Thunderer (23 page)

A
rjun’s work started slowly.
It had been a long time since he had last tried to read Tuvar, and it was a difficult language. Of all the tongues he had learned when he was younger, he liked this one least: so much depended on subtle shifts of tone, and it troubled him that he had so little idea how it should sound. Its music was always beyond his grasp. Still, for the time being, he had no better notion of what to do with himself.

The thin red book Holbach had told him to start with was called
Journal of the Bull’s Year
. It seemed to be the record of a series of—it was hard to know what to call them; Arjun was not sure whether they were experiments, in Holbach’s sense, or religious rituals, or perhaps artistic statements. The word the journal’s author used was related to the verb
to act,
so for the time being Arjun just wrote
activities.

There were twenty-three such activities. The author, sometimes alone, sometimes with numerous associates, would go out walking in complex patterns across the city. Sometimes they fasted for days; sometimes they used drugs; in one case, if Arjun read right, they underwent some sort of skull-surgery. They made certain changes to the city: performed acts of petty vandalism or charity, played music, started fires, painted or moved things, took things away, left them behind. It was all aimed at encouraging or delaying or altering the manifestations of a god called the Black Bull.

It was hard to read. It was a private journal, full of abbreviations and cryptic, personal allusions. After a week’s work, Arjun put the book to one side and started on another; he would come back to it when he knew more about the Tuvar. When he went round to Holbach’s study to explain, Holbach distractedly told him, “That seems reasonable,” and “Of course, I’m hugely grateful for your efforts,” and ushered him out.

He decided to start with one of the volumes bound in black leather. From the look of the page, it was an epic poem, the work of many hands, annotated by what seemed to be a generation of scholars. It told of the diaspora of the Tuvar people.

They were from cold and rainy plains to the north. An empire had fallen, to their west, following the failure of a royal marriage, loosing barbarians across the plains. The Tuvar took down their tents and folded them across the backs of their oxen, and set out in every direction where the barbarians were not. After many adventures, including a period of slavery, working the giant wheels of some great steel machine, and an incident of temptation by nymph-spirits as they passed the shore, a group of them came to Ararat.

This was all centuries before the poem was written, and the poem itself was centuries old, and even the paper on which the book was printed was yellow and brittle with age. Arjun copied it out, copied great tranches of it out, in journals and scrap-paper; he carried it around to cafés to work on it; his desk and his floor and his pockets filled with scribbled paper.

It seemed that the Tuvar had settled in a northern quarter of the city, near the slopes of the mountain. They had found a place that had been burned over after a plague and returned to the weeds, and set about cultivating it. Then, in the second volume, the poem shifted from stories of the heroic trek, and began to describe endless legal and economic conflicts with their neighbors in the city. Prophets and explorers gave way to a succession of priests and mayors. Some of them made a lot of money in the fabric trade. And then there was a long, strange episode involving a conflict between their first leader and a native of the city, who was his mirror image and shared his fate and tried to steal his life. They had to fight for the one soul, they believed; they could not share the city. One of them died. It was not certain which one. The poem’s authors described that incident as a typical example of the city’s mazy treachery.

But above all, the second volume was about the Black Bull. That, finally, was what Holbach wanted.

In their homeland, the Tuvar had had one god, an ox-headed, priapic power of the rains and mists, which fertilized their plains and sired their livestock. It seemed to have no name: they referred to it variously as the Father, or the Son, or the Land. They had suffered terribly when they left it behind—food not grown from the Father’s seed seemed tasteless to them, and earth not watered by it seemed dry and brittle beneath their feet—but they could not induce it to follow them by any sacrifice or ritual they could devise. Arjun felt their pain.

In Ararat, they found the Black Bull, a creature that stormed across the parks and heaths of the city, and thundered through the alleys, bowing and shaking the walls. It was found in old and wild places, like the blasted ground the Tuvar had settled on. Its horned head and broad shoulders reminded them of the Father. The steam that roiled from its snout reminded them of the mists of their home. It was a power of the city’s rich ancient ages. There were monsters’ bones buried in the timber of the city, under its black earth; the Bull raised up those relics, promising the depth and darkness of the soil, fertile and endless return and rebirth. They thought it was Ararat’s gift to them, the very image of their first Father, so they set about worshipping it and theorizing it in all manner of ways.

