Thunderer (27 page)

“I think so.”

Jack grew excited. He felt much less sympathy for the others than he thought he probably should. He knew they must be scared, or hurt, and that Fiss was distraught and despairing, but he knew he could make it all right again; no,
better
. He said, “I had a speech prepared to convince you. I wasn’t sure how it was going to go. I think it might have been hard to make everyone understand. Now I don’t need it. You’re going to
have
to do it, and like it. We’ll start with ourselves. Sorry, Fiss—don’t look at me like that. I’m just excited. Come on up, then. Follow me. I have something to show you.”

T
he Countess’s Shutlow watchhouse was a dull, three-story box of ivied stone, flat-roofed and not quite square in shape.

It was one of many. Mass How’s Parliament regarded Shutlow as part of its dominion, and maintained a watchhouse in Acker Street. Chairman Cimenti wanted it to be known that he was generously concerned to help keep Shutlow’s peace, and although of course he did not claim
authority,
by any means, he sponsored a civilian force based in Seven Wheels Market. A half-dozen other Estates kept their men around somewhere or other.

The Countess’s watchhouse was on Deacon Street. Two guards stood out the front. In other parts of the city—in Fourth Ward, in Garhide, in Ar-Mouth—it was not uncommon for riots to strike the gaols, whenever some criminal managed to win the mob’s affection; but there was no danger of that sort of thing in Shutlow, where the locals had never easily been stirred into action. The gate-guards were really only there for show.

Both men jumped as a tile shattered into red dust on the stones in front of their feet. They looked up, and then ducked, shielding their eyes with their arms, as a second tile came plummeting toward them. It broke over one man’s mailed back, dropping him to his knees. A third hit his shoulder and broke sharply, buckling the mail and piercing the flesh. His colleague scrambled crabwise through the door, shouting, “There’s some bastard up on the roof throwing things! Hinton’s hurt!”

Jack dropped fast, scattering the rest of the tiles as he landed by the gate. He had been far above the roof: far enough, he had guessed, that the dropped tiles would incapacitate but not kill. He felt a little sick to see the mess he had made of the watchman’s shoulder. Blood welled between the broken chain links; the arm hung at a bad angle; bone ground against tile as the man stood, screaming and bellowing. It was all much less clean than Jack had imagined. Next time, he would do better.

He made himself unsentimental, and grabbed the rifle in both hands and placed a foot on the man’s back, and pulled, so that the rifle’s strap snapped. The man screamed again. Jack reached for the bandolier. Holding the weapon, the charges, and the bullet-bag, he leaped into flight across the street.

Down the street, people were poking their heads from their windows. This was not Fourth Ward, where people knew to keep their heads down when they heard screaming; this was Shutlow, shabby and damp but
quiet,
where people believed they were not the sort of people to whom violence happened.
They
screamed, too, when they saw Jack leap, like an actor lifted aloft by wires and pulleys, but climbing much higher, and, impossibly, out there under the naked sky.

Jack landed on the high flat roof of a warehouse on the opposite side of the street. Fiss was there, watching. “Here,” Jack said, handing him the rifle and the bandolier.

Jack looked at Fiss’s tired, sunken eyes. “Remember: you don’t have to hit anyone. Just fire as fast as you can, and make them afraid. Don’t get shot yourself.” Impulsively, Jack hugged him, then kicked himself off the roof again.

As Jack flew back over, a group of watchmen burst out into the street, spreading out, angling their rifles into the air, scanning the skyline. There were five of them. One picked up the wounded man and helped him indoors. Two more ran out onto the roof, truncheons ready. A woman leaning out of the window of the pub three doors down called out, “He’s in the air! He’s in the air!” The watchmen paid her no attention.

A shot rang out across the open street, breaking the glass in the watchhouse window. Fiss stood out against the sky on the roof opposite, reloading his rifle. The watchmen pointed and fired in his direction, but he ducked behind the parapet. He rose up again to fire and they scrambled for cover.

Jack came around the building’s side where a second-floor window stood ajar. He pulled the window open and slipped through into someone’s office. He ran out the door and down the stairs.

