Thunderer (18 page)

A
rjun struggled in the freezing, stinking water of the canal, kicking and flailing and thrashing his head, casting about for the surface and the air. He broke the surface before his brain gave in to the crushing and the poison. He went under again.

Then somehow he was clutching a slimy post in the rushing water.

And some time later, he pulled himself up onto the path and vomited out foul liquid. He fell back, panting and looking up at the stars, and lay there in the cold night.

The last thing he was able to think was:
I remember.

At the last moment the god had
noticed
him. The shock had sent it recoiling in something like terror.

F
iss and Aiden brought Jack
back from the fight, reverently, each holding a trembling arm. Namdi walked alongside, pumping his fist. “Right across his face, Jack, his fucking face! He won’t forget you. So
fast.
Who taught you that? His face!”

They laid him down on a coarse, filthy blanket, in one of the hollow upstairs rooms of the Black Moon. His limbs shivered, and his head was full of light and wind. It was impossible for him to rope his darting thoughts together and bring them back down to earth, so he lay staring silently on his back.

After a while, Namdi came to sit with him. “You’re going to get up again, Jack. You took
ten
of them on, and they never touched you. You’re going to be all right.”

Fiss came, and held up his head and made him drink water from a cracked mug, then sat back against the wall and said, “We’re all worried about you, Jack. I saw you fight them. I was closer than Namdi, and I watch closer, too. That wasn’t skill. I don’t think you’ve ever even held a knife before, have you? You weren’t just quick. You were
too
quick. You cut them all before they could even move. How did you do it? You don’t know, do you?

“You know, we never had a leader. There was never anything to be led, just a few children who passed through. But they used to listen to me and Aiden. We were here first. We made this place.”

Fiss wrapped his arms around his thin legs. “Now they’re all talking about you downstairs. Silk this, Silk that. The fight. The escape, and the thieving. Your speed. How you
named
them. Aiden and me, we could keep them out of trouble, if we were lucky, and help them find food, and a place to sleep. Not this.

“Which is all right. I don’t mind. You need us, though. Because,
look
at you. You don’t know where you are, do you? You’re only half in the world, half the time. You need us to get things done. Don’t forget that.”

Sometime after midnight, Jack brought himself down and pulled himself together and descended into the cavernous dark bar. Those who were awake and those who were soon awoken cheered for Jack Silk. He felt like he was only halfway down.

W
hen Jack was much younger, a monster haunted Laud Heath and the wilds of scrub and weed down by the river. A monster, not one of the gods before which his parents prostrated themselves, not the sort of thing that would earn a child a slap across the face if you spoke of it without reverence. Just a beast. A
wild
beast.

Some people said it had fought its way out of the sewers. Others said it had escaped from Chairman Cimenti’s menagerie. All agreed that it looked like a dog, but one of monstrous size and ugliness, with eyes that burned like a plague pit put to the torch, snakelike tongue, twisted shoulders. They called it
hyena
. They said that it stole children, that it had brought down a dray horse, that it followed women home, slavering. They said it went to ground in the day and went ravening at night.

Men came through the streets and pasted up crude renderings of the beast. Jack couldn’t yet read the words underneath the caricatures, but he knew that the posters were promising a reward. The militia went hunting for it every night, their torches blazing. His father and his two eldest brothers went out on the Heath with their friends and neighbors. The fishermen brought their nets with them, Jack remembered. All of Shutlow and Ar-Mouth and Barbary were wild with loathing. The pubs spilled out at closing time in a fighting mood, and went roaring up to the Heath in the dark. It was no god, and they owed it no reverence; they were free to indulge their hate.

The watch couldn’t catch it. Nor could the mobs, or the citizen committees. Drunken brawls, near-riots, broke out on the Heath at night. After sundown, the amateur hunters were easy prey for thieves. There were stabbings; Jack’s father came back one morning with his eye blackened and his scalp bleeding. The Countess declared a strict curfew on the Heath.

None of them could catch it. It had gone to ground somewhere. It was too clever and wild. It made fools of them.

Jack fell in love with the monster. His heart beat in sympathy with it. He tore down the posters in his street and burned them in an empty lot, feeling like he was sharing in the beast’s splendid defiance. He got into a fight with some of the older boys in his street when he told them the beast would never be caught. Their fathers were out there every night, they said, protecting him: how
dare
he say that?

There were other boys who shared Jack’s fascination, and they would lead each other through the barrens and onto the Heath, hoping to meet the creature face to snarling face. They hid in the bushes on the Heath; they crept through the thorntrees of the Widow’s Bower. They went down to the wasteground banks of the river, where sometimes children drowned or were murdered, and poked through the rusted hulks and the empty rotting boat-sheds, always expecting to see the creature at any moment. They never thought what they would do if they met it. They ranged off far afield into the side streets, the weed-grown lots, the graveyards overgrown with ivy and briars; places where it was ridiculous to expect the beast. Jack mapped out the secret places of his city.

