Thunderer (34 page)

A
few days later, Olympia was woken by a messenger from Cimenti’s Bureau of Printing and Publication, who left behind an official letter on plain grey paper, in the ugly print of Cimenti’s typing-machines. It read:
Prisonr’s Request is GRANTED. Sentence is Liftd. Prepartions for Prsioner’s Release Are To Proceed Accordinlgy.
The date-stamp was weeks old. She stared at it blankly, then said, tentatively, “Nicolas?”

She spent the day at Cimenti’s courthouse and at the Bureau’s offices, trying to find out what had happened. The letter was real. Some wheel in the machine had jerked into sudden motion; no one could say why. She left the premises quickly, not wanting to ask too many questions, afraid it was a mistake that might still be corrected. “It’s real,” she said, to the hushed and awed assembly in Holbach’s dining room that evening. “And strictly speaking, no other Estate but Cimenti’s has sentenced him to
exile,
only to certain
conditions of exile,
so by itself this is effective to secure his release, if we act quickly. But I have
no
idea how this happened.”

“Who bloody cares how?” said one of the poets.

T
he Atlas-makers celebrated. Holbach and the professors and wise old men made speeches. The poets and painters and the young explorers raided Holbach’s wine cellar, and shouted down the speechifying. They carried Holbach through the hall on their shoulders, then Olympia, though she kept telling them it had nothing to do with her. At the end of the evening, Arjun and Olympia fell into bed in one of the upstairs rooms.

Two days later, Holbach received a letter, this one from Nicolas himself, and addressed to
All My Brothers and Sisters
. It said,
Today they opened the gates of my tower. Tomorrow a ship will take me from my island and return me to life. They will not tell me what miracle has secured my freedom. This letter may precede my return….
It was over a week old.

Nicolas himself appeared the next morning. They had made a place for him in Holbach’s house. A carriage brought him up from Ar-Mouth, and the house’s occupants poured out into the garden to see him. The shock of his return had not worn off. It was like a god manifesting before them. They clapped and cheered as he emerged, a frail, tiny old man in a plain brown coat, shaved head just starting to bristle again, all bony hooked nose and elbows, sharp, darting eyes. Holbach had the honor of supporting the sage’s shaking arm out of the carriage.

Arjun was around the house that day, and the next, as Nicolas held court in the study, and the assembled artists and thinkers came to pay him tribute. Exile had not mellowed him; it had burned him pure. In an angry, wounded rasp, he urged them on to greater defiance, greater outrage. He tore through Holbach’s piles of newspapers, quite literally, taking pages that enraged him in both bony hands and ripping them effortfully to shreds. “This boy has the idea!” he said, waving a page headlined
“Thunderer” Outlaws Strike Again: Can They Be Stopped?
“No compromise or cowardice. Not anymore. I am too old to be wise.”

He called them all around him, and said, “I have had so much time to think, gentlemen, and I am tired of it. My gaolers may snap me back at any moment; I am determined to
act
. I have great plans, gentlemen. We must organize.” A few of the scholars found Nicolas’s new talk too incautious, too frightening: they left the house, making weak excuses about their own neglected projects, and did not come back. Most of them stayed, waiting around the house, for the great sage to call them up into the study to be interviewed. Nicolas was inspecting his troops.

Arjun spoke to Nicolas only briefly, on the second day. Holbach, fussing around Nicolas like an anxious courtier, gave Arjun a brief introduction, as his translator and Liancourt’s composer. Nicolas turned sharp, angry eyes on him and said, “Yes, I’ve heard your name. The one who came here to look for his missing god. The one who tried to sneak a lot of religious nonsense into Liancourt’s play. The one who keeps demanding that the Professor waste his valuable time on some selfish obsession. Some
addiction.
I shall have to think carefully whether you have a place in the project. Now, Holbach, who’s next?”

