Thunderer

by Felix Gilman

  The corridor that led between cells 110 and 130 of Mensonge’s fief turned, and turned, and circled back on itself without exits, or windows, or escape. They walked round it a dozen times, hearts sinking. They ran helter-skelter round and round it and there was still no escape from it, and the wind of their passing as they went faster and faster and faster blew out the torches and they were in darkness and at the mercy of the god’s will. Caul and Wood screamed and sobbed as they ran. Caul went silent quite suddenly as he hurtled into something sharp in the dark. The rest of them kept running anyway, as if they could outrun the god’s mindless grip. Which was madness; the realization settled coldly on Jack that it was madness. All he had was the tiniest stolen scrap of the Bird-God’s power, the tiniest rag torn from its hem as it passed, a single bright coin stolen from its purse. In the face of the city’s true ancient Powers, he was nothing; he shouldn’t have come into the Chain’s place of power. He kept running anyway. And quite suddenly there was a doorway, and the beautiful, brilliant glare of torchlight, and they stumbled out into the new passage that opened before them. They weren’t sure whether they’d been released or driven further into confinement; which of the Rose’s two gods had blown past them—the Chain or the Key? There was no way of knowing, and it hardly mattered.

  A little later, Wood sat down and refused to move, or be moved. Beth cried and slapped his face, but he would not explain himself, and in the end he had to be left behind.

  They went deeper and saw stranger things with every turn. The prisoners in the cells on every wall babbled and begged in strange new languages, tongues Jack had never heard. Most of them were in rags; some of them were in stranger clothes, things cut in a style Jack had never seen. There were shiny fabrics he’d never seen before, more like metal than cloth. The people themselves were often strange. He’d seen dark-skinned folk before, of course. Namdi and poor Coit, for two; that funny little man Arjun, for three. Ararat was a big city and it was full of all sorts of people. But there were stranger shades; copper and nightshade and sky. There was a row of cells in which the prisoners had eyes like cats, yellow and hungry; he’d never seen that before. There were prisoners who went on all fours, and not, apparently, from madness, but from habit; their arms were long like spiders’ legs and their legs by comparison quite stubby. There were tunnels and tunnels and deeper tunnels, windowless, musty-smelling, where red roots as thick around as Jack’s waist twisted through the walls, and coiled and knotted underfoot like guts, as if Jack was crawling into the innards of some gigantic impossible tree. It was at that point that Jack had to concede that they’d gotten lost. That they’d taken a wrong turn, and more than one wrong turn. Beth was for turning back, but “We have to keep going,” he told her; and he ran on and carried them all with him, through corridors of black marble. There were corridors that creaked and swayed like an old ship, and smelled of saltwater and rot. Always there was the sound of heavy chains, dragging, sometimes right over their heads, crashingly loud, sometimes distant, stealthy, and ominous; always there was the sound of doors swinging open and slamming closed. Torchlight gave way to gaslight gave way to white-walled corridors where tubes of cold dead light buzzed and hummed. A woman in white, in a peaked white hat, stepped out of a white cell as they ran past, and she gasped in shock and dropped her white tray of pill-bottles and needles, and she called after them: “Children, children, you shouldn’t be here; there are sick people here, you mustn’t frighten them…” They passed her, left her behind, rushing on through chambers of glass, through shuffling chambers of thin white card-paper. Jack thought of the weight above them, the Rose’s terrible dark density; he thought of the world and the order of things buckling under the pressure. He thought of coal crushed into diamonds, of old dense stars collapsing into swirling hungry blackness. The thought of those black stars flitted across his mind as he ran, and he didn’t know why, or what it meant; it was no thought that belonged in his city. The Rose was misnamed; it was a star, not a flower. No; it was a wound, not a star—it was a great infected wound cut into the city’s flank. Purple and red and wormy; as they went down, they sliced further and further into torn city-flesh, broken and mis-set city-bones, all shards and odd angles, the city-tissues swollen and distended. They dug up buried strangenesses like writhing maggots.

