by Felix Gilman
Sunset stained the tower rose-petal red. Roosting next to Jack on the high iron beam were Beth, Caul, Wood, Kuyo, and Dait. They had guns over their shoulders but knives in their hands; these were the ones who’d volunteered for the close work. Who’d chosen to see it through to the end, all the way to the end, while Namdi and Een and Taine and the others perched up out of harm’s way, in the rigging, dropping their flash-powder parcels and firing their stolen rifles and playing a diversion, a distraction, a chorus.
When the sun fell all the way behind the tower and it was black again, Jack stood. There was a flash and a bang from away over on the southeast tower: Namdi. There was another flash over near the southwest tower: Simeon. There were gunshots. More flashes and bangs from the north and the east, and all over.
When he heard distant shouting, doors banging open, guards running and panicking, he stepped off the perch and dropped. Beth and Caul and Wood and Kuyo and Dait dropped with him, their silks fluttering in the night air.
Below them was a gaping black chimney-vent, wide as a river. They dropped soundlessly into its mouth.
C aptain?”
“Captain?”
Arlandes groaned and swore. The stink of blood in his nostrils almost covered the stink of fire and smoke from outside.
“Captain? Are you in there?”
Arlandes reached for his chair, which had fallen, and pulled himself up so that he was sitting against the desk. The voice was Sub-Lieutenant Gibson’s. Gibson himself came round the edge of the desk a moment later. The man was pale and unshaven and sweating filthily, but he was in uniform, red-coated, sword in hand.
There was a dull thud and crash from outside, and another. One to the west, one to the east.
“Captain? They’ve struck the magazines. They’ve blown up our magazines.”
“I can see that, man.”
“They’ve blown up one of the Countess’s countinghouses. They’ve blown up one of her gun-towers. I don’t know what else, sir. Sir, we’re on fire downstairs. Let me help you up.”
Gibson reached out a hand and Arlandes snarled at him to get back; to leave him alone. Arlandes stood, leaning on the edge of the desk, swaying slightly. He could not think what to do. He wanted to sink into his armchair again and wait for it to be over, for whatever was happening, to happen.
“Sir, it’s all happening at once, sir. We have to get out of here, sir.” Gibson stepped closer and stretched out his hand again, reaching for Arlandes’ arm.
There was something terribly wrong in the Sub-Lieutenant’s eyes: sickly fear and anticipation giving way to coldness, to resolve, and then a sudden wild surrender to decision and action.
Gibson’s left hand reached for Arlandes’ arm, and his right hand brought the saber back and drove it savagely forward at Arlandes’ gut. But Arlandes was already falling back and away, twisting out of Gibson’s reach, and the point pierced his shirt and grazed his side but did not, he thought, he hoped, do more than scratch him. And in the next moment, while Gibson staggered forward, Arlandes lunged forward and grabbed Gibson’s head by his ears and slammed it down hard, with a ripping and cracking sound, onto the desk’s surface.
Gibson fell back, bleeding from his nose and forehead, and tried to swing the saber again. He was stumbling and slow and quite comical. Gibson was no gentleman and had never been properly taught how to wield a saber. Gibson was more a carpenter than a warrior and held his saber like a hammer. Arlandes grabbed the nearest implement from the desk, which turned out to be a silver letter-opener, and speared Gibson under his armpit, and again in his throat, and twisted Gibson’s suddenly weak wrist until the saber fell from it. He stabbed Gibson one more time, in the gut, before thinking to question him.
He lowered Gibson’s quivering body into the armchair. He held the man’s jaw so that he could look into his terrified eyes. “Who bought you, Gibson? Who bought you?”
Blood poured from Gibson’s mouth and from his throat and covered Arlandes’ shirtsleeves. Gibson croaked and whined; he seemed unable to speak.
