Thunderer (32 page)

She kept nodding while he talked, and smiling. He didn’t think he could talk that way with anyone else, he told her. She told him he was sweet to say so; but he hadn’t meant it as flattery, but as simple truth. The smoke from the glass on the table made his tongue feel fat and numb, and his head charged but slippery. He’d lost his train of thought. No matter; it was there to be picked up again some other night.

She was fond of telling him, quite kindly, that he was mad. “Of course,” he observed, “to me
you
are mad, and foreign.” She remained unconvinced.

He spent most nights, when they weren’t off in some distant part of the city, at Olympia’s flat in Ebon Fields.

The Atlas-makers were libertines to a man, and were not shocked. Olympia had long had a prominent place in their daily gossip; they were happy enough to add Arjun to its cast.

Not everyone was happy. One of her other lovers, the painter Mochai, waited in Holbach’s hall, drinking rough wine, and threw himself weeping and cursing on Arjun as he passed, shouting, “She’s mine! Who the fuck are you? What’ve you got?”

He took a clumsy swing at Arjun’s head. It was not hard for Arjun to knock the man’s arm aside, and hold him until he stopped weeping. He had learned a little about violence in his travels. More than Mochai, at least. “I’m sorry,” they both said. Mochai picked himself up and stalked away with wounded pride, and stopped coming to Holbach’s house.

“Well,
I’m
not sorry,” Olympia said, when Arjun told her what had happened. “All that nonsense with birdshit.
Yuck.
” He mentioned it only in passing; he saw no reason to dwell on it.

A
nd the third thing that changed was that, after all his excitement about the work of the Atlas, his own work ran out, and he was left idle and aimless again.

He had a long meeting with Holbach on a sunny morning, in the downstairs study, where they had retreated to escape a foul smell Dr. Branken’s experiments had produced, which pervaded all the top floors of the mansion. They spent the morning finalizing Arjun’s contributions to the Atlas. With Arjun’s help, Holbach drafted a short entry on the Black Bull, with a brief summary of the theories of the Tuvar theologians. It ran to a page or two. They went up to the map-room, and added a few notations to the stretches of the map in which the Tuvar had lived.

“There’s still much more to be read,” Arjun said.

Holbach shook his head. “I don’t think we need more. The Bull and its folk are long gone from the city; little more than a footnote. Sufficiency will do, here, not perfection, I think.”

Holbach was also preparing a new version of an essay from the previous edition. “The death and the dying of gods, the how and the why of it. Or perhaps one should say that they
fade,
or are
extinguished,
or
resolved.
As with all the most interesting problems, it is hard to know even how to name our inquiry.” Over a long, late lunch, they worked a few references to the disappearance of the Bull into the essay. It didn’t require any changes to be made to its argument. The conclusion still amounted, essentially, to
Who knows?
It was, Holbach observed, defensively, a nascent science, regarding recalcitrant subjects.

Then it was over. Holbach laughed. “You worked too fast and too well! Put yourself out of a job!” Then he saw the expression on Arjun’s face, and scrambled to say, “I’ll tell you what, though. I think we barely have an entry on the Tuvar’s history.”

“I have it memorized. It reads, ‘Immigrant population circa 1100 to 1200; we presume assimilated or deceased.’”

“Oh, dear. And not a mark on the Big Map, either, I think. Hundreds of thousands of lives, perhaps. And some very worthy scholars, to judge from what you’ve translated. How sad. Well?”

“An entry on the Tuvar?”

“Why not? Who else? At this point, there’s no one who knows the Tuvar better. Talk to the historians, if you need advice. They were
people,
Arjun: do them justice! Have a crack at it.”

Arjun went back to his flat on foot, feeling suddenly guilty about taking a carriage on Holbach’s money. He started the slow work of writing an account of the Tuvar’s history. It didn’t come easily to him. He had no experience of writing anything but music. It was hard to know where to start. He could feel that he had many frustrating days ahead. He gave up in the evening, and took a carriage (
the Fire with it!
) to Olympia’s flat in Ebon Fields.

A
nd the days ahead were frustrating, until the fourth thing changed for him, and he found a new purpose.

Arjun had no idea how to order his thoughts on the Tuvar, and he was unable, after a fortnight, to produce a single satisfactory paragraph. He did not try very hard. When he could, he traveled around the city with Olympia. When he couldn’t, he spent most of his days at the mansion, joining in the rambling arguments of the painters and poets and other hangers-on. He surprised them and himself with his ferocity of argument.

