Thunderer

by Felix Gilman

  “Maybe I know more than I’ve told you, maybe I don’t. That’s not the information you’ve bargained for. Got anything else? Anyone else to betray? Any more friends? A lady-friend, perhaps? A brother? Oh—you don’t have any children, do you?”

  Arjun turned away. “Get some sleep, Shay. I want to finish our business tomorrow.”

  Lemuel lay back down, saying, “Don’t take your guilty conscience out on me, boy. You made your choice.”

  Arjun lay there. The man was wrong about Arjun’s conscience. He misunderstood the nature of Arjun’s choice. Arjun had seen Jack fight. He knew what Jack could do. It wasn’t Jack whom Arjun had betrayed with his promise. He’d murdered Shay, again, and this time not in combat, but by treachery. And he’d made the boy a weapon; that, too, was sickening.

  Sometime later, he said, quietly, “Shay?” There was no answer, but he felt the man was awake and listening. “Shay. There’s another possibility. Perhaps you are the same man as the man I shot, but that man is in your future. You say time becomes…complex in this city, on these paths.”

  The man grunted, “Could be.”

  “Then maybe I will kill you. Doesn’t that trouble you?”

  “We all die one day. If that’s how I go, that’s how I go.”

  “So be it, then. I don’t forgive you, Shay. But you’re not mine to judge. If I am going to kill you, I’m sorry.”

  The man grunted and rolled over. A stolen and disingenuous apology; it did little to relieve Arjun’s guilt.

  T hey made a stop back in the city, in the old familiar city Arjun had come into by sea; stopping at the Cere House, at Lemuel’s office.

  “Time’s not important, as such,” Lemuel said, methodically working through the keys on his heavy brass key-chain, like a man investigating the workings of a complex and broken engine. “I try to come back here once a week, every Bridge-day, but it’s always Bridge-day somewhere, you know? We could go wandering until we were old and grey, and we could still come back here on Bridge-day.” He shuffled up key after key, steel and copper and ivory and iron, teeth like tiny towers rising and falling on the chain’s brass loop. “But it’s best to have a routine. It’s important not to get lost or lose yourself for want of signposts. Aha!” He found the key to his mailbox and flourished it.

  There was a single letter in the mailbox. He read it quickly, muttering the words under his breath. Then he tore it up and scattered the pieces.

  “We have some business to do, young master Arjun. Come along, then.”

  Lemuel strode down the corridor, counting off the doors with jerking motions of his bony fingers: one, two, three, four, ah! Lemuel lunged for a plain wooden door and darted through. Arjun ran after him and caught the door just before it banged closed. Arjun followed through an unlit stone corridor, through a street at night under washing-lines fluttering in the moon like ragged monstrous moths, through a door in a tower on a bridge over a river of black oily water—and on, and on, always just barely keeping pace with Lemuel’s impatient strut—until he ran down a narrow brick hallway toward a slowly closing door, behind which Lemuel’s grating, mocking voice was already raised. He caught the door and stumbled through just as Lemuel said, “…wasn’t sure you’d bother to keep my card, Captain.”

  Lemuel was pacing back and forth in a bare room, a rough-edged cube of red brick. High arched windows opened out onto a slate sky and wisps of grey cloud.

  A man in singed and ragged black sat in the corner, on the room’s only chair. His hair was black and filthy, and his head was in his hands. A sword rested against his leg. He answered, “I didn’t think I was going to either, Mr. Lemuel. I thought I’d never call on you. I had my duty. But things are different now.”

  “Duty? Is that right? Is that what you call it? What’s so different now, then?”

