City of the Iron Fish

by Simon Ings

Genres: Science Fiction; Post-Apocalyptic sci-fi

Synopsis

Simon Ings has written a surreal adventure probing the very fabric of existence, tearing it open to reveal a sometimes horrifying world within. It is a work that will delight any fan of China Mieville. Only a fool would question the strange magics that maintain the cool haven of the City of the Iron Fish in the middle of an inferno of scorching heat and splintered rock, for the well-watered streets of the city hide secrets in their shadows. Thomas Kemp is just such a fool ... And embarks on a journey that will take him to the limits of reality. It may kill him, worse, that may not be enough. Especially as it is his only friend, Blythe, who may discover the secret of the city's isolation.

Release date: April 10, 2014

Publisher: Gollancz

Print pages: 320

Sample

PART ONE

1

‘Why must we feed the gulls?’

‘Put your coat on, child,’ said my mother, from the shadows of the hall. It was not yet dawn. The morning was damp and chill and uninviting. I belonged in bed. I moved away from the door, and slipped further into my father’s study. He was bent over his desk, a book open before him. He had little need of sleep. I wondered if he had been to bed at all.

‘But why must we feed them?’ I insisted. ‘Why do they need us?’

My father turned to me, amused by my naïve attempt to disguise reluctance with such a burst of curiosity. He said, ‘There are a great many inventions in the world. The gulls are but one invention.’

‘Why—?’

‘They cannot feed themselves. They are an invention. They have no native wit.’

I shrugged. ‘So?’

‘If we did not feed them,’ said my father, ‘they would die.’

I scowled: would that be so great a loss? Nasty, ugly grey birds …

My father read my expression. ‘They are our invention, and we have a responsibility towards them.’

I shuddered. It seemed an abomination: how could any living thing lack wit enough to feed itself? ‘Why did we make them like that? Why didn’t we make them better?’

My father sighed. ‘The process by which they were made – I mean, we couldn’t …’

From the hall my mother shouted: ‘Get your coat on!’

‘I’ll explain it to you later,’ he promised me. ‘These are complicated matters. Now go with your mother.’

‘Come on, child,’ my mother echoed. Her boots clacked on the hall parquet.

The City, our home, lay far inland, at the centre of a great desert. It was built on two hills. A sheer cleft divided these hills from east to west, and along its bottom ran a contiguous band of black stone, polished to a high sheen – a river of marble. The City was old, and people said that its magic had faded. Nonetheless, it fascinated me: it seemed capable of anything.

Our walk took us over the road bridge joining the two hills of the City. At its mid-point it arched several hundreds of feet above the marble river: here we stood, unmoving, with baited breath, facing east, scant minutes before the break of dawn.

Such an hour! Cool. Moonless: starlight edged my mother’s coat with silver and turned her breath to ectoplasm. My reluctance evaporated, as we stood and took in all the lights of the City: the gas lamps of the upper slopes and the firebrands of the lower terraces. I searched for patterns, and my mother pointed, marking out for me with her delicate gloved hand the boroughs of the City—

That dark swathe on the flank of the Southern Hill? A cliff face, and above it lie the vertiginous streets of the Baixa, famed for their whores and their seafood! That luminescent smudge, pulsing softly at the foot of the Northern Hill? ‘The Circus of Birds: the feathers of a thousand grey gulls reflect the gas-light there.’

So many patterns: firebrands and gas lamps, grids and curlicues, thoroughfares real and imagined. We gave up our game at last and stared at the reflection of all this richness in the polished marble below. The reflections gave a sense of dazzling immensity to the view. ‘As if there were no bottom to this place—’ my mother whispered; her poetry was a secret gift she shared with me alone ‘—and this fine city were floating in space, an isle of humanity cast by an unseen hand upon the void …’

Her beautiful, half-understood words echoed in my mind like the fall of distant waters.

