Thunderer

by Felix Gilman

  “That’s right,” Jack said. “Are you listening? You have to be careful now. So you lot stay here for the day. We’ll share what we bring back, I swear. And you lot are lookouts. You have to stay, and keep looking, right? This is important.”

  It took a while to make them disciplined, to make them understand that they had roles to play, duties to perform, if they were to stay in the Black Moon. One or two were caught in the meantime. The change happened, though, in time.

  Fiss was amazed by how thoroughly they were transformed. He came up to find Jack sitting on the roof, as was his habit in the evenings, and said, “They don’t even complain anymore. The boys we sent down to Seven Wheels Market are back. The lookouts are out for the night. And no complaints.” He sighed. “I tried to tell them the same things, you know. They just forgot, or said no, and got caught again. They never used to listen to me.”

  They listened to Jack. He was the hero who had broken out of the impregnable Barbotin House. He was touched by the Bird-God. He was the one who talked to them at night, telling them stories about the Bird, and the Nessene, and Lavilokan, like he was a priest or something; like he was a missionary, except that he was the best thief they had. And he could fly. He couldn’t really, he told them, but the little ones never listened. They thought he was waiting for his moment to take wing.

  The children listened to Jack, and Jack listened to Fiss. Jack had been so young when they locked him away; every day, something reminded him of all that he didn’t know about the city. He needed Fiss. It was Fiss, for instance, who knew how to fence what they stole. Jack went along once or twice, and watched Fiss deal with the hard men who bought and sold at the back of pubs in Ar-Mouth, or in dingy back-parlors of haberdashers in the Ward. Fiss had an easy, confident, joking manner with those men, respectful but unafraid; it was, Jack thought, very adult. It was more than Jack knew how to do.

  It was Fiss around whom the whole group had formed. Fiss was first—and Aiden, who was always with him, and who it seemed had escaped with him, although neither of them was willing to say where from, or why. Certainly they were not ordinary street-children. Aiden was quiet, thoughtful; Fiss was kind, funny, sensible. Those were rare traits in the sort of lives they lived. They were able to make the Black Moon into a refuge, a shelter for whatever children wandered by, but they lacked the strength and the hardness to discipline them. Jack had that strength, so long as he had their help.

  And it was Fiss who started calling him Jack Silk, because of his strange bright-threaded shirt. The name stuck. It was all right, Jack supposed. At first, he thought it was a joke at his expense, because Fiss made everything sound like a joke. But that wasn’t how the others took it. They took it seriously, like he was a hero, a myth. He knew that he had to be worthy of it.

  W ord spread: Silk’s lot were doing well. They had food, and blankets, and even money. They could offer protection. More children came. They wanted shelter, and they all wanted to see the miracle boy for themselves. Most had broken out of their workhouses, or run from their apprenticeships, or their families, or their panders, on the same strange day as Jack.

  There were Martin and Ayer, two more from Lime Street, who had followed Namdi out over the fence, but then got separated in the streets. Namdi at once proudly took responsibility and charge of them, speaking for them. They didn’t seem to mind; they were grateful enough for a place to stay.

  Turyk had run away from an apprenticeship to a carpenter in Mass How. He had not been chained, not physically: all he had to do was to look out the window at the Bird dwindling in the blue distance among the clouds, and throw down his tools, snatch up the day’s takings, and run out the door. “He’s mad,” Namdi said. “That’s a good job. Who’d run from that?”

  “He pulls his weight,” Jack said. “Mind your business.”

  Laura and Elsie came from a whorehouse in the Ward. They couldn’t be more than twelve or thirteen. It made Jack feel guilty to look at their skinny bodies. He asked Beth to look out for them. “What do you think I’m doing?” she said. “You just make sure nobody troubles them.”

  Jack heard many other stories of escape, but none as strange as his own. He had to tell his story again and again. All those who had run away on the day of the Bird believed him instinctively. They felt like they’d done it themselves.

  Once, the watch came poking through the abandoned shells of Moore Street. They hopped over the fence and hid down by the canal. The lookouts were sound, then. Good.

