by Felix Gilman
I t was perhaps midnight, but it made no difference. Red, fluxing light bathed everything, smoldered in the glass of all the windows, sparked in the air. The tall bone-bleached buildings around the Plaza were tortured into pillars and flutes and proud statues; they strove for grandeur, but could not compete with the thing rising from the center of the Plaza. But it was hard to look at that, so the eye was always drawn back to the buildings. Their polished marble reflected the flames.
The Fire poured endlessly up. It was as thick perhaps as the arm-span of a half a dozen men, and taller than the tallest buildings. Rigid but flowing. The Church taught that all those who died right would be born again as flickers in the Fire, endlessly purified and rarified. Maybe; who knew? It stung the eyes. It gave off much less warmth than one would expect.
It was like an exclamation mark, or an admonishing finger. It demanded attention. It had to mean something. But the flame curled silently in on itself. The courthouses and prison-houses around it captured its reflection and imposed meaning on it. Their stern facades spoke: it stood for justice and punishment.
Jack approached it on foot, through the crowd. He did not want to draw attention to himself. There were priests all around, and guards with rifles shouldered through the crowds. Irreverence would not be tolerated. Not that it was likely to be offered, in that sacred place; the crowds drifting around the Fire in the un-night looked dazed with worship.
The crowd parted. A group of priests came through, followed by marshals, leading a man in chains. He was absurdly small and thin and old. His head was shaved and his beard hacked off. The crowd hissed at him. The lead priest clapped his hands and the crowd cleared a path. Jack stepped back, too.
The priests wore the ornate red and gold robes of the Church of Tiber. They led the prisoner up to a scaffold, slightly off the plaza’s center, near to the Fire. The scaffold, and the men on it, cast long shadows across the stones.
Jack knew this ritual. His teachers had described it in detail and with relish. The Church would take men who were to be hanged. They did one a day, chosen at random from all the city’s many prisons. They would bring them to the Fire to be ended, so that they could contemplate it in their last moments, and then, afterwards, be purified within it.
The marshals held back the crowd with bayonets. Jack got as close as he could. He was too late to hear the first part of the ritual, the denunciation of the man’s crimes. Now the man was weeping, lamenting the sins and follies that had led him to the scaffold. He was reading from a script, of course. Jack knew the words. The priest raised the noose over the man’s shaved head.
Jack started running before he knew he was going to do it. The marshal in front of him lowered his rifle and raised his hand, shouting. When Jack kept coming, the marshal lifted the gun again, but too late. Jack leaped up and over his head.
Two marshals stepped down to block the scaffold’s steps. Jack rose up over the structure’s side. Landing lightly, he grabbed the condemned man’s arm. He stumbled. The man’s weight was too much, scrawny as he was. For a moment they were in motion, and maybe if the man had not fought him they would have been airborne. But his bloodshot eyes went wide with fear, and he scrambled back and fell; Jack wanted to slap him. Someone grabbed Jack’s arm from behind. Jack snapped his head back into bone and the hand released.
The condemned man tried to run out into the crowd, but a bullet tore at his hip, and he fell. Two marshals threw themselves on him and pinned his arms. A priest behind Jack was on his knees, clutching his bloody nose and moaning. Two more stood nervously around. Riflemen were cutting through the crowd.
The crowd yelled: “It’s his son, come back to save him!” and “It’s an accomplice! Stop him!”
Too late to do anything now; he had mistimed everything. Jack hurled himself up, arcing into the air, to gasps from the crowd. One woman screamed, “It’s the Key Himself!”
A shot was fired. Jack turned himself toward the Fire, where they could not look and dared not shoot. He swerved around it at the last minute. It stung but did not warm his skin.
When he was far enough away, he turned himself back around and headed south, to Moore Street, with a new sense of purpose. He knew what the Thunderers could do and be.
