Thunderer

by Felix Gilman

  She asked, “Is that what it was like before?”

  He shrugged. “No. Yes. It’s getting worse, I think. Every day. It’s in pain; you heard what Jack said. It’s only going to get angrier and angrier. I saw it before and it watched me. This time it reached out and…It’s learning to kill.”

  “Fucking Shay.” She rubbed her temples. “This gives me a headache.”

  “Waiting here is hard,” Arjun said. “We’re well outside of the Countess’s sphere of operations, but still…”

  “Never mind her. The Chairman will want us dead, too. If he really did use us to provoke her, like that…well, we’re a loose end. His agents will be looking. I’m more afraid of them.”

  They both looked around nervously. It was painful to be exposed in the open air, but they needed to wait somewhere where Jack might see them from the sky. The boys were doing the same nearby, on the rooftops around the park, wearing their crests. Silk had sharp eyes, they had told Arjun.

  “I hadn’t thought of that. Olympia, what will you do if we do free Holbach? Can you still operate in this city?”

  “Maybe. Maybe if we move further away. Out west or east. We’d have to start all over again. I don’t know. We’ll see.”

  They ordered more coffee. The proprietor looked at them suspiciously as she took their order. “Our brother is in there,” Olympia lied. “We just came to be close to him. I think maybe he can feel us, even if he can’t see us. Don’t you, Simon?”

  “I hope so,” Arjun agreed.

  They did not see Jack until he sat down next to them and swigged down Olympia’s coffee. He wiped his mouth with his sleeve and smiled. “Led it away. Lost it somewhere miles out in the west, around dawn. It wasn’t so fast.” A thought troubled his brow, and he said, “I’m sorry about your bodyguard.” He leaned forward. “So what was that thing? It was like a god, but no god behaves like that. No god gets lost, for one thing, but that’s what I did with it.”

  Arjun tried to explain.

  Jack shook his head. “Fuck. Did you see it?”

  “Not really,” Arjun said.

  “I saw it. I have good eyes. Do you want to hear what it looked like?”

  “Not really,” Olympia said.

  “Suit yourself.” Somehow, without his hands seeming to move, he had stolen and lit one of Olympia’s cigarettes. “So now it’ll come after me, too?”

  “Perhaps, Jack. We don’t know. We don’t understand how it thinks. If it thinks. Perhaps Holbach can find a way of stopping it. He knows a lot about these things.”

  “You should have told me.”

  “I didn’t think we’d be together long enough for you to be in danger. It’s very slow, Jack. It’s not as though it jumps out at us from every corner, every day.”

  “It’s slow, and I’m fast. But you still should have told me.”

  “We’re sorry,” Olympia said. “But we need you. Holbach can stop it. I believe he can. It’s getting stronger and you’d have been in danger even if you’d never met us. Everyone is. You just wouldn’t have known it, yet. But it’s true that you’re in more danger while you’re with us. We don’t want to put your people at risk. Finish it quickly and we’ll be done with each other. We should get started at once.”

  Jack gave Olympia a condescending look. “I have started. With the Thunderers. They’re getting what we need right now. Did you think I was going to take you, too? I can’t use you. You’re too old and too slow. Do you have a place to wait while we work?”

  Arjun patted his pockets. He pulled out a loose mass of paper from his jacket pocket. He shuffled through the heap. There were pages of musical notation. There were pages scribbled with strange languages, strange untranslated words and complex declensions and conjugations of Tuvar and Kael and Ghentian. There were old scraps of paper on which he’d nervously scribbled his income and expenses. Olympia raised an eyebrow; he shrugged. Jack’s eyes studied the proceedings coolly; Arjun wondered if the boy could read. “Can you read, Jack?” The boy nodded. “Good.”

  There were pages, neatly folded, on which he’d drawn maps. During his wanderings—back a long time ago, now—he’d tried to map the city. To map each day’s fruitless search. He wondered how much the city had changed since he’d wasted that ink. He opened the folded pages and one by one put them aside. Olympia picked them up as he put them down, and she flicked through them lightly. There was a page half-full of a map of Faugère. Arjun tore it in two, and on the blank half he wrote:

  THE HOTEL MACLEOD, 141 BOTANY STREET, ROOM 11

  SOUTH OF THE IRON ROSE

  NORTH OF THE TEMPLE MIRRORS

  WEST OF MUNDY WAY

  (DOWNHILL FROM THE THREE TALL WINDMILLS,

  UPHILL FROM THE MISSION)

  Olympia reached out and gripped the paper. “If he’s captured with that, they’ll come for us.”

