Thunderer

by Felix Gilman

  Sometimes Holbach would grab her arm weakly, pull her to the desk, and write, Then tell me what to do. He’d press it into her hand. She never knew how to answer.

  A rjun and Olympia slept together one last time, both knowing it was the last time, that there was no reason for them to stay together any longer. They were not out of danger, but for one night they both needed to pretend that they were. But when they woke, suddenly, in the dark, both lying silently, stiff and aching, in a bed that now smelled of stale nightmare sweat, neither of them could speak, or move, or breathe, as if they were still drowning in the nightmare that they could not, quite, remember. Something was different in the darkness of the room. Something was different in the darkness of the city. A light they had taken for granted was gone.

  T he Cypress, of course, had gone out of business, and what with all the unpleasantness and unruliness and general wickedness of recent weeks, Defour was not especially sorry. It had always been a burden; it had become unbearable.

  Heady had been her last lodger. And what a troubling lodger he’d become, who’d once been so nice, with his sinister new friends who came and went at all hours! Until one night he’d come home in a panic, packed his bags, taken a last bath—he always was a fastidious man, at least you could say that for him—and he had somehow contrived to drown himself in it, leaving Defour—all on her own!—to move that cold fish-pale body out into an alley to become a Matter for the Authorities. And then there was no one but Defour herself in that big drafty old place. Oh, because…

  (Madame Defour presently sat on a stone bench at the edge of Tiber’s Plaza, shielding her eyes from the red constant glare of the Pillar of Fire at the heart of that wide empty circle. It was nearly midnight, but it was never dark in Tiber’s incandescent presence. Defour’s bags were packed at her feet and she was very far from home indeed. Her neighbor on the bench was a fat young girl with stringy hair and an expression of sullen troubled self-pity, and Defour was explaining to her that she was far too young to know what trouble really was.)

  …because the rumor had started that the Cypress was cursed. Gods knew Defour had often privately thought of the boardinghouse as a curse, ever since the Spider condemned her to the care of it. But in recent weeks it seemed that the plague had claimed so many of the lodgers—indeed almost all of them—and people were starting to notice. No one wanted to live there. No one wanted to live in Shutlow at all, if they had any choice.

  And there was something strange in the Cypress. Defour hesitated to use the word haunted, but nothing better sprang to mind. For instance, the cellar had flooded, which it had never done before in thirty years, and remained flooded no matter how many buckets of stinking black muddy water were removed, until eventually Defour had ceded the cellar to the floodwaters and padlocked the trapdoor, and then there was always a faint creaking and groaning from beneath. Even in the sickly heat of that violent summer, the Cypress was cold and drafty. There were smells. All those people died, of course. Sometimes it seemed that there were more rooms than there should be, and all of those rooms were empty and bare and the curtains and carpet were mold-riddled and rotten, and then there were long, darkened hallways that went nowhere and the rooms were un-numbered, and…

  “That’s just how it was when my mum and dad died,” the fat young girl said, “and—”

  “Excuse me!”

  …and anyway the strange thing was these unusual phe-nomen-a kept getting worse, slowly at first, then faster and faster, as if whatever it was was getting stronger, more confident, was learning new tricks. And once it found something unpleasant to do, for instance causing all of the windows to break to let in freezing winds, or sprouting black weeds out between the floorboards, it would never let up, it would persist with dull unimaginative malevolence, so that after a few weeks, the Cypress was a thoroughly unearthly place, and most of Defour’s lodgers would have moved out if they weren’t all ailing so badly. Norris had died, and after that it was weeks before Clement passed on; by the end the lodgers were dropping dead as if it had suddenly become fashionable. Misery and anger and bitterness hung in the air like a cold black fog, and matches would not light.

