Thunderer

by Felix Gilman

  “I’ll keep breaking open your prisons as long as I can. There are more and more who follow me every day. We’ll kill you if you try to stop us or slow us. We will.”

  “Oh, no. I don’t mean to stop you, even if I could. I just want to know how you do what you do. No, in fact I’ve written, well, not me personally, but a man under my direction, on reform of our penal institutions; our practices of incarceration are a horror, Jack, yes, and I’ve campaigned against them since before you were born, ah, so I do understand what you’re doing—”

  “Shut up. You don’t. I followed the ship across the city. I saw what it did to Stross End.”

  “Oh. I’m so very, very sorry, Jack.”

  The clock measured out a further span of silence. Jack sat silhouetted in the window. Gusts of feeling twisted his thin shoulders. He was not in control of himself, Holbach could see.

  “So how does it work, then, wise man?”

  “I don’t know, Jack. I wish I did. If you could tell me how it started. Was it when the Bird returned? Did you call on it? The gods’ purposes are obscure, but they can be understood….”

  “How long will it last?”

  “I have no idea. If I could examine you…”

  “No. Don’t look.”

  Holbach snapped his head back to the ceiling. The molding was a dark map of shadows.

  “What would you do with it, if you knew how it worked?”

  “I’d share it, if I could. Find how it’s done and share it. If it works that way. I’d lift us all up, the whole city.”

  “That’s what I’m doing. I’ll free everyone, every prison in the city, and I’ll bring them with me. The power just gets stronger, the more I do it.”

  “But what you’re doing—something like it, maybe, yes, but what you’re doing makes no sense, Jack. I understand that you’re angry, but what’s going to happen to the people you free? Hundreds of them—are they going to starve? Or what? And they’ll kill you all if you keep doing it. You’re still just one boy. You’re building nothing that’ll last. And the balladeers will be just as happy to sing of your death as they are your fight. Perhaps I can help you: tomorrow we can talk about—”

  The door opened, and light came in, and the dark figure at the window fell away at once. In an ink-stained nightshirt and cap, holding a candle, the botanist Dr. Grishman shuffled into the room to rummage among the books on the table. He didn’t notice Jack; his eyes were fixed on the dark cluttered floor.

  Holbach did not bother to go to the window to look out after Jack. Instead, he roused his aching bones, and said, “Midnight oil, Grishman? Good for you. Can I help you look?”

  H aycock spent the spring moving from place to place, burrowing furtively north, and west, and north, and east for a week or two, and then north again. He took two cases with him. One was full of books, which he sold off for food and lodgings as he went—and, traveling well away from all his usual haunts and his regular clients, he was reminded again, every fucking day, how cheap, how greedy, how ignorant his fellow citizens were, what thieving vermin they were, how they took every opportunity to gouge and cheat a fellow down on his luck.

  The other case contained Haycock’s three ratty suits, and a wide assortment of charms and amulets and fetishes and inscriptions and philters and wards against evil. He picked up more as he traveled. He stank alternately of incense and booze.

  If he drank enough, maybe he could forget the shape he had seen, coiling and seething coldly in the grey mists that pooled in the Cypress’s lonely beer garden; he could forget how it had looked at him, how it had hated him. He could forget how his skin crawled with the knowledge that he had been marked.

  In his jacket pocket Haycock carried, crumpled now, the pages he’d cut from Thinkers of Our Age. Cuttle! There was a man one could deal with. There was a man who knew how things worked—a man who might save Haycock’s hide, in return for which there was nothing, nothing Haycock would not sell. If only Haycock could find Cuttle. For the time being, the important thing was to put as much distance as possible between himself and that little foreign Arjun bastard whose fault this all was.

