Iron Council (34 page)

That was how it had been. And then to this edge, this most literal badland.

“Here. This is it, here. The edge of it. The edge of the cacotopic stain.”

part six

THE CAUCUS RACE

CHAPTER TWENTY

The Monstrous Without—and Within. New Crobuzon’s Twin Enemies: The Watcher and the Treacherous. Night of Shame.

The newspapers declaimed. They brought out extra-large fonts for their condemnations of the EyeSky Riots. There were heliotypes of the dead barricaded in shops and smothered by smoke, crushed in falls from windows, shot.

In The Grocer’s Sweetheart on the Chainday after, Ori expected the
Runagate Rampant
meeting to be overflowing, but no one was there. He came back the next night and the next, looking for a face he remembered. At last on Dustday he saw the knit-worker, gathering money, whispering in the landlord’s ear.

“Jack,” said Ori. She turned, untrusting, and her face only opened a very little when she saw it was him.

“Jack,” she said.

“It’ll have to be fast,” she said. “I have to go. Wine, then, go on.

“Spiralling down, eh?” she said, pointing at the coil-marks on his clothes. “I see them all over now. They’ve gone from walls to clothes. Cactus punks are wearing them, Nuevists, radicals. What do they mean?”

“A link,” he said carefully. “To Half-a-Prayer. I know the man who started them.”

“I heard of him, I think . . .”

“He’s a friend of mine. I know him well.” There was silence. They drank. “Missed the meeting.”

“There ain’t no meetings now. You mad, Ori . . . Jack?” She was horrified. “I’m sorry, Jack,” she said, “really sorry. Curdin told me your name. And where you live. He shouldn’t have done, but he was keen I be able to get
Double-R
to you, if need be. I told no one.”

He contained his shock, shook his head.

“The meetings?” he said, and she forgot her contrition quickly.

“Why would we have meetings?” she said. “When it’s going
on?” Ori shook his head, and she gave a sound almost a sob. “Jack, Jack . . . Jabber’s
sake.
What are you
doing
? Weren’t you
there
?”

“Godsdammit, of course I was. I was in Creekside. I was . . .” He lowered his voice. “Who are the Militant Sundry, any damn way? I was trying to stand up for the godsdamned khepri your bloody brainless
commonalty
were busy trying to butcher.”

“The Sundry? Well, if you was xenian and all you’d had in your corner were the comprador bastards in the Divers Tendency, wouldn’t you turn somewhere else? And don’t you
dare.
Don’t you dare scorn people. You know the Quillers take up the human dust. Even your friend Petron knows that—and don’t bloody look at me like that, Jack, everyone knows his name, he was in the Flexibles. And I ain’t sure of all the bloody lunacies the Nuevists do, faddling about dressed as animals, silly bloody games, but I’d trust him. I don’t know as I’d trust you, Jack, and that’s a sad thing, because it ain’t that I think you don’t want what I want. I know you do. But I don’t trust your judgement. I think you’re a fool, Jack.”

Ori was not even outraged. He was used to the arrogance of
the Runagates. He looked at her with cool annoyance, and, yes, a residue of respect, a due she had inherited from Curdin.

“While you’re playing prophets, Jack,” he said, “keep your eyes open. When I move . . . you’ll
know.
We have plans.”

“They say Iron Council’s coming back.”

Her face had taken on such joy.

“It’s coming back.”

All the things Ori could think to say were obvious. He did not want to insult her, so he tried to think of something else to say, but could not.

“It’s a fairy tale,” he said.

“It ain’t.”

“A fable. There’s no Iron Council.”

“They want you to think that. If there’s no Iron Council, then we ain’t never took power. But if there is, and there
is,
we did it before, we can do it again.”

“Good Jabber, listen to yourself . . .”

“You telling me you never seen the helios? What do you think that was? You think they built the bloody train by marching alongside each other, women,
whores,
at the front? Children riding the damn cab hood?”

