Thunderer (28 page)

Food was the first priority. Across the mudflat, and a short walk through unfamiliar streets into Agdon, there was a great metal barn where the overseers of the forges doled out bread and beer to the workers. Jack’s boys knew how to do this very well by now, and came away with enough for all, with no alarm raised. They ate and drank and slept on the dirt for almost a day, even Jack.

For a week, Jack let them get stronger. Agdon Deep was not rich—it made no luxuries and consumed none, and the wealth its factories earned went elsewhere—but it made useful goods, and its warehouses were full. It brought in simple food in bulk for its workers. Everything the Thunderers needed was there to be taken.

He still didn’t discuss his plans for them. Safest to take one step at a time. They still had to rescue Aiden, and Beth, and the others; that would force them along the path he wanted.

He was thinner now than he had been when he escaped from Barbotin. His limbs seemed lighter, and his face sharper. His eyes were brighter. Sometimes when he caught his reflection in windows, in water, there was a frightening shine in his eyes that brought him up short; he smiled brilliantly and confirmed to himself that he was in fact
beautiful,
and increasingly so, with every day of waiting, every day of holding his vision fluttering inside.

One morning, when he couldn’t wait any longer, he came into the room where they sat on the dirt floor, playing with stolen cards, and said, “Stop that, and look at me. It’s all true. What you thought I could do. Look.” He stepped forward and up, into the rafters above them, and smiled down. They were stunned, then they started to cheer:
Silk! Silk! Jack bloody Silk!
When they were done, he settled to earth again, and said, “That’s how I got you out. That’s how we’re going to get the others out. We’re going back for them. I need you all with me. To search around, spy for our missing brothers; to be my lookouts; to take these”—hefting a rifle—“and be my army, if need be.”

Turyk, nervously, said, “That’s mad, Jack. It’s great, but it’s mad. We were lucky to get away once. It’s good, what you did for us. But they’ll kill us if we try it again.”

“You’d leave them behind? You’re free, so you’ll take it for yourself and leave behind those who took you in?”

Turyk looked around for support, saying, “We just want to be left alone, find something to eat. What’s wrong with that?”

Martin started to speak, but Jack cut him off. “You can go then.
Be
alone. Get out of here. This time I mean it. Get
out
.”

Jack would accept no apology. This was important. After a few moments, Fiss stepped forward to say, “Like Jack says, Turyk. Get out. Martin, bring him some food, and a blanket and a knife, to take with him. Then that’s it.”

The rest were his.

B
eth was back in Ma Fossett’s, the same place she had escaped from before. They’d added bars to the lower windows since she last got out, and wire around the outer fence, but they hadn’t troubled to bar the upper windows.

Jack came to the high window of her dormitory at night and called for her, waking a roomful of girls who started to shriek, “It’s a ghost! A vampire!” They banged on the room’s bolted door.

Beth came slowly to the window through the panicking flock, in her grey nightshirt, rubbing her eyes. “Are you real?”

“Of course.”

She looked down, beneath his hanging feet, and said, “You can fly. Like the little ones always thought you could.”

“Yes.”

“Well,
that’s
a bit of news.”

“The noise will bring guards. Take my hand.”

She leaned out the window and looked down. They were on the fifth floor; the bushes below were barely visible.

“We’ll come back for everyone else later. I just need you for now. If you come with me alone, just you, it’ll be like you were never here. I don’t want to raise any alarms. Yet.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Just take my hand.”

There was the sound of someone unlocking the door, from the outside, shouting, “Quiet, you stupid girls! Be quiet!” Closing her eyes, Beth took Jack’s hand, and stepped out of the window.

T
hey hit Barbotin a few days later. It was easy. The House was utterly unprepared for anything like this. Jack brought a group of them up onto the roof, where they waited with pistols, to ambush the laundry party when they unlocked the iron door and emerged into the light. The workhouse boys dropped their baskets and ducked for cover, but the invaders were not there for them.

Mr. Tar and Mr. Renfrew were with the laundry detail. They were overwhelmed at once. The Masters carried knuckledusters, and vicious barbed clubs, but no guns. They were used to beating down angry, frightened, underfed boys; they had never faced anything like this. Jack would have no killing—but he took their keys, and shot both men in the leg, to make sure they couldn’t follow him, and also for the sake of his feelings.