They were much luckier than I have been,
Arjun thought. It cheered him to read that. But then again, it saddened him to think that they had vanished from the city in the centuries between the writing of the poem and his reading of it. And their Black Bull, too, as far as he knew, and any other trace of any of them except a few books, unreadable to almost everyone, moldering in libraries across this foreign city.

H
e realized that he had a lot of money; Holbach was a stupidly generous employer. Arjun could afford to pay for some assistance.

He went back to the Cypress. There was a carriage rank near his flat, where the horses waited, hooves clicking sharply on the cobbles. With a great sense of luxury, he rode into Shutlow. It seemed very poor and mean. Not just poor—there were parts of Stammer Gate where starving scholars and artists and mystics clustered, after all, and his own flat was a cheap little thing, by the standards of Ararat’s richer quarters—but dismal.
Drab
.

He waited until Haycock came home. The little man smirked to see him. “Back again?
Now
are you ready to talk business?”

“It’s nice to see you, too, Mr. Haycock. I am, yes.”

They sat in the garden while Arjun explained what he needed. Books on the city’s gods, those could wait. For now, he had a job, and he needed dictionaries, histories, anything that might help him perfect his command of the Tuvar’s language.

Defour passed them. She was wearing black and held a handkerchief to her face. She didn’t see Arjun, or didn’t acknowledge him, as she went into the boardinghouse.

“It’s a big show of pious mourning for what’s-his-name,” Haycock explained. “Norris. The drink or the lung-rot finally caught up to him, I hear. Turned him right inside out. Right where you’re sitting, actually. Ha! Heady saw it and he says it was awful. Says the old man came home one last time in the pouring rain.”

Haycock illustrated the scene by walking the yellow fingers of his left hand across the tabletop. “And the hail. Too drunk to know to wear a coat. Drunk enough to swallow anything if it’s wet. Coughs, and coughs, and
bam
!”

Haycock struck his left hand flat with the fist of his right. “Coughed his black guts right up, says Heady, and the blood looked like black coal slag. Not funny, really. Mind you, there’s a lot of that sort of thing in these parts lately. Old drunks don’t all last the winter; sad, but there you go. So, back to business, then. Hey, are you all right?”

A
rjun had not been friends with Norris. They had only spoken once or twice. More accurately, he had listened to a couple of the man’s rambling monologues. Still, he had known him. So he asked Defour where Norris was buried, and went to pay his respects.

It was a pauper’s grave on the outskirts of the Cere House, a dirt circle ringed by statues. Norris was not important enough to deserve the rituals and honors bestowed in the Cere House’s inner precincts and tunnels. He had a little plaque on the seventy-seventh row. Under that plaque were his ashes.

Next to the plaque was a flat stone, with a corner of brown paper sticking out under it. Arjun moved the stone aside. Folded under it was the Spider’s envelope, addressed to Arjun. Someone had left it for Norris, Arjun assumed. Defour, perhaps? What did it mean to her? Was it meant to symbolize the hope of some new path, new possibilities, rebirth? Or was it meant to say,
Be happy with where you have come; accept your fate, even this one
? There was no way of knowing. He supposed she meant well. He put it back.

What killed you?

Arjun wasn’t sure what he’d expected. When Haycock told him his nasty story, Arjun had been so
sure
that the Typhon’s poisonous touch had killed Norris—so utterly sure that he’d almost been able to see the cold black fog gathering over the beer garden, that he’d almost been able to smell the stink of the thing creeping up out of the waters and into the street. Maybe he’d imagined that some sinister unholy aura would still hang over the old man’s gravesite.

But there was nothing; only a neat functional plaque, and, shoved under that stone, someone’s small sad gesture of kindness.

