by Felix Gilman
“It was only a matter of time.”
“You’re taking it calmly, sir. That’s good. You might want to grow a beard or something, or dye your hair. The Countess is busy right now, what with all this foolishness in the streets. But it won’t last forever; people get tired. They forget why they were angry. They decide they can live with things, after all. I’ve seen it happen. And then she’ll turn her attention to those who she’ll hold responsible, and that’ll be us. If you don’t mind my asking, sir, and you’re not in a position to mind these days, if you don’t mind my saying: why are you staying? Suppose we find Silk, suppose we do get the Professor out, suppose he can find you your Voice, what then?”
“I don’t know. Why do you stay, Hoxton? You never seemed to care much for the Atlas. If you don’t mind my saying.”
“Not your business, sir, I’m afraid. There’s a debt owed to the mistress. We’ll not discuss its nature. I got some history, not the kind you discuss. Ask her, maybe. But that brings me back to my point. Seems the mistress is following you for the moment. We’ll see how long that lasts. Let me say this: you’re not thinking more than one step ahead. You’re not planning. You’re waiting to be saved, and you think then you won’t have to wake up the next morning and take a shit. I’ve followed people like that in my time, in all kinds of capacities. Leads to undesirable consequences, you understand? Time to look to the real world. You got enemies, now, real ones. Think on it.”
T oward the end of the week, things got worse. Preceded by rumor and frightened whispers, the white robes came to Shutlow. They boiled up from the Ward, or they came down by the river. It was hard to say. There were so many of them. At first, no one was sure what side they were on; they clashed with the rioters and the soldiers alike. But they made their position clear; they shouted it in hoarse voices as they marched down the street, so that there could be no confusion. They were there in the name of the Fire; in the name of order, and justice, to stamp out riot and insurrection. That their activities also put them in conflict with the Countess’s men did not seem to trouble them.
They had guns now. That was new. They were dreadfully vicious. They tore into protests, wounding and killing, then remained, after they had driven off the protestors, to fight the soldiers. They struck from the rooftops sometimes, and sometimes they swaggered down the street, carrying their flaming brands, enforcing their strict code.
They did not like to see unaccompanied women, and they left scars to remind transgressors of their views. It was no longer safe for Olympia to go anywhere without Hoxton’s protection.
By the middle of the second week, the white robes were on every street corner. They tore books off the market stalls, and burned them. They torched the gambling dens and the whorehouses, and made a spectacle of beating the whores in the street.
The soldiers struck back at them, and killed many. The white robes were only children, and too fanatical to be good soldiers, but there were so many of them, and the Countess was only one of the city’s many rulers. She didn’t control very much, really: Shutlow, a share of Ar-Mouth, Barbary and the Ward, most of the Heath, a few other streets, here and there. The Flame poured in from all over the city. There were far more of them than of the Countess’s men. They were an angry ocean.
Arjun watched them from the high window of the room in the docks. The white robes, the grey soldiers, the dirty prison clothes of the desperate escapees, the drab of Shutlow’s angry citizens, the filthy brown rags of the Ward. It was as if the hand of a stupid and thoughtless god had taken hold of the Atlas-makers’ great map, and crushed it all together so that its colors ran together and its lines were all torn and ruined.
When, early in the next week, the bright colors of the Thunderers joined the clash, it came as no surprise.
J ack had come to Mass How to watch the movements of the guards at the Parliament’s Oak Street Gaol. The Thunderers had opened it before, more than a month ago, but he wanted to do it again. It was a fine game. He watched from the neighboring rooftops, and from the night sky.
Mass How had closed its borders. It stationed its citizen militia along the escarpment to keep out the rioters.
Jack had barely heard of the riots before leaving the hideout and crossing Fourth Ward to come to watch the Oak Street Gaol. Fiss and Aiden had been talking about the news out of Shutlow, but he’d barely paid attention; he had other obsessions.
Now, though, he looked down from Mass How into Shutlow, stretched out at the foot of the escarpment, and watched the fires dotting the dark streets. He drifted down the hill and watched from behind the chimneys. He saw the rioters clash with the grey-coated soldiers. He saw a man at the front of the mob raising a fistful of bright fabric, and shout, “Silk! Thunder!”
