Thunderer

by Felix Gilman

  There was no answer. Whatever presence there had been was gone. He was so relieved that he nearly laughed out loud. He had tried. He had done his best, he could go back. He turned around.

  The tunnel stretched out behind him. The light at its end was tiny and distant—a grey scratch of moonlight. Impossible: he had taken no more than few steps inside. Hadn’t he?

  Arjun set out walking toward the light, moving as quickly as he dared on the slimy stone, with his stiff, nerveless legs. He got no closer to the exit. As he walked, he bargained. “I am not one of your worshippers. That’s true. But I meant no disrespect. I have done you a service. I freed your image. I spared you that indignity. I can be of service to you.

  “I have some training in music,” he said. “I can sing your praises.” But he knew that was pointless: the thing did not care for song.

  He thought of Ama, from back in the hills so far to the south. When he spoke of the city’s gods and miracles, she corrected him, gravely: hauntings, she called them. Should he have kept her talisman?

  The light dwindled, until he wasn’t sure whether it was still there, or was just an afterimage scratched on his straining eyes. Then it was gone. He ran. Underfoot was deep, clutching mud. He stumbled and fell. The weeds and mud took him.

  A rjun hung suspended in the dark and the cold. His head burned and throbbed, but that was all right. He could not move, but there was nowhere to go. So many people came here in the end. Why not him? It hurt very much, but the city had to be fed. He felt all the lives that had been broken along the rivers and canals of the city, by the weight of the city’s industry, by the black water, by cruelty and thoughtlessness. Children above all; the water demanded sacrifice. The malice of empty places. The city’s dark and primitive past, always sucking back down.

  He felt all this, and it felt right and necessary. There was nothing to fight. This was the way it was. The presence was there with him, and there was nothing else. The magnificent and terrible hunger of the god filled the tunnel and the world. The burning in his head was a hymn. He hung there, in the void of that presence, accepting, worshipping.

  He opened his throat and It rushed in.

  He had no name for It. He needed no name for It. It occupied all his thoughts. It was the River; It was all the city’s waters and It touched everything, It seeped into everything. All weeds and rot in the city were nourished in it. In summer every black fly in the city’s skies would hatch there; Arjun felt them unfurling sticky wings. It fed all the city’s factories; Arjun’s body spasmed and shook and he felt the engines groan and roar.

  And in the end everything in the city would rot and feed the River.

  In the west he felt a bloated strangled body rise on the tide into suddenly foul night air by a café on the banks, and well-heeled patrons retched and dropped their drinks and saw, in that pale rotting face, the face of the god.

  This was a hard and terrible fact about the world. It was something Arjun had always known but no one had ever dared to say. There was a deep bitter joy in facing It, in knowing It.

  This is how everything ends.

  He shook again, and he opened his throat to the blackness again, and It began to swallow him from the inside out, and he felt, in the north, a storm rising over the River where It coiled into the slopes of the Mountain. A black acrid rain drowned the night. He felt Its cruel will bearing down over the city. He felt the rain crash down the streets and shake the trees and drive the birds from the sky.

  Abruptly the vision was snatched from him.

  He fell back into the meaningless pain of his body, blind and helpless and insignificant in the dark.

  The god was gone. He was alone.

  For a moment he was able to wonder: what happened? In the last instants of the revelation there had been something he had hardly noticed, some wrongness, some flaw; an imperfection that echoed and grew so huge, so suddenly, that the whole vision shattered. Some division. If he could only remember…

  First the loathing distracted him, then the pain. Now that he was alone he felt the purest, most sickening revulsion for that murderous god and its false revelation and everything about it and everything touched by it. He could not stand to be in its waters a moment longer. In the next moment a burning agony gripped his throat and he understood that he was drowning, and all he cared about was survival.

  A rjun struggled in the freezing, stinking water of the canal, kicking and flailing and thrashing his head, casting about for the surface and the air. He broke the surface before his brain gave in to the crushing and the poison. He went under again.

  Then somehow he was clutching a slimy post in the rushing water.

