Thunderer (7 page)

The city was full of sacred music, too. Robed choirs dedicated to a variety of powers proceeded through the streets. Churches rang their bells and wailed their calls to prayer. Organ music spilled from their doors. Lunatics, broken by divine visions, howled out hymns from the gutter. He avoided all self-consciously sacred music; he imagined he would find what he was looking for unexpectedly, by sudden grace, in the city’s profane and commercial clamor. Somewhere in it he hoped to hear an echo of the Voice, some trace of its spare rhythm, some snatch of its sad melody, some subtle harmony that might bring it to mind. He felt like it was always on the edge of his hearing, but he never heard it.

D
efour liked to host her lodgers in the boardinghouse’s dining room. It was dark and stale, and the fading music-hall posters around the walls did little to enliven it. But her lodgers were all single men, and poor, and could not refuse a free dinner. They sat around a lace-draped table in the middle of the room. Two black-crusted tureens held a stew made of the blubbery salty meat of some beast hooked up from the harbor. The candles were fat, smoky, and greenish. A few dusty moths circled them stubbornly.

Fat schoolmasterly Mr. Drabble sliced off a small piece of his meat and held it to the candle until it singed. “For Tiber,” he explained, answering Arjun’s curious stare. “A sacrifice. And just in case, why not for Lavilokan, and Bladud, and…” He rattled off a rapid list of names; others around the table suggested others, casually, as if they were gossiping about old school-friends. They cut it short and dug in before the food had cooled too much.

Defour started the conversation: “Perhaps our new guest could tell us where he’s been today? How does our fair city strike him today, I wonder?”

“I went to the Optical Cabaret,” Arjun said. “Standing room was half price for the day. I wanted to hear a song they call ‘The Rat-Catcher’s Daughter.’”

“The Palace!” Defour said. “What did you think?”

Arjun had not been impressed. “It was interesting,” he said. Into the silence, he added, “I think the singers were men, dressed as women. It was quite surprising.”

Mr. Haycock snorted. “That’s all that place is now since that swishy defrocked curate bought it. Mind you, I’d not say no to landing him as a customer. Expensive taste in filth, I hear.”

“You should have seen it in its day,” Defour said. She gestured with her grey head at the posters on the wall.

“Art Checken out of Hood Hill sells to him.
Filth
.”

“You used to go there often?” Arjun asked.

“I
headlined
’em, didn’t I? See? Gracie Defour. That’s me.”

“They say he tries to pretend it’s for the sake of classical learning,” Haycock offered. “One of
those
. All the better: you can charge extra for the intellectual pretensions.”

Haycock—a dwarfish man, a fierce and twisted pug-snout upturned fiercely at the world under a bald head—was a dealer in rare books and curios: not only pornographic texts, but also sermons, codexes, works of science and art; piles of remaindered journals, banned or merely forgotten. His clients were sometimes shady, sometimes illustrious, sometimes both; he loathed them all equally. He carried out his business from no fixed place, operating a number of stalls and lockups, or by post; therefore, he was never off the clock. He rattled out this sort of business-chatter almost constantly. Arjun thought he meant it aggressively. Him and Heady both; conversations between the two men were like peculiarly lead-footed fencing bouts. Arjun ignored him, asking Defour, “So you bought this place when you retired? You must miss the stage.”

She glared, then shrugged. “I suppose you don’t know. You don’t say that. Not to one who took her ticket.”

Arjun felt the sting of a frustration that was becoming familiar. He was at sea in this city, constantly wrong-footed by inexplicable shifts in the conversation. “…ticket?” he asked.

She fluttered an eight-pointed gesture over her heart, and said, “The Spider.” She indicated the little black-legged brooch at her throat. Then she explained (while Haycock described some of the perversions available to his customers for the benefit of the rest of the table, who had heard Defour’s story before).

