Iron Council (35 page)

Toro was with them. Ori realised it. He did not know how long that strange-silhouetted figure had been standing at the edge, with the oil-light drawing the edges of its horns. It was evening.

“Why are we here, Bull?” he said. “Where’s Ulliam?”

“Ulliam can’t come often. Remade would be a rarity on these streets. You’re here because I told you to be. Shut up and learn why. I’ll give you money. You get clothes. You’re servants now. Anyone sees you, you’re butlers, footmen, scullery maids. You keep yourselves clean. Got to fit in.”

“Was Badside compromised?” Ruby said. Toro did not sit, but seemed to lean, to be resting held up on nothing. Ori could feel the hex in those horns.

“You know what we aim to do. You know what we’ve wanted, what we build for.” Toro’s unnatural deep tones were a constant shock, a static charge. “The chair-of-the-board is in Parliament. On Strack Island. In the river. Vodyanoi militia in the water, cactus guards, officers in every chamber. Thaumaturges, the best in the city, putting up buffers and orneryblocks, charmtraps, all sorts. We ain’t getting into Parliament.

“And then there’s the Spike, and Perdido Street Station. You-know-who has to spend a lot of time in the Spike. Commanding the militia. Or in the station. In the embassy wing, in the high-tower.” It was more than the hub of New Crobuzon’s trains. It was a town, in three dimensions, encased in brick. The vastness of its mad-made architecture disobeyed not only rules of style but, it was said, of physics.

“When our quarry’s there, it ain’t as if it’s just the Perdidae we got to face.” Not that they would be easy to defeat. The dedicated submilitia given over to protect the station were well-armed and trained. “Wherever the chair-of-the-board goes, the Clypeans go. They’re our worry.

“What about in town? When did you last see any Fat Sun bigwig give a speech? They’re too scared, too busy trying to make secret peace with Tesh. So we need another strategy.” There was a long quiet.

“You-know-who is very close, intimate with one particular magister. Magister Legus. Weekly they meet. There’s all rumours, if you know who to ask. At Legus’
private
house. Where he lives as a citizen, takes off his mask. They settle down in private. Sometimes they don’t part again until the morning.

“Happens every week, sometimes twice. In the magister’s house.

“The house next door.”

Tumult.
How do you
know
?
someone was shouting, and
You can’t,
and
Whose is this place? How did you get this?
and on.

Ori had a memory. Something in him flinched from an understanding, unsettling, that veered close and was gone again and then was back. Ori saw others remembering, not sure what it was they remembered, not threading things together.

“It was hard to find out the true name behind a nom de jure,” Toro was saying. “But I did it. Took me a long time. Tracked him down.” Ori heard through gauze.

“This is the house . . .” Ori said, and then said nothing more. No one heard him and he was glad of that. He did not know what he wanted to do. He did not know what he felt.

This is the house where the old couple lived. That I heard about, the job you did, months ago, soon after I gave you the money. That the papers railed at. You killed them, or Old Shoulder did or one of us, and it weren’t that they was militia at all. They was rich, but you wouldn’t do them for that. It weren’t because they was rich but because of where they lived. You needed them gone so you could buy this house. That’s what you did with Jacobs’ money.

Ori felt gutted. He swallowed many times.

He sat hard on his own instincts. Something welled in him. All the uncertainty, the desperate lack of knowledge, then the weight of knowledge but vacillation of ideas, the shameful hash of theory that had sent him to the Runagaters, to all the different sects and dissidents, looking for something to ground him, a political home, which he had found in the anger and anarchist passion of Toro.
His uncertainty came back. He knew what he felt—that this was a dreadful thing, that he was aghast—but he remembered the exhortations to
contextualise,
always to have context, that the Runagaters above all had always stressed.

If one death’ll stop ten, ain’t it better? If two deaths’ll save a city?

He was still. He had a sense that he did not know best, that he had to learn, that he was a better man in this collective than out, that he must understand why this had happened before he judged. Toro watched him. Turned to Old Shoulder. Ori saw the cactus-man set his face.
They can see I know.

“Ori. Listen to me.”

The others watched without comprehension.

