Thunderer (41 page)

“You’d rather take up a knife and a gun and storm the Rose yourself?”

“I’d rather be
acting
than waiting.”

“This is a bad business. I’d rather be waiting.”

“Easy for you to say. Why don’t you sing us a song to pass the time?”

He put a finger to his lips. “Quiet. We should listen and wait.”

“You infuriating man.”

Arjun leafed through the spill of papers. A map of the northern edge of Fourth Ward; he ran his finger along the black borderline of the canal. He picked up a long yellow strip torn from the
Era:
he’d jotted down in the margin a dozen different possible translations for
Black Bull
.
Black
could equally have been
fertile
or
rich
or
ancient
in Tuvar.
Bull
could have been
king
or
father
or
night;
in fact it might equally have been
horse
or
ox
. Scribbled notes toward an inconsequential puzzle. He’d enjoyed those months.

“Ha! See? You,” Olympia said, “cannot let things go. You
cannot
put things down. An obsessive. Professor Almuth had theories about people like you; he says it begins in childhood, with toilet training. We printed his theory in the Atlas, and a censor from Mass How went quite mad over it. It’s very sad to see it in action.”

He smiled, balled up the paper in his hand, and dropped it on his plate.

Olympia nodded. “Keep going. You are a man badly in need of throwing things away.”

He tore up a page of music and scattered it.

“Progress!” she said.

“But not what you’re looking for. Not what you’re looking for me to give up. These are just empty gestures. Don’t confuse symbols with the world.”

“As Holbach liked to say.”

“Exactly.” He took a drink. “To Holbach. And Hoxton, of course.”

“To Holbach.”

They both drank.

“And what about you?” Arjun asked. “What will you do if we can’t get him back?”

“Something different, I suppose. Something new.”

They finished the bottle. Olympia didn’t like the way the proprietor was looking at them; he had an informant’s calculating eyes. They switched cafés. Two hours later they switched again. When they were drunk enough to be past caution of eavesdroppers, Olympia started telling stories about Holbach, then about Nicolas, and the Atlas, and the enemies they’d made, the wonderful trouble they’d caused. Stories about herself. As the sun was setting and they sat by the railings, she confessed that
Olympia
was not her real name. She’d taken it from a painting. She’d made herself over and if she had to she’d do it again, she told him. If she could, she’d make the whole city over.

Before Arjun could press her to give up her real name, there was a flash on the edge of his vision—it was over in the north, up on the Rose’s towers—and a distant thunderclap, and another, and another, going off like fireworks, like gunshots.

Arjun jumped up from his chair to watch. Another and another, flaring red, from the east tower and the west. After a while the explosions stopped, but there were still gunshots: distant, muffled, quiet enough that probably only he could hear them.

Olympia grabbed his arm. He turned and looked south. Across the hills, the river, the squares, days to the south—unless he missed his guess, back down by the docks, by Shutlow, by Foyle’s Ward, by the Heath—the sky was a lurid bonfire red.

They sobered up quickly.

A
rlandes snapped awake suddenly and with a sense of dread. A sense of having fallen and struck the ground with great violence. Something terrible echoed in his ears.

He’d fallen asleep in the black leather armchair in his office. When he wasn’t on the
Thunderer,
he generally just slept in his office; what else did he have to do but sleep?

Someone was shouting in the corridors outside. He replayed the sound that had woken him and concluded that it had been an explosion. Confirmation: from behind the thick curtains on his window there was a glowering red light in the darkness.

As he woke and stood and stretched his aching neck and walked over to the window, he daydreamed that someone had taken the
Thunderer
and turned it on the crowds, and he thought,
Good. Shut their mouths once and for all.

Footsteps running in the corridor, and more shouting. Leoden’s voice, and Gibson’s. Soon there would be someone banging on his door; he could feel it.

He pulled back the curtain. Fire over the rooftops, over northeast. There’d hardly been a night without fire for weeks, but this was a big one. Black smoke clouded out the sunset. Unless he missed his guess, it was the magazine of the North Shutlow barracks. Behind that squat brick building’s iron doors were shelves and shelves of powder, rifle and artillery. That would account for the explosion echoing in his ears.

Arlandes was in Barbary barracks. Not the barracks at the Countess’s estate; not anymore. In light of the filthy slurs in those plays and pamphlets—the Atlas-makers’ nasty sneaking insinuations regarding Arlandes’ relationship with the Countess—the Countess had thought it politic to keep him distant.

The
Thunderer
was far from Barbary barracks, and Arlandes had not set foot on its boards in—two days? Three? The days blurred into one now. The great ship drifted on its tether at its elevated dry dock, overlooking the Countess’s palace on Laud Heath—orbiting, as the Countess liked to put it, the sun of her glory.

Barbary barracks was on that district’s western edge, by the live-stock sheds. There were twenty-three men in it. None of them were his best.

A bad business if the rioters had gotten into the magazine. They were getting ambitious. It was time to restore order. It was time to put an end to softness. If they wanted fire, it was time to give them fire. He would talk to the Countess in the morning. He would organize a punitive force. Arlandes let the curtain go and reached for his sword, which rested against the desk.

Another explosion sounded outside, so close and so loud that it shattered the window-glass behind him and blew open the curtains. He staggered and fell against the desk. The walls rocked and the door crashed open and the bookshelf by the window rocked and swayed and fell with a crash. The room was full of sudden blazing heat and light and the stink of gunpowder, then the air was full of brick-dust.

The Barbary magazine.

Not twenty yards outside my own fucking door.

Arlandes, lying on his back on the floor, touched the back of his head; it was bleeding where he’d struck it on the desk. He felt suddenly very terribly tired.

