Thunderer

by Felix Gilman

  Then the others came in and pointed their rifles, but Jack was already running up and around the stairs and onto the next floor, where he ran to the window and threw himself out. And after that, it was easy to fly across to the roof where Fiss waited and lift him away before the watchmen could break down the door. It was all easy, so far.

  A lmost all of them made it to one of the rendezvous places Jack had named. Only one boy was unaccounted for. A recent recruit, by the name of Will. No one knew when he had fallen behind. “There’s nothing to be done about it now,” Jack said, after they had waited as long as they dared, hanging around the waste-heaps at the corners of the market. “If he’s still free, maybe he’ll find us. If they took him, we’ll find him soon enough.”

  That left an even dozen. They were tired and frightened. Two had been beaten, badly, by the guards. One had a swollen eye; another was nursing a twisted shoulder and a useless arm. Jack’s guilt over the man he had injured burned violently away.

  Fiss was no help: silent and withdrawn and weak. He had not eaten or slept in too many nights. The diversion back at the watchhouse had taken the last of his strength. With Fiss in that state, Jack had to organize the boys himself. Fortunately, they were tired and scared, easy to lead. He was so full of plans and excitement that he could barely remember their names.

  “It’s not safe to go back to Shutlow,” Jack said. No one was inclined to argue. So he chose a direction at random, as he had done before and always, he thought, with good luck, and led them west across Fourth Ward. “Don’t steal anything, don’t touch anything, don’t look at anything. Keep to the shadows, keep your heads down. We leave no trail.”

  They were all very hungry. It was torture to stand in the markets, even the sparse, stale markets of Fourth Ward, and touch nothing. “There’s food for us when we get where we’re going,” he said, although it was a lie.

  He grabbed a boy called Rauf and shook his arm. “Remember how you were marching up and down, playing at soldiers for the Countess? I told you to stop? You’re a soldier now, Rauf, and I’m telling you, march. Show us what you can take.”

  They were not such an odd sight in the streets of the Ward. Just another dog-pack of ragged children, scrabbling through the refuse. They slipped through the backstreets, the ditches cut in the sprawling mess, scrambling over the heaps of filth swept up by the sides of the road. They kept their hands in their pockets, if they had them, and stayed together, like obedient schoolchildren shuffling from one schoolroom to another.

  Jack went ahead, scouting the way. He remained grounded, not wanting to make himself conspicuous, but his feet tingled with pent-up excitement, and he broke constantly into a run.

  There were no special patrols, no armies of watch combing the city for the escapees. Perhaps none of the men in the watchhouse had dared confess their humiliation to their superiors. Or maybe the patrols were on their way, but just not organized yet. He urged the lads to move faster.

  No more press-gangs in the street, either, he noticed. Did that mean there was going to be peace, or did it mean that the Countess had all the men she needed for war?

  He led them by a circuitous route. He didn’t know the Ward very well, and they were going further west than he had ever been. He tried to navigate by the Mountain, but it was often obscured by the blighted buildings, and he got off course. He didn’t admit that he was sometimes lost. And he didn’t talk about his plans for them; it was too early.

  Night fell and they were still crossing Fourth Ward. A light snow began to fall, slowly making the shoulders and backs of their jackets sodden and heavy. He wouldn’t let them sleep. There was nowhere for a dozen boys to sleep, anyway. Local gangs and tribes were watching them out of the darkness, out of blank windows and holes in crumbling walls.

  No one attacked them. Anyone who tried would have had a terrible surprise. They had not left the spoils of the watchhouse behind. They carried rifles and swords, wrapped in rags taken from the waste-heaps at the edge of the market. There were pistols and knives under their jackets. Their pockets were full of powder and bullets. They had the makings of an army now.