Arjun was not offended. Nicolas was right. He was not truly part of the Atlas, and never would be or could be. He excused himself politely. He came back on the fourth day, just to see Olympia, but found that she was shut in the study with Nicolas. He waited for her in the lower library, reading the papers. He sat alone; all the life in the house had been drawn up into Nicolas’s presence, upstairs. He listened to a light rain scatter across the windows and the gravel paths outside.

The rain grew insistent; thick heavy bursts abused the trees and rattled the windows. The sky was suddenly very dark for a spring morning, or even, then, for a winter night, and the room was very cold. He heard the servants running around, closing the windows to keep out the downpour, and the sound was like doors slamming, like hull-timbers breaking—he felt like a trap had closed on him. He ran to the window. The path out of the garden seemed to stretch far into the dark.

There was a smell, stale and familiar. He knew what was coming down that dark path. He had felt it before.

He ran upstairs, almost bowling the housekeeper over on the landing, and burst into the study. He tried to shout, but his voice was constricted: “Something’s coming. You have to leave, all of you. It’s the—”

Nicolas cut him off. “We’re at work. We’ve no time for—”

“—the Typhon, the river-thing,
please,
come on, I can feel it, I remember it, it’s finally followed me here—”

“Quiet.” Nicolas turned to Holbach. “Holbach, is there any reason to imagine that the Typhon would manifest itself here?”

“Well, no. I would know if something were to manifest in my own house, and there’ve been no signs. Anyway, we’re far from any waterway. Arjun, the gods move in a predictable manner, rule-bound, as I’ve explained. Perhaps you’re—”

“See? Now please settle down or leave us.”

Arjun looked around in horror. They couldn’t feel it.
Yet.
Holbach was gesturing for him to calm down. Liancourt would not meet his gaze. Olympia was leaning against the wall, looking horrified and embarrassed. He grabbed her arm and dragged her out the door, protesting. She shouted at him and tried to push him away on the landing, but he barely noticed. He pulled her behind him down the stairs, saying, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, but we have to get
out.
” She nearly fell trying to keep up.

Hoxton appeared at the foot of the stairs, with a sudden blow to Arjun’s gut that floored him, sobbing and choking. He stood over Arjun, rubbing his knuckles.

“Sorry about that, sir. For what it’s worth, I always thought you were one of her better ones. Miss O.?”

“Hoxton, it’s not like that. Leave him. Arjun?”

He pulled himself to his feet, and tried to gasp out, “Please.” The pain and the fear were crushing his throat.

“All right, Arjun, I’ll come with you. All right.” Her voice was light, as if to humor him, but there was an edge of doubt and fear in it. “We’ll go for a ride, clear our heads. Hoxton?”

Hoxton wrapped a hairy arm around Arjun’s wheezing chest and helped him out through the garden and into the carriage.

“To Arjun’s place, Hoxton.”

“It’s the Typhon. I feel it. It’ll kill them all.”

“You heard Holbach, Arjun, it can’t be. You make it sound like a, I don’t know, a starved wolf. It’s not like that.”

Just a few streets away, the rain stopped and the cold lifted. Olympia’s mood was calm again, now that they were out of the house, and she said, “You’re reacting to the weather. We’ve all been under pressure. You should sleep. We’ll take you home.”

She sat by him for a while in his room, until she was sure he was no danger to himself. He was silent and exhausted. He would not go back to the house with her, so she left him with a troubled kiss, which he did not return.

I
’m so sorry, Nicolas.” Holbach shook his head sadly. “He’s not a bad young man. He just had a very nasty experience.” Nicolas grunted and indicated with a wave of his bony hand that the meeting should continue. Liancourt attempted to pick up where he had left off—with his proposal that the Atlas-makers form an alliance with certain dissident factions in remote Red Barrow, with whom he was in occasional secret contact through the medium of an actress, a defector—but the mood quickly soured. Branken objected that no one from Red Barrow could be trusted under any circumstances; Rothermere told Branken he was a fool; and a bitter squabble broke out.

Holbach sighed. He hoped Olympia would get back soon.

