Thunderer

by Felix Gilman

  “I was raised to listen.”

  “Don’t sound so smug. No one makes a living that way.”

  Arjun followed him one morning to Chairman Cimenti’s walled compound in Goshen Tor. They set out while it was still dark, heading down to the river. Dawn came while they were crossing the Jaw. They went up the hill to the Tor. Heady lectured Arjun on his need to make something of himself, pointing at all the monumental offices around them by way of illustration.

  When they got closer to the compound, Heady told Arjun what he knew about the Chairman. “First, he’s one of the Estates that claims authority over Shutlow. I suppose officially he’s only involved there as a charitable venture; but he’s a big man in these parts, and don’t you forget it. Second, he’s a banker. The Chairman is the big man at the top of the Cimenti concerns, which own, well, most things you can see from where you’re standing. Very rich. Pays good rates, too. Not that that matters to you, who’s above that sort of thing. Very nice, it must be. And third, then, he doesn’t keep a horde of do-nothing thugs in uniforms around like most of the rest of the big Estates. Not that I mean to say that they don’t do good work, because they do. Keeping the peace. Keeping things straight. It’s the gods’ work. What was I saying? The Chairman, yes. Spends his money on agents and spies. So watch what you say about him. Fourth, he’s a banker, like I said. Likes professional people. Businesslike. Go-getters. Ha! Good luck to you, young man.”

  “I understand he’s a great patron of the arts. I’ve seen his crest at a number of concerts.”

  “Yeah, well, if you say so. That way. Go on, then.” Heady pointed him toward the Chairman’s offices and walked off to wait outside the courthouse in hope of work.

  Arjun spoke through a copper grille to a smart young woman. “Good morning. I am Arjun Dvanda Atyava, of Gad. I represent the Choir, from far to the south. I am here to pay my respects to the Chairman.”

  He repeated this again and again, making his name a chant, to many different smiling faces. The receptionist took him through a marbled foyer, through a door behind the desk and into a high-windowed hall filled with rows and rows of clerks sitting poring over columns of figures in heavy books. She handed him off to a clerk who took him upstairs at the back of the hall and through a room of women tapping away at strange devices, like little square harpsichords, that rattled and choked out paper marked with heavy black print. Arjun realized that the clockwork bird he had brought as a gift was less impressive than he had hoped. The clerk passed him on to a hard-faced overseer who took him along a walkway past the vaults. And so on, up and around the building, until a bewildered secretary brought him into a gilded office occupied by a blond, neat, smiling young man, who was happy to accept Arjun’s respects on behalf of the Chairman, as one of his personal secretaries, and expressed the Chairman’s best wishes, and ushered Arjun out through some back passage onto the street before Arjun could explain his purpose in Ararat or ask for help. The way out was so much quicker than the way in. So that door into the city was closed, then.

  I n the morning, the children formed into clusters and left the Black Moon. Jack watched them patiently, wondering how best to insert himself into their society.

  Most of the smaller children there were scavengers, mudlarks; they went down to the river at low tide, to the sewers or canals, to gather the leavings of the city: firewood, coal, metal, scraps of clothing, scraps of food, anything the ragmen could take. They scavenged filth and ashes and bones. Horseshit and dogshit for the tanners. Jack couldn’t enter their business. You needed a basket, a bucket, a scuttle, something to hold the scraps you found. He wished he hadn’t thrown away his cap.

  Two of the boys sold newspapers; they picked up bundles of the Era or the Sentinel from a cart in the market and they stood in the streets all day shouting and waving the papers, which they could not read. Too public, too noisy; Jack didn’t dare. He might be seen. And besides, he was too old for it; he was no longer fresh-faced.

  Instead he followed the two boys his age—the tall blond boy was Fiss and his red-haired friend was Aiden, they said, and they seemed to be in charge—and watched them steal food in Seven Wheels Market, where the stalls sprawled in the shadow of the great wide wheels of grey stone. (Each was the size of a mill wheel; whatever ancient people had carved them and brought them up from the river had, everyone said, used them for sacrifice.)