There was a hall downstairs, with weapons along the walls: swords and rifles and spears. A kitchen opened off the hall, and inside it, the wounded watchman lay on the table, moaning. There was a lot of blood on the floor. Another man, the one who had dragged him inside, was trying gingerly to remove his armor.

The wounded man leaned up on his good arm as Jack came in, pointing at the intruder and yelling hoarsely in alarm. The other watchman picked up his club and came running for Jack. Jack sidestepped him and kicked the back of his leg. The watchman fell to one knee, then got back up and lunged again. He was huge, but much, much slower than Jack, who jumped away over the man’s head and pushed him in the back, sending him sprawling.

The wounded man was leaning off the table, stretching for a cleaver on the counter. Jack kicked the table; the wounded man’s weight unbalanced it and it fell. The man rolled into a corner, holding his arm and yelling. He did not try to get up again.

Jack drew his beautiful stolen knife and held it under the other man’s chin till he froze, and spat, “The cells. The cells and the keys to the cells. Now.”

The man lifted shaking arms over his head and slowly stood, and walked cautiously backward to the hall, and led Jack down the stairs into the cellar. Jack followed, the knife at the man’s throat. He felt all the man’s fight leave him.

A fetid tunnel led away from the cellar. There were cells all along it. Jack had the watchman take the keys and go down it, opening the cells. The first one contained an ancient-looking woman, a drunk probably, or a whore (
Gods help her if she is,
Jack thought), asleep on the straw. The next contained several of the Thunderers; Jack saw Turyk, the carpenter’s apprentice; Een, the little thief from the docks.

“Jack! Bloody
Fire,
Jack!”

“Just stand together, out in the corridor. Don’t move until I tell you to. Be quick.”

When all the cells were open, there was a group of maybe a dozen boys standing in the tunnel. They were not all there—and no girls at all, for that matter—but there was no time to count. No Aiden, no Namdi. “Where are the others?” he asked, and a babble of voices told him that they had been taken, the night before, processed to this workhouse or that. “We’ll find them later, then,” he said. “That’s enough for now.”

When they were ready, Jack snatched the rifle off his hostage’s back and handed it to Turyk. They went up into the hall, where Jack said, “Take a moment. Arm yourselves. Knives, guns, all you can carry. Bullets. No pikes or anything stupid.”

Two watchmen peeked around the door to see a thicket of brandished rifles, and dodged back out onto the street. Jack followed, leading his hostage before him, arms up. Outside, he saw the two watchmen in the street. Three more (
where did the fifth man come from?
) had made it across the street, braving Fiss’s fire, and were battering down the door of the warehouse.

Jack grabbed Turyk and said, “Go,” pushing him in one direction, and Martin in the other. In each boy’s ear, he whispered the name of a different market in Fourth Ward. They ran, the group splitting up to follow one or the other. Jack stood in the door, still holding the knife to his hostage’s throat. The watchmen looked at the escaping children, and at Jack and his hostage. Jack stepped back into the building, and they made their decision and chased him. In the hall, he dragged the watchman halfway up the stairs and then shoved him to his knees. He leaned to whisper in his ear, “Soon, there will be more of us than you can count.”

Then the others came in and pointed their rifles, but Jack was already running up and around the stairs and onto the next floor, where he ran to the window and threw himself out. And after that, it was easy to fly across to the roof where Fiss waited and lift him away before the watchmen could break down the door. It was all easy, so far.

A
lmost all of them made it to one of the rendezvous places Jack had named. Only one boy was unaccounted for. A recent recruit, by the name of Will. No one knew when he had fallen behind. “There’s nothing to be done about it now,” Jack said, after they had waited as long as they dared, hanging around the waste-heaps at the corners of the market. “If he’s still free, maybe he’ll find us. If they took him, we’ll find him soon enough.”

That left an even dozen. They were tired and frightened. Two had been beaten, badly, by the guards. One had a swollen eye; another was nursing a twisted shoulder and a useless arm. Jack’s guilt over the man he had injured burned violently away.

Fiss was no help: silent and withdrawn and weak. He had not eaten or slept in too many nights. The diversion back at the watchhouse had taken the last of his strength. With Fiss in that state, Jack had to organize the boys himself. Fortunately, they were tired and scared, easy to lead. He was so full of plans and excitement that he could barely remember their names.

