by Felix Gilman
Good for Shay, whoever he was, to have annoyed that pompous fool. Jack tore off the ugly verbiage and kept the print of the warship. He folded up the sheet and slipped it into his pocket.
Not long after, he snuck into the sumptuous bedroom of some bishop or prelate, where he washed his face in a golden bowl, and looked at it in a silver mirror. There’d been no mirrors in Barbotin. He was thinner than he had thought, and less strong-jawed. Still no growth of beard yet, which he knew, of course, but it was still somehow surprising to see.
From a glass cabinet on the wall, he stole a beautiful curved knife. It had a dancer’s balance. A small but satisfying revenge. A first revenge.
He quickly regretted it, though. The priests soon put a watch out at night, pacing the halls with blazing torches. He could slip past them easily enough in the shadowed empty halls, but it wasn’t long before they turned their attention to the roofscape. They sent up patrols of young seminarians, armed with sticks, poking around the derelict huts and abandoned towers.
They came close to Jack one night. The sound of them outside woke him. He gathered his belongings under one arm, and slipped out of the window, and ran across the open roof to hide in a dark corner behind a pile of rotted planks. He knew that they would find the corner he had used as a toilet.
They were closing in. He couldn’t ever sleep safely, he realized, with no one to stand watch for him. He could not survive for long on his own. Sooner or later, his luck would fail. The city was too vast; he was lost in it, alone. He went back to Shutlow, and the Black Moon, where they might take him in again. Perhaps it was safer now.
A rlandes woke from a dream of Lucia, dancing. In all of his dreams she was either dancing or falling, or sometimes both.
His valet had laid out his uniform on the walnut dressing table of his quarters. He still wore the black—he saw no reason yet to stop.
He dressed himself without thinking, his eyes half-closed, as if still in a dream. He slid a brown leather briefcase from under his bunk. He sat on his bunk with the case in his lap for some minutes. It was time; it was surely time; in his dream without thinking or being able to think he had decided it was time. Then he stepped out into the brilliant blue sky of morning.
His quarters were in the stern. He crossed the bare deck toward the prow, passing briefly under the cool shifting shadow of the air-balloon. His feet felt light as air; everything on the great ship felt light as air.
There was no roll or yaw, no heave or pitch, only a steady imperious stately drift, and his legs were not used to it.
There were no tides. When the wind blew—and the wind blew fiercely up there—the crew clutched at their hats, but the Thunderer did not sway. Whatever powered it was not dependent on the wind.
The sounds were strange. There was none of the creak or slosh or slop of a true ship. The rustle and snap of the great balloon overhead—that was passably similar to sails. Chains clanked and the wood creaked but somehow did not settle; it was weightless. Or not weightless, quite; there were no words yet for what it was.
Arlandes was no poet to coin new words for it. It was a weapon and it went where he pointed it—where the Countess ordered him to point it.
Whenever they docked—the dock being a kind of scaffold, like a scaffold for the hanging of giants, built on the hillside on the Countess’s estates, overlooking the palace, in a place where six months ago there had been a stand of beautiful oaks—Holbach was there, hanging around, rubbing his fat hands together and asking to be let on board. He yearned to study his device in operation. Holbach consorted with poets and playwrights and various kinds of degenerates and perhaps one of them could name the sounds the ship made; but Arlandes had resolved that the fat scholar and his cronies would never set foot on the ship’s boards unless and until the Countess personally ordered otherwise.
“We followed the river north overnight, Captain, and now we’re tacking west over Grafton and…” Arlandes waved Lieutenant Duncan away and proceeded alone across the deck.
The ship would go where it was ordered. No storms would impede it, no waves drown it. Arlandes doubted that his presence was even necessary.
Where the masts had stood were stumps of oak bound in brass. Gibson and Dautry were polishing the bindings. They saluted and went quickly back to their sweeping—they knew better than to wish Arlandes a good morning; they knew very well that he frowned on familiarity.
Otherwise Arlandes was alone. The Thunderer was undercrewed; it went of its own incomprehensible power, and there was little to man but the guns.
