by Felix Gilman
O lympia came to see him a few days later. “Holbach says you think you need to leave the city soon.”
“You knew I didn’t plan to stay forever.”
“Of course I did. Don’t flatter yourself. I’m just sorry to see you go for no reason. For a mad reason.”
“I’m not going yet. I’ll stay as long as I must, to find what I came for.” He noticed that there were lines of worry on her face; she had not been sleeping well either. “There’s something else troubling you. Are the plans going badly?”
“Things are very tense in the house. We’re all working very hard. And Nicolas is sick, and he’s taking it out on us. He’s very old, and the strain…It’s all very sudden for him. Oh, I don’t know, he’ll be all right. It’s just hard, at the moment.”
“I don’t like the changes to The Blessing. It’s out of my hands now, of course, but I regret what Nicolas has done to it. It’s very crude. Is that all that his plans amount to?”
“Oh, no. That’s nothing to do with Nicolas, or any of us, for that matter. It just started to appear, early last week. Liancourt is furious. So is Nicolas: he thinks it’ll bring retribution down on us, before we’re ready to move. They want me to put a stop to it, but I’m no censor. I don’t have the power. There’s no one to sue; the play crops up in one place for a day, and vanishes. They don’t use actors, they just hire whatever they can dredge up from the pubs. I try to tell Liancourt, if you let something like that play loose in the city, it’s not yours anymore. It changes. I’m just busy now trying to persuade the censors it’s not our work. I’m not sure they believe me.”
“Be careful, please, Olympia. Not just of the censors, but of the Typhon. You should leave that house.”
“Stop it. You should come back. Dangerous times are exciting times. This is what we’ve all been working for.”
“I can’t.”
They had sex, their first time in Arjun’s austere flat. They both seemed to need it very badly, but their moods were not greatly different afterwards. Olympia seemed irritated that it had not lifted Arjun’s dread or changed his mind. She left.
T hat afternoon, he went down to the docks again, but the play was gone, the rude stage dismantled. Arjun bought lunch, meat wrapped in thick leaves, from a stall.
There was an empty half-circle in the crowd, against the looming wooden wall of a shipyard. A man lay moaning against the wall. Blackish-green drool ran from his slack mouth. The crowd gave him a wide berth, pressing handkerchiefs to their faces if they had them, or the tails of their shirts. “Oh gods, it’s lung-rot,” said a clerk by Arjun’s side. “Don’t get too near.”
The smell was dreadful: cold and wet and deathly. It made Arjun think of the smell of the canal-tunnels. And he recalled that Olympia had said Nicolas was sick, and he suddenly could not believe how stupid he had been, how thoughtless. He had been within its mind, and he knew what sort of thing it was. It had pursued him in Shutlow, and taken Norris and the others, and then to Holbach’s house. And it has put its mark on Nicolas. Maybe on all of them. He turned and ran toward the Tor and Foyle’s Ward.
But he could not do it. He got near to Holbach’s street, and fear buckled his knees. He could not face it. He would rather die, and let everyone he had ever cared for die, than face the creature again. But they had to know.
There was a carriage rank nearby, and he found one of the stable-boys, and gave him a message. He had no paper or pen, so he made the boy memorize it: The Typhon has caused Nicolas’s sickness. It may be the source of the lung-rot. It may be the lung-rot itself. It may have marked you all. It may still be there. I beg you to leave the house now.
The boy repeated it back one last time. Arjun said, “Now, deliver that message to the first person you find, and see that they give it to Olympia—Olympia—or Holbach—Holbach. Will you remember that? And swear to me, on your mother, that you’ll leave as soon as you’ve done that, and got your money. Don’t stay there, for any reason.”
The boy nodded and ran off. Arjun hated himself for sending a child into that place. He watched him turn the corner.
H e sent a second boy to the Cypress, to warn Defour. Then he went to Olympia’s rooms, to wait for her.
“She’s not here, sir,” Pieta told him. “We’re not expecting her back for days.”
“Is she at Holbach’s house?”
“Dunno. Could be anywhere. You know how she is, sir.”
“I’ll wait.”
