Iron Council (7 page)

It was a young memory, a child’s memory—he did not know why he had been in the plaza or with whom. It was the first time for years the militia had been seen like that in their uniforms, had been a forerunner of their turn from covert policing, and in a grey wedge they had targeted the shouting segment of crowd. The overseer had drawn a flintlock and dropped his whip and joined them, and left the tethered figure.

Ori did not remember seeing the rough man who had ascended toward Jack Half-a-Prayer until he was near the top. He had a vivid image of him, but he did not know if that was his six-year-old’s memory or one constructed from all the reports he had later heard. The man—here came his puppet now, look, on the stage, while
the militia’s backs were turned—had been distinctive. Hairless, viciously scarred, pocked as if by decades of ferocious acne, his eyes sunken and wide, dressed in rags, a scarf pulled over his mouth and nose to hide him.

The puppet that skulked exaggeratedly up the steps called out to Jack Half-a-Prayer with a harsh voice, a twenty-year-old echo of the real man’s loud and piercing call. He called Jack’s name, as he had that day. And neared him and pulled out a pistol and a knife (the puppet’s little tinfoil constructions glinted).
Remember me, Jack?
he had shouted, and his puppet shouted.
I owe you this.
A voice like triumph.

For years after the murder of Jack Half-a-Prayer the plays had followed the first conventional understanding. The pockmarked man—brother, father or lover to one of the murdering Man’Tis’s victims—was too moved by rage to wait, overcome and righteous and straining to kill. And though it was understandable and no one could blame him, the law did not work that way; and when they heard and saw him it was the militia’s sad duty to warn him off, and when that didn’t work to fire at him, putting an end to his plans, and killing the Half-a-Prayer with stray bullets. And it was regrettable, as the legal process had not yet been completed, but it could hardly have been in any doubt that the outcome would soon have been the same.

That was the story for years, and the actors and puppeteers played Jack as the pantomime baddie, but noticed that the crowds still cheered him.

In the second decade after the events, new interpretations had emerged, in response to the question,
Why had Half-a-Prayer shouted in what sounded like delight when the man came for him?
Witnesses recalled the torn-skinned man raising his pistol, and thought that they had perhaps seen Jack strain as if to meet him and then
of course
a
mercy
killing. One of Jack’s gang, risking his own life to bring the humiliations of his boss to an end. And maybe he had succeeded—could anyone be sure it was a militia bullet that had ended the Remade captive? Maybe that first shot was a friend saving a friend.

The audiences liked that much more. Now Jack Half-a-Prayer was back as he had been in graffiti for decades—champion. The story became a grand and vaguely instructional tragedy of hopes noble-but-doomed, and though Jack and his nameless companion were now the heroes, the city’s censors allowed it, to the surprise of many. In some productions the newcomer took Jack’s life then ended his own, in others was shot dead as he fired. The death scenes of both men had become more and more protracted. The truth,
as Ori understood it—that though Jack had been left dead and lolling in his harness the pock-faced man had disappeared, his fate uncertain—was not mentioned.

Up the little stairs ran the scarred-man puppet, his weapons outstretched, scooping up the overseer’s dropped whip (a complicated arrangement of pins and threads facilitating the movement), as tradition said he had done. But
what was this
? “What is this?”
the narrator shouted. Ori smiled—he had seen the script. He was clenching his fists.

“Why pick up the whip?” the narrator said. Having been caught in the rude charm of the Nuevist production, the Quillers were definitely standing now, shouting again
shame, shame.
“Iber gotter gun,” said the scarred-man puppet directly to the audience over their rising cries. “Iber gotter knifey. Whybe gonner pick anubber?”

“I’ve an idea, pock-boy,” said the narrator.

“Ibey idear already too, see?” the puppet said back. “One an
dese,
” holding out the gun and the whip, “tain’t fer me, see?” An elegant little mechanism spun the pistol in his wooden hand so that suddenly he held it out butt-first, a
gift
for his tethered friend, and he took his knife to Jack Half-a-Prayer’s bonds.

A heavy glass trailed beer as it arced over the crowd to burst wetly.
Treason!
came the calls, but there were others now, people standing and shouting
yes, yes, tell it like it is!
Dogged, only dancing over the skittering glass, the Flexible Puppet Theatre continued with their new version of the classic, where the two little figures were not doomed or cursed with visions too pure to sustain or beaten by a world that did not deserve them, but were still fighting, still trying to win.

They were inaudible over the shouting. Food pelted the stage. A disturbance, and the master of ceremonies came on, his suit rumpled. He was hurried, almost pushed on by a thin young man—
a clerk from the Office of Censorship who listened backstage through all registered performances. His job had abruptly stopped being routine.