Arjun waited there for a while, nervous and disappointed.

There was a choir, of sorts, gathered around a plot a few rows down. The dead man below had been poor but popular. They sang a sad, slow song. They had weak, untrained voices, but the music forgave them. It was the song he had taught to the hurdy-gurdy man in Moore Street. It had an echo of the Voice in it.
It’s still spreading,
he thought. That was good. It pleased him to realize that melody felt good, again. It meant he was healing.

“I suppose you can take this as my gift to you,” he whispered to Norris’s plot. “For what it’s worth.” Then he felt embarrassed, so he got up and left.

A
rlandes was no longer loved.
It was something of a relief. After Stross End the newspapers and the gossip had turned cold to him, as he was to them. The city no longer found him fascinating. All that romantic humbug—the tributes to his flashing saber, his grief and his lonely devotion to duty, his courage and stern beauty—all that was over. The city regarded him with a chill wariness. A few papers dared to suggest that he was overworked. Some rabble-rousers with a printing press published accusations that he was insane; the Countess quickly had them packed off to the Rose in chains.

There’d been a play running on Harp Street for a month in which an actor, some limp-wristed invert with his face painted black-eyed in a pastiche of grief, had played Arlandes. (Lucia’s fictional counterpart had been killed by pirates; in the fiction, Arlandes had taken revenge and thus made himself whole again.) Arlandes had refused all invitations to attend, but by all accounts it had been a huge success. Ticket sales froze and withered after Stross End and it closed two weeks later.

Mr. Hildebrand—Lucia’s father—had finally stopped trying to visit Arlandes, finally stopped trying to talk business with him. The old man had come crawling round once a week every week, until Stross End: after Stross End, silence, at last. He’d been an investor in that travesty of a play; perhaps he was licking his wounds.

To be disliked gave Arlandes a dull satisfaction. Better that the mob despise him than that it affect, whorishly, greedily, to share his private pain. Better that it shunned him than that it dabble its dirty fingers in his soul.

Throughout that whole winter he hardly spoke to anyone, and hardly anyone spoke to him, save to give or take orders. He spent half his life on the
Thunderer,
adrift among the clouds and the spires, silently brooding in the dark womb of his quarters, as the great ship lurched back and forth over Stross End, asserting the Countess’s authority over her new territories, as it hammered the city’s redrawn borders into place. He spent the other half of his life in his office, hunched over his desk. His office was in the palace, in the east wing, only a few minutes’ walk from the Countess’s chambers, but even she avoided him. She sent him his orders through footmen and toadies and her private secretary and, on one awkward hem-hawing occasion, Holbach. She no longer adored him. He was no longer her favorite; he was, it was clear, only a tool. He drank grimly and with implacable purpose. He kept his silence like it was a bloody-minded vow. He therefore never told anyone about the strange visitation he received on the night of the Feast of the Crossing.

H
e’d attended the ball in his mourning-blacks, and stood alone, and danced with no one. The Countess had introduced him to a group of the Chairman’s young favorites—clever bookkeepers with bloodless smiles, as was typical of the Chairman’s favorites. His grim presence had put the fear of the gods into them. His duty done, he’d retired to his office, taking the back staircases to avoid the revelers.

He’d first set eyes on Lucia at the ball for the Feast of the Crossing, two years ago. No one remembered precisely what Crossing the Feast was supposed to commemorate, whether it was a tragedy or a victory, what the Feast was supposed to mean; but that was what it meant to him. It had been cruel of the Countess to make him attend.

He’d sat in his chair, lit the candle on his desk, and stared blankly into the shadows. He sat in silence, save when he started humming quietly to himself, the pretty, simple, sad little tune that he’d heard…he forgot where, exactly. Not at the ball; it wasn’t music for a ball. It soothed him, and so he stopped doing it; instead he ground his jaw silently.

The man entered with no knock on the door, and with no sound of footsteps. One moment Arlandes was alone, and the next he was not. A man sat in the armchair in the corner of the office. A wiry little man, in a dark suit, with close-cropped white hair.

