Thunderer (20 page)

He thought of Norris, from the Cypress, who had chased down Red-Beard in the maze of the city’s pubs and brothels, and left all his strength and youth with him. Was that why Defour was so protective of Norris? For the glamour of his sacred wounding?

They brought him paper and a pen. To relieve the loneliness, he spent his time composing another letter to the Choirmen (though the first still sat in a drawer in his room). He wrote to explain that he despaired of finding the Voice, that in fact he no longer knew whether he cared whether he found it or not, that he had been wounded in such a way that his love was poisoned by doubt, that he wondered if the whole thing was not madness, sickness—that he thought perhaps he hated the Voice, now, as much as he loved it. He tried to say that perhaps he was wrong to come, but he kept saying instead that he hated them for letting him go. That wasn’t what he wanted to say, he thought; he didn’t know. He tore up his drafts and threw them in the corner, until the sisters told him that paper was expensive, and that he had used up his ration.

One of his voyeurs, a young man in a cassock, was eyeing the crumpled drafts as if they contained some secret wisdom. Arjun swept them under the cot, for spite’s sake.

A
fter Jack’s theatrics
with the press-gang’s banner, Namdi kept his silence, but the talk about the Countess and the Gerent went on among the other boys. Some of them started to say that they sided with the Gerent against the Countess. That wasn’t the point either, Fiss explained, patiently. “The ship is our symbol ’cause it’s free, do you see? Not ’cause it’s powerful; because it’s
free
. It’s up there over the heads of all the people. It can go anywhere. Like us. You shouldn’t follow the Countess because of it, or the Gerent because we say you shouldn’t follow the Countess. They just want to turn it into a weapon, and beat and break things down here on the ground, so they can shut everyone up in prisons. That’s not what Silk wants. Do you see?”

Jack found it disgusting. He sat on the roof, looking down at the garden, watching the younger children play. They formed themselves into teams and fought with sticks—the Countess’s men, led by the boy who won the fight to play Arlandes, against the Gerent’s men, who always lost. It infuriated him.

He tried to keep himself and everyone else busy with work. He took three of the worst offenders—boys who he caught holding sticks like rifles over their shoulders, aping the press-gang’s march—and ordered them to go out to Seven Wheels Market, to patrol for incursions of the white robes into Shutlow. “If you
must
be soldiers, you can work it off that way,” he told them.

He went out alone a lot in the evenings, avoiding the ritual—at some point, it had gone from a habit to a ritual—of playing priest for the younger children. Anything they said would only be a disappointment to him.

Fiss could talk to them, even when they didn’t listen, and make jokes so that it was all right. Jack couldn’t do that. He had no patience for talk, and his
coup de théâtre
with the banner had been less effective than he had hoped. He could feel what he wanted for them, like a tug in his chest, always pulling forward and out, but he didn’t know how to say it. They were getting away from him. He made himself remote and forbidding, willing them to feel his displeasure. But that wasn’t enough either.

H
e went out walking every evening, down to the docks, across into Fourth Ward, all through Shutlow and Barbary. Over the rooftop ways, or down in the shadows of the streets. He got as far as he could go in an evening, and stopped. There was always one more turning that would carry him further into unexplored parts of the city, but he was not ready to walk out on them yet. So he crisscrossed the same streets again and again, his thoughts a maddening, futile spiral: what should he do, what
could
he do, with these children for whom he had somehow taken responsibility? How could he make himself, and them, worthy of the gift they had received?

He thought they didn’t see him go. He would sit up on the roof of the Black Moon as the sun began to sink toward the square towers in the west of the city. When the mood took him, he would jump across to the roof of the pawnshop next door, and then over to the boardinghouse. He would return by the same route, coming in through the window.

Namdi came out onto the roof on the evening of River-day. He had Martin and Ayer (his boys from Lime Street) in his tow. He rapped his knuckles on the tiles for Jack’s attention. He had a gift; at his instruction, Martin and Ayer reached into their jackets and pulled out bright tangles of silk thread in blue and crimson and gold, which they held out to Jack in cupped hands.

“Well done,” Jack said hesistantly.

“It’s for you,” Namdi said. “A gift, if you like. Peace offering.” He looked uncomfortable saying it.