I t was a long journey, even for him, and he stopped often in the night and the day, pacing up and down on high roofs, gesturing and talking to himself, preparing his speech. He wanted to say: they were brought together by the Bird’s casual gift of freedom, of the will to freedom. They were betraying it if they stopped where they fell, settling into petty crime, waiting to be arrested again, or going with the press-gangs, or…Only if they kept moving forward, sharing the gift, becoming greater and wilder, could they be worthy of the miracle. There was a whole city of prisons and workhouses, a city of chains to be broken. Now he had the power to do it. He could take them with him. They would be a dream of freedom. There was a final perpetual escape to be made. Those were the sort of things he wanted to say.
And yes, true, all right, his first attempt had not been a success, and perhaps he shouldn’t mention it; but with an army behind him, a growing army…That could be their purpose. They could all be saved.
And so on: cobbling together a fervent harangue, out of half-remembered playhouse picaresques and rogue-ballads, and out of the prayers and prophecies beaten into him in the House—unhampered by knowledge of anything else in the world, and with the power, the gift, whispering inside his head and bearing up his feet.
H e landed near the river, south of the Heath, and walked the rest of the way to the Black Moon with his hands in his pockets.
It was morning when he reached Moore Street. A couple of old men from the boardinghouses at the north end of the street were starting their dull days. Lagger was setting up his hurdy-gurdy on the corner, smoking a roll-up with his gnarled left hand. His bruises were healing.
Someone had torn the boards off the Moon’s front windows, opening the interior to the morning. Its innards looked pale and raw, and very small and shabby. The garden gate was smashed off its hinges. There was no one visible in the exposed interior.
Jack ran around the back and into the empty bar. He ran upstairs, shouting, “Who’s there? What happened?”
The upper floors were empty. Someone should have been there, always, whatever the time of day: he and Fiss had put a lot of effort into organizing them in shifts. “Fiss?” he called, banging the walls, his voice breaking. Their stuff was gone; their supplies, their reserves. All their small trophies.
He went up to the roof and looked down. There was no one around. In the corner of the garden was a heap of fresh ashes. He dropped down from the roof and poked through the cold ash. There were some scraps of unburned fabric in there: their blankets.
He walked around the front of the building again, and sat in the street, under the hanging sign. A few people looked at him, but he didn’t care who saw him now: he could no longer be caught or held. But the others could. And he had not been there. Let them report him; let them try to catch him.
He was hungry, and there was only so long he could ignore it. Around noon he went back into the Black Moon. They’d had food there. Perhaps the watch had left it untouched.
As soon as he stepped back inside, the building felt different. Before it had felt naked and exposed; now it felt furtive. Someone was hiding. Someone had returned while he’d been out the front. He sensed it before his conscious mind registered the footsteps: a flutter of fleeing feet down the stairs, stopping like held breath as he came in. Down in the cellar.
In the kitchen, the trapdoor was open. Dark steps led down into the floor. Jack stepped down slowly.
A figure rushed out of the darkness at him, holding a knife over its head. Jack had all the time in the world to step calmly aside. He waited until the figure was past him, then seized it by the shoulder, and looked Fiss in his startled and dirty face.
I t stank and it was hard to breathe in the unventilated cellar. Fiss had made a sm
all fire there, in the corner, out of a broken crate. They sat side by side against the wall.
“I didn’t know I was gone so long,” Jack said.
“Only a few days.”
“Something happened, Fiss.”
“You don’t have to apologize. You said you were going and you went. You weren’t our keeper, and you couldn’t have made a difference. It was never going to last forever, anyway.”
“I’m not apologizing. Don’t look at me like that: I didn’t know I was gone so long. Something did happen, and I could have made a difference. We can make it right again.”
Fiss shook his head and stared at his feet.
“So what happened here? How did you get away?”
“Day before yesterday. First thing in the morning, while it was still dark. Martin and Elsie were on lookout, I think. It was Elsie shook me awake, said there were men with rifles and lanterns coming. I woke Aiden, and we tried to get everyone out into the garden and over the fence, like last time, like that last time the watch came, but they were out there waiting, in the dark, taking us and dragging us away. So I got a couple of lads and tried to go back out the other way, and then I heard them ripping back the boards out the front, and smashing the door at the back. Though it wasn’t even locked.”
