Gears of the City by Felix Gilman Read Free Book Online Page B

said, had been Ivy’s business, before … well, she said she’d talk about that later, maybe.
    But mostly Ruth sold maps. It had been one of the Dad’s numerous little businesses; and it had been
his
father’s before him, and somewhere way back in the family line had been travelers, explorers, peripatetic wanderers of the city, lodgers in odd boardinghouses, consummate fakers of dialects, connoisseurs of exotic omnibus passes and indecipherable street signs. Now there was nowhere to go; everywhere in the city was the same. Same machines, same streets, samehouses, same factories, same owners. Now people bought the maps because they were little glimpses of other, better worlds; the Know-Nothings forbade their sale, but there was a steady, albeit small and cultish, demand.
    Ruth sighed a lot as she spoke. She flitted from shelf to shelf looking for maps, dusty maps, brittle yellow maps, maps printed on hard cracked leather or carved into dark wood or woven into moth-eaten embroideries, muttering, “Iron Rose, Iron Rose. There’s a Rose Theater, here. There’s any number of Rose Streets. And here, this mark shows the Temple of the Seven Hundred Rose Petals. Isn’t that lovely? Were there temples where you’re from? They’re all gone, now. Ah, look here, where it says
Territories of the Ivory Rose.
I don’t know who that was. Do you?”
    “I don’t.”
    “Ivory Rose. Doesn’t that sound beautiful? I wonder if it was a woman. None of those people exist anymore. All of those places are gone, except on these old maps.”
    “Do the people around here buy a lot of maps?”
    “Some,” Ruth said.
    “Not enough,” Marta said, appearing at the top of the stairs as if she were a sorcerer. (There was a connecting door on the second floor, between the stacks, that Arjun had not at first noticed.) “But we get by,” she said, hefting a small sack of vegetables for dinner. “We feed ourselves. The building is ours. We’ve always lived here. We answer to no one. We don’t have to toady to the bosses and we don’t have to wear ourselves out in any factory.”
    “I’m very glad,” Arjun said.
    They sat for dinner. There was a small circular table, on which elbows touched in accidental intimacy. Three chairs, three settings; Arjun wondered whose place he had taken.
Ivy’s?
There was a vague sense of absence, of incompleteness, which the sisters filled with talk.
    Marta worked out of No. 29, she explained. She sold herbs, remedies, poultices, treatments. As she described her work, Arjun had a vague recollection of various wise women and cunning men he’d dealt with in the past, in other parts of the city. He recalled a sinister man in a room full of gimcrack stars; he recalled an old alchemist in a gold-and-black skullcap, in a high airy room full of brass birdcages. Ashmole? He recalled holding that old man’s velvet-sleeved wrist and demanding,
I need something to make me hear. Something to open my
senses. Even if you must blind me in recompense.
He did not recall the alchemist’s answer.
    And anyway, there was nothing of those uncanny folk in Marta, who ladled out cabbage soup into three clay bowls and sat down to eat, vigorously, methodically.
    Every morning, Marta said, she went out at dawn and gathered weeds from the waste grounds, moss from the canal sides, mold from the timbers of old sidings and sheds; whatever grew in the soot and smog of the factories, like the Dad taught her; mixtures for women in family trouble, salves for the raw wounds left by the loose rusty teeth of the factory machines. Cures for accidents of one kind or another. “Like yours, poor old ghost.”
    “It was no machine that wounded me.”
    “So you said. Lots of the ghosts that come down from the Mountain are missing something. Fingers aren’t so bad. You can still do most work. Do you remember who did it?”
    “No. That is, yes; I remember. No, it was not on the Mountain. It was here, in Fosdyke. It was not quite a who, but