  North again, then, toward the Mountain. Haycock wasn’t sure why, but it seemed like just plain common sense that that was the way to find Cuttle, or someone, anyone, who might know what the score was. After a couple of months Haycock’s money ran out. He swore and cursed his own kindness, his own damn fool kindness, in leaving the rest of the book behind to warn Arjun—Haycock could have bought lodging for days more with that fucking thing! Haycock slept in the parks or under the arches. He was too old for sleeping rough. He came down with a cough, and a dead numbness in his legs. He tried to sweat the fever out, sleeping in an abandoned lockup full of damp and rust and mold, in the shadow of a disused rendering plant. He knew it was a mistake—the god was always at home in abandoned and ugly places—but what fucking choice did he have? His lungs burned and unpleasant visions came and went. When the door banged open and leaves and rain swirled in and behind them he saw that unspeakable formless poisonous thing, all he could do was croak in despair: Fuck you, then, monster.

  A rjun woke up on a cool Bounds-day morning, on the edge of Olympia’s bed. There was a sticky splash of red wine across the tangled sheets. Olympia was not there. She was an early riser, as Arjun himself had always been, back in the Choristry, and during his time of hard travel. I’m becoming dissolute in my idleness, he thought.

  Olympia’s girl, Pieta, had filled the ewer in the toilet with warm water. Arjun shaved with a crisp blade, then pulled on black trousers and a loose white shirt. On his way out, he passed Pieta, and spoke with her for a while. Olympia always addressed Pieta by name, and encouraged her opinions, and Arjun saw no reason not to follow Olympia’s practices in her house.

  “I saw The Blessing again,” she said. “At the Palace. I took my sister. I had to have her see it. She cried and cried when the little girl’s father was taken from her.”

  “Good. We wanted tears. Was the singer adequate?”

  “She did you proud, Mr. A. Pretty, too.”

  “No riots? No torch-bearing savages? No censors?”

  “Some loony Lavilokine stood up at the back, and held this big mirror around, shouting ‘Look at your blasphemy and repent!’ like they do, but a bunch of lads from the soap-works—you know ’em by the smell, you know?—gave him a knock on the head. And there were militia sniffing around the edges, a few of ’em trying to look like normal people, you know, but they weren’t doing anything. Miss O. says they’re scared to do anything. Says the play is too popular to put it down.”

  “Maybe. If they ever stop being scared, though, it’ll take more than the soap-works lads to save us.”

  “Ah, I’m not frightened. Oh—not that I mean to say you are, Mr. A.”

  “No offense taken, Pieta.”

  No, he could see that she wasn’t frightened; but then, she was very young. Arjun wished her a good day, and went out.

  T he Marriage Blessing was a ridiculous, triumphant, blazing success. It had its first night at the Radiant Crown, on the fringes of Harp Street—a boxy little outfit, whose name was a joke at the expense of its spare grey space, and whose underfed and urgent impresarios were thrilled beyond belief to be launching the new play of the great Joseph Liancourt. Arjun could see their thin shoulders square and their chests inflate as Liancourt told them of his plan, and as they realized that he meant it, it was not some cruel joke. Arjun had not, until then, understood how famous and well-loved Liancourt was.

  When the first night opened, the Crown was so packed that it seemed people were hanging from the rafters. Many more were turned aside at the gate. “It has to be this way,” Liancourt had explained. “The larger theaters won’t take it, even for me. Too dangerous. But it’s better this way, anyway. Open small at first. Let it gather momentum. Sneak up on the censors. Make people beg to come and see it. Make it seem like a secret, something they have to work for. It worked for The Sign, and by gods
it’ll work for this.” But his confidence broke on opening night, and he fretted and tugged at his hair, back in the wings, peeking out at the seething dark hall as if every person in it wore a white robe and carried a flaming brand just for him.

  Arjun stood near him. Unlike Liancourt, he had nothing to do and no one to fuss over: he trusted the musicians they’d hired. And he had no reputation at stake: he’d refused to be named anywhere as the play’s composer, saying that the music was not his creation, that he’d only echoed it—which he knew Liancourt found aggravatingly pious, but the truth was the truth. Still, he was almost as nervous as Liancourt, and he was listening more to the crowd than to the music. He wanted very badly to be understood. He liked to think it was more than vanity.

