Thunderer

by Felix Gilman

  “That is, sir, I regret that…”

  He halted and his voice cracked and he began again.

  The men of the Countess’s navy—Arlandes’ men—were mostly the scum of the city, press-ganged wharf-rats, and Arlandes typically mourned their deaths no more, at most, than one would mourn the loss of a well-trained dog; but the officers were of course drawn from the ranks of better men, from among young men of breeding, and sometimes in the course of events those young men met their deaths, and Arlandes had always made it his business to extend his condolences to their parents. The Countess encouraged the practice, on the grounds that the Captain’s noble grieving presence might nip bitterness and blood-feud in the bud.

  But he had no language suitable for the occasion of dear Lucia’s death.

  “Your daughter, sir…”

  The old man continued to nod, apparently in time with the clock’s heavy tick. On the table between them the maid had placed a tea set on a silver tray. The tea smelled pungently of aniseed and wet moss; it was a concoction boiled up from some root dug up from damp roadside ditches in the northern district of Dog-Bellow, and it had recently come into fashion for occasions of mourning and grief.

  “Sir, I regret the events of the funeral. I regret very much the events of the funeral.”

  The old man raised his head and looked Arlandes in the eye. One of the old man’s eyes was blind and milky. The other was sharp—blue-green and bright and dry. The old man’s face was lined and pallid, spade-bearded. There was no trace of Lucia’s beauty or innocence in his face. He was every inch the man of business, every inch the stern overseer. He looked Arlandes in the eye and shrugged and offered an awkward stiff smile.

  T he funeral had not been conducted with the dignity the girl deserved.

  Arlandes had done his best. He had planned as diligently as always. Through the good graces of the Countess, they had been permitted to hold Lucia’s funeral deep in the inner precincts of the Cere House, as if the girl had been a hero or lord of the city. Arlandes had attended the funeral flanked by his most loyal officers; they had walked the Cere House’s dark corridors together in silence, boots clacking on the paving stones, all in jet-black of a tight military cut, black-braided, sabers clanking dully against black boots. An attendant of the House had led them through its corridors with silent gestures. They had gathered in the Seventh Precinct under the rustling shadow of the waxcloth, where the body was to be slowly and reverently dismembered.

  The Cere House catered to a variety of rites of ending. Mr. Hildebrand was a follower of austere and incandescent Tiber; his fortune, Lucia’s fortune, the fortune into which Arlandes had married and which was now no more than ashes and dirt to him, came from his interests in a number of the Church of Tiber’s mills and workhouses, including Harmony, Merry Vale, Barbotin, and Broadway. Accordingly, Mr. Hildebrand had demanded that his daughter be burned. Arlandes, like most military men, preferred not to play favorites among powers. Lucia herself had had a fondness for Lavilokan, of the mirrors—which was hardly surprising: she had been an only child, and a shy girl, and a pretty one. She’d believed she’d seen the god’s shimmering face more than once in the glitter, in the shadows, in the corner of her dressing-mirror, and perhaps she had. Accordingly, Arlandes had insisted that the Observants of Lavilokan conduct the proceedings. Mr. Hildebrand had shrugged and let him have his way. Hildebrand wasn’t a pious man. It would look bad in front of his business associates, but it was safer to cross them than to cross the Captain.

  There had been three Observants, in velvet robes sewn with tiny glinting mirrors that clinked and rattled as they slowly crisscrossed the floor in front of and behind Lucia’s bier. When they came up close to Arlandes, the mirrors caught his reflection like a scattering flock of ravens. They read the service from heavy books with blank silver pages, in which it was said they could read their god’s words in the lines and angles of the infinite refractions.

  Arlandes’ mind had been as blank and as brittle as the Observants’ mirror-masks.

  Arlandes and his officers had stood stiffly on the left of the bier. When Lieutenant Duncan had tried to rest a hand on Arlandes’ shaking shoulder, the Captain had wrestled away as if assaulted. Duncan had stood with Arlandes on the deck of the Vanguard at the Lion’s Mouth when the air was black with powder and smoke, and Arlandes loved him dearly, but his touch—any touch but hers—was unbearable.

  Mr. Hildebrand had stood on the right, surrounded by what appeared to be business associates. The mother was long dead; there was an ancient, wizened, weeping servant-thing there that might have been a nanny.