“Something happened, of course it did, but they were put down. It was a strike is all. They’re long dead—”

She was laughing. “You don’t know, you don’t know. They wanted them dead, and they want them dead again, but they’re coming back. Someone from the Caucus set out for them. We got a message. Why’d they be going, if not to tell them to return?

“Haven’t you seen the graffiti?” she said. “All over. Along with all them coils and spirals you’re wearing.
IC You.
Iron Council, You. It’s coming back, and even just knowing that’s a godsdamned inspiration.”

“People want them, they’ll find them, they’ll believe in them, Jack . . .”

“What you don’t know,” she said, and didn’t even look angry anymore, “is that we’re moving. If you could hear the Caucus.” She sipped her drink. She looked at him, some kind of challenge.
She’s sitting on the damn
Caucus. The cabal of insurrectionists, the truce of the factions and the unaligned.

“There are those in Parliament trying to cosy up, you know. They can’t admit it, but there are factories where
we
decide if people go to work or not. They want to negotiate. Parliament ain’t the only decider in New Crobuzon anymore. There’s two powers now.”

The knit-worker stretched her hand across the table.

“Madeleina,” she said deliberately. “Di Farja.”

He shook her hand, moved by her trust. “Ori,” he said, as if she didn’t know.

“I tell you something, Ori. We’re in a race. The Caucus is in a race to get things ready. It’ll be weeks or months yet. And we won’t just go round and round—we’re making it a race
to
something. We ain’t stupid, you know. We’re racing to build what we have to, chains of—” She looked around. “—chains of
command,
communication. Last night was the start. There’s a way to go, but it’s started. The war’s going sour, they say. The maimed’ll fill the streets. If Tesh could send over that—” She closed her eyes and held her breath, retrospectively aghast. “—that thing, that sky-born witness, what else might they do? Time . . . we ain’t got much time.

“And the Iron Council’s coming back,” she said. “When people hear that, it’ll go off.”

Maybe we’re all together,
Ori thought with a plaintiveness that troubled him.
Maybe the Caucus race is our race too . . .

“We’re all racing,” he said.

“Yeah, but some of us in the wrong direction.”

He thought then of what it would be. Of that moment when the dispossessed, the toilers, the, yes if she wanted, yes, the commonalty heard that the
Mayor,
the head of the Fat Sun, the arbiter of New Crobuzon, was
gone.
What that would be.

“You want to talk inspiration?” he said. He was angry again, at her monomaniac prescription. “That I’ll give you,” he said. “You’ll thank me, Jack. What we’re doing, what
we’re
doing . . . we need to
wake people up.
”

“They’re already awake, Jack. That’s what you don’t see.”

He shook his head.

Bertold Sulion the Clypean Guard had lost his commitment to New Crobuzon, to the Mayor, to the law he was pledged to. Baron told them.

“It’s bled out of him,” he said. “You ain’t trusted to much when you’re a Clypean. The oath you take says it all:
I see and hear only what the Mayor and my charges allow me to.
Bertold don’t know so much. But he knows the war’s being lost. And he’s seen the deals they’ll do while them he trained with fight and die. It’s all gone rancid. His loyalty’s bled out of him and there ain’t nothing left.

“That’s the thing,” he said. He spoke with care. “It’s in you like your blood.” He patted his sternum. “And when it goes bad, when it goes septic, you might say, you bleed it out and then either something else fills it, or it leaves you empty. Sulion ain’t got nothing in him anymore. He wants to grass, and for form’s sake, he’s asking a lot of money for it, but it
ain’t
the money he wants. He wants to betray because he wants to betray. He wants us to help him go bad. Whether he knows it or not.”

They were not in Badside.
Here are keys for you,
the note had said, pinned by one of the two-horned cesti to the wall.
We have a new meeting house.
An address. Ori had read the note with Enoch, and they had stared at each other. Enoch was a stupid man, but this time Ori shared his confusion. “Flag Hill?”

At the edge of the city, at the end of the Head Line unrolling north from Perdido Street Station, Flag Hill was where the bankers and industrialists lived, the officials, the wealthiest artists. It was a landscape of wide-open ways and sumptuous houses sheer onto the streets, backing onto shared gardens. There were flowering trees and banyans spilling their knotting creepers and making them roots and trunks, emerging from between black paving.

