Thunderer
Page 36
O lympia went with Hoxton to visit a man she knew in the Countess’s countinghouse, who had been a good source of rumor in the past. The next day, she visited a woman who filed documents for the Countess’s court, and who could sometimes be bribed to disclose their contents. There was nothing Arjun could do to help, so he sat alone in the room in the docks, cross-legged on the bare floor, meditating on the Voice and its song.
Jack came back three days later, through the window, in the morning. Olympia was asleep in the bed; the others in blankets on the floor. Jack rapped on the rusty bedframe to wake them.
Olympia jerked awake, and choked down her shock at Jack’s intrusion. We need him, she reminded herself. She said, “Jack. Jack, I know where they’re keeping him. It’s confidential, but I know someone—she let me see the order of transfer to the—”
“The Iron Rose,” Jack said. “I know. I don’t have to know anyone. I can break into their file-rooms myself, as I please.”
“Then will you do it?” Arjun asked.
“It’s far to the north,” Jack said. “And my Thunderers have business here, with the white robes. We’d have to give up the fight, or split our forces. They could do it without me, of course they could,” he said quickly, “but still.”
“It’s the greatest prison in the city,” Arjun said. “In the parts of the city we know, at least. And you’ve never struck at it, have you? If you have, I’ve never heard of it. Will you let it stand?”
“I said I’ll do it, and I’ll do it. I do what I say I will. Don’t you? You can come north with me, if you like.”
“Yes,” Olympia said. “We’ll be there.”
“Then I’ll come back in the evening. We’ll go at night.”
W hen he came back that night, they were waiting, tensely. They collected their few possessions—the handful of things Olympia and Hoxton had been able to snatch from their homes, a few necessities Arjun had purchased from the markets in the docks, some food and other provisions—left the room behind, and set out. Jack walked with them, a jacket over his bright shirt.
They went west and north, across Fourth Ward. A squad of soldiers stopped them, once, and told them to turn away from Piven Street; there was violence there, and it was safest for a family like them to stay clear of it. They were just an ordinary family, weren’t they? They weren’t looking for trouble? With apologies for wasting the soldiers’ time, Arjun led the group away, and they took another route west. There was a fire on the skyline, a few streets over, and broken bricks under their feet.
Jack pointed the way—walking at the back of the procession, light-footed, nervous, eager; sheepdog-like, Olympia thought, warming to him for a moment before she reminded herself to be wary—until, after a few hours’ walk, they were on the east end of Fourth Ward, at an empty street of factories, closed and locked away behind chain-link fences. “This is it,” Jack said. “Wait here. I’ll be back for you.”
He disappeared down the dark street, and over a fence.
“Can he be trusted, do you think?” Hoxton asked.
“I don’t think it’s a trap, if that’s what you mean,” Olympia said. “If he wanted to rob us, he could have killed us at any time.”
Hoxton snorted, skeptically.
“He’ll help us,” Arjun said. “He has to. He can’t not.”
They waited perhaps another twenty minutes. Then Jack returned. There were a dozen youths behind him. Thin, dressed in dirty grey, with bright crests. A couple were really children; most, like Jack, were nearly young men. There was one square-jawed girl. They stared suspiciously, defiantly. “This is all the help I’ll need,” Jack said. “Now, follow us if you want to.”
T ogether, the two groups headed back across the docks, and crossed the Jaw. On the other side, it was like a different world. The streets were quiet, and unmarked. They had almost forgotten what streets free of violence looked like. The windows were not barricaded. There were washing-lines hung across the streets again, unmolested. The lamps were lit.
They walked north, up Cato Road, Jack and the adults in the lead, the Thunderers following behind, in the shadows. As they crested the hill, the black shape of the Iron Rose became visible in the distance, rising in front of the grey clouds.
