Thunderer

by Felix Gilman

  H e watched the carriages go; watched them recede and merge into the general din and haze of the city’s traffic, until, as they reached a busy crossroads, he could no longer tell which of the distant carriages going to and fro carried her, or poor Holbach, or the Atlas-makers, and which were insignificant, which were only noise.

  “I have certain ideas,” he said, to no one in particular. “And if I am very lucky, perhaps the city may be saved. But I will have to be very lucky.”

  T he Urbomachy was another of the city’s monstrous northern landmarks. Hundreds of years ago, the territories of four lords had cornered there. They had fought, with guns of a forgotten design, that launched fire in high curving arcs over the no-man’s land of the ’Machy, and with bomb-dropping balloons. Each of them had put up high walls against the guns, and manned them with riflemen against the balloons. The walls had grown monstrous as they fought to overtop each other. They were made of a remarkably durable yellow-white stone, the source of which was also forgotten.

  As the tides of war broke back and forth over the streets, the victors built new walls to encompass newly won territories, and the losers were forced to build new walls as they fell back. Some wall-sections crumbled under the guns. New sections were built to corner and buttress the old, fracturing the streets into uncomfortable angles. The warring dynasties were exhausted or intermarried. Then they, too, were forgotten. The walls remained. The warrens grew like weeds at the foot of the walls. Stone steps and wooden ladders led up the walls, past broad out-thrusting platforms. People lived on the platforms. The oldest ones, built to house the wall-builders’ armies, were the more expensive districts in the ’Machy; unlike the later additions, they never collapsed, and they often had running water, pumped up by ancient machines. The newer shelves were stacked with the poor and the desperate; they hung over the warrens like vultures in a becalmed ship’s rigging.

  You could cross from wall to wall, platform to platform, on rope-bridges, or, if you were brave enough, by climbing hand-to-hand along the ropes. The boys who did this would sometimes drop things on passersby below, for a laugh.

  It was another of many cities within the city. A good place to hide: many of Ararat’s criminal enterprises were headquartered there. The warrens were a thick, dark soil. It was a good place to begin things.

  Arjun rented a room on Shelf Seven, Wall Nine. It was one of the wall-builders’ shelves. There were only two more above him, and so his room got a little light. Olympia had left him money. He could afford it. He felt safer on the high walls. The white robes sometimes came through the warrens below, terrorizing the inhabitants—who were not easily terrorized—but they never climbed the stairs. They were appendages of the Typhon now, and the Typhon preferred the depths.

  He was quite high up, and it did not take long to climb the stairs from his room to Wall Nine’s battlements. There, he could look out over the city. Some days he went walking, nervous of the monsters hunting him, trying to listen for the sound of the Voice, but often he just looked out over the city, until the roofs turned red with the setting sun, then blue, then finally black.

  Once, from the battlements, he thought he saw the Thunderer disappear behind a distant tower, like a wild stag half-glimpsed behind trees. “Look, there,” he said to his neighbor, a pleasant young woman with too many children and not enough teeth, who clapped with excitement to see that the thing was still there, still real. He knew she had been hoping to see it. It would be something to tell her children. He was glad she was happy. She had listened generously to the story of his own search, and promised to help him if she ever could.

  Some days he felt that he was beginning again; that, after many mistakes and wrong turns, he had found himself back at the start of things, unencumbered, full of promise. Some days he felt that he was at the end of things; past the end, that all the orchestra’s lively and noisy themes were finished, for better or worse, and he was a mere coda, a single note repeating quietly, in measured isolation, soon to be stilled.

  When he spoke to his neighbors, he gave his name as Simon Nelson; a good ordinary local name. The Typhon, he thought, would not be hunting him by means of his name, the Countess was gone, and he was not sure that the Chairman was still alive to pursue him; still, best to be careful. His neighbors assumed his name was false anyway, and that he was hiding from something; it was that sort of place.

