Thunderer (12 page)

“Yeah, well. Let’s talk about what you owe me for the Harrifon, and the Montagu. And while we’re at it, Professor, there’s another bit of business. A young man of my acquaintance is looking for work. You’re always looking for translators, right? You name it, he speaks it. Chirps away all singsong like a little brown parrot. Funny little foreign bugger, but clever in his way.
Gad,
he’s from. Got that in your Atlas, Professor?”

“Hmm. Outside the city, you say? No, Haycock, no, we probably don’t. Bring him to me and I’ll see if I can use him. You’ll get your commission.”

Haycock took a grubby nub of pencil from behind his ear and prepared his bill. “So, what you said about water. Is that good or bad?”

“I expect it can be turned to advantage. Perhaps it means fluid times. Times of change and growth and rebirth. Hmm. I feel quite optimistic. I’ll tell you what, Haycock, tell me more about Galliatin’s
Erotica,
would you?”

I
n the evening,
Madam Defour took her guests for a promenade through the streets of Shutlow. She thought it would be nice, she said, to take the air. Her guests couldn’t really refuse, though the sky was cold and grey. Defour held up a pale green umbrella to ward off the autumnal drizzle. She stepped high, holding her skirts, along the line of flat stones that ran along the middle of Moore Street, lifting the fussy pedestrian out of the street’s wet filth. She gave her umbrella the occasional stagy twirl. Her guests trudged along behind, shoulders hunched against the rain.

Apart from Defour’s umbrella, they were a drab and monkish procession. The city’s autumn was weather for waxy black rain-cloaks or long grey coats. Arjun had picked his own coat from a musty pile in the basement of Klozny & Klozny’s on Many Street.

Klozny’s had been an adventure in itself; he was still turning over in his mind the strangeness of it. He’d wandered for what seemed like hours through the corridors, half-lit by shuttered candles, smelling of dust, old perfume, sweat, wax, spices, a thick grey soporific funk of heaped wool. His first time in a department store, of course: he’d startled at mannequins, he’d touched things he shouldn’t have touched, he’d gotten lost, he’d attracted stares. He spluttered in the dark stinking tobacco-shop on the second floor; in a bright cold hall on the third floor he nearly knocked over a glass table piled with ices and chocolates; somewhere in the basement he scuttled through an appalling room whose walls were oak-paneled and lined with plaques bearing a variety of mangy animal heads, trying to avoid eye-to-glassy-eye contact with either the living or the dead. In low corridors there were shelves and shelves of tiny lacquered sculptures of pretty little street-children, of noblewomen in ballgowns, and of stranger things that were presumably gods. He picked up a china noblewoman in a china ballgown: when he figured out what the numbers black-penciled on her base were he fumbled in shock and almost dropped her. Who had that kind of money? And of course Klozny & Klozny wasn’t even that smart, even Arjun could see that, there on dirty crowded Many Street, up on the outskirts of Mass How, on the hillside, so the floorboards subsided at sad angles—the
smart
folk, the truly rich folk, shopped elsewhere. Goods came to them, perhaps. Arjun wasn’t sure how it worked. But in K & K there was, wonderfully, eerily,
music,
piped through the corridors somehow, low repetitive strains of violins that always seemed to be going somewhere but never did. He never found the source, though he pressed further and further into the shadows, though he pressed his ears up against the walls and peered into the corners, though he even got down on his hands and knees to inspect the wainscoting, risking a trampling by crowds of middle-aged ladies. By that point the suspicious attentions of the store’s staff were quite pointed; they followed him flexing their knuckles, ready if necessary for violence in defense of Klozny’s tight profit margins. He finally found himself in the discount basement, and he purchased an old coat mostly because he felt he had no choice. He brought it back home oddly proud of his achievement. Madam Defour pronounced it
rather shabby,
and Heady, who professed to know about clothes, agreed:
shoddy goods.
But the coat was now a
done deal,
as Mr. Haycock might say.

It let in the rain, though.

All the rainy way down Moore Street, they kept their hands in their pockets and their heads hunched. Arjun hung near the back of the group, among Defour’s disfavored.

