Thunderer

by Felix Gilman

  Behind Arjun, one of the Countess’s redcoats turned his horse, its legs knitting in a fine circle, and set it into a charge toward him. The soldier’s face was resolute, and he held his sword level. Arjun could not quite manage to stand.

  A heavyset figure stepped over him and fired two pistols, one in each hand, with a crash and a stink of powder. One shot at least did its work, tearing the rider from his saddle to hang tangled in the reins. The horse reared in terror as Hoxton bent down, firmly gripped Arjun’s arm, and dragged him away.

  H oxton let go of Arjun’s arm as soon as he was upright, and strode off, reloading his guns, calling over his shoulder, “Hurry up if you’re coming.” Arjun limped after him. A group of young men in factory uniforms ran between them, holding iron pipes, charging the front; for a moment, Arjun was afraid that he had lost Hoxton, but he saw him again when the mob passed.

  No one stopped them. The Heath was emptying out. The riot-front had moved west, where the soldiers dismounted to pursue the hard core of the rioters into the dark of the Widow’s Bower. A few men and soldiers ran here and there in Hoxton’s path, but he hid his guns and kept his head down, and they left him alone.

  Arjun followed Hoxton to a copse by the edge of the Heath, where Olympia waited behind the trees. She no longer affected her eye-catching and finely tailored masculine dress, Arjun saw: instead, she wore a shapeless, anonymous grey-white smock.

  “Got ’im,” Hoxton said. “You were right, it was him. Took some finding; he’d walked himself into the thick of it.”

  “Thank you, Hoxton. Thank you. Olympia…”

  She cut Arjun off with a wave of her hand, and said, “We should get away from here.” They climbed over a low wall, and into a dark alley that ran between two rows of restaurants, and ran through the smells of spices and the stench of rotting food.

  T hey took a circuitous route back to an attic room in a backstreet in the docks, over a sailors’ pub. “I have given the landlord to understand that I am a whore,” she said, “and Hoxton my pimp. That makes you custom. Try to look the part. Call me Julia, if you need to call me anything.”

  The room was bare, except for a bed, and a blanket in the corner that, to judge from the weapons arranged around it, was Hoxton’s. Olympia sat on the bed and rubbed her brow.

  “You should go further away,” Arjun said. “We’re still in the Countess’s territory. If you go north, you may be safe.”

  “He’s not wrong,” Hoxton said.

  “Not yet. Holbach’s still alive. That bitch kept him alive, and you can bet she’s keeping him close to her.”

  “What can you do for Holbach now?”

  “I don’t know yet. I saved some of the others. I persuaded the prosecutors that Branken and Rothermere, and a few others, weren’t involved in the play. I made sure your name never came up. I persuaded them to hold off on condemning the Atlas itself, and that gave some of the others time to go to ground. But then they charged me, too, to shut me up, and no, I don’t know if there’s anything more I can do, not from hiding. But I can’t leave Holbach. We might still recover one day, if we still have Holbach. You should go. There’s no reason for you to stay here. I don’t think they’re looking for you, too, but they might.”

  “Holbach’ll give ’em your name sooner or later, if they question him,” Hoxton said.

  “No,” Arjun said. “I won’t leave Holbach either. Or you.”

  “Because you think he’ll help you find your fucking Voice?”

  “Partly, yes. Only partly. I’m sorry. I do want to help. Him, and you.”

  She glared at him. “We were trying to change the whole city. All you ever cared about was that, that nothing.”

  “That’s not true.”

  Hoxton checked over his weapons. He held up a heavy black pistol by its barrel, and asked Arjun, “Can you handle this?”

  “A little.”

  “Ever shot a man?”

  “I’m afraid I have.”

  “Really? You? Right then, good.” He handed it over. “Keep it hidden. You’re not a child or a fool, so I don’t have to tell you that if you ever have to use it against the watch, you’re already as good as dead.”

  They were quiet for a while longer in the hot little room. Olympia’s face was very pale and grim. Hoxton, by contrast, had acquired an efficient, soldierly sangfroid. There was clearly something military in his background, and he reverted to it wholeheartedly. He went out for food, and brought back beer, and vinegary fish in stale batter and newspaper.