Carswell, who had been his friend when they were both prisoners, was still with the laundry detail. Jack clapped the stunned boy on the shoulder and gave him a pistol, telling him, “You’re with us now.” Then they all went down into the shadows.

He had heard that the Masters had a locked case of guns on the ground floor, where no boy was ever allowed to tread. But the Masters didn’t even try to arm themselves; when they heard what was coming through the House’s dark corridors, gaining numbers as it went, methodical and angry, inflicting measured repayment in blood, they ran, not stopping to lock the doors behind them. A great flood of pale youths followed, bursting out through the last, narrow door onto the wasteground around the House.

Outside, more of the Thunderers waited, and tried to channel the flood, but most of the escapees vanished at once into the streets, like rats going to ground, like ghosts. “That’s all right,” Jack said. “We gave them their chance.”

A few—the ones Jack knew were reliable—came with them across the Ward, back to the boathouse, where Jack explained that they could stay, so long as they helped with the next job, and the next.

I
t was a pleasant day
for walking, at last, after months of winter; cool but bright and clear. On the way to Holbach’s house, Arjun stopped in a café in Foyle’s Ward for lunch. He sat under a linden tree, checking over his notes.

A group of young men at the table behind him talked politics and war. Was the Gerent alive or dead? There had been no further violence for more than two months. Would the
Thunderer
strike again, or had the Countess made her point? It was all well-worn ground, discussed to death all over the city for months. They were very loud, though, perhaps drunk too early in the day. Unwisely loud for such a conversation; for all they knew, Arjun might have been a spy for the Countess.

It was best not to be too close to people like that. You never knew. He paid the bill and headed around to Fallon Circle.

A
n excellent start,” Holbach said. “This will be very helpful. Now, was there anything of any interest in Sethre’s
Daybook
?”

“Nothing of interest to you, I don’t think,” Arjun said. “Largely a matter of disputes over parish politics. Sethre felt strongly about simony. I doubt that you do.”

They sat in Holbach’s study, drinking coffee and discussing Arjun’s work. The pile of books on and around the table was impossible—the city in microcosm, full of precarious towers and shadowed valleys; one day it might grow to swallow the real city. Piles of neglected correspondence sat on the outskirts like ghost towns. Holbach’s project had wind in its sails.

The soldiers were gone now, leaving Holbach, to his great relief, to take his own chances. Their place had been taken by an army of scholars. The economist Dr. Kamminer had marked out a permanent ghetto within the book-city for his own texts. Dr. Branken kept a laboratory in Holbach’s attic, a tangle of glass and mirror and copper tubing that to Arjun’s eye looked like an exploded pipe organ. The playwright Liancourt seemed to live in the kitchen. Two jurists sat in the library, shouting at each other about the nature and purposes of the right of property.

These were formal men, but in Holbach’s house, they left their wigs by the side of their chairs and threw aside their coats. They sat around the fire scribbling in their dingy undershirts. Paper flew back and forth between them like birds flocking from tree to tree, spire to spire.

Arjun knew that he was only a small part of Holbach’s project. The expertise he had acquired was a narrow, peculiar one; a small immigrant population, centuries gone and forgotten. A single street in Holbach’s city of scholarship. Still, once a week or so, Holbach found time to hold these meetings, where they came back again and again to the Black Bull, and to the Tuvar’s theories about their vanished god.

“Heirophant Teitu’s
Daybook,
on the other hand, was a real find. Haycock did well.” Arjun passed a pile of papers across the table. He fumbled in his jacket pockets, produced a sheaf of scribbled notes. “I’ve begun to translate. Teitu had the misfortune to live in the last days of the Bull.”

“Distressing for him, but it serves us very nicely.”

Arjun described the book. Teitu had been one of the Tuvar’s Hierophants in the community’s dying days, when the Bull had appeared less and less often, and finally stopped coming altogether. It had been painful for Arjun to read.

A man Arjun had never seen before came into the study and rummaged in the books. Holbach introduced him. The man was an architect, apparently, and an engineer, and very famous. Arjun failed to catch his name.