Arlandes tore open the brass buttons of the man’s jacket and emptied his pockets. A chapbook copy of The Marriage Blessing, with a lurid frontispiece showing the Countess draping her bony body around Arlandes’ stiff brutish shoulders, in a cruel parody of seduction. A pamphlet demanding the release of Professor Holbach in the name of the Atlas and the city and the future and progressivism and all the other usual nonsense. A scrap of paper with an address in Ebon Fields, and the name Olympia Autun, which was, if Arlandes remembered rightly, the name of that sneering bitch who’d dragged Holbach’s fat carcass around all those years. Arlandes snorted and scattered the papers and gripped Gibson’s jaw again.
“Ridiculous. Absurd. Do you take me for a fool? You are not one of Holbach’s people. Shutlow magazine and Barbary magazine and the countinghouses and who knows what else, all in one night. Holbach’s people don’t have the will to do that. They only talk and talk. They write plays, for the gods’ sake. They don’t get their hands dirty. Someone real bought you. Who? Was it the Stross Mercantile? Was it the Thane of Red Barrow? Was it Mensonge? Was it Cimenti and his bloody bankers? Was it bankers’ money that bought you, Gibson? Was it the Combine? Or was it somebody’s church? Did you do this for some god, Gibson? Were you a pawn, or a sacrifice?”
Gibson’s eyes had gone dull and the bleeding had stopped. Arlandes let go and let the dead man’s head loll. Then he picked up his own saber and ran out into the hallway, shouting, “To me! To me! Redcoats, on your feet!”
T he corridors of the Iron Rose were lined with iron cells and cages. Most were empty, or contained men who were blind or mad or perhaps dead, but every few yards they would pass pale hands reaching out to them, pleading or moaning.
Some of the prisoners even knew who Jack was; they saw the bright silk and called out his name. It pained him to pass them by, but he had no keys for their bars. Indeed the cages seemed to be opened not by locks, but by machinery hidden within the thick walls, by levers and gears hidden in the heart of the Rose some-where. Or perhaps they couldn’t be opened at all. Jack and Beth and Kuyo gripped the bony hands as they went past, and they asked, Where is the warden? Where’s the heart of this place?
Some of the prisoners walked around the corridors freely—if you could call it freedom, lost in the Rose’s half-lit maze. They wore badges or collars or chains; many were branded. They drifted alone and apparently mad, or swaggered around in gangs. Jack tried to avoid them, if he could. He suspected they might have bought their comparative freedom with promises of loyalty to the guards. He didn’t know; the place made no sense to him.
Even in the Rose there were white robes, dressed in robes cut from greyish blankets but still identifiable by their shaved heads and burn-marks; little feral packs of them, snarling and bullying the weaker prisoners, strutting around like little wardens themselves. Jack felt a kind of pity for them, and he left them alone.
There was a lightless pit, behind bars, where the sick were thrown, in their dozens. There was a terrible stench from the pit’s mouth: a variety of human and animal stinks, and over it all the cold, alien, mossy stink of the river-god’s black-lunged plague. After he saw that, Jack stopped touching the prisoners’ hands.
The ceilings everywhere were oppressively low and dark. It reminded him of Barbotin. He’d learned how Barbotin worked, over the years, learned its puzzle so well he’d broken it open, but every prison was different. The city contained cruelty in infinite variety.
For a while they had it easy, as the Rose’s guards panicked, running up and down through the corridors; word had gone out that they were under attack, from all quarters at once, from above, from within, from nowhere. Near the foot of a wide staircase that led down through the upper levels, Jack skulked in the shadows, Beth leaning over his shoulder, and they watched two groups of armored men run up to each other at a junction of gas-lit corridors and shout, “We’re under attack at the north tower!” and “To the east tower!”
and practically fall over each other’s pikes and bayonets trying to work out where to go.
But before the Thunderers had gone too much further down, they had to get their hands dirty. On the sixth level down—maybe seventh; the place was mazy and the floors and walls seemed to shift—there was a wide inner courtyard lit by bonfires. Jack watched from high arches of blood-red brick that hung over the yard as a group of guards, their senses seemingly addled by panic, drew their rifles and opened fire on a huddled pleading mass of prisoners, who they’d apparently mistaken for their attackers. Jack and the others dropped from the arches. They threw their knives as they crossed the yard’s dark interior space. They landed as the knives struck and they pulled them from the guards’ flesh and they struck again. When there were only a handful of guards left alive, they asked, Where’s your warden? Where’s your boss? Who runs this place? Where’s the heart of it?