The man had a smell of chemicals about him, and that smell had preceded him slightly.

Arlandes took him at first for a palace servant. Without looking at him, Arlandes snarled, “Out of here, sir, at once.”

“Captain Arlandes? You’re a hard man to get in to see. It took me a while to find a path. I’ve heard a lot about you.”

“How tiresome for you. If you’re lost, sir, the ball is downstairs.”

“You call that a ball? It’s a pretty rustic performance, Captain, down there. You should see some of the balls I’ve seen. If that’s the best ball they throw in these parts, I’m not impressed. On the other hand, I’ve heard a lot about that ship of yours, Captain, and that
does
intrigue me.”

Arlandes stared at the man, inspecting him up and down, from his neatly shined shoes to his thin shoulders. The man wore round spectacles, and in the candlelight it was impossible to make out his eyes. “Do I know you? You seem familiar.”

“I go by
Mr. Lemuel
. No first names, if you don’t mind; it doesn’t do to get friendly with the customers.”

“I
do
know you. You are an attendant of the Cere House. You were at Miss Hildebrand’s funeral. You were insolent then as you are tonight.”

“So how does it work, then? The big ship. How was it made?”

“You’re remarkably brazen for a spy, Mr. Lemuel.”

“I’m a businessman, not a spy, Captain. I’m a scholar, an explorer, an archeologist, a collector of all the clever little things that make this city so intriguing, not a spy. Whatever second-rate local warlord you’re imagining I work for, rest assured: I wouldn’t be seen dead in their service. Just tell me how it works and you’ll never see me again. I’ll be gone. Think of it as an act of kindness to a poor mendicant, who’s stopped here briefly out of the storm, and will be passing into the storm again.”

Arlandes laughed. “You’d have to ask Professor Holbach how it works. I’m only the hand that steers it.”

“This Holbach person sounds a bit tricky. A bit clever, for one of the natives. I don’t know if I’m ready to speak to him yet. No offense to you, Captain; I have the highest respect for the military mind, within its proper sphere of operations.”

“You will not speak to Holbach because you will not leave this place, except in chains,
spy
.”

Arlandes reached across his desk for his saber and his hand found nothing. He stared around in confusion. He turned behind him to find that his pistol was not in its rack. He turned back again to see Lemuel cradling the pistol in his lap. He stood and made to dart for the door, but it seemed that there
was
no door. It was surely only a trick of the shadows, but there
was
no door.

“Will you listen, Captain? Sit and listen.”

Arlandes sat.

“We’ll haggle then, if you won’t tell me from the kindness of your heart.” Lemuel folded his hands on his lap—Arlandes couldn’t quite see where the pistol had gone—and unfolded them. A tiny white glow formed between the palms of his hands. He raised up his left hand. A small glass cube sat on it. Within the glass there was the faintest suggestion of beating wings. Indeed it seemed the wings beat smoky trails of light through the glass, outside the glass, and into the corners of the room. Lemuel lowered his hand; the cube remained floating. “What do you think of this, then? Your Professor Holbach’s not the only one who can steal the Bird’s power. What do you think of this?”

“I think it disgusts me.” In fact it did more than disgust Arlandes; it filled him with fear. The beating of white wings made him think of her, falling, and he could hardly stand to look at the thing’s light. “There was a man called Shay; Holbach said he was dead. Were you in business with him, Lemuel?”

“Not the cages, then.” Lemuel reached out and plucked the glass from the air with his finger and thumb. He put it back in his pocket, and the room filled with shadows again.

Lemuel scratched his chin. “I suppose you’d take an offer of money as an insult to your honor?”

Arlandes regarded Lemuel in silence. He froze his face into a mask of arrogant disdain. It was an expression he’d perfected for dueling; it made strong men tremble. It seemed to have no effect on Lemuel at all. In fact, beneath the mask, Arlandes was terrified. Quite terrified. Lemuel made his skin crawl. The casual way Lemuel spoke about the most horrible blasphemies; it would not have surprised Arlandes if they’d both been struck dead then and there. If the city had simply swallowed them both up. All he could think of was Lucia’s death; he imagined himself falling in her place.

