Thunderer (5 page)

There was a mirror sitting behind Julah’s head. Sometimes, while he conducted tutorials, Julah would look into it and groom his beard (greying now) with a pair of tiny gold scissors; he seemed to enjoy company for the act—though he did that less often these days. Arjun could see his own reflection in it. Thin, dark, and intense. Perhaps too intense. He tried to compose his face into a persuasive compromise between reason and passion. But this was no time for too much tact, and he spoke firmly.

“Father. The Voice is gone. We are like an unstrung harp. There is no breath in us. It will not come back.”

Julah was silent for a moment. “Arjun, I’ve always tried to help you. I think you know that. But all I can counsel now is patience. These are hard times.”

“Patience? What are we waiting for? Without the Voice, we have no purpose. We can’t go on. Another decade, maybe, no more. Gad will swallow us. The plains will turn their back. We can’t take any more students. It wouldn’t be right. What do we have to offer them? The Voice is not coming back. It’s been too long. I don’t know whether it can’t reach us anymore, or whether we drove it away, or it tired of us…but it is not coming back.”

“Do you remember Leb? He came to me, talking like this, not long ago. He left us, Arjun. I don’t want you to do that. Are you asking me whether you should leave?”

Arjun looked Julah in the eye. “Yes. I am asking you for permission to leave. Wait; listen: I ran away, once. You brought me back, and up into the presence of the Voice. Now I need to go away again. This time, I’ll bring the Voice back to you.”

H
e told Julah, and he told Abayla, and then he told various subcommittees, and finally, standing in the great shadowy hall, he told all the Choirmen assembled in council, like big black crows in their robes. He asked them if they had heard of a city called Ararat, to the north, on the other side of the world.

They’d heard the stories. A city of unthinkable size and age, marking a line across the northernmost edge of all the Choristry’s maps; beyond that line was nothing but the city, borderless, un-charted, a great question mark. A hundred counts and dukes and parliaments and churches fought over those mazy streets.

They had heard the stories about the gods in Ararat. Everyone had: in Ararat, a thousand gods walked the streets. The city itself gave birth to gods, they said, and was half fevered with their worship. The Choirmen had heard that a great bird visited the city’s skies; that a haunt of smoke and mirrors slipped through the theaters, behind the red curtains, crazing the city’s dreams; that there was a hunger in the canals. In Ararat, their own dear Voice would be just one presence of many. It was painful to think of that.

Arjun dug out texts scavenged from the vaults, works of theology and science by Ararat’s scholars, and read the relevant passages to the Choirmen. He made his case to them.
First,
the Voice had removed its presence from Gad. They could sit in the Chamber straining their ears until they starved and they would not hear it. Gad was dying.
Second,
Ararat was alive, its streets were fertile soil for divinity; and
third,
Ararat, he told them—jabbing his finger at the relevant sections of Kamisar’s
Discourse on Theogeny (Consider the city not as a spider in the center of her web, but as a ball sitting on a sheet of gum-rubber; consider the depression it causes in the stuff of the world)
—drew the world’s divine presences to it. Hungry for gods, it stole them from the rest of the world. He offered examples drawn from history books and scribblings in the margins of old scrolls. Where else but Ararat could the Voice have gone? Perhaps it was lost in Ararat’s streets now, or sounding in some empty steeple; and
finally, therefore
it could be followed. Arjun could follow it, find it, bring it back to them. At the very least, if he searched the streets of the city of gods, he could find some clue as to where the Voice had come from and where it had gone.

The Council was skeptical. He thought they wouldn’t have let him go if Julah had not persuaded them, and he thought Julah had only done that because otherwise Arjun would slip away like a thief in the night, and Julah wanted to spare him the disgrace.

Arjun himself had little hope that he could bring the Voice back to Gad. In fact, he couldn’t even imagine how that could be done: he was glad they didn’t ask too many questions. He just couldn’t bear to
wait
anymore; he thought that if he could find the Voice for himself, in some alley, and hear it one more time, that would be enough for him, and it was all he could do.

B
y the time Arjun finally secured the Choir’s blessing, snows blocked the path down from the mountain. He passed the time in his room reading about Ararat and the route there.

He knew the journey would be dangerous. He found a copy of the soldier-courtier-seducer Anian Girolamo’s
Techniques—Military and Amatory,
and practiced Girolamo’s instructions for handling a blade, trying to follow the illustrations. He had no way of knowing whether he was getting better.