“Enough, you have to stop,” shouted the MC and tried to pull the puppets away. “I’ve been informed, this performance is
over.
” He was shocked out of his pompous patter. Thrown scraps hit him, so he cowered even more than he already was. The supporters of
the Flexibles were few but loud, and they were demanding the
show continue, but seeing Fallybeggar’s man lose control the young
censor himself stepped up and spoke to the audience.

“This performance is cancelled. This troupe is guilty of Rudeness to New Crobuzon in the Second Degree, and is hereby disbanded pending an enquiry.”
Fuck you, shame, get off, show must go on. What rudeness? What rudeness?
The young censor was quite unintimidated, and was damned if he’d put this dissidence into words. “The militia have been called, and on their arrival, all still here will be deemed complicit with the performance. Please leave the premises immediately.” The mood was too mean for dispersal.

There was more glass in the air and the screams that told it had landed. Quillers were targeting the stage, Ori saw, heading to beat the performers, and he pushed himself up and indicated to nearby friends and they headed off to intercept the knuckle-cracking Quillers, and the riot blossomed.

Adely Gladly ran out, already in her risqué costume, and shouted for peace. Ori saw her, just before he split his fist on the back of some Quill-scum head, then looked back at the matter in hand. On the stage the Flexible Puppet Theatre were scooping all their props out of the way. Over the noise of beating and shouts and percussions of glass the wonderful voice of the Dog Fenn Songbird begged for the fighting to stop, and no one paid her any notice.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The play was defunct and done, and the militia when they came were more concerned with clearing the building than with making arrests. Ori blocked the Quillers long enough for the puppeteers to clear their pieces, and with the Flexibles he ducked backstage past brawls that were now mostly drunken, without political hatreds to refine them.

They came out into an alley, bloodied but laughing, a mass of theatre people stuffing costumes into carpet bags, and one or two like Ori, observers. It had rained a little moments before, but the night was warm, so the film of water seemed like the city’s sweat.

Petron Carrickos, who had been the narrator, pulled his moustache off, leaving its ghost in spirit gum above his lip, and stuck it on the alley’s lone poster, giving the revivalist whose sermons it advertised thick eyebrows. Ori went west with him and several others to Cadmium Street. They would double back and head for Salacus Fields Station without passing Fallybeggar’s entrance.

Late but not so late, the streets where Salacus met Howl Barrow were full. There were militia on corners. Ori jostled through late window-shoppers and theatre-goers, the music-lovers at voxiterator booths, a few golems like giant marionettes, wearing their
owners’ sashes. There were markings on walls. Illicit galleries and theatres, artists’ squats, signposted by graffiti for those who could read it. Salacus Fields itself was becoming colonised by the weekend bohemians. There had always been moneyed slummers, bad-boy younger children seeking tawdry redemption or dissolution, but now their visits were temporary and their transformations tourist. Ori felt contempt. Artists and musicians were moving out as agents and merchants moved in and rents rose, even while industry floundered. So to Howl Barrow.

The streets sputtered under the bilious elyctro-barometric shopsigns. Ori nodded at the faces he knew from meetings or
performances—a woman by the silversmith’s door, a thickset
cactus-man handing out flyers. Brickwork buckled and held on, and leaned house on house, repaired in a patchwork of metal and cement, paint in anarchic styles, and spirals and obscenities; and coming out and over into the sky were temple spires and lookout pitches for the militia, and towerblocks. The crowds were thinning as the evening went toward deep night.

By raised train through the roofs to Sly Station, changing platforms and bidding friends goodnight, till even Petron had gone for Mog Hill, and Ori was alone among late-night travellers sprawled on seats and smelling of gin. He stepped past some in overalls from late shifts, who turned to not look at the drunkards. Ori sat next to an older woman, and followed her gaze through dirt-stained glass into the miles of city, a fen of buildings thick with glints. The train crossed the river. The woman was staring at nothing in particular, Ori realised, and it caught his attention too—just a juddering of lights at some intersection, a kink of city.

The windows of Ori’s street in Syriac were mostly uncurtained, and when he woke he looked out and in gaslamp-light saw large still figures standing in their houses, sleeping. It was a street colonised by cactacae. He rented from a kind, gruff she-cactus who had effortlessly hefted his bags in one greenling hand when he had moved in.

The small-hours’ trains passed the top windows shining dimly. They went to The Downs southerly or on north up to their huge terminus, that synapse of troublesome architecture between the city’s rivers, Perdido Street Station.

