Thunderer

by Felix Gilman

A rlandes’ redcoats left the alleys and crossed Gull Street, which was a wide river of panic. All the bars were closed. The market-carts were stopped in the streets, and fruit and fresh butcher’s meat had spilled all over the paving stones, and splattered and slid under trampling, panicking feet.

  The crowds parted for the redcoats.

  Some of them came running up to Arlandes, pleading and whining: What’s happening? There’s fire everywhere! What’s happening? Who’s doing this? A grey-haired woman in a ragged grey dress, four fat children in tow, clutched at Arlandes’ sleeve and begged: “They burned my street. Why won’t you help us?”

  He shoved her aside. Now they begged for his help! After weeks of slurs, and slander, and riot and sedition, now they wanted his protection again. Now that some foreign enemy was there on the streets, skulking in among the crowds. Now that the game of riot had become the reality of war. He despised them.

  Was it Mensonge? Was it Cimenti? Cimenti was a tricky bastard and it was his style to use proxies and subterfuge; Mensonge was a degenerate and Arlandes would not put it past him to use slander and dirty plays and the passions of the mob. There was no way of knowing, and Arlandes could not think straight; the streets were too busy and too noisy.

  There were more redcoats among the crowds—little scattered bands of them, confused and leaderless. They rallied round Arlandes; they made their panicked reports. Bad news was general all over Shutlow and Barbary and Fourth and Foyle’s. More than one of Arlandes’ fellow captains had vanished mysteriously, most likely assassinated. There’d been explosions and fires all over, at barracks and magazines and watchhouses and countinghouses and courthouses. It was too coordinated to be mere riot, but the perpetrators were invisible, uncatchable; they wore no uniforms, they vanished among the angry and frightened crowds.

  On Gissing Street the fences were plastered all along their length with fresh wet posters: FREE HOLBACH and UNBIND THE ATLAS and NO GODS, NO MASTERS, AWAY WITH THE OLD MAPS. Arlandes, striding through the wet leaves heaped in the street, thought Holbach! Was it possible that fat old fool had planned this? The men torching Shutlow were no scholars, whoever they were, none of Holbach’s degenerate clique of playwrights and intellectuals, but Holbach was rich; he could have hired them. Holbach may have been unworldly, but he had worldly people around him. That woman, the one who’d escaped the arrests; she’d had a cunning look about her.

  The redcoats did not know whom to shoot. On Quay Back Row, Arlandes passed a group of young men moving with a purposiveness he found suspicious, and he ordered them shot on general principles. A quick search of their pockets found nothing more than ordinarily incriminating. Leoden looked sick; Arlandes told him, “Keep moving. The Countess’ll pay their families compensation in the morning, if she’s still alive.”

  On Grossmarket Street they passed the body of a woman, black-haired, facedown, and broken in the dirt. The crowds rushed past ignoring her, eyes on the fires on the skyline, just as they’d rushed past Lucia’s body, eyes turned to the sky and the Thunderer. Arlandes held back tears; he pretended it was only the smoke.

  On Barium Street they passed a flock of those white-robed hooligans putting the torch to a public house. Arlandes couldn’t recall which mob was which, or what they called themselves: the white-robed shaved-head creatures and the chattering shrieking children in silk blended in his mind into one swirling slurry of gutter filth. One more sign that the city was falling into ruin. For a moment he speculated, absurdly, that those evil children were his hidden enemy; that this new mutant generation of bastards and freaks was rising to take the city from him and from the Countess. Leoden fired a single shot and the white robes scattered like pigeons. (Their white robes fluttered away like her dress, as she fell.)

  Arlandes’ numbers swelled. He had some twenty-five men with him when he went through Seven Wheels Market. A bomb had toppled Coney Wheel: the great stone wheel lay split in two, carts and stalls crushed beneath it. Arlandes rallied two redcoats who’d been trying to fight the fires. Near Saddler Wheel he picked up a prowling half-dozen of the grey-coated Irregulars. The Irregulars were, in his view, little better than thugs and murderers, their mere existence a symptom of decay in the body politic, but it was no night to stand too nicely on scruple. Thirty-two men. Too few, far too few. Their numbers were too few, their resources strained and scattered, after long weeks of policing and patrolling and pleading, almost, for order. He kept thinking, How has it come to this? What god did we offend? He started thinking, How did the Countess fail us so badly?