  The Blessing followed two stories. One was a sentimental piece, a story of a girl whose father was taken into the Iron Rose for crimes that were not specified, but were strongly implied to be a matter of subversive or blasphemous speech; her mother died quickly of an illness that could not, due to the family’s straitened circumstances, be treated, leaving the poor girl to be cast out into the city’s streets, among criminal folk. She would find that all her attempts to better her situation and, later, to find a husband, would be thwarted by the machinations of shadowy figures. And the second story was a comic one, with flashes of anger: a solid craftsman, plump, a little bald, and not-so-young, whose own attempts to marry were frustrated again and again by mocking aristocrats and his own shabby status. Arjun lent both characters the Voice’s song.

  This was the sting: Liancourt had added a chorus to the play, masked figures resembling no particular god, but clearly godlike in nature, who mocked all of his heroes’ efforts to escape their situation, who moved the city’s powers around like chess-pieces to thwart them. And every time a cruel boss or a smirking lord or a criminal thug denied something to Liancourt’s heroes, those avatars of repression would shrug and point to the chorus behind them, and say, “But the gods say no”—and, on a good night, the audience would yell back at the stage in anger.

  This was the promise: both protagonists were saved by the discovery of a book of wisdom and wit, with a magical map that plotted the way out of their respective traps. It was not safe for Liancourt explicitly to propagandize for the Atlas, but the play’s code was not subtle: it was easily understood that The Blessing was heralding the Atlas’s return, was clearing its way.

  It closed, of course, with dual weddings, and a birth, and the overthrow of the wicked and the unmasking of false gods, and with the jubilant pouring of the cast onto the crowded stage, and then with the most tremendous crescendo of bells. An extraordinary number of bells. Arjun had insisted on the bells. They used neighborhood children to bang them. Wedding bells, prayer bells, fire bells, warning bells, tinkling chimes and deep bass notes, all rising and spiraling and rejoicing and raging together like a lightning-storm from which emerged—slowly, imperceptibly, at last—the simple pure melody of the Voice.

  (Arjun had studied the acoustics of the theater intently, and experimented carefully. He’d wanted to make it overwhelming, but not—not quite—intolerable.)

  The first-night crowd wept and howled and, at the end, stamped their feet. Liancourt hugged cast and crew, then collapsed in a prop chair, exhausted with relief and joy. He beckoned Arjun and Olympia, and in an exaggerated croak of exhaustion, said, “Come here. Don’t make me get up; I’m too old, and you’re too young. We reached ’em, no? There’s something in them that was ready to be moved.”

  Over the next few weeks, the play moved out of the Crown and into the Key, the street’s largest playhouse. Then Liancourt was happy to let it out of his hands, and allowed companies all over the city to stage their own performances, hastily knocking together scenery, making work for even the worst singers and actors. The play made it as far north (at least) as Stross End, in an iron-walled hall at the base of one of the surviving clocktowers, and as far west as the Sacral Wall, as far east as the docks of Red Mire. Some stripped-down versions, with minor characters cut away and ambiguities resolved, made their way into the streets, and were performed by enthusiastic amateurs from the backs of carts, for tossed pennies or food. The street-players cut out the orchestra, but they always kept in the main themes of the music. It worked well even on crude instruments. Sometimes they banged out the bells on pots and kettles; it was a bloody awful noise but the crowds stamped and cheered anyway. There was an energy to it that persisted even in the shabbiest circumstances.

  The churches staged protests and vigils, but for every passerby they drove away, they drew another curious one in.

  The white robes closed down a few productions with fire, but others sprang up. At the Summit, the robed children rushed the stage and beat the heroine with brands in the glare of the stagelight, then fled into the crowd before the watch could come. Olympia had known the actress, and she and Arjun went to visit the poor woman in the hospital, to promise that the Atlas-makers, by which they meant Holbach, would compensate her for her ruined career.

  The Era’s editor warned that the play was a dangerous and reckless subversion of the city’s fragile order, and should be stamped out forthwith, while the Sentinel praised it rapturously, as a fine flowering of the polyphony and creativity that was Ararat at its best. After a couple of weeks, the papers reversed their positions, to keep the fight fresh.