That was how Jack got taken into the custody of Barbotin House: the watch caught him after curfew. Jack’s friends were processed to some place in Fourth Ward, and Jack was sent to Barbotin. The reasoning behind those differing sentences was never clear to Jack. And a few months later, a new inmate told Jack that the Laud Heath Beast had been taken by the militia, and carried through the streets in triumph, lashed between two stout rods. It just looked like a yellow dog, the boy said, like a scrawny twist of bloody fur: no kind of monster at all.

Now Jack was chasing a different kind of beast. In his dreams, the
Thunderer
was wild in the city’s sky, far out of reach of the grasping spires. It was their secret sign.

The lads stitched the image of the ship into the pockets of their jackets, using a bolt of blue silk Aiden had stolen from the tables in Seven Wheels Market. Beth’s girls laughed at them. “Look at you,” Beth said. “Like the crests the boys at the church schools wear. Aren’t you fancy now.”

Fiss stuck his chest out and tilted his nose comically in the air. “You jealous? We look splendid and you know it. You shouldn’t even be talking to us.” Fiss and Beth both laughed.

“It’s not like schoolboys, anyway,” Namdi said, seriously. “It’s like soldiers, with medals.”

With stolen paint, they painted a huge image of the ship on the mold-ridden wall of the Moon’s empty bar. Then they painted it in corners and cracks all over Shutlow.

The younger boys liked to play at being Arlandes, the great ship’s captain. From the chatter in the streets and the markets, they picked up that there was bad blood between the Countess and the Gerent of Stross End, and they acted out battles between the warship and the Gerent’s guns. On other days, they imagined Arlandes directing his mighty forces against their enemies in white robes. They knew that Arlandes was famously in mourning, for a young bride tragically lost in the ship’s raising, but they found it hard to act out that aspect of his character.

Occasionally, the warship went overhead on some unknowable mission. Then the Thunderers took to the roofs and yelled after it. If it was moving slowly, they might try to chase it.

Shutlow’s buildings were all tumbled together, falling on each other’s shoulders like huddled refugees. Its streets were narrow and dark; few were more than alleys. No one had thought it a virtue before. Jack was proud to prove them wrong: if you were fast and fearless, you could leap from rooftop to rooftop, scrambling on hands and knees up sloped tiles, catching just barely onto rusted fire escapes, climbing hand-over-hand to find a flat roof where you could run full tilt between chimneys and water towers, scaring up pigeons, to throw yourself across the next alley (its contents irrelevant, depressing; don’t look down) to continue the chase. He thought—he hoped—that no one before him had discovered that property of Shutlow, that saving grace.

Someone probably had, he knew, but none of the Thunderers had discovered the sport. He had to teach them. He had to dare them into it.

He knew he’d never catch the great warship that way. But so what? The chase was its own prize.

One by one, they would draw up before a jump that defeated their nerve, and stop, clapping for those brave enough to go on. Jack always went furthest, but reckless, forceful Namdi was close behind.

H
olbach was trying
to work through a problem in his mind, regarding certain anomalies in the recent manifestations of Lavilokan. The mathematics were difficult, and it was hard with people talking. With a sigh, he put down his pen.

He sat at one end of a long table, covered with a fine white cloth, on which the Countess’s insignia was stitched in gold, over and over. The Countess sat in the center of the table, of course, and around her were all her various advisors. Captain Arlandes sat at the other end of the table. They were splendid: the advisors in laced and ruffed doublets, Arlandes in medal-hung crimson, the Countess a riot of diamonds and gold, her face as perfect and white as marble.

A second table faced them across the empty floor, a plain shape of machined steel. The Gerent of Stross End hunched in the middle, dressed in dark business-suit and tie. He was surrounded by his senior executives, all dressed the same way.

They were sitting out in the open air, on the sandy floor of the Danaen Amphitheater. Gulls went by overhead. Stepped rows of stone seats swept out and back in all directions. It was the only structure, apart from a small ferry station, on the wooded Isle of Wine, in the middle of the river. Neutral ground.

The Countess’s advisors passed bits of paper around. One leaned in and whispered to her, for a very long time. Then she spoke, formally and sonorously. “Gerent. I regret to say that your proposal is not acceptable. The issue in Ar-Mouth is not one of tribute, but of
jurisdiction.
Your generous offer cannot compensate us for the encroachment on our authority.”

The Gerent conferred with his advisors, then responded, enunciating firmly, “It appears I must clarify my words. Neither
tribute
nor
compensation
were offered. However, if you are not willing to consider a
sharing
of the harbor’s
profits,
then we are of course willing to discuss issues of jurisdiction.”

Holbach was not there to offer his opinions, only so that he could be
seen
to be there. A subtle reminder of the
Thunderer
’s power; something to keep it in the Gerent’s mind, and to let him know that it was in the Countess’s mind too. All he had to do was stay awake and try not to look foolish.