  I n the night, they passed through rag-hung courtyards under a great wall of concrete towerblocks. Snaking tunnels in the concrete opened onto deeper plazas. Jack scouted ahead, leaving Fiss in charge—and, on a second look at Fiss’s grey face, Turyk, too. And he hid behind a pile of broken bricks and looked ahead, down a tunnel into the deepest clearing, where a parade was passing, bearing torches and drums. Whirling women danced at the van. There was drumming deep in the earth. Maned men at the back came on all fours. A dreadful red giant stamped joyfully in their midst. Lights sparked in all the windows. Jack dug his dirty nails into his palms so that he would not join the dance. In the morning, he was not sure that it was not a dream.

  T hey stopped at the end of the night, on the debatable border between the Ward and Agdon Deep. “That’s far enough,” Jack said.

  “We’re into the Combine’s territory now,” Turyk agreed. “The Countess won’t extend her forces this far across the Ward. Not for the likes of us. She’d be too exposed.”

  Jack looked at Turyk with surprise. “That’s right,” he said. At least, it sounded right.

  They had found an abandoned stretch of canal. Its water had been diverted elsewhere, and its stones were dry. A ramshackle mess of empty boathouses stood by the water, their bricks and timbers not yet altogether stripped and carted away. There was a wide expanse of muddy ground all around them, crept over by growths of scrub and weed. The steel forges of Agdon sounded distantly down the hill. It was empty, lonely space: if they hid in the boathouses, they would see enemies approaching but would not themselves be seen coming and going. They began again.

  Food was the first priority. Across the mudflat, and a short walk through unfamiliar streets into Agdon, there was a great metal barn where the overseers of the forges doled out bread and beer to the workers. Jack’s boys knew how to do this very well by now, and came away with enough for all, with no alarm raised. They ate and drank and slept on the dirt for almost a day, even Jack.

  For a week, Jack let them get stronger. Agdon Deep was not rich—it made no luxuries and consumed none, and the wealth its factories earned went elsewhere—but it made useful goods, and its warehouses were full. It brought in simple food in bulk for its workers. Everything the Thunderers needed was there to be taken.

  He still didn’t discuss his plans for them. Safest to take one step at a time. They still had to rescue Aiden, and Beth, and the others; that would force them along the path he wanted.

  He was thinner now than he had been when he escaped from Barbotin. His limbs seemed lighter, and his face sharper. His eyes were brighter. Sometimes when he caught his reflection in windows, in water, there was a frightening shine in his eyes that brought him up short; he smiled brilliantly and confirmed to himself that he was in fact beautiful, and increasingly so, with every day of waiting, every day of holding his vision fluttering inside.

  One morning, when he couldn’t wait any longer, he came into the room where they sat on the dirt floor, playing with stolen cards, and said, “Stop that, and look at me. It’s all true. What you thought I could do. Look.” He stepped forward and up, into the rafters above them, and smiled down. They were stunned, then they started to cheer: Silk! Silk! Jack bloody Silk! When they were done, he settled to earth again, and said, “That’s how I got you out. That’s how we’re going to get the others out. We’re going back for them. I need you all with me. To search around, spy for our missing brothers; to be my lookouts; to take these”—hefting a rifle—“and be my army, if need be.”

  Turyk, nervously, said, “That’s mad, Jack. It’s great, but it’s mad. We were lucky to get away once. It’s good, what you did for us. But they’ll kill us if we try it again.”

  “You’d leave them behind? You’re free, so you’ll take it for yourself and leave behind those who took you in?”

  Turyk looked around for supp
ort, saying, “We just want to be left alone, find something to eat. What’s wrong with that?”

  Martin started to speak, but Jack cut him off. “You can go then. Be alone. Get out of here. This time I mean it. Get out.”

  Jack would accept no apology. This was important. After a few moments, Fiss stepped forward to say, “Like Jack says, Turyk. Get out. Martin, bring him some food, and a blanket and a knife, to take with him. Then that’s it.”

  The rest were his.

  B eth was back in Ma Fossett’s, the same place she had escaped from before. They’d added bars to the lower windows since she last got out, and wire around the outer fence, but they hadn’t troubled to bar the upper windows.