A rjun and Olympia went northeast up Mundy Way, and north round Glabber Crescent, until they found a hill from which they could see the Rose more clearly.
The hill was covered in broken and graffiti-etched marble pillars, and equestrian statues of dead rulers with broken arms and heads and swords. There were stone benches, but they were already full; the hill was crowded with gawkers, passing around jugs and bottles, watching the flames and the explosions and the echoes of distant gunshots. Whispering: That’s right, burn the fucker down and What if they all get loose? What if those scum get loose? What happens to us then? and What’s happening to this city?
There were intermittent flashes and bangs from the southern towers. The northernmost tower seemed to be quite seriously ablaze.
Arjun and Olympia watched it with fascination, and horror, and exhilaration, and guilt, and shame.
“This is horrible,” Olympia said. “This is a horrible thing to be involved with.”
“This is a terrible city. A terrible cruel city. Even those who try to do good for it are tarnished.”
“What do you think’s happening back south?”
“More of the same, I expect. Fire and riot and madness.”
“Gods, maybe they’ll finally kill that bitch Ilona. Maybe she’ll finally kill Cimenti. Maybe they’ll kill each other.”
“That won’t stop it. Someone else will take their place. Or something else. The river-thing will take what’s left. It will get worse and worse. Discord only grows and grows. This ugliness will not stop it. Only silence and peace can stop it. Olympia, did I ever tell you about the Thunderer? I don’t know what else to call you except Olympia. It fits you well, real or unreal. I wonder if I ever told you about the Thunderer. Not the ship, but what it makes me think of. Olympia, there was one of the Fathers of the Choristry, a Father Hari—many cycles of our song before I was born—who had a theory regarding the Voice. That it had an opposite, that its existence implied an opposite somewhere. Or perhaps merely an absence. Dynamically, so to speak, its existence implied its absence, and that absence would be everything the Voice was not: it would be loud, and violent, and senseless, and chaotic. It would be the most terrible discord in the world, sounding eternally but without purpose, and everyone who heard it would go mad. It would crash and smash and shake loose the sanity of all those who heard it. Hari named it Thunder. It was only a theory, of course. Hari did not really believe in its existence in a literal sense. I think perhaps Hari and Holbach would have liked each other. Though Hari did not attempt to bring his fear into being. I wonder if I ever told you this.”
Olympia had stopped listening, and Arjun’s voice had long since trailed off into a murmur anyway. Olympia was staring north, and biting the nail of her thumb.
“Arjun. I can’t watch this anymore. Those poor children. Those horrible vicious children. What if it all burns down? Those poor people back in Shutlow, and Foyle, and Barbary, and gods know where else. Sometimes I think we’ve done everything wrong, Arjun.”
C aptain, what…”
“Sub-Lieutenant Gibson is dead. He was a traitor and this is his blood on my hands. If there are any other traitors present, I suggest you come forward now and we’ll resolve the matter.”
He was weeping, but it was only from the smoke that filled the drill-yard. Smoke invaded his lungs and he bent double, coughing, but he wasn’t the only one; all the men were crouching and wheezing and holding rags and cloths to their faces.
The barracks were ablaze. Auterton and Lane and Kay were dead; they’d been trapped in the kitchen, which had been next to the magazine, and had gone up first and fiercest.
Lieutenant Leoden had been leading a group of the men in fighting the blaze, with buckets and the drill-yard’s well. It was a doomed effort but a good one; however, there was more important work to be done.
“The fire’ll spread, Captain. If the wind changes, the fire’ll spread to the rest of the street. We have to stop the fire, sir, or—” Leoden was a good man. Nevertheless, Arlandes had cuffed his face, collared him, thrown him to the floor in front of all the rest of the men. He’d told them: “Forget the fire. The enemy has betrayed his hand. This is no accident. Tonight we save our Countess. Tonight we save the Thunderer. Tonight we take revenge. In the morning we rebuild. Do you understand?”