  And some time later, he pulled himself up onto the path and vomited out foul liquid. He fell back, panting and looking up at the stars, and lay there in the cold night.

  The last thing he was able to think was: I remember.

  At the last moment the god had noticed him. The shock had sent it recoiling in something like terror.

  F iss and Aiden brought Jack back from the fight, reverently, each holding a trembling arm. Namdi walked alongside, pumping his fist. “Right across his face, Jack, his fucking face! He won’t forget you. So fast. Who taught you that? His face!”

  They laid him down on a coarse, filthy blanket, in one of the hollow upstairs rooms of the Black Moon. His limbs shivered, and his head was full of light and wind. It was impossible for him to rope his darting thoughts together and bring them back down to earth, so he lay staring silently on his back.

  After a while, Namdi came to sit with him. “You’re going to get up again, Jack. You took ten of them on, and they never touched you. You’re going to be all right.”

  Fiss came, and held up his head and made him drink water from a cracked mug, then sat back against the wall and said, “We’re all worried about you, Jack. I saw you fight them. I was closer than Namdi, and I watch closer, too. That wasn’t skill. I don’t think you’ve ever even held a knife before, have you? You weren’t just quick. You were too quick. You cut them all before they could even move. How did you do it? You don’t know, do you?

  “You know, we never had a leader. There was never anything to be led, just a few children who passed through. But they used to listen to me and Aiden. We were here first. We made this place.”

  Fiss wrapped his arms around his thin legs. “Now they’re all talking about you downstairs. Silk this, Silk that. The fight. The escape, and the thieving. Your speed. How you named them. Aiden and me, we could keep them out of trouble, if we were lucky, and help them find food, and a place to sleep. Not this.

  “Which is all right. I don’t mind. You need us, though. Because, look at you. You don’t know where you are, do you? You’re only half in the world, half the time. You need us to get things done. Don’t forget that.”

  Sometime after midnight, Jack brought himself down and pulled himself together and descended into the cavernous dark bar. Those who were awake and those who were soon awoken cheered for Jack Silk. He felt like he was only halfway down.

  W hen Jack was much younger, a monster haunted Laud Heath and the wilds of scrub and weed down by the river. A monster, not one of the gods before which his parents prostrated themselves, not the sort of thing that would earn a child a slap across the face if you spoke of it without reverence. Just a beast. A wild beast.

  Some people said it had fought its way out of the sewers. Others said it had escaped from Chairman Cimenti’s menagerie. All agreed that it looked like a dog, but one of monstrous size and ugliness, with eyes that burned like a plague pit put to the torch, snakelike tongue, twisted shoulders. They called it hyena. They said that it stole children, that it had brought down a dray horse, that it followed women home, slavering. They said it went to ground in the day and went ravening at night.

  Men came through the streets and pasted up crude renderings of the beast. Jack couldn’t yet read the words underneath the caricatures, but he knew that the posters were promising a reward.
The militia went hunting for it every night, their torches blazing. His father and his two eldest brothers went out on the Heath with their friends and neighbors. The fishermen brought their nets with them, Jack remembered. All of Shutlow and Ar-Mouth and Barbary were wild with loathing. The pubs spilled out at closing time in a fighting mood, and went roaring up to the Heath in the dark. It was no god, and they owed it no reverence; they were free to indulge their hate.

  The watch couldn’t catch it. Nor could the mobs, or the citizen committees. Drunken brawls, near-riots, broke out on the Heath at night. After sundown, the amateur hunters were easy prey for thieves. There were stabbings; Jack’s father came back one morning with his eye blackened and his scalp bleeding. The Countess declared a strict curfew on the Heath.

  None of them could catch it. It had gone to ground somewhere. It was too clever and wild. It made fools of them.

  Jack fell in love with the monster. His heart beat in sympathy with it. He tore down the posters in his street and burned them in an empty lot, feeling like he was sharing in the beast’s splendid defiance. He got into a fight with some of the older boys in his street when he told them the beast would never be caught. Their fathers were out there every night, they said, protecting him: how dare he say that?

