Thunderer (48 page)

Then the game was changed, and Arjun had few cards. “Money, then. Or I can promise you service.”

“You can do better than that. I can see it; there’s something you don’t want to have to promise. Let’s hear it.”

“I know the makers of the Atlas. The foremost scholars of the city. I can share their secrets with you.”

“They don’t have any secrets I want. This is a backward part of the city, my friend, in a backward time. Look how little you know. Look how much you’ve forgotten. None of you here have an inkling how vast the city is. Whatever this ‘Atlas’ is, it’ll be swallowed and forgotten soon. I know more than any sad excuse for a scholar you may have befriended. Do better.”

Arjun clenched his fists. There was one thing left. It was a terrible thing to offer, but he had no choice. Not for the Voice—he thought that to make this offer would be to make such a terrible discord in his soul that the Voice might be lost to him anyway—but for the Typhon. There was nothing he wouldn’t sacrifice to end it. So he said, “I have a final offer. Have you heard of Jack Silk? The anarchist, the runagate, the prison-breaker? The boy who was touched by the Bird, nearly a year ago, now, and who still holds on to the Bird’s power? It’s still growing in him. He can pass it on to those around him. I’ve seen it happen. It’s marvelous. He trusts me, I think. I can bring him to you. Don’t you want to know how his power works?”

Part of Arjun hoped Lemuel would refuse—but he didn’t. He smiled hugely, and put aside the gun, saying, “I don’t think I need this, do I?” and lit another cigarette. “That’s very interesting. I’ve heard rumors about that boy.” He walked over to the caged presences, and whispered to them. They glowed in response. “The Bird’s mark is on you, they say, though weakly. I’m inclined to believe you’ve met this boy. I want your promise, young man, that you’ll bring him to me. If you cross me, I’ll harry you across this city and all others, till you wish you were dead. My curse’ll be on you. I’ll turn every path you might ever walk against you. Do you doubt me?”

“I promise you, Lemuel, Shay, whatever your name is.”

“You know I’ll need to keep him? To make him mine? You know I may not be able to treat him kindly?”

“I promise you. Now tell me: how can I destroy the Typhon?”

“You can’t. But you can hide.
Run.
Maybe you’ll find your Voice, too, on the way. I’ll teach you the trick of it.”

A
rjun did not know
how long his apprenticeship to Lemuel lasted.

Following in Lemuel’s footsteps, it was sometimes day, sometimes night, but according to no natural order. Lemuel wove his own pattern of dark and light across the city. Lemuel’s cold rasp was always with him, sneering and snapping when he put a foot wrong. Time could be measured only by the progress of his lessons.

They slept when they were tired. Lemuel could take a turn down certain streets, like so, under certain arches, up a fire escape that led onto a wide white roof where the city was in a lazy tropical summer, where the citizens went shirtless and brown-skinned, and it was possible to sleep blissfully under the open sky, and Arjun woke refreshed. When he wanted night, Lemuel could find that, too; it was always night somewhere.

They ate when they were hungry. Through a maze of alleys, through a stinking tunnel, over a cable-winged bridge of strange design, was a place where Lemuel was known, and restaurateurs ran out from under their awnings to press plates of food on him, for the honor of serving him. Lemuel looked a little shy, as if he had gone too far to impress Arjun, made himself look insecure.

After that, for a while, they ate in parts of the city where meaty fruit grew on the trees by the side of clean streets, to be plucked off by the passing pearl-haired children.

When Lemuel thought Arjun was getting complacent, they started to eat in soup kitchens, among desperate demobbed sailors in mission basements, or laid-off factory workers in grubby church halls, then he made them wait in shambling lines of ruined men, stretching over cratered ground under blasted skeletons of buildings, for scraps of bread handed out by black-armored soldiers with heavy steel guns.

Lemuel moved by subtle navigation, tacking across the city in response to certain signs, unweaving and reweaving its map by act of will.

“It’s not
will,
” he said, apropos of nothing, as they walked across the bay, in a part of the city where the bay was solidly choked with stationary boats, and you could walk across on planks. “Though I may have told you it was. It’s a way to think about it; it gives you confidence. But it’s crap, of course. What’s one man’s will against the city? An infinity of time, an infinity of infinities, has gone into the weaving of it. You know the nature of the entities that weave it as well as any man. Weaving it backwards and forwards, all throughout time and space. Imagine exerting your will against those. You might as well try to fight electricity, or wrestle multiplication.