River-day was an ill-omened day for gifts and treaties, but no one would have taught Namdi that, and Jack saw no reason to mention it. He took a handful of the thread, curiously. Namdi reached out and tugged at the loose shoulder of Jack’s shirt.

“No offense,” Namdi said, confident again, “but look at you. Jack Silk, you’re looking grey these days.”

Jack looked down at himself. The threads of his shirt were ragged and sparse. It had been a long time since the escape from Barbotin, and he’d never meant the shirt to last for longer than the moment’s magic required. What threads were left were dirty and faded and grey.

Namdi looked at him expectantly. Behind him, Martin and Ayer were nervous. Jack shook Namdi’s hand, firmly, and said, “Thank you.” Then, when Namdi and the boys had gone, he shoved the threads into his pocket and forgot about them until Bell-day, when he came back from one of his long walks to see Martin and Ayer, sat down by the small fire in the bar, sneaking nervous looks at him; their faces asked, had they displeased him?

Moved more by guilt than by any desire of his own, he took needle and thread (they always had uses for needles; they never bothered to dispose of thread) and went up onto the roof to work on his uniform. His hands were practiced and very quick at the work, and he grew quickly bright again.

While he was working on that, Fiss came out to join him on the roof. Aiden followed, leaning silently against the chimney.

“They don’t understand,” Fiss said.

“I know that.”

“I mean they don’t understand why you’re angry.”

“I know that, too.”

“We all know you go away every night,” Fiss said.

“You know?” Jack asked.

“We’re not stupid. Are you always going to come back?”

“Maybe.”

“What is it you need, to stay?”

“I don’t know. They don’t understand anything.”

“They’re young. And not well-schooled, you may’ve noticed.”

“It’s like it’s just another prison. Do you understand?”

“No. I don’t understand. This is our
escape
.”

“I can’t stay here, in this place, every night, until we all get taken by the watch again. I need to
do
something with it, with the freedom. This
speed,
that the Bird gave me. To be worthy of it, of keeping it. Or I’ll have to go.”

They were both silent. Then Fiss said, “So you don’t know what you want. But we’re not good enough, is that right? You can fuck off, then, can’t you? Better now than later.”

Jack looked back at him, stung. Before he could say anything (
How dare you?
crossed his mind, and also
I’m sorry
) the window slammed open and Namdi reached out and slapped the tiles for attention. “It’s coming. Look—out over the Jaw.”

Jack looked east. There was a black shape in front of the clouds in the distance: the warship, moving over the city. The fleet of sharp little boats flocked around it like crows.

“It’s moving slowly,” Namdi said. “We can catch it. Come on, then.” Namdi ran for the edge and threw himself across onto the roof of the pawnshop. He ran on without stopping, with a long, confident stride. Brushing past Jack, Fiss followed after Namdi, checking himself as he landed, and then starting the run for the next jump. Aiden came, too, and others followed from out of the window, whooping. Jack ran after them.

Fiss fell back before the end of Moore Street, balking at the gap between 47 and 49. Aiden stopped in Shymie Mews, before a sharp drop down from the gables of Anansi’s temple to the old Ghentian butcher’s place. The others all reached their limit before they left Shutlow. Jack drew level with Namdi near Allen Street, atop the houses running like a row of yellow teeth.

Namdi was panting, red-faced, the veins standing out on his neck. For Jack it was easy. It was good to move straight ahead, gathering speed, in wordless rushing air. Gently, he slowed to keep pace with Namdi, who threw himself violently from building to building, landing heavily, sweating despite the cold.

The shape of the ship grew larger, then smaller again, its course taking it past them, up from Ar-Mouth and northwest. They turned in its wake and followed it.

Namdi finally fell behind at Sunder Square, on the edge of Shutlow, where he missed his footing on a loose tile and slid, scrabbling, down the sloped roof; by the time he had checked his fall, he was far below the path. Jack kept going, gathering speed. Under his rushing feet, vaulting up the little houses on the escarpment, Shutlow gave way to the terra-cotta buildings of Mass How. The streets were wider here, full of evening life and music. The buildings were taller and their architecture more varied. It made the puzzle of Mass How’s rooftops more challenging. Jack took an eccentric, zigzag route north. Through all his changes of direction and elevation, he kept the ship steady in his sight. He crossed Mass How in no time at all.