  “The Countess is defeated. I’m ruined. I’m little more than a pirate now. Nothing more than a pirate. The Thunderer is the most wonderful weapon ever devised in this city, and I’ve become a pirate with it. I feed my men by raiding. We run, we hide, we lose ourselves among the towers like pirates hiding in rocky shoals. Sometimes I think we could abandon the ship, scurry off like rats, hide in the streets. Turn bandit, turn mercenary, I don’t know. But I can see what’s happening below. From the ship, I can see what’s happening to the city below. The stain spreading, the river flooding. The plague’s rotten shadow swelling. The fire gone out; I hardly noticed it when it was there, but now it’s gone. Those savages, those terrible children, swarming over the rooftops, killing and killing. We’d fire on them but we have no shells left. Sometimes we take shots at them with our rifles, when we’re hanging low, but they don’t care, and they look up at us with those black eyes, and it’s as if they’re saying Soon we’ll come for you, even you, even up in the sky. The plague’ll reach us soon. I’m sorry, Mr. Lemuel, I haven’t slept recently. I don’t think I’ve slept since Lucia died. I can see it: the River-god making itself manifest, growing and never going away. That’s not how the city’s supposed to work. There’s supposed to be a cycle to these things, isn’t there? I never made any great study of theological science, but isn’t that how it should work? The city’s broken and diseased. This place”—he gestured out of the tower window—“is as low to the ground as I dare get now. It’s hopeless. My duty is over. I want to escape. I want to be with Lucia again. You said there was some part of the city where she was alive. I want to go there. I want to go to a part of the city where that monster won’t reach, just for my lifetime, and hers, and be done with it. You asked for the Thunderer; it’s yours, Lemuel. Take it to the Mountain, if you like. Crash there if you like. Whatever you want.”

  The man’s voice was deep, and cold, and cut from the finest crystal of aristocracy; as he spoke, jagged cracks appeared in the crystal and on it’s yours it broke, and he almost sobbed; he sounded like a beggar. He moaned deep in his throat. He looked up for the first time, and noticed Arjun.

  “Don’t I know you? I saw you at the Countess’s palace. Weren’t you one of Holbach’s creatures? You were. You were one of Holbach’s. Tell me, was it Holbach who planned this? Was it Holbach who planned the Countess’s downfall? This monster, this poisoned god loosed on the city—was it his revenge?”

  Arjun opened his mouth, and Lemuel motioned for silence.

  “There’s some dispute over the blame for this development, Captain. Let’s let sleeping dogs lie, is what I say. Let’s say no more. Let’s just say, Captain, that you disappoint me. Is that all you have to offer?”

  “You came to me, Lemuel, remember. You wanted to trade. For the Thunderer, you promised me Lucia. You told me she was out there somewhere. Why not now, damn you?”

  “That was a long time ago. Longer for me than for you, I would have said, though you’ve aged terribly, Captain, now that I come to look at you. I have other interests now. And if I wanted the secret of your ship, well, this young man”—he jerked a thumb at Arjun—“can tell me as well as you. And Captain, let’s be frank here. The ship won’t be yours for long anyway. Look at you; your days are numbered, as they say. You’re nearly done. You’re only a loose end. You’ll be plucked soon, and I reckon I know how. I reckon I know who your successor will be, and I reckon I’ll soon own that young chap, too, and so no one needs you anymore, Captain.”

  Arlandes reached for his sword and stood. Arjun stepped back into the corner of the room, behind Lemuel, who remained in place, hands folded behind his back.

  Arlandes held his sword back poised to swing, his feet placed to lunge. He stood like that for a while. He was apparently looking into Lemuel’s eyes. Arjun, backed up against the wall, could not see what the Captain saw in those eyes.

  After a while Arlandes let his sword clatter to the floor. He sat back down in his chair with his head in his hands.

  Lemuel clapped his hands together. “That was a waste of time. It’s a good thing I have so bloody much of it. Goodbye, Captain. We won’t see each other again, I don’t think.
Come along, you little yellow bugger.” He stepped out into the hallway.

  Arjun crossed the room quickly, silently, and stood over the Captain’s chair. “Captain?” He ventured a hand on the man’s tense and knotted shoulder. “Captain? I can offer you a deal. I cannot offer the same terms as Lemuel. I do not know how to find this Lucia of yours. I am very lost myself. But I can try. I have a plan, Captain, to save the city from the flood. I think I can use your ship, and your sword. Help me and I can try. I can make no promises but I can offer you hope.”

  Arlandes’ shoulder shook. He seemed to shrink into himself. The Captain was not in fact a big man, though he’d seemed that way at first sight. He made no sound.

