Thunderer (26 page)

A
rjun went back to Shutlow, again, to see Haycock, again.

It was an unnerving journey. Shutlow was close to the River, in the damp bend of the west bank; it lay in a depression where mist collected and stale water puddled in the streets. Arjun was able to face it only by leaving on an unusually clear afternoon, immediately after one of Olympia’s visits. He had been able truthfully to tell Olympia that he had nearly a week’s work to show for the past week. They had talked about music, again, and gods, and politics, which Arjun had not understood. His mood was good when he set out; by the time he reached Moore Street he felt nervous and hunted again, and he remembered:
It knows you were in the Cypress. It trailed you there. It took Norris there.

Arjun paid a boy a quarter-rial to run down the street and extract Haycock from the Cypress. The boy did not come back. Arjun did not panic—it would have been both irrational and pathetic to panic—but instead promised a grubby-faced girl a quarter-rial of her own
if
she came back with Haycock in tow. She came running back shouting, “The old lady Duffer says Haycock’s at his stall in Seven Wheels that still counts you owe me my money you fucking owe me my money”—which Arjun thought fair.

He found Haycock at his stall in an empty and desolate part of Seven Wheels Market, in the shadow of one of the great stones, on what was turning into a drab and damp late-winter afternoon. Haycock’s stall was heaped with moldering books, their paper yellow, their covers fading to the shades of spoiled fruit.

“Holbach says he’s worried about you,” Haycock said.

“That’s not important.”

“Makes me look bad; that’s not important?”

“I’m sorry. I have business for you.” Before Haycock could say anything further, Arjun began his story. He told Haycock everything about his meeting with Shay, his vision in the canal-tunnel, his fears, his theories about the god’s extraordinary condition. Haycock nodded and grunted,
huh, huh,
without great interest. Arjun tried to describe the dread; he said it was like drowning, it was like being held under by weeds, whenever one saw the face of the creature form out of the rain, or drift shifting in shapeless expressions of agony across the filthy surface of a puddle, whenever one felt, in the stink of the sewers and the stale water, the
pain
it was in, the
hate
it had…

“Then why aren’t you dead already?” Haycock interrupted.

“I’m sorry?”

“If the god’s hunting you, why aren’t you dead already? If
I
wanted to kill you, I’d have bloody well done the job by now.”

“It’s not like that, Mr. Haycock. Part of it’s poisoned by humanity, now; part of it is thousands of years old. Older than the city, maybe. What does it care if it waits a few months?”

Haycock grunted.

“And imagine how confused it must be, how upset it must be, how sick it must make it to be what it is now. To be
imperfect.”

Haycock just shrugged. In fact Haycock’s question had been one that Arjun had not considered, even for a moment, all winter long; his surprising facility in answering made him doubt his own words. He said quickly, “I will pay for books, Mr. Haycock, on the Typhon. Or I suppose on Shay, if there are any, or anyone doing Shay’s business, whatever it was. Or whatever you think suitable. I have to go. It’ll be dark soon.”

He took a carriage back to Stammer Gate. The driver went too close to the water, but Arjun held his tongue. Night fell. The carriage passed briskly by a long lonely street to the left of the main thoroughfare, and down the brick terraces and railings and weeds of the street it was possible to see the edge of the River, and an unhealthy light playing across the heavy water, and by that light for an instant Arjun saw the tiny figures of a man and a child down by the water. Arjun said nothing, and felt terribly ashamed.

T
hree days later Haycock brought Arjun a sackful of books.

There was a nasty and sadistic fiction called
The Murders of Doctor MacLaglan,
in which a repellent man who lived in a narrow dark house whose unwashed windows opened over the river carried out a series of lovingly described murders, by strangling, or drowning, or poison, all at the command of a gurgling voice that rose up from the cold water every night and called itself
Timon.
First MacLaglan murdered neighborhood street-children, and then his nieces, then a succession of prostitutes, then his own beautiful sister. He did it joylessly, resolutely. One by one he brought the bodies down to the water.

Arjun was unable to finish the book. It seemed inevitable that either the protagonist would prosper without consequences for his murders, or he would be devoured himself by the monster. Either outcome would be unbearable to imagine. Arjun was not surprised when Haycock told him that the book had been banned as blasphemous, and for the most part destroyed, and
that
was why Haycock’s expenses for the book were so great.