He went up Cere House Hill, his feet soundless on the shrouded roofs. He crossed a span of temples and towerblocks for which he had no name, west of the Heath. The turrets of some great estate rose on his right. He recognized the Countess’s flags. He crossed some place where the houses were round and built of white stone, and poles stood on every corner, with men sitting cross-legged on top of them, up above the city, staring at the sky. They turned and watched him as he streaked by. Factories; slums; then a wide, curving street full of theaters and music halls, in exotic forms; the air smelled of spice, then smoke, then sewage, then fruiting trees. A row of parapets rose before him, and a strip of low hovels fell behind, like waves thrown up in the ship’s wake. He was far from any part of the city he had ever known. Impossible for a man on foot to go so far in one night, even at street-level, doubly so by roofscape. He was closing in. The city was a blur under his feet.

H
e knew Stross End when he saw it. There was a slim pamphlet being passed around Shutlow,
Our Cause against the Tyrant of Stross End
. On the frontispiece, in the foreground, a lizard-like man with a hooked nose and a stained business-suit clutched at a pile of money with clawed hands. Behind him there was a dehumanizing mass of towers, some belching smoke, others lined with narrow office windows and topped with huge clockfaces and bell towers. In the background, under the towers, in vulgar, forceful denial of perspective, the artist had rendered shadowed courtyards full of hunched, frail-looking men in shapeless smocks, scuttling from factory to office to mill. To Jack’s surprise, the rendering of Stross End was not unfair.

Stross End was lit by fires from the smelting-towers. The
Thunderer
slowed as it came over the courtyards and into what appeared to be the central plaza. Jack found a route up onto the top of a block of office towers on the far side of the plaza and sat on a ledge above a great clockface. He watched expectantly. Now that he was close, he could see the fleet of smaller boats around the
Thunderer,
each carrying a group of riflemen.

He tried to ask himself how he had come so far, so fast; how was it possible? But the immense warship hanging above the courtyard commanded all his attention. Was it his imagination, or could he see a man on the
Thunderer
’s foredeck, holding a saber over his head? Was that the Widower Arlandes?

The courtyard emptied.

At the north end of the plaza, one tower was taller than the others, and bore the Gerent’s crest in place of a clock. Men in black armor came rushing out of the tower’s tall iron doors, filling the courtyard in ranks. They pointed their rifles in the air and fired up at the
Thunderer
’s hull, without effect.

Arlandes—if it was Arlandes—slashed his saber down. At his signal, the
Thunderer
’s guns fired, shaking the sky. Two shells exploded in the ranks below, sending broken bodies flying. A second struck the Gerent’s tower, and the twisted metal of the Gerent’s crest fell into the courtyard, followed by a shower of bricks and dust. Black smoke covered everything.

There was an answering flash from the top of the Gerent’s tower, and then another, from the other end of the plaza.
Not rifles,
Jack thought:
artillery. They were prepared for this
.

A constant, rolling thunder filled the air. A shell from the Gerent’s guns struck one of the kite-boats, and it fell in flames. One of the towers slumped sideways and disintegrated across the courtyard, its structure gone, its matter loosed to spill and burst. There was fire and dust everywhere.

The kite-boats flocked around the
Thunderer,
and hovered over and among the towers. The tiny men in a boat below Jack’s perch staggered to the side of their vessel, and heaved a box over it; flame flowered where it landed on the courtyard below.

A shell punctured the golden balloon above the
Thunderer,
and tore out the other side of the deflating fabric. The ship listed and fell at an angle. Jack held his breath. It righted itself. A second shell tore open a hole in the
Thunderer
’s wooden side, without any noticeable effect on the warship’s functioning. Whatever powered it, such wounds clearly meant nothing to it. Of course, Jack thought: how could one expect to sink it, when it already defied gravity? Ignoring the fires on its dark decks and the scrambling and screaming of its crew, the
Thunderer
revolved slowly above the courtyard, a mandala of war, and fired again and again at the Gerent’s guns.