  Arjun waited as long as he dared before following Lemuel’s fading path, which was not long at all. He left the Captain sitting silently on his chair in the empty tower.

  L emuel had other business to conduct. He set up in the top of a ruined gun-tower overlooking a lake full of jostling houseboats. The squat, bowlegged, grey-faced men who came to see him under cover of night were, he said, some of the Lake’s most prominent Captains. “You make them nervous,” he told Arjun. “You have a disapproving puritanical look about you. Go make yourself useful somewhere else.” The stairs to the gun-tower crunched underfoot with moldering bone fragments, remains of some ancient assault. Arjun made a desultory effort to clear them. The Captains scuttled down the stairs past him, holding their precious shameful purchases under their cloaks. Finally Lemuel came down, saying, “Come on, then, come on,” rattling his crowded key-chain, and he locked the tower behind him, and set out walking down toward the Lake, and out onto one of the many noisy brightly lit piers. Arjun followed. Soon the pier was a long, busy Main Street in a wholly different part of the city.

  For two days Lemuel sat in an office above a large railway station and answered his mail. “Can I trust you with a knife?” Lemuel asked. “Good, then. Take this and open those envelopes. Try not to hurt yourself.”

  Everything in the office was painted grey or a drab olive-green, and the carpet was covered in cigarette burns. On the mantelpiece there were four large and complex clocks, three of which contained live birds; in the glass window of the fourth was a tiny avian skeleton. The clocks ticked and struck at odd times, and Lemuel’s pen scratched, and the trains groaned noisily back and forth underneath.

  Arjun slept on the sofa while Lemuel worked through the night. When he woke, a second bird was dead. The remainder seemed to be watching him intently and unhappily.

  “Do you have a laboratory, Mr. Lemuel?”

  “Slept well, did you? No, I do not. Do you?”

  “I read about a Mr. Cuttle once, who looked like you. He had a laboratory, where he had strange lights, and animals and birds that could nearly speak, but not quite.”

  “Doesn’t ring a bell. Cuttle’s a good name, though. Efficient. Businesslike.”

  “I don’t know when you’re lying to me. I should stop asking you questions, I suppose. Your birds are starving.”

  “They’ll be fine.”

  “Someone should feed them.”

  “So go buy birdseed. Maybe I’ll still be here when you get back and maybe I won’t.”

  The little birds watched Arjun reproachfully through the dirty glass of their cages, and probably there would in fact have been plenty of time to buy food and return, because Lemuel worked on his mail for hours before standing suddenly and saying, “Come on, then, come on.”

  S ome time later, Arjun and Lemuel sat in a park at a long table made of a fallen oak split down the middle, surrounded by hairy red men, under a sky in which the sun was held by a mailed fist. The clutching fingers made shafts of shadow, leagues wide. In the distance, a great black bull, tall as a mountain, stamped its feet into the stuff of the city. Long seconds after each mighty hoof hit the earth, thunder sounded at the table, and the men cheered and clapped, and the towers and windows around the park quivered and re-formed into new shapes.

  “I like these people,” Lemuel said. “When it’s that blatant, you really have to know the score. And they do, and not only have they accepted it, and not gone mad, they’ve learned to love it. Terrible place for business, can’t sell ’em anything, but you have to admire their enthusiasm. Ha! Yes!” He joined the clapping at a particularly violent transformation.

  Arjun was listening to the people at the table talk. Their excited chatter, at first, was itchily familiar. Slowly it had resolved itself into words that he knew. Now he was fascinated; so that was the melody of their vowels, that was the rhythm of their clacking consonants. He’d imagined that Tuvar would sound with sad minor notes; he didn’t know why. It wasn’t sad at all.

  “So, have you been watching me? Are you a good pupil, young man? Have you figured the trick of it yet?”

  T hey had bargained for a while before leaving the Cere House. Lemuel had tried to insist that Arjun bring him Jack before he would teach him anything.

  “It can’t work that way,” Arjun had said. “We can’t deal on that basis. I can’t trust you to honor your promise. Would you, if you were me? How could I hold you to anything? But you can trust me, because you know I fear you, and you know I can’t escape you. That’s the only way it can work between us.”