  He had forty men with him by the time they passed under the arch on Ruby Street—the gates of which it appeared some entrepreneur had unhinged and carried away for their iron—and forty-two when he stepped onto Laud Heath.

  Up the hill, over the lawns, behind the tree line, the Countess’s estates were burning.

  Arlandes broke into a run, and his redcoats followed.

  Long, thin shadows came flying over the lawns down the Heath toward them, and then past them; men and women fleeing, tumbling down the hill, back-lit by the bonfire of the palace: servants, disloyal, rats fleeing from the burning building. The servants’ arms were full of stolen silverware and furnishings. A girl in a maid’s dress came careening down the hill, candlesticks stacked in her arms like firewood; she blundered into the redcoats and spilled her burden. A man in a butler’s black suit fell on his face, almost cartwheeling downslope, and put his foot right through the painting he’d stolen, which was of the Countess’s grey-bearded grandfather, and snapped its golden frame beneath his weight; Arlandes cuffed him aside and kept running.

  Perhaps there was no true enemy; perhaps it was only the plague. Perhaps the plague had driven the city mad, and the city was turning on itself. Fire and flood.

  They ran through the Widow’s Bower, trampling the neatly graveled paths. The lanterns had fallen from the trees and they stamped them under their boots.

  At the crest of the hill, the hill just southeast of the palace, they stumbled into a group of men who were running through the trees on a course aslant of them. Both sides were briefly startled, but only briefly. They drew swords and pistols and lit into each other. The interlopers, whoever they were, dressed in neat black suits; they fought efficiently, quietly, brutally. They carried nasty barbed brass rapiers; they lunged again and again at Arlandes’ head like ravenous mosquitoes. They were outnumbered—they left behind no more than a dozen bodies—and they went down quickly. There was no time to search the bodies to see whom they’d served.

  Arlandes cut through the trees, and burst through the bushes, and left the Bower, and looked down on the Countess’s estate.

  N either Arjun nor Olympia could sleep. They walked through the streets, around and around in aimless circles. They went arm-inarm; it was cold, and they were frightened.

  They turned down a street with no name that they could see any sign of, because there were lampposts among the trees and lights on in the brownstones, and there was the sound of conversation and laughter from one of the windows.

  “I can’t stay,” Arjun said. “I’ve decided. If they bring Holbach back to you, and you and he go on to bring back the Atlas, I can’t stay with you. Or if they don’t bring Holbach back, and you go on anyway.”

  “Nicolas is dead. Liancourt is dead. If they don’t bring Holbach back, the Atlas is over.”

  “You’ll find a way. You won’t be alone. Holbach’s friends and your friends are still around. They weren’t all arrested, were they? Hidden, maybe, for now, but still around. Aren’t they? You’ll begin it all again. Things go away and come back again; that’s how this city works. You won’t be able to walk away from it, Olympia.”

  “But you can?”

  “It isn’t why I came here.” He shrugged his thin shoulders. “I do not want to be misunderstood; your work is a better and braver thing than anything I may ever do. Even though sometimes terrible things must be done, must happen.” He gestured vaguely in the direction of the Rose, a
nd then south toward Shutlow. “All this will pass. But I cannot stay. I have no business in this world. Perhaps I am not brave enough.”

  They turned off onto a narrower street, less well-lit, without trees. He held her closer; they leaned against each other.

  She shook her head. “What will you do? How will you go on searching? What if that monster finds you? What if Holbach can’t stop it? What if it just keeps feeding until it’s swallowed the whole city? Will you give up then?”

  “I have some ideas. I have been thinking. I have been thinking that I have been going about things all wrong. I have fought against the city when I should have bent with it, and bent with it when I should have fought. I have certain ideas as to how I should proceed. I think no one further needs to be hurt. Or hardly anyone. After tonight, I think, if we all make it through tonight, there need be no further cruelty, or violence. Or hardly any. Perfection eludes our grasp, of course, but we can do better. I’ll begin again. If I tell you what I plan you will think I am mad.”

  On the corner of the street, there was a theater, closed and shuttered for the night. Out the front of the unlit ticket-office was a wooden statue of a little boy, stiffly and blindly holding out a wooden tray. Olympia ran her hand over its painted head as they turned left onto a street of seedy haberdashers and gin-houses and warehouses.