No salt spray to sting the skin and redden the eyes. But the light somehow was colder and brighter and the wind harsher than on the ground.
The men were different, too. A kind of spring in their step. They laughed more. One-eyed scar-faced grizzled old hands suddenly catching themselves laughing, giddy as serving maids on carnival. Perhaps it was the lightness of the air, or the nearness of the sun. Perhaps it was that the city they inhabited was so different: no alleys, no filth, no beggars, no shadows; only rustling flags, and weather vanes, and high glittering windows, and the golden spear-tips of the spires; and more often there were only clouds, and birds. Only Arlandes remained solemn.
They talked about him behind his back, of course.
He leaned over the lightning-carved prow. He was alone out there—the helm, that complex arcane machinery that he did not understand or care to understand, was down belowdecks. No doubt Lieutenant Duncan or someone was down there tending to it.
The sprawl of brick houses and tanneries and mills below him must have been Grafton. Not a district with which Arlandes was familiar.
There was to be a trade conference that day between the Burghers of Grafton and the Stross End mercantile—the Gerent’s drab-suited bunch. Chairman Cimenti’s bankers were to be present, too. The Thunderer’s mission was simply to be there; to hang in the sky, over the delegates’ heads; to be seen.
And Arlandes—what would Arlandes do with himself all day, as the ship hung idle? Sometimes he itched to spark the thing’s heavy black guns.
Tiny throats piping, wings snapping and chattering, a flock of blackbirds came wheeling around the prow, scattering and circling around the intruder in their space. They passed away to starboard. One tiny creature circled the deck for a moment, alone and frantic, before returning to its flock.
Arlandes leaned the briefcase against the prow’s rail and snapped it open. Folded neatly inside it was a white dress, bloodstained.
The city spread out beneath him. Grafton’s tallest buildings were its jute-mills, chimneys craning up toward him, their smoke-belching mouths distant black specks. On the western edge of Grafton a tributary of the river wallowed into unhealthy marshland and fen, scattered with shacks among the thorntrees and the scratches of wooden bridges over the slime. The hills west of that were capped and crusted by tower blocks. They looked somehow uninhabited; Arlandes wasn’t sure what gave him that impression. It was something about the windows—no sun glinted from the distant tiny panes. A dead zone, perhaps. Miles of deep valley behind those hills; then further hills, on the edge of Arlandes’ vision, sprouted domes and minarets like mushrooms. A storm flared over the domed hill, and the sky in the distance was hazy with rain, and Arlandes could see no further.
And if he turned north he could see all the way to the Mountain; he could almost see the clouds around the Mountain’s peak, and the towers around its slopes, and the density of it. The crew all avoided looking at it; they’d all picked up the same habit of dropping their eyes when they had to turn that way. If he turned the helm north he could be there in only a few days. They said the streets that carved the Mountain were strange, and dangerous.
If am lucky, the Mountain might make an end of me.
He’d once imagined that the city would seem smaller from the air. Holbach had told him to imagine it, Captain: the whole city laid out before us, to be comprehended as one perfect whole. He and Holbach had both been wrong. The city’s fa
r walls were invisible, still mere rumors, far beyond every hazy horizon.
And it shifted. The streets below him that curled and twisted like warped timbers also shifted like waves. Like the folds and bloody lace of her dress, falling. So they said, of course. So they said. The gods shape us for their ends, as they said. They are always weaving. But to see it, to see it clear and cold from above, was terrifying and disgusting beyond all reason.