  Some days he went walking, listening for the music. He sometimes saw the monsters the white robes had become loping through the streets. They were grey now. They were like dead dogs forgotten in the gutters, yanked up into unlife by their necks, set loose to drag others into the filth with them. They feared nothing. They had already welcomed the worst in, willingly. It made him sad, as well as fearful.

  It took courage for anyone to make music. The white robes had always hated music, and now their childish, callow hatred was joined with the Typhon’s bottomless enmity. Anyone who dared to sing or play out in the streets had to be ready to run.

  Still, the city couldn’t be silenced. Theaters locked up, and the music halls went dark, and all of Harp Street was abandoned, but the music remained. The churches would not give up their hymns. The streets were full of musicians who made their living entertaining the crowds; for them silence meant starvation, and they had no choice but to risk it.

  Arjun listened to their music, and when the monsters came from the shadows and the muck, he ran. He didn’t stand out; everyone ran. The white robes used their clubs viciously if they caught you. There were rumors that they swallowed souls, which Arjun didn’t entirely believe. There were also rumors that they spread disease with their cold breath, which he did. Certainly, the illness was still spreading. The hospitals were always full, even though the victims didn’t last long. The Cere House was overburdened with bodies.

  A few of the city’s lords tried to strike against the white robes, but found that bullets were useless, and that the brutal children, filled with the power that their god had gifted to them, could tear apart a soldier’s mail like paper. After a few humiliating losses, most simply denied that the white robes existed, that they were anything more than another of the city’s irrational summer panics.

  The river itself had turned deadly; there’d been sinking after sinking of barges and boats. The cranes of the loading docks sagged, their timbers rotted through and bolts rusted, and toppled into the water. Mill wheels fell idle, clogged and choked with weeds and muck. Piers and jetties crumbled. The river lapped up over the stones, and reached its fingers into the streets and flooded the cellars with foul water. The city’s industry foundered and sank. The city’s lords and captains of industry threw money at the problem, sending out boat after boat, crewed by desperate and more desperate men, until finally no danger-money in the city’s coffers could pay for a coal-barge to set out on the black water. Some entrepreneurs, it was rumored, attempted to revive the old sacrifices to the river, but the river was not grateful. Businesses closed, boarded up, and so the city was riddled with dark and empty and shuttered places for the monster’s dank spirit to fill. The city’s streets were clogged with displaced and hungry men—plague-fodder.

  Arjun needed, he thought, only to find the one door, the one street, the one line of sweet music, behind which the Voice waited, but the Typhon was bent on closing all doors, drowning all streets, silencing all music. He had been inside its mind, had felt how it tormented the Typhon to be limited to one place, bound to a single body. Now it had broken the bars of its fallen state. Riding the willing bodies of the white robes, it could be a thousand places at once. Hunting. And now there were places where no one went, other than the monsters. Dark spaces, holes swallowed out of the city’s map. Wounds. Abscesses. A darkness spreading across the city. Time was winding down.

  O ne of the ways he had gone wrong before, he thought, was that he had pinned all his hopes on one source of assistance. He had spent months waiting for Holbach’s help, becoming hopelessly entangled in Holbach’s own mission. He wou
ldn’t do that again.

  Instead, he corresponded with a dozen different scholars. He used a variety of false names, and three different boxes in post offices run by the administrations of three different lords of the city, all of them well outside the warrens.

  He offered the scholars his quest as an intriguing problem in applied theology. He hinted that the Choristry could reward them. If that didn’t work, he tried to snag their interest by dropping hints about his knowledge of the great theological puzzle of the day: the white robes’ infusion of dark power, the plague, and the rumors regarding the Typhon’s connection to both. At first he tried to hold back what he knew, to bargain for their attention to his own problem, but the guilt was quickly too much for him; if they could find a way to stop the horror, he wouldn’t be the one to slow them down. He gave away what he knew freely, and hoped they would do the same—but he refused all requests to meet in person.

