Iron Council (9 page)

He loathed being a lumpen cutter of purses, but he knew that anything more refined risked bringing the militia. As it was when he careered down crowded streets at twilight, the street gangs filled his wake as arranged and the officers would only plunge a little way into the rookeries, swinging truncheons.

Twice he did it, and could hardly stop his trembling. He became energised, vastly excited to be committing these acts, to be doing something palpable. The third time and the times after that, he had no fear.

He never took a stiver from the money he stole. He delivered it all to his unseen correspondent. It took several deliveries. He lost track. The robberies became routine. But he must have made his forty nobles: a new commission appeared. This time it was a wax tube, scored with grooves, that he had to take to a voxiterator booth.

Over the spit of the needle he heard a voice, faded through crackles:
“All good my boy now let’s get serious let’s you bring us a militia crest.”

He saw Spiral Jacobs every week. They had developed a language
of ellipsis and evasion. He was not categorical—he admitted to nothing—and Spiral Jacobs still spoke with erratic logic. Ori saw the old man’s madness was at least in part a mime.

“They’ve got me doing things,” Ori said, “your mates. They’re not the most welcoming coves, are they?”

“No they ain’t, but when they make friends with you they’re friends for
life.
Been at that shelter a long time. Been there a long time, wondered if I’d find anyone to introduce them to.”

Ori and Spiral Jacobs discussed politics in this careful and mediated way. Among the
Runagate Rampant
chaverim, Ori was quiet and watchful. Their numbers dwindled, rose again. Only one of the women from the Skulkford sweatshop still came. She spoke more and more often, with increasing knowledge.

He listened with a kind of nostalgia and wondered,
How am I going to do this?

He went to Dog Fenn, where he knew the militia would be harder to find but where he could hide. It took two attempts, a lot of planning and several shekels in bribes. By night in the darkness of
Barley Bridge’s girdered underside. A two-man patrol lured by a breathless street-boy telling them someone had been thrown in, while a gang of his fellows shouted. A young streetwalker wailed in the black water while trains wheezed overhead. She thrashed with genuine fear (she could not swim but was kept afloat by two vodyanoi children below her who swilled water in their submerged equivalent of giggles).

The first night the militiamen only stood at the edge and shone their lanterns at the bobbing woman while the children hollered at them to save her. They shouted for her to hang on and went to find help; and Ori emerged, dragged the disgusted prostitute out and hurried everyone away.

On the second night, an officer left his jacket and boots with
his companion and waded into the cool water. The vodyanoi descended, and the woman panicked very badly and began to sink. The chaos in the water was not feigned. The children milled shrieking around the remaining militiaman, clamouring for him to help, jostling him until he bellowed and swung his truncheon, but it was too late by then. They had opened the bundle of his partner’s clothes, even still in his grip, rifled its contents.

Ori left the badge in an old shoe at Toro’s corner. When he came back two days later, someone was there to meet him.

Old Shoulder was a cactus-man. He was thin and dwarfed for his kind, shorter than Ori. They walked through the meat-market. Ori saw that prices were still rising.

“I don’t know who pointed you our way and I ain’t going to ask you,” Old Shoulder said. “Where you been before now? Who you been with?”

“Double-R,”
said Ori, and Old Shoulder nodded.

“Yeah, well I ain’t going to moan about them, but you better make your choice, lad.” He looked at Ori with a face bleached the faintest green by years of sun. He made Ori feel very young. “Things go very different with our friend.” He scratched the side of his nose, extending his first and last fingers splayed into horns. “I don’t give spit about what Flex or any of his lot would have said. You can kiss good-bye to philosophising. We ain’t interested in the toil concept of worth, or graphs of the swag-slump tendency and whatnot. With
Double-R
it’s just more and more notions.

“I don’t care if they can lecture like we was at the university.” They stood still among the flies and the warm smell of meat, among the cries of the sellers. “What I care about’s what you
do,
mate. What can you do for us? What can you do for our friend?”

