Thunderer (47 page)

“A Mr. Lemuel.”

“Where is he?”

“He works in the Cere House. He’s in the Sixteenth Precinct. Room 1104. I’d go quickly if I was you. Rumor travels fast, and it won’t be long before enough people hear of this, and the bastard ends up on the end of a rope. I’m thinking I could do it myself, to him and you both, if it wouldn’t be bad for my business. Now
fuck
off, and never come back.”

I
t was a day’s journey back south to the Cere House, by coach.

The House occupied Cere House Hill, at the southwest corner of the Heath. Arjun had passed it many times, months ago, when he was new to the city. And he had visited it many times, for Norris, then for all the other dead of the Cypress.

Deaths that were on his head, of course. If he had not broken Shay’s horrid little cases, the Typhon would not have fallen into the monstrous, fallen state in which it had murdered those men. He shuddered at the thought that he was on his way to visit another man in Shay’s line of work. He was excited—he had been relying on a mere hunch that, in a city the size of Ararat, if one man had discovered the science at Shay’s command, perhaps there might be others who had done the same, and it was exciting to be proved right—but he was scared, too. He resolved not to make the same mistakes with Lemuel as he had with Shay. He would get what he needed, and try to do no harm.

When he had first heard about the Cere House, he had misunderstood its nature. He had thought that it served the entire city as mortuary, necropolis, place of funeral rites. He had wondered how that was possible; vast as the House was, its cloth-shrouded precincts covering the hill, its spires rising high above and, by all accounts, its vaults burrowing deep below, it could not possibly take in all Ararat’s dead.

It didn’t, of course. It served only a tiny part of the city. The ’Machy probably marked the northern borders of its jurisdiction, and even the ’Machy’s dead rarely ended up within its walls. Probably there were similar institutions elsewhere.

Moreover, it took only certain kinds of dead. The churches disposed of their own faithful. The Cere House disposed of the churchless and lonely poor, with a functional minimum of ritual, and it also took those too great and powerful for any one church to claim, who received the highest honors known to the city, enacted with obsessive and painstaking ceremony.

Still, it was an awesome, solemn sight, as Arjun stepped off the coach at the base of the hill, where the green lawn of the Heath gave way to the grey-white shale of the House’s outer precincts. The sun filtered cool and dusty through the waxcloth.

Mourners followed graveled paths away to the outer precincts, to visit their dead. Arjun had business in the inner circles. He lied to the man at the gate, telling him he was a historian, there to make a study of the engravings on the tomb of (selecting a name at random from his vague memories of the Atlas-makers’ talk) the Champlain family.

He quickly got lost in the House. It reminded him very much of the Choristry, with its hushed, single-minded dedication to a sacred purpose; then he would turn the corridor into a room lined with skulls, or cross a walkway over a courtyard in which the House’s mourners practiced their wailing, a wild sound entirely unlike the measured song of the Choir.

Finally, he asked someone for directions to Mr. Lemuel.

“Who’s Lemuel?”

“I think he’s probably new here. He’s in Room 1104?”

“Oh. Then…” They didn’t look twice at him; lost visitors were common in the House.

Room 1104, Lemuel’s office, was behind an oak door in one of the lower corridors. Smells of formaldehyde, death, old stone. Arjun knocked on the door. A voice called, “It’s open.”

Arjun stepped into an empty office. A door at the back was ajar. He went through, into a wide, dark room, full of tables on which what were presumably bodies lay under white cloth. The room was cluttered with ritual paraphernalia of a dozen cults, piled promiscuously together. A man at the back of the room was painting a design onto a corpse’s chest, with looping swirls of the brush. He stuck the brush jauntily between the corpse’s arm and torso, for safekeeping, and turned to greet Arjun.

“This is Lemuel. Good afternoon. What I can do for you?”

It was Shay. The wild white hair had been razored to a gritty stubble, and the dirty pin-striped suit had been replaced by the grey smock of the Cere House’s servants, but it was unquestionably Shay. He even had the same little round glasses.

“If you’re here to mourn your dead, you should go wait elsewhere. You don’t want to see ’em before I pretty them up. The dead deserve their rituals. Is that it? Speak up!”