  Not all of them were escapees. Some came who had been accustomed to begging. Shutlow was a poor place for it; it held its purse strings tightly. They were weak and covered in sores. They were taken in, but Jack would not permit begging. They had to be taught to steal. Jack wanted them to be proud.

  Then there were those who had been in other gangs, who came to the Black Moon for protection from their enemies. The first came from Fourth Ward, where his lot had lived in the sewer, scavenging the city’s filth, until they got driven out by the Chaste Flame. The Flame smashed their stuff, and beat them bloody, day after day, until they joined up or ran away. Others came with the same story, up from the Ward, over from Barbary.

  “The Flame?” Jack asked Fiss.

  “Don’t you know? I know you don’t know much, but you should know this, from your books. They’re Tiber’s mad boys.”

  “In the House, they taught us about a Chaste Flame. They were a counter-church of Tiber. A kind of cult, but all children, like a gang. There was a mad monk, Vilar, Volar, I think, who founded them. They wore white robes and carried torches. The Church pronounced them anathema, and put them down. But they keep coming back. Always children: it was one of the heresies they were protecting us from in the House, they said.”

  “If you say so. The important thing is, they’re not just in books. They’re all over the city, the last couple of years.”

  “I heard they started up this time in the ’Machy,” Aiden said. “Down in the warrens.”

  “But you see them all over,” Fiss said. “They burn things. Whorehouses, playhouses. Pubs, cafés. Books, music, pleasures. Making things pure. Never seen them myself. But they say they’re like angry ghosts. They say it’s like they’re on fire.”

  “There’s a lot of children want to join them,” Aiden said. “There’s a lot in this city want to see others’ pleasures burn.”

  B usy days passed, but the children kept talking about the Flame. They said the Flame shaved their heads so you couldn’t tell boys from girls. They said they came on you like phantoms, bearing fire, and killed and beat and burned. They said they could pass through walls, drift on the smoke, that they could not be killed. Some of the children spoke of the Flame with terror and tears, others with envy. All the stories of their own escapes, their own daring, their hopes for their freedom, gave way to an endless chewing-over of the fear the white robes inspired.

  It made Jack sick to see them shut in their own fear like that. He sat out on the roof trying to think how to break its bars: there was a lesson to be learned from the way the Flame did things, he thought.

  He called them all up into the Moon’s loft one evening, and stood by the window, framed by the street’s dying light.

  “I hear you talking. Flame this, Flame that. I know some of you are thinking about joining them. And I know some of you are just here to hide from them. Like the Flame owns this city. Well, what are we? Are we nothing?”

  They shouted that they were not.

  “We broke out from all over. We were all given the signal, and we took it, and we broke out from everything, all over. No one can take us back, if we don’t want to go. We can take whatever we want. Who’s scared of the Flame?” No one was. “They got a uniform and they got a name, and that makes you think they’re something special. We’re special. Not them.”

  The little ones cheered. The older ones looked skeptical. It was all so much grander and better and more obviously right in his head than he had words to express. His mouth was dr
y. But they sensed his excitement, and watched him intently.

  “So what I think is, I think we need a name, too.”

  He unfolded the Era’s print of the flying warship, and held it up against the light. “Know what this is?”

  Several hands shot up among the little ones. “That’s the Countess’s ship,” Namdi said. “I saw it.”

  “Wrong. That’s our sign. Ours. Namdi, you remember the day you got out from Lime Street? Beth, you remember? Turyk, you remember when you told that Master of yours where to stick it? That’s the same day this thing went up. The same thing that made us free, made this thing free. I saw it, too, up in the Tor. It’s incredible. It can go anywhere. No one can stop it or touch it. Like they can’t touch us or stop us, not if we keep moving.”

  Namdi nodded, grinning. “It’s amazing.”

  “Same day as we all escaped. Same thing that brought us all together. It is amazing. It’s the future. It’s going to be our sign.”

  They were all looking at him. Bright faces in the attic’s shadows. He was unsure what to say next, so he said again, but louder, “This is our sign.”