  He watched them cut two rabbits from a pole in Coney Wheel, and lift a box of matches from a barrel in Chandler Wheel, and slip grey linens from the secondhand clothing heaps in Saddler Wheel. He watched them buzz the pockets of the clerks as they came out of their rickety grey brick offices in Sunder Square. He watched as, inviting damnation, they slid the smooth carved prayer beads from the back-pockets of the men who came out of Atenu’s temple.

  He watched their subtle walk, but he couldn’t replicate it. He was too awkward. He stood out. His brightly threaded shirt didn’t help. Hands went to purse strings when he came close; merchants leaned protectively over their stalls and fingered their clubs. The first day, he went hungry.

  In the evening, Fiss tossed him a hairy sliver of dried fish, and said, “Eat. Look: if you won’t leave us alone, at least stay out of the way, all right? You don’t know what you’re doing. You’ll get us all caught.”

  The second day, he followed Fiss and Aiden anyway, though at a distance. Back to Seven Wheels again, where he remembered a few things; how the market’s ragged western edge ran down into Fourth Ward, and how brave he’d felt as a child when he’d gone into that western sprawl, where they said that gangs up from the Ward held sway. And he recalled that Seven Wheels, though it looked rich enough to him after the workhouse, was where Shutlow’s poor fed and clothed themselves; the better sort went north and east to the tall department stores of Hoeg Street. He supposed, though, that it was too hard to steal from those places, and he told himself to remain patient and watch Fiss closely. And quickly enough it all started to come back to him. He sauntered up to the butcher’s slab, his eyes and his apparent attention elsewhere, arousing no suspicion, snatched a fistful of sausage, and bolted. The shout went up, but he forced his way through the crowds and away. He ate down by the canal.

  That evening, Fiss shook his head to see Jack come back to the Moon. “We saw them chasing you. Never thought you’d get away. You won’t last a week, Jack, if you keep that up.”

  Jack just smiled. He remembered the trick of it. Now he was free, and fed, he felt faster and more confident. By the third day, he was quicker still. By the fourth, he was quicker than Fiss or Aiden had ever seen, moving lightly, with an innocent smile. He could take whatever he wanted. He moved in on Fiss and Aiden’s marks while the other boys were still just standing there. He snatched a purse from under a priest’s red robes; two handkerchiefs, one monogrammed, from pin-striped clerks at lunch in the market; a plain craftsman’s knife from the belt of a hard-looking man on his way to the Ward; other bits and pieces. Volume came easy. Quality might need practice.

  As they sat around the floor of the Black Moon’s bar that night, he made a show of graciousness: he gave Fiss and Aiden the lion’s share of the takings, saying, “This was yours. No offense. I just couldn’t wait. Thought I’d save you some time.”

  Fiss looked him up and down. A couple of days ago, he had looked at Jack with an exasperated mother-hen pity. Now he appraised him sharply, sizing him up. Jack smirked back.

  “Why are you wearing that shirt?” Fiss asked. “You look like a clown, with all that silk.”

  “Like a tart,” Aiden said. “Who’s a pretty boy, then?”

  That got a laugh. Jack didn’t rise to it. Instead, he told the story of his escape, explaining the magic he had worked with the shirt, the blanket-wings, and the bright silk.

  “No one gets out of Barbotin,” Fiss said. “Bird or not.”

  “Not till they’re old,” a boy called Riley agreed. “They let you out when they’ve squeezed you dry. Old man Lagger from the corner was in there
, and look at him now.”

  (No he wasn’t. Yeah he was. How do you know?)

  Aiden asked him about some boys he knew who’d ended up there. Riley knew another. Jack was able to describe them both.

  A murmur went round the room. “My sister knew a lad who came out of there,” Fiss said. “Head full of book-learning, but sick, and no useful trade. So talk like him, then, if you can.”

  Jack recited Tiber’s catechism; when that wasn’t impressive enough, he summarized and criticized the thesis of Lagrange’s Ordination and Incarnation.

  “That’s the stuff, all right,” Fiss said, “whatever it means. Barbotin, broken out from. Who would have thought it?”

