Thunderer (40 page)

At the end, Arjun could only say, “I’m sorry. I don’t understand. You can’t provide for the people you free. They’ll only end up locked up again. You can’t change the city this way. It won’t last forever, and they’ll just start again as soon as you stop. You can’t change that. It makes no sense. I’m sorry.”

Jack shrugged. “I didn’t think you’d understand. It doesn’t change anything.”

“No. I suppose it doesn’t.”

T
here was a distant red glow on the horizon. Even after all his months in the city, Arjun for a moment thought that it was dawn. But the glow was in the far north: it was Tiber. It was the Fire. Dawn was not coming. They were in the darkest hours of a night that seemed like the deepest and longest of his life.

The river was a very long dark tunnel into black emptiness. Although it was a summer night, there was a chill around Arjun’s feet. They were passing through vacant industrial space. Rusty cranes towered overhead; it was as if Arjun were sunk on the riverbed, and the cranes were thick waving weeds. It was as if…

He knew the signs. In his head, his wounds throbbed in response to the approaching presence. It was coming down the river. Why had he been stupid enough to go near the river? Had he simply not wanted to look like a coward in front of the boy?

He stopped walking suddenly, turned to Olympia, and said, “It’s coming. Again. We have to get away from the water.”

He waved to Jack and the Thunderers behind him. Jack ran up to him (so
quickly
), and Arjun said, “There’s something coming. A monster. The river-god. The plague. It’s found us. Please don’t argue. We have to get away from the water, go uphill.”

“Believe him,” Olympia said. “He can feel it.”

There was a bad, stale smell rolling up. Jack sniffed, and his face wrinkled with distaste. Waving the rest of the boys up, he said, “We have to get away from the water. Something bad’s coming. This one here, he’ll explain later. Come on, quick.”

The boys all took knives or pistols out of their clothes and dropped into a ready crouch as they took the road east, away from the docks and cranes. Arjun’s group went ahead. They had to climb over a fence. One of the boys had a stiff leg, and his fellows had to lift him over.

A cobbled road ran east up Hood Hill. The buildings around were blank and dark. They saw lights going out as they went by, windows being shuttered, and Arjun wondered whether that was the presence’s doing, or whether the people inside could feel it coming, and were hiding their own lights for fear of it. The road seemed very steep, and the cobbles wet. They moved slowly, as if always sliding back down toward the hungry water.

T
hey all sensed it at once, when it was nearly on them, and turned.

The street behind them was dark and there were no stars. There was an icy cold and a terrible sense of pressure. There was no wind but the trees all down the street quaked and thrashed and snapped.

Foul water trickled between the cobbles underfoot.

Jack said, “I
see
it.”

Some of the boys started to cry. Olympia staggered back and slipped on the wet cobbles. Arjun stood in front of her. He could not think what to do. He had a sudden mad urge to sing. Music might sting the monster. At least, he would die with the Voice in his ears. But his throat constricted silently.

“It’s huge,” Jack said. “It’s so
ugly
.” His gaze was fixed on some invisible point high above the darkened street. His wide eyes darted, as if whatever he was seeing was twisting and writhing. “Gods, look at it; it’s in so much
pain
.”

Hoxton grabbed Jack’s arm and said, “What do you see?” Jack pointed. Then Hoxton grunted and stepped forward. He grabbed a fallen child by his collar and half-pushed, half-threw the sobbing boy back, away, into Arjun’s arms. Then he drew both his guns and fired into the blackness.

T
here was a long silence, swallowing the echo of the guns. The darkness neither lifted nor deepened. Further down the street, there was the sound of a window breaking, and another, and another.

Hoxton fumbled for more bullets, found nothing, swore, turned to the others and shouted, “
Run,
you idiots!”

Jack quivered with feverish fascination and stood almost on tiptoe to stare down the street. “Gods,” he moaned, “it
sees
us.”

Now nothing could be seen in the dark; the street behind them was a stinking void.

H
oxton threw both empty guns into the darkness, pistoning his right arm forward, then his left, roaring incoherently. Then he drew his heavy knife from his back, and turned and shouted again,
“Run!”

Arjun and Olympia slipped and staggered away, stumbling in the dark, on the slick mossy stones, dragging and being dragged by the children and each other. Arjun could not stop himself looking back, again and again, but there was nothing to see except darkness.

And now Hoxton turned and ran, too, but he took only three steps away from the black cloud before the slime under his feet cost him his footing. The cloud rose around him. To Arjun, it seemed that Hoxton was falling far away, into empty darkness, though he was still there, kneeling on the cobbles, reaching for help, terribly alone.