The sky continued to blacken as the storm seethed outside. Nicolas cursed the darkness and ordered candles to be lit; they promptly flickered out. The Atlas-makers sat in the shadows and sneered and sniped at each other’s pathetic plans. Holbach slumped in his chair and a sense of hopelessness settled on him. The room grew cold and for a moment the long shadow of a chair’s heavy back swayed against the far wall and took on an angular shape that was both monstrous and tortured, and Holbach felt an instant of stupid, demoralizing terror.

Soon Nicolas started to cough, damply, miserably, painfully, and the old man retired to bed. Soon after that, both Branken and Grishman complained of headaches and fever, and the meeting was adjourned. Holbach had a stiff drink to steady his nerves.

O
lympia came to Arjun’s flat
the next morning.

“What happened?” he asked. “Are they all right?”

“Nothing happened. Yes, they are. Are you?”

He looked glumly at her. “You don’t believe me.”

“Arjun, nothing happened. I’ll admit, I was unnerved at the time. But
nothing happened
. It’s all right: I told Nicolas you’d had a terrible experience with the Typhon, and that the rain must have brought it back to you. He understands. More or less.”

“I don’t need his understanding. It was
there.
I remember how it felt. I can’t go back.”

“We’ve talked about this. Arjun, the Typhon couldn’t possibly come to Holbach’s house. It’s not part of its path, he says. It couldn’t happen without signs, portents; and Holbach would know. He knows about these forces, Arjun. They are bound by rules. I thought you understood. You were so much better.”

“I forgot. I let myself be distracted. Now I remember. Olympia, I
felt
the Typhon, down in the tunnels.
I
know it, better than Holbach or you. It’s sick. It’s not like the others, not at all, not anymore, if it ever was. Not after what Shay did to it. Not after what I did to it. I don’t know what it might be able to do.”

“You’re not making sense.”

“I’m sorry.”

Irritation and sympathy clashed on her face. She wouldn’t be understanding for long. They did not have, he had not sought, that sort of relationship. “I have a meeting,” she said. “I’ll check on you tomorrow. Don’t just sit here worrying all day.”

H
e visited the herbalist on the corner, and bought a pouch of leaf-wrapped pellets that would, he was assured, bring sleep and prevent dreams. Many of Stammer Gate’s scholars had bad dreams, the herbalist told him. Arjun spent the day darting from one café to another. He went back to his flat that night reluctantly, but it was—to his desperate relief—free of the monster’s mark. It had not followed him.

O
lympia came again the next evening. “You look terrible,” she said. “Bloodshot eyes and bloodless everything else. Are you eating? You should come back to the house. Don’t you want to see what Nicolas is going to do next?”

“I can’t. I’m sorry.”

She couldn’t stay long. There was too much to be done. As she was leaving, he said, “Tell Holbach to come and see me. He promised me, months ago, he could help me find the Voice. It’s time now. It has to be now. Tell him to come.”

“I’ll try. I’ll be back again soon.”

She did not come the next day. Nor did Holbach. Was it so hard for them to believe him? They were too proud of what they thought they knew; they had lost their fear of the city.

To pass the time, he went back to work on the last of his Tuvar texts. The pile was small now. At noon, a boy came bearing a note from Liancourt, expressing Liancourt’s hopes for a swift recovery, and telling him not to worry that Nicolas would be angry with him: the great sage knew how highly strung creative temperaments like Arjun’s could be, and would understand, soon.

The next day passed in the same way, and the next, and the next. In the evening, he gave up waiting, and went walking, east across Stammer Gate, past the Surgeons’ College that marked the border with Rywhill. He tried to listen for the sound of the Voice, but it was hard to keep himself open for it. Every draft, every scent of rot or mud or the city’s sewers, made him think of the Typhon. The city felt like a toothed trap, its spring winding down. The Typhon was coming for him. He felt it.

Holbach came to the flat the next morning. Arjun had no place to entertain guests, so they went for a walk. The sun was high and hot, and the street smelled rank.

“Thank you for coming, Professor.”

