by Felix Gilman
A constant, rolling thunder filled the air. A shell from the Gerent’s guns struck one of the kite-boats, and it fell in flames. One of the towers slumped sideways and disintegrated across the courtyard, its structure gone, its matter loosed to spill and burst. There was fire and dust everywhere.
The kite-boats flocked around the Thunderer, and hovered over and among the towers. The tiny men in a boat below Jack’s perch staggered to the side of their vessel, and heaved a box over it; flame flowered where it landed on the courtyard below.
A shell punctured the golden balloon above the Thunderer, and tore out the other side of the deflating fabric. The ship listed and fell at an angle. Jack held his breath. It righted itself. A second shell tore open a hole in the Thunderer’s wooden side, without any noticeable effect on the warship’s functioning. Whatever powered it, such wounds clearly meant nothing to it. Of course, Jack thought: how could one expect to sink it, when it already defied gravity? Ignoring the fires on its dark decks and the scrambling and screaming of its crew, the Thunderer revolved slowly above the courtyard, a mandala of war, and fired again and again at the Gerent’s guns.
The ground under Jack’s feet shook and tilted. There was fire below. A shell had struck the tower he was standing on. The floor dropped as something below gave way. He panicked, looking around for somewhere to run or jump to. All around was fallen or in flames. He had let the battle hypnotize him, and now it was too late. The ground slid and dissolved beneath him. He leaped wildly into the air. He did not come down.
H e hung in the night air, drifting slightly in the wind, above the smoke and the flames. Tears ran down his face, tilted to the sky. Of course. Of course. Why did I wait so long? The gift was still in him. Praise Be. He felt dizzy.
Everything below was in fire and ruin. Distant screams and moans floated up on the wind. He heard a terrible crashing sound as the flaming skeletons of two buildings slid into each other.
The Thunderer and its fleet were moving slowly back to the south, their hideous work done. Jack angled his body into the sharp wind and followed, far above and behind the ship.
T he Thunderer hung low over the Stross End courtyard, beneath the jagged accusing shadows of the ruined towers. Despite the cold morning drizzle, fires were still burning somewhere; smoke made thin black stains on the grey air. The stink of charred wood and brick-dust blew across the deck. Arlandes looked down over his work.
Below him—under his watchful shadow—the Countess’s red-coated men went to and fro, dragging bodies from the rubble and making two tidy heaps at the north and south of the courtyard. Dragging stragglers from the Gerent’s forces struggling out of their hidey-holes and making a tidy corral of them beneath the clock-tower. Setting up, beneath red flags, a breadline for the displaced factory-hands. Restoring order and peace and quiet. An occasional shot rang out.
At that moment, Arlandes knew, the Countess would be making her speeches. On her podium on Laud Heath, or by the docks. Her face a jeweled mask of white, her voice dripping concern. Regretting the necessity of violence. She would probably make a visit to the ruins soon.
By which time the redcoats below would have cleared away the rubble. Put out the fires. Carted away the broken bodies, each one of which reminded him agonizingly of her. Torn down the buildings, for no building around the courtyard was altogether intact, and their towers sagged and trembled dangerously. Swept the blood off the flagstones.
Or perhaps they’d simply leave it. Leave it like a raw wound in the city’s flesh. As a reminder.
Arlandes shivered and was numb. His men were grim and cold and sick and almost speechless.
He didn’t delude himself; he’d do it again if she ordered it.
He looked at the ruins around him. He turned his head left to right, and everything he saw was in ruins. He’d never seen anything like it in all of Ararat. A new kind of death had come to the city.
I t was early in the morning when Olympia next came. Cold morning sunlight made the hospital’s white walls icy and ethereal. There’d been no guests, no voyeurs, no audience nor supplicants all morning, or the day before or the day before that, so Arjun sat in silence on his bunk, alone with uncomfortable thoughts, wondering if perhaps he was no longer of interest, if perhaps whatever strange information he’d carried back from that terrible place had been assimilated by the city’s buzzing mind, was no longer news…. It alsooccurred to him that perhaps it was simply too cold out for sightseeing.
