Thunderer (10 page)

J
ack watched the Black Moon
from the roof opposite for a day before concluding that it was still safe. He saw Fiss and Aiden come back from a day’s work, and followed them in a few minutes later. He was surprised by the warmth of their welcome.

“Thought they got you,” Fiss said. “Where’d you go?”

“Uptown. The Tor.”

“You mad? It’s crawling with the watch.”

“Yeah. I know that
now
.”

“You got away with it, though,” Aiden said.

“Better than
got away
. While they were chasing me around down here, I was hiding in their own stupid temple. Look what I took.” Jack pulled the bright stolen blade out of his jacket and twirled it in his wrist. They crowded in appreciatively.

“So are they still looking?” Jack asked.

“You got lucky. Haven’t seen them in days.”

A black-haired boy shouldered past Fiss, and stood in front of Jack. He was Jack’s age, probably, but larger, with a grown man’s set to his shoulders already, and heavy black brows. Jack didn’t recognize him. “This him?” the boy asked.

A girl in a blue dress called out, “He doesn’t look like much.” Jack didn’t recognize her either; in fact, he thought, the room was full of children he didn’t recognize.

“That’s the lad,” Fiss said. “Believe it or not. They’ve been dying to see you, Jack.”

The black-haired boy grinned and slapped Jack on the shoulder. “Barbotin House. Fuck me. Tell us about it.”

T
he large boy’s name was Namdi. He had escaped from the workhouse at 34 Lime Street. “Took this lot with me,” he said, gesturing at a handful of scruffy boys. “We were all out in the yard, breaking up rocks. It wasn’t the worst place I’d ever been in. I mean, it was cushy, really. I was in Dagger Row, once: the Master there was a fucking
madman
. But when that thing came overhead, I just felt…I dunno. I felt
light,
sort of; couldn’t take it anymore. I felt like I wanted to be
free.
I just had to
run.
”

“Did you…” Jack began.

“Not the way you did. Nothing like that. I just knocked the Master on the head and we legged it over the wall.”

The girl in the blue dress said, “My name’s Beth. These girls here are with me. Don’t get any ideas, they’re not here for you boys’s pleasure. They’re here for shelter. Fiss said we could stay. So: we got out of Ma Fossett’s house. Same story as Namdi, more or less. It was hard, but it was all right, until that day. The
god
. That, it was like, I had to be like it. Free.”

“That’s right,” Namdi said, “that’s what it was like.”

“So we snuck out the window that night,” Beth said. “Hid until they stopped looking for us.”

“There’s a lot more like them out there, Jack,” Aiden said. “All over town. Started turning up just after you did. All broke out of this hole or that, or run away from their masters.”

“It was a busy day round these parts,” Fiss said. “These two strays turned up and wouldn’t leave. We told them about you. They thought we were making it up. Who breaks out of Barbotin?”

“Never mind Barbotin. You
flew,
” Beth said. “With the Bird. Tell us what it was like again.”

How could he tell them? There weren’t the words. When it happened, it felt like nothing that could be named. It could never be repeated or shared, so what use were words?

Except that ship, that amazing ship: that rose at will, and took its crew with it. Was that possible?

Instead, Jack said, “Later, maybe,” and turned to Fiss. “They must be looking for them, too,” Jack said. “If there’s that many of them—us—out there, they must be looking.”

“Course,” Beth said. “They took a girl just yesterday. She was stealing food down in Brand Market, and the watch took her. Caitlin here saw it. They’re on the lookout, all right. There’s too many of us now.
The citizenry is terribly concerned,
” she simpered mockingly.

“They’ll get us again soon,” Namdi said. “They always do. Put us right back. It’s worth a whipping to get out, though, even if it’s only for a bit.”

“No,” Jack said. “I’m not having that. No one goes back.”

T
hey were hard to organize. They were only children, after all—Jack was almost the oldest—and unruly, and disobedient. The trick was, Jack had to explain again and again, that they couldn’t all go out at once. Not anymore. Not if they were all going to stay free. No more running wild. The watch would take them one by one. “Someone has to keep the workhouses running, don’t they?” Fiss told them. “That’s what you’re all for, boys and girls. They’ll take you back in a second.”

“That’s right,” Jack said. “Are you listening? You have to be careful now. So you lot stay here for the day. We’ll share what we bring back, I swear. And you lot are lookouts. You have to stay, and keep looking, right? This is important.”

It took a while to make them disciplined, to make them understand that they had roles to play, duties to perform, if they were to stay in the Black Moon. One or two were caught in the meantime. The change happened, though, in time.

Fiss was amazed by how thoroughly they were transformed. He came up to find Jack sitting on the roof, as was his habit in the evenings, and said, “They don’t even complain anymore. The boys we sent down to Seven Wheels Market are back. The lookouts are out for the night. And no complaints.” He sighed. “I tried to tell them the same things, you know. They just forgot, or said no, and got caught again. They never used to listen to me.”

They listened to Jack. He was the hero who had broken out of the impregnable Barbotin House. He was touched by the Bird-God. He was the one who talked to them at night, telling them stories about the Bird, and the Nessene, and Lavilokan, like he was a priest or something; like he was a missionary, except that he was the best thief they had. And he could
fly
. He couldn’t really, he told them, but the little ones never listened. They thought he was waiting for his moment to take wing.

