Thunderer by Felix Gilman Page A

the evening. The boy from the bar behind him came out and lit the streetlamp’s flame. Arjun sat alone in a ghostly halo. The streets were like tunnel mouths.
    He stood up. He looked at the broad uphill sweep of Cato Road, rising up out of the grey, and into the black mouths that swallowed the docksmen going home into Barbary Ward. He tossed a coin.

I n the first hours after his escape, Jack ran frantically through the streets, trying to put as much distance as possible between himself and the House, keeping to the alleys and the shadows, flinching from passersby.
    After a while, it started to rain, a chilly drizzle becoming a downpour that bent the trees and flooded from the gutters. Jack’s thin silk-shot shirt quickly soaked through. Real fear seized him. In Barbotin, when it rained, it drummed on the outer walls and made the interior echo distantly—and frequently, gods knew, the damp seeped in through cracks—but nothing like this. Jack found that he feared the falling sky.
    He found the first shelter he could: a brick overhang at the back of a brewery, next to the drays’ stables. The nearness of animal bodies was comforting; it was a thing from his childhood. The rain washed thickly over the courtyard. He held his hand out to catch it; after a while, he leaned his head out and forced himself to look up into the vortex of falling water. He blinked and gagged and his eyes stung; he looked up again, and again, until the rain slackened. Then he ran his hand through his slick black hair, scraping the water from his face.
             
    H e knew where he was. These drab grey streets; this place was called Shutlow. The locals pronounced the
-low
with a cat’s-meow whine. That was how you knew them. He was born there. In the north was the grey slope of the escarpment, with Mass How at the top; Shutlow lay below it, like something not-quite-satisfactory left on the doorsteps for the charitable societies.
    He knew his way home, although his memory’s map was more moth-eaten than he had hoped. And so many things had changed, and many more of the old places were dead and vacant, boarded or bricked up. Shutlow had never been a thriving neighborhood, but now it looked smaller and grubbier than ever. The people looked nervous and put-upon, in their petty offices. He wandered for a while, too scared to ask for directions, painfully aware of his bizarre clothes.
    The house he’d been born in was still there, but it was no one’s home now. They’d converted it into offices. The street-level shingle advertised the Gies Mercantile, Import & Export; oversized script painted in the upper windows promised the services of a dentist and a notary public.
    His family was gone, then. Perhaps his parents were dead. They were the drunken, distant sire and dam of a feral litter: he wouldn’t miss them much. He had grown without them. What about his siblings? Locked up somewhere? Dead? Moved all around the city, perhaps? He could think of no way of tracking them down. He wasn’t sentimental, anyway.
    The house, though: he was sentimental about that. That hurt. He walked round the side, tracing the wall with his fingers. He remembered its cracks and marks. There, under the window, was a crude scratching, a foot high, of a man bearing what was meant to be a hammer. He remembered it fondly. Its edges had been rubbed smooth by generations of tracing fingers. Figures like that were all over Shutlow, and probably all over the whole city, in amongst the gang markings and the advertisements and the beggars’ marks and all the rest of the city’s graffiti and glyphs. There had been another one scratched into the wall of the house opposite, in the form (more or less) of a cat.
    If you saw a god manifest itself in the stuff of the city—and if the experience left you untouched, or at least unscarred—you scratched one of these into that sacred fabric.
Theophany
was the word the House’s Masters used. Normal people might