Thunderer (25 page)

W
inter gripped the city. It rained more often than not and it was nearly always dark. Arjun let the Tuvar gather dust again, and began avidly reading the newspapers for reports of deaths.

He found the bigger, grander papers—the
Sentinel,
the
Era,
the
Commercial Intelligencer
—essentially useless for his purposes. They wrestled ponderously with the great issues of the city. The
Sentinel
and the
Era
were always full of stories about the wonderful progress of the reconstruction of Stross End. The
Commercial Intelligencer,
which was published somewhere in the north and available only rarely in the newsstands of Stammer Gate or Foyle’s Ward, mused darkly and obsessively on the irresponsible menace of the Countess and her unholy
Thunderer.
They were above tallying the insignificant dead.

Fortunately, a dozen local rags did little else. Arjun found the
Stammerer
especially useful. Its editor had a fascination with the subject that rivaled Arjun’s own, so that Arjun began to wonder if the man had shared his own vision of the thing that haunted the waterways—but Arjun’s letters were never answered.

Arjun was interested in two classes of deaths: deaths (of any cause) in or near the water, or deaths (wherever located) from diseases similar to whatever claimed Norris—Black Lung, or Langshaw’s Disease, or the Shivering Greys, or other sicknesses of rot or damp or industry or poverty or desperation.

He kept two piles of clippings, on either side of his desk. Winter dragged on and the piles grew with unnerving speed. Foyle’s Ward was full of students who seemed prone to falling, in the dark of the winter nights, into the canals on their drunken ways home; they accounted for a fair number of the dead. Black Lung claimed the elderly at an impressive rate. Three children disappeared; four the next week. The
Stammerer
lamented the plague of wild children in the streets, who were a danger to themselves and others, and deplored a recent rash of violence against the Houses of Correction. The next week, two children were found strangled in a pumphouse, and one more disappeared from a wealthy home in Foyle’s Ward. In the same week, a barge disappeared en route between the Blake & Blake Brewery and Foyle’s Ward, and the crew—father and son—were lost. After a while Arjun had to subdivide the pile of
deaths by the water
into
murders
and
drownings
and
other;
he could not decide how to subdivide
disease,
and that pile swelled enormously.

Was that normal for the time of year? Arjun had no way to be sure.

W
hen Olympia first came to visit him—she’d happened to be passing on business—Arjun conceded that no, he had
not
been seen at Holbach’s mansion lately. It seemed pointless to lie to her—her eyes were too sharp and clever—so he admitted that he had no work to show Holbach, and no particular prospect of producing anything in the immediate future.

She looked as if she was about to say something cutting and unkind, but thought better of it.

Anyway, he explained, his circumstances made it hard for him to come to the mansion at all. It was not only that he could only travel on dry days; he had to set out after the damp grey fog of morning had dissipated, but early enough that he could be sure of being back before dark. He had to take a circuitous route to avoid water. These were just some of the rules he’d developed as a defense against the monster; he wasn’t sure that they
worked,
exactly, but he had nothing but instinct to guide him.

Olympia was dressed somewhat less outlandishly than usual, in a black winter cloak. She had brought with her a long-haired young man in an expensive fur coat, and introduced him as Mochai, a painter. As Arjun explained his situation, Mochai shook his head and consulted his pocketwatch. It appeared Mochai and Olympia were lovers, because when Arjun was finished, Mochai took Olympia’s arm with an attitude of commanding familiarity, and said, “This poor fellow’s mad. Why did you say you removed him from the hospital? We should leave him be.” She pushed Mochai’s hand away and told him to be quiet, and he rolled his eyes.

Olympia passed Mochai her cloak, under which she wore a dark velvet jacket, and leaned against the wall by the desk.

She said, “Arjun, I’m sorry. Have you spoken to Holbach about this? He’ll tell you this doesn’t make sense.”

“He’s explained his theories to me, yes. At great length.”