  Arjun asked, “Did Holbach learn anything about the Typhon?”

  “I don’t know,” Olympia said. “There was so little time. And it’s the least of our problems now, anyway.”

  “I hope so.”

  “You had me worrying about ghosts and phantoms and monsters. This is what’s important: power and politics and princes, and the laws, and the gaols, and the censors, and the watch.”

  It seemed that any answer would only infuriate Olympia further. Arjun took a swig of beer, and said, “I saw Pieta.”

  “Oh gods, is she all right?”

  “Yes. I gave her some money and sent her home.”

  “Thank you. I’m sorry. Gods, I didn’t even think about her. I was with Holbach, busy trying to fight off those charges, and then when they arrested him I was here, hiding. I didn’t think.”

  They ate in silence for a time, then Olympia said, “It was that fucking play. It wasn’t even anything to do with us. We were so careful, and we had such plans, and then that thing got out of our control and went bad, and we paid for it.”

  “It was a strange thing,” Arjun said. “It was as if the play’s new authors wanted to goad the Countess into destroying the play, and the Atlas. I wondered at first how Nicolas could be so reckless, but if you say he wasn’t responsible, who was?”

  “I don’t know. I tried to tell the Countess’s men we didn’t have anything to do with it, that we even tried to stop it, but they didn’t believe us. But I agree. I think someone was trying to force the Countess to act. Trying to destroy us.”

  “I wasn’t expecting the riot. I hadn’t thought the Atlas was so well-loved. Did you have a hand in that?”

  “No. I was just there to watch. What else could I do but fucking watch? But there were always people who loved us, people who had hopes for what we were doing. And they loved the play, you know? Your play, too. For them to see what that woman did to Liancourt…Gods, I can’t believe she turned the Thunderer’s cannons on the crowd. She had soldiers there, it was under control, she didn’t need that, that abomination.”

  “She didn’t. I was watching the guns when the explosions hit. They never fired. I’m sure.”

  “Then somebody brought powder-charges into the crowd.”

  “It did look as though the Thunderer attacked the crowd.”

  “Perhaps it was meant to. If you’re sure of what you saw. Perhaps even the Countess wouldn’t be that reckless. But people will think she did it, and they’ll never forgive her. Perhaps someone meant them to, to make them hate her.”

  They sat in silence for a while longer. “Gods,” Olympia said, “what use am I like this? I can do nothing from hiding.”

  Arjun turned the bottle between his fingertips, and thought. There was shouting in the street. He went to the window, and watched a group of men stagger down the street. There were about a dozen of them. They were too drunk to agree on a slogan, so some of them cursed the Countess and her monstrous weapon, and some cried for Jack Silk, some for the Atlas or Liancourt, and some for freedom, or truth. The man at the front waved a fistful of silk threads. They went into the Red Lion.

  “Jack Silk could free Holbach,” he said.

  “Well, yes, if he exists. Sadly, none of us have been gifted with miraculous powers, or an army of wild children, or any of the rest of the things they say he has.”

  “Maybe we can find him. I think I may have seen him once, before he became notorious. Did I ever tell you? It wa
s just before I first met you. The Flame, the white robes, attacked the street I was staying on. There was a fight. There were some boys, who I think drove the Flame off. One of them…I only saw his back, but he was wearing a shirt that streamed with bright silk, the way they describe Jack Silk. There were always gangs of children around Moore Street, hiding in the derelict buildings. I think he might have been one of them. He might be somewhere in Shutlow. We can look for him there.”

  “We’ll never find him. That’s a fantasy. We might as well wait for your Voice to rescue Holbach.”

  “I don’t want to go to Shutlow. The Typhon was there once. It may still be. But do you have a better idea?”

  E very day for the next week, they crept up from the docks into Shutlow, and split up, and hung around in the pubs and halls and churches, asking after Jack Silk.

  Hoxton took to the work easily. He made a convincing dock-hand or factory-rat, or laborer, or criminal, depending on the company. He bought drinks and made crude jokes. If anyone had known anything, they’d have told him, but they didn’t.