“Yes,” he hissed. When the man fell, and a grey coat loomed over him with his club raised, Jack shot down from the roof and cut the club from the soldier’s hand, then disappeared onto the other side of the street so fast no one could have been sure what happened.
He watched the arrival of the white robes with hate. He saw them set up their barricades in the streets, demanding gestures of submission from anyone who tried to pass. He saw them bludgeon down the rioters who wore his colors. They were willing and eager gaolers. He could not abide them.
When he had seen enough, he crossed back over Fourth Ward, and entered the boathouse through an upper window, into the loft, where Fiss was talking to Aiden. “I saw the riots,” Jack said. “It’s magnificent. Like they’re all with us, at last. But the white robes are there, too. Hundreds of ’em. Putting the riots down, in Tiber’s name. Ashes, and they call it order.”
“Gods,” Fiss said. “How bad is it?”
“Bad. But it doesn’t have to be. We can do something about it. We beat them before, remember? We’re so much stronger now. We can bring them all under our wing.”
The boys gathered in the room below, at the foot of the loft’s ladder, listening up to Jack and Fiss’s conversation. Jack stepped out to the edge overlooking them. “What are we for, if we allow this? Is this our city or theirs?”
Fiss and Aiden looked at each other nervously, but the boys below cheered. Namdi cheered loudest, at the front.
They had to wait a while for some of their number to come back from thieving in the market, and to check over their weapons, then they followed Jack back across the Ward. In Jack’s widening wake, they moved almost like he did, unaware of their own speed and grace, over the crumbling roofs, under dark scudding clouds.
T hey no longer went out alone. It was less efficient to go everywhere as a threesome, and they were more likely to draw attention from those who might be hunting them, but the streets were simply too dangerous and too frightening to be alone.
They were in the Ghentian Hall, on the edge of Barbary, not far from Moore Street. It was a cavernous, many-leveled terra-cotta structure, aping the Mass How style, but uglier, cheaper, cracked and dirty. The interior was smoky and hot and noisy, sticky with spilled beer. Barmaids hustled through the crowd in a state of half-undress, dodging and slapping at pawing hands. Grey-coated soldiers roved in groups of two or three, holding pistols or pikes, glaring suspiciously. Some in the crowd glared back. Others were happy to see them; at least they kept the Flame away.
The three of them did not sit together—that would have made them conspicuous—but they kept an eye on one another. Hoxton was down in the pit, backslapping and joking with an even larger man, a Ghentian, brown-suited and walrus-mustached, both of them roaring and laughing. Olympia was talking to one of the barmaids. Arjun could see them both from where he sat, on one of the raised platforms, by one of the bars, listening.
“…not going to that temple again, not after that. I won’t be told it’s Atenu’s will that I bow down to that bitch, after what she’s done. She turned a bloody warship on that crowd. I hear there’s a preacher in Chalk Street has some bloody balls. Who’ll come with me?”
“…lost another to the lung-rot. We’ll have to sh
ut up shop if we lose another, not that there’s any custom now. That’s what drives me mad: they say that those Atlas-makers were working on a cure, could have saved us all, and then the Countess smashes ’em down just because they dared hurt her feelings. I don’t know, I just don’t know.”
“Tomorrow night. Greycloak Court. There’s a man; you’ll know him when you see him. We’ll go from there.”
“It’s no joke. How do you think I got here tonight? The Flame had a barricade at the end of our street, and you think they’d have let me pass if I said I was going out boozing with you lot? No, they’re real: they came running down the street, and I swear to you, flying off the roofs, all bright and fast, and they swept them away. I was out on the Heath when the Bird passed, and I remember how it felt; it felt that way. I swear.”
That sounded promising, perhaps, but Arjun had heard a lot of stories like that in the last couple of days. He was sure now that Silk was here, somewhere, and apparently locked in battle with the white robes. Just knowing that Silk was around was no help, though: Arjun needed to know where. Just in case, he picked up his drink and moved toward the speaker, through the crowds, trying to look as if he was just looking for somewhere to sit.