She let him sit on the sofa, drumming his fingers nervously on a glass-topped table.
“Do you mind if I ask, sir? Is there trouble between you and the mistress?”
He glared at her. She left him alone. He regretted his coldness, but could not face calling her back. He sat alone all day, and went home in the evening, when it was clear Olympia wasn’t coming.
The next day, he sent another messenger to Holbach’s house, in case the first had run off with his money. Still no reply.
He went back to Olympia’s flat the following afternoon. To reach it, he had to cross the delicate carved bridges over the pleasure-canals of Ebon Fields. The Fields lay between the canals: sharp-edged, gleaming jags of ebony set on a background of verdant grass, jeweled with bright flowers. And on a wide flat mound of ebony, beneath the bridge, a crew of players was performing the bastardized Blessing. Arjun told the driver to rein his horses, and leaned over the bridge to watch. The crowd here was well-dressed, the spoiled pleasure-seekers of the Fields. They seemed to find the play a guilty thrill. It was cut short quickly, the pantomime-villain-Countess in mid-sneer, when a boy came running to the foot of the black rock stage to shout, “Watch! Coming quick!”
The players and the crowd ran for it. Arjun got back in the carriage and proceeded to Ebon Fields. She was still not there.
T wo days later, he was woken by a banging on his door. It was very late in the morning. The pellets helped him sleep, but made it hard to rise. He waited, warily, until he heard Olympia’s voice call, “Arjun?”
He let her in. Holbach was with her. Both looked tired and grey. He asked them, “Well?”
“Nicolas died in the night,” Holbach said. Olympia choked back a sob and put a tense fist against the wall.
Arjun shook his head. “I’m sorry.” It was sad news, but he had resigned himself to it days ago.
Holbach said, “It was the lung-rot, in the end. Like all the other cases I’ve studied, in the end, but slower. A week ago, it was a cough and a shortness of temper, then it grew, and grew, and last night…I got your messages. I’ve sent everyone away. We need to talk, Arjun. Tell me again: what did you see in that tunnel? This time I promise to listen.”
Arjun took a deep breath, and began to describe it, leaving nothing out. When he was done, Holbach was shaking his head. “That’s very wrong. What you say you felt. Very strange, and very wrong. The sickness, the division you describe, between the divine and the impure elements. I’ve never heard of anything like it. If Shay affected it somehow, changed it, then, well…I don’t know how it might behave. I suppose it might behave the way you describe.”
“Shay poisoned it,” Olympia spat.
“That seems most likely,” Holbach said.
“It followed you to us,” Olympia said.
“I’m sorry. I tried to warn you.”
They were silent for a time. Arjun asked, “Professor, can you defend against it? Hide from it? Fight it?”
“I have no idea how to even begin to answer that question. I have no idea what sort of condition the Typhon may be in. I’ve never heard of one of its kind being, ah, corrupted like this. I’m not even convinced that you’re right; it may be a mere coincidence, and your recollection may be confused. I don’t even know all that much about the Typhon, even in what you might call a healthy state. I told you once, I think, that I prefer to study the useful powers of the city. What use is the Typhon? Let it sit in its tunnels and be forgotten, was always my view. But now…”
“Don’t go back to yo
ur house, Professor.”
“Gods no. I’ll take rooms somewhere.”
“Find some way to fight it or ward it off. I release you from your promise to me. You have to work on this, instead.”
“Oh, yes. Ah, thank you. Yes, I will, of course.”
“If it hunts me down, I’ll never find the Voice. If you can fight it, I’ll be able to search again.”
“Ah. I see.”
“I’m sorry about Nicolas. I hope the Atlas survives.”
They talked a little longer, awkwardly, painfully. There was nothing much to say. Olympia and Holbach were still too shocked, too sad, to know what they would do next.
“Ah, no,” Holbach said. “No funeral plans, yet. Not yet.”
They left. Arjun shook Holbach’s hand. Olympia moved behind Holbach and out the door, not meeting Arjun’s eyes.