“Yes,” Toro lowed. Ori felt like a schoolchild before a teacher,
so disempowered, so ill-at-ease. He felt truly sick. Toro’s thaumaturged drone felt through his skin.

“Yes,” Old Shoulder said. “This is the house. They were old, rich, alone, no one to inherit, it’d be sold. But no, it ain’t good. Don’t presume, Ori, that there’s no guilt and pain.

“We get in that house beside us . . . we’re done. We
win.
We
win.
” Under the cactus’s words, Toro began to roar. It was a sound that went from beast-noise to the cry of elyctricity and iron under strain. It lasted a long time, and though it was not loud it took over the room and Ori’s head and stopped him thinking until it ebbed again and he was staring into Toro’s phosphorescent glass eyes.

“If we win, we take the city,” Old Shoulder said. “Take off the head. How many do we save then?” One by one, the other Toroans were understanding.

“You think other things weren’t tried? The magister’s house is closed. We can’t lie in wait there. The boss can’t push in, even with the horns. Some ward blocks us. Weapons won’t go through: not a bullet, a blast, a stone. It’s packed hard with charms. Because of who comes to visit. The sewers are stuffed with ghuls—no way in there there. It’s what we had to do. Think about it. You want out of this, now?”

How did I become the one to be asked? Don’t the others have to decide?
But they were looking to him. Even Enoch had come to it now, and was open-mouthed thinking of what he had acted as lookout for, that night. Old Shoulder and Baron watched Ori. Tension drew the cactus-man up and stiff. Baron was relaxed. They would not let Ori walk, of course. He knew that. If he did not go along with this, he was dead. Even if he stayed, perhaps. If they thought they could not trust him.

Everything that was necessary was
necessary.
It was a tenet of the dissidents. And yes of course that
necessary
had to be fought over, debated and won. But they were so close. That they had found egress to a place their target would be alone, unwarded, vulnerable, where they could finally give their gift to New Crobuzon, was a towering thing. If it took two deaths to make it happen . . . could Ori stand in the way of history? Something in him blenched.
It was necessary,
he thought. He bowed his head.

On the top floor, the wall adjoining Magister Legus’ property had been precisely excavated. Inches of plaster and thin wood were swept away. The wall was dug out.

“Deeper’n that, hexes kick in,” Old Shoulder said. He touched the exposed surface with tremendous care. He was looking at Ori. Ori made his face unmoving. He listened. Toro had been preparing for weeks.
Do you have other gangs?
Ori thought, with an emotion he could not come close to identifying.
Or are we your only ones? Whose name is this house in? It ain’t as if you bought it as yourself,
is it?

Baron was talking, with his instrumental precision.
I better listen,
Ori realised.
This is the plan.

“Sulion’s close to caving. We’re buying two things: information, of who’s where and what their tactics are, and a first move. Without him at the door, we’re dead.”

This is militia techniques,
Ori thought,
that’s what I’m learning.
Once again, Ori wondered how many militia there were who had been to the war and had come back with such bitterness as this, so full of it. What they would do. He watched Baron and realised that everything in Baron led him to this, that he had no plans beyond this, that this would be his revenge.

An epidemic of murders. That’s what we’ll see. If those AWOL and back from the wars don’t have outlets. And the New Quill will recruit, too. They’ll recruit men like this. Jabber help us.
And Ori’s eagerness to take off the head of the government came back strong.
Soon,
he thought.
Soon.

He felt as if he might lose himself. He had to tell himself several times, until he was sure of it, that he was where he was meant to be.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

People could not walk New Crobuzon’s streets without
looking up. Past the aerostats and the wyrmen, the hundreds of lives—alien, indigenous, created—that teemed the city’s skies, they looked at the cold white and the austere sun, and wondered if another of those searing organic shadows would come.

“They’re still trying to parley,” Baron told the crew. He had it from Bertold, who had inferred it from the Mayor’s forays to the embassy wing with diplomats and linguists.

Ori returned to the shelter. Ladia welcomed him, but she was wary. She looked so exhausted he was shocked. As ever there were men and women the colours of dirt lying where gravity huddled them, but now the hall itself was scarred. The walls were tattooed with splinters and ripped-up paint; the windows were boarded.

