Chained City: Short

There’s two guards at the border post. Tall, as citizens go, which means a bit shorter than me. Chainmail upon them, spiked chains in hand, and of course their collars: dull iron rings, trailing chains down into the depths of the city. Low class.

I finger my own. A bespoke fitted design by Vyner, more tall and narrow than I’d like but that’s the fashion. Gold leaf trim on a lightweight aluminium body, with a velvet inner lining to prevent chafing. Three rubies stacked on the throat. It’s a waste of hard-earned links, but I had enough to indulge - and you have to dress properly if you want the upper echelons to listen to you. My chain scrapes on the road behind me, making me push a little harder each step to move forward. Like it always has - never so loud or so heavy you can’t hear or move, but never so soft or light that you can forget its presence, linking you to the depths. Until you reach its maximum extent and it jerks you back, suddenly taut, barring you from going any further.

I’m about ready to never see two joined links again.

“What is it, citizen?” They speak from behind their fine mesh veils, unfriendly as they are paid to be. On edge. They can see the city well from here.

“I’m leaving.” I brandish my papers: Reizei Rin, discharge of permanent work visa and leave to cross the border of this Hell. Leave to leave.

Behind me there’s a juddering crash and a scream of metal and throats as another city block succumbs and collapses into the mire. Another thousand collars pulled down, never to surface again.

They take the papers and feed them into their machine. It debits my account the steep administrative fee, and I feel my chain tauten. I take a step back - but only one. Then as it grinds away with the glacial reluctance with which any apparatus of hell greets the possibility of release, the guards look to the city, and me, and back and forth again.

“Do you know what’s happening?”

~~

My colleagues, of course, will swear blind they could never have known.

We knew they were monsters of some kind but we deal with monsters all the time. It’s just a matter of management, more efficient and more productive than the negative-sum game of extermination. So they say, ‘Why don’t you go close this deal with them? You’re young and fresh, it’ll be a rocket-boost to your career.’ And you go, and visit their nice skyscraper, and get in the elevator and by the time you’ve realised it’s going down, not up, it’s entirely too fucking late.

Then it’s a week later, and they’ve finally accepted you know almost nothing worth telling them. And they turn you loose, after a fashion. Drop you on an iron shore with an iron collar, with six feet of chain between you the bubbling black mud. All and only that to your name.

I needed to go up. Above me was a tower of iron, rickety and ramshackle yet vast to the horizon. A myriad myriad chains draining down from it into the darkness beneath me. Ghostly figures wandered between them, often hunched or crawling, tracking their few feet of chain along the shore. All clothed in rags or nakedness, every one of them collared to the mire.

They came to speak to me, hungry for my warmth. I’m not dead, you see, unlike them. They told me the mire was rising. Every day a little more, while the chains stay put. If you don’t want to sink, you need to rise. To take chain-links from others. They begged me for mine - o traveller, would I not be generous? - but I had a better proposition. They should give theirs, that I might go up and return with more for all. I was alive you see, not bound to this realm, a being apart. I had no reason to betray them.

Each tributed me a few and was dragged that bit closer to the void. I took them and went up and presumably they are all gone by now. To have been taken in by that, they were almost gone already. The void was a mercy.

~~

Above the dregs was the bowels of the city. I scrubbed dishes, served gruel, blistered my fingers in the foundries where the grave goods of the newly damned are rendered down into links for the chains. Here I saw them again - the burghers of the upper city, with their corsets and bindings and jewelled collars that proclaim their wealth to we in our rags. Figures I had seen in the distance when they questioned me, now again. I made myself known to them - not as a former guest to former hosts, but to others, as a rarity - a warm glow of life in this abyss.

He plucked me from the factory and bedecked me in cheap fineries. Red silks and silver manacles, leaden paints and a fitted collar. A gilded cage for his parties, where other desperate men gathered in envy of his find. A treasure, apart from the rat race, something to protect. I agreed. I became his confidante, the one who cradled his head and let him speak of his stratagems, not judging, only listening, and encouraging him to better things. I learned much about him - his mediocrity, his irrelevance, his craven yearning. Soon he hid me, jealous of other gazes. Trapped me in the heart of his home where none could find me. And there I left him, once he finally trusted me, locked in his own cage.

With his links I could move more freely - and bound myself again. In the elegance of the high spires I went to meet their lords, sat weighted in their chaises tugging at fine chains, manipulating the clockwork of the ether. This world I knew.

~~

Still I could not leave. The Chained City is jealous of its citizens. To open the gate you must pay the fee, and with the fee paid your chain shortens and drags you back into the thick. I would need more, chain enough to buy back my life from the netherworld.

I went to each lord and said: Have you not earned this? This beautiful thing you have built of your own mind and strength and will. It must be kept safe. The Chained City is a realm of the dead and its thoughts are the thoughts of the dead. And so I showed them the devices of the living - each of them for his own viewing only, that he might protect his investments. Each of them bound his wealth up with chains, each of them bound it by exposing his rivals, but all of them were already bound together, and together they would fall.

I stood on the far side of the fulcrum, my short chain bet against all of theirs. It was a risk - I might have fallen. But they fell first, and sent me up.

~~

The guards are silent and then nod.

“It was all agreed, then?”

“So there’s nothng to be done.”

They sit and watch the collapse of the city, as the machine spits out my papers, signed to go. And I had better. Soon they will discover what I have done and will combine at last to undo me. But I will be long gone.

I present my pass and step through the gate, and the elevator doors open to the light of the sun.

~~

I thought it would have gone by now, the scar around my neck. The collars chafed but that was long ago. Why won’t it go?