At length the stars went out. The horizon took on an indeterminate colour, somewhere between black and blue and green. The light swelled rapidly. In it a structure formed, a black lattice silhouetted against the dawn: the rail bridge. Twin to the bridge on which we stood, it too spanned the crevasse between the Northern and Southern Hills. Below and beyond it, the roofs of docks and warehouses coagulated from out the morning mist. The temperature fell. There was a moment of unutterable stillness – I smelled the breeze before I felt it: salt and kelp. Rotten and refreshing and delicate, it weaved up mistily from the City’s lower terraces.

Mother led me across the bridge to the Northern Hill. From here we ascended winding brick-paved streets, to the gardens which lie at the summit of the Baixa. There was an artificial lake here: Quiet Lake, frequented by strange birds.

My mother stroked my neck. Her woollen gloves scratched my skin; I shivered.

‘Don’t be afraid,’ my mother said. ‘Feed them. They’re hungry.’

The gulls looked at me with big round greedy eyes. They walked very slowly back and forth over the dusty gravel, as if they were thinking of something strange and huge, something that escaped definition.

When we had fed them, we walked hand in hand up to a high point: a promontory from which we could look across the great rift between the North and South hills and watch the trams trundle this way and that over the road bridge. ‘Look!’ said my mother. ‘Do you see the flower cart? Do you see it? Look, it’s scattering flowers on the road.’ I squinted at the bridge, and noticed a tiny figure, naked, perching on the parapet at its middle point. I gasped. My mother spotted the figure too late to shield my eyes—

The man dived from the bridge.

I gripped my mother’s hand so tight she gasped with pain. The man’s descent was surprisingly swift and soon he was lost to sight.



Mother and I returned home. Father was in his study still, poring over a book. My mother, pressing her finger to her lips for silence, motioned for me to stand outside: she went in and closed the door after her. I heard a murmured conversation. Footsteps. My father opened the door. He looked pale, and stared at me abstractedly, as if he did not know who I was. He said, ‘You have seen a strange sight.’

I said, ‘He will be all right, won’t he?’

My father was silent.

‘Won’t he?’

My mother came up and nudged my father in the back. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Ah yes. Indeed.’ He gave me a big, false smile. ‘Come into the kitchen,’ he said. He led us into the back of the house.

A bright patch of late morning sunlight shone upon the brick floor of the kitchen. Flecks of mica in the peach-coloured brick danced in my eyes. I crossed to the patch of light, and looked out the window. Josey, our maid, had climbed a few feet up the trellis where the sweet peas grew and was leaning over the garden wall: flirting, no doubt, with next door’s chauffeur.

Mother came up behind me, reached past me and swung the window open. ‘Mrs Hugg!’

Josey swung around wildly and fell from the trellis into a bed of petunias. ‘Silly tart,’ my mother muttered; she took my shoulder and turned me to face the room. My father sat at the head of the kitchen table, his hands splayed upon the bare wood. ‘Be seated,’ he said, with gentle authority.

Mother and I sat beside him on opposite sides of the table. He said, ‘In view of the things Tom has seen, and interpreting them as we must, I believe it will be necessary for us to perform certain observances.’

My mother stirred uneasily. She disliked arcane procedures; she felt that they undermined the modern comforts of her life. I, on the other hand, leaned forward towards my father, eager to hear what these exciting observances might be.

‘First,’ said my father, ‘we shall wear nothing but blue for the next six days.’

My mother sighed. Blue was her least favourite colour, and yet so many of these observances were associated with it – the symbolic colour of the absent yet ubiquitous sea.

‘For the six days following,’ my father went on, ‘we shall wear nothing but yellow.’

It was my heart’s turn to sink: I knew from afternoons at the wash-tub listening to Josey’s prattling that yellow dyes take most easily, and were therefore used on the cheapest, roughest cloth.

‘Throughout this time,’ my father continued, ‘we shall refrain from eating plaice.’ He smiled, then – a self-satisfied sort of smile – made the sign of the circle over his breast, and stood up from the table.

Even then, such rituals had been largely forgotten; people looked askance at us when we performed them.

Far from being embarrassed, however, I took snobbish pride in my father’s strictures: and though that month I was much teased for my yellow sack-cloths, I was priggishly pleased that they marked me out from my schoolfellows: indeed, I promised myself that when I was older I would continue to obey such observances.