“Quillers,” she told him. “Three days ago. They heard we
were . . . affiliated. We were slack, Ori, left papers around. With what’s going on in Dog Fenn, I suppose, we’ve been distracted: it’s been impossible to be so careful. We got cocky.”

He made her lie down, and though she bantered with him she cried when he laid her out on the old sofa, cried and held onto him for seconds, then sniffed and patted him, made a last joke and slept. He cleaned for her. Some of the homeless helped him. “We had a play yesterday,” one broken-toothed woman said to him as she wiped the tables. “Some Flexible troupe. Come to play for us. Very good it was, though not like nothing I’d seen before. I couldn’t really hear what they was saying. But it was nice, you know, good of them to come and do that for us.”

No one had seen Jacobs for days. “He’s been around, though. He’s been busy. You seen? His mark’s all over.”

The chalk spirals that Jacobs left wherever he went, that had given him his name, continued to disseminate, gone viral. They were in all quarters, in paint and thick wax colour, in tar; they were carved onto temples, scratched on glass and the girders of the towerblocks.

“You think he really started it? Maybe he’s just copying someone else. Maybe no one started it at all. You heard how it’s turning? People are using it as a slogan. It’s been adopted.”

Ori had heard and seen it. Spirals that tailed into obscenities levelled at the government. Shouts of
Spiral away!
when the militia appeared. Why that and not another of the symbols that had defaced walls for years?

The old man’s corner was grey with spirals. Ink and graphite, in different sizes, the angles and directions of the curves variant, and here were spirals off spirals in intricate series. It could be a language, Ori thought. Clockwise or widdershins, stopping after so many turns, in differing directions and numbers; derivatives budded from each corkscrew whorl.

For nine nights, Ori came. He volunteered the night shift. “I got to do this,” he told Old Shoulder. “I’ll do what you need in the day, but I got to do something.”

The Toroans granted him a kind of sabbatical, without trust. As he walked, Ori would stop, fasten his shoe buckle, lean against a wall and look behind him. If not Baron, someone would be following him, he was sure: he knew that the first time he spoke to someone that his unseen watcher, his fellow Bull-runner, did not trust, he was dead. Or perhaps there was no one. He did not know what
he was to his comrades.

In The Two Maggots, Petron Carrickos gave Ori a book of his poems, self-published as Flexible Press.

“Been a long damn time, Ori,” he said. He had a shade of
wariness—his mouth twitched to ask
Where’ve you been? You
disappeared
—but he bought Ori grappa and spoke to him about his projects. Petron held
Runagate Rampant
—not quite openly, but with the new bolshiness of the times.

Ori read a stanza aloud.

“A season here/In your flower/Petals of wood and iron/Lockstock stonedead shock of a Dog Fenn frown.” He nodded.

Petron told Ori about the Flexibles: who was doing what, who had stayed part of something, who had disappeared. “Samuel’s buggered off. He’s selling stuff in some tarty gallery in Salacus Fields.” He snorted. “Nelson and Drowena are still in Howl Barrow. Of course everything’s changed now, you can imagine. We’re still trying to do the shows when we can. Community stuff, in churches and halls and such.”

“And just how does the Convulsive New go down with the commonalty?” It was a keystone concept from the second Nuevist Manifesto. Ori was sardonic.

“They like the Convulsive New just fine, Ori. Just fine.”

There was an illicit congress of all the underground guilds, the militant factory workers of Smog Bend and Gross Coil, spreading, Petron said, to other industries. Delegates from foundries, shipyards, dye plants, in a secret Dog Fenn location, discussing what demands to put to Parliament.

“Caucus is talking to them, too,” he said, and Ori nodded. He did not say, as he thought,
More talking, talking again, that’s the problem, ain’t it?

At a crowded canalside market in Sangwine they reached, as part of the aimless walking that Petron theorised as a reconfiguration of the city, they came to sudden screams. “What in gods’, what in gods’, “ someone was shouting, and there was a strange back-
forward surge of crowd, people running to see what was happening and fleeing again past the stalls of books and trinket jewellery.