  “He won’t be captured. Will you, Jack? You won’t be captured and you won’t forget us.” Arjun gently eased the paper from Olympia’s grip. He handed the paper to Jack, who folded it and placed it in his own jacket pocket with great silent solemnity.

  Jack nodded once. Then he turned, rising from his chair, vaulted the railings, and disappeared into the bushes. A moment later they heard the rushing of footsteps over the roof-tiles.

  H igh girders of pitted and rusting iron held together the Rose’s towers and vanes, its shuttered bridges and disused walkways. The thick iron sagged and bowed with age. Cables cut across the sky like rigging, binding the whole creaking mass together.

  Sometimes the Rose’s guards would shove a prisoner out there and lock the door behind them, leave them for the birds. Here and there rust-swollen cages hung from the cables, were bolted to the spires and girders; bones turned yellow in them.

  Namdi and Een sat on a girder that stuck out at the crazy angle of a broken rib from the southeast tower. They’d been quite alone up there all morning—since Jack left them there—but now Jack was back and they were all waiting, and still waiting, all through the hot afternoon, for night to come.

  Someone had painted most of the girders’ length black, many years ago; only a few flaking black leaves remained. Jack idly plucked at them, chipped them off from the iron, sent them drifting slowly down onto the rooftops below. His nails were long and dirty, and he got rust under them. It was windless and his long black hair hung greasily.

  Namdi sat on Jack’s left, smoking, his back leaning against a knot of cables, his bad leg stretched out along the girder. Little Een sat cross-legged on his right, his rifle (ridiculously oversized) in his lap.

  Beneath them—far beneath them—was a flat expanse of roof, heaped with gravel. Below that the roof fell away in a tiled slope, and below that—at the edge of Namdi’s and Een’s rifles’ range—the tower walls were studded with the dull mirrors of windows.

  A door opened below with a distant scrape and clang of bolts and chains. Three guards with guns and billy clubs led a troupe of pale and bony men out onto the rooftop. The prisoners carried what Jack thought at first might have been weapons of their own, but were apparently brooms. For an hour they swept the gravel across the roof’s surface. None of them bothered to look up. The afternoon wore on sweltering hot and windless.

  Namdi shielded his eyes from the glare of the setting sun and studied the men below. “Don’t suppose he’s one of them, is he?”

  “He’s fatter. A lot fatter.”

  “Could have lost weight.”

  “True. Not that much, though, not that fast.”

  “True. Poor bastards.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Would have saved time. Could’ve just plucked him off and no one would have had to go in, down there. Would have been easier.”

  “What are we, shopkeepers? Looking for the easy deal? This is going to be sport.”

  “For you, maybe.” Namdi stiffly shifted his leg. “For me it’s a long wait.”

  “Shut your whining. You’ve got a gun, soldier-boy. You get to shoot it. What else
would you rather be doing?”

  Namdi shrugged. “Don’t know. True enough.” He looked Jack briefly in the eye; Jack was angry again, for no reason. He’d been worse than ever since Fiss died. “Redcoats wouldn’t have me now, anyway. This’ll be sport, like you said. Look at that great black iron bastard.” As the prisoners filed back in through the door, their guards kicking and shouting, Namdi flicked his cigarette down onto the roof. “I mean, if we don’t come back from this, it’s not a bad way to go.”

  Jack scowled, then smiled.

  A few minutes later Jack stood, balancing on the iron beam. He covered his eyes and stared at the northeast tower. “I’m going to check on Beth’s lot. Namdi, Een, will you be ready?”

  “We’ll be ready. Right, Een?”

  “Good lads.” Jack stepped off the iron; he fell ten feet to a cable and ran up its quivering length and at its tight arcing apex he launched himself into the sky. Namdi watched the speck of him recede and vanish among the cables and rusting iron.

  The sun passed behind one of the towers.