  Arjun couldn’t easily pass for a local or fake nonchalance the way Hoxton could, but he was good at making himself inconspicuous, and listening. He had a well-trained ear; if he focused, he could listen to a half-dozen conversations at once.

  Olympia found it frustrating. She needed to shine, to shock; it was hard for her to be forgettable. Conversation dried up around her. She was asking about a dangerous subject. She seemed like a dangerous person, and it was a dangerous time. It was hard for her, and it was made worse by the sense that she was neglecting her duty to the Atlas. There was a report in the Era that the Countess had arrested fourteen book-dealers, all over the city, on suspicion of conspiracy to circulate and sell the forthcoming edition of the Atlas. Olympia knew that the Countess was right about eleven of them.

  On the second day, on her way through the streets, Olympia passed the building that had been the Great York Printworks; it was boarded up, BY ORDER OF THE COUNTESS. “I should be doing something,” she said, back at the docks that night. “They were our people. I was the one who brought half of them into the Atlas. I should be fighting for them.”

  “You’re a fugitive, too,” Arjun pointed out. “You know there’s nothing you can do. You know that.” She glared silently.

  On the second night, all three of them went to Moore Street to search the ruins. Hoxton crowbarred a way in for them. There was a tiny group of starveling infants in the Black Moon; Hoxton caught one by the arm as they fled, but he knew nothing of the Thunderers, only the same stories as everyone else.

  They heard a lot of grumbling about the Countess, which turned, with drink, into angry denunciations of her tyranny. And they heard empty fantasizing about Jack Silk, who would lead an army of children to take revenge on whomever the speaker saw as his or her particular oppressor—but nothing useful.

  It was hard. They must have looked like spies. People were suspicious, and rightly so: all week, Shutlow was rocked by violence. The riot on the Heath was followed by another the next day, during which much of the Widow’s Bower was burned. Smaller disturbances broke out constantly. The Countess’s soldiers marched in force in the streets, and crowds formed to hurl bricks and ordure at them, before running back into the alleys.

  It was not how Arjun remembered Shutlow. Its citizens were angry—angry and full of frustrated hope. When the Countess’s soldiers marched down the street, shouting at the windows that the city’s good order, and the will of the gods, required that the citizens remain peaceful and quiet, Shutlow had something to throw back at them: the Atlas, the Thunderers, The Blessing.

  Even so, it would probably have gone nowhere, the citizens would probably all have choked back their anger and sulked silently into their beers, same as always; but now, after months of Silk’s prison-breaking, the backstreets and the flophouses and the bars were full of desperate and rootless young men, with nothing to do and no fear of the watch. It was as if they’d been waiting. Arjun wondered if the Bird—it was Holbach’s theory that the Bird was responsible for the Silk phenomenon—if the Bird had intended that consequence when it had worked its change on the boy. Maybe, maybe not. But the scum Silk had freed were natural recruits for the rioters. Possibly natural leaders, too; Arjun didn’t investigate them too closely. Once, he was sitting in the Grey Goose, listening, when a line of soldiers marched past outside, and all the pub’s people got up at once and ran out to pelt the soldiers with glasses and run for their lives. Arjun fled through the back door.

  He read the Era and learned that the riots were by no means confined to Shutlow. They were much worse in Fourth Ward. Huge crowds gathered on the Heath. The docks roiled with it. The rioters wanted Holbach released; they wanted the play and the Atlas un-banned; they wanted the Thunderer scrapped. Mostly, though, they made no demands. They were just angry. The Countess was burned in effigy a hundred times.

  Sometimes, Arjun heard secrets, whispered in the back of pubs: meeting-places and times, a man who could provide guns, plans for protests, rumors that other protests had been compromised. Never the secret he was looking for. For all the talk about Silk, there was no hint that anyone knew where he was or how to reach him: he might not have been real at all.

  Businesses closed down. Their owners watched the streets nervously from behind boarded windows, clutching their guns. The mills of Fourth Ward shut down and locked their gates, rather than take the risk of allowing in workers in a machine-breaking mood. The idle weavers of the Ward took to making banners.