He went down in the new year. The Choirmen provided well for him. He had money, and a supply of toys and medicines to trade in places that didn’t recognize money. He took the Girolamo, the Kamisar, and a few other texts, and a knife. Down on the plains, in an alley behind a dance-hall, he bought a pistol.

He went north slowly over the dry plains. For a while, he traveled with a caravan much like Tsuritsa’s. Later, he rode with a group of cattle hands, lying to them that he was handy with his pistol and on a horse, but he slowed them down and they left him behind.

The rainy season came and the heavens turned on their axis and poured the seas down over the plains, and the world turned to mud and white floodwater. He stayed in a town called Happal, where he tended the oxen. He slept in the barn and sang at night to the huge odorous beasts. When the rains lifted, he left the plains; he bought passage downriver on a flat-bottomed barge, which took him north through stinking swamps. Skirting the mountains, he crossed the hills on the back of an ass he bought in a town in the valleys. Winter fell again; he lived in pine-timbered Hokkbur with Ama, the village doctor’s daughter, where they found him exotic and fascinating; he taught her children the piano until it was safe to go on. He paid his way over the vast northern desert on a great machine that roared black smoke and ran on iron tracks over the sand. He had never seen or heard of such a machine. He suspected that the fierce, dark men who claimed to own it understood its workings no better than he did.

His tonsure grew out. In the desert his skin grew darker and harder, going from brass to stewed tea to old teak, under a gathering black storm of beard. He got used to hunger. He’d always been slight, and delicate; he grew wiry. He had occasion to practice with his gun.

He crossed the Peaceful Sea on a trading ship out of Ghent. Arjun asked what cargo the small ship carried. With a gap-toothed grin, the captain explained that larger, slower ships might take timber or food, but the real riches and risks in trade with Ararat lay with more esoteric cargoes. That year, his hold was full of animal teeth. Various species. If his intelligence was good, the order of Uktena was flush with money and still persuaded of the sacred significance of these little fetishes. A big
if:
two years ago, he had brought a cargo of double-backed mirrors for sale to the followers of Lavilokan, only to find that they now considered double-backed mirrors blasphemous for some fool reason. It had nearly ruined him. He touched the mast for luck and shrugged: the city was crazy, what could you do?

The ship came into the Bay on a bright morning. Arjun barely saw the passing of the Bird. All he saw was a rush of white that lost itself in the city’s skyline. The captain fell to his knees, moaning. Arjun waited tactfully, pleased to find that it didn’t frighten him at all. Perhaps it was an auspicious sign.

The crew took the ship into the harbor in awed, nervous silence. They passed easily through the chaos there. They had been ready to be stopped, questioned, held up for bribes, but in the shifting, slopping, splintering mess that the Bird’s passage made of the harbor, no one cared to stop a little trading ship.

They tied off at Gies Landing. Arjun reached out for a dull black bollard, and hauled himself up and onto land. He shook the captain’s hand once, firmly, and slipped into the crowds.

A
rjun stopped a man for directions, some sort of trading-company official, who fidgeted and looked over Arjun’s shoulder at the wreckage behind him, but pointed the way.

He pushed through the crowds, holding his pack close, wary of thieves. He passed under an ornate wooden arch and left the docks by a broad paved road leading northeast, curving up and around stately Stable Hill. From the side of the road, through a green curtain of tall lindens, he could look down on the river, and on the square, brutal warehouses and sunken alleys of the docks. The road was clogged with traffic: carriages painted with the livery of a dozen lords, gilded palanquins, rude wooden carts hauling produce from the docks. Passengers the length of the road had dismounted to stare into the sky. As he passed, the traffic slowly wound itself into motion again. It began to rain.

Cato Road ran north under another arch, this one squarely built of white stone, topped by two rearing horses, and dedicated, according to the plaque, to one Chairman Cimenti. North of the arch loomed a row of grand marble buildings. Broad steps stretched down from colonnaded facades to the tree-lined street; ranks of anonymous office windows towered into the sky. The steeples and domes of vast temples rose in the background.