  Namdi looked down at the drop. “Well, that’s us fucked if he doesn’t come back.”

  “He’ll come back.”

  “Unless he doesn’t.”

  Een screwed up his face into an expression of great resolution and loyalty, and said nothing.

  Namdi rolled two cigarettes, and gave one to Een. Een tossed one of the bombs to Namdi, and Namdi tossed it back, and so on, for a while. Later, Namdi sat rolling the bomb back and forth in his lap, until he worried that the sweat of his palms would soak the paper and dampen the flash-powder.

  He kept thinking about that…thing. The thing that had come at them out of the river. The thing that Jack had fought. Sickness and plague and drowning, raging through the city. Namdi’s own mother had died of a cancer that rotted and hollowed her and made her stink and go mad. It scared him dreadfully. He looked at Een’s face, round and tiny and dirty. Een was little; probably he’d forgotten it already, or at least grown used to it. Grown used to a city that contained that madness.

  Maybe this fat scholar Holbach could stop it. He’d bossed the Bird around to make that ship; maybe he could order that monster back to the river. But in the meantime the thing was out there somewhere, and angry, and no city that contained it made any kind of sense. Something very bad was going to happen. Maybe not to him, and he hoped not to Een, who wasn’t a bad lad, and he prayed not to Jack, because he loved him fiercely, but somewhere, to someone.

  Sunset would be the signal to get ready. The first flash and distant thunderclap from the northwest tower would be the signal to begin. Namdi checked his rifle over again, and again.

  A rjun waved for the proprietor. He ordered bread and cheese and water.

  “And wine,” Olympia said. “I bloody well intend to get drunk.”

  “We should stay alert.”

  “We’re superfluous, Arjun. You heard that awful boy. Nothing to do but wait.” The proprietor placed a jug on the table, and two rough clay mugs. Olympia waved him away. “To Holbach! He’d want us to have a drink ready for him.” She filled her mug and knocked it back, and made a sour face. “To Hoxton, too. It’s probably best he’s dead. If he were still alive, the humiliation of this would kill him.”

  “You’d rather take up a knife and a gun and storm the Rose yourself?”

  “I’d rather be acting than waiting.”

  “This is a bad business. I’d rather be waiting.”

  “Easy for you to say. Why don’t you sing us a song to pass the time?”

  He put a finger to his lips. “Quiet. We should listen and wait.”

  “You infuriating man.”

  Arjun leafed through the spill of papers. A map of the northern edge of Fourth Ward; he ran his finger along the black borderline of the canal. He picked up a long yellow strip torn from the Era: he’d jotted down in the margin a dozen different possible translations for Black Bull. Black could equally have been fertile or rich or ancient in Tuvar. Bull could have been king or father or night; in fact it might equally have been horse or ox. Scribbled notes toward an inconsequential puzzle. He’d enjoyed those months.

  “Ha! See? You,” Olympia said, “cannot let things go. You cannot put things down. An obsessive. Professor Almuth had theories about people like you; he says it begins in childhood, with toilet training. We printed his theory in the Atlas, and a censor from Mass How went quite mad over it. It’s very sad to see it in action.”

  He smiled, balled up the paper in his hand, and dropped it on his plate.

  Olympia nodded. “Keep going. You are a man badly in need of throwing things away.”

  He tore up a page of music and scattered it.

  “Progress!” she said.

  “But not what you’re looking for. Not what you’re looking for me to give up. These are just empty gestures. Don’t confuse symbols with the world.”

  “As Holbach liked to say.”

  “Exactly.” He took a drink. “To Holbach. And Hoxton, of course.”

  “To Holbach.”

  They both drank.

  “And what about you?” Arjun asked. “What will you do if we can’t get him back?”

  “Something different, I suppose. Something new.”

  They finished the bottle. Olympia didn’t like the way the proprietor was looking at them; he had an informant’s calculating eyes. They switched cafés. Two hours later they switched again. When they were drunk enough to be past caution of eavesdroppers, Olympia started telling stories about Holbach, then about Nicolas, and the Atlas, and the enemies they’d made, the wonderful trouble they’d caused. Stories about herself. As the sun was setting and they sat by the railings, she confessed that Olympia was not her real name. She’d taken it from a painting. She’d made herself over and if she had to she’d do it again, she told him. If she could, she’d make the whole city over.