Arjun stared frantically at the man’s face, hunting for some sign of a scar on the sallow scalp. But no, that was absurd; the wound he’d given Shay was nothing that could be healed; Shay was dead, beyond doubt. But how could it possibly be anyone else?

“Well, I take it from your look of mental disarray that you’re not here on Cere House business. You’ve heard word of some other business, right? Something special?”

Arjun found his voice again. “Yes.”

“I’d rather you people would come after hours. I have a job here, you know. It’s not as though I expect to keep it for long, but it would be nice to enjoy it for a bit.”

“You remind me very much of someone I once knew.”

“Well, it’s a big city, isn’t it?” Lemuel backed toward a table in the corner of the room, under a thick grey tarp, and began untying the tarp’s knots.

“Do you know a Mr. Shay?”

Lemuel started. “I’ve gone by that name at times, and in places. I don’t think I’ve dealt with you before, though.”

“You have. Under the name of Shay.”

Lemuel pulled back the stiff tarp carefully, winding it under his arm. His wares were underneath, pressing their greasy, ghostly lights against the glass of their cages. Lemuel leaned in close to them, on his haunches, and, in a stagy whisper, said, “Well then, little ones. I don’t like the look on this fellow’s face. He looks like he doesn’t like me. Now, a lot of my customers don’t like me, because they’re ashamed of what they’re here for. But there’s no shame on this man. And he knows things he shouldn’t. So, little ones, does he mean me harm?”

Lemuel put his ear against the glass as the lights buzzed and clicked. Arjun reached under his jacket for his gun.

“Yes. He means me harm. Or…no, he has
done
me harm. But I don’t think I know him yet. Isn’t that odd?”

Lemuel stood and stared at Arjun, curiously, appraisingly. His left hand was scratching idly at his scalp, just below the hairline, Arjun noticed: was that where the bullet had struck?

“You don’t remember me?”

Lemuel sat and lit a cigarette. “I meet a lot of people,” he said. “Tell me more.”

“Is this a joke? A game?”

“Humor me.”

“You were in the Observatory Orphée. On Laud Heath. With your…things. You were in a room full of false stars, some old machine, that only you understood. You don’t remember this?”

“I don’t think I’ve ever been there.”

“I came to you with questions. There was a mob outside, howling for your head…”

“Ha! That’s life. Mine, anyway. It’s a hard road to walk.”

“I wanted to know how you did it. How you caught these…
things.
I was looking for a god, a ghost. A Voice from my childhood. I thought you might know how to find it. You told me you had a lot of little tricks.”

“So did this man who looked like me, did he help you?”

“There wasn’t time. The mob was coming. I don’t know whether you would have helped or not. I had nothing left to pay you with. There was an…altercation. You tried to turn those things in the cases, those reflections you steal, you tried to turn them on me.” Arjun drew his gun, and put it on the table before him, resting his hand on it. “I know your tricks. Don’t try it again, Shay. It won’t work. Move away from them.”

Lemuel rolled his eyes, smiling, and scooted his chair a few feet away from the table.

“You turned them on me, and you tried to kill me. I
shot
you. In the head. You died, Shay.”

“I really don’t think I did.”

“I set them free. Your creatures. One of them…I followed one of them, as it escaped, and it returned to its source. The Typhon. Do you know what’s happening in the city outside, Shay? Do you know what you did?”

“I haven’t been here long, but I’ve read a paper or two.”

“It’s devouring the city, bit by bit. And it’s hunting
me.
It’s a plague. There’s nothing else like it. Nothing that can stop it from growing, and growing. Did you know that could happen if you set one of these things free?”

“Well, there are always risks, aren’t there? In anything anyone really wants? Besides, the way you tell it,
I
wasn’t the one who broke the cases. That was bloody stupid of you.”

“Stop fucking
smiling,
Shay. How many of these things do you sell? How do you know what people might do with them?”

“The people who buy these things cherish them, hoard them. Hold them close, rocking in the dark. They don’t free them.”

“You have no idea what they do. You know you’ll be well away, though, don’t you? Into other places. You’re a monster, Shay. The most
reckless
…This is
your fault
.”