Along with
Doctor MacLaglan,
there were two histories of the River. One alluded vaguely to the rituals of the Bargemen, back in the hard old days, who would gather at midwinter in the tunnels and draw lots to determine whose child would be offered to the water that year, so that the Bargemen might be spared drowning or sickness or loss of business. Another noted casually, as if it were something everyone knew, that “of course, the first bridges had bodies in their foundations.” Both referred in passing to the Typhon, but there were a dozen other gods of the River and they dwelled on those instead.

There was a short, poorly written
Memoir of the Life of a Bargeman
. It began:

I was born into a hard life, my mother said I came early in the Cut under Tyn Wald and the lanterns had burned out and every bargeman knows how in the tunnels the day at the end is only a speck, it gives no light, to see by. In the dark the horses panicked along the narrow towpath when she cried out in her labor and my father, who was slow sometimes she said because of the ague, tangled his foot in the towropes and fell in, and though my uncles came back with poles and lanterns to look for him he was never found. We say, another for TYPHON’s coils, when that happens, and that is how a Bargeman goes, or by the ague. Father was taking coal from Unger to the Wald for the heating of Baths, by contract to the HOLCROFT Combine, who never paid a penny for the death of him because they said, the GOD willed it. So when I could first walk I had to become a Bargeman my own self.

The
Memoir,
too, had been banned, for injudicious remarks about the Holcroft Combine and its ultimate owner, the Gerent of Stross End.

Those four exhausted Arjun’s budget; Haycock packed up the rest of his books with a shrug. As he was leaving, Haycock stopped to offer a range of charms and amulets against evil and drowning, purchased, he said, from secret but impeccable sources. Arjun bought two of them, which he could not afford to do. He spent the rest of the day wearing a bracelet of white feathers and a dull pewter ring with a paste gem and feeling increasingly ridiculous. The books answered none of his questions.

His purchases left him almost without money for food for the rest of the week, and so when Olympia came by three days later and suggested they go to a café, he was delighted to say yes. She had Hoxton take them to a snug and warm and smoky place full of students. Olympia drank heavily and cheerfully, and Arjun drank, too, until his head reeled. When Arjun wondered out loud what had happened to that painter, that “Mochai, was it?” she laughed and said, “We had a
disagreement.
No more Mochai!” and his spirits rose immensely. The students at the next table sang a drinking song that used part of the melody that was the Voice for its chorus. For the next two days Arjun’s mood was good, and he was productive and happy, and noticed music again; on the third day it rained and the fear washed filthily back over him.

W
inter dragged on. It seemed to Arjun that it lasted for an uncommonly long time, as if slowly gathering its strength; no one else seemed to find it unusual. Two more students drowned, an apparent suicide was found floating in the Calder Canal, and there was an outbreak of Black Lung in the Missionary Shelter at Hailie Circle.

J
ack did not go back
to Shutlow at once. It would have seemed like a waste of the gift he had been given. He set out wildly over the city, slicing great arcs across its map. The whole sky was his. He shared it with smoke and startled birds. Sometimes he saw the
Thunderer
on the horizon, but he kept his distance.

He decided to go
out,
as far as he could. He faced west and went forward. For every acre of city he put behind him, there was another ahead on the horizon. And as he moved away from the River and the Mountain, the effort required to keep his balance grew more exhausting. He gave it up around evening, afraid that if he kept going he would find his power failing in midair.

He came to rest on a flat roof in a part of the city where huge standing mirrors flashed at each other across the rooftops, and rested for a time. Then he came back in toward the River, navigating by the Mountain’s great starless shadow. It seemed that he didn’t need to sleep, as if flight took the place of sleep. He wondered several times if he was in fact dreaming.

At first he felt a strong urge to treat this gift reverently, to make it an act of worship, although he was not sure to whom or what, so he kept a solemn face and tried to think deep thoughts. He couldn’t keep it up for long. He went up to Goshen Tor, and drifted among the high windows of the banks, scaring the pigeons off the ledges. He rapped on the windows, then fell laughing away when the clerks turned to look. He found a plush office at the building’s peak, and knocked on the window and called, “Excuse me, sir, shine yer shoes, sir? Sir? Buy the
Era,
sir!” A pale fat man in a brown suit gaped at him; Jack stared wide-eyed and innocent back, then laughed and fell back into the air. That sort of thing amused him all afternoon.

Since he was on the Tor, he drifted up to the temple of Tiber, where he had hidden months ago, and sat for a while, thinking,
Catch me now, you bastards!
But no one came for him.

He sat on a north-facing slope of cold tin. As the winter evening darkened, a red light waxed on the horizon. The Pillar of Fire. The god of his gaolers. It was always there, a faint glow on vision’s edge by which one could navigate at night, but he had never been there. He ran to the edge of the roof with quick steps and threw himself into the air, going north.