A woman lay in shudders by the lock and the watergates, her skirt puddled, her hair crawling like worms in static that made
the air shake. People stared at her and tensed, made to run in and grab her and pull her away, but they blenched at the manifestation above her.

Vapour, a slick and sickly bruise-blue—a purpling as if the world itself, the air, was bleeding beneath its skin. The air souring and, like badness in milk, particles of matter coagulating from nothing, clots of rank aether aggregated into organising shape, and then there was a moving insectile thing made of scabbed nothing and sudden shade that twisted in the air as if suspended by thread and glimmered visible and invisible and then was unquestionably there, a hook-legged thing in the colours of rot, as large as a man. A wasp, its waist bone-thin below a thorax that refracted light like mottled glass, its sting like a curved finger beckoning from its abdomen, extending and adrip.

It cleaned its legs with its intricate mouth. It turned ugly compound eyes and looked at the aghast crowd. It unfolded its limbs one by one and shuddered and was moved, though not it seemed by the motion of those legs, but still as if it dangled and some giant hand holding its line had shifted. It came closer.

The woman was seizing. Her face had gone dark. She was not breathing. There was a gasp, a choking in the front of those watching. Two others fell. A man, another woman, fitting epileptically, flecking with spittle and vomit.

“Get out of the way!”
The militia. From the entrance to the market. They came firing, and the sounds of the guns broke the cold that had held people, and they scattered screaming. Ori and Petron ducked but did not run, pushed away from the noisome apparition and watched the militia fire into its corpus.

Bullets went through it, to break glass and china beyond. The woman in its shadow spat and died. In a fever of shot, the wasp trilled and scissored its limbs like a trap. The lead was taken into it with a bare ripple in its uncanny flesh, and some emerged and some was eaten. The thing was dancing in the officers’ fire. The leakage from the dead woman’s mouth was dark, her innards turned to tar.

An officer-thaumaturge cracked his fingers and made occult shapes, and filaments spun into sight between his fingers and the wasp, plasm made hexed fibres and webbing, but the predatory thing passed through the mesh, suddenly far-off or side-on or blinked closed like an eye, and in a spatter of unlight was there again and the net was evanescing. The others stricken by the wasp were still, and a seasick green was coming to the faces of the militia.

But then the wasp was gone. The air was clean. In a moment, the militia began slowly to straighten, Ori braced himself, dropped with a cry when a ghost image of the wasp returned in air again momentarily varicose, and went, and came back once more, now nothing but a vespine insinuation, and was, finally, all gone.

“It’s not the first of them,” Petron said. They had run back to The Two Maggots, where they sucked at sugared rum tea, craving warm and sweet. “You not hear about them? I thought it was stupid rumours, at first. I thought it was nonsense.”

Manifestations that killed by toxic ambience. “One was a grub-thing,” Petron said, “in Gallmarch. There was one was a tree. And one was a dagger, up Raven’s Gate way, I heard.”

“I heard of the dagger,” Ori said. He remembered some strange headline in
The Beacon.
“And weren’t there others? A sewing machine? Wasn’t there a candle?”

“Goddamn Tesh, isn’t it? That’s what it is. We got to end this war.”

Were the conjurations Tesh weapons? Each must cost countless psychonoms of puissance, especially if called from Tesh, and each took only a handful of victims. How could they be effective?

“Yeah but it isn’t just that, is it?” Petron said. “Not just the numbers. It’s the effect. On the mind. On morale.”

The next day Ori heard of another manifestant. It was in Serpolet. It was two people gripped together and fucking. No one could see their faces, he heard. Just saw them adangle, turning on twine, mashing their lips, their hands pushed into each other’s flesh. When they went—driven out by the attacks of the locals or not, who knew?—they left five dead, leaked and spilled on the cobbles, turned bitumen.

When at last Spiral Jacobs came to the soup-house, Ori could not believe the look of him. The old man was twisted under the weight of his own bones; his skin was rucked and wretched on him.