  The Countess had not attended; affairs of the city made it impracticable. Holbach was present—whether as the Countess’s envoy or on his own behalf Arlandes had not known or cared. The fat scholar’s face had been sickly green with well-deserved guilt. One of his intellectuals—some girlish young man, or some girl disrespectfully in men’s mourning attire—had held his plump left arm and whispered to him. He’d had more sense than to approach Arlandes.

  One of the attendants of the House—a Mr. Lemuel, a wiry little black-robed functionary, who had made the broken body presentable, who had placed the lilies and brought out the blades on a steel tray, who had presumed to shake Arlandes’ stiff hand—stood on Holbach’s right side, and made inappropriate remarks, too loudly, as if he were watching some play-act staged for his private amusement, and poorly staged at that. When the Observants started to read from their blank books, Lemuel had stage-whispered: I’ll bet you they’ve just memorized the words. How much for one of the books, do you reckon? Holbach at least had the common decency to recoil and blush but had sheepishly suffered Lemuel to continue speaking to him. When the Observants each took up one of the sharp glittering blades and began carefully, methodically, to divide and subdivide Lucia’s body, slice by slice, joint by joint, until no piece could be distinguished from any other bright bloody piece, until the body was lost in a blank haze of its own reflections of itself—a procedure that was much less elegant in practice than in theory, and that made even Arlandes’ veteran officers blanch and retch—Lemuel had chuckled and snorted: Nasty. Oh, this is a nasty part of the city. Numbly Arlandes had clutched the hilt of his saber. Lieutenant Duncan steadied Arlandes’ hand again and he left the weapon sheathed and remained stiffly frozen.

  In hindsight Arlandes doubted that Lucia would really have chosen such an ending. She’d been a gentle creature—their consummation, all too recent, had been a thing she had faced with a becoming trepidation and a wonderful, charming courage. She’d have wanted a softer and gentler passing. But of course all endings were terrible things. All divinities and their rites and the sacrifices they demanded were terrible things.

  It had not been possible to keep the proceedings private; also present were numerous gossips and gawkers and several of the Countess’s idle cousins pressing their handkerchiefs to their faces in horror and a trio of shabby-suited hacks from the broadsheets taking notes.

  And also belatedly present, arriving just as the Observants, their mirrors dulled by gore, were finishing up their work, were seven men and three women in white and off-white robes or long loose smocks, each of them wild-haired and dirty, each whining and pleading and moaning as they shoved forward through the crowd. One skinny white-haired woman staggered into Holbach and knocked him to the floor. One of the men slammed into an Observant and they both went down with a great crash of breaking glass. The others—crying out, She was touched by the Bird! She was touched by the Bird-God!—stretched out and dabbled their dirty fingers in the blood of Lucia’s body. One of the women touched her fingers to her lips and let her wild eyes roll back in her head. One of the men seemed to be trying to paint his face with bloody wings. Several attendants of the House came running up after them and tried to wrestle them away; the Bird-worshippers scattered and hopped and leaped madly, legs in the air. Mr. Lemuel started to laugh. That was the point at which Arlandes drew his saber.

  B
efore the chill and the numbness left his mind and a great and desperate futility and shame took their place, and he collapsed weeping on the bier, the blood soaking his clothes, he had run four of the worshippers through, one by one, with the quick lunging foot-forward motion in which he had been drilled. Three of the four, pierced in throat or breastbone, expired on the spot, though not quickly. The strikes were neat but the deaths were not. All that sacred decorum and mystery turned to the floor of a butcher’s shop! One of the Observants took off his mirror-mask to vomit, revealing his yellowing sweaty terrified mutton-chopped face, cursing in shock and disgust.

  Three were dead; the fourth twisted to take the blade in the shoulder and was likely to live. But they were not persons of any consequence—they were only the last pathetic lunatic surge of a mania that was now passing from the city—and the Countess had been able to ensure that no consequences would follow from their slaughter. Because of the embarrassment of the incident, however, Arlandes had not lodged any complaint with the House regarding Mr. Lemuel’s conduct.

  I cannot tell you how deeply I regret…”

  “Think nothing of it, Captain.”