“I have only a little time, Arjun. We’re very busy now, of course. We have new plans now. Arjun—Olympia says you won’t be coming back. I don’t mean any offense, but you understand, don’t you, that you must not talk of our work or our plans to anyone?”

“Of course.”

“Nothing happened, you know.”

“I know what I felt. You were lucky to escape unharmed, if you did. You should leave that place, or you should think of ways to protect yourself from it, if you have that science.”

“There’s nothing to protect against. And we have other concerns.”

“So do I, Professor. You promised me you would help me find the Voice if I worked for you. And I have. I faced Shay for you; I have worked for months on your Atlas. The play you’re all so proud of is as much my work as it is Liancourt’s.”

“I know, I know.”

“It’s time for you to help me.”

“Gods, there’s just so much
else
to do. With Nicolas’s return, we’ve moved the deadline for the new edition back a month, but we have so much more to do; and the Countess demands that I do something about the Thunderers, find the source of their power somehow, and that I do something about the lung-rot epidemic, which is
entirely
outside of my field, but she doesn’t understand that I have limits, too. Gods.
Soon,
I promise.”

“I may not have much more time in this city. It’s turning against me. I feel it. It’s only a matter of time. Because
you
sent me to Shay, the Typhon has
seen
me, and
hates
me, and it’s
marked
me.”

“It doesn’t work like that. And anyway, I couldn’t possibly have known you would meet the Typhon when I sent you. I meant to do you a favor. I thought Shay could help you.”

“Nevertheless. What happened, happened.”

“All right. Yes. I’ll think. That’s all I can do just now. It’s a strange problem. I never meant to waste your time, you know. I’ll think and I’ll let you know if I make any progress. I may know some people who can help. I may send you some books.”

“That’s all I can ask. On your honor, don’t forget, Professor.”

They shook hands stiffly at the end of the street.

T
he heat got worse. Summer, too, was coming. Nagging clouds of midges and mosquitoes hatched out of the earth, out of the cracked brickwork. The air was hazy with them, reminding Arjun of the swamps through which he had passed in the south. The herbalist on the corner spat in disgust out of his door, into the street: “Fucking things. Last summer it was clear, and we had the Bird, Praise Be; this year it’s this vermin. No wonder no one can sleep.”

Arjun thanked him, and pocketed his pills, then he went down to the docks, where the water was a very deep green, and the fish-stench was thick and greasy, and the dockhands sweated and reddened and swore at each other. Down by the docks’ edge, in the spray, there was some relief to be had from the heat.

The familiar strains of
The Blessing
’s opening theme were playing from a makeshift stage by the water, then a weak, vulgar voice started knocking the heroine’s song about. A small crowd gathered, and Arjun joined them.

The players were rough, untrained but forceful. The men had the look of dockhands, sailors, toughs. The heroine looked brazen, slatternly. They looked, in fact, like criminals, like convicts, and probably were. It was a bad summer for crime and for random violence in the streets. The beneficiaries of Silk’s campaign were all over the place. Some found work in the docks or the factories, some were snatched back into their gaols, and some ended up begging or starving; but too many formed brazen packs in the streets. “Money with menaces,” that was the legal term. The newspapers were quite hysterical about it.

And the play itself had been rewritten by some hack’s hand. It was similar, but not quite the same. In Liancourt’s original, the protagonists had been abused by cruel, arbitrary aristocrats, but those powers had been left artfully unnamed: they could have been any of the city’s rulers, or, if the censors asked, none of them. To Arjun’s surprise, in this version, the enemy was quite clearly identified as the Countess Ilona. She commanded a flying ship, with a ghoulish, death-obsessed Captain, who flew about the city to place obstacles in the heroes’ way.

Where Liancourt had used a chorus of the gods to comment on the action, this version used conversations between the Countess and her Captain. They were crudely sexual, the Countess throwing herself, humiliatingly, at the frigid Captain.

The street-players had slashed the play’s length greatly. Wit was replaced by curt sloganeering. The music had been truncated brutally; this bastardized version used only the songs into which Arjun had poured his anger and bitterness, his fear, his abandonment. The players had cut the gentler, wiser music entirely. Arjun was appalled to recognize sour notes—sour notes that
he
had written, but never really heard—that owed more to the Typhon than the Voice.