The Iron Rose was one of the city’s most recognizable structures. At least, in the part of the city Arjun knew, he reminded himself: there were certainly reaches of the city where it was unheard of. Five great ancient towers of black stone had leaned slowly into each other as the rocks beneath the city shifted until they fell against each other, and were, to everyone’s surprise, able to check each other’s collapse. They formed a circle, a crown, a rose. Later generations had bound the slumping giants in place with a web of iron struts and girders. They had built bridges and walkways between the towers, high above the streets. They had tunneled the towers together into a maze of strange angles.
It was a fortress for a while, then a temple, then finally a prison. It was vast, far larger than any single one of the city’s powers, even the cruelest, could make use of. No one had that many enemies. Instead, they shared it. It belonged to all the city, by complex treaty. Its labyrinthine interior was divided into a thousand precincts, in each of which the guards enforced the punitive regimes of different churches or lords.
They said it was possible to escape into the tunnels or across the bridges, from one zone into another, so that a person arrested on the authority of, say, the Thane of Red Barrow might escape from his cruel justice into, say, the more lenient, whimsical regime of Lavilokan’s halls. One of the printers who hung around Holbach’s house had claimed to have done just that.
As with everything else in Ararat, the Rose was shaped by its gods. Two presences fought through its dark corridors. The Key passed through, opening the gates, breaking shackles; if you could find it, and follow it, you might escape. The Chain was a power of confinement and duress, to be avoided at all costs: it locked doors, turned passages that might have led into the light into closed circles, buried the prisoners deeper in confinement. They crossed each others’ paths endlessly, folding and unfolding the shifting tunnels behind them.
There was a rumor that the Atlas-makers had a map of the Rose, that they had somehow smuggled an explorer in to chart its tunnels, but that they had never published it; to do so would undoubtedly have brought down retribution on them. Arjun didn’t know whether that was true. He supposed it didn’t matter now.
“Not that way,” Jack said, when they reached the great golden archway that led north onto Goshen Tor. “Too well-guarded.” They turned west, down the hill, to the River, where the Rose was no longer visible. It was a relief; the presence on the horizon had been troubling. Arjun dreaded entering it.
They followed the river’s banks north, scrambling through wild stretches of scrap and scrub, quickly past loading-docks and jetties quiet for the night, cautiously past riverside pleasure-districts and palaces. Jack shuttled back and forth between the two groups, planning with the Thunderers, walking with Arjun’s group in silence, except when he needed to discuss directions with Hoxton, who knew the river well.
Arjun walked next to Jack as they crossed an expanse of stone, sparsely dotted with statues of robed women walking down to the river, arms raised before them, as if bringing some sacrifice down to the water, or beckoning something up from it. The boy—he was nearly a man, really, but there was something incurably not-adult about the boy’s presence, with his ridiculous clothes, his feverish intensity, his grace—the boy both fascinated Arjun and repelled him. The boy was in the grip of an obsession, he could see. A very peculiar and personal mission. Arjun wondered if he looked as strange to others as the boy did to him.
He had to ask. “Jack. Listen a moment. I know you grew up here, in this city. You have many gods here. You love them and hate them at the same time, in ways I don’t fully understand. We had only one god, and it was everything to us. I want to know if you can understand this. Why I’ve done what I’ve done.”
Jack listened silently as Arjun told his story, beginning down on the plains, where he first heard the Voice’s echoes in the song Mother Abayla sang to him as an infant. He whispered: this was between the two of them. “Do you understand why I had to come here? Would you have done it?”
They walked past one of the statues, so that it passed between them. On the other side, Jack shook his head and looked coldly at Arjun. “It’s a waste. It’s selfish. You’re not doing anything. No one knows or cares. You’re alone.” It stung, but Arjun had been expecting it, he supposed. It changed nothing.
After a few minutes, Jack said, whispering, “When I was young, there was this monster on the Heath. A hyena. And I followed it….” Arjun listened as Jack described his confinement in and escape from Barbotin, his slow discovery of the Bird’s gifts to him, the disciplining and naming of the Thunderers, the purpose to which he had put them.