Two nights ago, for instance, they’d passed low over Carvalho Street, and they’d seen the lights come on in the Rookeries—the gaslights and torches coruscating in gold and purple and green, hung all around the doors and windows of the bars and brothels and playhouses and teahouses and wrestling-pits. The lights had formed a twinkling aurora in the night sky. And Arlandes—unable to sleep, pacing the deck—had watched that aurora spread and climb and reach into the sky; had watched it drift down Carvalho Street like smoke, like a tide, watched the tide cascade down through the crowds in the street, who raised their hands and shook ecstatically as the crawling shimmering god passed through them. Some would go blind; others might never see anything again but colors and glitter and star-blaze. It changed what it touched. The Spirit of the Lights, of course; Arlandes, distracted by the glory of the incandescence below, and by his fear, forgot its proper name. When the Light suddenly winked away, it was like blindness; the sky seemed suddenly dreadfully black. All of that Arlandes might have seen from the ground, but he would have been within it, and not seen it clear and cold. It was only from the air that he could see how the street was changed with the god’s passing; how the Rookeries burned brighter and higher, in new stained-glass colors, deep fleshy reds and icy blues; how Carvalho was wider and deeper and straighter; how the Rookeries’ light spilled down the new boulevard; how the shadows in the drunken alleys off Carvalho were deeper and blacker than ever.
What sacrifice had the god taken for its work? Blindness would only be the beginning of it. He’d gone below and ordered the helmsman: Take us away from here. It still chilled him to think of it.
Lucia had not been well-traveled. She was an only child and her father kept her close to the hearth. She’d not know how cruel the city could be. He reached into the case and stroked his finger down the white lace of the dress until he came to a blotch where the lace was brittle with dried blood.
Beneath him Grafton was riven with darkness and shadows. Under the mills’ fumes, slums spread like oil slicks. Grafton’s mill-workers were all at their employment, and the streets were still and quiet, but it was a false stillness, like the surface of a pond; something dark and heavy might rise from it at any moment.
Turning and leaning over the starboard rail, he could see the river behind him, thick and green and turbid, clogged with barges and black coal scows. In the old days, he recalled, sailors would not launch a ship of any consequence down the river without a sacrifice of a child—a sailor’s child, or an orphan dragged from the streets, bound and fed to the River. Things were more civilized now. But he thought of Lucia’s death, falling as the Thunderer rose, as if the two masses were turning around some grotesque invisible fulcrum, working some horrible machine. The gods were always hungry. His gut lurched and he clenched the bloody lace in his fist. The city sickened him. If he could, he would never come down from the air. It suddenly occurred to him that he need not come down. He could take the ship and simply go. Duncan would follow him, if it came to it; so would some of the others, enough of the others. Why should he use the miracle for which Lucia had given her life to bully and threaten for the Countess? He could go. The Countess would never catch him, never be able to bring him back. But where would he go? What would he do? Fear and guilt and anger boiled in him.
With a low growling moan he pulled the dress from the case. He lifted it to his face and breathed deeply; there was no smell but the sour metal of blood. He was vaguely aware of Gibson and Dautry, behind him, leaning idly on their brooms, watching him. He waited for a long, long moment until a strong wind blew across the deck, whipping the dress out streaming in the air, and then he let go.
The wind carried it up at first, up into the glaring sun and silver-bright clouds; then it fell, changing its shape, curling and twisting. He thought of how he had first seen her: she’d been dancing then, too. The falling whiteness billowed open, then snapped closed. It’s time, Arlandes had thought, to let her go: but he’d made a terrible mistake. He couldn’t bear it. He lunged out over the prow as if to snatch her back. The rail thumped hard into his chest and he gave a hollow bark and he suddenly remembered how the romantic notion of casting the dress onto the winds had come to him, who was not naturally a romantic man; it had come from the musical play Hare and Isabel, where the prince scattered the cuttings of his beloved’s golden hair from the highest parapet it had been possible to construct on stage, and swore an oath to her memory. Arlandes could not remember the playwright’s words, and he had none of his own, and the moment had passed anyway because now the dress was spiraling down out of sight. He hadn’t watched the play; he had watched her, leaning over the brass rail of their high box, out over the tense darkness of the theater, laughing and crying. He couldn’t let her go. He lunged so recklessly for the dress that he nearly tipped himself over the edge after it. But it was too late, and Grafton’s factories’ grey smoke swallowed her.
