Gears of the City by Felix Gilman Read Free Book Online

city. Arjun was not sure yet whether he was a lucky or an unlucky man.
    Ruth had thought he might be a thief. He was, Arjun thought, slight, and wiry, and silent; he might have been a
good
thief. He had a number of scars; perhaps he’d been a soldier—a bandit? Arjun thought not. No, he thought that he was an ordinary man, and those possibilities seemed too strange, too fabulous, too picaresque. They made him smile.
    I Am Come Down from the Mountain to Tell You.
Perhaps he was a holy man. Perhaps he was a priest. That might explain the sense he had, floating at the edge of his memories, of some profound but indescribable
need.
That might explain why he looked at the city around him and thought: this world is not real.
    He was quite sure he’d been a musician. He held up his right hand—his
good
hand—and flexed his fingers. They made silent memory-notes.
    Arjun held up his left hand. Under the bandages, he still had his index, his middle, his thumb. A good enough tool for most employment, but worthless for a musician—
mute.
Numbness spread down his aching arm and gripped his heart. He knew that he had lost something, something irreplaceable; he could not be sure how much.
    He heard the two women coming up the stairs.
    They called you a ghost.
    T hey were sisters. There was a third, they said—at least Ruth began to say it, and Marta shushed her. This was on the third day of Arjun’s recovery, and he was clear in his head, and the pain in his phantom fingers was manageable; but he was tired, and weak, and did not press the matter.
    The silence was broken by an ugly bird that settled on the sill outside the attic’s half-open window, and pressed its lumpy head through the crack. Its feathers were like dirty grey rags and its yellow eyes were strangely human. Its misshapen claws—there were bright rags torn from someone’s red dress stuck in them—appeared to be fumbling with dim intelligence to reach round the pane and unbolt the latch. “Faaakyu,” it sang. “Oi.”
    Marta banged the glass against its head with an old book and it dropped away dazed into the alley.
    “Horrible thing,” Marta said.
    “What was it?”
    “Just a bird. Don’t they have birds where you’re from?”
    “Yes. Of course. It just reminded me of something.”
    “Thunners, they call them. Nasty breed. Or Thunders. Or Thunderers.”
    “Because of the noise they make,” Ruth said.
    “Because they won’t stop fucking shouting,” Marta agreed.
    “Oh.”
    Marta bolted the window and turned back to Arjun. “You’re looking better, anyway. You can start thinking how to pay us, yeah?” And she squeezed her sister’s shoulder and briskly left the room.
    Another bird landed on the sill, and peered through the window with a resentful yellow eye. Arjun decided to ignore it.
    The attic was stuffed to the rafters with furniture and boxes and books; unsold stock. Arjun lay on an ancient sofa. Ruth sat beside him. The cushions were grey and hard. There was, however, a blanket, which was relatively clean. There’d been food—potatoes, cabbage, and carrots—no meat. The house was cold. These sisters were not poor—not by the standards of some places in the city—but they were far from rich by the standards of all but the most desperate quarters. Names of places and times and parliaments and dukes and churches slipped through the shadows of Arjun’s mind, too many and too fast for him quite to grasp them.
    “Ruth, you called me a ghost.”
    “Sometimes people come wandering down the Mountain. We’re so close to it here. They’re like you. They don’t know who they are or where they’re from. They come and go. They don’t really belong here and they go, soon enough. We try to be kind to them when they’re here. There are more than enough people who’ll try to be cruel.”
    “Tell me again, Ruth, where we are. I am still forgetful. Do you have a map?”
    “Boxes and
boxes
of ‘em,” she laughed. “Are you