  Jack came to the high window of her dormitory at night and called for her, waking a roomful of girls who started to shriek, “It’s a ghost! A vampire!” They banged on the room’s bolted door.

  Beth came slowly to the window through the panicking flock, in her grey nightshirt, rubbing her eyes. “Are you real?”

  “Of course.”

  She looked down, beneath his hanging feet, and said, “You can fly. Like the little ones always thought you could.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, that’s a bit of news.”

  “The noise will bring guards. Take my hand.”

  She leaned out the window and looked down. They were on the fifth floor; the bushes below were barely visible.

  “We’ll come back for everyone else later. I just need you for now. If you come with me alone, just you, it’ll be like you were never here. I don’t want to raise any alarms. Yet.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Just take my hand.”

  There was the sound of someone unlocking the door, from the outside, shouting, “Quiet, you stupid girls! Be quiet!” Closing her eyes, Beth took Jack’s hand, and stepped out of the window.

  T hey hit Barbotin a few days later. It was easy. The House was utterly unprepared for anything like this. Jack brought a group of them up onto the roof, where they waited with pistols, to ambush the laundry party when they unlocked the iron door and emerged into the light. The workhouse boys dropped their baskets and ducked for cover, but the invaders were not there for them.

  Mr. Tar and Mr. Renfrew were with the laundry detail. They were overwhelmed at once. The Masters carried knuckledusters, and vicious barbed clubs, but no guns. They were used to beating down angry, frightened, underfed boys; they had never faced anything like this. Jack would have no killing—but he took their keys, and shot both men in the leg, to make sure they couldn’t follow him, and also for the sake of his feelings.

  Carswell, who had been his friend when they were both prisoners, was still with the laundry detail. Jack clapped the stunned boy on the shoulder and gave him a pistol, telling him, “You’re with us now.” Then they all went down into the shadows.

  He had heard that the Masters had a locked case of guns on the ground floor, where no boy was ever allowed to tread. But the Masters didn’t even try to arm themselves; when they heard what was coming through the House’s dark corridors, gaining numbers as it went, methodical and angry, inflicting measured repayment in blood, they ran, not stopping to lock the doors behind them. A great flood of pale youths followed, bursting out through the last, narrow door onto the wasteground around the House.

  Outside, more of the Thunderers waited, and tried to channel the flood, but most of the escapees vanished at once into the streets, like rats going to ground, like ghosts. “That’s all right,” Jack said. “We gave them their chance.”

  A few—the ones Jack knew were reliable—came with them across the Ward, back to the boathouse, where Jack explained that they could stay, so long as they helped with the next job, and the next.

  I t was a pleasant day for walking, at last, after months of winter; cool but bright and clear. On the way to Holbach’s house, Arjun stopped in a café in Foyle’s Ward for lunch. He sat under a linden tree, checking over his notes.

  A group of young men at the table behind him talked politics and war. Was the Gerent alive or dead? There had been no further violence for more than two months. Would the Thunderer strike again, or had the Countess made her point? It was all well-worn ground, discussed to death all over the city for months. They were very loud, though, perhaps drunk too early in the day. Unwisely loud for such a conversation; for all they knew, Arjun might have been a spy for the Countess.

  It was best not to be too close to people like that. You never knew. He paid the bill and headed around to Fallon Circle.

  A n excellent start,” Holbach said. “This will be very helpful. Now, was there anything of any interest in Sethre’s Daybook?”

  “Nothing of interest to you, I don’t think,” Arjun said. “Largely a matter of disputes over parish politics. Sethre felt strongly about simony. I doubt that you do.”

  They sat in Holbach’s study, drinking coffee and discussing Arjun’s work. The pile of books on and around the table was impossible—the city in microcosm, full of precarious towers and shadowed valleys; one day it might grow to swallow the real city. Piles of neglected correspondence sat on the outskirts like ghost towns. Holbach’s project had wind in its sails.