The next day, my father tried to explain to me about the gulls, and about the other strange and contradictory inventions upon which the City was founded.

He began by taking me by tram across the road bridge to the Northern Hill. We descended from the tram at Central Station and walked under glowering rain-clouds towards that triangle of waste ground which slopes up to the Sé. The downpour began the moment we reached the foot of the hill. My father swung a fold of his blue cloak around me so that I might be protected from the rain, and led me up the right-hand side of the triangle, where a steep lane wound round the bluffs and spurs, shielded by a terrace of dingy and defeated properties. The rain had begun to ease by the time we reached the Sé. We waited in the shadows of the Southern portico, and watched the clouds dissipate at last, under the fierce glare of a mid-morning sun.

‘This,’ my father explained, ‘is where the Ceremonies begin. The procession winds down Green Monkey Street, gathering subsidiary processions from east and west, and comes to rest at last, after many ritual stops and starts, at the Circus of Birds.’

He was speaking of the Ceremonies of Stuffing and Hanging; they were the central ritual of our city, and took place once every twenty years. The next festival was only six months away.

We set off down Green Monkey Street, with mincing steps, lest we slip on the rain-silvered pavement. ‘Of course,’ my father confided, ‘the coming festival will be only the third one I’ve attended. The Ceremonies of Hanging and Stuffing take place so rarely, it is unheard of for people to witness more than four in their lifetime, though of course, people tell tales …’

It was a commonplace exaggeration when describing an aged person to say that they had ‘seen five fish’.

‘It’s now, when the preparations for the Ceremonies are once more under way, that those tatty old books I’ve been collecting demonstrate their true value,’ my father explained, with pride. ‘Without such works, no-one would remember what form the Ceremonies should take; and without the correct observances—’ he shuddered ‘—heaven knows what would become of us.’

I waited for some explanation, but none came. ‘Really?’ I said, to prompt him: but he only nodded, and frowned ominously, lost in some private rumination.

‘What would happen?’ I insisted.

‘Depends,’ he muttered, still off in some place of his own.

‘On what?’

He shook himself. ‘Beg pardon?’

I shrugged: my face, mask-like, hid a sudden flood of resentment. As usual, my father was talking more to himself than to me.

I was immature still: I did not know how to deflect my hurt onto others: instead I stored it up inside, charged it up like a corroded battery, labelled the battery: ‘Father’. I was young, and I loved him. I admired his powers of concentration, his upright frame, the precision of his movements, his clockwork habits. Boys adore machines; so I adored him. I wanted to be like him. I wanted to read his books, and perform his observances; these, I knew, were the keys to his heart. It never occurred to me that he had bolted his heart from the inside, that he didn’t want to teach me; that, though I wished to follow, he did not care to lead.

As we walked, he drew my attention to the street’s various furnishings: insignificant objects, which only came into their own during the Ceremonies. ‘You see those large brass hooks, above the lintels of the houses, either side of us? Close to, you can see that they have grotesque faces moulded into them. They are very old, very carefully tended. All the bunting is attached to them. It is very bad luck to secure it to anything else. You see how there are little ledges mounted on the window sills here? That is so the fruit and flowers and rag dolls placed here for the ceremony do not plummet onto the revellers beneath. Those poles mounted in the street? When the parade begins, barrels of raw wine are set beside them and a flag of gold cloth is run up the pole. And there …’

I covered my mouth with my hand and yawned. The street was long, my father lost in a world of his own: my eagerness to learn notwithstanding, I was bored.

This was of course a special time for him. As the son of bargee, he had been refused admittance to the Academy. Now, many years later, the Academicians were having to consult with him. In their search for details about the forthcoming Ceremonies, they were having to peruse with him – and in a more or less comradely spirit – all those various manuals he had rescued from depositories and junk shops. Such gentle vengeance gave him great pleasure—

‘And here,’ he exclaimed, ‘lies the Circus of Birds!’