Next afternoon, a messenger delivered a note with the address of Holbach’s hotel, and instructions that Arjun should contact Holbach if anything happened, or if he remembered anything important, and a promise that Holbach would be in touch as soon as he made any progress.
A rjun sat at his desk, taking stock. He now had two impossible goals. First, to find the Voice; he would not leave without it. Second, to hide from or destroy the Typhon; he could not stay so long as it hunted him. He had no inkling of how to do either. He was mortal, and they were not. He could not touch or reach them. And, too, he was afraid for Olympia and Holbach and all the Atlas-makers. They had been kind to him, and their dream was a good one. He was afraid their time, too, was short.
That night he leafed through one of the last of his books, the Hierophant Vikar’s record of his theological debates. It was tiresome and self-serving, perfect to induce sleep.
The last thing he read was Vikar’s penultimate chapter, in which Vikar soundly defeated (he claimed) the heresy of a city-native who had denied that the gods were deserving of worship. Vikar explained:
That man’s confusion had many sources, for every street in this city may lead a man into confusion. But above all, it was his reading of a certain ancient text, a Riddle-Book (which he unearthed in a manner it may be safest not to discuss) that addled him. It was a very foolish book, the product of many dozens of this city’s scholars, proof, if any were needed, that numbers are no guarantee of wisdom, and that folly compounds with folly. In the form of a riddle-book, though one swollen to monstrous size, they thought to pose and answer all the city’s questions and paradoxes. They dreamed of explaining the joke of the city to the city, my unwise friend told me, and so help it rise above its own absurdity, and set it aside. There can be no better answer to those Riddlers’ foolishness than this: they are gone, their book burned and their names expunged from history. Thus the city refuted them.
Arjun put the book aside and slept, badly.
H e waited for three days before deciding that he needed to see Holbach. He needed to speak to Olympia, too, he didn’t want to leave things between them as they were, but Holbach had to be first. Arjun was going mad waiting to hear from him.
So he headed down to the carriage rank. There was a message-post there, always full of announcements and offerings, pronouncements of blessing or anathema. A small crowd gathered around it. He pushed gently through, and started to ask, “What are we looking at?” but it was obvious. Thick black print on a half-dozen posters shouted:
All Citizens Are Warned: The Performance Known as THE MARRIAGE BLESSING Has Been Found by the Authority of the Countess ILONA to Be Both Seditious and Libelous. The Following Persons Involved in This Libel, and in the Proscribed Work THE ATLAS, Are to Be Questioned.
Possession or Performance of the Proscribed Works Are Forbidden Within Our Territories. By ILONA’S Order.
By the GODS’ Will and The CITY’S.
A list of some twenty names followed. Nicolas Maine’s topped it, followed by Holbach’s and Liancourt’s and, near the bottom, Olympia’s. Arjun’s name was not on the list.
He had not imagined Ilona would act with such unseemly haste. He extricated himself carefully from the crowd, staring at his feet, willing himself invisible. He took the first free carriage, and when the man asked “Where to?” he could not decide for a moment whom he was most frightened for. After a second, he gave the man Olympia’s address.
He waited in her street for a while, watching. When he saw Pieta at the window, emptying out the chamber pots, he judged that there were no watchmen waiting there. But Olympia wasn’t there, either. And when Arjun told Pieta what had happened, she dropped the vase she was dusting in shock, and held her pale hand to her face: she hadn’t known. Olympia had not been back for days, and the Countess’s men had not been to the flat. “Go home to your family,” Arjun said, and, as an afterthought, he opened his wallet, saying, “She may not be back for a time. I can give you some money to tide you over.”
The desk clerk at Holbach’s hotel told Arjun that Holbach was gone. Arjun left at once, before the clerk could report him.
T hree days later he stood at the back of a tight-pressed crowd out on the Heath, hot animal bodies packing onto the grass, stinking together of sweat and fear and anger. The sun burned the backs of their necks, except in the middle of the crowd, where a swath of shadow lay over them, cast by the low-hanging Thunderer. At the edge of the West Meadow, a wooden platform raised distant figures above the audiences’ craning heads.