The darkness rose into the sky. The street was spattered with muck and reeking water. Weed and wet leaves spun and drifted in the still, windless air. Underfoot there was decaying wreckage; timbers, old worn bricks, slimy with moss. It seemed the street was crumbling; as Arjun stumbled slowly backwards, a pub-sign snapped from rusted chains and fell at his feet. The rotten wood snapped in two. There was screaming; Olympia, the boys, the people in the buildings all around, perhaps Arjun himself.

Hoxton fell away at the center of the darkness. A deeper darkness seemed to cover him, as if the black mud beneath the cobblestones was rising, flooding, seizing him. Darkness covered his roaring mouth and he choked. Darkness covered his eyes.

Hoxton drowned. It was only moments, but seemed to take a very long time.
(Long enough for everyone to forget you,
Arjun thought,
that’s how long the thing takes to kill.)

Someone pushed past Arjun. Then there was a speck of white in the air, trailing brightness, in front of the inky cloud, hanging high over Arjun’s head. “Chase me, monster,” Jack yelled.
“Chase me.”
He threw his beautiful stolen knife into the darkness, and turned in the air, like a tropical fish twisting in the water, and streaked over the darkness, and west, across the river and into the stars. The night followed, flowing after him.

T
he street was empty again. The stars were out and there was a cool summer breeze. A few people looked out of their broken windows. Filth and debris were strewn everywhere. Hoxton’s slime-swaddled body lay on the cobbles. Olympia ran to him, and touched his chest, and sobbed.

The Thunderers stood around in shock, looking at the sky. Without their leader, there was nothing much to them. They were ill-fed and scared boys.
I have to speak quickly,
Arjun thought,
before they panic.
He tried not to let them see how nervous they made him.

“We need to keep going,” he said. “Jack would want you to keep going.”

The boy with the bad leg snapped, “We need to wait for him. He’ll be back. If we go, how will he find us?”

“Do you have no faith in him? He’ll find us. He’ll escape that thing and find us. But if we wait here, that thing may lose interest in him, and come back, and kill us. Do you want to leave him alone? Do you want him to come back here, and find he’s
alone
? I know what he’d want you to do.
Think
.”

They looked at him, murmuring.

“What’s your name?” Arjun asked the boy who had spoken.

“Namdi.”

“Namdi. Think of what he’s risking, leading that thing away from us. You need to take a risk now, and go on without him. He’ll find us. But we can’t stay.”

They were unhappy about it, but they didn’t want to stay either, really. The monster’s mark was on that place.

There was a glint in the grime of the street: Jack’s fallen knife. Arjun picked it up. Then he tenderly helped Olympia to her feet, and they walked silently together, the boys following them, up the hill, east, and then north again, to the Iron Rose.

N
ot far east of the Iron Rose
was a small park. There was a café in the middle of it, by the pond. It was a depressing place; the prison’s complex shadow fell across the water for the best hours of the day. Arjun and Olympia sat out at the wrought-iron tables in the café’s garden all morning, sipping coffee.

“I’m very sorry about Hoxton—” Arjun started to say.

She cut him off. “It’s not your fault. No, wait, we don’t
know
that it’s your fault. Maybe the monster was chasing you, but maybe it’s chasing us all. It killed Nicolas, after all. Maybe it has a taste for us. Maybe we
offend
it.”

“Olympia, even if it is me it’s chasing, I didn’t ask for it. I’m trying to help. I can leave you, if you like, if you think I’m a danger to you.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

She lit a cigarette, and inhaled and exhaled deeply. She looked very tired in the morning light, under the grey shadow.

She asked, “Is that what it was like before?”

He shrugged. “No. Yes. It’s getting worse, I think. Every day. It’s in pain; you heard what Jack said. It’s only going to get angrier and angrier. I saw it before and it
watched
me. This time it reached out and…It’s learning to kill.”

“Fucking
Shay
.” She rubbed her temples. “This gives me a headache.”

“Waiting here is hard,” Arjun said. “We’re well outside of the Countess’s sphere of operations, but still…”

“Never mind her. The Chairman will want us dead, too. If he really did use us to provoke her, like that…well, we’re a loose end. His agents will be looking. I’m more afraid of
them.
”

They both looked around nervously. It was painful to be exposed in the open air, but they needed to wait somewhere where Jack might see them from the sky. The boys were doing the same nearby, on the rooftops around the park, wearing their crests. Silk had sharp eyes, they had told Arjun.

“I hadn’t thought of that. Olympia, what will you do if we do free Holbach? Can you still operate in this city?”

“Maybe. Maybe if we move further away. Out west or east. We’d have to start all over again. I don’t know. We’ll see.”