I reawoke, and looked around me. The wide road down which we had come had opened out like a funnel into a roughly circular space surrounded on all sides by spare and dirty tenements, six or seven storeys high. At the centre of the Circus stood a huge pigiron gantry, all lattices and chains and pipes. The stone beneath this gantry was scooped into a shallow and rainwater-filled basin, stained brown with rust.

My father made a wide gesture, taking in the whole draughty space. ‘This is where the Ceremonies take place.’

I looked around me. ‘Father,’ I said, ‘why are all the buildings boarded up?’

He looked around at the decrepit tenements, the boards in the windows scribbled over with sooty graffiti by a desperate hand, the gutters everywhere stuffed with sodden papers and vegetable matter. ‘It is unsettling to live here,’ he replied at last, subdued by our surroundings. ‘This is the epicentre of our City’s mutability.’

I blinked up at him.

‘I mean,’ he said, conscious that his enthusiasm had run away with his vocabulary, ‘that this square is a ghostly place: the mutagenic forces released here during the Ceremonies linger, trapped in the very fabric of the buildings: shadows, strange sounds, inexplicable occurrences, small but unnerving …’ He looked at me: his mouth twitched in irritation. He did not know how to talk to children.

He took me by the arm and led me up to the scaffold. It looked as though it had been constructed by a party of madmen let loose in a railway yard. It towered above me, terrible and absurd in its purposeless complexity – chains, funnels, valves and curlicues of ribboned metal. The structure rested upon three massive iron legs, arranged in a tripod. I reached out and touched the leg nearest me. The whole structure seemed to vibrate under my fingers. I snatched my hand away. Droplets of rain water fell from the higher parts of the structure: a light drizzle, filling the shallow stone basin beneath the scaffold. With a start, I realized that the basin was no deliberate structure; rather, it had been chiselled by the water itself, caught and funnelled and concentrated upon this patch of stone by the many strange spigots and gutters and dishes welded to the scaffold.

How long would it have taken, I wondered, for these few drops of water to carve out the basin? It chilled me, to think how old this place – this very scaffold – must be.

‘And this,’ my father said, pointing to the top of the scaffold, ‘is where we hang the Fish!’

2

Father had explained much to me that day, but he was a halfhearted teacher, and none of what he said really added up. Though I knew he might think me ungrateful for saying so, I explained my confusion to him. Out of the blue he said, ‘If you want to know more, it’s time you began reading my books.’

My heart leapt: I was to be initiated.

Father’s study was not one of those mahogany-lined talking-pieces – those confections ill-learned men furnish in baize and brass to impress their equally ill-learned friends – but a study in truth: a workshop of the intellect. Books and papers lay stacked about his desk in orderly rows. Wire trays held abstracts and borrowed manuscripts, lists of enquiries, bookshops’s bills and learned correspondence. There was something fetishistic about this clutter and business with which my father surrounded himself: it was not, I think, altogether necessary to his studies; rather, the show of it pleased him. But I am not inclined to blame him for his vanity: he worked alone, without the approbation of colleague or mentor; and he was entitled to his foibles if they lent meaning to his life.

From a high shelf, he took down a heavy volume and set it before me on the hearth rug.

‘Go on,’ he said, seeing me hesitate. ‘It won’t bite.’

I opened it up—

‘Mind the spine.’

I winced, closed the book; then opened it again, more gently, and held the cover at an angle so as not to strain the binding.

‘Better,’ he muttered.

I reached the title page:

A Companion to Mutagenic Poesy

‘Father,’ I said, ‘what does “mutagenic” mean?’ He was sat at his desk already, working. ‘Father?’

He glanced away from his book. ‘Eh?’

‘What does—’

‘What? Does what?’

I took a deep breath. ‘There’s a word I don’t understand.’

‘In the corner: dictionary.’ He turned back to his book, leaned forward, grew still again.

I stood up, went to the shelf he had pointed to, took up the dictionary, opened it. The marks on the page were incomprehensible. ‘Father?’

He sat staring at the papers on his desk, but I could see he was not reading them. He was waiting – quite still, with the patience of a cornered mouse – waiting for me to be quiet. To give up. To go away.