Clarion Street cut off south from Cimenti’s arch. It took Arjun, as he had been told it would, into the dignified red-brick houses of Foyle’s Ward. He turned onto Mullen Dial, where a ring of discreet professional offices marked off a small open space in the heart of the Ward. The cobbles shone slick and black in the rain. Arjun walked clockwise around the Dial, counting off numbers on the brass plaques. Seventeen was his contact.

The week after Arjun went before the Council, Father Julah had handed him a yellowing letter. It came from some vault to which Arjun did not yet have access. Nearly one hundred years ago, Julah explained, the letter’s author, Father Alai, had gone north to Ararat. The Choirmen of the time kept no record of his reasons. Kindly, Julah did not say the obvious: that they had considered Alai’s travels to be a shameful vanity.

Three years later they had received a letter. The Voice alone knew how it had crossed that unthinkable distance. It was clearly not the first letter Alai had tried to send. Alai boasted cheerfully that he had founded a small choir in Ararat, that he was well on his way to adding the Voice to Ararat’s crowded pantheon. He had reported that Ararat’s people were very friendly, and very kind, and very generous. He left an address.

Arjun frankly doubted Alai’s sanity. Who would leave the Voice behind to go preach in a distant city? What did the Choir care what Ararat worshipped? What was the point of another Choir in another place, a world away from the Voice? Still, this was his only contact. This man’s successors would surely help him. Perhaps they had even found the Voice themselves. Perhaps, even, it was they it had come to. It was at least a place to start.

He banged the brass clapper, and waited.

A
fterward, he walked back down Cato Road in the rain.
Of course
there was nothing left of Alai’s hundred-year-old outpost.

It had been reconsecrated to some local Power, then reconsecrated again, then turned into lawyers’ offices.
How fast things change here!
The woman behind the door had been intrigued to meet him and hear his story: she’d wondered what former owner had installed the huge organ that occupied the third floor and could not, she said, be removed without bringing down the structure. There was no other trace of the man.

He walked back to the docks, and sat down back at Gies Landing. He wondered how he had come this far without thinking past this point. There was no one to help him, and no place to start. He could not think what to do next or where to go.

He wrote his letter. He filled it with tinny, false confidence—very much like Alai’s letter, he thought. He folded it and put it in his pack between the covers of the Girolamo, and wondered if he would ever be able to send it, and whether the Choirmen were waiting to receive it.

The sun went down behind the jutting roofs of Barbary Ward. Thick fog came in off the water, muffling the sounds of the docks as they wound down for the evening. The boy from the bar behind him came out and lit the streetlamp’s flame. Arjun sat alone in a ghostly halo. The streets were like tunnel mouths.

He stood up. He looked at the broad uphill sweep of Cato Road, rising up out of the grey, and into the black mouths that swallowed the docksmen going home into Barbary Ward. He tossed a coin.

I
n the first hours
after his escape, Jack ran frantically through the streets, trying to put as much distance as possible between himself and the House, keeping to the alleys and the shadows, flinching from passersby.

After a while, it started to rain, a chilly drizzle becoming a downpour that bent the trees and flooded from the gutters. Jack’s thin silk-shot shirt quickly soaked through. Real fear seized him. In Barbotin, when it rained, it drummed on the outer walls and made the interior echo distantly—and frequently, gods knew, the damp seeped in through cracks—but nothing like this. Jack found that he feared the falling sky.

He found the first shelter he could: a brick overhang at the back of a brewery, next to the drays’ stables. The nearness of animal bodies was comforting; it was a thing from his childhood. The rain washed thickly over the courtyard. He held his hand out to catch it; after a while, he leaned his head out and forced himself to look up into the vortex of falling water. He blinked and gagged and his eyes stung; he looked up again, and again, until the rain slackened. Then he ran his hand through his slick black hair, scraping the water from his face.

H
e knew where he was. These drab grey streets; this place was called Shutlow. The locals pronounced the
-low
with a cat’s-meow whine. That was how you knew them. He was born there. In the north was the grey slope of the escarpment, with Mass How at the top; Shutlow lay below it, like something not-quite-satisfactory left on the doorsteps for the charitable societies.

He knew his way home, although his memory’s map was more moth-eaten than he had hoped. And so many things had changed, and many more of the old places were dead and vacant, boarded or bricked up. Shutlow had never been a thriving neighborhood, but now it looked smaller and grubbier than ever. The people looked nervous and put-upon, in their petty offices. He wandered for a while, too scared to ask for directions, painfully aware of his bizarre clothes.