They had him as a messenger. He had to show his worth, picking up packages or messages that Old Shoulder left for him, ferrying them across the city without investigating them, delivering them to men or women who eyed him without trust and sent him away before they would open them.

He drank in The Two Maggots, keeping his friends among the Nuevists. He went to the
Runagate Rampant
discussions. Hidden histories: “Jabber: Saint or Crook?”; “Iron Councillor: The Truth behind the Stencil.” The hard young machine-knitter had become a political authority. Ori felt as if he watched everything through a window.

In the first week of Tathis, at a time of sudden cool, Old Shoulder had him as lookout. It was only at the last second that he was told what his job would be, and all his excitement came back.

They were in Bonetown. They watched evening come in livid shades through the silhouettes of the Bonetown Claws, the Ribs. The ancient bones that gave the area its name curved more than two hundred feet into the air, cracking, yellowed, mouldering at a geological pace, dwarfing the houses around them.

There was to be a delivery to the kingpin Motley. Ori could not even see where his gang would intercept it. He was exhilarated. He watched and watched, but no militia came. He could see to the clearing below the bones, to the city scrub where acrobats and print-vendors were counting their takings, oblivious to the monstrous ribcage above them.

He watched nothing, frantic, wishing he had a pistol. Young men passed in a gang and eyed him, decided not to bother. No one approached. The whistle stayed in his tense fist. He had no idea anything had even started till Old Shoulder tapped him from behind, jerking him violently, and said, “Home again, boy. Job’s done.” That was all.

Ori could not have said when he was made a member. Old Shoulder began to introduce him to others, to muttered discussions.

In the pubs, in the tarry shacks and mazes of Lichford, Ori talked tactics with Toro’s crew. He was a probationer. He felt a queasy guilt when his new companions mocked the Caucus—
“the people’s pomp” they called it—or
Runagate Rampant.
He still went to
Double-R
’s under-pub discussions, but unlike his many months there, he could see the impact of his new activities immediately. They were in the papers. Ori had been lookout on what they called the Case of the Bonetown Sting.

He was paid, with each haul. Not much, but enough to compensate for the wages he was missing, and then a little more. In The Two Maggots and Fallybeggar’s, he bought generous rounds, and the Nuevists toasted him. It made him feel nostalgic.

And in Lichford, he had new companions—Old Shoulder,
Ulliam, Ruby, Enoch, Kit. There was an élan to Toro’s outlaw
gang. Their lives were different, were richer and more tenuous, because they were being risked.

If they catch me now they won’t just lock me up,
Ori thought.
They’ll Remake me for sure, at least. Probably I’m dead.

There were strikes most weeks in Gross Coil now. There was trouble in Smog Bend. Quillers had attacked the khepri ghetto in Creekside. The militia went into Dog Fenn, Riverskin and Howl Barrow, took unioners and petty crooks and Nuevists away. The foremost exponent of DripDrip poetry was beaten to death in one such raid, and his funeral became a small riot. Ori went, and threw stones with the mourners.

Ori felt as if he were waking. His city was a hallucination. He could bite down on the air; he could wring tension out of it. Daily he passed pickets, chanted with them.

“It’s gearing up,” Old Shoulder said. He sounded gleeful. “When we get it done—when our friend can finally get through and, uh, meet up with you-know-who . . .”

The gang glanced, and Ori saw several quick looks his way. They were not sure they should be speaking in front of him. But they could not keep themselves quiet. He was careful, did not give in to his desire to ask them
Who? Who is I-know-who?

But Old Shoulder was staring at a streetside fixing-post, its
fat pillar many-skinned in ancient posters. There was one block-printed heliotype, a stark rendition of a familiar face, and Old Shoulder was looking at it as he spoke, and Ori understood what he was being told. “We’ll finish it all off,” the old cactus-man said. “We’ll change everything when our friend meets a certain someone.”