  There were other boys who shared Jack’s fascination, and they would lead each other through the barrens and onto the Heath, hoping to meet the creature face to snarling face. They hid in the bushes on the Heath; they crept through the thorntrees of the Widow’s Bower. They went down to the wasteground banks of the river, where sometimes children drowned or were murdered, and poked through the rusted hulks and the empty rotting boat-sheds, always expecting to see the creature at any moment. They never thought what they would do if they met it. They ranged off far afield into the side streets, the weed-grown lots, the graveyards overgrown with ivy and briars; places where it was ridiculous to expect the beast. Jack mapped out the secret places of his city.

  That was how Jack got taken into the custody of Barbotin House: the watch caught him after curfew. Jack’s friends were processed to some place in Fourth Ward, and Jack was sent to Barbotin. The reasoning behind those differing sentences was never clear to Jack. And a few months later, a new inmate told Jack that the Laud Heath Beast had been taken by the militia, and carried through the streets in triumph, lashed between two stout rods. It just looked like a yellow dog, the boy said, like a scrawny twist of bloody fur: no kind of monster at all.

  Now Jack was chasing a different kind of beast. In his dreams, the Thunderer was wild in the city’s sky, far out of reach of the grasping spires. It was their secret sign.

  The lads stitched the image of the ship into the pockets of their jackets, using a bolt of blue silk Aiden had stolen from the tables in Seven Wheels Market. Beth’s girls laughed at them. “Look at you,” Beth said. “Like the crests the boys at the church schools wear. Aren’t you fancy now.”

  Fiss stuck his chest out and tilted his nose comically in the air. “You jealous? We look splendid and you know it. You shouldn’t even be talking to us.” Fiss and Beth both laughed.

  “It’s not like schoolboys, anyway,” Namdi said, seriously. “It’s like soldiers, with medals.”

  With stolen paint, they painted a huge image of the ship on the mold-ridden wall of the Moon’s empty bar. Then they painted it in corners and cracks all over Shutlow.

  The younger boys liked to play at being Arlandes, the great ship’s captain. From the chatter in the streets and the markets, they picked up that there was bad blood between the Countess and the Gerent of Stross End, and they acted out battles between the warship and the Gerent’s guns. On other days, they imagined Arlandes directing his mighty forces against their enemies in white robes. They knew that Arlandes was famously in mourning, for a young bride tragically lost in the ship’s raising, but they found it hard to act out that aspect of his character.

  Occasionally, the warship went overhead on some unknowable mission. Then the Thunderers took to the roofs and yelled after it. If it was moving slowly, they might try to chase it.

  Shutlow’s buildings were all tumbled together, falling on each other’s shoulders like huddled refugees. Its streets were narrow and dark; few were more than alleys. No one had thought it a virtue before. Jack was proud to prove them wrong: if you were fast and fearless, you could leap from rooftop to rooftop, scrambling on hands and knees up sloped tiles, catching just barely onto rusted fire escapes, climbing hand-over-hand to find a flat roof where you could run full tilt between chimneys and water towers, scaring up pigeons, to throw yourself across the next alley (its contents irrelevant, depressing; don’t look down) to continue the chase. He thought—he hoped—that no one before him had discovered that property of Shutlow, that saving grace.

  Someone probably had, he knew, but none of the Thunderers had discovered the sport. He had to teach them. He had to dare them into it.

  He knew he’d never catch the great warship that way. But so what? The chase was its own prize.

  One by one, they would draw up before a jump that defeated their nerve, and stop, clapping for those brave enough to go on. Jack always went furthest, but reckless, forceful Namdi was close behind.

  H olbach was trying to work through a problem in his mind, regarding certain anomalies in the recent manifestations of Lavilokan. The mathematics were difficult, and it was hard with people talking. With a sigh, he put down his pen.