T
he Thunderers all had pocketwatches, or the wrist-worn watches that were fashionable in Soutine and Albermarle and other northern districts, or some other stolen timepiece; but none of the devices told quite the same time and none of the boys or girls had any idea how to fix that. Atlay had been a clockmaker’s apprentice, but Atlay had succumbed to the plague two weeks ago; they’d wrapped his poor body in a blanket, doused him in oil, and burned him clean away. Fiss had been clever with locks and trinkets and he’d always known how to fix stolen things up nice for the fences, but Fiss was dead, too. So Jack had abandoned the idea of using watches to coordinate, and instead the signal they’d chosen was sunset, behind the Rose’s western tower. It was better that way, anyway. It
felt
better—
purer
.

Sunset stained the tower rose-petal red. Roosting next to Jack on the high iron beam were Beth, Caul, Wood, Kuyo, and Dait. They had guns over their shoulders but knives in their hands; these were the ones who’d volunteered for the
close
work. Who’d chosen to see it through to the end, all the way to the end, while Namdi and Een and Taine and the others perched up out of harm’s way, in the rigging, dropping their flash-powder parcels and firing their stolen rifles and playing a diversion, a distraction, a
chorus.

When the sun fell all the way behind the tower and it was black again, Jack stood. There was a flash and a bang from away over on the southeast tower: Namdi. There was another flash over near the southwest tower: Simeon. There were gunshots. More flashes and bangs from the north and the east, and all over.

When he heard distant shouting, doors banging open, guards running and panicking, he stepped off the perch and dropped. Beth and Caul and Wood and Kuyo and Dait dropped with him, their silks fluttering in the night air.

Below them was a gaping black chimney-vent, wide as a river. They dropped soundlessly into its mouth.

C
aptain?”

“Captain?”

Arlandes groaned and swore. The stink of blood in his nostrils almost covered the stink of fire and smoke from outside.

“Captain? Are you in there?”

Arlandes reached for his chair, which had fallen, and pulled himself up so that he was sitting against the desk. The voice was Sub-Lieutenant Gibson’s. Gibson himself came round the edge of the desk a moment later. The man was pale and unshaven and sweating filthily, but he was in uniform, red-coated, sword in hand.

There was a dull thud and crash from outside, and another. One to the west, one to the east.

“Captain? They’ve struck the magazines. They’ve blown up our magazines.”

“I can see that, man.”

“They’ve blown up one of the Countess’s countinghouses. They’ve blown up one of her gun-towers. I don’t know what else, sir. Sir, we’re on fire downstairs. Let me help you up.”

Gibson reached out a hand and Arlandes snarled at him to get back; to leave him alone. Arlandes stood, leaning on the edge of the desk, swaying slightly. He could not think what to do. He wanted to sink into his armchair again and wait for it to be over, for whatever was happening, to happen.

“Sir, it’s all happening at once, sir. We have to get out of here, sir.” Gibson stepped closer and stretched out his hand again, reaching for Arlandes’ arm.

There was something terribly wrong in the Sub-Lieutenant’s eyes: sickly fear and anticipation giving way to coldness, to resolve, and then a sudden wild surrender to decision and
action
.

Gibson’s left hand reached for Arlandes’ arm, and his right hand brought the saber back and drove it savagely forward at Arlandes’ gut. But Arlandes was already falling back and away, twisting out of Gibson’s reach, and the point pierced his shirt and grazed his side but did not, he thought, he hoped, do more than scratch him. And in the next moment, while Gibson staggered forward, Arlandes lunged forward and grabbed Gibson’s head by his ears and slammed it down hard, with a ripping and cracking sound, onto the desk’s surface.

Gibson fell back, bleeding from his nose and forehead, and tried to swing the saber again. He was stumbling and slow and quite comical. Gibson was no gentleman and had never been properly taught how to wield a saber. Gibson was more a carpenter than a warrior and held his saber like a hammer. Arlandes grabbed the nearest implement from the desk, which turned out to be a silver letter-opener, and speared Gibson under his armpit, and again in his throat, and twisted Gibson’s suddenly weak wrist until the saber fell from it. He stabbed Gibson one more time, in the gut, before thinking to question him.

He lowered Gibson’s quivering body into the armchair. He held the man’s jaw so that he could look into his terrified eyes. “Who
bought
you, Gibson? Who bought you?”

Blood poured from Gibson’s mouth and from his throat and covered Arlandes’ shirtsleeves. Gibson croaked and whined; he seemed unable to speak.

Arlandes tore open the brass buttons of the man’s jacket and emptied his pockets. A chapbook copy of
The Marriage Blessing,
with a lurid frontispiece showing the Countess draping her bony body around Arlandes’ stiff brutish shoulders, in a cruel parody of seduction. A pamphlet demanding the release of Professor Holbach in the name of the Atlas and the city and the future and progressivism and all the other usual nonsense. A scrap of paper with an address in Ebon Fields, and the name
Olympia Autun,
which was, if Arlandes remembered rightly, the name of that sneering bitch who’d dragged Holbach’s fat carcass around all those years. Arlandes snorted and scattered the papers and gripped Gibson’s jaw again.

“Ridiculous. Absurd. Do you take me for a fool? You are not one of Holbach’s people. Shutlow magazine and Barbary magazine and the countinghouses and who knows what else, all in one night. Holbach’s people don’t have the will to do that. They only talk and talk. They write
plays,
for the gods’ sake. They don’t get their hands dirty. Someone
real
bought you. Who? Was it the Stross Mercantile? Was it the Thane of Red Barrow? Was it Mensonge? Was it Cimenti and his bloody bankers? Was it bankers’ money that bought you, Gibson? Was it the Combine? Or was it somebody’s church? Did you do this for some god, Gibson? Were you a
pawn,
or a
sacrifice
?”