At the end, Arjun could only say, “I’m sorry. I don’t understand. You can’t provide for the people you free. They’ll only end up locked up again. You can’t change the city this way. It won’t last forever, and they’ll just start again as soon as you stop. You can’t change that. It makes no sense. I’m sorry.”
Jack shrugged. “I didn’t think you’d understand. It doesn’t change anything.”
“No. I suppose it doesn’t.”
T here was a distant red glow on the horizon. Even after all his months in the city, Arjun for a moment thought that it was dawn. But the glow was in the far north: it was Tiber. It was the Fire. Dawn was not coming. They were in the darkest hours of a night that seemed like the deepest and longest of his life.
The river was a very long dark tunnel into black emptiness. Although it was a summer night, there was a chill around Arjun’s feet. They were passing through vacant industrial space. Rusty cranes towered overhead; it was as if Arjun were sunk on the riverbed, and the cranes were thick waving weeds. It was as if…
He knew the signs. In his head, his wounds throbbed in response to the approaching presence. It was coming down the river. Why had he been stupid enough to go near the river? Had he simply not wanted to look like a coward in front of the boy?
He stopped walking suddenly, turned to Olympia, and said, “It’s coming. Again. We have to get away from the water.”
He waved to Jack and the Thunderers behind him. Jack ran up to him (so quickly), and Arjun said, “There’s something coming. A monster. The river-god. The plague. It’s found us. Please don’t argue. We have to get away from the water, go uphill.”
“Believe him,” Olympia said. “He can feel it.”
There was a bad, stale smell rolling up. Jack sniffed, and his face wrinkled with distaste. Waving the rest of the boys up, he said, “We have to get away from the water. Something bad’s coming. This one here, he’ll explain later. Come on, quick.”
The boys all took knives or pistols out of their clothes and dropped into a ready crouch as they took the road east, away from the docks and cranes. Arjun’s group went ahead. They had to climb over a fence. One of the boys had a stiff leg, and his fellows had to lift him over.
A cobbled road ran east up Hood Hill. The buildings around were blank and dark. They saw lights going out as they went by, windows being shuttered, and Arjun wondered whether that was the presence’s doing, or whether the people inside could feel it coming, and were hiding their own lights for fear of it. The road seemed very steep, and the cobbles wet. They moved slowly, as if always sliding back down toward the hungry water.
T hey all sensed it at once, when it was nearly on them, and turned.
The street behind them was dark and there were no stars. There was an icy cold and a terrible sense of pressure. There was no wind but the trees all down the street quaked and thrashed and snapped.
Foul water trickled between the cobbles underfoot.
Jack said, “I see it.”
Some of the boys started to cry. Olympia staggered back and slipped on the wet cobbles. Arjun stood in front of her. He could not think what to do. He had a sudden mad urge to sing. Music might sting the monster. At least, he would die with the Voice in his ears. But his throat constricted silently.
“It’s huge,” Jack said. “It’s so ugly.” His gaze was fixed on some invisible point high above the darkened street. His wide eyes darted, as if whatever he was seeing was twisting and writhing. “Gods, look at it; it’s in so much pain.”
Hoxton grabbed Jack’s arm and said, “What do you see?” Jack pointed. Then Hoxton grunted and stepped forward. He grabbed a fallen child by his collar and half-pushed, half-threw the sobbing boy back, away, into Arjun’s arms. Then he drew both his guns and fired into the blackness.
T here was a long silence, swallowing the echo of the guns. The darkness neither lifted nor deepened. Further down the street, there was the sound of a window breaking, and another, and another.
Hoxton fumbled for more bullets, found nothing, swore, turned to the others and shouted, “Run, you idiots!”
Jack quivered with feverish fascination and stood almost on tiptoe to stare down the street. “Gods,” he moaned, “it sees us.”
Now nothing could be seen in the dark; the street behind them was a stinking void.