He had not seen Spiral Jacobs for days. When at last Ori tracked him down, the tramp was distracted. He had not been to the shelter in a long time. He looked exhausted, more unkempt and dirty even than usual.

Ori followed leads from other forgotten men and women to find him, at last, in The Crow. He was shuffling between the great shops of the city’s central district, its statues, facades of grand marble and scrubbed white stone. Jacobs had chalk in his hand, and every few steps he would stop and murmur to himself, and draw some very faint and meaningless sign upon the wall.

“Spiral,” Ori said, and the old vagrant turned, his rage at the interruption making Ori start. It was a moment before Spiral Jacobs composed himself.

They sat in BilSantum Plaza among the jugglers. In the warm colours of the evening, Perdido Street Station loomed beside them, its variegated architecture unsettling, massive and impressive, the five railway lines spreading out of its raised arch-mouths like light from a star. The Spike, the militia minaret, soared up from its western side. Perdido Street Station seemed to lean on it like a man on a staff.

Ori looked at the seven skyrails that stretched from the Spike’s summit. He looked along one tugged to the southeast, over the red-light district and the salubrious Spit Hearth, over the scholars’ quarter of Brock Marsh, to another tower, and on to Strack Island, to Parliament itself, surrounded by the conjoining rivers.

“It’s the Mayor,” said Ori, while Spiral Jacobs seemed not to listen, only to play with his chalk and think whatever he wanted to think. “Toro’s crew are fed up with taking out militia corporals and what-have-you. They want to kick things off. They’re going to kill the Mayor.”

It might have seemed that Spiral Jacobs was too gone to
care, but Ori saw his eyes. He saw that gummy mouth open and
shut. Was it a surprise? What else was there for the people’s bandit to do?

And though Ori might have told himself that he let Spiral know only for some kind of duty, out of some sense that the old fighter, Jack Half-a-Prayer’s comrade, deserved to know, there was more than that. Spiral Jacobs was involved, had in his random way ushered Ori to this brutal and liberatory political act. A plan like this, Ori said, would take guts and strength and information and money. This was the start. Come for the soup tomorrow, said Spiral Jacobs suddenly, promise me.

Ori did. And perhaps he knew what was in the bag that Jacobs brought him. Opening it in his room much later, alone by his candle, he could not silence his gasps.

Money. In rolls and tight wraps. A huge haul of coins and notes, in scores of currencies. Shekels, nobles and guineas, yes, the newest decades old, but there were ducats too, dollars and rupees and sandnotes and arcane bawbees, square coins, little ingots from maritime provinces, from Shankell, from Perrick Nigh and from cities Ori was not sure he believed in. It was the dregs of a highwayman’s life, or a pirate’s.

A contribution,
said the note enclosed.
To help with a Good Plan. In Jack’s memory.

part three

WINE LAND

CHAPTER TEN

The golem watched the sleeping travellers. It stood by the embers taller than a man or a cactus-man. Thickset, with arms too long that hung in front of it, vaguely simian. Its stance was buckled, its back hunched into a saddle. Its clay skin was sun-cracked.

With dawn the golem was blundered across by woken insects. It did not move. Burrs and spores blew over the sleepers in their hollow. Breezes prickled their flesh. They were north of the relentless heat.

Drogon rose first. When the others woke he was gone, scouting, and Pomeroy and Elsie went too, to leave Cutter alone with the golem’s master.

Cutter said, “You shouldn’t have left. Judah, you shouldn’t have gone.”

Judah said, “Did you get the money I left?”

“Of course I got the money, and I got your instructions too, but I fucking didn’t follow them, did I? And ain’t you glad? With what I brought you?” He slapped his pack. “They weren’t ready when you left.”

“And now one’s broken.” Judah smiled sadly. “One’s not enough.”

“Broken?” Cutter was stricken. He had dragged the equipment so far.

“You shouldn’t have gone, Judah, not without me.” Cutter breathed hard. “You should have waited for me.”