Olympia’s voice preceded her. It carried down the chill corridors and rang confidently off the iron bars. There was an approaching echo of curt orders and arch mockery, interspersed with the defeated resentful mumbling of the Sisters, always a step behind the beat. Arjun watched silently as they turned onto his hallway. Olympia, striding, sent Sister Judith and Sister Margaret scurrying before her. Without further objection, Sister Judith unlocked the door to Arjun’s cage. Olympia stepped in. Arjun plucked at his too-small robes.
“Good morning, Arjun. My apologies for the delay.”
“You have a way for me to get out of here?”
“They’ve already agreed to release you. Oh, don’t look so surprised. You expected a midnight rescue, pistols blazing? That may be how things are done in the mountains, but this is Ararat. I took the matter to court, Arjun. I had an appointment to argue your case before a judge in Mass How tomorrow. I made it not worth their while to fight for you. Frankly, I think they found you disappointing anyway. Now pack up and come with me.”
She had a coach waiting outside, an elegant two-seater. The driver sat reading a newspaper. He wore no coachman’s uniform; he was wrapped instead in a long coat of rough brown wool, draped heavily over ursine shoulders. His spade-broad face carried a thick black beard. Casually, he asked, “No trouble then, Miss O.?”
“No trouble, Hoxton. The Sisters had no stomach for a fight. Here he is. Hoxton, Arjun; Arjun, Hoxton.”
“If only it was always that easy, eh?”
“If only, Hoxton, if only. After you, Arjun.”
Where else did he have to go, what else did he have to do? Arjun stepped up onto the coach. The driver had a heavy knife—more of a machete—strapped behind his seat, and it knocked against Arjun’s knees whenever the coach bounced. “You must tell me everything, absolutely everything,” Olympia said. “As soon as we see the Professor,” she added, burying herself in a book. The words Bambridge’s Conflict of Laws were stamped on its spine.
Arjun leaned forward. “Mr. Hoxton, am I right to think that, if Olympia had been forced to stage a daring rescue, guns blazing, the guns would have been yours?”
“Ah. Well, everyone likes to be useful, Mr. Arjun.”
The air was sharp; Arjun was very cold in his thin hospital gown. As they passed through Ar-Mouth, he was surprised to see old drifts of dirty snow by the side of the street. “It snowed a couple of days ago,” Olympia said. “And before that rain, and rain, and the most awful hail. The weather took a turn for the worse while you were in your cell.”
“That’s not the only thing, Miss O.,” Hoxton said.
“No,” Olympia agreed. “No, I’m afraid it wasn’t.”
They rode gently up Cato Road, under the triumphal arches. The statues were topped with snow, fresh, white snow, raised above the dirt of the streets. It formed a virginal blanket over the backs of the embracing lovers on the Diamond Queen’s Arch.
There was a small garden of bare trees by the side of the road, at the base of a sweeping black wall carved with names. A string quartet played slow, mournful music. Old men in dark winter coats stood around them, heads bowed, hands in pockets.
“Stop a moment,” Arjun said. He got down and stood by the railings, looking into the garden. Snow collected at the base of the wall, shrouding the flowers left there.
Olympia pointed to the wall’s inscription: The Battle of Mantle Court, and underneath, The City Will Always Bear Their Mark. “Two Estates clashed in the north of the city, when these men were young,” sh
e said. “It was stupid. You don’t need to know why; it looks like you will watch us suffer it all again.”
“I was interested in the music.”
“Oh, that. I’ve heard it before somewhere. It’s been all over the city these last few weeks. Actually, I think I heard some girl singing ‘Lero, Lero’ to its tune. It’s very pretty.”
“Yes, it is. It’s gone through many translations to get here. Much has been lost. But I suppose it is, even still.”
“Does it mean something to you?”
The music changed, segueing into a triumphal, upward-slashing piece. Arjun turned away and got back on the coach. He wasn’t sure how to answer that question anymore.