He tried to tell Holbach that the man should stop paying his salary, but Holbach wouldn’t hear of it: with all the work for the Atlas and the Countess consuming his time, Holbach couldn’t afford to let anyone go. So Arjun hung on. He talked to the explorers who came back from distant parts of the city. None of them, in their travels, had ever heard of anything like the Voice.

He talked to Rothet, a hard man, older and tougher than the rest of the students and aspiring scholars who formed the cartographers’ ranks, a man who had come back from the forbidden precincts of Red Barrow with dreadful stories of the Barrow’s brutal Thane and a fresh scar on his face from the Barrow’s militia. Arjun described the Voice; he sang an echo of its song. Shaking his head, slight tears on his scarred cheeks, Rothet said, “Never. No. No music in the Barrow. I’ll keep an ear out, though. It’s lovely. I’m not ashamed to say that. What is it?”

On a bright Bell-day afternoon, Arjun was sitting in the kitchen talking to Alwhill, a young man who had come back from charting a district called Ton-Pei, made of warrens built into the side of a cliff, near to the Mountain—“but not dangerously near. I’m not being paid enough to go too close.”

“It would be an insubstantial spirit,” Arjun said, “that sings, or makes music. If it has found worshippers, they would devote themselves to echoing it. Have you heard of it?”

“Sorry. They weren’t very musical. They had a sort of, ah, spider-thing. I don’t know if it’s the same as what we in these parts call the Spider, or different—they said it lived deep in their tunnels. Holbach says he needs more data to decide what it was. They did everything as a gamble, because they said it pleased the spider. They wanted me to take my chances before they’d give me any interviews, and some of their forfeits were bloody nasty, so you can imagine I didn’t talk to anyone much more than I had to. I just mapped their tunnels and got out. Bloody stupid way to live, whatever kind of spider their spider is. This singing thing, is that what you’re studying?”

“In a manner of speaking.” Arjun shook his head. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be cryptic. I’m…” He was distracted by the sight, through the window, of Liancourt leading a group of unfamiliar people across Holbach’s lawn and into the pine-gabled building behind the rose garden.

“The new play,” Alwhill said. “
The Marriage Blessing
. Liancourt wants it to be a musical performance. He thinks he’ll rouse more people with music than with words. The state of
his
words, he may have a point. I’m sorry, but I frankly think he’s overrated. Don’t tell anyone I said that, all right? Anyway, our host had a lot of musical instruments brought into the conservatory, a few years back, when he was working on some study of some music-spirit. Liancourt’s going to work there.”

“Can we talk later? I want to see this.”

Arjun followed them into the conservatory—white-walled, rose-trellised, at the end of a gentle path. Inside, a flock of actors and actresses stood around while Liancourt auditioned a group of composers, who one by one tried out their offerings on the clutter of dusty instruments. “No, no. That’s too weak. We want
anger;
our hero has been kicked in the face by the city
yet again
! I’m sorry, but no. Do you have anything else?”

One after another, Liancourt rejected all their suggestions: too slow, too derivative, lacking in zest. He tugged in frustration on a grey fistful of his own hair. He threw himself into his chair, sullenly, like a child, then threw himself up out again and paced like a drill-sergeant.

Finally, one of them sat at the piano, tried playing the echo of the Voice that Arjun had set loose in the city, months before. Liancourt had one of the actresses sing some nonsense syllables to it, to see how it sounded for voice. “It’s very pretty,” he said. “And I like the thought of adapting a popular piece, something
familiar;
I want people to feel this play is
theirs.
But it’s not quite perfect.”

“It’s an echo of an echo,” Arjun said. “Of an echo. It’s been corrupted since I gave it out to the city.”

“That’s yours?” Liancourt said. “Really?”

“I can do better than these men. Give me a few days.”

Liancourt agreed. Arjun asked Liancourt to have food and bedding brought to him in the summerhouse, and to leave word for Olympia that he was well, but not to be disturbed. Liancourt left a copy of the play, and his first draft of the libretto, and left Arjun to his work.

This
did
come naturally to him. He felt himself reaching out and back across time to the Chamber of the Voice, and he let it echo through him and through the music.

He paid very little attention to what Liancourt’s play was supposed to be about; what he read of it had a vicious wit that was not altogether to his taste. Leafing through, he saw there was something about an angry young man; something about a much put-upon young woman; various cruel lords and ladies. Anger, then, was appropriate, and also sadness. He put everything that mattered into it: all of his longing for the Voice; all of his sadness when it vanished; all of his bitter anger when it never returned; everything he remembered of joy.