‘Please—’

‘What?’

I felt helpless, and stupid: I don’t understand the script.’

‘Oh, that,’ he muttered. He paused a moment, summoning up the strength to speak to me: ‘It’s how our forefathers wrote: clear enough if you practice it.’

‘Can you—’

‘For God’s sake,’ my father exclaimed, with sudden fury, ‘I’m in the middle of a translation. Can’t you at least make a stab at it on your own?’

I murmured an apology. He waved it away and turned back to his books and papers.

Unable to decipher the dictionary, I went back to Mutagenic Poesy and contented myself with the illustrations: drawings and water-colours behind translucent protective papers, cataloguing with skill and rigour the thousands of elements which go to make up the Iron Fish. When I was done, I turned back to the text and did my best to understand …

The Fesh is bigged according to strict & arcane Principles, by a Woman taken up at Puberty by the College of Makers – it being a secretive Sect of talented Females – and inducted to the Mysteries of Smith & Engraver.

Two Years before the Ceremonies of Stuffing & Hanging, the Fesh is begun with the carving of a fine Skeleton of fire-hardened Mahogany. The Initiate rivets to the Frame a Latticework of Burnished Copper, plated with Lead to forestall Corrosion. To the Frame she applies molten Scales of Iron and when the Fesh is cool she engraves upon each Scale the intricate swirling Details required of her by the Foremothers.

Each Scale – & some Nine Hundred & Forty-Seven Scales make up the Feshes Skin – is designed in accordance with an unique Rule, each Rule possessing its own History, its own unique Matrix of Stricture & Expectation – its own ‘Meter’.

(Indeed, it is often said that in the Fashioning of the Fesh, the Engraver’s Art approaches the condition of Poetry. Some observers – both Poets & Smiths – have suggested that – au contraire – the City’s fine Tradition of Poetry has been drawn from the Techniques of Engraving, which seems to this author a very pretentious Assertion.)

This, then, is the Iron Fesh: intricate, elegant, eccentric – &, for the present moment, powerless: a firing mechanism without powder. For the Fesh, it will be minded, is nothing of itself, but rather it is the Vessel or Womb which potentiates the Contents placed inside it during the Ceremonies of Stuffing & Hanging—

‘But they were only details, Father,’ I complained, as he wished me goodnight. ‘I want to know why things happen.’

He sighed, tucked me into bed, pressed his lips to my forehead, then sat with me for a while, rattling his brains for some reply a young boy might understand.

‘There is, you know, no end to the number of times one can ask “why” something is the way it is.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

But he went on: ‘Our city is a place of invention. It is reinvented every twenty years, by our Iron Fish. That is how things are. True, not everyone is satisfied by that. It seems to some people that the arrangement is somehow insufficient: that the world should not need to be reinvented; that it should be given to us whole. They point to the legends which say the world was once a given thing, a thing that sustained itself and did not need us to reinvent it. They resent the fact that now we do have to keep reinventing it, moment by moment, ritual after cumbersome ritual. They search the City for signs of their “given world” and if by these means they find nothing—’

‘Then,’ I said, intuiting a new link between the lessons of that day and the incident which had inspired them, ‘they do what that gentleman did – on the bridge?’

‘Yes,’ my father replied, thinly. ‘They do as you saw that man do. They jump – from the bridge.’ He looked away from me. ‘It’s traditional.’

I nodded, sagely. I did not see – I did not see at all – but I was content to know that the man I had seen plummet from the bridge was, after all, simply performing one of my father’s prized ‘observances’. This was enough to make the incident seem less frightening. ‘So he’s all right, then.’

‘What?’ my father exclaimed.

‘So he’s all right – the man who jumped.’

‘Oh.’ He sucked his upper lip, searching for the right words. ‘Quite. He – I am sure he’s happier now than he was.’

‘Good!’ I exclaimed, my mind put to rest.

‘Now, try to sleep,’ said my father, brusquely, ‘or you’ll be late for school tomorrow.’

