Thunderer (39 page)

Jack left in the morning, when everyone but him was ready to drop. “There are people waiting for me,” he said. “I have to be there when they wake. I’ll come back here soon. Wait for me.”

J
ack went back to the factory where the Thunderers waited on foot. The streets were silent in the cold dawn. Arjun and Olympia had told him what they had seen and heard in the warehouse; that the rioting, and the causes of the rioting, might all be some ploy of Cimenti’s, some subtle strike against the Countess. He didn’t know whether he believed it or not. He felt out of his depth. It was dirty, and he needed to believe that everything was pure of purpose. He decided he would not mention it to the others, and put it from his mind.

It got hot and stinking around noon, and the boys were drenched with sweat as they chased the white robes away from Amber Street. In the afternoon, Jack followed the
Thunderer,
from rooftop to rooftop, keeping a careful distance, watching the great ship cast its shadow on the crowds below. There was a distant crack and a tiny puff of muzzle-smoke from up on the edge of the deck, and a chimney pot not twenty feet away from Jack exploded. A good shot! Eventually Jack got bored and let the ship go on its way. He sat on a flat roof among empty wire pigeon-coops and watched the sun go down.

And in the evening, he decided that it was time to help them, if he was going to. He told Namdi to lead the boys back to the factory, and he began to visit the prisons of Shutlow and Fourth Ward, watching from the sky, darting through the shadows, looking for Holbach or some sign of his trail.

A
rlandes heard the crack of the rifle through the locked door to his quarters. He heard the men cheering. He did not get up. He was busy writing a letter to the Countess urging—with all due respect and humility—that she consider permitting him to make full and unrestrained use of the
Thunderer
against the rioters and criminal conspiracies and seditious vermin in the streets below.

For weeks the
Thunderer
had been idle, useless, drifting like a sullen cloud. The Countess’s attention was focused on her own noisily crumbling territories, and she had no time to threaten and bully and poke and jab at her rivals’ districts. And there was nothing for the
Thunderer
to do at home in Shutlow or Barbary or Fourth Ward: what good was a weapon like that against rioters, and stone-throwers, and slogan-chanters?

At least, that was what the Countess said. With a brittle and cold smile, she’d ordered Arlandes to keep the
Thunderer
’s guns in check; she cautioned
patience
and dreamed her people would learn to love her again.

And now she would not talk to Arlandes at all. Three days ago Arlandes had received orders, by messenger, and not even under her signature, but under that of her cousin Sir Brice, commanding him to return the
Thunderer
to drydock at the palace on Laud Heath, and to abandon his pointless patrols of the sky. Arlandes had complained and Brice had explained that it sapped the
Thunderer
of its menace, its authority, for it to be seen to be ineffective against the rioters. Arlandes had continued regular patrols anyway, and Brice had said nothing further.

Above Arlandes there was a general breakdown in order and will. Below him, too, discipline decayed. There had been desertions and defections even among the sounder men: Bradley, at least, and possibly Yager, had left their red coats folded on their bunk beds and gone over to the rioters. Or gone to hide in some shabby hole with their wives, which was, to Arlandes’ mind, an equal dereliction of duty.

And the plague had killed Lieutenant Duncan two weeks ago; he’d choked and puked and curled up and died, and they’d thrown his body over the
Thunderer
’s edge, somewhere over the River, for fear of infection. Dautry had gone the same way. Their bodies, rotten before they were even dead, had dropped and spattered like birdshit from the warship’s arse. Bad times all round.

And so the remaining men, with nothing better to do, had made it into a sport to take potshots with their rifles over the edge of the deck whenever they saw, far below on the rooftops, one of those unholy children in the robes or ribbons or what-have-you. They were yet to claim a scalp, the distances being what they were.

Arlandes let the men be. His attention was absorbed by his letter—in which he urged the Countess to consider, with all respect
et cetera,
that perhaps things would
not
get better, that her people would
not
learn to love her again, that everything might be irretrievably ruined and broken and poisoned, and that therefore the best option might be to unleash whatever fire they still had at their command and damn the consequences. Of course he wouldn’t send it, any more than he had sent any of his previous drafts. But it sickened him to see the great weapon reduced to impotence; so much had been sacrificed for it.

