The Gods Of Gotham Read Online Free PDF

after me.
    Neighbors trickled into the street under the charcoal sky, staring in awe and with a weird city-dweller’s thrill-seeking pleasure at the wide ribbon of flame on the upper floor. Behind us, at last the nearest fire bell rent the air with its shocking peals—single clangs to summon help to Ward One. Moments later, the answering echo erupted from the cupola of City Hall, beyond the park.
    “Wait,” I said, pulling sharply at Julius’s shoulder.
    The remaining windows of the storage facility began lighting up like a series of matchsticks—sparks had clearly invaded every story, fire devouring the interior as if the huge building were made of paper. Glass shattering in sudden pistol shots that I couldn’t quite understand.
    Then I did understand, and that was far worse.
    “This is Max Hendrickson’s store,” I whispered.
    Julius’s brown eyes went wide.
    “Jesus have mercy,” he said. “If the fire hits his stock of whale oil—”
    Red flannel flashed past us as a volunteer fireman with his braces hanging off and his curious leather helmet drooping over his face careened around the corner of Exchange Place.
Hell-bent to claim thenearest fire plug for his own engine company,
I thought with my familiar slight flare of disdain.
And thereby all the glory.
    Meanwhile, it occurred to me that my future was now less than certain.
    “Go, fetch your valuables,” Julius ordered before I said anything. “And pray you have a house an hour from now.”
    I lived in Stone Street, two blocks below the southern terminus of New Street, down Broad, and I sprinted around the corner away from the doomed building with nothing but Mercy, my residence, and its four hundred dollars in silver on my mind. I would get that money if it killed me. Storefronts I’d passed a thousand times went by in an eyeblink, handcrafted chairs and leather-bound books and bolts of cloth just visible behind the darkened shop displays, my boots flying over eroding cobblestones, running as if hell were at my heels.
    That was my first mistake. Hell turned out to be in front of me, over a block away from the New Street fire.
    The instant my foot touched Broad, a detonation like a volcano erupting burst 38 Broad Street into a plume of rock, granite missiles the size of grown men sailing above me. The structure had hurled a quarry’s worth of stone into the buildings opposite by the time I skidded to a halt.
    At first I thought,
Holy Christ, someone’s set a bomb in our midst.
But 38 Broad, I remembered in the back of my hellfire-dazzled mind as the mammoth warehouse rent itself in pieces before my eyes, was presently a saltpeter storage facility. It held shipments of gunpowder belonging to the well-liked merchant duo of Crocker and Warren. Which was a shame for New York, really. As thunder nearly shattered my eardrums, I thought,
Bad luck. A window must have been open,
for cinders from the oil fire in New Street had obviously been borne on the wind across the thoroughfare and into a room ofpowder kegs. Amid the fury, airy curlicues of ash hung perfectly still high above the cobbles. Maybe it was thick of me to even ponder the role of luck at the time, but exploding saltpeter warehouses seem to have a slowing effect on my wits.
    Belatedly, I turned to run. I’d taken two steps when I saw a woman flying past me, her mouth open and her face fixed in surprise, her hair streaming backward in a lazy arc. One shoe was blown from her foot, and the foot itself had a smudge of blood on the instep. And that was when I started seeing things funny, just as I realized that I was flying too. Then I heard—no,
felt
, for the world was silent—the entire earth ripping in half as easily and raggedly as an old piece of cotton.
    When I opened my eyes again, the planet had inverted itself. And it was still busily exploding.
    My head rested against a door still within its frame, but doors aren’t meant to be horizontal. I wondered why this one was. And why there