“No, all we can do is follow in their steps. Look carefully for their signs. For the tangles in the weave. It’s a loose weaving they make, great clumsy proud monsters that they are; it has a great many knots and holes in it. As many as there are streets, or doors, or people. Slip through silently. Cunning, not will. It’s a trick; no magic to it.”

“But, in your office, you forced some change on the room’s angles. Or at least on my perceptions. How did you do that?”

Lemuel looked amused. “Well, there’s tricks, and then there’s
tricks.
I’ll show you what you can pay for. For now, that’s this. So shut your mouth, follow, and watch, and listen.”

They passed through a great many places. Or, as Lemuel put it, they saw the city from a great many angles. Many of them were very different from the city Arjun was familiar with, which he was coming to think of as the city of the Atlas-makers. No point in trying to put them in any order. Some were in the Atlas’s future, others in its past. Which was which might depend on the angle at which one walked down the street. “It’s all in how you look at it,” Lemuel said. “It’ll all come round again, somewhere, if you wait long enough, or go far enough in.”

On a sunny day, they climbed the wire-mesh steps that spiraled around a gleaming steel needle on a hill. Curious black butterflies, the size of a man’s fist, nuzzled against them. Lemuel pointed out over the steel city. “I grew up in a place not much different from yours. It’s always still a shock to see this much gleam and glitter. Some times shine harder than others. Those are poisonous, by the way; cover your skin. Sometimes it’s hard to believe that these places are real, even for me, and I’m used to it. But they are. All no less real than any other. It could all be different, if we had turned left and not right. You know that. But they don’t. Their lives are real to them. Their
needs
are real. And lucrative, of course.”

The city was the only constant; the city, and its vast northern Mountain. There was an infinite variety of people, and of gods. In some places, they thought they had only one god, insubstantial and abstract; in others, the gods strode about far more brazenly even than they had in the Atlas-makers’ city.

“Why does it work this way?” Arjun asked. “Is it that the presence of so many gods opens up these hidden paths, or is it because the city is built of so many secret places that it gives rise to so many gods? Or…”

“Who gives a shit? Keep your eyes on the path. This way.”

T
here was a place where the men of the city, all pale and tiny and nervous, traveled in palanquins born by great apes, trained and bred for the work, caparisoned in their masters’ colors. Packs of the apes broke free and shucked off parts of the uncomfortable armor, and fought and rutted in the alleys. It was a big problem, Lemuel said; they weren’t sure what to do about it, other than breed more apes for protection from the apes they had. He thought it was rather funny.

They stayed in a hotel room the windows of which were heavily barred against inquisitive primates. Lemuel took the bed by the door, and snored remarkably loudly for such a little man. Arjun lay awake in the bed by the window, listening to the jungle sounds of the street. He felt dizzy, vertiginous; the days (weeks? months?) of his apprenticeship fell on him in a rush. He was horribly conscious of the fragility of the city’s stuff; he felt that he could fall through at any moment into deeper and more secret places. Nothing was solid or real.

After a time, he realized that Lemuel was sitting up in the gloom, watching him twist and turn, listening to his ragged breathing. There was a half-visible sneer on the man’s face.

Arjun found his fear quickly burned away by anger. He sat up and stared at Lemuel. “Who are you really? I’m tired of this game. I think you know I beat you, once, and you’re scared to admit it.”

“Maybe I know more than I’ve told you, maybe I don’t. That’s not the information you’ve bargained for. Got anything else? Anyone else to betray? Any more friends? A lady-friend, perhaps? A brother? Oh—you don’t have any
children,
do you?”

Arjun turned away. “Get some sleep, Shay. I want to finish our business tomorrow.”

Lemuel lay back down, saying, “Don’t take your guilty conscience out on me, boy. You made your choice.”

Arjun lay there. The man was wrong about Arjun’s conscience. He misunderstood the nature of Arjun’s choice. Arjun had seen Jack fight. He knew what Jack could do. It wasn’t Jack whom Arjun had betrayed with his promise. He’d murdered Shay, again, and this time not in combat, but by treachery. And he’d made the boy a weapon; that, too, was sickening.

Sometime later, he said, quietly, “Shay?” There was no answer, but he felt the man was awake and listening. “Shay. There’s another possibility. Perhaps you are the same man as the man I shot, but that man is in your future. You say time becomes…complex in this city, on these paths.”