  Defour herself would have left weeks ago if not for her holy oath to the Spider-God, which had put her in charge of the Cypress all those years ago. She stayed and made offerings of flies to her god. She knitted a web in her bedroom so that it might feel at home there, and come to protect her. It did not. The Spider’s aloof enigmatic indifference, which had always been so fascinating and awe-inspiring, now seemed like a very flimsy and trivial thing by comparison to the haunting presence that she felt watching her and hating her. And then one day, shortly after the Heady business, she was doing her face in the morning and her dressing-table mirror cracked and in the lonely fragments of her reflection she saw drowned faces pleading and screaming and rotting, and she said, “So much for the bloody Spider, then,” and fled, leaving the Cypress unlocked for any child fool enough to squat there.

  Defour had no family to stay with. Instead she went north to the distant Plaza where Tiber burned. She spent the last of the fortune she’d saved from her days on the stage on carriages and rickshaws, and practically flew along. She traveled by day and by night for nearly a week. She told a succession of drivers to follow the red light of the Fire over the skyline, and be quick about it; her reasoning being that the haunting was a water-thing, was a cold and dark and rot-thing, so perhaps it feared the Fire, perhaps there she would be safe. Now she sat on a bench at the edge of the Fire’s Plaza, watching the long shadows of men and women drift back and forth in the god’s stark glare. She’d tried to find a room nearby but they all seemed to be taken.

  “Well, yeah,” the fat young girl said. “That’s why we’re all here.” And she waved a grubby hand at the Plaza, and at all the men and women on the stone benches, or huddled together sleeping on the paving stones, or, far off at the heart of the Plaza, kneeling in penitence so close to the Fire that they might very well go blind.

  S hut up about the Spider now,” the fat young girl hissed. “And get yer head down.” She lowered her own greasy head and folded her hands in an attitude of worship. Defour, quite shaken, did likewise.

  Six young shaven-headed boys and girls in white robes strutted past. Three of them carried lit torches, a gross superfluity in Tiber’s blazing presence. They inspected Defour and the fat girl and apparently found them acceptable, but they kicked awake a man sleeping nearby with his head on his suitcase, and demanded to know why he was showing no fucking reverence for the fucking god in its fucking holy place, and they dragged him away to be beaten.

  When the white robes were gone, the fat girl spat. “That’s how it is here, ma’am. Those little shits think they own the place. Don’t make them angry.”

  “Yes, young lady, thank you, I have seen these creatures before. But this is disgraceful! Shouldn’t there be priests here, militiamen, watchmen, something to get rid of them?”

  “The priests drive the white robes away when it’s time for the morning ritual or the midnight ritual. Otherwise they let them be. There’s too many of them, and it’s our problem, not the Church’s.”

  “Disgraceful!”

  The fat young girl’s name turned out to be Delia. She told Defour all about her own sad story, her own grisly vision of the Thing, and Defour, only half-listening, watched the white robes hunt in packs through the crowd.

  D efour found that she was muttering to herself: Oh dear, oh dear. The Fire shed harsh light but no warmth, and it offered little comfort, and everything was terribly wrong in the city. Oh dear, oh dear. She very much wanted to have someone to complain to.

  Delia was now in animated conversation with another girl, equally unwashed and desperate-looking, whose parents and brother had apparently drawn their barge into a dark tunnel and never emerged. The other girl was thinking about joining the white robes; how else was she supposed to feed herself now? Delia, on the other hand, was resigned to prostitution; she�
��d heard rumors that some of Tiber’s priests were generous.

  It was all terribly wrong, Defour thought. The city was cracking like her dressing-mirror. It should have been someone’s job to prevent it, but apparently there was no one who could be bothered. All the princes and priests and mayors and councilmen and soldiers were as distant as the Spider, as cold and useless as the Fire.

  Defour, reaching a difficult decision, leaned over and clipped Delia round the ear. “Girls,” Defour said, “stop that talk at once. Don’t you look at me like that, young madam. I’ve never heard such talk. Don’t you have any values? Your poor parents. Now, you both listen to me…”

  But neither girl was listening. A sullen scowl had appeared on Delia’s face and then vanished, replaced by an expression of confusion and creeping horror. The barge-girl shrieked and pointed across the Plaza. Defour turned her head and at first she couldn’t see it. Then she saw how the shadows gathered at the edge of the Plaza; and yet it was never dark in Tiber’s presence, had never been dark for a thousand years; for a thousand years the Fire had burned away the darkness and glared off the marble and glass of the buildings for a mile all around. But now darkness prowled at the Fire’s edge, and deepened, and swelled, and pooled coldly on the stones.