  Some of the smaller children came to Jack that night. He was a godly man, they said: they had heard him. They never got to hear any such talk, not in the kind of lives they had. Could they listen to him some more? They asked him about Tiber, and he told them that that god was very distant, and wouldn’t warm them. They looked heartbroken. They asked him about the Spirit of the Lights, and he said he’d never seen it; it wasn’t welcome in Barbotin. They asked: They say there’s a golden god that walks round in the north somewhere, comes down from the mountain, and it makes the streets all gold where it walks. Jack named it for them, and told them: If it’s real, it’s far to the north. You’ll never see it. But they kept asking; they were hungry for something wonderful. He couldn’t say no to them, so he talked to them about the Bird, and how it had been to fly. Fiss listened, too, pretending to sleep, Jack noticed.

  F iss woke Jack, digging his grubby patched boot into Jack’s ribs, firmly but not ungently; when Jack started, shocked to see that it was already morning outside, and that he had slept later and deeper than he had allowed himself to for years, Fiss said, “So the others are out earning their keep. You’re fast, and you’re clever; you can come with me, take a look, see what you think.”

  Jack followed Fiss down to the docks, through lunchtime crowds. The lanky blond boy was much too tall for his ragged grey trousers, but he carried the absurdity gracefully. He kept up a running commentary on the passersby, the contents of whose pockets he claimed to be able to tell at a glance; when they sensed him looking too closely, and turned to stare back, Jack tensed to strike or run, but Fiss just smiled confidently and wished them the blessings of the god of their choice, which seemed enough to set them at ease. It was a good trick.

  Fiss led them up the stairs at the back of the Cup-Bearer’s little chapel, perched on the edge of the Jaw, the great crowded bridge that joined the two halves of Ar-Mouth harbor.

  “That’s the place,” he said, pointing down over the Jaw’s edge to a small square building of red brick. “It’s a storehouse and countinghouse for one of the shipping companies. I come down here and watch sometimes. It used to have just one guard out the front; now, see, there’s a team of them pacing up and down. But look—no one around the back. If you could get in…”

  Jack watched a stream of young men, dockhands, move in and out of Fiss’s warehouse and the others in the street, loading and unloading sacks and crates. A young brown-smocked preacher of Atenu, the Simple Laborer, stood on an upturned crate, offering them an extended sermon on the virtue of their exertions. His words were only half audible over the noise of the docks, but the gist was clear. Jack thought that he could do the preacher’s job, or that of his audience, if only he knew where to start. He asked Fiss, “What’s in there?”

  “I don’t know. But they must think it’s worth protecting. It has to be something better than wallets and handkerchiefs. I think maybe we could do it. But I don’t know how. And then there’s another problem. I’ve seen other people watching it. A serious gang, from the Ward, I think they are. I’ve seen some of them around at the place I sometimes go to, you know, unload what we take. I don’t want to cross them. We’re not anything like as dangerous as them. So then. Any ideas?”

  Fiss was looking at him intently, hopefully, but Jack had nothing to offer. All he could think was that the preacher was barely older than him, and some of the dockhands were younger. He didn’t know what to do with himself; his years in the House had not prepared him for any kind of adulthood. Everything they were doing down there looked both absurd and intimidating, in equal measure. But he was surely too old for Fiss’s way of life; so, too, was Fiss, of course. It couldn’t last.

  Fiss shrugged. “Never mind. Don’t feel like flying down through their windows? Maybe later.” He laughed, and walked away. Jack stayed, for a while, watching the crowds; when he closed his eyes and let the noise rush around him, he could imagine he was flying.

  I f any of them still doubted his story, they believed it when Mr. Tar and Mr. Shunt came asking round about him. Two black-suited, dirty-bearded men, pale and red-eyed, of uncertain age. They were overheard everywhere, asking bartenders, shopkeepers, whores, old Lagger, the crone at the Cypress. A boy had escaped them, and they wanted him back. “Defn’tly you they was asking about,” Fiss said. “And they were from Barbotin. They said so.”

  Any other House might let a boy slip back into the streets, one who was more trouble than he was worth, knowing they were all the same and another House would snatch him up again soon enough, or the cold, or hunger, or fever. Not so Barbotin, it seemed.

  So he slipped away from Shutlow’s shabby streets. He told no one where he was going; he didn’t know himself. At first he chose streets at random. He quickly decided that, between any two possible streets, he would always choose the richer one, with the grander and cleaner buildings, and he would always try to seek higher ground. He was looking for somewhere as unlike his native ground as possible, somewhere they would never think to look for him.