The man grunted, “Could be.”

“Then maybe I
will
kill you. Doesn’t that trouble you?”

“We all die one day. If that’s how I go, that’s how I go.”

“So be it, then. I don’t forgive you, Shay. But you’re not mine to judge. If I am going to kill you, I’m sorry.”

The man grunted and rolled over. A stolen and disingenuous apology; it did little to relieve Arjun’s guilt.

T
hey made a stop back in the city, in the old familiar city Arjun had come into by sea; stopping at the Cere House, at Lemuel’s office.

“Time’s not important, as such,” Lemuel said, methodically working through the keys on his heavy brass key-chain, like a man investigating the workings of a complex and broken engine. “I try to come back here once a week, every Bridge-day, but it’s always Bridge-day somewhere, you know? We could go wandering until we were old and grey, and we could still come back here on Bridge-day.” He shuffled up key after key, steel and copper and ivory and iron, teeth like tiny towers rising and falling on the chain’s brass loop. “But it’s best to have a routine. It’s important not to get lost or lose yourself for want of signposts. Aha!” He found the key to his mailbox and flourished it.

There was a single letter in the mailbox. He read it quickly, muttering the words under his breath. Then he tore it up and scattered the pieces.

“We have some business to do, young master Arjun. Come along, then.”

Lemuel strode down the corridor, counting off the doors with jerking motions of his bony fingers: one, two, three, four,
ah
! Lemuel lunged for a plain wooden door and darted through. Arjun ran after him and caught the door just before it banged closed. Arjun followed through an unlit stone corridor, through a street at night under washing-lines fluttering in the moon like ragged monstrous moths, through a door in a tower on a bridge over a river of black oily water—and on, and on, always just barely keeping pace with Lemuel’s impatient strut—until he ran down a narrow brick hallway toward a slowly closing door, behind which Lemuel’s grating, mocking voice was already raised. He caught the door and stumbled through just as Lemuel said, “…wasn’t sure you’d bother to keep my card, Captain.”

Lemuel was pacing back and forth in a bare room, a rough-edged cube of red brick. High arched windows opened out onto a slate sky and wisps of grey cloud.

A man in singed and ragged black sat in the corner, on the room’s only chair. His hair was black and filthy, and his head was in his hands. A sword rested against his leg. He answered, “I didn’t think I was going to either, Mr. Lemuel. I thought I’d never call on you. I had my duty. But things are different now.”

“Duty? Is that right? Is that what you call it? What’s so different now, then?”

“The Countess is defeated. I’m ruined. I’m little more than a pirate now.
Nothing
more than a pirate. The
Thunderer
is the most wonderful weapon ever devised in this city, and I’ve become a pirate with it. I feed my men by raiding. We run, we hide, we lose ourselves among the towers like pirates hiding in rocky shoals. Sometimes I think we could abandon the ship, scurry off like rats, hide in the streets. Turn bandit, turn mercenary, I don’t know. But I can
see
what’s happening below. From the ship, I can see what’s happening to the city below. The stain spreading, the river flooding. The plague’s rotten shadow swelling. The fire gone out; I hardly noticed it when it was there, but now it’s
gone
. Those savages, those terrible children, swarming over the rooftops, killing and killing. We’d fire on them but we have no shells left. Sometimes we take shots at them with our rifles, when we’re hanging low, but they don’t care, and they look up at us with those black eyes, and it’s as if they’re saying
Soon we’ll come for you, even you, even up in the sky.
The plague’ll reach us soon. I’m sorry, Mr. Lemuel, I haven’t slept recently. I don’t think I’ve slept since Lucia died. I can see it: the River-god making itself manifest, growing and never going away. That’s not how the city’s supposed to work. There’s supposed to be a cycle to these things, isn’t there? I never made any great study of theological science, but isn’t that how it should work? The city’s broken and diseased. This place”—he gestured out of the tower window—“is as low to the ground as I dare get now. It’s hopeless. My duty is over. I want to escape. I want to be with Lucia again. You said there was some part of the city where she was alive. I want to go there. I want to go to a part of the city where that monster won’t reach, just for my lifetime, and hers, and be done with it. You asked for the
Thunderer;
it’s yours, Lemuel. Take it to the Mountain, if you like.
Crash
there if you like. Whatever you want.”