He found the buzz in Holbach’s house overwhelming after the silence and solitude of his scholar’s room in Stammer Gate. People grabbed him as he passed and lectured passionately on their research; everyone expected him to be an expert on everything, fascinated by everything. In the little anteroom to Holbach’s study, Branken had talked to him at length about the structure of the human eye (lenses, apparently, not unlike a telescope). In the hall downstairs, Arjun had asked Liancourt about the progress of his latest play, and was subjected to a bitter analysis of the travails of theatrical fund-raising. And not just scholars: three painters sat in the billiards room, drinking Holbach’s wine and smoking his cigars. Holbach was too busy to add to his collection, but his hospitality was still open. “When is the big man going to be
done
with all this, eh?” they’d asked Arjun, who’d shrugged and passed by.

The explorers and the scholars met in corners, and whispered urgently to one another. They spoke in hints and codes and raised eyebrows and sly, electric smiles. They gathered upstairs, in the ballroom, where something was being built, something to which Arjun was not privy. He didn’t ask.

And young men, students, or struggling artists, Arjun’s age, came to the house from distant reaches of the city, bringing charts and facts back with them, staying a few days before they were dispatched again. Explorers. Mapmakers. They came back with surveyor’s theodolites slung over their backs, the way a soldier might wear a rifle or a broadsword. Sometimes they wore those, too; they were often called on to visit dangerous places.

The house celebrated when an expedition returned from the slums of Dreshkel, late but unscathed. There was grave concern when an expedition to the Mountain failed to return on time. The house’s occupants slowly accepted that it would not return at all. “No one’s yet gone that close to the Mountain and come back,” Arjun had heard the historian Rothermere saying, leaning over the billiard-table, lining up his shot; his coat was the same rich green as the felt. “I hear the streets fold in on you, up there, and you end up lost in strange places. You can meet mirror-selves, strange new versions of yourself in foreign streets, and you get confused or stolen, and
never
come back. It’s reckless. I’m sorry, but it is.”

“What are we here for,” his opponent had replied, “if not to be reckless?”

“Don’t see you sending
yourself
out,” Rothermere said, unthinkingly, and the mood froze; but Arjun was on his way out of the room anyway.

Holbach observed that the coffeepot was empty, and rang the bell to summon his housekeeper. He filled the pause, as he often did, with praise for Arjun’s efforts. It was his instinct, Arjun thought, to ingratiate. “Again, I’m amazed by your facility, the mastery you display of this really rather alien culture. Remarkable progress. I think we’ve learned a lot of good stuff.”

“If it comes naturally, it’s because I sympathize with their search for the Bull. They are not so alien to me.”

“Oh? How goes your own search? Are you still searching?”

“I don’t know. My…experience with the Typhon wounded me. I don’t know. I am wary of throwing myself back into my search. Of being
possessed
again. But I can’t forget the Voice. I want to find It, to hear It, to know what It is. Does that make sense?”

“By the standards of the things people say about their gods, yes. I promised I would help you, didn’t I? Of course I did. And I will, as soon as this”—he waved a hand to indicate the piles of paper and the scholarly occupation of his house—“is done with again for a time. Gods, and this!” He strode to the window and took a pile of broadsheets off the sill; he clutched them to his head in a pantomime of horror. “She demands I do something about this. Reports of some flying child breaking open gaols and workhouses, all over the city. Yes, flying.”

“Is that possible?”

“Does it sound
probable
?”

“A great many things in this city strike me as improbable.”

“Well, I haven’t looked into it yet. I’m sure it’s nonsense. Certainly there’ve been riots, escapes, as there always are, but the more colorful details:
no
. The papers are always full of that sort of nonsense. Well, no, no”—he rolled a paper thoughtfully into a cone as he spoke—“I shouldn’t say
nonsense
. It’s an expression of the city’s deep feelings. This stuff
rises
up. Childlike dreams of freedom, of insurrection. Notice that they cast this ridiculous winged savior as a child?”