  He handed the print to Fiss, who looked at him curiously and passed it wordlessly to Aiden, who shared it with Beth; then they all gathered in, looking at it and at Jack. The Thunderer: the Thunderers. No mere thieves or vagrants. It would be their name and their strength: they, too, would amaze. He was very excited; he thought they liked it. It was a start.

  A rjun spent the day on Fraction Street, up on Mass How, in the instrument-makers’ shops and workshops, in dark spaces full of jangling wires and strings and clanking brass and the cacophony of poorly made instruments being tuned, of untutored would-be musicians banging away. All of the city’s tunes, few of which he liked, none of which was the music he hoped to hear, all sounding at once, and mostly badly played. He was ejected from one shop after another when it became clear that he had no money. It crossed his mind to apply for work, but he did not wish to be tied down there, to be caught in those dusty webs of catgut and piano-wire. Perhaps when his money ran out he would reconsider.

  He came back to Shutlow in the evening to find the streets full of bunting. Clotheslines were hung with red flags, and, if flags weren’t available, with cloth or rags dyed red. Red banners flew over Seven Wheels Market, stitched in black with the image of a ship, lightning at its prow, lifted by a swelling balloon. Moore Street’s evening shadows glittered with broken glass and scattered flags. Off in the distance there was still cheering and the honking of a brass band. On the horizon—north, over on the Heath—there was the faint spark of fireworks against the black sky.

  He sat in the guests’ room in the unraveling green armchair in the corner. Haycock was there warming his feet by the fire, jotting down sales and prices in a crabbed hand in an overstuffed ledger-book.

  “Was there a festival, Mr. Haycock? Or a parade?”

  “Too bloody right there was. Bloody awful racket. Where’ve you been? Don’t you read the papers?”

  “Hardly ever, Mr. Haycock.”

  “Ignorance is bliss, ain’t it? There’s been a famous victory, they say. Or the Countess says, and so everyone else says. With that bastard ugly ship of hers. Over pirates. Or what the Countess is pleased to call pirates. The distinction between our city’s glorious leaders and a bunch of pirates being a subtle one that’s probably beyond a foreigner such as youself. We’re all so very bloody excited, waving our little banners. Though what good it’s going to do me is beyond me. Don’t talk to that puffed-up bootlicker Heady, that’s my advice. He’s insufferable tonight.”

  D own on the Heath it was dark, lit only by firework flashes. The great ship Thunderer hung darkly far overhead, fixed and frozen in the night.

  From the Thunderer’s prow Arlandes could still see the sunset burning sullenly down behind the cranes and factory towers of Agdon Deep.

  The crowds on the Heath had screamed and cheered loud enough for the Thunderer’s crew to hear them. They were dispersing now; it was a cold evening. It was colder still up on the deck, and Arlandes hugged his thick black wax-coat tightly around himself.

  They had taken the Thunderer down through Goshen Tor, hanging so low they were level with the tops of the tallest buildings, and the bankers came running close to the windows to stare, shouting silently and banging their fists on the thick glass. The crew had saluted back at them and laughed. It was enough, probably, to have driven the Chairman to a blind fury: to have that weapon parading itself through his territory, his own people cheering it…But the Countess had ordered it, so Arlandes obeyed.

  She smiled all the time now. Her painted jeweled face, her white skin and red lips, curled into a constant sly smile. She was full of plans.

  The battle—if you could call it a battle—had been fought that morning, at dawn, as the sun rose over the Bay so that the water seemed stained with blood. There was an island in the Bay, a rocky island, crowned with a fort: Sleutel’s Island and Sleutel’s Fort. The rocks and the reefs made it almost unapproachable by unfriendly ships, so Sleutel and Sleutel’s predecessors had generally been left alone. They seized the occasional ship; it had always been seen as a kind of tax.

