Thunderer (49 page)

The man’s voice was deep, and cold, and cut from the finest crystal of aristocracy; as he spoke, jagged cracks appeared in the crystal and on
it’s yours
it broke, and he almost sobbed; he sounded like a beggar. He moaned deep in his throat. He looked up for the first time, and noticed Arjun.

“Don’t I know you? I saw you at the Countess’s palace. Weren’t you one of Holbach’s creatures? You
were.
You were one of Holbach’s. Tell me, was it Holbach who planned this? Was it Holbach who planned the Countess’s downfall? This monster, this poisoned god loosed on the city—was it his revenge?”

Arjun opened his mouth, and Lemuel motioned for silence.

“There’s some dispute over the blame for this development, Captain. Let’s let sleeping dogs lie, is what I say. Let’s say no more. Let’s just say, Captain, that you disappoint me. Is that all you have to offer?”

“
You
came to me, Lemuel, remember. You wanted to trade. For the
Thunderer,
you promised me Lucia. You told me she was out there somewhere. Why not now, damn you?”

“That was a long time ago. Longer for me than for you, I would have said, though you’ve aged terribly, Captain, now that I come to look at you. I have other interests now. And if I wanted the secret of your ship, well, this young man”—he jerked a thumb at Arjun—“can tell me as well as you. And Captain, let’s be frank here. The ship won’t be yours for long anyway. Look at you; your days are numbered, as they say. You’re nearly done. You’re only a loose end. You’ll be plucked soon, and I reckon I know how. I reckon I know who your successor will be, and I reckon I’ll soon own that young chap, too, and so
no one needs you anymore,
Captain.”

Arlandes reached for his sword and stood. Arjun stepped back into the corner of the room, behind Lemuel, who remained in place, hands folded behind his back.

Arlandes held his sword back poised to swing, his feet placed to lunge. He stood like that for a while. He was apparently looking into Lemuel’s eyes. Arjun, backed up against the wall, could not see what the Captain saw in those eyes.

After a while Arlandes let his sword clatter to the floor. He sat back down in his chair with his head in his hands.

Lemuel clapped his hands together. “That was a waste of time. It’s a good thing I have so bloody much of it. Goodbye, Captain. We won’t see each other again, I don’t think. Come along, you little yellow bugger.” He stepped out into the hallway.

Arjun crossed the room quickly, silently, and stood over the Captain’s chair. “Captain?” He ventured a hand on the man’s tense and knotted shoulder. “Captain? I can offer you a deal. I cannot offer the same terms as Lemuel. I do not know how to find this Lucia of yours. I am very lost myself. But I can try. I have a plan, Captain, to save the city from the flood. I think I can use your ship, and your sword. Help me and I can try. I can make no promises but I can offer you hope.”

Arlandes’ shoulder shook. He seemed to shrink into himself. The Captain was not in fact a big man, though he’d seemed that way at first sight. He made no sound.

Arjun waited as long as he dared before following Lemuel’s fading path, which was not long at all. He left the Captain sitting silently on his chair in the empty tower.

L
emuel had other business to conduct. He set up in the top of a ruined gun-tower overlooking a lake full of jostling houseboats. The squat, bowlegged, grey-faced men who came to see him under cover of night were, he said, some of the Lake’s most prominent Captains. “You make them nervous,” he told Arjun. “You have a disapproving puritanical look about you. Go make yourself useful somewhere else.” The stairs to the gun-tower crunched underfoot with moldering bone fragments, remains of some ancient assault. Arjun made a desultory effort to clear them. The Captains scuttled down the stairs past him, holding their precious shameful purchases under their cloaks. Finally Lemuel came down, saying, “Come on, then, come on,” rattling his crowded key-chain, and he locked the tower behind him, and set out walking down toward the Lake, and out onto one of the many noisy brightly lit piers. Arjun followed. Soon the pier was a long, busy Main Street in a wholly different part of the city.

For two days Lemuel sat in an office above a large railway station and answered his mail. “Can I trust you with a knife?” Lemuel asked. “Good, then. Take this and open those envelopes.
Try
not to hurt yourself.”