O
lympia went with Hoxton to visit a man she knew in the Countess’s countinghouse, who had been a good source of rumor in the past. The next day, she visited a woman who filed documents for the Countess’s court, and who could sometimes be bribed to disclose their contents. There was nothing Arjun could do to help, so he sat alone in the room in the docks, cross-legged on the bare floor, meditating on the Voice and its song.

Jack came back three days later, through the window, in the morning. Olympia was asleep in the bed; the others in blankets on the floor. Jack rapped on the rusty bedframe to wake them.

Olympia jerked awake, and choked down her shock at Jack’s intrusion.
We need him,
she reminded herself. She said, “Jack. Jack, I know where they’re keeping him. It’s confidential, but I know someone—she let me see the order of transfer to the—”

“The Iron Rose,” Jack said. “I know. I don’t have to know anyone. I can break into their file-rooms myself, as I please.”

“Then will you do it?” Arjun asked.

“It’s far to the north,” Jack said. “And my Thunderers have business here, with the white robes. We’d have to give up the fight, or split our forces. They could do it without me, of course they could,” he said quickly, “but still.”

“It’s the greatest prison in the city,” Arjun said. “In the parts of the city we know, at least. And you’ve never struck at it, have you? If you have, I’ve never heard of it. Will you let it stand?”

“I said I’ll do it, and I’ll do it. I do what I say I will. Don’t you? You can come north with me, if you like.”

“Yes,” Olympia said. “We’ll be there.”

“Then I’ll come back in the evening. We’ll go at night.”

W
hen he came back that night, they were waiting, tensely. They collected their few possessions—the handful of things Olympia and Hoxton had been able to snatch from their homes, a few necessities Arjun had purchased from the markets in the docks, some food and other provisions—left the room behind, and set out. Jack walked with them, a jacket over his bright shirt.

They went west and north, across Fourth Ward. A squad of soldiers stopped them, once, and told them to turn away from Piven Street; there was violence there, and it was safest for a family like them to stay clear of it. They were just an ordinary family, weren’t they? They weren’t looking for trouble? With apologies for wasting the soldiers’ time, Arjun led the group away, and they took another route west. There was a fire on the skyline, a few streets over, and broken bricks under their feet.

Jack pointed the way—walking at the back of the procession, light-footed, nervous, eager; sheepdog-like, Olympia thought, warming to him for a moment before she reminded herself to be wary—until, after a few hours’ walk, they were on the east end of Fourth Ward, at an empty street of factories, closed and locked away behind chain-link fences. “This is it,” Jack said. “Wait here. I’ll be back for you.”

He disappeared down the dark street, and over a fence.

“Can he be trusted, do you think?” Hoxton asked.

“I don’t think it’s a trap, if that’s what you mean,” Olympia said. “If he wanted to rob us, he could have killed us at any time.”

Hoxton snorted, skeptically.

“He’ll help us,” Arjun said. “He has to. He can’t not.”

They waited perhaps another twenty minutes. Then Jack returned. There were a dozen youths behind him. Thin, dressed in dirty grey, with bright crests. A couple were really children; most, like Jack, were nearly young men. There was one square-jawed girl. They stared suspiciously, defiantly. “This is all the help I’ll need,” Jack said. “Now, follow us if you want to.”

T
ogether, the two groups headed back across the docks, and crossed the Jaw. On the other side, it was like a different world. The streets were quiet, and unmarked. They had almost forgotten what streets free of violence looked like. The windows were not barricaded. There were washing-lines hung across the streets again, unmolested. The lamps were lit.

They walked north, up Cato Road, Jack and the adults in the lead, the Thunderers following behind, in the shadows. As they crested the hill, the black shape of the Iron Rose became visible in the distance, rising in front of the grey clouds.