  Before Arjun could press her to give up her real name, there was a flash on the edge of his vision—it was over in the north, up on the Rose’s towers—and a distant thunderclap, and another, and another, going off like fireworks, like gunshots.

  Arjun jumped up from his chair to watch. Another and another, flaring red, from the east tower and the west. After a while the explosions stopped, but there were still gunshots: distant, muffled, quiet enough that probably only he could hear them.

  Olympia grabbed his arm. He turned and looked south. Across the hills, the river, the squares, days to the south—unless he missed his guess, back down by the docks, by Shutlow, by Foyle’s Ward, by the Heath—the sky was a lurid bonfire red.

  They sobered up quickly.

  A rlandes snapped awake suddenly and with a sense of dread. A sense of having fallen and struck the ground with great violence. Something terrible echoed in his ears.

  He’d fallen asleep in the black leather armchair in his office. When he wasn’t on the Thunderer, he generally just slept in his office; what else did he have to do but sleep?

  Someone was shouting in the corridors outside. He replayed the sound that had woken him and concluded that it had been an explosion. Confirmation: from behind the thick curtains on his window there was a glowering red light in the darkness.

  As he woke and stood and stretched his aching neck and walked over to the window, he daydreamed that someone had taken the Thunderer and turned it on the crowds, and he thought, Good. Shut their mouths once and for all.

  Footsteps running in the corridor, and more shouting. Leoden’s voice, and Gibson’s. Soon there would be someone banging on his door; he could feel it.

  He pulled back the curtain. Fire over the rooftops, over northeast. There’d hardly been a night without fire for weeks, but this was a big one. Black smoke clouded out the sunset. Unless he missed his guess, it was the magazine of the North Shutlow barracks. Behind that squat brick building’s iron doors were shelves and shelves of powder, rifle and artillery. That would account for the explosion echoing in his ears.

  Arlandes was i
n Barbary barracks. Not the barracks at the Countess’s estate; not anymore. In light of the filthy slurs in those plays and pamphlets—the Atlas-makers’ nasty sneaking insinuations regarding Arlandes’ relationship with the Countess—the Countess had thought it politic to keep him distant.

  The Thunderer was far from Barbary barracks, and Arlandes had not set foot on its boards in—two days? Three? The days blurred into one now. The great ship drifted on its tether at its elevated dry dock, overlooking the Countess’s palace on Laud Heath—orbiting, as the Countess liked to put it, the sun of her glory.

  Barbary barracks was on that district’s western edge, by the live-stock sheds. There were twenty-three men in it. None of them were his best.

  A bad business if the rioters had gotten into the magazine. They were getting ambitious. It was time to restore order. It was time to put an end to softness. If they wanted fire, it was time to give them fire. He would talk to the Countess in the morning. He would organize a punitive force. Arlandes let the curtain go and reached for his sword, which rested against the desk.

  Another explosion sounded outside, so close and so loud that it shattered the window-glass behind him and blew open the curtains. He staggered and fell against the desk. The walls rocked and the door crashed open and the bookshelf by the window rocked and swayed and fell with a crash. The room was full of sudden blazing heat and light and the stink of gunpowder, then the air was full of brick-dust.

  The Barbary magazine.

  Not twenty yards outside my own fucking door.

  Arlandes, lying on his back on the floor, touched the back of his head; it was bleeding where he’d struck it on the desk. He felt suddenly very terribly tired.

  T he Thunderers all had pocketwatches, or the wrist-worn watches that were fashionable in Soutine and Albermarle and other northern districts, or some other stolen timepiece; but none of the devices told quite the same time and none of the boys or girls had any idea how to fix that. Atlay had been a clockmaker’s apprentice, but Atlay had succumbed to the plague two weeks ago; they’d wrapped his poor body in a blanket, doused him in oil, and burned him clean away. Fiss had been clever with locks and trinkets and he’d always known how to fix stolen things up nice for the fences, but Fiss was dead, too. So Jack had abandoned the idea of using watches to coordinate, and instead the signal they’d chosen was sunset, behind the Rose’s western tower. It was better that way, anyway. It felt better—purer.