They’d asked, “What enemy, sir?” And he hadn’t been able to answer, but of course it hardly mattered.
There were twenty of them. They formed two columns, and Arlandes took the lead, and rifles in hand they marched through the streets.
On Sheppey Street a boy threw a half a brick at them, and Arlandes shot him as he fled back into the alley’s trash-heaps.
On Exhibition Street someone threw a piss-bottle from an upper window, which tumbled spilling its foul contents down through the washing-lines and, seeming now incongruous and absurd, a line of tattered red flags. It broke quite precisely before Arlandes’ black boots. If nothing else, the riots had taught the Countess’s people good aim. There was no time to chase the offender down, so Arlandes signaled Ignore it.
They turned down Silden Street, and into the mirror-cracks of unnamed alleys that ran between Barbary’s warehouses. In the shadow of the warehouses, they couldn’t see the fires burning all around them. In the deep ravines of brick and slate and sagging timber, they could barely hear the distant thunder of the Countess’s third and last magazine going up.
Huddled under the loading-arches of the Great West Ferry & Freight warehouse, they found a group of the plague-sick. Great West had closed its Barbary operations three weeks ago, and the warehouse was empty. The plague-sick—their eyes black and their bodies thin—were gathered around a bonfire of chairs. They stank of weeds and rot. They stared blankly, resentfully, at Arlandes’ shining black coat, his bright saber, at his men in their rooster-red coats. Leoden swore and spat. Arlandes shook with horror and for an instant it seemed the dying men’s black eyes were hunting him; the lung-rot seemed a malign and purposive thing. He wondered if all the forgotten and abandoned places of the city were filling with that rotten filth. Fire and flood, he thought, nonsensically, the River has burst its banks.
He gave the order and his redcoats—from a safe distance, handkerchiefs or gun-cloths to their faces—opened fire, and reloaded their muzzles, and fired again, and put the ghastly creatures out of their misery.
T he warden of the Iron Rose was a fat man, very fat, and he’d worn a ridiculous hat shaped like a locked box; the hat had rolled off into a corner and the man himself lay dead on his desk like a fat fish flopped on a market stall. His suite was more like a priest’s chambers than a warden’s offices. His hat was a priest’s kind of hat, and he’d worn black robes hung and wrapped with chains, like a priest of the Chain, which was presumably what he really was.
He’d begged for his life. When Jack had come bursting into his chambers, he’d begged and whined. He’d run (puffing and waddling) across the floor, from the side of the room that was dark and lacquered jet-black and into the side of the room that was painted white, and full of wide-open windows. There he’d thrown
open his closet and shown Jack his white robes, hung with golden chains, broken, and with golden keys. He’d babbled about the Chain, and the Runagate, and the sacred cycle of the Iron Rose and of confinement and release and confinement again and release….
Beth’s parents had died in the Rose. They’d been arrested, when she was very small, by the police of the Parliament of Mass How, for subversive activities. Or at least so she remembered it; Jack suspected it was something less heroic. Probably they were debtors or something stupid—it was none of his business. But they’d been taken, and locked away, and the cycle for them had ended right there, so Jack let her shoot the warden. “I am only a servant,” he’d whined. “Only a servant of the Rose. Only—”
Afterwards, while Jack and Wood and Dait went through the warden’s ledgers, she was sick behind the warden’s closet. It was hardly the first time she’d shot someone, but she was sick anyway. Dait laughed and Jack cuffed his ear.
The ledgers said that those who had offended against the Countess were held seven stories down. The Countess’s entries in the ledgers were only a tiny, tiny part of the whole. To Jack’s surprise, she was not close to the heaviest user of the Rose’s services. Even so, she had an extensive maze of cells to her name; Holbach was at the heart of it.
Seven stories down. The stairs were crowded with rushing guards and panicking prisoners, so they dropped the first three stories down an air-shaft.