“Gods almighty,” Ori said gently as he ladled food. “Gods almighty, Spiral, what’s happened to you?” The vagrant looked up at him with a wonderful and open smile. There was no recognition
at all. “Where you been? All this time?”

Jacobs heard the question and pulled his brows together. He thought a long time and said carefully: “Perdido Street Station.”

It was the only thing he said that night that evidenced sanity. He murmured to himself in a foreign language or in children’s noises, he smiled, drew ink spirals on his skin. At night amid the grunts and the draughts, Ori came to where Jacobs sat chattering to himself. He was nothing but silhouette when Ori spoke.

“We’ve lost you, ain’t we, Jacobs?” he said. He was stricken. He could almost feel the rise of tears. “I don’t know if you’ll come back. Where you’ve gone. I wanted, I wanted to find you to tell you thank you, for everything you done.”
You can’t hear me but I can.
“I got to tell you this now, because I’m going places and doing things that might, might make it so I won’t get to see you no more, Spiral. And I want you to know . . . that we took your money, your gift, and we’re doing it
right.
We’re going to make you proud. We’re going to make Jack proud. I promise you.

“What you done for me. Gods.” Spiral Jacobs jabbered and drew swirls. “To know someone who knew Jack. To have your blessing. Whether you come back or not, Spiral, you’ll always be part of this. And when it’s over and it’s done, I’ll make sure the city knows your name. If I’m here. Got my word. Thank you.” He kissed the crumpled forehead, astonished at the fragility of the skin.

That night there was no moon, and the gaslamps of Griss Fell gave out. In the dark the New Quill Party attacked the kitchen again. Ori woke to chants of “scum” and the tattoo of missiles on the wooded windows. Through a slit between boards he could see them massed. Ranks of men, studies in shadow, the brims of their bowlers low, making their eyes belts of dark. A streetful of carefully suited malignance, rows of black-cottoned shoulders padded with fighters’ muscle, tipping their hats, straightening the dark ties noosed from their white shirts. They brushed imagined dust from themselves and swung weapons.

But the vagrants’ fear was brief. Was it Militant Sundry who came for them? Was it the mixed ranks of the Caucus? Ori could not see. He only heard shouting and shots, saw the Quillers start and turn like a pack of feral clerks, and run to fight.

Ladia and the residents scattered. Ori ran for Jacobs, but to his surprise the old man walked past him with purpose but no urgency. He did not look at Ori or anywhere but ahead. He walked quickly past the last milling homeless, while at the street’s end was the sound of battle and in the dark only a rapid and ugly mass of black figures. Jacobs turned the other way, toward Saltpetre Station and the raised arches that climbed north over the city.

Ori hesitated, thinking that there was perhaps nothing left to speak to in that shell, and then realising that he wanted to see where the man would go and what he would do. In the very dark of New Crobuzon without its lamps, Ori followed Spiral Jacobs.

He did not stalk him like a hunter but merely walked a few steps behind. He tried to place his shoes down soft enough that his step was only a ghost-echo of the mendicant’s shuffling. They were the only people in the street. They walked between a fence of wood and iron on one side, damp bricks on the other, rising scores of feet above their heads. Spiral Jacobs skipped, treaded forward singing a song in an alien key, wandered back some steps, ran his fingers, poking from the cutoff ends of his gloves, over the corrugated iron and rubbed at its rust, and Ori came behind him as respectful and observant as a disciple.

With a thumb of chalk, Spiral Jacobs drew the shape that had given him his name, whispering while he did, and it was of astonishing perfection, a mathematical symbol. And then there were curlicues, smaller coils coming from its outer skin, and Jacobs ran his hand over it, and walked on.

It began to rain as Ori reached the mark Jacobs had made. It did not smear.

Past the tumbledown brick arch of Saltpetre Station and on toward Flyside into a place where the gaslamps had not given out, where guttering dirt-light returned to tan the walls and doors into grotesques. The old man wrote his shapes. He wrote on window, once, the grease of whatever he was using gripping the shine. A rut of street closed up to Ori and funnelled him through a brick arch after his idiot guru, into a wider zone of pallid light where the gas was effaced by the elyctro-barometrics, cold lurid colours, red and gold made ice in knotted glass.