The Iron Rose was one of the city’s most recognizable structures. At least, in the part of the city Arjun knew, he reminded himself: there were certainly reaches of the city where it was unheard of. Five great ancient towers of black stone had leaned slowly into each other as the rocks beneath the city shifted until they fell against each other, and were, to everyone’s surprise, able to check each other’s collapse. They formed a circle, a crown, a rose. Later generations had bound the slumping giants in place with a web of iron struts and girders. They had built bridges and walkways between the towers, high above the streets. They had tunneled the towers together into a maze of strange angles.

It was a fortress for a while, then a temple, then finally a prison. It was vast, far larger than any single one of the city’s powers, even the cruelest, could make use of. No one had that many enemies. Instead, they shared it. It belonged to all the city, by complex treaty. Its labyrinthine interior was divided into a thousand precincts, in each of which the guards enforced the punitive regimes of different churches or lords.

They said it was possible to escape into the tunnels or across the bridges, from one zone into another, so that a person arrested on the authority of, say, the Thane of Red Barrow might escape from his cruel justice into, say, the more lenient, whimsical regime of Lavilokan’s halls. One of the printers who hung around Holbach’s house had claimed to have done just that.

As with everything else in Ararat, the Rose was shaped by its gods. Two presences fought through its dark corridors. The Key passed through, opening the gates, breaking shackles; if you could find it, and follow it, you might escape. The Chain was a power of confinement and duress, to be avoided at all costs: it locked doors, turned passages that might have led into the light into closed circles, buried the prisoners deeper in confinement. They crossed each others’ paths endlessly, folding and unfolding the shifting tunnels behind them.

There was a rumor that the Atlas-makers had a map of the Rose, that they had somehow smuggled an explorer in to chart its tunnels, but that they had never published it; to do so would undoubtedly have brought down retribution on them. Arjun didn’t know whether that was true. He supposed it didn’t matter now.

“Not that way,” Jack said, when they reached the great golden archway that led north onto Goshen Tor. “Too well-guarded.” They turned west, down the hill, to the River, where the Rose was no longer visible. It was a relief; the presence on the horizon had been troubling. Arjun dreaded entering it.

They followed the river’s banks north, scrambling through wild stretches of scrap and scrub, quickly past loading-docks and jetties quiet for the night, cautiously past riverside pleasure-districts and palaces. Jack shuttled back and forth between the two groups, planning with the Thunderers, walking with Arjun’s group in silence, except when he needed to discuss directions with Hoxton, who knew the river well.

Arjun walked next to Jack as they crossed an expanse of stone, sparsely dotted with statues of robed women walking down to the river, arms raised before them, as if bringing some sacrifice down to the water, or beckoning something up from it. The boy—he was nearly a man, really, but there was something incurably not-adult about the boy’s presence, with his ridiculous clothes, his feverish intensity, his grace—the
boy
both fascinated Arjun and repelled him. The boy was in the grip of an obsession, he could see. A very peculiar and personal mission. Arjun wondered if he looked as strange to others as the boy did to him.

He had to ask. “Jack. Listen a moment. I know you grew up here, in this city. You have many gods here. You love them and hate them at the same time, in ways I don’t fully understand. We had only one god, and it was
everything
to us. I want to know if you can understand this. Why I’ve done what I’ve done.”

Jack listened silently as Arjun told his story, beginning down on the plains, where he first heard the Voice’s echoes in the song Mother Abayla sang to him as an infant. He whispered: this was between the two of them. “Do you understand why I had to come here? Would you have done it?”

They walked past one of the statues, so that it passed between them. On the other side, Jack shook his head and looked coldly at Arjun. “It’s a waste. It’s selfish. You’re not doing anything. No one knows or cares. You’re alone.” It stung, but Arjun had been expecting it, he supposed. It changed nothing.

After a few minutes, Jack said, whispering, “When
I
was young, there was this monster on the Heath. A
hyena
. And I followed it….” Arjun listened as Jack described his confinement in and escape from Barbotin, his slow discovery of the Bird’s gifts to him, the disciplining and naming of the Thunderers, the purpose to which he had put them.