They ordered more coffee. The proprietor looked at them suspiciously as she took their order. “Our brother is in there,” Olympia lied. “We just came to be close to him. I think maybe he can feel us, even if he can’t see us. Don’t you, Simon?”

“I hope so,” Arjun agreed.

They did not see Jack until he sat down next to them and swigged down Olympia’s coffee. He wiped his mouth with his sleeve and smiled. “Led it away. Lost it somewhere miles out in the west, around dawn. It wasn’t so fast.” A thought troubled his brow, and he said, “I’m sorry about your bodyguard.” He leaned forward. “So what was that thing? It was like a god, but no god behaves like that. No god gets
lost,
for one thing, but that’s what I did with it.”

Arjun tried to explain.

Jack shook his head. “Fuck. Did you
see
it?”

“Not really,” Arjun said.

“
I
saw it. I have good eyes. Do you want to hear what it looked like?”

“Not really,” Olympia said.

“Suit yourself.” Somehow, without his hands seeming to move, he had stolen and lit one of Olympia’s cigarettes. “So now it’ll come after me, too?”

“Perhaps, Jack. We don’t know. We don’t understand how it thinks.
If
it thinks. Perhaps Holbach can find a way of stopping it. He knows a lot about these things.”

“You should have told me.”

“I didn’t think we’d be together long enough for you to be in danger. It’s very slow, Jack. It’s not as though it jumps out at us from every corner, every day.”

“It’s slow, and I’m fast. But you still should have told me.”

“We’re sorry,” Olympia said. “But we need you. Holbach can stop it. I believe he can. It’s getting stronger and you’d have been in danger even if you’d never met us. Everyone is. You just wouldn’t have known it, yet. But it’s true that you’re in more danger while you’re with us. We don’t want to put your people at risk. Finish it quickly and we’ll be done with each other. We should get started at once.”

Jack gave Olympia a condescending look. “I
have
started. With the Thunderers. They’re getting what we need right now. Did you think I was going to take you, too? I can’t use you. You’re too old and too slow. Do you have a place to wait while we work?”

Arjun patted his pockets. He pulled out a loose mass of paper from his jacket pocket. He shuffled through the heap. There were pages of musical notation. There were pages scribbled with strange languages, strange untranslated words and complex declensions and conjugations of Tuvar and Kael and Ghentian. There were old scraps of paper on which he’d nervously scribbled his income and expenses. Olympia raised an eyebrow; he shrugged. Jack’s eyes studied the proceedings coolly; Arjun wondered if the boy could read. “Can you read, Jack?” The boy nodded. “Good.”

There were pages, neatly folded, on which he’d drawn maps. During his wanderings—back a long time ago, now—he’d tried to map the city. To map each day’s fruitless search. He wondered how much the city had changed since he’d wasted that ink. He opened the folded pages and one by one put them aside. Olympia picked them up as he put them down, and she flicked through them lightly. There was a page half-full of a map of Faugère. Arjun tore it in two, and on the blank half he wrote:

THE HOTEL MACLEOD, 141 BOTANY STREET, ROOM 11

SOUTH OF THE IRON ROSE

NORTH OF THE TEMPLE MIRRORS

WEST OF MUNDY WAY

(DOWNHILL FROM THE THREE TALL WINDMILLS,

UPHILL FROM THE MISSION)

Olympia reached out and gripped the paper. “If he’s captured with that, they’ll come for us.”

“He won’t be captured. Will you, Jack? You won’t be captured and you won’t forget us.” Arjun gently eased the paper from Olympia’s grip. He handed the paper to Jack, who folded it and placed it in his own jacket pocket with great silent solemnity.

Jack nodded once. Then he turned, rising from his chair, vaulted the railings, and disappeared into the bushes. A moment later they heard the rushing of footsteps over the roof-tiles.

H
igh girders of pitted and rusting iron held together the Rose’s towers and vanes, its shuttered bridges and disused walkways. The thick iron sagged and bowed with age. Cables cut across the sky like rigging, binding the whole creaking mass together.

Sometimes the Rose’s guards would shove a prisoner out there and lock the door behind them, leave them for the birds. Here and there rust-swollen cages hung from the cables, were bolted to the spires and girders; bones turned yellow in them.

Namdi and Een sat on a girder that stuck out at the crazy angle of a broken rib from the southeast tower. They’d been quite alone up there all morning—since Jack left them there—but now Jack was back and they were all waiting, and still waiting, all through the hot afternoon, for night to come.

