Bel, and he was a very unusual ghost. He’d arrived on Carnyx Street without a penny in his pockets, but in splendid and aristocratic clothing of a bygone age; wig and ruff, velvet and buckle, silk and brocade—somewhat torn and scorched, but still fine. He appeared neither haunted nor hunted; he was not lost and nervous and forgetful like other ghosts. He pronounced himself to be unutterably bored with the ugliness and squalor of the times, and winced with theatrical disgust at the debased men who inhabited them. His voice was loud and hooting. He made enemies in the pubs, in Rawley’s Tearoom; he seemed to relish making enemies. He dared the drinkers to gamble, he put up his golden watch as stake, and he cleared out every man in the room. He declared that he was bored with his good fortune. When hotheaded young Thayer laid hands on him Brace-Bel produced a tiny silver pistol from his pocket, and waved it like a conductor.
    He was a strikingly ugly little man, Marta said; wet-lipped and droop-eyed and fat-jowled, a rash of pockmarks on his cheeks, a feverish energy in his beady eyes. In repose his body appeared soft and fat and idle, almost boneless; when he walked, rapidly, urgently, gesturing with his plump hands to illustrate some obscenity or philosophical point, or to call attention to something that particularly disgusted him, or delighted him, or both—then he moved with the jerky confidence of some exotic bird.
    “Brace-Bel,” Arjun said. “I know that name.”
    Marta nodded as if her suspicions were confirmed.
    “But I remember nothing about him,” Arjun said. “He was from another time, another place?”
    “He said so,” Marta said. “And he spoke like he was.”
    “He kept bragging about the old city,” Ruth said.
“His
city. About princes and kings and brilliant scholars and playwrights and wits. Gods and miracles. Monsters. He said he was a great man back then. He had …
things.
He had a silver stick, with a pommel, like a crystal of mercury, and it gave off a kind of light, like no light I’ve ever