The house he’d been born in was still there, but it was no one’s home now. They’d converted it into offices. The street-level shingle advertised the Gies Mercantile, Import & Export; oversized script painted in the upper windows promised the services of a dentist and a notary public.

His family was gone, then. Perhaps his parents were dead. They were the drunken, distant sire and dam of a feral litter: he wouldn’t miss them much. He had grown without them. What about his siblings? Locked up somewhere? Dead? Moved all around the city, perhaps? He could think of no way of tracking them down. He wasn’t sentimental, anyway.

The house, though: he was sentimental about that. That hurt. He walked round the side, tracing the wall with his fingers. He remembered its cracks and marks. There, under the window, was a crude scratching, a foot high, of a man bearing what was meant to be a hammer. He remembered it fondly. Its edges had been rubbed smooth by generations of tracing fingers. Figures like that were all over Shutlow, and probably all over the whole city, in amongst the gang markings and the advertisements and the beggars’ marks and all the rest of the city’s graffiti and glyphs. There had been another one scratched into the wall of the house opposite, in the form (more or less) of a cat.

If you saw a god manifest itself in the stuff of the city—and if the experience left you untouched, or at least unscarred—you scratched one of these into that sacred fabric.
Theophany
was the word the House’s Masters used. Normal people might say
wonder
or
miracle
or
unveiling;
or
show
if they wanted to appear tough-minded, cool, indifferent. To see such a thing was either very lucky or very unlucky. You carved to mark the event, and to remind everyone whose work the city really was.

The one under his finger was Atenu, the Laborer. The one over the street was Yemaya, Sphinx-Mother. If he’d had a knife, he’d have carved wings into the soft wet wood under his hand. They’d be etched all over the city by morning, he thought.

No god had visited them in the corridors of the House. Even Tiber, the Fire, in whose name the House was run, had kept Its distance. Maybe that was for the best: there was no one to blame for the House but the men who’d made it. Too painful to think otherwise.

He found the Sphinx’s mark after poking around for a few minutes. It was behind a straggly plant that had not been there before. He sat by it and looked across the street into the window of the Mercantile’s office until the young man at the desk came to stand in the doorway and watch him suspiciously, and Jack recoiled into an alley.

He slept that night on hard earth, curled around a scraggly tree in an empty lot: the cold nearly broke him.

H
e dreamt of the Barbotin House. It was a shadowy dream.

What little light there was in Barbotin came from a narrow central shaft open to the sky. There was only one door out, on the ground, and one only passed through it once as a child. On the floors above, he had worked the silk in half-light, winding and twisting the thread, serving the machines. Encased in windowless iron walls, the nights were lightless and savage. In summer, the House was an oven, and in winter, it froze.

Who would build something like that? Jack knew the story; parts of it the Masters taught, and parts were rumor. The building was once a warehouse operated by the Ergamot Mercantile, a formerly powerful concern that was bankrupted by its last president’s paranoia; the structure on Plessy Street was a minor manifestation of that illness.

To spite his creditors, as the Mercantile sank, its ruinous president gifted the building to the Church of Tiber. When the Church tore itself, victorious, from the resulting mire of litigation, it had no idea what to do with the monstrosity it had won. The structure sat idle for some years, before Father Barbotin conceived a vision: that huge safe-box, inescapable and impregnable, was surely made by the city’s gods to be a
school.

Father Barbotin’s first plan was that the building could keep the flower of the Church’s own youth locked away from the city’s temptations, held to their studies, but his colleagues were unwilling to see their own sons locked under iron in the grime of Barbary Ward. So he was forced to propose—Jack pictured him saying it; he had a very vivid image of the long-dead Father, its clarity sharpened by hate—that the place be used as a workhouse, to trap and tame the masterless youth of the docks. And that way, it could pay for itself: those boys could be put to character-building, productive,
marketable
work. Properly adjusted, the plan caught on quickly. Tiber was a power of justice, of punishing and purifying flame; it was natural for its church to branch out into the workhouse business.

Barbotin’s bust stood on the center of every floor, in the narrow well of light. It turned an enigmatic smile on the House’s occupants, neither cruel nor sympathetic. Did he hate them for the shabby corruption of his dream—what he had hoped would be a retreat for the city’s finest young men, turned into little more than another workhouse for its scum?
They
certainly hated
him
.