“Music,” Holbach said, “is wonderful stuff.” (Holbach appeared behind Arjun’s shoulder from time to time, a genial paterfamilias, taking an interest in his household.) “I don’t know why we don’t have more musicians. We have painters, and poets, and playwrights, and Mr. Tilbury dabbles in sculpture, to rather daring effect. But a dearth of musicians. But it’s such an esoteric art, don’t you think? It draws the mind away from the material things of the city, and from the hurly-burly of political life, and from the company of one’s fellows, and from nattering old fools like myself, I suppose, and on to higher things. And yet at the same time it is so remarkably
compelling.
So powerfully moving, and on such a deep and primal and inarticulate level. It rouses the masses in a way that all the words and science in the Atlas can’t manage. It touches the passions and the sentiments. Wonderful stuff. Wonderfully effective. May I hear a piece of it? I promise not to steal your thunder; I won’t repeat it. I wouldn’t know how; I can barely whistle.”

Holbach’s visits made Arjun uneasy, and oddly guilty, for reasons he could not quite articulate, and for hours afterwards he could not quite hear the music. After the third visit he took to locking the door to the summerhouse. As soon as the bolt slid home, the music flowed back into him, as if he’d unlocked something within himself, and he ran back to his chair with his head spinning.

He emerged a few days later with sheaves of paper, and played Liancourt the main theme. “It needs work,” Liancourt said. “I mean, it’s not perfect.” His voice was slightly hoarse, and his eyes wet and gleaming. “But we can get it into shape. We have a few weeks. Let’s get to work, then.”

B
right green shoots
cracked out of the flat grey earth by the Thunderers’ new hiding place. Spring brought white birds to flock around the lonely bushes. The boathouse buzzed with life and excitement. Jack was very proud of them and full of pure fierce love. Months had passed since the attack on Barbotin. They had never slowed since.

The week after Barbotin, Jack went back to Ma Fossett’s and unlocked all its gates and windows. His boys held the matrons helplessly at bay, glowering, while their girls made their choice. Some of them chose to stay; others seized their moment and ran. All Jack could do was offer them that moment, he thought.

As Jack watched the girls flee the workhouse, into the winter night in streets in their nightdresses, Beth said, “For the gods’ sake, Jack, they’ll need better clothes than that, it’s winter.” He took some of the lads to hunt out the laundry room, and steal a heap of the thick grey wool dresses. “Grow up,” Beth told them as they sniggered over the undergarments.

They brought some of the girls back to the boathouse. Jack had let Beth suggest which ones were sound. She marked out a separate wing for them, which Jack agreed was sensible.

The next week they hit 34 Lime Street. The Masters had heard the stories, and tried to be ready; they had armed themselves and thought they would be brave, but when Jack came down out of the sky, the setting sun behind him, bright silk threads trailing in the wind, and his savage children rose up with rifles on the rooftops all around, they gave up without a fight. No one had to be hurt.

They found Aiden there. He had been given a terrible beating, to mark him as an escaper, and to warn the other boys; his face was still bruised and his left eye would not stop bleeding. He didn’t say anything, but his cracked and swollen face beamed and he hugged them fiercely.

“There’s nothing special about Shutlow,” Jack said. “There’s a whole city of prisons out there. Anyway, they’re expecting us in Shutlow now. They’re ready for us. They can’t stop us, but they can slow us down. They can make it expensive.”

So they struck out into Agdon Deep, and broke open the iron doors of the forge, and gave the boys who worked the machines their freedom, if they wanted it; and they stole the keys to the leg-irons on the chain gangs that scavenged the burnt-over ruins of Stross End for fragments of brick and timber.

At first they only struck the places where children were held. But on the day the year turned over (by most reckonings), they opened the concrete hulk of Mensonge’s prison in Fourth Ward. They gave all the men there their freedom, without asking what their crime was. “It’s not our place to pick and choose who goes free,” Jack said. “We’re not gaolers.” They did not, however, bring any of them back to the boathouse; it would have seemed wrong, somehow.