Everything in the office was painted grey or a drab olive-green, and the carpet was covered in cigarette burns. On the mantelpiece there were four large and complex clocks, three of which contained live birds; in the glass window of the fourth was a tiny avian skeleton. The clocks ticked and struck at odd times, and Lemuel’s pen scratched, and the trains groaned noisily back and forth underneath.

Arjun slept on the sofa while Lemuel worked through the night. When he woke, a second bird was dead. The remainder seemed to be watching him intently and unhappily.

“Do you have a laboratory, Mr. Lemuel?”

“Slept well, did you? No, I do not. Do you?”

“I read about a Mr. Cuttle once, who looked like you. He had a laboratory, where he had strange lights, and animals and birds that could nearly speak, but not quite.”

“Doesn’t ring a bell. Cuttle’s a good name, though. Efficient. Businesslike.”

“I don’t know when you’re lying to me. I should stop asking you questions, I suppose. Your birds are starving.”

“They’ll be fine.”

“Someone should feed them.”

“So go buy birdseed. Maybe I’ll still be here when you get back and maybe I won’t.”

The little birds watched Arjun reproachfully through the dirty glass of their cages, and probably there would in fact have been plenty of time to buy food and return, because Lemuel worked on his mail for
hours
before standing suddenly and saying, “Come on, then, come on.”

S
ome time later, Arjun and Lemuel sat in a park at a long table made of a fallen oak split down the middle, surrounded by hairy red men, under a sky in which the sun was held by a mailed fist. The clutching fingers made shafts of shadow, leagues wide. In the distance, a great black bull, tall as a mountain, stamped its feet into the stuff of the city. Long seconds after each mighty hoof hit the earth, thunder sounded at the table, and the men cheered and clapped, and the towers and windows around the park quivered and re-formed into new shapes.

“I like these people,” Lemuel said. “When it’s that blatant, you really have to know the score. And they do, and not only have they accepted it, and not gone mad, they’ve learned to love it. Terrible place for business, can’t sell ’em anything, but you have to admire their enthusiasm. Ha! Yes!” He joined the clapping at a particularly violent transformation.

Arjun was listening to the people at the table talk. Their excited chatter, at first, was itchily familiar. Slowly it had resolved itself into words that he knew. Now he was fascinated; so
that
was the melody of their vowels,
that
was the rhythm of their clacking consonants. He’d imagined that Tuvar would sound with sad minor notes; he didn’t know why. It wasn’t sad at all.

“So, have you been watching me? Are you a good pupil, young man? Have you figured the trick of it yet?”

T
hey had bargained for a while before leaving the Cere House. Lemuel had tried to insist that Arjun bring him Jack before he would teach him anything.

“It can’t work that way,” Arjun had said. “We can’t deal on that basis. I can’t trust you to honor your promise. Would you, if you were me? How could I hold you to anything? But you can trust me, because you know I fear you, and you know I can’t escape you. That’s the only way it can work between us.”

Lemuel had tried to argue his way around it, but Arjun had been immovable, and in the end Lemuel had shrugged, and said, “There isn’t always a way out, even for me. Very well, then. Come with me, and I’ll show you.”

They walked for a long time down Lemuel’s paths before he announced that Arjun was ready to learn the trick. Lemuel stood up from the long oak table, tossed some coins down, and walked under an arch of trees, across graveled paths, over a bridge across the pond that had not been there before, through a gate in the fence that had not been around the park when they entered, and through the streets, into a concrete tower block, stepping over drug-haggard vagrants, into a rusty box that shook and rattled as it dropped with them in it, then along an antiseptic corridor, through a door that opened into the bone-lined vaults of the Cere House, and back into Lemuel’s office.

“Patience, and silence. Openness to even the tiniest sign. The cunning and daring to seize it. There’s a certain habit of mind. Not just anyone can do it. If you just start walking randomly, you just stay where you are. You go in circles. To find the secret paths, the hidden doors, to slip into the gods’ footsteps—well, there’s a trick to that.