  “Sir, I am most deeply ashamed…”

  “An understandable incident.”

  “Sir. I do not refer only to the incident at the funeral. Sir, the circumstances of…of her passing, sir…”

  He kept thinking of her body; of turning over the body broken on the grass, in the bloodstained white dress.

  The old man sipped his tea. “Nonsense, Captain. Nonsense. She was a brave girl, wasn’t she? We were very proud.” He set the cup down and lifted his eyes to Arlandes’ own for the first time. His eyes studied Arlandes’ face carefully, cautiously, almost pleadingly. “Very proud. An accident; it’s always a risk, that sort of thing, isn’t it, Captain. We bear no grudge. Will you be sure to tell the Countess we bear no grudge?”

  Arlandes was unable to speak; he nodded.

  “Will you assure her that it was an honor—an honor to be associated with her great work? We were very proud to enter into that relationship with your Countess. Very proud, Captain. I told you how proud I was when you asked me for, for Lucia’s hand. This doesn’t change that, not as far as I’m concerned. I’m glad you came here today, Captain. This tragedy doesn’t change that.”

  Arlandes remained still.

  “How is the—the ship? Your new command? Wonderful thing. Exciting new days ahead, right? Could be a whole new order. Just what this city needs: a strong hand to knock things into shape. I see a city full of new opportunities in this thing. I hope the Countess won’t forget those of us who sacrificed for it, though you’ll tell her we bear no grudge, won’t you? Though if she were minded to offer some sort of compensation, we’d not say no. That’s all I’ll say on that front. But I hope we won’t be forgotten. I hope my dear Lucia won’t be forgotten. That’s all.”

  Arlandes nodded, gestured to the door, wordlessly excused himself.

  In the hallway mirror—dusty, vulgarly ornate—he caught his own reflection. His black clothes, his bloodshot eyes, his pallor on which the old dueling scar over his eye stuck out sore and livid: he was a stranger to his own reflection. There was nothing sacred in that mirror, no trace of whatever Lucia had seen in the glass’s silvery depths. Only a tired and sick man, looking older by the day.

  It would be a relief to return to the sky. He was painfully sick already of the earth.

  A rjun found lodgings in the Golden Cypress, on the cheap end of Moore Street, where Shutlow drained down into Barbary Ward.

  The Cypress was a strange survival. Its name dated back to an older cycle in the life of Moore Street, when the docks were further up-River, and sailors from warm seas came to drink on the Street. Those crowds were long gone, and the name was sadly out of place on this dark cobbled street. The beer garden out back was shadowed at all times by the warehouses on either side. Chill fog off the canals gathered there.

  Moore Street had still had a sort of rough life only a few years ago, but some of the trading companies had closed, and others had moved their facilities, and the docksmen went elsewhere to drink, and Moore Street’s pubs started closing. Somehow the Cypress had kept going while the Black Moon and the Harrow and Red-Beard’s folded and were boarded up and given over to the desperate and wretched squatters of the city. The pub stayed afloat on the hunched backs of a few scowling old men, who sat and drank stiffly and apart from each other.

  Madam Defour kept a cheap boardinghouse behind the beer garden. A piece of card-stock glued in the Cypress’s smeared window promised BED & BOARD REASONABLE WEEKLY RATES, in a crabbed hand; in rather larger and more vigorous script it warned NO TIMEWASTERS NO DRUNKARDS NO KAT-CHEWERS NO “FREE-THINKERS.” Inside, it smelled of cabbage, aniseed, and peeling paint, and the stale smells of Defour’s lodgers, all aging bachelors or vague and helpless widowers.

  Defour herself was a sharp birdlike little woman. She interviewed Arjun in her tiny office, clutching her grey woolly shawl about her and complaining of the cold. She pronounced him “Acceptable. Younger than I’d like. But new to the city. You’ll be looking for work. That should keep you quiet enough.”

  Arjun thought it as good a place as any other, and it was cheap. And there was a dangerous city outside, full of over-reaching towers, crazed constricting alleys, strange gods. It scared him to think that the maps in the Choristry’s library had not been able to place any borders around it. Shutlow was a dusty little corner of that vastness; a place for tiresome, ill-paid office jobs, for eking out one’s retirement on a small pension, for a sad kind of nervous respectability. The escarpment to the north cast a constant grey shadow. It was hard to imagine coming face-to-face with some maddening god in such a place. It was somewhere safe to begin.