  The soldiers were gone now, leaving Holbach, to his great relief, to take his own chances. Their place had been taken by an army of scholars. The economist Dr. Kamminer had marked out a permanent ghetto within the book-city for his own texts. Dr. Branken kept a laboratory in Holbach’s attic, a tangle of glass and mirror and copper tubing that to Arjun’s eye looked like an exploded pipe organ. The playwright Liancourt seemed to live in the kitchen. Two jurists sat in the library, shouting at each other about the nature and purposes of the right of property.

  These were formal men, but in Holbach’s house, they left their wigs by the side of their chairs and threw aside their coats. They sat around the fire scribbling in their dingy undershirts. Paper flew back and forth between them like birds flocking from tree to tree, spire to spire.

  Arjun knew that he was only a small part of Holbach’s project. The expertise he had acquired was a narrow, peculiar one; a small immigrant population, centuries gone and forgotten. A single street in Holbach’s city of scholarship. Still, once a week or so, Holbach found time to hold these meetings, where they came back again and again to the Black Bull, and to the Tuvar’s theories about their vanished god.

  “Heirophant Teitu’s Daybook, on the other hand, was a real find. Haycock did well.” Arjun passed a pile of papers across the table. He fumbled in his jacket pockets, produced a sheaf of scribbled notes. “I’ve begun to translate. Teitu had the misfortune to live in the last days of the Bull.”

  “Distressing for him, but it serves us very nicely.”

  Arjun described the book. Teitu had been one of the Tuvar’s Hierophants in the community’s dying days, when the Bull had appeared less and less often, and finally stopped coming altogether. It had been painful for Arjun to read.

  A man Arjun had never seen before came into the study and rummaged in the books. Holbach introduced him. The man was an architect, apparently, and an engineer, and very famous. Arjun failed to catch his name.

  He found the buzz in Holbach’s house overwhelming after the silence and solitude of his scholar’s room in Stammer Gate. People grabbed him as he passed and lectured passionately on their research; everyone expected him to be an expert on everything, fascinated by everything. In the little anteroom to Holbach’s study, Branken had talked to him at length about the structure of the human eye (lenses, apparently, not unlike a telescope). In the hall downstairs, Arjun had asked Liancourt about the progress of his latest play, and was subjected to a bitter analysis of the travails of theatrical fund-raising. And not just scholars: three painters sat in the billiards room, drinking Holbach’s wine and smoking his cigars. Holbach was too busy to add to his collection, but his hospitality was still open. “When is the big man going to be done with all this, eh?” they’d asked Arjun, who’d shrugge
d and passed by.

  The explorers and the scholars met in corners, and whispered urgently to one another. They spoke in hints and codes and raised eyebrows and sly, electric smiles. They gathered upstairs, in the ballroom, where something was being built, something to which Arjun was not privy. He didn’t ask.

  And young men, students, or struggling artists, Arjun’s age, came to the house from distant reaches of the city, bringing charts and facts back with them, staying a few days before they were dispatched again. Explorers. Mapmakers. They came back with surveyor’s theodolites slung over their backs, the way a soldier might wear a rifle or a broadsword. Sometimes they wore those, too; they were often called on to visit dangerous places.

  The house celebrated when an expedition returned from the slums of Dreshkel, late but unscathed. There was grave concern when an expedition to the Mountain failed to return on time. The house’s occupants slowly accepted that it would not return at all. “No one’s yet gone that close to the Mountain and come back,” Arjun had heard the historian Rothermere saying, leaning over the billiard-table, lining up his shot; his coat was the same rich green as the felt. “I hear the streets fold in on you, up there, and you end up lost in strange places. You can meet mirror-selves, strange new versions of yourself in foreign streets, and you get confused or stolen, and never come back. It’s reckless. I’m sorry, but it is.”

  “What are we here for,” his opponent had replied, “if not to be reckless?”