The business of night continued. The air was warm and wet, and it unstuck glue and ate at brickwork’s pointing. From the oldest parts of the city, tough hut-work, ivy-swaddled ruins in Sobek Croix. Families slept rough in warehouses at the edges of Bonetown. Brock Marsh was crossed by cats, then by a badger waddling home under cluttered shop facades. Sedate and baleful aerostats waited below clouds.

Two rivers ran, and met, and became one big old thing, the Gross Tar, guttersome and groaning as it passed out of city limits through the stubs of a bridge, through shantytowns in New Crobuzon’s orbit, looking for the sea. The city’s illicit inhabitants came out briefly and hid again. There was midnight industry. Someone was always awake, countless someones, in towerblocks or elegant houses or the redstones of Chnum or in the xenian ghettos, in the Glasshouse or the terraces of Kinken and Creekside, configured by the khepri grubs, reshaped with brittled insect spit. Everything continued.

There was nothing of the riot in any news-sheets the following day, or the next. It did not stop people hearing something had happened.

Ori made it known to the right people that he had been there. Passing the shops and pubs of Syriac he saw that he was seen, and knew that some who glanced at him—the woman here, the vodyanoi, the man or cactus-man, even the Remade there—were with the Caucus. Not showing his excitement, Ori might pat his chest gently with a fist in surreptitious greeting, which they might ignore or might thump back at him. Between themselves the Caucusers flashed complicated finger-shapes, messages in downtown handslang Ori could not decipher. He told himself they were perhaps about him.

The Caucus, in its closed and hidden session, talking about him. He knew it wasn’t so, but it delighted him to think it. Yes, his friends were Nuevists, but not decadent or wastrel nor satisfied only to shock. He thought of the Caucus, delegates from all the factions, breaking off from consideration of strategy and rebellion, breaking off from evasion of the militia and their informers, to commend Ori Ciuraz and his friends for a fine provocation. It wouldn’t happen, but he liked it.

In Gross Coil, Ori took what day-work came his way. He hauled and delivered for food and poor pay. Gun-grey components of some military machine that must be heading around the coast and through the Meagre Sea and the straits and on to the distant war. He worked at whatever siding or yard, whatever wreckers would take him, unloading barges by Mandrake Bridge, and when the days were done he drank with workmates become temporary friends.

He was young, so the foremen bullied him, but nervously. They were edged with unease. There were all the troubles. Tense times for the factories of Gross Coil, for Kelltree and Echomire. Past the foundry on Tuthen Way, Ori saw scars from fires on the ground, where in recent weeks pickets had been. The walls were marked with sigils of dissidence.
Toro; The Man’Tis lives!;
the stencilled councillor. Bullet holes marked walls at the Tricorn Fork, where
less than a year before the militia had faced down hundreds of marchers.

It had started at the Paradox Concerns, in unorganised complaint at some dismissals, and then had been on the streets with great speed, and shop floors in the surrounds were fractured as
others joined the demonstrators, whose slogans had veered from reinstatement of friends to increased wages, then were suddenly
denunciations of the Mayor and of the suffrage lottery, were demands for votes. Bottles were thrown, and caustic phlogiston; there were shots—the militia shot back or started it—and sixteen people were dead. Chalked homages appeared regularly at the junction and were cleaned away. Ori touched his fist gently to his chest as he passed the site of the Paradox Massacre.

On Chainday he went to The Grocer’s Sweetheart. A bit before eight, two men left the taproom and did not come back. Others followed, in casual and random order. Ori drank the last of his beer and went as if for the privy, but seeing he was not followed he turned down a damp-mottled corridor, lifted a trapdoor down into the basement. Those assembled in the dark looked and did not greet him, almost as much suspicion as welcome on their faces.

“Chaverim,” he said to them. A category stolen from an old language. “Chaver,” they said back—comrade, equal, conspirator.

One Remade man, and it was the first time he had come. His arms were crossed at the wrists and were fused, and when he clenched and unclenched his fingers it was as if he imitated a bird.

There were two women from a sweatshop under the Skulkford railway arches, knit-machine workers, by a docker and a machinist, and a vodyanoi clerk in light-cloth mimicry of a human suit that he could wear in the water, complete with stitched-on tie. A cactus-man stood. The barrels of cheap beer and wine served as tables for dissident publications: a crumpled
Shout, The Forge,
and several copies of the best-known seditionist sheet,
Runagate Rampant.

“Chaverim, I want to thank you for coming.” A middle-aged man spoke with calm authority. “I want to welcome our new friend Jack.” He nodded at the Remade. “War with Tesh. Militia infiltration. Free trade unions. The strike at Purrill’s Bakery. I’ve word on each of those. But I want to take a few minutes to talk about my
approach—our approach,
Double-R
’s approach—to the question of race.” He glanced at the vodyanoi, at the cactus-man, and began to speak.