“I can’t help you to find your Voice. Maybe it’s out there, here in the city, maybe it isn’t. There’s no special way of hunting these things. Never was. At least, not that I’ve ever learned, in all my travels. If you’re patient, and you travel the city widely, sometimes you see them, and then you can snatch away what you need. I could show you
that
trick, but that’s not what you want, is it?

“What I can give you is time, and space. I can open up the city to you. You can hide from the Typhon there. And if you wander it long enough, maybe you’ll find your Voice.”

They left the office again, Arjun following Lemuel, then, at Lemuel’s urging, trying to take the lead. It was slow work, at first. There was so much to learn, and to notice. It was like the science by which Holbach predicted the motions and manifestations of the gods, but where Holbach took months of research and calculation to produce an answer, Lemuel darted from street to street, taking signs in at a glance, saying, “That way! Quick, now,” and committing himself to a path.

“You have to find a sign that means something to you. If you want to knot and weave the gods’ trails into the path
you
want, you have to build it out of the signs that speak to
you
. Make the city yours.
Take
what you need.”

For Lemuel, the sign was death, and the accoutrements of death. “I don’t think I’m a morbid man,” he would say. “I think I’m an
honest
man. Vanity, vanity, all is vanity, you know? Maybe you don’t. Well, one likes what one likes. For that
Shay,
who you met in the room of lights in the Observatory, perhaps for him it was stars. Or those secret forgotten machines. Who knows?”

He would walk the streets, head cocked into the air, eyes darting, until he saw a graveyard, or a funeral home; or a bench with a plaque commemorating a beloved husband and father, or a marble pillar honoring the dead of one war or another; or the corpse of a rat or dog in the street; or bones in a gibbet or the meat of a man hung from a lamppost; or a moon-white leafless tree, dead by the side of the road. He would dash into whatever street or tunnel or door the sign marked, with Arjun rushing to keep up. Then he would repeat the process, and again; and soon enough, by a subtle compounding of strangeness, he would find himself in a new city.

For Arjun, of course, it was music. He learned to make all the city’s music a sign, a key, a path, a map; he learned to improvise, to descant his own song in and around the city’s music. Grudgingly, Lemuel said, “This should have taken you years to learn. I have to admit, you have a knack for this.” Of course he did. He had practiced all his life.

G
o on, then,” Lemuel said, when they were back in his office again. “Go on out. See where it takes you. Spread your wings! But make a note of the way you go: walk it back again, and come back to this place, and this time. I’ll be here. Don’t betray my trust.” Then Lemuel took the brush he had left in the corpse’s armpit, dipped it again in the blue paint, which had not yet dried, and resumed his work.

Arjun walked out into the corridors of the Cere House. Turning left down the nearest passage brought him into a courtyard where student mourners practiced a dirge on their dark-wood cellos. A flight of stairs led up to a wall on which plumed trumpeters blasted out a martial honor for a dead princeling, as his mailed body slid from the wall into the firepit below. A ladder down led into a narrow room where an old woman sang a wavering nursery rhyme to her grandson’s grave.

Turning and turning, he worked his way out of the Cere House. He was still learning the art.
Art
—he would not call it a
trick,
he cheated nobody by it; Shay and Lemuel had spoken of it as if it was fraud or theft, but the city was ready and willing to unfold its impossible profusion to those who were patient and attentive. It took Arjun a long time to find his path out of the House, and its countless cognates on other angles of the city. Between one passage and another, he walked for a while through a House that took its victims alive, and against their will. He ran through its corridors.

In an overgrown graveyard precinct, he let the hazy song of the grasshoppers direct him through a trail in the thick grass, and then he was out on the Heath, or something much like it, though he felt lumpish and grey among the beautiful, swan-necked young men and women who lounged on the meadows. He walked for a while until he found a band playing by a white bridge.

Most of the places he saw were unremarkable. He passed through a dozen places like Shutlow, where ordinary dull lives were spent. But there was a place where the people all had cats curled around their shoulders, whispering to them, and he walked quickly—instinct told him not to run—to get away from their curious stares; and there was another place where a great bird-god (was it the same one?) held its shining wings over the city’s whole sky, their slow beating marking out day and night, and all the people drifted between their city’s high arches. But perhaps their own lives were unremarkable to them, too.