  He ended up across the river, in Goshen Tor, than which he could imagine nothing stranger. He marveled at the towering offices of the banks, the endless grids of blind windows. Multifaceted, like the eyes of the Spider were said to be.

  It was not safe for him in the streets around the banks; the watch was always there in force and he felt sorely out of place. It was no safer in the temple prefectures. The Tor’s temples were rich, and old, and paranoid, and he stood out dreadfully there, too. But he could not go back, so he went up.

  The temples were massings of ancient stone, marble and steel and glass. Not one of them was still consecrated to the god for which it had been erected, in ancient and unrecorded time. Spires were thrust up proudly, then abandoned when the gods to which they were sacred fell from favor and the rituals for which they were constructed were forgotten. The city’s builders would stretch out bright domes over the roofs, then leave them to turn green and mossy and cracked a century later. Temples grew together and divided violently, cannibalizing each other’s bricks for new towers and arches. The banks were almost as ancient, and transformed themselves almost as riotously. From the streets, everything was ordered, marmoreal grandeur; from the sky, the Tor was chaos.

  It was easy to hide on those roofs, and Jack did. He found his way up the fire escape at the back of the Latimer Museum, up from a backstreet that was not like the dark and dirty back-alleys he knew, being instead lamp-lit and lined with discreet gentlemen’s tailors and clubs. From the Museum’s high gables he balanced across a narrow beam to the mazy roof of a temple of Tiber. He hid in an abandoned office clinging to the side of what had once been an observatory dome. At twilight, he crept down to steal food from the kitchens, hopping over uncertain, rotted floorboards, sneaking through dusty halls and down into the temple’s living parts. He ate out in the air on the roof.

  He was on the edge of the dome, chewing a rind of bacon, when a great shadow swept over the roof, rising behind him. There was a throb, a drone, and a sense of great pressure. The air rushed past, followed by a great curve of wood, like a falling moon. He was frozen with dread. It passed overhead, seeming close enough to touch, and he dropped to the floor, but as it went past, he saw that it was in fact far, far above him. Impossibly, the shape resolved itself into a ship: a deep, stretched
curve of a hull, a heavy hump of rear decks. As a child, he’d seen such ships (with sails, though, where this had a great gibbous balloon instead) painted on theater backdrops, in pirate romances. Such things had no business here in the city, or even, he thought, in the real world, much less in the city’s sky. He couldn’t believe it; had the city changed so much while he was locked away?

  It dwindled in the darkness to the north. He watched it go. After a while, there was a distant sound of thunder and a flash of fire on the horizon. And another.

  A few days later, he stole a newspaper from one of the offices below. The Era reported that the Countess Ilona’s miraculous warship, the Thunderer, had destroyed the fortress of the Urbomachy’s notorious crimelord Jack Bull. A glorious day, the Era’s editors rhapsodized; a promise of the bright future to come. Perhaps one day the city entire may be lifted into the sky. No borders to spark conflict; and no shadows in which crime can hide and disease breed! And for this miracle we must thank the Countess Ilona—some previous reader had scrawled “whore” in the margin—and the scholarship and vision of Professor Holbach, who in a remarkable ritual on the banks of the Urgos, on Tisday, Cabriel 14th…Jack tapped his finger on the date.

  The story was accompanied by a blocky, awkward print of the warship. Jack thought it looked beautiful.

  The rest of the page was taken up with a column under the heading “THE THUNDERER” but, to Jack’s disappointment, it wasn’t about the marvelous ship; THUNDERER seemed to be the pen name of whatever loudmouth boss owned the paper. It was a pompous, blustery rant, attacking some merchant named Shay, who had, in some manner too horrible for the Era to describe clearly, transgressed against the city’s gods. Reader, you are rightly angry, it said: This man’s disrespect for Our City may be tolerated no longer. Because The Gods themselves may not strike him, the responsibility falls to those charged with Rulership of Our City, and it is to them that we address our Plea. We certainly would not wish to be forced to suspect that Shay is suffered to go about his Business freely because his offerings are of interest to some man of Power…