Lemuel clicked his fingers. “Of course! You’re the one with the dead wife, right? See, I told you I’d heard about you. Hence, I suppose, the getup. Am I right in thinking this is a part of the city where you wear black for mourning? Don’t look so shocked, Captain. You’ll have to pardon my insensitivity. I’m well-traveled. I’ve seen a lot of little lives and deaths. You know how it is. I imagine when you’re up there on your big floating ship, blasting away, you don’t feel much for the lives below, do you?”

“You make me sick, Lemuel. I should kill you.”

“There’s a place where she’s still alive, Captain. This is a big city, right? There’s a thousand places where she’s still alive. There’s places where she’s alive, but better, if that’s what you want. I can
show
you.”

“What do you mean?”

“What do you think I mean?” Lemuel stood. “Pull yourself up out of your chair and come with me. Stop sulking and open your eyes. You’ve lived in this city all your life, and you think it’s so
small
. I’ll never understand how people can be so blind. Talk about making me
sick
. Come on, Captain: what was she like, then? A nice posh girl, I’ll bet. There’s a ball somewhere where she’s dancing right now. Was she bookish? There’s a study where she’s reading, right this moment, somewhere. I can show you. She won’t be the girl you knew, not quite, but nearly, we’ll find one who’s very, very near, if we’re patient. You’ll hardly know the difference. I’ll let you look. If you’re very helpful, if you have some really good stuff to tell me, I’ll let you touch. Maybe I’ll let you bring one back. Maybe I’ll let you have two, what do you say? Fuck, I’ll let you have a dozen; what do I care? People are cheap. Do they keep harems in this part of the city? Come on, Captain. Off your arse. You know you want this.”

Lemuel walked to the door (the shadows retreated; there was a door again). He held it open. The door opened inward, blocking Arlandes’ view of the hallway—but the sounds that came through it weren’t the sounds of the hallway, the palace, the ball downstairs. There was a sort of distant grinding and churning of engines. There was a faint sound of unpleasant rough music—high-pitched and whirling. There were the sounds of gulls. The light that came through the door was a cold midday sunlight; the deep lines in Lemuel’s face were sharply visible. The lines around his sneering mouth and eyes.

Arlandes remained frozen in his chair. The terror and loathing that gripped him were the most dreadful things he’d ever felt.

He spat, “You make a mockery of her death, Lemuel.”

“Oh dear. What a romantic sensibility you have, Captain.”

Lemuel waited. He sighed. He scraped his dirty fingernails clean with his thumbnail. He reached into his pocket, and Arlandes’ gut lurched, but Lemuel pulled out no further dreadful blasphemy, only a small white business card. “When I’m in these parts, I keep an office, Captain. Maybe I’ll still be there if you change your mind and maybe I won’t.” He flicked the card in Arlandes’ direction; it landed neatly on the desk.

It read simply
EXOTIC GOODS
and
DISCREET SERVICE
. It bore an address in the Cere House, in the inner precincts.

Arlandes looked up from the card just as the door swung shut.

A few moments later he rose from his chair with a sudden heaving motion, like a man staggering on a storm-tossed deck. He threw open the door and lunged out into the hallway, where he crashed into a pair of drunken guests from the ball downstairs. He slapped the man in his masked face and roared at him, and made the girl cry. There was no sign of Lemuel.

He watched the couple scramble away down the stairs, the girl weeping, the man blustering empty threats. Then he retreated into his darkened office again, to hide, and pity himself, and sulk like a ruined frightened beast. He turned the card over and over in his sweating hands until it wrinkled soft and grey. There was an address; he didn’t dare destroy it, though nor did he dare visit it. If he ever saw Lucia again he didn’t know what he’d say to her, how he’d face her.

In the morning, orders came, via messenger, that he was to return to the sky, and he was able to put the incident out of his mind and return, with relief, to his duty.