  The Countess did not sit still. Arjun saw more than one riot put down with force. She had special soldiers for that sort of work; he saw them around more and more often. Her regular forces wore red coats and plumes; these men wore mottled grey and flat caps. These men were not for show; they were for killing.

  Arjun recalled that Girolamo had written of his experiences as a soldier in Ararat. He had said that it was not like being a soldier anywhere else in the world. Ararat’s wars were fought between city-lords, in city streets. No serried ranks clashing in open fields; instead, there were dark-clad men shooting each other from high windows, or hacking at each other in alleys. Girolamo had said that it was worse than any sort of warfare he had ever seen. Seeing the bloody aftermath of a protest that had met the grey men, Arjun could believe it. He wished there was something he could do for the survivors, but there was nothing. He no longer belonged in the city. It was not his affair.

  In the narrow streets, stray bullets might smash in your window and kill you. The advice of those who had seen that sort of thing before was to pile up furniture in the window: an upturned table, a mattress, the dusty back of a heavy armoire. It made the streets claustrophobic and unfriendly.

  The Countess was not the only Estate to claim authority over the rioting territories, but her rivals did not help her. For the time being, the crowd’s anger was directed solely at the Countess, and perhaps her rivals preferred not to become targets themselves. Perhaps they were enjoying her humiliation. Chairman Cimenti issued a statement to the effect that he regretted the loss of life and damage to property, and hoped that the proper authorities would achieve a peaceful and equitable resolution of the situation, with all dispatch. It must have infuriated her.

  The churches were split. The priests of Lavilokan issued sermons in coded support of the rioters. Lavilokan was a spirit of masks and mirrors and smoke, prone to manifestation among theaters and theater-folk, and her priests took the suppression of The Blessing and the execution of Liancourt as an affront. The order of Uktena celebrated both sides’ ferocity for its own sake. Tiber demanded submission to the lawful authorities; Tiber’s priests preached it in the streets, suffering the catcalls and projectiles of the mob with patient disdain.

  Some groups of rioters took to carrying banners marked with the Pillar of Fire. Arjun overheard an unusually articulate protestor explaining the symbolism to a reporter from the Sentinel: “What do the priests know? Tiber stands for justi
ce and punishment. We want justice. The Countess went too far, she’s lawless now. We want justice. That’s all we want.” Arjun checked later; the Sentinel had not dared to publish the story.

  He heard some of the rioters singing songs he had written for The Blessing. Liancourt’s words—asking why decent people should be at the mercy of arbitrary and cruel powers, cloaked in the authority of the city and the gods—but Arjun’s music. His own anger and pain fueling Liancourt’s complaints, and now those of the crowds. It bothered him.

  “You know there’s a hundred other reasons why they’re rioting,” Olympia said as they walked quickly away from the scene of a clash between rioters and militia, heads down. “You’ve been here long enough to understand that. They didn’t do it just because you gave them a good protest song.”

  “I know. But I shouldn’t have been a part of it. I shouldn’t have made the Voice part of this violence.”

  “Maybe you should have. Maybe it’s about time for something like this.”

  “It’s terrible.”

  “It was terrible before, too. Weren’t you paying attention?”

  “I’ve stayed too long. I’ve done the wrong things.”

  O n the fifth day, Arjun was the first of them to return to the room in the docks. He had passed the Cypress earlier, wondering whether Defour was still there, still alive, but had not dared to go in; he couldn’t trust her not to report him. Besides, he felt a gathering darkness about the building’s windows that put him in mind of the Typhon, and though he was sure that it was only imagination, he could not concentrate for the rest of the day. He went back to think.

  Hoxton came back early, too, his only explanation: “Got into a fight. Lot of wrong things were said. Best not to stay on the scene, you know?” He sat in the room’s sagging sofa, and said, “So there’s bad news, Mr. A. Three watchmen in the Red Lion, asking around after you. Wanted on charges of sedition, by order of the Countess. Inflaming the populace.”