  Two more levels down from the nurse in white, there was a man in a steel-lined cell whose face and bare arms were stitched and woven with silver wires. He sat cross-legged next to the bars, and reached through pleadingly, curiously. His golden eyes glittered and irises clicked open and closed. The flesh around the wires looked infected. The wires themselves carried a faint glow. He spoke in a language none of them understood, and in fact they were not sure the noises he made were language at all; they seemed almost involuntary. The glow of the wires blinked on and off in stained-glass shades, the sparks of color pulsing up and down the man’s arms and face. He looked at them expectantly, patiently, as if the lights were a message, a code, as if he hoped they would understand him. Jack shrugged; the man’s golden eyes blinked shut, blankly. They could not find a way to open his cell. When he fell silent, despairing, the wires still hummed and hissed.

  There was nothing like him in Ararat—Jack would have sworn to it. But there the man was. Jack resented him; he couldn’t help it. They left him behind (humming and clicking and hissing and blinking) and went down, and down, but Jack could not put the poor bastard out of his mind. Could the same city that held Jack, and Barbotin, and the Palace Cabaret and Shutlow and the hideout in the Black Moon pub and all that, also hold that creature? It seemed impossible. If they ever escaped the Rose, would it be to the same city they’d woken up in that morning?

  Jack’s breath came ragged and raggeder. He stumbled over cables and chains. The scale of the Rose and everything contained within it overwhelmed him. He thought about the dwindling numbers of the Thunderers; he thought how tired and ragged and pathetic they were, and how vast the city was. He thought of himself beating his tiny wings against a vast thunderstorm, pointlessly, forever; his futile motions changing nothing, nothing. He staggered and slowed. He was on the point of sitting down, like Wood, and just stopping, when Beth cried out and grabbed his arm.

  She pointed down the corridor. An archway at the end of it was hung with a beautiful familiarity, the comfort of something he’d always, always hated: the Countess’s arrogant red flags. He grinned, hugged Beth tightly, inhaling the wonderful bitterness of her sweat. “We’re not done yet, then.”

  I n the early evening of the next day, they were woken by a knock on the door of their hotel room. Olympia jumped from the bed, pulled the dirty sheet around herself, and ran stiffly to the door. Arjun woke slowly and watched from the bed as she opened it to reveal the hotel’s fat manager, fist raised in mid-knock.

  “Boy here says he has a message for you. Little bastard woke me up. Don’t do it again.”

  It was the smallest of Jack’s Thunderers. Arjun thought his name was Een. He said, “Someone wants to see you. Follow me.” They followed. He stayed well ahead of them, waiting for them at the end of each street they turned onto. He led them onto a street of imposing office buildings, and in through a door under a partially dismantled sign that marked the building as an abandoned outpost of the Gerent’s commercial empire.

  The foyer inside had probably once been grand, but the steel and marble had been stripped by thieves. Now it was dusty and grey. The Thunderers stood around in the room’s shadows. A heavyset figure slumped on one of the room’s stone benches, his head lowered. He was writing something in a notebook in his lap.

  “Professor,” Olympia called, and ran toward him.

  Jack stepped in front of her. He looked pained, sympathetic—older, somehow. His awkward face announced that he was trying to be kind. “We got him out. We found him. It wasn’t easy but we found him. But they’d beaten him badly. We didn’t want to bring him to your hotel. He, well, he’d attract attention. He must have made the Countess very angry. I’
m sorry. You’ll need this for him.” Jack handed her an empty notebook. “The bitch let him write, so he could work his science for her, but she took his tongue. I’m sorry.”

  Olympia went and sat next to Holbach. When he got closer, Arjun could see that Holbach’s whole face was purpled, bruised and swollen. The wound was quite new. Olympia put her arm round his shoulder, and held his hand. No one spoke.