As they worked, Jack got stronger and stronger, faster and faster. At first it was hard for him to bear a single boy aloft; by the end of winter, he could, with an effort of will, bring a whole group of them briefly into the air, like the
Thunderer
leading its fleet. At first they went arms linked, each bearing his brother, the hilarious, ecstatic gift passing from hand to hand. They’d thought that was the greatest wonder the city could offer, but the power was still growing, unfurling. Slowly, and at first without noticing it, they found that the gift was in Jack’s wake: that when they followed in his footsteps, it passed into them, and like him they ran and leaped from rooftop to rooftop, crossing from tower to tower with weightless loose-limbed strides. None of them could be sure when it had started—had it been there when they’d chased the
Thunderer
across Shutlow? To some degree, surely: how else could they have survived those headlong vertiginous dashes with their necks and backs unbroken? Nor could they be sure when or whether it would end.

The unnatural power the Bird had gifted to Jack couldn’t be contained within one person, even if he’d wanted to keep it for himself. He knew of course that it was a basic principle of theological science: that the changes the gods made to the fabric of the city each entrained further changes, expanding outward unpredictably like ripples in a pond. It was an extraordinary demonstration, though. His teachers could never have imagined it.

But for the time being, all he and his followers needed to know was that the power was there. He was electric with it; he sparked it in those around him. But only, Jack noted with satisfaction, so long as they kept to his course, kept faith with his purpose.

They took their first wound in the last week of winter, when they struck the chainhouse of the Crawling Stone, in Third Ward. The priests had hired a group of bravos from Garhide, who knew how to use their weapons and how to set an ambush. They were still no match for the speed and power Jack had stolen from the Bird, but they managed to kill two of the escaping boys and to place a bullet in the bone of Namdi’s leg. Two of the bravos were also killed, to Jack’s regret. It could not be helped.

Jack brought Namdi through the night to a sawbones in the ’Machy; he judged that to be far enough from home for safety. Jack held the patient’s arm as the man dug in the meat of Namdi’s leg. Namdi bore his scars and his limp with pride, prematurely elevated into an honored old soldier.

The chainhouse was the first time they had to kill, but there were other incidents, as their targets got better prepared, and as Jack’s forces swelled, taking in angry new blood. They tried not to kill, or at least Jack told them to try, but mistakes were inevitable. They were only boys, after all. Jack could lend them speed and flight, but not wisdom or patience or self-control. He found it easy to forgive them, so long as they did his work.

Jack hardly ate anymore, but the others needed to be fed, and there were more of them all the time. So they still stole. They were more organized, now; they never went thieving near to the boathouse, and they would go a full day’s walk to find fences. Fiss handled all that sort of thing. Feeding, organizing, caring; Jack lacked the patience.

He and Fiss didn’t talk much that winter. Fiss was quiet and drawn tight. “This is your purpose, not mine,” Fiss told him one evening, standing out on the cold mudflats. “It can’t last; you’ll get us all killed soon enough.
My
job is to keep them fed. Just try to let me do that, if you can, will you?”

Jack couldn’t bring himself to get rid of Fiss. He owed him too much. And he needed him, he knew. But he kept an eye on him, anyway, after that, and he made his plans with Namdi instead.

Spring brought a flowering of ballads about the Thunderers. Jack would slip out over the city, dressed plainly so that no one would know him, and listen to the songs. When anyone asked him who he was, he would say that he was an apprentice, out to make purchases for his master. There were children running free in the streets singing the songs; they leaped from stone to stone in the broken streets, arms outstretched as if in flight, shouting the words. He watched a crowd sing “The Ballad of Jack Silk” outside the Ironwood Gaol, until the militia rode out and scattered them with whips. He resolved to come back.

All the various militias were searching for him and for the Thunderers. He hid in alleys or on fire escapes and watched them questioning confused bystanders. They were clumsy and heavy-footed, and he did not fear them. He followed the watchmen back to their barracks and listened at their windows; they never had anything to report to their superiors. The Thunderers never struck near their home, and the militia would not find them.

In the first weeks of spring, he noticed new pursuers on his trail. Young men, asking around in the pubs and markets of Fourth Ward and Shutlow. They were not soldiers or watch. They were soft, unscarred, with quiet, precise voices. They had journals, and they took careful notes, not the half-literate scratchings of the watch. They didn’t seem interested in where to find him: they asked questions like “Were they all wearing silk, or only one boy? Did he flap his wings, like a bird, or did he move according to his own nature, as the
Thunderer
does? What I mean is, did he appear to be
walking
on air?”