Fiss looked very thin in the fire’s light. He had not eaten or really slept since this happened, Jack guessed. Still, he would have to be strong enough for what Jack needed. They would have to act quickly, and there was no time to rest.
“I got out on the roof—I panicked, Jack, there was nothing I could do. Namdi wanted us to fight, but how were we supposed to fight? They had swords and guns. So I got out on the roof and jumped for it over to the pawnshop. Beth was with me, but she couldn’t jump in that skirt. Aiden missed the jump. I made it. I made it out of the street. They had men outside, Jack, they were mad to catch us, they could have done it anytime they liked, anytime we made them angry enough to take the trouble.”
“Did anyone else get away?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“Was anyone hurt?”
“Aiden fell. I saw someone hit on the head. I don’t know.”
“Whose men was it?”
“The Countess. I think. Yes, the Countess.”
“So, it’s only been a day. No one will have been moved. They’ll still be in the Countess’s watchhouse, here in Shutlow.”
“I think so.”
Jack grew excited. He felt much less sympathy for the others than he thought he probably should. He knew they must be scared, or hurt, and that Fiss was distraught and despairing, but he knew he could make it all right again; no, better. He said, “I had a speech prepared to convince you. I wasn’t sure how it was going to go. I think it might have been hard to make everyone understand. Now I don’t need it. You’re going to have to do it, and like it. We’ll start with ourselves. Sorry, Fiss—don’t look at me like that. I’m just excited. Come on up, then. Follow me. I have something to show you.”
T he Countess’s Shutlow watchhouse was a dull, three-story box of ivied stone, flat-roofed and not quite square in shape.
It was one of many. Mass How’s Parliament regarded Shutlow as part of its dominion, and maintained a watchhouse in Acker Street. Chairman Cimenti wanted it to be known that he was generously concerned to help keep Shutlow’s peace, and although of course he did not claim authority, by any means, he sponsored a civilian force based in Seven Wheels Market. A half-dozen other Estates kept their men around somewhere or other.
The Countess’s watchhouse was on Deacon Street. Two guards stood out the front. In other parts of the city—in Fourth Ward, in Garhide, in Ar-Mouth—it was not uncommon for riots to strike the gaols, whenever some criminal managed to win the mob’s affection; but there was no danger of that sort of thing in Shutlow, where the locals had never easily been stirred into action. The gate-guards were really only there for show.
Both men jumped as a tile shattered into red dust on the stones in front of their feet. They looked up, and then ducked, shielding their eyes with their arms, as a second tile came plummeting toward them. It broke over one man’s mailed back, dropping him to his knees. A third hit his shoulder and broke sharply, buckling the mail and piercing the flesh. His colleague scrambled crabwise through the door, shouting, “There’s some bastard up on the roof throwing things! Hinton’s hurt!”
Jack dropped fast, scattering the rest of the tiles as he landed by the gate. He had been far above the roof: far enough, he had guessed, that the dropped tiles would incapacitate but not kill. He felt a little sick to see the mess he had made of the watchman’s shoulder. Blood welled between the broken chain links; the arm hung at a bad angle; bone ground against tile as the man stood, screaming and bellowing. It was all much less clean than Jack had imagined. Next time, he would do better.
He made himself unsentimental, and grabbed the rifle in both hands and placed a foot on the man’s back, and pulled, so that the rifle’s strap snapped. The man screamed again. Jack reached for the bandolier. Holding the weapon, the charges, and the bullet-bag, he leaped into flight across the street.
Down the street, people were poking their heads from their windows. This was not Fourth Ward, where people knew to keep their heads down when they heard screaming; this was Shutlow, shabby and damp but quiet, where people believed they were not the sort of people to whom violence happened. They screamed, too, when they saw Jack leap, like an actor lifted aloft by wires and pulleys, but climbing much higher, and, impossibly, out there under the naked sky.
Jack landed on the high flat roof of a warehouse on the opposite side of the street. Fiss was there, watching. “Here,” Jack said, handing him the rifle and the bandolier.