  He took a room on the second floor, an awkward little yellow box. A shelf over the bed was cluttered with tarnished pewter icons and idols, left behind by previous lodgers. Their postures and expressions were utterly inscrutable to him.

  He started to tell her his story. Not the truth, but entirely a lie; that he’d come to the city “as a representative of my order, my Choir, in the hope that there might be trade between our…” But she made no pretense of interest, and he let the subject drop.

  In the daytime he went walking in the city. Every morning, he would set out in a different direction, charting out courses at random, walking until the light began to fade and he had to turn back to Moore Street. He struck out north, through drab Shutlow up into Mass How, where he admired the great kilns of the terra-cotta works. The border between the districts was clear even to an alien; the sad litter and muck of Shutlow’s streets ended sharply when it met the bounds of Mass How’s fussy street-sweepers. He made it as far as Laud Heath, and climbed the hill to the old Observatory and looked down across the meadow and over the river. The next day, he went under Cimenti’s arch into Goshen Tor, and looked up past the grand facades into the close-packed windows, trying to imagine the engines of commerce at work behind them, the lives locked within.

  One day he went as far as the cafés and theaters and pleasure gardens of Faugère, where he spent more than he could afford on coffee, a new experience he found both repulsive and compelling. He spent the evening drifting among the jewelers of the Arcades, where constellations of lights hung smokily under a canopy of mirrorglass and silver. Barmaids dressed like princesses beckoned passersby into bars and cafés. They did not look at Arjun; his poverty must have been obvious. He spent too long there, and had to walk home nervously in the darkness. He envied those who passed him in carriages.

  He bought a blank loose-bound journal from a printer’s workshop on Janus Street, and he made notes, methodically, charting the streets as he went. Inky trees grew on every page, sprouting every day from the kernel of Moore Street to encompass North Shutlow, South Shutlow, Mass How. He marked off the streets one by one as they disappointed him. His pockets filled with scraps of scribbled paper, snapped pencil stubs, the dust of dried in
k.

  He got filthy looks from passersby who saw him sketching out his maps. He wasn’t sure why; it seemed they took it as an insult or an intrusion. One day, a fat red-faced man slapped the journal out of his hand and spat on it. He tried committing the streets to memory as he walked, and marking them down in his room at night, alone. He couldn’t do it; he couldn’t hold it all in his mind. He could recall, quite perfectly, each note and accent and tricky ghost note of Julah’s notorious Opus 21, but the streets defeated his memory. Sometimes he suspected they changed from day to day. After a while he gave up; he let the streets take him where they wanted.

  He followed the streets south, too, into the slums and shanties and hacked-about concrete blocks of the Fourth Ward. He kept his blade prominent as he stepped carefully through the cracks and filth of the narrow streets, weaving around the stick-and-daub huts that sprouted in every street or ditch or scrap of empty space. He stepped over bodies sprawled on the mud that were either dead-drunk or dead. He followed the canals to the brutal mills of Barbary. He stopped outside a huge concrete building under a sign that read POULTRY TERMINAL 7. The sounds and stench drove him home.

  There were temples and churches everywhere. He didn’t go into them. He wasn’t ready. He tried to steer clear of the cloisters and ghettos the various cults carved out of the city, where strange and sacred laws applied. Whenever he saw an efflorescence of bright-robed men in the street, or a sprouting of strange statues, he would take a sharp turn and keep walking.

  For an afternoon, he sat across the street from one of Tiber’s churches, a high-arched building in the Third Ward. He sat on the edge of a dried-up stone horse trough and watched the crowds flow in and out of the church’s doors. The stained-glass windows showed a pillar of fire towering over stylized golden rooftops. He stopped a woman leaving the church and asked her what it stood for. She looked at him oddly, and explained that it was not a symbol of anything. Tiber was the Fire, she told him; it burned to the north, in a plaza full of courthouses and prisons; on a clear night you could see the glow from Third Ward, if you found a high place to stand. He thanked her, thinking that the Voice seemed very insubstantial and remote next to the city’s brash wonders.