Clement and Ewan walked in front of him. Both were little men. Clement had brought a copy of the
Era
with him. Ewan held it, Clement stretched out the wings of his raincoat over it, and they read it together by the light of Clement’s cigarette, jabbing their fingers at things that annoyed them. They craned their heads together and whispered.
Disgusting,
Arjun heard, and
makes you sick,
and
blasphemy
and
should be strung up
and
no way to show respect for the powers
and
bloody outsiders
and
shame. Shame shame shame.
Or possibly
Shay
.

Clement turned his head back. With his glasses, in the dark, he looked like an owl. “What are
you
looking at? Mind your business.” Arjun shrugged and took a step back.

He walked by himself for a while as they crossed Nancy Street. Defour signaled with her umbrella and the line turned sharply left down Capric Street—sharply away from the whorehouse on the corner of Nancy, where the girls stood out under the gaslights and whistled after the lodgers’ retreating backs and Haycock whistled back.

The rain was not unpleasant. The city hissed and sighed and breathed deep with it.

Norris tapped him on the shoulder. Arjun turned. Norris was smiling, so Arjun attempted to smile in return.

Norris’s smile was a shy, silly thing. His thin neck and arms were scarred with ugly, fading tattoos, but his eyes were wide and weak, like a sick child’s. He was an old drunk, nothing more, Haycock had said, sneering, but Arjun thought there was some deeper deficiency in the man.

Defour had a way of talking to Norris; she humored him kindly. He was the only person she treated that way. Something in Norris invited pity. Arjun tried to mimic Defour’s manner.

“Haycock says you’re looking for something that ran away from you,” Norris said.

“He told you that, did he?”

“He says you’re mad.”

“There was a Voice that sang in a high room above my home. My home was made of its echoes. It left us alone, and without a purpose. I suppose I feel its loss very deeply, and that makes me strange. But this city seems full of equal strangeness.”

“He says everybody’s mad.”

“Well. Good. They probably are.”

Norris leaned up to Arjun’s ear again and whispered. “I went looking for something once.” Arjun stopped and turned to listen.

“It was ’47, ’48. I worked for Butcher Mose. Bad boy, see? Younger, then. Flush. Money rolled in for Mose’s men. Knew me in all the Wards. Legbreaker. Hit women. Fathers and children. Not like it was at first. I’m talking later, now, see?”

“Slow down. I’m listening. It’s all right.”

“At first. I get confused. Later it got hard. At first, ’42, ’43 maybe. I was a new boy. I went into a place, all the women knew me. Money to flash around. I was on the up. Broke out of gaol, once or twice. Daring, that’s what it was. Ran with Greeley the Barber. Went up to Goshen, stole from the temples and the nobs. Brought it back and threw it around.”

“I’ve heard the ballads about Greeley. He was much loved, for a crimelord.”

“They were about all of us. Used to pay the girls to sing them to us in the bars. Welcome everywhere. This is still before. Drank all around town. Smart boy. Joe, Bill, Hod, Owney, all with me. All over the city, place to place, every night. Lights and smoke and drink and singing. Like you, see? Singing.”

“Perhaps. I suppose so.”

“Owney got killed on business in Goshen. Greeley died locked up in the Iron Rose. I got married, but the girl died in childbed. A fever hit the Ward in ’44. They closed all the places I knew. Sailor, Star ’n Garter. The Howling Wolf.”

“And then you worked for Mose?”

“Not the same. Still on top, I was, mind you. Under Mose. That Haycock thinks he’s so hard. I was the real thing. Hurt people. Made them afraid. Point is, it was harder. Colder. Lonely. Too much competition, had to get nasty. Not the dashing young rogue anymore. Older. A bully. Hated and feared. No more drinking and singing. That’s it. That’s what it was. So we went looking. Me and Hod. Down where the Howling Wolf used to be.”

“What were you looking for?”

“The Horned Man. Red-Beard. Do you know what I mean?”

“I’ve read about it. A power of drink and revel.”

“That’s right. They said he was twenty feet tall. They said he drank out on the Heath or on the Wilding Moor or down in Garhide or the ’Machy’s warrens. Crew of mad wild women. Dangerous. Loud. No one ever saw him themselves, but they knew a man who knew a man who had. They said you might, maybe, see him anywhere, any boozer in the city, he could come barreling on through, no warning, cloud of music and shouting with him.”