J ack watched the Black Moon from the roof opposite for a day before concluding that it was still safe. He saw Fiss and Aiden come back from a day’s work, and followed them in a few minutes later. He was surprised by the warmth of their welcome.
“Thought they got you,” Fiss said. “Where’d you go?”
“Uptown. The Tor.”
“You mad? It’s crawling with the watch.”
“Yeah. I know that now.”
“You got away with it, though,” Aiden said.
“Better than got away. While they were chasing me around down here, I was hiding in their own stupid temple. Look what I took.” Jack pulled the bright stolen blade out of his jacket and twirled it in his wrist. They crowded in appreciatively.
“So are they still looking?” Jack asked.
“You got lucky. Haven’t seen them in days.”
A black-haired boy shouldered past Fiss, and stood in front of Jack. He was Jack’s age, probably, but larger, with a grown man’s set to his shoulders already, and heavy black brows. Jack didn’t recognize him. “This him?” the boy asked.
A girl in a blue dress called out, “He doesn’t look like much.” Jack didn’t recognize her either; in fact, he thought, the room was full of children he didn’t recognize.
“That’s the lad,” Fiss said. “Believe it or not. They’ve been dying to see you, Jack.”
The black-haired boy grinned and slapped Jack on the shoulder. “Barbotin House. Fuck me. Tell us about it.”
T he large boy’s name was Namdi. He had escaped from the workhouse at 34 Lime Street. “Took this lot with me,” he said, gesturing at a handful of scruffy boys. “We were all out in the yard, breaking up rocks. It wasn’t the worst place I’d ever been in. I mean, it was cushy, really. I was in Dagger Row, once: the Master there was a fucking madman. But when that thing came overhead, I just felt…I dunno. I felt light, sort of; couldn’t take it anymore. I felt like I wanted to be free. I just had to run.”
“Did you…” Jack began.
“Not the way you did. Nothing like that. I just knocked the Master on the head and we legged it over the wall.”
The girl in the blue dress said, “My name’s Beth. These girls here are with me. Don’t get any ideas, they’re not here for you boys’s pleasure. They’re here for shelter. Fiss said we could stay. So: we got out of Ma Fossett’s house. Same story as Namdi, more or less. It was hard, but it was all right, until that day. The god. That, it was like, I had to be like it. Free.”
“That’s right,” Namdi said, “that’s what it was like.”
“So we snuck out the window that night,” Beth said. “Hid until they stopped look
ing for us.”
“There’s a lot more like them out there, Jack,” Aiden said. “All over town. Started turning up just after you did. All broke out of this hole or that, or run away from their masters.”
“It was a busy day round these parts,” Fiss said. “These two strays turned up and wouldn’t leave. We told them about you. They thought we were making it up. Who breaks out of Barbotin?”
“Never mind Barbotin. You flew,” Beth said. “With the Bird. Tell us what it was like again.”
How could he tell them? There weren’t the words. When it happened, it felt like nothing that could be named. It could never be repeated or shared, so what use were words?
Except that ship, that amazing ship: that rose at will, and took its crew with it. Was that possible?
Instead, Jack said, “Later, maybe,” and turned to Fiss. “They must be looking for them, too,” Jack said. “If there’s that many of them—us—out there, they must be looking.”
“Course,” Beth said. “They took a girl just yesterday. She was stealing food down in Brand Market, and the watch took her. Caitlin here saw it. They’re on the lookout, all right. There’s too many of us now. The citizenry is terribly concerned,” she simpered mockingly.
“They’ll get us again soon,” Namdi said. “They always do. Put us right back. It’s worth a whipping to get out, though, even if it’s only for a bit.”
“No,” Jack said. “I’m not having that. No one goes back.”
T hey were hard to organize. They were only children, after all—Jack was almost the oldest—and unruly, and disobedient. The trick was, Jack had to explain again and again, that they couldn’t all go out at once. Not anymore. Not if they were all going to stay free. No more running wild. The watch would take them one by one. “Someone has to keep the workhouses running, don’t they?” Fiss told them. “That’s what you’re all for, boys and girls. They’ll take you back in a second.”