  She told him, “I already think you’re mad. Remember? But it’s a gentle enough madness. Maybe there’ll be a place for that kind of madness when we remake the city. Why does the world have to make sense when we remake it? We’ll make it beautiful, and large enough for everyone. You’re right, you know; we’ll begin again, and better. No Countess or Chairman or any other bastard’ll crush us. If not the Atlas anymore, something else, something better. This is Ararat, after all; what’s the Countess or the Chairman in the great scheme of things? What’s some stinking forgotten river-god? There’s a thousand rivers out there somewhere and a thousand gods of it. What’s the Atlas, for that matter? There’s a thousand movements and revolutions, all the time. There are things dying and being born again everywhere, in a thousand different ways. What matters is the future. We’ll go north, maybe. There’s people in the High Parliament of Dewey Hill who’re friendly to new ideas.”

  She stopped and peered ahead. As the street curved crookedly round south by southwest, and downslope, a circle of flickering gaslight came into view, and dark figures moving in it.

  “Maybe we’ll go east. I’ve been in correspondence with a man in Millom-Bry. A banker, an inventor, he wrote for the Atlas on Quicksilver and Nitre and I don’t know what else. He’s rich; he’ll take us in, maybe.”

  As they got closer, they saw that the gaslights stood in a circle around a row of tables, on which were heaped food and blankets. On one side of the tables a small group of women in robes bustled and fussed; on the other a queue, a procession, a slow dismal tide of men, shuffling, in rags. Some women, also, and children.

  “Maybe we’ll stay right here. We’ll hide in burned-out buildings like those awful children; we’ll live like wild animals, and fuck anyone who tries to stop us.”

  As they entered the circle of lamplight, everything became clear; sheer black silhouettes took on faces, lined and tired. The building on the street corner proclaimed itself a Nessene Mission. The ragged people, bent double, coughing and sighing, bore the signs of lung-rot, in their black eyes, their glistening fish-belly skin. Their stink.

  Behind the tables worked the Nessenes, the healers, in their blue robes, the little golden trident-pins glittering in the gaslight. They wore breathing-masks of blue cloth and charms to keep out the sickness. The little women looked like delicate industrious beetles. They barely looked up as Olympia and Arjun approached. There were only four of them, and there were so very many of the plague-sick.

  “Enough talk,” Olympia said. “We’ve talked enough and I’m sick of it. If we can’t sleep, let’s make ourselves useful. Sisters,” she called out, “can we help you?”

  F rom the hilltop, Arlandes looked down northwest onto the palace. He looked down north onto the Thunderer, and its great complex wooden dry dock. The palace was in flames; the Thunderer was not. Men scurried back and forth in the firelight, antlike, vicious, purposive. They climbed the dry dock and swarmed the Thunderer’s rigging.

  Leoden stood at his side, sword in his hand. “Captain?” Arlandes shushed him.

  The fire in the palace was in the west wing, and in the conservatory, and parts of the arboretum. There was fighting at the east wing. Muzzle-flashes at the windows, barricades on the lawns. He watched the invaders launch a charge, a brief sally, coming round by the carppond and up the ornamental steps. The charge failed. The south wing, however, had clearly fallen to the invaders, and its occupants had been lined up on the lawns, and were being—searched? Suborned? Charged and tried and executed, perhaps? But by whom?

  It occurred to Arlandes that he’d recognized the barbed brass rapiers of the men he’d killed in the Widow’s Bower. He’d fought a duel once against one of Chairman Cimenti’s half brothers, or nephews, or managers, or something; that was the weapon the man had chosen. Were those Cimenti’s men down there? But there were so many of them: could Cimenti field so many men?

  Leoden stepped closer. “Captain? The Countess, Captain, the Countess needs us.” Arlandes held up his hand for silence.

  There were men crawling over the deck of the Thunderer; at least thirty men. More on the dry dock. More belowdecks, no doubt. They didn’t know how to launch it, clearly. They were not perfect, whoever they were. They did not know everything. They were blundering in the same darkness as Arlandes.

  Who were they? It could have been Cimenti. But it could have been any of a dozen others. Red Barrow could deploy that many men; Red Barrow’s Thane liked fire. He had no territorial ambitions this far south, surely, but would regard death and chaos as its own reward.