  The first replies he received urged him to read books he had already read, or to wander the streets, keeping an ear open, hoping for the best. He wrote again and pressed them for more. He knew they were busy men.

  He didn’t rely entirely on the city’s scholars. He liked them; he had found the Atlas-makers entertaining, he had enjoyed their reckless pursuit of their obsession, and he was well disposed to them and all their colleagues. Even so, he wasn’t sure that they really understood how the city worked. The only person he had met who seemed to really understand the city had been Shay. So it made sense to ask for help also from perverts, criminals, and heretics. All he had to do to find them was to take the stairs down into the warrens.

  He listened in the corners of disreputable dives until he could identify the fixers, the arrangers of things, the conduits for information. He approached them cautiously, gave them enough time to decide that he was no spy, no censor, no threat. He let them know what he was looking for. Not the Voice; no point in asking that sort of person to find the Voice. He was looking for something else, someone they were well equipped to find, if he was there to be found. He told them he would pay for any rumor.

  After long weeks—summer still dragging itself hotly across the city—he came home to his room on the shelf to find a note under his door. Got a bite. Barker. See me.

  He went down into the warrens. He armed himself first. He had told his contacts that he was merely representing some other, hidden power, that he had no money of his own and was not worth robbing. Still, it was best to go armed. The people he was dealing with expected it; it showed he was serious; not to have taken a gun would have been almost an insult.

  Barker could be found at the back of the Alexander Club, near the dancers’ stage. He looked a little like a sick dog, of a breed for which there was little demand. He was always sitting behind a table whenever Arjun saw him; if he ever had to get out of his chair, Arjun thought, he might have to walk on all fours.

  Barker called Arjun over as he walked into the bar. “Nelson. You’d better pay well for this. I don’t like it. Have I told you that? I don’t. There are limits.”

  Arjun sat down opposite Barker. “I’m sorry if this is hard for you. But it’s very important to my employer.”

  “Don’t take the piss.”

  Arjun shrugged. He had not been insincere. “What do you have for me?”

  “I know you don’t think much of me. Looking at me like a criminal. Because of my associations. My business. All right. But I’m a religious man, too, and I don’t like this. It’s this sort of thing that left the city in the mess it’s in today.”

  “You’re probably right. But we need what we need. You’ve found a man who’ll sell what I’m looking for, then?”

  “Pay me first. As agreed.” When he saw a look of suspicion cross Arjun’s face, Barker spat on the floor. “Don’t give me that. Don’t insult my integrity any more than you already are.”

  “I don’t mean to insult you,” Arjun said. “It’s just a matter of caution.” He looked at Barker’s hairy muzzle of a face. There was honest shame on it. Barker wouldn’t be troubled by cheating Arjun; shame meant that he meant to help him. “Here,” Arjun said, unwrapping a roll of notes. Barker snatched at them.

  “I’ll be straight with you, Nelson, because I don’t like you, and I don’t want you as a friend, and I don’t want your business in the future. If you’d waited a little, you could have learned this for free. See, I know you’ve got other eyes and ears out for this. They’ll all hear it in a day or two. You would have heard the rumors soon. You just got taken. But you can’t wait, can you? I can see it in your face. So—this man. Seems he set up business a week ago. He’s been putting out feelers. Letting people know. A friend of mine has a friend who works out of the docks, and he heard about it, and he passed it on. The man’s down south, so word’s taken a few days to get here. That, and most people don’t want to get involved.”

  “He claims to be able to sell gods? As I described? Potent ghost lights, under glass?”

  “Rapes ’em, steals ’em, cages ’em, sells ’em to scum like your boss. I don’t know the details. There’s only hints. It’s disgusting.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “A Mr. Lemuel.”

  “Where is he?”

  “He works in the Cere House. He’s in the Sixteenth Precinct. Room 1104. I’d go quickly if I was you. Rumor travels fast, and it won’t be long before enough people hear of this, and the bastard ends up on the end of a rope. I’m thinking I could do it myself, to him and you both, if it wouldn’t be bad for my business. Now fuck off, and never come back.”