Jack looked at Fiss’s tired, sunken eyes. “Remember: you don’t have to hit anyone. Just fire as fast as you can, and make them afraid. Don’t get shot yourself.” Impulsively, Jack hugged him, then kicked himself off the roof again.
As Jack flew back over, a group of watchmen burst out into the street, spreading out, angling their rifles into the air, scanning the skyline. There were five of them. One picked up the wounded man and helped him indoors. Two more ran out onto the roof, truncheons ready. A woman leaning out of the window of the pub three doors down called out, “He’s in the air! He’s in the air!” The watchmen paid her no attention.
A shot rang out across the open street, breaking the glass in the watchhouse window. Fiss stood out against the sky on the roof opposite, reloading his rifle. The watchmen pointed and fired in his direction, but he ducked behind the parapet. He rose up again to fire and they scrambled for cover.
Jack came around the building’s side where a second-floor window stood ajar. He pulled the window open and slipped through into someone’s office. He ran out the door and down the stairs.
There was a hall downstairs, with weapons along the walls: swords and rifles and spears. A kitchen opened off the hall, and inside it, the wounded watchman lay on the table, moaning. There was a lot of blood on the floor. Another man, the one who had dragged him inside, was trying gingerly to remove his armor.
The wounded man leaned up on his good arm as Jack came in, pointing at the intruder and yelling hoarsely in alarm. The other watchman picked up his club and came running for Jack. Jack sidestepped him and kicked the back of his leg. The watchman fell to one knee, then got back up and lunged again. He was huge, but much, much slower than Jack, who jumped away over the man’s head and pushed him in the back, sending him sprawling.
The wounded man was leaning off the table, stretching for a cleaver on the counter. Jack kicked the table; the wounded man’s weight unbalanced it and it fell. The man rolled into a corner, holding his arm and yelling. He did not try to get up again.
Jack drew his beautiful stolen knife and held it under the other man’s chin till he froze, and spat, “The cells. The cells and the keys to the cells. Now.”
The man lifted shaking arms over his head and slowly stood, a
nd walked cautiously backward to the hall, and led Jack down the stairs into the cellar. Jack followed, the knife at the man’s throat. He felt all the man’s fight leave him.
A fetid tunnel led away from the cellar. There were cells all along it. Jack had the watchman take the keys and go down it, opening the cells. The first one contained an ancient-looking woman, a drunk probably, or a whore (Gods help her if she is, Jack thought), asleep on the straw. The next contained several of the Thunderers; Jack saw Turyk, the carpenter’s apprentice; Een, the little thief from the docks.
“Jack! Bloody Fire, Jack!”
“Just stand together, out in the corridor. Don’t move until I tell you to. Be quick.”
When all the cells were open, there was a group of maybe a dozen boys standing in the tunnel. They were not all there—and no girls at all, for that matter—but there was no time to count. No Aiden, no Namdi. “Where are the others?” he asked, and a babble of voices told him that they had been taken, the night before, processed to this workhouse or that. “We’ll find them later, then,” he said. “That’s enough for now.”
When they were ready, Jack snatched the rifle off his hostage’s back and handed it to Turyk. They went up into the hall, where Jack said, “Take a moment. Arm yourselves. Knives, guns, all you can carry. Bullets. No pikes or anything stupid.”
Two watchmen peeked around the door to see a thicket of brandished rifles, and dodged back out onto the street. Jack followed, leading his hostage before him, arms up. Outside, he saw the two watchmen in the street. Three more (where did the fifth man come from?) had made it across the street, braving Fiss’s fire, and were battering down the door of the warehouse.
Jack grabbed Turyk and said, “Go,” pushing him in one direction, and Martin in the other. In each boy’s ear, he whispered the name of a different market in Fourth Ward. They ran, the group splitting up to follow one or the other. Jack stood in the door, still holding the knife to his hostage’s throat. The watchmen looked at the escaping children, and at Jack and his hostage. Jack stepped back into the building, and they made their decision and chased him. In the hall, he dragged the watchman halfway up the stairs and then shoved him to his knees. He leaned to whisper in his ear, “Soon, there will be more of us than you can count.”