  Lemuel had tried to argue his way around it, but Arjun had been immovable, and in the end Lemuel had shrugged, and said, “There isn’t always a way out, even for me. Very well, then. Come with me, and I’ll show you.”

  They walked for a long time down Lemuel’s paths before he announced that Arjun was ready to learn the trick. Lemuel stood up from the long oak table, tossed some coins down, and walked under an arch of trees, across graveled paths, over a bridge across the pond that had not been there before, through a gate in the fence that had not been around the park when they entered, and through the streets, into a concrete tower block, stepping over drug-haggard vagrants, into a rusty box that shook and rattled as it dropped with them in it, then along an antiseptic corridor, through a door that opened into the bone-lined vaults of the Cere House, and back into Lemuel’s office.

  “Patience, and silence. Openness to even the tiniest sign. The cunning and daring to seize it. There’s a certain habit of mind. Not just anyone can do it. If you just start walking randomly, you just stay where you are. You go in circles. To find the secret paths, the hidden doors, to slip into the gods’ footsteps—well, there’s a trick to that.

  “I can’t help you to find your Voice. Maybe it’s out there, here in the city, maybe it isn’t. There’s no special way of hunting these things. Never was. At least, not that I’ve ever learned, in all my travels. If you’re patient, and you travel the city widely, sometimes you see them, and then you can snatch away what you need. I could show you that trick, but that’s not what you want, is it?

  “What I can give you is time, and space. I can open up the city to you. You can hide from the Typhon there. And if you wander it long enough, maybe you’ll find your Voice.”

  They left the office again, Arjun following Lemuel, then, at Lemuel’s urging, trying to take the lead. It was slow work, at first. There was so much to learn, and to notice. It was like the science by which Holbach predicted the motions and manifestations of the gods, but where Holbach took months of research and calculation to produce an answer, Lemuel darted from street to street, taking signs in at a glance, saying, “That way! Quick, now,” and committing himself to a path.

  “You have to find a sign that means something to you. If you want to knot and weave the gods’ trails into the path you want, you have to build it out of the signs that speak to you. Make the city yours. Take what you need.”

  For Lemuel, the sign was death, and the accoutrements of death. “I don’t think I’m a morbid man,” he would say. “I think I’m an honest man. Vanity, vanity, all is vanity, you know? Maybe you don’t. Well, one likes what one likes. For that Shay, who you met in the room of lights in the Observatory, perhaps for him it was stars. Or those secret forgotten machi
nes. Who knows?”

  He would walk the streets, head cocked into the air, eyes darting, until he saw a graveyard, or a funeral home; or a bench with a plaque commemorating a beloved husband and father, or a marble pillar honoring the dead of one war or another; or the corpse of a rat or dog in the street; or bones in a gibbet or the meat of a man hung from a lamppost; or a moon-white leafless tree, dead by the side of the road. He would dash into whatever street or tunnel or door the sign marked, with Arjun rushing to keep up. Then he would repeat the process, and again; and soon enough, by a subtle compounding of strangeness, he would find himself in a new city.

  For Arjun, of course, it was music. He learned to make all the city’s music a sign, a key, a path, a map; he learned to improvise, to descant his own song in and around the city’s music. Grudgingly, Lemuel said, “This should have taken you years to learn. I have to admit, you have a knack for this.” Of course he did. He had practiced all his life.

  G o on, then,” Lemuel said, when they were back in his office again. “Go on out. See where it takes you. Spread your wings! But make a note of the way you go: walk it back again, and come back to this place, and this time. I’ll be here. Don’t betray my trust.” Then Lemuel took the brush he had left in the corpse’s armpit, dipped it again in the blue paint, which had not yet dried, and resumed his work.

  Arjun walked out into the corridors of the Cere House. Turning left down the nearest passage brought him into a courtyard where student mourners practiced a dirge on their dark-wood cellos. A flight of stairs led up to a wall on which plumed trumpeters blasted out a martial honor for a dead princeling, as his mailed body slid from the wall into the firepit below. A ladder down led into a narrow room where an old woman sang a wavering nursery rhyme to her grandson’s grave.