  It could have been Mass How; there’d been subversive elements in Mass How’s Parliament that had had truck with the Atlas.

  It could have been the city itself; it could have been the city turning against the Countess and her people.

  Arlandes’ eyes darted back and forth across the battlefield. There, down by the doors to the south wing: a woman being dragged down the stairs, and onto the croquet lawn. Her clothes appeared gold and her face white, but perhaps it was only the firelight. She was so tiny and distant. Leoden stepped forward and Arlandes held his shoulder, pulled him back. There were black-suited men holding her arms and one of her legs. It might have been the Countess or it might have been a serving-girl; it might have been anyone. A crowd of men in black surged around her, grabbing her, dragging her down, obscuring her from view.

  Arlandes sagged. He held tightly to Leoden’s shoulder to support himself; his legs felt suddenly weak. If she is gone, I am next. He whispered it out loud—“If she is gone, I am next”—and Leoden looked at him in shock.

  And if he saved her—if he charged down there and hacked about him left and right and dragged her from the melee, if somehow they escaped—then what? Then she would begin again, of course. Her face white and stiff and implacable, she would begin again. And there would be revenge, and more sacrifices, and more death, and he could not stand it; he could not stand the thought of it. What was the point? There was nothing worthwhile left to save. Her terrible white face, red-lipped, ordering him Begin again. Build again. Cold as a statue, heartless as a god. And beneath that white face could be anyone; it hardly mattered. It was the cruel mask that mattered, and the orders it would give. He felt his courage and the last of his dignity tremble and break at the thought of it.

  He pulled himself up straight again and drew his sword, and pointed with it north, past the palace, at the Thunderer, and the dry dock, and the men swarming over it.

  “The Thunderer, gentlemen. We must take the ship. The Thunderer is everything. Our last and best weapon. If we assault the palace, we give up the Thunderer; we give up our only escape. She would want
us to save the Thunderer first. Those were her orders, gentlemen.” He hated the sound of his own voice, pleading and whining like a shopkeeper, a condemned man, a coward, a deserter. The men shuffled uneasily.

  “If we take the Thunderer, we can avenge her,” he lied. “Do you understand?”

  His redcoats put up no real resistance. It was shameful.

  J ack had Holbach’s floor and cell number, from the warden’s files, and it should have been easy to find him, but it wasn’t; it wasn’t at all; in fact they all felt as though they’d been in the Rose for ten nights, or a hundred, or a thousand. They went down and down and the Rose unfolded beneath them. Petals of rust and iron; barred walls and bloody spikes and the dragging of chains over stone.

  There were very few guards to challenge them—they’d all gone up, it seemed, into the upper floors, drawn up by Jack’s diversion. The Thunderers wiped off their knives on the bedding of an empty cell and stuck them back in their belts. There was no one left to fight. But the Rose itself turned deadly beneath them. Grinding its gears like jaws, it slid open pitfalls and spike-traps. It spun and tilted its corridors like a slow-motion knife-juggler. Chains would pull and drag across the floor and—suddenly—the ceiling might fall, or a wall might draw itself across Jack’s path, or blades might whisk across the floor. They danced and leaped and fleeted over the blades and the spikes and chains; without the Bird’s gift, they’d each have been skewered a dozen times. Sometimes the floor would shake and groan and shift beneath their feet, and they’d soon find themselves back again descending a staircase they’d already descended once, twice, three times. Once, an iron curtain descended across the corridor they were running down and cut Beth off from the pack, and it seemed that it was hours later that they found her again and she threw herself into Jack’s arms sobbing with relief. When the same thing happened to Coit, they searched and searched but they never found him.

  Some of it was just clever engineering—walls shifting and sliding on hidden and oiled gears like scene-changes at the theater. Inside one suddenly opening pit there was an immense slowly spinning device of chains and pinions and crankshafts and steam-pistons; Jack jammed it with a guard’s pike and it screamed to a juddering halt. There were trip wires and pressure plates and similar bits of machinery. But some of it, most of it, maybe, was nothing to do with human ingenuity; it was the god, the Chain, rushing through its lair, reshaping it. Bars grew out of nothing, across the hallways, right in front of them, in brazen defiance of sense; bars that, when Jack touched them, were fixed stiffly in place by centuries of rust and dust and cobwebs and dried blood.