  The Fort crumbled at the first volley from the Thunderer’s guns. It was built of some soft yellow sandstone and it turned back to sand. There had been riflemen on the turrets firing pointlessly at the Thunderer’s side; when the walls burst into powder and smoke they’d fallen screaming. The inner structures of the Fort were made of wood, and burned. The Thunderer’s bombards had sprayed oil and powder and flame wherever they struck. It had been a resoundingly successful test.

  There had been perhaps two hundred people in the Fort. Not all of them had been men, though Arlandes did not know their exact numbers, and had not cared to descend into the rubble to count.

  Arlandes was neither proud nor ashamed. The fireworks exploded over the Heath and lit his face violent reds and greens and he still stared blankly at the sunset.

  What crowd there still was, was still cheering. They couldn’t see him, of course; only the great black hull blocking out the stars.

  He knew what they said about him. He rarely went anywhere these days except the Countess’s estates and the Thunderer itself, but he’d overheard the gossip: the Mourning Captain, all clad in black. There were stories in the papers and ballads sung in the streets. The Era’s editorials called him a throwback to a nobler, more sensitive age, which sat poorly with their claims that he and his wonderful ship were heralds of the city’s future; but it sold papers either way. He’d caught the popular imagination. Romantics pictured him grieving at the prow of his ship; he’d confiscated a chapbook from one of the men on which, under the words GRIEF’S LONELY WARRIOR, he was pictured in black, a single tear on his chiseled cheek, gazing at the horizon, hand on his sword. It was a publication of disgraceful and dispiriting stupidity. Young women wrote him letters by the sackful; after reading a few—perfumed, appallingly florid—he’d ordered his valet to burn them and all similar missives.

  Less-romantic gossip pictured him going mad in his quarters, clutching the bloody dress to himself in the darkness, weeping and pleading. That was possibly closer to the truth; though he’d let the dress go, he clutched it close in his dreams. And certainly he saw nothing romantic in his situation. Every day it was harder to rouse himself from his bunk. There was a constant numb ache in his head. His men avoided him; he snarled and swore at them, and had found himself more than once gripping the hilt of his sword with half-formed intent. He was not sleeping; his dreams were waking dreams, and cold, and repetitive, and pointless. But when the guns fired—when the walls burst and those tiny, fragile figures had scattered and fallen—well, that was something. That was a sort of feeling. The flash and the thunder were like a kind of joy.

  T he next morning, Arjun followed Heady to the fortress of the Marquis Mensonge, which crowned the arc of the Diorite Bridge like a helmet’s plumes. There were flags everywhere, purple and silver.
A soldier at the gate, in purple and silver, too, planted his mailed fist in Arjun’s ribs and shoved him back into the street, telling him to waste someone else’s time, if he must.

  The day after, Heady gave Arjun directions to the Mass How Parliament, and he queued all day outside its stolid bronze-red bulk. The queue seemed to move no faster than the dead dignitaries carved into the walls. The police turned them all away in the evening. Arjun began to doubt Girolamo’s advice.

  He went walking down to the Fourth Ward. He leaned over the edge of a dry canal and listened to a group of children down in the mud. They formed a circle to sing together. Something about a plague; one by one, they clapped hands and fell laughing out of the circle onto their backs. Arjun recognized the tune: it was a simplified form of a hymn the cantors of Lavilokan sang, up on Goshen Tor. They scattered when they saw him watching.

  In the evening, he joined the crowds up on Laud Heath, for a carnival thrown by the Countess Ilona. Clowns and fire-eaters entertained the jostling crowds. Fireworks exploded overhead. At the west end of the Heath, the Countess’s orchestra played for a quieter audience. Arjun slipped in at the back to listen.

  As the last light drained from the sky, the orchestra came to the final, jubilant crescendo of Karpinsky’s Sacred Dance, a crashing of cymbals and a banging of drums; and up over the hill, across the sky from behind the Observatory, the Thunderer came in ominous progress, a black shape limned by fireworks, hanging over the Heath. Arjun felt for a moment that he and the crowds down on the dark Heath were all underwater, looking up. The orchestra went silent as the great ship’s guns took up a slow, pounding rhythm, both celebratory and threatening.