“…how dare she. That Liancourt was right, gods bear him to glory, he was bloody right. She can’t hold us back now.”
“…I mean, look at the bastards. Fucking look at them, with their guns and that sneer…”
“I just want it to stop. I have daughters, and they haven’t been out for days. I need money. It’s too hard.”
“…recover from this. She pushed things too far, and now she’s paying the price. She can’t stop it. It makes her look weak. What use is the Thunderer against this sort of thing? And if I can see she’s weak, then you can bet the Parliament can, or the Chairman, or somebody. I tell you. Just wait.”
“Remember when Monan appeared in the sky, a few weeks back? I think he was warning us about this. I think the stars spelled out how to stop it, make it right again, if only we could read them. No, I’m serious, I really do. I do. Well, fuck you then.”
“I’m not going to stand here and tell you that you shouldn’t be angry. You’re men, aren’t you? Of course you’re angry. Who isn’t? Who wouldn’t be? Yes. All I’ll say is, I can tell you how to make that anger useful. Wait, shut up, shush…”
Arjun stopped. He knew that voice. It was Mr. Heady, from the Cypress. The Typhon hadn’t got him, then.
“…All right, I was saying. You’re not much use by yourselves. But you want to be useful. Course you do. These are times for brave men, they say. There’s a place, and a man can get you arms. Listen, now…” He leaned in and whispered.
Arjun turned around, and made his way over to Olympia. “There’s a man over there—don’t look—recruiting for some sort of riot, or sabotage, or strike against the Countess.”
“This place is full of that sort of thing.”
“But I know this man. I lodged with him. He was…he was no radical. No rioter, no rebel. He was very proud of his deference to power. It’s very odd. He can’t be doing this out of anger. Someone must be paying him. I would like to know who.”
Heady got up, shaking the hands of the other men, who remained at the table. He walked toward the door.
“He’s leaving. I’m going to follow.”
“We should get Hoxton.” But they couldn’t see him. He was lost in the throng down in the Hall’s drinking pit.
Arjun felt a tug at the back of his mind. There was a path and a connection before him. He thought of the Spider’s letter. An image of incurious, manipulating spider-eyes clicked quickly across his mind. “I’m following him. I’ll come back and find you later.” He pushed out through the crowd, and Olympia, after a moment of nervous scanning for Hoxton, followed.
A ll their numbers meant nothing. All their hate meant nothing. The Thunderers fell on the white robes with fierce joy. The white robes were earthbound, and the Thunderers were not. The Thunderers came at them from the rooftops; they hurtled down the streets to topple their barricades. They moved with the speed and freedom of the Bird’s gift. As he led the charge, Jack could turn his head and see them behind him, moving brightly across the drab of Shutlow’s roofs. Their clothes were grey or brown, dirty and ragged, but each was marked with a blue, red, or gold crest of the Thunderer, and each of them trailed brilliant silk. It made him sure that he was doing the right thing. His power was widening. If it ever stopped, he would know he was no longer worthy of it.
“Don’t be afraid of killing,” he’d said as they left the boathouse, “if you can. If you can’t bring yourself to do it, think of this: they chose it. They live for this. For the cruelty. They’re not just doing their job. This is their purpose. There’s hundreds, thousands of them. Many, many more than us. We can’t share the city. We have to put them down.”
On the first night, Jack had seen a dozen of the white robes striking into a crowd on the Heath, gathered around a fire of broken wood, the remains of the barricade the Countess’s men had erected on Gauzy Street. A trio of young women danced in time to the crowd’s clapping. The crowd was drunk, and off-rhythm, and the girls sometimes stumbled, laughing.
From behind the trees, the white robes fired on the crowd, felling several, then forced their way through, stabbing, to the dancers. One tall one grabbed one of the dancers by the hair, and spat on her screaming face.