One of them was asking around in Seven Wheels Market, on the corner near Mensonge’s gaol. A slight young man, with a wispy beard and glasses. Jack followed him back that evening.

H
olbach was dreaming of dark streets that roared out flame and swirling clouds of broken bone, under a black moon and the thunder of guns; and as he walked slowly—he couldn’t run—through what he knew was Stross End, the bloody arms of corpses clutched his legs, and ragged jaws yawned open to tell him that he had missed yet another deadline, and that the printers had lost his manuscript in any case.

He awoke sweating and cold. There was a slight figure moving in the darkness of his bedroom. No, his study; he was on the sofa, a book open across his belly. It must be one of his colleagues. He considered pretending still to be asleep, to avoid embarrassment at having fallen asleep in his study again, like a student, at his age.

He sensed the figure turning toward him, although the moonlight was too weak to make out its features. “Don’t move,” it said. “Look at the ceiling, not at me. If you turn your head toward me, I’ll kill you. I can
see
you.”

Holbach’s gut froze. He snapped his head rigidly to the ceiling, and babbled, “I have money, a lot of money, in a safe across the hall. Do you know who I am? If you kill me, the Countess will hunt you down.”

“I don’t need your money, and I don’t fear your Countess. I know who you are. I’ve been watching and listening. Do you know who I am?”

Holbach was silent. The invader was trying hard to speak deeply and roughly, but it was overdone: underneath the imposture, it was still a boy’s voice; not a child, but by no means a man. It was familiar, somehow. “Jack, ah, Jack Silk?”

“That’s right. I followed one of your spies here.”

“Ah. Ah, not spies, exactly, Master Silk, so much as they are students. Oh, I do hope you didn’t hurt him.”

“Not yet. Why are your spies out following me? Asking around about me? Is it for the Countess? She’s hunting me?”

“Well, yes, strictly speaking, she wants me to investigate you, and yes, of course she wants to catch you, Jack, may I call you Jack? After all you’ve done, of course she does. But no,
I’m
not trying to trap you or catch you. I promise you. I only want to know how it works, what you do. If it’s true.”

“You’re the one who made the
Thunderer.
”

“Yes, I am.”

“Did you make me?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Why the Bird’s gift never left me. Like the
Thunderer.
What they say is true, you know; I can fly. It’s not much like walking on air at all, if you must know. Was it your doing?”

“I promise you it wasn’t.”

The figure was silent. Holbach listened to sixty slow ticks of the clock and tried to will his pulse to slow with them. He asked, “May I see you do it?”

“No. I won’t be your weapon.”

“Oh gods, boy, that’s not what I want. I—”

“I’ll keep breaking open your prisons as long as I can. There are more and more who follow me every day. We’ll kill you if you try to stop us or slow us. We
will
.”

“Oh, no. I don’t mean to stop you, even if I could. I just want to know how you do what you do. No, in fact I’ve written, well, not me personally, but a man under my direction, on reform of our penal institutions; our practices of incarceration are a horror, Jack, yes, and I’ve campaigned against them since before you were born, ah, so I do understand what you’re doing—”

“Shut up. You don’t. I followed the ship across the city. I saw what it did to Stross End.”

“Oh. I’m so very, very sorry, Jack.”

The clock measured out a further span of silence. Jack sat silhouetted in the window. Gusts of feeling twisted his thin shoulders. He was not in control of himself, Holbach could see.

“So how does it work, then, wise man?”

“I don’t know, Jack. I wish I did. If you could tell me how it started. Was it when the Bird returned? Did you call on it? The gods’ purposes are obscure, but they can be understood….”

“How long will it last?”

“I have no idea. If I could examine you…”

“No. Don’t look.”

Holbach snapped his head back to the ceiling. The molding was a dark map of shadows.

“What would you do with it, if you knew how it worked?”

“I’d share it, if I could. Find how it’s done and share it. If it works that way. I’d lift us all up, the whole city.”

“That’s what I’m doing. I’ll free everyone, every prison in the city, and I’ll bring them with me. The power just gets stronger, the more I do it.”

“But what you’re doing—something like it, maybe, yes, but what you’re doing makes no sense, Jack. I understand that you’re angry, but what’s going to happen to the people you free? Hundreds of them—are they going to starve? Or what? And they’ll kill you all if you keep doing it. You’re still just one boy. You’re building nothing that’ll last. And the balladeers will be just as happy to sing of your death as they are your fight. Perhaps I can
help
you: tomorrow we can talk about—”