  The censors sniffed around—stood disapprovingly at the back of the theaters, sent Liancourt threatening letters on thick official paper—but the play was too popular to be closed down, and too artfully vague. Besides, the censors were too busy with the ballads of Jack Silk, liberator, gaolbreaker, and the sudden parades of citizens dressed in brightly dyed tatters and rags, the wild anarchic street theater. That was far more blantantly subversive than Liancourt’s play, and took all their attention.

  Arjun went to a few performances, to see how the singers handled their parts, but otherwise he took no part in it. It was not his job to train them or direct them. It was no longer his business. He directed inquisitive journalists from the Era and the Herald to talk to Liancourt instead.

  He took to walking the streets again, renewing his old search. For two days, he went out by himself, rising in the morning, taking a carriage north until midday, then wandering, following whatever music he heard.

  On the third day, he slept late, and when he woke, he found that Olympia was already back from her morning’s meeting with an official of the First Citizen’s Office of Doctrinal Correction, and was sorting her files in the study. “Oh, it ended almost before it began,” she said, “with screaming and impotent threats on both sides. Not dignified, sadly. Horrid little man.”

  She was free for the rest of the day, so he pulled her away from her papers, and they took a carriage together; Arjun told the driver to choose a direction at random. They went north, until they passed a wedding on the banks of the river. The wedding party were dressed in white and gold, and protected by a heavy guard: it was a joining of great houses. The party danced stiffly to an orchestra on the pier. Arjun stopped the carriage, and they sat by the river’s edge, listening to the music.

  The grim black prison-bulk of the Iron Rose loomed incongruously in the distance behind the stately dancers. Further down the river’s banks, the RiverHouse Theater’s banners advertised The Blessing. Olmypia pointed to the banners. “So, do you want to hear my theory?”

  “Certainly.”

  “It’s rather good. I think the play’s success comes down to this: the threat of war is over. No further attacks for months. Stross End was the first and the last. The Thunderer is almost vanished from the skies. The Countess rolled dice with the city; she could have sparked total war, great rolling waves of blood and fire back and forth across our streets, but it didn’t happen. Renegotiation of borders and tribute went on over our heads, secret moves in the great game. And then after months of fear, without any official word, without any surrender or treaty, we all realized that it was over, forgotten, and who know
s when that happened? I have superb sources of information, Arjun, and I was in the dark, too. But if it hasn’t happened now, it won’t. And so all that pent-up tension and fear had to go somewhere. What first presented itself? The Blessing. And the Thunderers, too, I suppose. The city’s new obsessions: both ways for everyone to say, ‘It’s over, we can, we will, move on.’”

  “I don’t think that can be all of it.”

  She laughed. “Is that injured pride of authorship? Holbach’s hangers-on rubbing off on you at last? Of course your music is important, too.”

  “I meant that the city’s very big; I’m sure many people find many different things in the play. As many people hate it as love it. Anyway, it wasn’t my music. I just echoed it.”

  “Oh gods. How pious. Oh.” She looked at him. “That’s what we’re out for today, isn’t it? Looking for your Voice. You’re starting that again. I thought you’d lost interest. I thought we’d given you something else to think about.”

  He looked out over the grey water. “The Atlas has been a pleasant diversion. I don’t mean to insult you by putting it that way. But I’ve done what I can for you. When I wrote that music for Liancourt, I looked inside myself, and the Voice was still there, waiting. It’s time to move on, and there’s nowhere else I can go, nothing else I can do, but search for it.”

  “Oh, well. I knew you were mad. We could have talked about it, you know. I wouldn’t have understood, but I would have made sympathetic noises. So, let’s get up and get on with it, then.”

  They wandered along the river until it started to get dark. They found nothing, of course. She teased him, but that was all right. He didn’t mind. He saw no reason why his quest should be a solemn matter, and it was pleasant not to be alone.

  A few days later, Olympia was woken by a messenger from Cimenti’s Bureau of Printing and Publication, who left behind an official letter on plain grey paper, in the ugly print of Cimenti’s typing-machines. It read: Prisonr’s Request is GRANTED. Sentence is Liftd. Prepartions for Prsioner’s Release Are To Proceed Accordinlgy. The date-stamp was weeks old. She stared at it blankly, then said, tentatively, “Nicolas?”