“You wanted to find it. To get back what you had, even if it was only for a moment.”

“They said he’d come through like a blast of wild wind and everyone would go with him. Taken. Who knows where?”

“Is that what happened to you?”

“No. Yes. Me and Hod, we knew how to look. Found a man in Stammer Gate. A scholar. Lived in a tower up over the square. Kept bats and birds. Paid him what we got from Mose. He told us how. We went down to where the Wolf used to be and we started there, ’cause that’s where we last saw Owney, and he was one of us when it was good. We went up to the Star. Then the Whistler. Every place we went, we threw more money at the crowd.”

“Did they forgive you?”

“No. I mean, maybe. Not at first. To the Compass and the Lion. The Mineshaft. They hated me there in them days. Good reason, too. But they were cheering for me that night. But they were all blurry; wasn’t just the drink. Up to the Hesperus. To Shecky’s place, as never had no name, even in the good days. We took the door out the back, I remember, and we went up these stairs between two, two…” He gestured oddly, steepling his hands sharply against each other, “See? And we went into this place where it was like the old crowd was there. It was like they were all young again. I swear Owney was there. Danced with a woman I’d have sworn was my wife.”

“Could I follow this route, to find this god?”

“No. The gentleman made it special for us. It was places that meant something to
us,
see? Wouldn’t do nothing for you. Anyway, we went out that place through a back door when the bell rang. There was another place under the arches. And another, when the bells rang again. Must have been days, but it was still dark. The places we were in, I don’t know, there was one that was lit so
bright,
but not by fire. There was a place with the strangest damn music, and clothes. There was a time when I think we was out on the moor, but it was so dark, you couldn’t see nothing but the fire. And women dancing round it, all bare. Sounds nice, son, I know, but it wasn’t.”

“You were getting closer to the god. Did you see it?”

“I saw
Him
. On a stone bench. Just in a place, looked like the Compasses, a bit. He looked like—so
big,
but not tall or wide, or…All these people with him, and they were all like me. Following. I wasn’t special. They loved Him so much.”

Arjun waited. Eventually, Norris spoke again, emphatically, as if sick of talking.

“I don’t have a way with words. Haycock could tell you what it was like. But
I
saw Him. I was with Him for a long night, a bloody good night, as good as it ever was; couldn’t ever be the same afterwards. And Hod never came back, and
I
came back in the end, woke up out in the ’Machy in some trash heap, in ’58, ’59. I know I haven’t been right since. I
know
. The god took all my strength with Him. We shouldn’t have tried to
use
Him; He wasn’t
safe
. Nothing’s right since. No point in anything now, right? Came to this fucking place to wait it all out.”

He picked up a stone from the street, and turned it over in his grubby fingers. “None of it’s the same anymore. None of it’s real, either; when we were with Red-Beard, everything changed around us and everything was new all the time. Now I know none of it’s
real
.” Without warning, Norris flailed back his arm and threw the stone across the street. A window broke loudly. “See?” he said.

Heady and Clement came running back. Heady held Norris’s arm while Clement asked him, “What did you do that for?” Norris babbled incoherently; his brief articulacy had vanished. Arjun hung back.

W
hen Arjun went back to his room that night, he struck a match in the dark and lit the candle on his shelf. There was an envelope tucked underneath. He picked it up and turned it over in his hands. It was plain, thin, and brown. His own name was written on it, in a round, characterless, childish hand.

There was a tingle in his chest and at the back of his head. A faint tugging. He felt a black weight at the other end of a quivering silvery line. The Spider, or one of its agents, had sent this. A strange sort of welcome to the city.

He looked at it for a long time. He knew that if he opened it, he would do what it told him. Would it put him on the path to finding the Voice? Probably not. From what Defour had said, it would be something utterly arbitrary. That was the
point
.

If he opened the letter, he would most likely be giving up the search for the Voice. But it was tempting. That search felt stillborn, hopeless; the Spider would set him on another path. Any path, any purpose. Perhaps one that could replace the Voice.

Behind him, there was a knock on the open door and Haycock walked in. Arjun clutched the envelope in both hands and made as if to hide it behind his back, like a child caught stealing, before getting control of himself.