  T hey waited a little longer. Holbach was writing something in the notebook for Jack. When he was finished, Jack took the notebook, and said to Arjun, “I got what I wanted. And it was good, to take someone out of that place. We’ll come back, one day, and smash it all down. I’m sorry they did what they did to him. I’ll wish you good luck, I suppose.”

  “Thank you, Jack. Was it very terrible? Did your own people come out unscathed?”

  Jack didn’t answer.

  “What about the Rose’s guards?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I see. I’m sorry, Jack.”

  Jack shrugged. Arjun shook his hand, then Jack led his boys away, into the street.

  Holbach’s legs were weak. Not broken, but badly bruised by his shackles. Together, they helped him outside.

  O lympia had a place near the warrens, on the edge of the ’Machy’s huge walls, not far north of the Rose. It was a square stone building, in a neighborhood of empty shops. It had once been a pumphouse. “Hoxton picked it out,” she said. “He used to have connections in the ’Machy. Not quite legal ones. I kept it in case of something like this. In case I ever needed to hide.”

  She didn’t dare to visit any of the banks where she had accounts, but she had hidden a few caches of money about the city. “I always knew we might need to begin again one day,” she said. They reclaimed the money under cover of darkness.

  Before she had gone into hiding, before she had had Hoxton rescue Arjun from the riot on the Heath, she had been able to help a few of the Atlas-makers into hiding. Now she went out across the city and brought them back. Several of the explorers had survived; so had Branken the optical scientist, Marchant the jurist, Mellarmé the surgeon, a few others. They found rooms nearby.

  Holbach was sick. At first Arjun feared it was the god’s touch, but it was just the result of Holbach’s wounds and exhaustion. Arjun cared for him as best he could, with what he remembered of the Choir’s medicine, until Olympia brought Dr. Mellarmé out of his hiding place to take over.

  Some of the Atlas-makers had refused to come with Olympia. Others had been missing when she had looked for them; murdered, or gone deeper into hiding. Those who remained needed very badly for someone to lead them. They hovered nervously around Holbach.

  Arjun spoke to Holbach twice. He asked, “Professor, did you learn anything of the Typhon? Any way to fight it?”

  Holbach held his pencil weakly and scratched, No. Need my books to learn anything. Can do nothing here.

  “Did you learn anything of the Voice? Anything that might help me find it?”

  No. I am sorry.

  Arjun held the sick man’s arm and squeezed it, saying, “That’s all right, Professor. That’s all right.”

  T hey were far north of the Countess’s territories, safely out of the storm of unrest. The news of what had happened reached them slowly. They avidly collected rumors and newspapers, keen to see their worst fears confirmed.

  There’d been a quiet week. The Thunderer had sat idle in dry dock. The greycoats had retreated into the shadows. The streets had been empty. The newspapers had begun to ask whether the violence had burned itself out.

  But then there’d been some further protest, reports of explosions in Seven Wheels Market, a rash of plague deaths, some intolerable outrage by the white robes. Whatever the cause was, something sparked it all off again.

  It was worse the second time. Even allowing for the newspapers’ exaggeration and hysteria, it was clearly worse. Everyone, on all sides, had guns and explosives and the will to use them. It was not tolerable; it could not last.

  Piecing together a half-dozen papers, it was possible to pinpoint the night when it all burst and broke. In one night, it seemed, the rioters had struck each of the Countess’s barracks, shipyards, watch-towers, gun-towers, and countinghouses. Her forces maintained three magazines around Shutlow and Barbary, squat buildings behind whose barred iron doors were shelves and shelves of powder, rifle and artillery; in one terrible hour they were all exploded, spraying fountains of fire and brick-dust across the streets, blasting out every window for blocks. Casualty reports were unclear: some people said that the magazines’ neighbors had been warned and had slipped safely away with their children and valuables just before the fatal hour. Olympia shook her head and said, “People always say things like that.” Certain scholars had tried to calculate the theological significance of the triangle of fire marked out by the explosions, but their results were inconclusive.