  It flowed from all directions, and welled up from the ground. It crept in hungry tendrils toward the Place from which the Fire silently roared. The tendrils burned away into a foul fog, but more came, and more. The night was dreadfully cold now.

  Defour watched the crowds of stragglers empty out of the heart of the Plaza; first glancing away from the darkness and trying to pretend that it wasn’t there; then, as it crept around them, walking stiffly and nervously away; and now they were running desperately past Defour, and Delia, and the barge-girl.

  The Fire guttered.

  It swayed and flickered as if in an unimaginable wind that might blow away a thousand years in an instant. Long shadows all across the Plaza twisted and lurched.

  Bile rose into Defour’s throat and her bladder let go.

  The barge-girl was already off and running. Delia was staring pale-faced and idiotic at the darkness. “Stupid girl,” Defour shrieked, and tweaked Delia by the ear to make her run, and then they were both fleeing as fast as they could over the slick wet stones, over which shadow and firelight thrashed back and forth in a conflict that Defour could not understand, that she did not want to understand, that it made her sick even to imagine. And it seemed to take a great and unmeasurable depth of time, but before Defour had taken more than a few unsteady steps, the shadow won and there was no more light; the light was swallowed.

  Defour kept running and she did not look back, not until she reached the mouth of the alley that led between the temple and the courthouse, and she momentarily remembered her abandoned suitcases. She glanced back and the Plaza was just a great empty unlit space in which bitter night winds blew, and there was a darkness at its heart.

  A few of the white robes had fled; one had nearly trampled Defour at the alley’s mouth. But the greater part of them remained in the Plaza. Defour could see them by their torches, tiny spheres of weak light in that vast shadow. Slowly the white robes approached the darkness that had swallowed their god. There was something reverent about them, something awed. Did they drop to their knees? Defour couldn’t be sure. One by one they extinguished their torches, and that was the last Defour could see of them.

  “Fucksake,” Delia bellowed, standing at the alley’s far end, where the streetlights still blazed, “come on, come on, you stupid old woman.” And Defour, having nowhere else to go, followed.

  T hen Arjun sat up, shoving away rank and sweat-drenched sheets, and got to his feet. Olympia was already at the window, leaning out, looking north.

  The quality of the room’s darkness was subtly changed. Olympia put a name to the nagging absence: “The Fire is gone.”

  They pulled on clothes and stepped out into the hall. In the next room, Branken and two of the explorers were waking from the same nightmare. Silently, all five went outside, into the night, to join a growing crowd in the street, all murmuring in shock and misery. If they had all dreamed it, it must be true. It could not be true. It would not be allowed.

  They were south of the Urbomachy, and its towering walls blocked the view to the north. Together they climbed the spiraling stairs of wood and stone that led up the side of the nearest wall. The crowd grew as they passed the stone houses that crusted the sides of the wall, and sleepers came out to join them. There were many resting-places on the side of the wall, but they did not rest. They had to see. Eventually they reached the top of the wall and stood among the battlements. They were high above the city; they could see as far north as it was possible to see. The roofs below bristled with desperate watchers like themselves. For the first time in the city’s memory, the horizon was dark, all the way to the Mountain.

  W hen it was the Countess,” Olympia said, “we could stay and fight, or at least hope to fight one day. Even when it was the Chairman, though that smiling bastard scared me, I won’t say he didn’t. But this is too much. This is like the city turning against us. It doesn’t want us. Do you understand? The gods are the city. The city is us. Even for people like us, blasphemers, libertines, whatever else they called us. Do you understand?”

  Olympia could not have been more upset, more confused, if the sun had failed to rise one morning. She paced and fretted.