I
t was perhaps midnight, but it made no difference. Red, fluxing light bathed everything, smoldered in the glass of all the windows, sparked in the air. The tall bone-bleached buildings around the Plaza were tortured into pillars and flutes and proud statues; they strove for grandeur, but could not compete with the thing rising from the center of the Plaza. But it was hard to look at that, so the eye was always drawn back to the buildings. Their polished marble reflected the flames.

The Fire poured endlessly up. It was as thick perhaps as the arm-span of a half a dozen men, and taller than the tallest buildings. Rigid but flowing. The Church taught that all those who died right would be born again as flickers in the Fire, endlessly purified and rarified. Maybe; who knew? It stung the eyes. It gave off much less warmth than one would expect.

It was like an exclamation mark, or an admonishing finger. It demanded attention. It had to
mean
something. But the flame curled silently in on itself. The courthouses and prison-houses around it captured its reflection and imposed meaning on it. Their stern facades spoke: it stood for
justice
and
punishment.

Jack approached it on foot, through the crowd. He did not want to draw attention to himself. There were priests all around, and guards with rifles shouldered through the crowds. Irreverence would not be tolerated. Not that it was likely to be offered, in that sacred place; the crowds drifting around the Fire in the un-night looked dazed with worship.

The crowd parted. A group of priests came through, followed by marshals, leading a man in chains. He was absurdly small and thin and old. His head was shaved and his beard hacked off. The crowd hissed at him. The lead priest clapped his hands and the crowd cleared a path. Jack stepped back, too.

The priests wore the ornate red and gold robes of the Church of Tiber. They led the prisoner up to a scaffold, slightly off the plaza’s center, near to the Fire. The scaffold, and the men on it, cast long shadows across the stones.

Jack knew this ritual. His teachers had described it in detail and with relish. The Church would take men who were to be hanged. They did one a day, chosen at random from all the city’s many prisons. They would bring them to the Fire to be ended, so that they could contemplate it in their last moments, and then, afterwards, be purified within it.

The marshals held back the crowd with bayonets. Jack got as close as he could. He was too late to hear the first part of the ritual, the denunciation of the man’s crimes. Now the man was weeping, lamenting the sins and follies that had led him to the scaffold. He was reading from a script, of course. Jack knew the words. The priest raised the noose over the man’s shaved head.

Jack started running before he knew he was going to do it. The marshal in front of him lowered his rifle and raised his hand, shouting. When Jack kept coming, the marshal lifted the gun again, but too late. Jack leaped up and over his head.

Two marshals stepped down to block the scaffold’s steps. Jack rose up over the structure’s side. Landing lightly, he grabbed the condemned man’s arm. He stumbled. The man’s weight was too much, scrawny as he was. For a moment they were in motion, and maybe if the man had not fought him they would have been airborne. But his bloodshot eyes went wide with fear, and he scrambled back and fell; Jack wanted to slap him. Someone grabbed Jack’s arm from behind. Jack snapped his head back into bone and the hand released.

The condemned man tried to run out into the crowd, but a bullet tore at his hip, and he fell. Two marshals threw themselves on him and pinned his arms. A priest behind Jack was on his knees, clutching his bloody nose and moaning. Two more stood nervously around. Riflemen were cutting through the crowd.

The crowd yelled: “It’s his son, come back to save him!” and “It’s an accomplice! Stop him!”

Too late to do anything now; he had mistimed everything. Jack hurled himself up, arcing into the air, to gasps from the crowd. One woman screamed, “It’s the Key Himself!”

A shot was fired. Jack turned himself toward the Fire, where they could not look and dared not shoot. He swerved around it at the last minute. It stung but did not warm his skin.

When he was far enough away, he turned himself back around and headed south, to Moore Street, with a new sense of purpose. He knew what the Thunderers could do and be.

I
t was a long journey, even for him, and he stopped often in the night and the day, pacing up and down on high roofs, gesturing and talking to himself, preparing his speech. He wanted to say: they were brought together by the Bird’s casual gift of freedom, of the
will
to freedom. They were betraying it if they stopped where they fell, settling into petty crime, waiting to be arrested again, or going with the press-gangs, or…Only if they kept moving forward, sharing the gift, becoming greater and wilder, could they be worthy of the miracle. There was a whole city of prisons and workhouses, a city of chains to be broken. Now he had the power to do it. He could take them with him. They would be a dream of freedom. There was a final perpetual escape to be made. Those were the sort of things he wanted to say.