The children listened to Jack, and Jack listened to Fiss. Jack had been so young when they locked him away; every day, something reminded him of all that he didn’t know about the city. He needed Fiss. It was Fiss, for instance, who knew how to fence what they stole. Jack went along once or twice, and watched Fiss deal with the hard men who bought and sold at the back of pubs in Ar-Mouth, or in dingy back-parlors of haberdashers in the Ward. Fiss had an easy, confident, joking manner with those men, respectful but unafraid; it was, Jack thought, very adult. It was more than Jack knew how to do.

It was Fiss around whom the whole group had formed. Fiss was first—and Aiden, who was always with him, and who it seemed had escaped with him, although neither of them was willing to say where from, or why. Certainly they were not ordinary street-children. Aiden was quiet, thoughtful; Fiss was kind, funny, sensible. Those were rare traits in the sort of lives they lived. They were able to make the Black Moon into a refuge, a shelter for whatever children wandered by, but they lacked the strength and the hardness to discipline them. Jack had that strength, so long as he had their help.

And it was Fiss who started calling him Jack Silk, because of his strange bright-threaded shirt. The name stuck. It was all right, Jack supposed. At first, he thought it was a joke at his expense, because Fiss made everything sound like a joke. But that wasn’t how the others took it. They took it seriously, like he was a hero, a myth. He knew that he had to be worthy of it.

W
ord spread: Silk’s lot were doing well. They had food, and blankets, and even money. They could offer protection. More children came. They wanted shelter, and they all wanted to see the miracle boy for themselves. Most had broken out of their workhouses, or run from their apprenticeships, or their families, or their panders, on the same strange day as Jack.

There were Martin and Ayer, two more from Lime Street, who had followed Namdi out over the fence, but then got separated in the streets. Namdi at once proudly took responsibility and charge of them, speaking for them. They didn’t seem to mind; they were grateful enough for a place to stay.

Turyk had run away from an apprenticeship to a carpenter in Mass How. He had not been chained, not physically: all he had to do was to look out the window at the Bird dwindling in the blue distance among the clouds, and throw down his tools, snatch up the day’s takings, and run out the door. “He’s mad,” Namdi said. “That’s a good job. Who’d run from that?”

“He pulls his weight,” Jack said. “Mind your business.”

Laura and Elsie came from a whorehouse in the Ward. They couldn’t be more than twelve or thirteen. It made Jack feel guilty to look at their skinny bodies. He asked Beth to look out for them. “What do you think I’m doing?” she said. “You just make sure nobody troubles them.”

Jack heard many other stories of escape, but none as strange as his own. He had to tell his story again and again. All those who had run away on the day of the Bird believed him instinctively. They felt like they’d done it themselves.

Once, the watch came poking through the abandoned shells of Moore Street. They hopped over the fence and hid down by the canal. The lookouts were sound, then.
Good
.

Not all of them were escapees. Some came who had been accustomed to begging. Shutlow was a poor place for it; it held its purse strings tightly. They were weak and covered in sores. They were taken in, but Jack would not permit begging. They had to be taught to steal. Jack wanted them to be proud.

Then there were those who had been in other gangs, who came to the Black Moon for protection from their enemies. The first came from Fourth Ward, where his lot had lived in the sewer, scavenging the city’s filth, until they got driven out by the Chaste Flame. The Flame smashed their stuff, and beat them bloody, day after day, until they joined up or ran away. Others came with the same story, up from the Ward, over from Barbary.

“The Flame?” Jack asked Fiss.

“Don’t you know? I know you don’t know much, but you should know this, from your books. They’re Tiber’s mad boys.”

“In the House, they taught us about a Chaste Flame. They were a counter-church of Tiber. A kind of cult, but all children, like a gang. There was a mad monk, Vilar, Volar, I think, who founded them. They wore white robes and carried torches. The Church pronounced them anathema, and put them down. But they keep coming back. Always children: it was one of the heresies they were protecting us from in the House, they said.”

“If you say so. The important thing is, they’re not just in books. They’re all over the city, the last couple of years.”

“I heard they started up this time in the ’Machy,” Aiden said. “Down in the warrens.”

“But you see them all over,” Fiss said. “They burn things. Whorehouses, playhouses. Pubs, cafés. Books, music, pleasures. Making things pure. Never seen them myself. But they say they’re like angry ghosts. They say it’s like they’re on fire.”

“There’s a lot of children want to join them,” Aiden said. “There’s a lot in this city want to see others’ pleasures burn.”

B
usy days passed, but the children kept talking about the Flame. They said the Flame shaved their heads so you couldn’t tell boys from girls. They said they came on you like phantoms, bearing fire, and killed and beat and burned. They said they could pass through walls, drift on the smoke, that they could not be killed. Some of the children spoke of the Flame with terror and tears, others with envy. All the stories of their own escapes, their own daring, their hopes for their freedom, gave way to an endless chewing-over of the fear the white robes inspired.

It made Jack sick to see them shut in their own fear like that. He sat out on the roof trying to think how to break its bars: there was a lesson to be learned from the way the Flame did things, he thought.

He called them all up into the Moon’s loft one evening, and stood by the window, framed by the street’s dying light.

“I hear you talking. Flame this, Flame that. I know some of you are thinking about joining them. And I know some of you are just here to hide from them. Like the Flame
owns
this city. Well, what are we? Are we nothing?”