Presumably Arlandes was there for the same reason. Even if they didn’t recognize Holbach, which was unlikely but possible, everyone could recognize the
Thunderer
’s tragic captain. There was even a play,
The Captain Unmoored;
posters all over the city bore his mournful countenance. Holbach couldn’t bring himself to see the play. He feared he might be the villain of the piece. Holbach could not look at Arlandes without guilt. The man was still shadowed by the death of his wife on the day of the
Thunderer
’s launch: that absurd, pathetic death. Poor gentle young Lucia. She’d been a mere afterthought, a decorative touch. The Countess had wanted someone to go up with the balloon, for the look of the thing, for the benefit of the crowds. Why hadn’t he said no?
Because the girl was neither here nor there to your experiment,
he thought.
She canceled out. So you gave her no thought. You selfish, silly man. Nicolas would be ashamed of you.

And that young man was on his conscience, too. Arjun. No word for days. And he did not seem to be the kind to just vanish, distracted by some girl or wager or exciting new theory, as Holbach might have when he was that age. It was troubling.

But Shay really
might
have been able to help Arjun. It had not been a wholly selfish gesture to send Arjun in his direction, had it? Perhaps he
had
helped: perhaps Arjun had vanished because Shay had been able to point him toward that Voice of his. They said Shay had secret paths; perhaps Arjun was on them now. That lifted his mood, but then he was annoyed to think that he might never hear what Arjun had learned of Shay’s secrets.

The Countess spoke. “We should not be limiting our discussions to Ar-Mouth. Our grievances, I fear, are inextricably linked to the issue of Kanker Market.”

The Gerent locked shocked. His advisors turned to each other, whispering, and huddled in around their lord. They didn’t seem to have a response prepared.

Holbach began to worry. The Countess had been so aggressive lately. This was the third such conference of the week. She had made stiff demands of the Mass How Parliament, which they had referred nervously to committee for further consideration. She had taken a frighteningly high-handed and demanding tone with the Chairman Cimenti, who had acquiesced to her demands with a smiling grace that had left the Countess infuriated and Holbach quite terrified. He would take revenge, Holbach thought; would he still be smiling when he did it?

It was the
Thunderer,
of course. She was making the most of her new weapon. It certainly wasn’t what he had created the damn thing for. It was supposed to be the great triumph of the Atlas-makers: he had dreamed that it could carry his cartographers all over the city, perhaps as far as the rumored walls in the east and west, which the Atlas had never so far reached; perhaps even over the mountain in the north. It would lay everything bare.

Not for this. Never for this.

Someone tossed a copy of the
Sentinel
across the table and the sudden motion made Holbach snap to attention with a grunt. One of the Gerent’s men was yelling about libels and threats published in that rag, that lying rag.
Oh,
Holbach thought,
is the
Sentinel
one of ours, then?

His mind wandered; he let the newspaper remind him again of Arjun. The
Sentinel
had reported—
gloated
—that the Observatory Orphée had been sacked by the mob, and the body of the blasphemer Shay paraded down Laud Heath and cast into the river. So where was Arjun? Had he gone on to find his god, or had Shay killed him? Or the mob? Was he lying in some hospital?

Yes. Hospitals. That was how best to proceed. He could have someone search the hospitals. Olympia, perhaps. She could take care of that, as she took care of so much else.

But enough of that. He looked around. The conference was heated now. The Countess and the Gerent were both talking as fast as their advisors could hand them paper. Numbers, commodities, place names, dates, old treaties, obscure laws, ancient battles.

Having decided what to do about Arjun, Holbach put the problem out of his mind and tried to go back to his work. He took a silver fountain pen out of his pocket and began to sketch the angle of Harp Street from memory, plotting the points of the theaters along it, and the intersecting arcs of Foss Row and Monmouth Street. He marked the points of two fires reported in last week’s
Sentinel,
and a murder. He pondered the possible sacred forms that could be composed from these points.

He lost patience again. It was too hard, without his tables, maps, and books, and with all this shouting. He rested his head on his hands and ran his fingers through his beard. He hummed a tune inside his head—a pretty, sad melody that he had first heard a few days ago, sung by a flower girl in Faugère.

The shouting had stopped for a while before Holbach noticed. He looked around. The Countess and the Gerent were glaring at each other. Under the Countess’s stiff white facepaint, a faint flush of blood was visible. The Gerent was squeezing the edge of his table in a liver-spotted claw.

The Countess spoke first. “I regret the failure of this conference. I’m sorry you were not prepared to listen to reason.” She stood in a sweep of golden skirts. Her entourage quickly gathered up their papers and followed, and together, they passed under the arch and into the cool tunnels below.

The Countess’s anger vanished as soon as she was out of sight of the Gerent’s men. As they walked through the tunnel, she reached out and stroked Arlandes’ stiff impassive cheek with the backs of her fingers. She was smiling. “My beautiful, sad Captain. It seems we will have need of your
services
.”