“It’s not safe to go back to Shutlow,” Jack said. No one was inclined to argue. So he chose a direction at random, as he had done before and always, he thought, with good luck, and led them west across Fourth Ward. “Don’t steal anything, don’t touch anything, don’t
look
at anything. Keep to the shadows, keep your heads down. We leave no trail.”

They were all very hungry. It was torture to stand in the markets, even the sparse, stale markets of Fourth Ward, and touch nothing. “There’s food for us when we get where we’re going,” he said, although it was a lie.

He grabbed a boy called Rauf and shook his arm. “Remember how you were marching up and down, playing at soldiers for the Countess? I told you to stop? You’re a soldier
now,
Rauf, and I’m telling you,
march
. Show us what you can take.”

They were not such an odd sight in the streets of the Ward. Just another dog-pack of ragged children, scrabbling through the refuse. They slipped through the backstreets, the ditches cut in the sprawling mess, scrambling over the heaps of filth swept up by the sides of the road. They kept their hands in their pockets, if they had them, and stayed together, like obedient schoolchildren shuffling from one schoolroom to another.

Jack went ahead, scouting the way. He remained grounded, not wanting to make himself conspicuous, but his feet tingled with pent-up excitement, and he broke constantly into a run.

There were no special patrols, no armies of watch combing the city for the escapees. Perhaps none of the men in the watchhouse had dared confess their humiliation to their superiors. Or maybe the patrols
were
on their way, but just not organized yet. He urged the lads to move faster.

No more press-gangs in the street, either, he noticed. Did that mean there was going to be peace, or did it mean that the Countess had all the men she needed for war?

He led them by a circuitous route. He didn’t know the Ward very well, and they were going further west than he had ever been. He tried to navigate by the Mountain, but it was often obscured by the blighted buildings, and he got off course. He didn’t admit that he was sometimes lost. And he didn’t talk about his plans for them; it was too early.

Night fell and they were still crossing Fourth Ward. A light snow began to fall, slowly making the shoulders and backs of their jackets sodden and heavy. He wouldn’t let them sleep. There was nowhere for a dozen boys to sleep, anyway. Local gangs and tribes were watching them out of the darkness, out of blank windows and holes in crumbling walls.

No one attacked them. Anyone who tried would have had a terrible surprise. They had not left the spoils of the watchhouse behind. They carried rifles and swords, wrapped in rags taken from the waste-heaps at the edge of the market. There were pistols and knives under their jackets. Their pockets were full of powder and bullets. They had the makings of an army now.

I
n the night, they passed through rag-hung courtyards under a great wall of concrete towerblocks. Snaking tunnels in the concrete opened onto deeper plazas. Jack scouted ahead, leaving Fiss in charge—and, on a second look at Fiss’s grey face, Turyk, too. And he hid behind a pile of broken bricks and looked ahead, down a tunnel into the deepest clearing, where a parade was passing, bearing torches and drums. Whirling women danced at the van. There was drumming deep in the earth. Maned men at the back came on all fours. A dreadful red giant stamped joyfully in their midst. Lights sparked in all the windows. Jack dug his dirty nails into his palms so that he would not join the dance. In the morning, he was not sure that it was not a dream.

T
hey stopped at the end of the night, on the debatable border between the Ward and Agdon Deep. “That’s far enough,” Jack said.

“We’re into the Combine’s territory now,” Turyk agreed. “The Countess won’t extend her forces this far across the Ward. Not for the likes of us. She’d be too exposed.”

Jack looked at Turyk with surprise. “That’s right,” he said. At least, it
sounded
right.

They had found an abandoned stretch of canal. Its water had been diverted elsewhere, and its stones were dry. A ramshackle mess of empty boathouses stood by the water, their bricks and timbers not yet altogether stripped and carted away. There was a wide expanse of muddy ground all around them, crept over by growths of scrub and weed. The steel forges of Agdon sounded distantly down the hill. It was empty, lonely space: if they hid in the boathouses, they would see enemies approaching but would not themselves be seen coming and going. They began again.