She had been a milliner’s girl, who had turned to the stage. Most of the others she had known failed and some of them starved. She was the lucky one. She headlined the Chymic, until the Palace outbid it. Did Arjun know “What Will You Do, Love?” Or “Lero, Lero”? In her day, those were
her
songs. The crowds roared for them; they loved her even more when she teased and
didn’t
sing them. Anything she did could only make them love her more.

Then a letter came for her, backstage. A plain brown envelope, addressed in a shaky child’s hand, placed under her mirror. She knew what it was, and could have chosen not to read it, but she did.

She followed the letter’s instructions and went to a small fenced-in park in Foyle’s Ward, where a motley crowd waited. Beggars and gentlemen jostled each other to get to a plain wooden box sitting on a bench. Each of them reached in blindly and took a ticket, then slunk home without talking.

Her ticket told her to release a dove on stage during her act. It made her shiver: she had taken a ticket at random—how could it be so perfectly targeted to her? But of course she knew how. She obeyed the instruction; how could she not?

And she obeyed every other instruction that came to her on the little tickets, over the years. Many of them made small, arbitrary changes to her act. Her fans adored her all the more: her performance was out of her control now, and stranger and wilder by the week. One of them ordered her to marry a certain weaver from Salt Marsh—her first husband, dead now, let him rest. Sometimes she was told to write her own tickets, and leave them at the Spider’s obscure churches, for some stranger to draw.
Take in a girl from a workhouse and educate her,
she wrote on the first one, when she felt she should do good;
Steal gold from a temple,
she wrote later, when she dared to be bad.

She was afraid at first, but as the lottery played on she threw herself into each change with utter determination. The tickets and letters were a chain linking her to something impossible, transcendent; a power that lurked at the center of its web and pulled obscure strings, changing lives. No one ever saw the Spider with their own eyes, they said, or knew where it lived, but when she took a ticket, she was on the end of its line. She was connected to it and to all the other people throughout the city who took its tickets and wrote them, whoever they were, whatever lots they held. That was how the god manifested. Sometimes she dreamed the Spider’s glittering black presence in her room at night, its cold mirror-eyes on her, its clicking mechanical legs. Its magnificent complex
indifference
.

Perhaps she opened the letter because she feared it was only meaningless fortune that had put her where she was, and another roll of the dice could throw her back down; the Spider’s lottery gave a purpose to chance, made the arbitrary sacred. But perhaps it was just to feel the god’s tug in her soul.

Her final ticket told her,
Change lives with the first person you see from your window. Never draw another ticket
. So she swapped with the fat man who owned the Cypress; nervously they exchanged identical tickets between their shy hands. It was the most intimate thing; then they forgot each other. The Spider only knew what he was supposed to do with
her
life. She knew that some idle gossips—and she most
certainly
meant to include Mr. Haycock, and Mr. Clement, and Mr. Drabble—liked to spin stories about the fortune she’d squirreled away somewhere from her days on the stage; she advised Arjun to get no funny ideas on that account. Oh, at her final performance, her fans moaned as if at a sacred wounding! But that was years ago. They forgot her quickly. “As they should,” she said, “as they should.” Her ticket was what it was. There were many better but many worse. She missed nothing. It was a
vocation
. She looked both defiant and sad. Arjun looked away.

A
t night, Arjun reread his small store of books, by the light of the candle Defour had provided (making a note in her rentbook).

He had marked certain passages in Varady’s
Speculations
. One concerned the disappearance of a priest—
an eccentric figure, with his feathered dress and his habit of issuing inappropriate challenges
—who had come from the jungles of Luahl in pursuit of a jaguar god that had vanished from Luahl’s treetop temples.
He told me he was tracking the god,
Varady wrote,
and his manner was such that I believed him, although I would be hard-pressed to explain why: his methods, sniffing after trails on all fours in the streets, tasting tree bark, and so on, were very odd and irreligious to my way of thinking. I believe he found what he was seeking; regrettably, he vanished before I could question him. I will have more to say on this later
. But maddeningly, Varady never came back to the story.