“You seem to be falling into confusion, young man. That wasn’t me. This is a big city, bigger than most people realize; there’s probably a great many men who look a great deal like
you
out there. At most, the man you met was a way I might have been, had I walked different streets. We’ve never met, Mr….?”

“It was you. It had to have been you. Somehow you survived; you called on those abominations in your cages to save you, or—or—you said you could walk in secret places, open secret ways; you found some way to walk away from your own death and come back unscarred.”

Lemuel scratched his head. “That doesn’t sound likely.”

“I think that’s what you are. And I don’t care if you are a different man, anyway. You’re in the same filthy business.”

“Are you just here to talk rubbish and insult me?”

“No. I need your help. The other one wouldn’t help me. But you
will
. I have two questions, and you will answer both. I need to know how to destroy the god that’s hunting me. I need to know how to find the god I’m hunting. I need to make the city give up its secrets to me. Tell me, or”—he lifted the gun from the table—“I’ll kill you again, Shay. If you came back once, you’ll come back again. Or, if somehow there are two of you, there must be three, four, a hundred. Either way, I’ll keep killing until I find one who will help me.”

Lemuel leaned back and exhaled smoke from the side of his mouth, and smiled toothily, and said, “
Well
then.”

The ghost lights pulsed, scattering an oily weave of light across the room, which grew vaster and darker, refracting into strange new angles. Arjun pulled the trigger. Though he had been sure his gun was pointing at Lemuel’s chair, the bullet thudded into a corpse-cloth on the other side of the room. It was hard to see where Lemuel was. There seemed to be a thousand possible paths across the room between him and Lemuel’s chair. Ghost-light trails wove the floor and the walls and made the space all new and puzzling. Lemuel stood, and a dozen Lemuels around the room stood, too. Some of them approached Arjun; some walked away into the darkness, following trails of pale light. Firm hands reached around from behind Arjun’s back and took the gun from him.

Arjun staggered, hands to his head, as some of the Lemuels sat back down in their chairs, and several of them took a moment to calmly reload and prime the weapons.

Each Lemuel uttered a
click
at the back of his throat, and the trails wound their way back home. Arjun fell to the floor. His head was clear again. The room was still. Singularly, Lemuel sat opposite him, holding the pistol on him with a casual hand.

“That’s to prove a point. I don’t know what happened with this Shay fellow you met. Sounds like a disappointment. But it won’t happen with me. That was one of
my
tricks.”

He gestured at the cases with his free hand. “These are the weavers of the city. Or, as you put it, reflections of them, which is the next best thing. Fragments of their power. I can unweave and reweave the city’s paths with them. I can tie you in knots you can’t imagine. What I just did was
nothing
.”

Arjun glared at him from the floor, a humiliating reddening sting behind his eyes.

“I should probably kill you. But I won’t. Do you know why?”

Arjun didn’t answer, not trusting his voice not to shake.

Lemuel went on, cheerily. “Let us suppose I’m
not
the same as the man you killed; he was merely my shadow, let’s say. You killed the bugger. As I see it, I owe you for that. I don’t need competition. Least of all from someone who may or may not be more or less me. Cunning old bastard that I am.”

He raised a finger. “Now let’s say it was me you shot. Well, I’ve been around a long time and I’ve got a great many tricks. Perhaps you shot me and I came back, or something in me came back, some
essence,
and I don’t remember. That’s worth something: a chance to start fresh.”

“You didn’t take it. You’re still the same.”

“Well, granted. But then, now I know better what sort of man I really am, deep down, and there’s value in self-knowledge. So either way, I owe you. If you’d asked respectfully, I would have helped you, you know.”

“I don’t believe you, Shay. And I don’t find you funny.”

“Oh dear. Well, what I’ll do instead of helping you is, I’ll discharge my debt by letting you live. So get up, go on. Sit down, like a civilized man.”

There was another chair across the room. Arjun sat in it.

“Now then. Maybe I’ll help you anyway, but after that unpleasantness, you’ll have to pay. What can you offer me?”

Arjun thought for some time. Was this the same game, or had the rules changed? “I know the secrets of the
Thunderer
.”

“Is that that big ugly floating ship? That’s of no interest to me. I’m a man who does his business quietly. I’ve no interest in announcing my presence to all the city.”