He slumped in the green leather of his chair. “And gods know that I sympathize. If you knew how caged one feels as a scholar in this city, Arjun. How many lords and ladies and jumped-up little
councils
breathe down your neck, checking your every word for heresy or dissent, itching to give you a spell in the Rose, or to clip your ears or clap you in the stocks. We have too many gods, too many lords; more laws than people. If you stay here, Arjun, as a young man of some promise, you too may find your head high enough one day to fear for your neck. Sometimes one just wants to, oh,
knock
it all down.”

He swung a thick arm across the table for emphasis, and visited catastrophe upon a parish of the book-city. He cleared the rubble sheepishly, with Arjun’s help.

E
very so often, Arjun reminded Holbach of his promise. Arjun’s wounds were healing. He had not forgotten the Voice; he
could
not. The man he was, was made of its echoes. The bitterness and doubt the Typhon had inflicted on him, down in the tunnels, were still there, discords that might never be resolved, but it made no difference. If he gave up the search, he would be nothing; there would be nothing to fill him. Still, for the time being, he was content to help Holbach, occasionally reminding the Professor that he would one day have to help Arjun in return. He didn’t delude himself: he was stalling, treading water, afraid to begin again, to fail again. But it was not unpleasant, in the meantime.

H
aycock vanished one day. Arjun didn’t notice until Olympia mentioned it, as they sat outside a café, enjoying the shaft of cool sunlight that came through the trees. “He came to the mansion a few days ago. I tried to give him Holbach’s orders for the month, and he made some
remarkably
improper suggestions. Apparently half the people in his lodgings are dead of the lung-rot, and he’s going to go to ground somewhere in the north.”

Lung-rot, again. Arjun hadn’t known; he hadn’t been back to the Cypress in weeks. He went there that afternoon, to find the place almost empty. Defour remained in her place; he understood now that it would insult her to ask why. Heady had gone, too, she said, and the lodger who had taken Arjun’s room had died.

“Haycock left this for you,” Defour said, removing a heavy old book from the desk drawer in her office. “Excuse
me,
young man! I didn’t hold this for you for free, you know.”

They haggled. Eventually, grudgingly, she let go.

Arjun spent the afternoon visiting graves all around the outer precincts of the Cere House. Having made the observance for Norris, he felt he had to do it for them all; he had a fine sense of justice.

Shutlow felt dark and close. Winter would not let it go. He remembered how, in the hills, they had feared the wolves in winter; there was that sense of something prowling, hungry and mad, around the edge of sight; a sense of time held back, of violence deferred. People looked tense and wary. He pulled his collar up, shoved his hands in his pockets, and got out.

T
he book Haycock had left behind was called
Thinkers of Our Age: Thirty-Five Collected Profiles in Invention.
What Age, exactly? It was hard to say. The date of publication was not in any form Arjun recognized, which generally meant—he had learned—that the book was either exceedingly old or from very far away. It was made of a finely cut glossy paper, and was so unblemished it might have been printed yesterday. Back in his flat, Arjun flicked quickly through it, and recognized none of the names of people or places anywhere in its pages. He began to think that Defour had made a mistake, had given him the wrong book, until he came to the splendid full-page picture—it seemed too clear, too precise, too sharply colorful to be an ordinary illustration—of
The Enigmatic Mr. Cuttle, Welcoming Us to His Laboratory.

The man in the picture, wearing a smart grey suit, smiling wryly, gesturing with a many-ringed hand at a shadowy background of cages and contraptions and clockfaces and greasy lights, was—unquestionably—Shay.

The text accompanying the picture was both nonsensical and deeply disturbing. It was made even more confusing by the fact that someone—Haycock?—had neatly sliced out a half-dozen pages.

Arjun ran down to the street and took the first carriage he could find back to the Cypress. He caught Defour on her way out the door, dressed in her finest shawl, attempting to carry a folding chair under one arm and an umbrella under the other.

“Where did he go? Where did Haycock go?”

“Young man,” she snapped, “am I not already
quite
late enough?”

“Please. Anything. I must find him.”

“Hmm. Come with me and I’ll see what I remember. You can carry the chair. Yes,
and
the umbrella.”

They walked together down Moore Street, down Millward, down Stevenson, and came to a grassy hill overlooking the River. A shabby little patch of slum huddled on the banks below.