Jack came at them over the heads of the terrified crowd. He drew his knife, and struck quickly. He killed three; those who ran he only marked. The rest of the Thunderers were approaching through the crowd by the time he was done. They started to clap and cheer, and the crowd joined in. Jack found himself in a firelit circle surrounded by applause. He held the arm of the sobbing dancer and pulled her up, and, impetuously, kissed her, dipping her flamboyantly, like they did on the stage.
The crowd loved it, and roared his name. The girl tolerated it stiffly for only a moment, then pulled away from him, sobbing. He left bloody fingerprints on her arm and face.
F iss died two days later.
He wasn’t the first; the Thunderers had lost a boy called Gantley in Rudder Street, when a fight with the white robes had been interrupted by the Countess’s grey-coated soldiers, and a lucky bullet had caught Gantley in his beardless throat. Martin’s skull had been cracked by a white robe’s brand. Jack had brought him back, sleeping, to the locked-out factory they were using as a base, but he had never woken up. Fiss wasn’t the first, or the last, but he was the first to give Jack pause.
He had died pointlessly. The Thunderers had routed one of the white robes’ barricades from Akely Street; as the white robes ran down the street, one of them turned and fired wildly behind his back, and the bullet hit Fiss in the chest. Jack leaped on the shooter instantly, crossing the intervening space in a single weightless step, and cut his throat.
Jack ran back across the street, letting the others go, his steps seeming very heavy. It seemed to take him a very long time to reach Fiss. He held him for a moment, saying, “It’s all right, Fiss, there are doctors, don’t try to speak, don’t…” Then Fiss jerked, choked up blood, and died.
Jack hunched over Fiss’s heavy body for a long time. He was sad for Fiss, but more, he was sad for the Thunderers. Without Fiss, how could he keep them going? He had needed Fiss. “Our time is nearly up now,” he whispered. Namdi, kneeling next to him, stared, but Jack didn’t explain. It was clear to him. Fiss’s vision was dead; Jack’s had swallowed it. Without Fiss, there would be no more of them. Their ranks could not grow. There was no promise of peace and shelter to hold them together. There was only Jack’s war. That could not last forever. Soon they would be worn out, and then they would fall apart.
He supposed that had been bound to happen, anyway. They would not have been young forever. But this was cruel.
Thirty-two of them there: that was what he had to work with. He would do what he could with the time that he had. He brought them back to the factory to mou
rn and regroup. Mourning should be a joyful thing, he told them; they should stoke their anger. Aiden slipped away, without speaking; Jack did not see him go. Thirty-one. Over the next few days, they redoubled their efforts.
T he Thunderers still needed sleep, and food, but Jack didn’t. He left them in the factory at night and went out into the dark streets. The lamps had been extinguished all over the Countess’s territories, to help enforce curfew. He took note of where his enemies’ strengths and weaknesses were.
It was a quiet night. Perhaps people were tired of the violence; perhaps they were at home, plotting more. Small squads of soldiers carried lanterns and pikes through the streets. Citizens scurried here and there, from pub to pub, always in twos or threes: to travel alone was to risk violence from the white robes, and any larger group might be stopped by the Countess’s men on suspicion of seditious intent, and taken for questioning. There were rumors about the questioning.
From atop the hammer-tower of Atenu’s temple on Bow Street, Jack watched five white robes gathered in an alley around a fire of broken boards, checking over their guns, practicing holding their rifles. He had never seen them smiling before. It made him uncomfortable. He left them alone, that once.
In the alley on the other side of the building, a group of men stood around a tall, hard-looking man with a lantern, who was saying, “…are you serious? There’s no point if you aren’t serious. But if you are—that’s right, yes, but keep it down—if you are, I know a man who can get you guns. That’s right. Come back here tomorrow if you mean it. We’ll talk.”
The tall man left the others behind in the alley. Jack watched him go. He was not especially interested. He was aware of all the plotting going on around him that week, but he had paid little attention. He had recognized men he had freed from a dozen gaols among the rioters, and he was pleased to see what they were doing with his gift, but it was their fight, not his. Still, it was a quiet night, and he was a little curious, and he followed behind the man as he walked quickly through the streets. He felt a certain tug, a certain urgency; he felt that there were many calculating blank eyes appraising him.