“You see, whatever you may have felt or seen, the god isn’t interested in
hunting
you. You care about it but it doesn’t care about you. Imagine a mirror—”

“Let me tell you
my
theory.”

She allowed him to interrupt her; she nodded slightly to say
Go on
.

“I won’t argue with you about the normal operation of your city and its gods. You are all very clever and you have studied the matter more deeply than I. Of course. And you may think I am very simple, but we had our own god where I came from. There was only one, so we had nothing to compare it to, and perhaps we understood it less well than you understand yours. But we understood it well enough—until one day it surprised us.”

“That’s different. They come and go; they always have. Holbach always says he’s half-historian.”

“I think the Typhon is sick. Broken. I don’t know what word to use. I think it is a process that has become corrupted.”

“You’ve thought a lot about this.”

“Of course. Will you understand if I say it makes me think of a piece of music, in which a theme is being worked out, developed, elaborated upon, and one is still composing as one goes along, improvising it with every moment, if you can imagine that. Into that piece of music is introduced an error, an imperfection in the theme. An unexpected ugliness. One cannot ignore it; one cannot simply begin again; one has to explore its implications. The imperfection grows. Soon it threatens to swallow the music. One tries to work it away but each correction only raises new imperfections. It defies all your efforts to expunge it. Now you find yourself playing what
it
demands of you, what
it
makes necessary. You are trapped. You cannot stop playing or the ugliness will be all that’s left, but each moment you play causes you increasing pain. Wouldn’t you call that poisoned music your enemy?”

She scrutinized him with compassion and curiosity; she was not persuaded. She said, “I’m not very musical.”

“Shay poisoned the god. Shay broke it. Shay introduced an imperfection into it. When he stole a fragment of its power, and made that fragment into a toy, a creature, a
pet
. For whatever kind of disgusting man might want to make something like that his plaything.”

“Holbach has his doubts about that, now. Actually, he thinks Shay was a fraud, that he tricked you. He told me not to tell you this, because he still feels guilty about sending you there; but I think it’s better you hear it.”

She put a hand on Arjun’s arm. Behind her Mochai idly flicked through the newspaper clippings. “He talked with Branken about the heliotype, the machine you described. He’s had people look into it. It doesn’t make any sense. Everything Shay said was only patter. You have showmen and patter even out in the wilderness, don’t you?”

“Yes! I mean yes, I am not a fool, and no, it was quite real. This is what
happened,
Olympia. Shay stole something from the god, and changed it, molded it, made it into something
human
. Is it my fault if that’s impossible? The world is as it is. I was stupid enough to return that fragment to the god, and now the god is sick with it. Poisoned with it. Full of imperfections. I felt that the moment when it turned its eyes on me. I think I was the first thing it ever saw, the first thing it ever
knew
. Now it knows how to hate. If I had been torn away from perfection and made to see the world as people see it, I’d be full of hatred, too.”

She looked at Arjun for a long time. Mochai, behind her, consulted his pocketwatch again, and sighed.

She asked, “Why don’t you leave?”

“I’m sorry?”

“If you believe all this, why don’t you leave the city?”

“I don’t know.”

“What happened to the Voice you came here to find?”

He realized that he had not thought about the Voice for weeks, not since he’d heard that echo of it in the music at Norris’s gravesite. Olympia’s eyes flashed—she’d scored a point.

“You’re a great deal more charming when you talk about music,” she said. “Instead of rivers and drowning and death.”

“I imagine I am.”

“It’s a hard city, Arjun, life’s easier if you’re charming.”

“I’m sure that’s true. Olympia, I asked you if I could read Brindley’s writings on the canals. You said you had to think about it.”

She sighed, and stepped away from the desk. Mochai smoothly fastened her cloak around her shoulders.

“You’re no danger,” she said. “All right.”

She stopped at the door. “Music that improvises as it goes along?”

“I only meant to illustrate a point.”

“We
have
something like that. Something like that exists. One day if you have time you should go northwest up to Moricand and stop in the bars there. It might do you good.”