It was these introductions, these discussions, that had first brought Ori close to the
Runagate Rampant
circles. He had bought a copy every fortnight for three months from a fruit-seller in Murkside, and eventually the man had asked him whether he was interested in talking through the issues covered, had directed Ori to these hidden meetings. Ori had been a regular, raising more points and objections, engaging with more enthusiasm—and eventually less—until after one meeting, while they were alone, with affecting trust the convenor had told Ori his real name, Curdin. Ori had responded, though like everyone they still went by Jack to each other within the meetings.

“Yes, yes,” Curdin was saying, “I think that’s right, Jack, but the question is
why
?”

Ori unfolded his
Runagate Rampant,
read it in snippets. Exhortations for unity in action that he had seen before, angry and
illuminating analyses, columns and columns of strikes. Each workplace, each two or three people who had put their tools down, won or lost, a gathering of twenty or a hundred, a half-hour walkout, the disappearance of every guildsmember or suspected unioner. A catalogue of every dispute, murderous or paltry. It bored him.

There were stories missing. Ori’s frustrations with the meet-ings was growing. Nothing was happening here. It was elsewhere, though, fleetingly. As in Fallybeggar’s.

He tapped his
Runagate Rampant.
“Where’s Toro?” he said. “Toro took another one. I heard it. In Chnum. Him and his crew took out the guards, shot the magister that lived there. Why’s that not in here?”

“Jack . . . it’s clear what we say about Toro,” Curdin said. “We had the column last-but-one issue. We don’t . . . it ain’t the way we’d do things . . .”

“I know, Jack, I know. You criticise. Carp at him.”

The convenor said nothing.

“Toro’s out there and he’s
doing
something, yeah? He’s fighting, and he’s not
waiting
like you keep waiting. And you sit and
wait,
and tell him he’s getting ahead of himself?”

“It’s not like that. I won’t snip at anyone fighting the magisters, or the militia, or the Mayor, but Toro can’t change things on his own, or with his little crew, Jack . . .”

“Yeah but he’s changing something.”

“Not enough.”

“But he’s changing
something.
”

Ori respected Curdin, had learnt so much from him and his pamphlets, he did not want to alienate him. But the complacency of his convenor had begun to infuriate him. The man was more than twice his age—was he just old? They sat and glowered at each other wordlessly while the others looked back and forth between them.

Afterward Ori apologised for his bad temper. “It’s nothing to me,” said Curdin. “Be as rude as you want. But I tell you the truth, Jack”—they were alone and he corrected himself—“I tell you the truth, Ori. I’m worried. Seems to me you’re going down a certain road. All your plays and puppets . . .” He shook his head and sighed. “I ain’t against it, I swear to you, I heard what happened at Fallybeggar’s and, you know, good on you, on your friends. But shock and shooting ain’t enough. Let me ask you something. Your friends the Flexible Puppeteers—why’d they choose that name?”

“You know why.”

“No I don’t. I know it’s a homage, and I’m glad for that, but why
him,
why not Seshech or Billy le Ginsen, why not Poppy Lutkin?”

“Because we’d get arrested if we tried that.”

“Don’t play stupid, lad. You know what I mean—there’s scores of names you could’ve chose to send a message, to piss in the Mayor’s bath, but you honoured
him.
The founding editor of
Runagate Rampant
—not
The Forge
or
Toilers’ War
or
The Bodkin.
Why him?” Curdin tapped his paper against his thigh. “I’ll tell you
why, lad—whether you know it or not, he’s the one scares the
powers. Because he was
right.
About factions, about war, about the plurality. And Bill and Poppy and Neckling Verdant, and them
others—Toro, Ori, Toro and his band and all, even Jack Half-a-Prayer—good people,
chaverim,
but on stuff like this their strategy’s for shit. Ben was right, and Toro’s wrong.”

Ori heard arrogance, or commitment, or fervour, or analysis in Curdin’s voice. Angry as he was, he did not care to disentangle them.

“You going to sneer at Half-a-Prayer now?”

“I didn’t mean that, I ain’t saying that . . .”

“Godspit, who you think you are? Toro’s
doing
things, Curdin. He’s making things happen. You—you’re
talking, Double-R
’s just talking. And Benjamin Flex is
dead.
Been dead for a long time.”

“You ain’t being fair,” he heard Curdin say. “You ain’t hardly got fluff on your chin, and you’re telling
me
about Benjamin Flex, for Jabber’s sake.” And his voice was not unkind. He meant it lightly, but Ori was outraged.

“At least I
done
something!” he shouted. “At least I’m doing
something.
”