F allon Circle was no longer quiet or peaceful. There were men in red uniforms out in the street in front of Holbach’s mansion, marching up and down the street, or gathered around camp tables playing cards and smoking bituminous roll-ups. The soldiers checked their names, and let Arjun and Olympia through. There were more soldiers in the wood-paneled entry hall.
Holbach emerged from a door and waved them in. He led them through the deep shelves of his library to a table at the back, under an arched window, where they sat down. “This may be the only place in my own home where I can speak freely,” he said.
“What is all this?”
“You haven’t heard? Olympia, you didn’t tell him? I see. Arjun, I suspect she wants to make me tell you, just to make me suffer. She blames me, you know. As perhaps she should. You’ve been missing for a long time, Arjun. Almost a month, and a month is a very long time in politics. The Countess’s grievances with the Gerent of Stross End came to a head.”
“Her grievances were imaginary,” Olympia said. “She wanted to make an example. To display her new weapon to full effect.”
“Yes, yes. The weapon I built for her. So, Arjun, two days ago, she sent it north to Stross End, and turned its guns on the Gerent’s tower. It brought down half the offices of the Stross Mercantile. And I am under constant guard for fear of reprisal.”
“I told you how she would use it, Professor. Nicolas would have told you, if he were still with us.”
To fill the silence, Arjun asked, “Were many people killed?”
“Dozens, maybe hundreds. No one knows whether the Gerent was among them. The Countess has been too busy to talk to me since it happened; I don’t know whether she has him imprisoned somewhere, or perhaps even let him go. But he’s a spent force. He gambled all the strength he had in the defense of his tower.”
Arjun found it hard to feel strongly about the deaths in Stross End. He had barely heard of the place before today; it sounded so far away, separated from him by a dense unmappable urban vastness, all full of people he would never know or even see. But these natives of the city, they had found a way to expand their sympathies to encompass its reaches. Perhaps, he thought, he should learn how to do the same.
“We should get a move on,” Holbach said. “I have a lunch appointment. So then, tell us all about it.”
Olympia leaned forward, steepling her fingers, Holbach leaned back in his chair, and Arjun began. Holbach’s eyebrows raised, and he said, “Not a fraud. You’re sure? He couldn’t have used lights, mirrors? Hypnosis? He couldn’t have drugged you?”
Holbach quizzed Arjun on his conversation with Shay for what seemed like hours. Arjun found that he remembered very little, after the horror of the Typhon and his weeks of fever and confinement, but he did his best to answer.
“We’ll have to ask Branken whether he knows of this ‘heliotype’ device,” Holbach said. “More his field than mine.”
To Arjun’s relief, whatever anger Holbach might have felt at Shay’s needless demise was outweighed by his own guilt. “I was thoughtless, Arjun. My curiosity got the better of me; I didn’t think of the risks. There were others I should have sent instead, perhaps. I hope you’ll accept my apology.”
Warily, Arjun told them about the Typhon. When he was done, he said, “I had expected you to react differently. I was afraid you would fall all over yourselves in reverence for that, that thing. I couldn’t have stomached that.”
“You needn’t have worried,” Olympia said.
“We rather tend to share your estimation of the creature,” Holbach said. “The Typhon is a great power, but not, shall we say, a useful one. To be feared, yes, but not, ah, admired.”
“Frankly, you’re lucky you’re still alive,” Olympia said. “You’re lucky you didn’t drown, and what a waste that would have been.”
Holbach nodded. “He probably, I don’t know, washed up on the bank? Snagged on a bank? Do the canals have banks? I’m afraid my studies rarely take me to those parts of the city. So many little mysteries! Olympia, you know, since Brindley died, sad business, ugly business, we’ve had no canal engineer. Is his work still current, do you think?”
Something uncertain and nervous must have been visible on Arjun’s face, because Olympia, ignoring Holbach, looked sharply at him and said, “Yes?”
“I do not wish to describe the vision.”
“Quite fair,” she said. “Horrible. But?”
“But at the last moment I felt the creature recoil. I did not drown because it turned away from me.”