S
he came round personally, two days later, to deliver the Brindley. She brought three slim volumes, wrapped in a red cloth. For obvious reasons, she said, she couldn’t trust them to a messenger-boy. He had no idea what she meant.

Each volume was bound in white, and plainly printed, in a dense type that marched in blocks down the pages, crowded with wild enthusiasm around illustrations, diagrams, formulae, musical notation, and above all maps, maps, and more maps. The myriad subjects seemed to be organized by no principle Arjun could see; it was not alphabetical, or at least not in any alphabet he recognized. According to the stark white covers, he now possessed volumes three, nine, and thirty-one of the third edition of the
Atlas
of Nicolas Maine and company.

This time Olympia was accompanied by Hoxton, who impressed on Arjun, with a kind of genial menace, the importance of never being seen reading those volumes outside the flat; keeping them under wraps when visitors came; bringing them safely back to the mansion when he was done.

“I rarely go outside anyway,” Arjun said, flipping through volume nine to find the bookmarks Olympia had placed at entries titled
Locks and Inclined Plane Engineering
and
Curiosities of the Canals of Our Forefathers,
both signed
—B.,
which Arjun took as standing for
Brindley.
“It rains too much,” he explained.

“Get a cloak,” Hoxton said.

“I had a cloak from the basement of Klozny & Klozny. It was stolen.”

“Get a
decent
cloak,” Hoxton said. “I get mine at Tito’s, on Ashcroft Street.”

“Well,” Olympia said, “I hope this helps. I can’t keep coming around here.”

“Tell Tito I sent you.”

B
rindley’s writings were no help at all.

Brindley had written in great and densely mathematical detail on the blasting of tunnels, the design of bridges, and the engineering of locks and planes; on the suitability of various kinds of soils and clays and bedrock, and what to do in the event that the area of the city through which one wished to drive a canal was one in which the earth below had long since been developed into sewers and cellars and catacombs; on towage and earthworks. Olympia had also marked Brindley’s long, obscure analysis of the
Political Economics of Coal-Transportation,
which sat improbably between a wittily unkind entry on
Modern Melodrama
and a foul-mouthed tirade against
Corn Laws.
Brindley’s breezy little essay on
Curiosities of the Canals of Our Forefathers
appeared, for no particular reason Arjun could understand, in the annotations to a comprehensive map of the district of Grafton.

The technical entries were dry and incomprehensible and irrelevant.
Curiosities
seemed promising at first, but Brindley doggedly discussed only pleasant matters: boat-races, famous marriages on the pleasure-canals, the tremendous gentle swans that had supposedly existed in an age when it had been possible to engineer such creatures (which Brindley considered apocryphal but charming), the scattering of flowers on the waters in the summer in Abbagnano,
et cetera.
Brindley made no mention of sacrifice or death or tragedy. In fact Brindley’s good cheer was so relentless that it became suspicious. There was something in it that seemed like nervous flattery. Slowly Arjun began to suspect that Brindley was deliberately concealing some horrible truth; that he was willfully refusing to name that dreadful Name, for fear of angering it. Brindley offered an aside on the failure of experiments, at the turn of the previous century, with steam-powered barges, and Arjun thought:
Of course. The god would not allow it.

Brindley’s entries cross-referenced other interesting discussions—notably
Rituals of the Old River,
and
Characteristic Diseases of the Bargemen
—but those seemed not to be contained in the volumes Olympia had given Arjun.

When she came around again, a few days later, on the way between urgent appointments, Arjun asked Olympia for those volumes and she promised
maybe.
She was still flushed with excitement after her court appearance of the morning, in which she had done something daring and brilliant that Arjun was unable to understand, but that had somehow resulted in the release from gaol of the scandalous advocate of free love, Mr. Brace-Bel; a triumph, apparently. She wanted to talk about Arjun’s god. “Forget Shay. Forget the River. It’s a big city. You have to learn to forget things.” He told her that he remembered very little about it now. They talked instead about music, until Hoxton shouted up from the street to let Olympia know she was running late.