  I t was a day’s journey back south to the Cere House, by coach.

  The House occupied Cere House Hill, at the southwest corner of the Heath. Arjun had passed it many times, months ago, when he was new to the city. And he had visited it many times, for Norris, then for all the other dead of the Cypress.

  Deaths that were on his head, of course. If he had not broken Shay’s horrid little cases, the Typhon would not have fallen into the monstrous, fallen state in which it had murdered those men. He shuddered at the thought that he was on his way to visit another man in Shay’s line of work. He was excited—he had been relying on a mere hunch that, in a city the size of Ararat, if one man had discovered the science at Shay’s command, perhaps there might be others who had done the same, and it was exciting to be proved right—but he was scared, too. He resolved not to make the same mistakes with Lemuel as he had with Shay. He would get what he needed, and try to do no harm.

  When he had first heard about the Cere House, he had misunderstood its nature. He had thought that it served the entire city as mortuary, necropolis, place of funeral rites. He had wondered how that was possible; vast as the House was, its cloth-shrouded precincts covering the hill, its spires rising high above and, by all accounts, its vaults burrowing deep below, it could not possibly take in all Ararat’s dead.

  It didn’t, of course. It served only a tiny part of the city. The ’Machy probably marked the northern borders of its jurisdiction, and even the ’Machy’s dead rarely ended up within its walls. Probably there were similar institutions elsewhere.

  Moreover, it took only certain kinds of dead. The churches disposed of their own faithful. The Cere House disposed of the churchless and lonely poor, with a functional minimum of ritual, and it also took those too great and powerful for any one church to claim, who received the highest honors known to the city, enacted with obsessive and painstaking ceremony.

  Still, it was an awesome, solemn sight, as Arjun stepped off the coach at the base of the hill, where the green lawn of the Heath gave way to the grey-white shale of the House’s outer precincts. The sun filtered cool and dusty through the waxcloth.

  Mourners followed graveled paths away to the outer precincts, to visit their dead. Arjun had business in the inner circles. He lied to the man at the gate, telling him he was a historian, there to make a study of the engravings on the tomb of (selecting a name at random from his vague memories of the Atlas-makers’ t
alk) the Champlain family.

  He quickly got lost in the House. It reminded him very much of the Choristry, with its hushed, single-minded dedication to a sacred purpose; then he would turn the corridor into a room lined with skulls, or cross a walkway over a courtyard in which the House’s mourners practiced their wailing, a wild sound entirely unlike the measured song of the Choir.

  Finally, he asked someone for directions to Mr. Lemuel.

  “Who’s Lemuel?”

  “I think he’s probably new here. He’s in Room 1104?”

  “Oh. Then…” They didn’t look twice at him; lost visitors were common in the House.

  Room 1104, Lemuel’s office, was behind an oak door in one of the lower corridors. Smells of formaldehyde, death, old stone. Arjun knocked on the door. A voice called, “It’s open.”

  Arjun stepped into an empty office. A door at the back was ajar. He went through, into a wide, dark room, full of tables on which what were presumably bodies lay under white cloth. The room was cluttered with ritual paraphernalia of a dozen cults, piled promiscuously together. A man at the back of the room was painting a design onto a corpse’s chest, with looping swirls of the brush. He stuck the brush jauntily between the corpse’s arm and torso, for safekeeping, and turned to greet Arjun.

  “This is Lemuel. Good afternoon. What I can do for you?”

  It was Shay. The wild white hair had been razored to a gritty stubble, and the dirty pin-striped suit had been replaced by the grey smock of the Cere House’s servants, but it was unquestionably Shay. He even had the same little round glasses.

  “If you’re here to mourn your dead, you should go wait elsewhere. You don’t want to see ’em before I pretty them up. The dead deserve their rituals. Is that it? Speak up!”