Cutter kissed him, with the urgency that always came when he did, a desperation. Judah responded as he always did—with something like affection and something like patience.

Even now, Cutter realised with wonder, Judah Low seemed not quite focused on what was before him. It had been that way as long as Cutter had known him. A typical distracted researcher in something or other, Cutter had thought at first. Cutter’s shop was in Brock Marsh, and scholars were his customers. He had been surprised when he traced the remains of some downtown accent in Judah’s voice.

More than ten years ago they had met. Cutter had emerged from his back room to see Judah looking at the esoterica crammed on darkwood shelves: notebooks, metaclockwork, vegetable secrets. A tall thin man with dry, uncut hair, much Cutter’s senior, his face weathered, his eyes always open wide at whatever he saw. It was shortly after the war in the dumps, after Cutter had been made to surrender his cleaning construct. He was washing his own floors, and was in a bad mood. He had been rude.

The next time Judah came, Cutter tried to apologise, and the older man just stared at him. When Judah came back a third time—stocking up on alkalids and the best, most dense clay—Cutter asked his name.

“And should I say Judah or Jude or Dr. Low?” Cutter had said, and Judah had smiled.

Cutter had never felt so connected, so understood, as at that smile. His motives were uncovered without effort or cynicism. He knew then that this was not a man distracted like so many of the scholarly, but someone beatific. Cutter had come very quickly to love him.

They were shy with each other. Not only Cutter and Judah, but Judah and Pomeroy, Judah and Elsie. He asked them again and again for the stories of Drey’s death, and Ihona’s and Fejh's. When they had told him who had been lost, he had been aghast. He had crumpled.

He had them tell the deaths as stories. Ihona in her column of water; Drey’s cruciform fall. Fejhechrillen’s dissolution under the iron barrage was harder to sanctify with narrative.

They tried to make him tell them what he had done. He shook his head as if there was nothing.

“I rode,” he said to them. “On my golem. I took him south through the forest and on the ties and lines. I bought passage across the Meagre Sea. I rode him west, through the cactus villages. They helped me. I came through the cleft. I knew I was followed. I set a trap. Thank Jabber you realised, Cutter.” A brief terrible look went over him.

He looked tired. Cutter did not know what Judah had had to face, what had taxed him. He was scabbed: the evidence of stories he would not tell. It did not take much from him to keep this golem alive, but it was one drain among the many of his escape.

Cutter put a hand on the creation’s grey flanks. “Let it go, Judah,” he said. The older man looked at him with his perpetual surprise. Smiled slowly.

“Rest,” Judah said. He touched the golem on its basic face. The clay man did not move, but something left it. Some orgone. It settled imperceptibly, and dust came off it, and its cracks looked suddenly drier. It stood where it had stood, and it would not move again. It would fall slowly away, and its hollows would be homes for birds and vermin. It would be a feature of the land and then would be gone.

Cutter felt an urge to push it over and watch it break apart, to save it from being stuck like that in time, but he let it stand.

“Who’s Drogon?” Judah asked. The susurrator looked lost without his horse. He was busying himself, letting them discuss him.

“He’d not be here if I’d my way,” Pomeroy said. “For a whispersmith he’s got a damn lot of power. And we don’t know where he’s from.”

“He’s a drifter,” said Cutter. “Ranch-hand, tracker, you know. Some horse tramp. He heard you’d gone—gods know what the rumours are now. He’s attached hisself to us because he wants to find the Iron Council. Out of sentiment, I think. He’s saved us more'n once.”

“He’s coming with us?” Judah said. They looked at him.

Carefully, Cutter said: “You know . . . you don’t have to go on. We could go back.” Judah looked oddly at him. “I know you think you burnt your bridges with the golem trap in your rooms, and it’s true they’ll be watching for you, but
dammit,
Judah, you could go underground. You know the Caucus would protect you.”