  And a hundred shocked reports said that the Countess’s palace had been sacked, burned, blown up. The blaze was said to be visible all across the Heath for the better part of a day.

  Hundreds of people claimed to have been eyewitnesses to the worst fighting. A mob of escaped criminals—Did we not warn that the anarch Silk would bring unrest and destruction on the city? While our rivals indulged in childish hero-worship of the anarch, did we not warn? asked the Sentinel—had attacked the palace, and the Thunderer’s dry dock, without warning, while the bulk of its guards were engaged elsewhere.

  In the end, the Countess’s forces were spread too thin to protect any of her strongholds.

  It was bloody, and confusing. The only thing everyone agreed on was that the Thunderer had survived, and so had Captain Arlandes. They said Arlandes managed to get the ship into the air, though its crew was halved and its cannons unarmed, and had escaped over the Heath, and into the tall buildings to the west.

  Over the coming weeks, the Thunderer was seen (so they said) all over the city, drifting in and out of the towers. It had gone wild, in the forest of the city’s skyline. Its crew descended on ropes in the night (they said) to steal food and supplies from the city’s tall buildings.

  The Chairman issued a statement to the effect that the fighting in the Countess’s territories could no longer be tolerated; that it was a threat to the whole city’s good order. With his peers’ consent, he sent in his peacekeeping forces.

  The rebels were wiped out almost at once, like an army whose supply-line has been cut, the Era said, skirting perhaps dangerously close to the truth. Knowing what they knew, Arjun and Olympia could not doubt that the Chairman had armed the rioters, stoked their grievances, used them, then cut them off when they were no longer useful. They wondered how many others knew.

  It wasn’t clear what had happened to the Countess. The Chariman held her territories now (for the city’s benefit, of course). The woman herself had fallen into the same abyss of memory as the Gerent. Olympia searched desperately for some news of the Countess’s fate, for some vicarious taste of revenge, but she found nothing. Her eyes teared up with frustration.

  The Chairman issued a statement promising to restore peace to the affected areas, and to avoid the hubris that had led the Countess to the creation of the Thunderer and the repression of the Atlas (though he conspicuously did not lift the ban).

  “That’s the true face of evil in this city,” Olympia said. “The true modern monster works entirely through the disingenuous statement to the press. Now he’ll turn to the loose ends. To us.”

  But then that was the last anyone heard of the Chairman. Rumor had it—the papers would not dare print any such thing—that he had been murdered. Some people said that Jack Silk had stolen into his high bedroom window at night and slit his throat, to punish him for trying to end the violence and anarchy in which Silk throve. Others said that Arlandes had had one last shot left in the Thunderer’s cannons, and had fired on the Chairman’s tower. Most people preferred not to discuss the subject at all.

  When Holbach was strong enough, they
brought the newspapers to him. He and Olympia spent long hours passing paper back and forth, trying to determine what had happened to them, trying to plan their next move; Arjun absented himself discreetly from those conversations.

  I n fact those conversations—which Arjun imagined, as he walked through the streets outside in silence, as intense and brilliant, a flurry of plans and stratagems and wild notions—went nowhere, over and over again.

  Olympia said, “She’s dead, the one who did this to you. You outlasted her. Are you going to let her silence you now?”

  And Holbach’s pencil hovered over the paper, and sometimes he’d write out a few words, and then scratch them savagely out—during which operation he made little cattlelike moaning noises, apparently without knowing it. Sometimes he was unable to write at all. Olympia would hold his hand to stop it shaking.

  Sometimes he forgot—hard as it was to believe, sometimes he forgot. Sometimes he opened his mouth to expose the ruined architecture within—they’d shattered his teeth during the operation—and released a thick moronic wordless bellow. He’d clamp his mouth shut, too late; the shame on his face would be unbearable and Olympia would have to avert her eyes.

  At other times his eyes were simply blank and hopeless, and terribly, terribly lonely.