There had been a slum in Flag Hill for years, like an abscess: an oddity of city planning. Mayor Tremulo the Reformer, two centuries past, had ordered some streets of modest housing built on the slopes of the rise that gave the area its name, so that the heroes of the Pirate Wars, he said, could live by those they had defended. The Flag Hill rich had not welcomed the newcomers, and Mayor Tremulo’s schemes for “social merging” had been made risible. Without money what had been modest became a slum. Slate and brick went sickly. The little community of Flag Hill poor came in and out by train, while their neighbours disdained the raised rails for private hansoms, and waited for squalor to reach a critical mass. It had done so fifteen years before.

The poor had been removed from their collapsing houses, settled in ten- and fifteen-floor blocks of concrete in Echomire and Aspic. And then their once-neighbours had moved curiously into the deserted, hollowed rookeries, and money had at last come. Some buildings had been made into houses for the new wealthy, shored up and two or three holed together: to live in reconfigured “base cottages” became a fashion. But several streets at the heart of Flag Hill’s nameless poverty district had been preserved, architecture as aspic, and made a slum museum.

It was through this that Ori and Enoch came. They had cleaned themselves, worn their better clothes. Ori had never been to this street-long memorial to poverty. There was no rot, of course, no smell, nor had there been for more than a decade. But the windows were still broken (their shard edges reinforced by subtle braces to prevent more cracking), the walls still bowed by damp and discoloured (thaumaturgy and joists holding them at the point of their collapse).

The houses were labelled. Brass plaques by their doors told the history of the slum, and talked of the conditions in which the inhabitants had lived. Here, Ori read, can be seen scars of the arson and accidental conflagrations that plagued the streets, forcing the locals to endure life in the spoils of fire. The house was smoked and char-dark. Its carbonised skin was sealed under a matte varnish.

There were front rooms and outhouses that could be entered. A
FAMILY OF SIX OR EIGHT MIGHT CROWD INTO SUCH TERRIBLE SURROUNDINGS.
The detritus of slum life was left in place, sterilised and dusted by attendants. I
T SEEMS UNBELIEVABLE THAT IN MODERN TIMES SUCH SQUALOR COULD GO UNCHECKED.

The house to which they had been directed was a classic of Flag Hill architecture: big, beautiful, mosaiced in painted pebbles. Ori wondered if he had misread the address, but their keys worked. Enoch was frowning. “I been here before,” he said.

It was empty. It was a sham house. Its rooms were bone-
colourless, as were its curtains. Enoch’s awe at the house and the gardens annoyed Ori.

There were people on the Flag Hill streets, men in tailored jackets, women in scarves. Mostly it was humans, but not only. There were canals here, and a community of wealthy vodyanoi who passed with their jump-crawl, dressed in light waterproof mumming of suits, chewing the cheroots that humans smoked and the vodyanoi would eat. There might pass a cactus now and then, some rare uptown achiever. There were constructs here, jolting steam-
figures that gave Ori nostalgia for his childhood when they had been everywhere. The Flag Hillers were wealthy enough to afford the licences, to have their equipment pass the assiduous tests instituted in the aftermath of the Construct War. Mostly, though, even the rich had golems.

They walked with inhuman care, empty-eyed clay or stone or wood or wire men and women. They carried bags, they carried their owners, looking from side to side in mimicry of human motion, as if they could see through those pointless eyes, as if they did not sense mindlessly and abnaturally to follow their instructions.

When the other Toroans arrived, they all asked the question: “What are we doing here?”

When Baron came he was dressed as smartly as a local. He wore the lambswool, the fine sifted cotton and silk easily. They gaped.

“Oh yes,” he said. Shaven, cleaned, smoking a prerolled cigarillo. “You’re my staff, now. Best get used to it.” He sat with his back to the wall in their new, huge, empty room, and told them about Bertold Sulion.