Someone had painted most of the girders’ length black, many years ago; only a few flaking black leaves remained. Jack idly plucked at them, chipped them off from the iron, sent them drifting slowly down onto the rooftops below. His nails were long and dirty, and he got rust under them. It was windless and his long black hair hung greasily.

Namdi sat on Jack’s left, smoking, his back leaning against a knot of cables, his bad leg stretched out along the girder. Little Een sat cross-legged on his right, his rifle (ridiculously oversized) in his lap.

Beneath them—far beneath them—was a flat expanse of roof, heaped with gravel. Below that the roof fell away in a tiled slope, and below that—at the edge of Namdi’s and Een’s rifles’ range—the tower walls were studded with the dull mirrors of windows.

A door opened below with a distant scrape and clang of bolts and chains. Three guards with guns and billy clubs led a troupe of pale and bony men out onto the rooftop. The prisoners carried what Jack thought at first might have been weapons of their own, but were apparently brooms. For an hour they swept the gravel across the roof’s surface. None of them bothered to look up. The afternoon wore on sweltering hot and windless.

Namdi shielded his eyes from the glare of the setting sun and studied the men below. “Don’t suppose he’s one of them, is he?”

“He’s fatter. A lot fatter.”

“Could have lost weight.”

“True. Not that much, though, not that fast.”

“True. Poor bastards.”

“Yeah.”

“Would have saved time. Could’ve just plucked him off and no one would have had to go in, down there. Would have been easier.”

“What are we, shopkeepers? Looking for the easy deal? This is going to be
sport
.”

“For you, maybe.” Namdi stiffly shifted his leg. “For me it’s a long wait.”

“Shut your whining. You’ve got a gun, soldier-boy. You get to shoot it. What else would you rather be doing?”

Namdi shrugged. “Don’t know. True enough.” He looked Jack briefly in the eye; Jack was angry again, for no reason. He’d been worse than ever since Fiss died. “Redcoats wouldn’t have me now, anyway. This’ll be sport, like you said. Look at that great black iron bastard.” As the prisoners filed back in through the door, their guards kicking and shouting, Namdi flicked his cigarette down onto the roof. “I mean, if we don’t come back from this, it’s not a bad way to go.”

Jack scowled, then smiled.

A few minutes later Jack stood, balancing on the iron beam. He covered his eyes and stared at the northeast tower. “I’m going to check on Beth’s lot. Namdi, Een, will you be ready?”

“We’ll be ready. Right, Een?”

“Good lads.” Jack stepped off the iron; he fell ten feet to a cable and ran up its quivering length and at its tight arcing apex he launched himself into the sky. Namdi watched the speck of him recede and vanish among the cables and rusting iron.

The sun passed behind one of the towers.

Namdi looked down at the drop. “Well, that’s us fucked if he doesn’t come back.”

“He’ll come back.”

“Unless he doesn’t.”

Een screwed up his face into an expression of great resolution and loyalty, and said nothing.

Namdi rolled two cigarettes, and gave one to Een. Een tossed one of the bombs to Namdi, and Namdi tossed it back, and so on, for a while. Later, Namdi sat rolling the bomb back and forth in his lap, until he worried that the sweat of his palms would soak the paper and dampen the flash-powder.

He kept thinking about that…thing. The thing that had come at them out of the river. The thing that Jack had fought. Sickness and plague and drowning, raging through the city. Namdi’s own mother had died of a cancer that rotted and hollowed her and made her stink and go mad. It scared him dreadfully. He looked at Een’s face, round and tiny and dirty. Een was little; probably he’d forgotten it already, or at least grown used to it. Grown used to a city that contained that madness.

Maybe this fat scholar Holbach could stop it. He’d bossed the Bird around to make that ship; maybe he could order that monster back to the river. But in the meantime the thing was out there somewhere, and angry, and no city that contained it made any kind of sense. Something very bad was going to happen. Maybe not to him, and he hoped not to Een, who wasn’t a bad lad, and he prayed not to Jack, because he loved him fiercely, but somewhere, to someone.

Sunset would be the signal to get ready. The first flash and distant thunderclap from the northwest tower would be the signal to
begin.
Namdi checked his rifle over again, and again.

A
rjun waved for the proprietor. He ordered bread and cheese and water.

“And wine,” Olympia said. “I bloody well intend to get drunk.”

“We should stay alert.”

“We’re
superfluous,
Arjun. You heard that awful boy. Nothing to do but wait.” The proprietor placed a jug on the table, and two rough clay mugs. Olympia waved him away. “To Holbach! He’d want us to have a drink ready for him.” She filled her mug and knocked it back, and made a sour face. “To Hoxton, too. It’s probably best he’s dead. If he were still alive, the humiliation of this would kill him.”