At the front of the stage were two men on their knees. Arjun could not make out their features, but he knew that they were Holbach and Liancourt. Behind them, dozens of armed men.
The Countess stood among her soldiers, her high collar making a halo of diamonds and gold behind her head. To Arjun, she looked like the monstrous lizards he had seen in the southern desert, which opened collars of scaled skin around their heads and spat poison. She stepped forward, and a footman screamed for silence, and she spat out the sentence that the crowd had gathered to see carried out.
The verdict had been rendered in sealed proceedings, in the Countess’s chambers, and made public the day before. The Atlas was still under investigation, but there could be no question that The Blessing was both libelous and seditious. The sentence was death for Liancourt, whipping and imprisonment for Holbach.
She wouldn’t want to lose Holbach’s services, Arjun thought.
Some of the crowd cheered her, others booed, quietly at first, then with gathering courage as others joined them. Two burly men next to Arjun started to hum a theme from The Blessing, in a deep, defiant drone. When they saw him watching, they went silent and stared at their feet. He wanted to signal to them, Don’t worry, I am no spy. He wanted to say, Do something, for the love of the Voice, do something to stop this.
The Countess screamed her proclamation louder, her voice hoarse. She was taking the insult very personally.
A man next to Arjun, a thick-necked laborer in a grey cap, fingered a knot of bright silk threads in his dirty left hand. Arjun thought, Silk’s here! but the man was at least forty; he was not the famous prison-breaker.
For a moment, Arjun pictured himself as Silk, rushing up to the stage, casting the executioners down, and carrying the condemned men to freedom, but it was only a childish fantasy. He would not indulge himself in it.
He would attend solemnly. He would suffer along with them.
The Countess screamed, “Be warned!” She turned her back on the crowd, then turned again, with a shaking, pointing claw, and shrieked, “Be warned!” Then she gestured to one of her men, who stepped up behind Liancourt, drew his pistol, and fired it into the back of the playwright’s head. The bellowing of the crowd was senseless and terrible.
Holbach’s scourging was a more drawn-out affair. Arjun could not keep his word, and turned his eyes away.
The crowd’s mood grew ugly as the punishment dragged on. The man next to him was openly raising his fistful of silk over his head, and shouting, “Silk!” and “Shame! Shame!”
There was some commotion at the front of the crowd, and the man
in front of Arjun stumbled back against him, and Arjun nearly fell. There was screaming. He craned around the head in front of him, and saw men trying to climb onto the stage, the soldiers stamping on their heads and hands. A shot was fired. Soldiers with rifles converged on the front of the crowd, hunching against a hail of thrown objects. A curtain of soldiers drew around the Countess and the pale, bloody mess that was Holbach.
A signal ran through the crowd and shocked it into ugly life. Arjun stood his ground, jostled by frightened and angry people surging in all directions. He didn’t know whether to push forward, to join in the riot, though it was certainly a doomed gesture, or back, to get clear, before something terrible happened. He felt fixed in place, the whirlwind’s still center.
More shots, more screams. A group of men with convicts’ shaven heads rushed past, charging forward, brandishing knives and hammers; an elderly woman tried to lead a group of screaming, sobbing schoolchildren out through the crowd to safety. He wondered who could be attacking the stage. He had not thought the Atlas-makers had so many friends in the city, or at least not friends of this sort.
The press of the crowd took him under the Thunderer’s shadow, and he looked up with holy dread at its great black guns. If the riot was not stopped soon, would it turn those guns on the crowd? He stared up at the warship, feet planted widely to keep his balance in the blindly surging throng. As he stared, there was an explosion across the Heath, though the guns had not fired. Then there was another explosion, closer to him. Each was followed by silence, a cloud of dust, then screaming.
The crowd was thinning now. Men ran through a fog of dust and smoke. The white wood of the bandstand, where Arjun had so often watched the city’s musicians, was in flame. Soldiers on horseback rode over the Heath, striking fleeing men on their heads and necks with sticks. Arjun was not sure which way he was facing anymore. He thought he could see the skyline of the river’s bank, and ran that way. He stumbled over a hole in the torn earth, and fell, his leg twisted beneath him.