  “Perhaps,” Arjun said. “When the Voice departed, it almost destroyed us. I cannot imagine how it would have been if the Voice had stayed, but turned on us, began to hunt us.”

  “It’s not just hunting us. It’s raised an army against us. It’s drowning and devouring the city’s other gods, turning them against us, too. Maybe soon it’ll be all that there is. I said we’d begin again, and I meant it, but…I said everything always begins again, and I meant that, too, but things are different now. Do you understand? This isn’t how the city works—everything’s ended and begun again for a thousand years, maybe forever, I don’t know—but now I think that’s all changed. I think it’s over. I think everything’s broken. I can’t stay here; I can’t stay if there’s no hope. No future.”

  In the first days after that night of unanimous dreaming, the papers and the scholars had frantically debated what Tiber was trying to communicate by withdrawing its flame, while its priests sat ashen-faced and blank-eyed in the streets, mourning; Arjun’s heart bled for them. The popular theory was that Tiber was expressing its disdain for the recent disorders.

  The first rumors of the change in the white robes appeared a few days later. Their eyes were now black and their skin corpse-white. They no longer lit their brands. They were said to have terrible strength, and a stare that could steal breath from your throat, rot the skin from your face. No wound could kill them. They were everywhere, in packs. Hunting for something. Killing those who got in their way.

  Preposterous, the Era assured everyone; people had always been tempted, it observed, to ascribe supernatural powers to those really rather ordinary and pathetic young hooligans, and the new stories were probably just a confused extension of the stories regarding Jack Silk and the Thunderers. Et cetera, et cetera: but the rumors didn’t stop. Too many people remembered the nightmare, and couldn’t pretend they didn’t.

  Five days after that night, Arjun saw a trio of the white robes sniffing down the street, slouching, necks craning loosely, their eyes black, blank. They smelled dead. The poisoned god was in them. They had welcomed it in. There were ugly fanged eyeless eels in the canals, Arjun knew; he’d seen them anatomized in the pages of the Atlas; he’d shuddered at the diagrams. That was the sinuous, suggestive, hungry quality of their motion. He shuddered again, and hid in a doorway.

  “We can’t fight this,” Olympia said. “They’ll tear us to pieces. And who knows what it might do next? I’m not saying I’m ready to give up on this city. I don’t want to abandon it to that monster. But my first duty is to the Atlas. Holbach can’t
lead us anymore. The others are dreamers, not leaders. I have to take care of Holbach, and what’s left of us. We have to leave Ararat. We have to find a safe place. Maybe we’ll be able to return. Or maybe we can build again, somewhere else.”

  “I understand.”

  “I’ll ask one last time. Come with us. You’ll die here.”

  “You know I can’t.”

  “And if it just isn’t here? If you’re wrong?”

  “Then I’m wrong. But this is my last and best chance. If it isn’t here, it isn’t anywhere. I can’t go. I don’t have the courage.”

  She hugged him for a moment. Holbach shook his hand, and Branken clapped him bluffly on the arm. Then they lifted their packs over their shoulders (the explorers showing the more sedentary scholars how it was done), and they left the pumphouse. They would find a ship at the docks—any ship.

  He walked with them a little way, though he would not go with them all the way to the docks: “You’ll be safer without me,” he had said. “I shouldn’t go near the water with you.”

  “I’m scared,” Olympia said as they walked. She said it quietly. “I’ve never left the city. Everything I know is here.”

  “It won’t be so bad. There isn’t…so much as this, anywhere else. But there are places that need scholars and thinkers, and builders. Think: you could map the whole world.”

  “There’s barely a dozen of us left.”

  “You could start. Or you could continue your old work; you could write it, and smuggle it back into the city.”

  “No one here cares about anything that comes from outside the city walls. You should know that by now.” She smiled.

  It was an hour’s walk to the nearest carriage rank. They would have preferred to walk—it would have been less conspicuous—but Holbach was still too weak for the long trek south. They waited awhile until there were enough carriages for all of them. Arjun shook everyone’s hand one last time, before they got into their seats. Olympia did not ask him again.