And Arjun reread Girolamo’s
Techniques
. In his capacity as courtier, Girolamo advised the traveler to the city, or the city native who had business in some unfamiliar district, to make a presentation of themselves to whatever local powers or Estates held sway there. In his capacity as a soldier, Girolamo had traveled widely in other countries, and it was his view that the squabbling rulers of Ararat were far more jealous of the proper gestures of respect than the rulers of more unified polities.

That advice struck Arjun as reasonable. Best to observe the city’s traditions, if he wanted its help. Of course, Girolamo’s information regarding the particular rulers he had dealt with was many decades out of date. Arjun needed advice from the living. But his circle of acquaintances was narrow. After a little thought, he went to Heady’s door and knocked softly.

Heady was one of the city’s jurors. A professional. A small living, but it was his. He had explained it to Arjun on their first meeting, with great pride and in minute detail. Ararat had such a multiplicity of courts and laws that there was always a demand for a reliable juror, one who could be trusted not to give a disobliging verdict. He sat in whatever causes were going, wherever they didn’t check the property qualifications or would let them slide. Every morning, he would go down to the courthouses to make himself available. He never paid much attention to the facts; they would only distract him. And he certainly never learned much about the law of any of the courts. Who could? There were so many; woe betide any man who committed a crime over which two or more courts claimed jurisdiction; his trials would be a longer and worse ordeal than his punishments. However, he learned to determine with perfect accuracy how the judge wanted him to vote, which was the more important qualification anyway.

Not always a “judge,” of course: in Ilona’s courts they called him the Inquisitor, and Mensonge’s courts were run by priests; in Mad Ananias’s courts they let a horse stamp out the judgments, but it was the official who chose which questions to feed to the horse who really counted. All the same sort of people, in Heady’s professional experience: they just wanted to deal with reliable people who knew not to make trouble, how to show respect for their betters. So they called him back, time after time. He had a little reputation, if he did say so himself.

He especially liked criminal cases (preferably sexual matters), but a good long family-estate dispute was a source of reliable income for months—not that he was in a position to be picky. Best of all, though, was when they got some dissident or heretic on the hooks. “Not the loonies, the pathetic street-howlers. Those are just sad. I mean the smart-arses. The
fancy
ones, you see?” It was his great pride to have been the thirty-first juror, back when he was young and keen, in the famous trial of the blasphemer Nicolas Maine, and to have done his part to help the censors and the Chairman to stand up for the decencies of ordinary folk, returning a richly deserved sentence of exile.

Arjun doubted whether Heady’s profession was honorable, but it was clear that the man knew who was who and where to go. And Heady was happy to help. He was very proud. He was glad to give advice; the price was that Arjun had to listen to it.

“You’re a good listener, you know,” Heady told him. “No back talk. Eager to learn.”

“I was raised to listen.”

“Don’t sound so smug. No one makes a living that way.”

Arjun followed him one morning to Chairman Cimenti’s walled compound in Goshen Tor. They set out while it was still dark, heading down to the river. Dawn came while they were crossing the Jaw. They went up the hill to the Tor. Heady lectured Arjun on his need to make something of himself, pointing at all the monumental offices around them by way of illustration.

When they got closer to the compound, Heady told Arjun what he knew about the Chairman. “First, he’s one of the Estates that claims authority over Shutlow. I suppose officially he’s only involved there as a charitable venture; but he’s a big man in these parts, and don’t you forget it. Second, he’s a banker. The Chairman is the big man at the top of the Cimenti concerns, which own, well, most things you can see from where you’re standing.
Very
rich. Pays good rates, too. Not that that matters to you, who’s above that sort of thing. Very nice, it must be. And third, then, he doesn’t keep a horde of do-nothing thugs in uniforms around like most of the rest of the big Estates. Not that I mean to say that they don’t do good work, because they do. Keeping the peace. Keeping things
straight
. It’s the gods’ work. What was I saying? The Chairman, yes. Spends his money on agents and spies. So watch what you say about him. Fourth, he’s a banker, like I said. Likes professional people. Businesslike. Go-getters. Ha! Good luck to you, young man.”