The House never entirely lost Barbotin’s commitment to education. The boys worked the machines all day, but in the evenings, they were herded randomly into dark rooms for their lessons. The Masters were no great scholars—only the most pathetic of the Church’s men would consent to grind out their days in that place—but before the boys were turned back out onto the streets, they were given a haphazard but intense theological training. Jack was a scholar of a weird and narrow sort. He was equipped to give the catechism like a priest or argue doctrine with the theologians. Though of course he would never be either; the stain of Barbotin could not be forgiven.

So Jack listened intently when Mr. Garond—a spindly half-seen shade hunching over his desk—read to the class from the pages of the
Sentinel
about the predicted return of the Great Bird. Later, he took books from the House’s little library into the lightwell and studied them. He palmed scissors and thread from the workrooms, stole silk from the storerooms, and worked on his ritual. Soon after, he fought Dallow.

In the Barbotin House, laundry work was something to be fought for. It was hard work even for the oldest boys to turn the great mangles, but it was safe enough. Safer than the silk machines. More important, though, was the fact that the House had too few mangles for the volume of laundry it produced. There were days when excess laundry was taken to the roof to be dried in the light and wind, and the laundry detail, too, were allowed to take their pale and scrawny bodies up into the air for a moment. They fought over it: it was pathetic, and they knew it, but they had little else worth fighting for.

Jack picked on unpopular, brutish, bearded Dallow, once a ship’s boy from Aysuluk run wild on shore leave in the city. It was to protect little Simon from Dallow’s demands, Jack said, and that was partly true, but he would have done it anyway. He took Dallow by surprise, downing him with a foot to the back of his knee, and stamping on his fingers, breaking them.

When he was done, Jack leaned in to Dallow’s bawling, snotty face and whispered, “Sorry, mate. But you would have done the same.” Dallow was quite old, he had thought. Eighteen, perhaps; the two, perhaps three years that separated him from Jack were a wide, dark gulf. They might let him go early, now that he was unfit for work. It was almost a kindness, really. Turning to the watching boys, he’d said, “I get his billet, all right? Anyone else want to try for it?”

Four nights ago, he removed some critical pins and bolts from three of the mangles. A dozen boys were chosen to be whipped for that outrage. He was not among them, but he could see no way to offer himself in their place and still keep his plan. And every day after that, the Masters had to lead the laundry workers up into the light on the roof, and so he was in place at the right moment.

He began to dream of the Bird’s coming. White wings filled his mind for a moment; then he was wide awake, and it was morning.

C
hildren darted in and out of the alleys around Moore Street. Children like himself: he could see they were nervous and hiding, too. Some of them were wearing the coarse grey wool jackets that marked them as workhouse escapees. Filthy and torn, as if their wearers had been free and wild for months.

He followed some of them, and watched them come and go from the abandoned shell of a pub at the south end of the street. The sign still hung, naming it the Black Moon, but the windows were boarded up, marking its death. (Jack recalled the Masters’ lectures: the faithful of Dloan placed coins over the eyes of the dead.) Three stories of wet black timber. The whole building seemed to be leaning over the pawnshop next door, like a slow-moving giant looking for support. One day the two might touch.

The children came and went in twos and threes, or alone, slipping around a gate in the collapsing fence at the building’s side, and into the back garden. Some were brazen, some furtive. Some were tiny little animals, no older than eight or nine; others were Jack’s age, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen: rangy street-thieves, with underfed frames and the beginnings of thin beards. Jack watched them all day. He was hungry and cold, but wary of making a mistake. He took sips of stale rainwater from a barrel in the alley.

That evening, he crept in, around the gate and into the weed-strangled garden, and through a window at the back. The Moon’s downstairs bar, stripped of its former furnishings, sunken slightly below the road, was full of children sleeping in corners on stolen rags, or on the bare boards. The windows were broken but sealed with newspaper or blankets. There was a weak fire in the corner, crawling around a couple of old chair legs in a pile of ash.

The place was cold, and it smelled, but it was sheltered from the rain. Jack sat himself in an empty corner.

A dozen pairs of distrustful eyes were looking at him. Jack looked around, and met the eyes of what he judged to be the oldest boy, a tall, slim, blond-haired creature, with a spark of curiosity in his gaze.