Then, at the end, he was astonished to see, they made it explicit that the book that saved the heroes was the Atlas. They called it by name. Liancourt had not dared to do so, before. They were inviting retribution. What had made them so reckless?

It was quickly over. A few angry hecklers had gathered, but it finished before there could be violence. The players took away their props with them on the back of a cart, disappearing at once into the shadowed streets of Barbary. The crowd, too, quickly dispersed, and Arjun with them. It was safest not to linger after such a performance.

O
lympia came to see him a few days later. “Holbach says you think you need to leave the city soon.”

“You knew I didn’t plan to stay forever.”

“Of course I did. Don’t flatter yourself. I’m just sorry to see you go for no reason. For a mad reason.”

“I’m not going yet. I’ll stay as long as I must, to find what I came for.” He noticed that there were lines of worry on her face; she had not been sleeping well either. “There’s something else troubling you. Are the plans going badly?”

“Things are very tense in the house. We’re all working very hard. And Nicolas is sick, and he’s taking it out on us. He’s very old, and the strain…It’s all very sudden for him. Oh, I don’t know, he’ll be all right. It’s just hard, at the moment.”

“I don’t like the changes to
The Blessing.
It’s out of my hands now, of course, but I regret what Nicolas has done to it. It’s very crude. Is that all that his plans amount to?”

“Oh, no. That’s nothing to do with Nicolas, or any of us, for that matter. It just started to appear, early last week. Liancourt is furious. So is Nicolas: he thinks it’ll bring retribution down on us, before we’re ready to move. They want me to put a stop to it, but I’m no censor. I don’t have the power. There’s no one to sue; the play crops up in one place for a day, and vanishes. They don’t use actors, they just hire whatever they can dredge up from the pubs. I try to tell Liancourt, if you let something like that play loose in the city, it’s not yours anymore. It
changes
. I’m just busy now trying to persuade the censors it’s not our work. I’m not sure they believe me.”

“Be careful, please, Olympia. Not just of the censors, but of the Typhon. You should leave that house.”

“Stop it.
You
should come back. Dangerous times are exciting times. This is what we’ve all been working for.”

“I can’t.”

They had sex, their first time in Arjun’s austere flat. They both seemed to need it very badly, but their moods were not greatly different afterwards. Olympia seemed irritated that it had not lifted Arjun’s dread or changed his mind. She left.

T
hat afternoon, he went down to the docks again, but the play was gone, the rude stage dismantled. Arjun bought lunch, meat wrapped in thick leaves, from a stall.

There was an empty half-circle in the crowd, against the looming wooden wall of a shipyard. A man lay moaning against the wall. Blackish-green drool ran from his slack mouth. The crowd gave him a wide berth, pressing handkerchiefs to their faces if they had them, or the tails of their shirts. “Oh gods, it’s lung-rot,” said a clerk by Arjun’s side. “Don’t get too near.”

The smell was dreadful: cold and wet and deathly. It made Arjun think of the smell of the canal-tunnels. And he recalled that Olympia had said Nicolas was sick, and he suddenly could not believe how stupid he had been, how thoughtless. He had been within its mind, and he knew what sort of thing it was. It had pursued him in Shutlow, and taken Norris and the others, and then to Holbach’s house.
And it has put its mark on Nicolas. Maybe on all of them.
He turned and ran toward the Tor and Foyle’s Ward.

But he could not do it. He got near to Holbach’s street, and fear buckled his knees. He could not face it. He would rather die, and let everyone he had ever cared for die, than face the creature again. But they had to know.

There was a carriage rank nearby, and he found one of the stable-boys, and gave him a message. He had no paper or pen, so he made the boy memorize it:
The Typhon has caused Nicolas’s sickness. It may be the source of the lung-rot. It may be the lung-rot itself. It may have marked you all. It may still be there. I beg you to leave the house now.