  He sat at one end of a long table, covered with a fine white cloth, on which the Countess’s insignia was stitched in gold, over and over. The Countess sat in the center of the table, of course, and around her were all her various advisors. Captain Arlandes sat at the other end of the table. They were splendid: the advisors in laced and ruffed doublets, Arlandes in medal-hung crimson, the Countess a riot of diamonds and gold, her face as perfect and white as marble.

  A second table faced them across the empty floor, a plain shape of machined steel. The Gerent of Stross End hunched in the middle, dressed in dark business-suit and tie. He was surrounded by his senior executives, all dressed the same way.

  They were sitting out in the open air, on the sandy floor of the Danaen Amphitheater. Gulls went by overhead. Stepped rows of stone seats swept out and back in all directions. It was the only structure, apart from a small ferry station, on the wooded Isle of Wine, in the middle of the river. Neutral ground.

  The Countess’s advisors passed bits of paper around. One leaned in and whispered to her, for a very long time. Then she spoke, formally and sonorously. “Gerent. I regret to say that your proposal is not acceptable. The issue in Ar-Mouth is not one of tribute, but of jurisdiction. Your generous offer cannot compensate us for the encroachment on our authority.”

  The Gerent conferred with his advisors, then responded, enunciating firmly, “It appears I must clarify my words. Neither tribute nor compensation were offered. However, if you are not willing to consider a sharing of the harbor’s profits, then we are of course willing to discuss issues of jurisdiction.”

  Holbach was not there to offer his opinions, only so that he could be seen to be there. A subtle reminder of the Thunderer’s power; something to keep it in the Gerent’s mind, and to let him know that it was in the Countess’s mind too. All he had to do was stay awake and try not to look foolish.

  Presumably Arlandes was there for the same reason. Even if they didn’t recognize Holbach, which was unlikely but possible, everyone could recognize the Thunderer’s tragic captain. There was even a play, The Captain Unmoored; posters all over the city bore his mournful countenance. Holbach couldn’t bring himself to see the play. He feared he might be the villain of the piece. Holbach could not look at Arlandes without guilt. The man was still shadowed by the death of his wife on the day of the Thunderer’s launch: that absurd, pathetic death. Poor gentle young Lucia. She’d been a mere afterthought, a decorative touch. The Countess had wanted someone to go up with the balloon, for the look of the thing, for the benefit of the c
rowds. Why hadn’t he said no? Because the girl was neither here nor there to your experiment, he thought. She canceled out. So you gave her no thought. You selfish, silly man. Nicolas would be ashamed of you.

  And that young man was on his conscience, too. Arjun. No word for days. And he did not seem to be the kind to just vanish, distracted by some girl or wager or exciting new theory, as Holbach might have when he was that age. It was troubling.

  But Shay really might have been able to help Arjun. It had not been a wholly selfish gesture to send Arjun in his direction, had it? Perhaps he had helped: perhaps Arjun had vanished because Shay had been able to point him toward that Voice of his. They said Shay had secret paths; perhaps Arjun was on them now. That lifted his mood, but then he was annoyed to think that he might never hear what Arjun had learned of Shay’s secrets.

  The Countess spoke. “We should not be limiting our discussions to Ar-Mouth. Our grievances, I fear, are inextricably linked to the issue of Kanker Market.”

  The Gerent locked shocked. His advisors turned to each other, whispering, and huddled in around their lord. They didn’t seem to have a response prepared.

  Holbach began to worry. The Countess had been so aggressive lately. This was the third such conference of the week. She had made stiff demands of the Mass How Parliament, which they had referred nervously to committee for further consideration. She had taken a frighteningly high-handed and demanding tone with the Chairman Cimenti, who had acquiesced to her demands with a smiling grace that had left the Countess infuriated and Holbach quite terrified. He would take revenge, Holbach thought; would he still be smiling when he did it?

  It was the Thunderer, of course. She was making the most of her new weapon. It certainly wasn’t what he had created the damn thing for. It was supposed to be the great triumph of the Atlas-makers: he had dreamed that it could carry his cartographers all over the city, perhaps as far as the rumored walls in the east and west, which the Atlas had never so far reached; perhaps even over the mountain in the north. It would lay everything bare.