That night I dreamed romantic dreams – heady fantasies in which I spent my time probing the secrets of the City. With each pronouncement of the word ‘why?’, one gauzy veil after another was lifted from my sight, revealing a world ever brighter and more magical. I imagined myself standing naked on the parapet of the bridge, laughing and joking with the man I had seen jump the day before, readying myself for my own leap. I dreamed that we were adventurers in that land of the final ‘why’, leaping with pride into the unknown mysteries of our time … I awoke with a start, exhilarated and happy. I dressed and waited impatiently for breakfast time. I wanted to tell my friends at school what I had seen and learned; most of all I wanted to tell them about the man on the bridge, the brave diver, and how one day I would follow him on his ambitious descent.

Circumstances, however, conspired to upstage me: I arrived at school to learn that my ‘brave diver’ was the father of a new boy, one Boris Stock. He was not, furthermore, in any sense ‘all right’ after his jump: upon contact with the impermeable black river his head had shattered like an eggshell, spraying brain matter all over the marble.

Gruesome details of Stock père’s messy suicide flew about the school for days. Such bloody and horrible reports confused me: I, who knew so much about ritual, as yet knew nothing about life.

One evening, about a fortnight before the Ceremonies of Stuffing and Hanging, my father returned home with a stranger: from my room, where I was reading, I heard a woman’s voice.

I straightened my clothes, ran my fingers through my hair, opened the door and ran down the stairs to the hall. Next to my parents stood a middle-aged woman. She wore tight leather trousers and a cloak of black hessian. Over her shoulder she carried a thick belt to which were clipped a water bottle, a bundle of clothes, and a leather satchel: she was a gypsy.

I completed my descent of the stairs. My father looked me over, nodded curt approval. ‘This is my son,’ he said.

The gypsy nodded and smiled. She was very self-confident. She looked perfectly at ease. She approached me. We shook hands. Her grip was firm. Her accent was strong and awkward-sounding: ‘My name is Lilith,’ she said.

Thomas,’ I murmured, intimidated by her foreignness. My father explained: ‘Lilith has returned to our city with maps of the surrounding countryside. It seems there are new places suited to the growing of vines. She wishes to sell her maps to our Association, and the Association wishes to offer her every comfort while the deal is struck. I have offered her our humble hospitality – with your sanction, as always, dear wife.’ My mother curtsied, and disappeared into the kitchen to speak to Josey.

I ate little of the evening meal. I was fascinated by Lilith. A gypsy – an explorer! But why, I asked her, did she explore only the surroundings of our city – why did she not explore some other part of the world?

An abrupt and embarrassed silence descended. Lilith merely smiled and shook her head. My mother said, ‘You will understand these things when you grow up, Thomas.’

But a while later my father, always eager for new information and insight, took up my lead and questioned the gypsy closely about her work, her beginnings, and her beliefs.

‘I left the City,’ said Lilith, ‘when I was a child, to explore the world. The City had begun to feel too cramped, too little; I was a wild youngster and I had run out of places to explore. I left on the night of my thirteenth birthday. I was an orphan child – my parents died in a fire when I was eleven – and I don’t suppose my disappearance troubled the seminary for very long.’

‘Where did you go?’

‘I worked for a time in the vineyards of the City, picking the grapes when that was the season, tending the vines – and in the winter months, other things.’ A faint blush coloured her cheeks – I admired its prettiness. ‘Soon, that life began to pall, and I began to hear of the gypsies who wander the wastes beyond the City’s boundaries. As soon as I heard about them, I wanted to join them. I earned myself enough for a wagon and supplies and set out into the scrub.’

‘What did you find?’ I asked her.

She looked at me and smiled indulgently. ‘Nothing,’ she replied.

‘Nothing?’ A lame way indeed to end a story.

‘Nothing,’ she affirmed. ‘What they teach you in school is quite true, I’m afraid – there is nothing beyond the City. No other cities, no roads, no people.’ Her gaze held me. ‘Nothing exists beyond the hills.’

How depressing it was, to have this romantic-seeming woman. . .