And yes, true, all right, his first attempt had not been a success, and perhaps he shouldn’t mention it; but with an army behind him, a growing army…That could be their purpose. They could all be saved.

And so on: cobbling together a fervent harangue, out of half-remembered playhouse picaresques and rogue-ballads, and out of the prayers and prophecies beaten into him in the House—unhampered by knowledge of anything else in the world, and with the power, the gift, whispering inside his head and bearing up his feet.

H
e landed near the river, south of the Heath, and walked the rest of the way to the Black Moon with his hands in his pockets.

It was morning when he reached Moore Street. A couple of old men from the boardinghouses at the north end of the street were starting their dull days. Lagger was setting up his hurdy-gurdy on the corner, smoking a roll-up with his gnarled left hand. His bruises were healing.

Someone had torn the boards off the Moon’s front windows, opening the interior to the morning. Its innards looked pale and raw, and very small and shabby. The garden gate was smashed off its hinges. There was no one visible in the exposed interior.

Jack ran around the back and into the empty bar. He ran upstairs, shouting, “Who’s there? What happened?”

The upper floors were empty. Someone should have been there, always, whatever the time of day: he and Fiss had put a lot of effort into organizing them in shifts. “Fiss?” he called, banging the walls, his voice breaking. Their stuff was gone; their supplies, their reserves. All their small trophies.

He went up to the roof and looked down. There was no one around. In the corner of the garden was a heap of fresh ashes. He dropped down from the roof and poked through the cold ash. There were some scraps of unburned fabric in there: their blankets.

He walked around the front of the building again, and sat in the street, under the hanging sign. A few people looked at him, but he didn’t care who saw him now: he could no longer be caught or held. But the others could. And he had not been there. Let them report him;
let
them try to catch him.

He was hungry, and there was only so long he could ignore it. Around noon he went back into the Black Moon. They’d had food there. Perhaps the watch had left it untouched.

As soon as he stepped back inside, the building felt different. Before it had felt naked and exposed; now it felt furtive. Someone was hiding. Someone had returned while he’d been out the front. He sensed it before his conscious mind registered the footsteps: a flutter of fleeing feet down the stairs, stopping like held breath as he came in. Down in the cellar.

In the kitchen, the trapdoor was open. Dark steps led down into the floor. Jack stepped down slowly.

A figure rushed out of the darkness at him, holding a knife over its head. Jack had all the time in the world to step calmly aside. He waited until the figure was past him, then seized it by the shoulder, and looked Fiss in his startled and dirty face.

I
t stank and it was hard to breathe in the unventilated cellar. Fiss had made a small fire there, in the corner, out of a broken crate. They sat side by side against the wall.

“I didn’t know I was gone so long,” Jack said.

“Only a few days.”

“Something happened, Fiss.”

“You don’t have to apologize. You said you were going and you went. You weren’t our keeper, and you couldn’t have made a difference. It was never going to last forever, anyway.”

“I’m not apologizing. Don’t look at me like that: I
didn’t
know I was gone so long. Something
did
happen, and I
could
have made a difference. We can make it right again.”

Fiss shook his head and stared at his feet.

“So what happened here? How did
you
get away?”

“Day before yesterday. First thing in the morning, while it was still dark. Martin and Elsie were on lookout, I think. It was Elsie shook me awake, said there were men with rifles and lanterns coming. I woke Aiden, and we tried to get everyone out into the garden and over the fence, like last time, like that last time the watch came, but they were out there waiting, in the dark, taking us and dragging us away. So I got a couple of lads and tried to go back out the other way, and then I heard them ripping back the boards out the front, and smashing the door at the back. Though it wasn’t even locked.”

Fiss looked very thin in the fire’s light. He had not eaten or really slept since this happened, Jack guessed. Still, he would have to be strong enough for what Jack needed. They would have to act quickly, and there was no time to rest.

“I got out on the roof—I panicked, Jack, there was nothing I could do. Namdi wanted us to fight, but how were we supposed to fight? They had swords and guns. So I got out on the roof and jumped for it over to the pawnshop. Beth was with me, but she couldn’t jump in that skirt. Aiden missed the jump. I made it. I made it out of the street. They had men outside, Jack, they were
mad
to catch us, they could have done it anytime they liked, anytime we made them angry enough to take the trouble.”

“Did anyone else get away?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“Was anyone hurt?”

“Aiden fell. I saw someone hit on the head. I don’t know.”

“Whose men was it?”

“The Countess. I think. Yes, the Countess.”

“So, it’s only been a day. No one will have been moved. They’ll still be in the Countess’s watchhouse, here in Shutlow.”