H oxton threw both empty guns into the darkness, pistoning his right arm forward, then his left, roaring incoherently. Then he drew his heavy knife from his back, and turned and shouted again, “Run!”
Arjun and Olympia slipped and staggered away, stumbling in the dark, on the slick mossy stones, dragging and being dragged by the children and each other. Arjun could not stop himself looking back, again and again, but there was nothing to see except darkness.
And now Hoxton turned and ran, too, but he took only three steps away from the black cloud before the slime under his feet cost him his footing. The cloud rose around him. To Arjun, it seemed that Hoxton was falling far away, into empty darkness, though he was still there, kneeling on the cobbles, reaching for help, terribly alone.
The darkness rose into the sky. The street was spattered with muck and reeking water. Weed and wet leaves spun and drifted in the still, windless air. Underfoot there was decaying wreckage; timbers, old worn bricks, slimy with moss. It seemed the street was crumbling; as Arjun stumbled slowly backwards, a pub-sign snapped from rusted chains and fell at his feet. The rotten wood snapped in two. There was screaming; Olympia, the boys, the people in the buildings all around, perhaps Arjun himself.
Hoxton fell away at the center of the darkness. A deeper darkness seemed to cover him, as if the black mud beneath the cobblestones was rising, flooding, seizing him. Darkness covered his roaring mouth and he choked. Darkness covered his eyes.
Hoxton drowned. It was only moments, but seemed to take a very long time. (Long enough for everyone to forget you, Arjun thought, that’s how long the thing takes to kill.)
Someone pushed past Arjun. Then there was a speck of white in the air, trailing brightness, in front of the inky cloud, hanging high over Arjun’s head. “Chase me, monster,” Jack yelled. “Chase me.” He threw his beautiful stolen knife into the darkness, and turned in the air, like a tropical fish twisting in the water, and streaked over the darkness, and west, across the river and into the stars. The night followed, flowing after him.
T he street was empty again. The stars were out and there was a cool summer breeze. A few people looked out of their broken windows. Filth and debris were strewn everywhere. Hoxton’s slime-swaddled body lay on the cobbles. Olympia ran to him, and touched his chest, and sobbed.
The Thunderers stood around in shock, looking at the sky. Without their leader, there was nothing much to them. They were ill-fed and scared boys. I have to speak quickly, Arjun thought, before they panic. He tried not to let them see how nervous they made him.
“We need to keep going,” he said. “Jack would want you to keep going.”
The boy with the bad leg snapped, “We need to wait for him. He’ll be back. If we go, how will he find us?”
They looked at him, murmuring.
“What’s your name?” Arjun asked the boy who had spoken.
“Namdi.”
“Namdi. Think of what he’s risking, leading that thing away from us. You need to take a risk now, and go on without him. He’ll find us. But we can’t stay.”
They were unhappy about it, but they didn’t want to stay either, really. The monster’s mark was on that place.
There was a glint in the grime of the street: Jack’s fallen knife. Arjun picked it up. Then he tenderly helped Olympia to her feet, and they walked silently together, the boys following them, up the hill, east, and then north again, to the Iron Rose.
N ot far east of the Iron Rose was a small park. There was a café in the middle of it, by the pond. It was a depressing place; the prison’s complex shadow fell across the water for the best hours of the day. Arjun and Olympia sat out at the wrought-iron tables in the café’s garden all morning, sipping coffee.
“I’m very sorry about Hoxton—” Arjun started to say.
She cut him off. “It’s not your fault. No, wait, we don’t know that it’s your fault. Maybe the monster was chasing you, but maybe it’s chasing us all. It killed Nicolas, after all. Maybe it has a taste for us. Maybe we offend it.”
“Olympia, even if it is me it’s chasing, I didn’t ask for it. I’m trying to help. I can leave you, if you like, if you think I’m a danger to you.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
She lit a cigarette, and inhaled and exhaled deeply. She looked very tired in the morning light, under the grey shadow.