“Ah, now.” Holbach tapped a plump pink finger on the table for attention. “Not a creature, please. You are a foreigner and may not understand. Who knows what kind of low people you’ve been living with while you’re here, and what sort of unsophisticated and irrational notions you’ve picked up. But Ararat’s powers and presences and gods, whatever you may wish to call them, are not creatures. Like some big animal!”
“It saw me, Professor, and—”
“No, no, you see, that’s impossible, that’s what Wayneflete calls a confusion of categories; you might as well—”
“It hated me, Professor. It meant to hurt me.”
“You might as well say the night intends darkness, or gravity means you to fall, or, ha, that—”
“Then there’s something broken in it, Professor, something sick…”
“Or, yes, quite, that the sunset’s broken, or eleven o’clock is sick, do you see?”
“It was scared, Professor, it will never forgive me.”
“What?”
Arjun realized he was standing; he thought he might have been shouting. Olympia, embarrassed, was averting her eyes; Holbach looked damp-eyed with pity.
Arjun sat down.
Holbach and Olympia entered into an urgent communication of raised eyebrows and significant glances and discreet head-shaking.
Arjun was suddenly very keen to remain, and very afraid that he was about to be ejected from the mansion, from the company of these people who, eccentric and infuriating though they were, might at least be able to shed some light on the events and visions of that horrible night.
And besides, he needed money.
Mr. Haycock had a kind of smile and laugh that he used whenever he’d said something so offensive that Defour looked ready to expel him from the dining-table. That laugh somehow worked to render everything that had gone before it harmless and quickly forgotten. Arjun attempted the same trick now.
Holbach sighed. “Again,” he said, “I’m most terribly sorry. Oh dear. I hope at least you found something that might help you with your own search?”
Arjun realized that in his dread of the Typhon, he had forgotten his own god. He shook his head. “I don’t know if I’m still looking. No—please don’t ask.”
There was silence.
Holbach went on. “Well. My offer stands. I need a translator who knows Tuvar. And I want to repay you for the injury I feel I have done you. Are you interested?”
“I lost the last of my money. Perhaps in the water, or perhaps the Sisters took it. I have to eat. I need new clothes. I may need to pay for my passage back to Gad; I haven’t decided yet. So, yes, I am. What is it you do, exactly, Professor?”
H olbach loved to hear himself expatiate on his work; that was obvious from his eyes, his
gestures, the rolling cadences of his well-rehearsed discourse, his enthusiastic digressions from it.
“I think of myself as a scientist, not a mystic, or a priest, or a wizard, although I have been called all of those things. A scientist. No less than, say, Dr. Branken, whom you may meet soon, whose specialty is optics, or our colleague Marchant, the jurist. I am a scientist of the holy. You might say that I am a geographer; a cartographer of the sacred city, a student of the forces beneath its surface that buckle and shape it. Forces that, if I may adopt Dr. Kamff’s term, though hardly in his intended sense, as you may know if you know his work—no?—which I would call tectonic: our makers, our architects. Demiurgic, it’s sometimes said, but I prefer my word.
“Much nonsense is spoken about these forces. Indeed, the city is in a sense built out of that nonsense. Out of an absurd reverence. As I think you’re aware. Now, true, our gods are very strange, and hard to understand, just as the city they build is full of secrets and strangeness. But, for all that they are obscure, there is no reason to see them as fundamentally mysterious. No more so than the forces that lay the course of the river, or shape the coastline, or sculpt the mountain. They may be mapped, plotted, brought under reason.”
A housekeeper brought in coffee on a silver tray. Arjun accepted gratefully. He stirred thick honey into it, and swigged it eagerly. It was better than any of the Nessenes’ cures.
“I can understand my fellow citizens’ knee-bending tendencies, of course. I was present, as you are no doubt aware, for the recent return of the Bird. I was otherwise occupied, of course, and it was very far away, but…And then, once, I was in the Arcades, I believe purchasing perfume for a young lady who is sadly no longer with us, and Orillia—the spirit of the lights? The god of the Illuminations?—manifested; all the glass of the Arcades, and the lamps hanging in chains from arch to arch, all became brilliantly deep and, ah, brilliant. I found myself bending the knee and tearing at my hair with all the rest of the crowd. So I do understand.