Judah looked at them and one by one they broke his gaze, ashamed. “You don’t think it’s still there,” he said. “Is that what this is? You’re here for
me
?”

“No,” said Pomeroy. “I always said I wasn’t just here for you.”

But Judah kept talking. “You think it’s gone?” He spoke with calm, almost priestly certainty. “It hasn’t. How can I go back, Cutter? Don’t you realise what I’m here for?
They’re coming for the Council.
When they find it, they’ll bring it down. They came for the Teshi, but now they found it they can’t let the Council be. I heard it from an old source. Told me they’d found it, and what they’ll do. I’ve to warn them. I know the Caucus won’t understand. Probably cursing me.”

“We sent them a message,” Cutter said. “From Myrshock. They know we’re after you.”

From his satchel Judah brought out papers and three wax cylinders.

“From the Council,” he said. “The oldest letter’s near seventeen years old. The first cylinder’s older'n that. Almost twenty years. The last ones arrived three years ago, and they were only two years old when they came. I know the Council’s there.”

The messages had travelled by unknown routes. Fellid Forest to the sea, by boats to the Firewater Straits, Shankell and Myrshock, to Iron Bay and New Crobuzon. Or through byways in the hills, or through woods by paths hundreds of miles into the swamps below Cobsea. To Cobsea itself in the great plains. Or by air, or thaumaturgy, somehow making their ways at last to Judah Low.

And could you write back, Judah?
Cutter thought.
You know they’re waiting. Do they know you’re coming? And how many of their messages were lost?
He saw austere gullies strewn with fragments of wax. Gusts sending scraps of encoded paper like blossom across the grassland.

He was awed to see the paper, the grooved cylinders, sound fixed in time. Artefacts from a Caucus rumour, from the stories of travellers and dissidents.

What would he know? When first he had heard of Iron Council he was a boy, and it was a folktale like Jack Half-a-Prayer, and Toro, and the Contumancy. When he grew old enough to know that his Parliament might have lied to him—that there might have been no accident in the quagmires to the south—the Iron Council some said had been born there could never be found. Even those who said they had seen it could only point west.

Why did you never show me those, Judah?
he thought. Through all their discussions, through all their growing closer. Judah had taken Cutter’s cynicism and tried to do something to it, tried to tell Cutter that it had clogged him. There were other ways of doubting everything that need not sullen him, Judah had said, and sometimes Cutter had tried.

A dozen years they had known each other, and Cutter had learnt many things from Judah, and taught him a few. It was Judah had brought Cutter to the fringes of the Caucus. Cutter thought
of the debates in his shop and in his small rooms, in bed. And in
all those political ruminations—Judah a most unworldly insurrectionist, Cutter never more than a suspicious fellow-traveller—
Cutter had never seen these stocks from the Iron Council itself.

He did not feel betrayed, only bewildered. That was familiar.

“I know where the Council is,” Judah said. “I can find it. It’s wonderful that you came. Let’s go on.”

Judah spoke to the whispersmith. No one but Judah could hear Drogon’s replies, of course. At last Judah nodded, and they understood that Drogon was coming with them. Pomeroy glowered, despite all the susurrator had done.

Judah the somaturge did not seek leadership, did nothing but say he would continue and that they could come, but they became his followers, as they always did. It had been the same in New Crobuzon. He never ordered them, often seemed too preoccupied to notice they were with him, but when they were they attended him carefully.

They prepared. There must be weeks of travel. Miles of land, and more land, and rocks and more trees, and perhaps water, and perhaps chasms, and then perhaps the Iron Council. They slept early, and Cutter woke to the sound of Pomeroy and Elsie’s lovemaking. They could not help their little exhalations, nor the scuffing of their bodies. The noise aroused him. He listened to his friends’ sex with lust and an upswelling of affection. He reached for Judah, who turned to him sleepily and responded to his tonguing kiss, but gently turned away again.

Below his blanket Cutter masturbated silently onto the ground, watching Judah’s back.