Iron Council (30 page)

He had tried not to neglect Spiral Jacobs. The man was not easy to find. He disappeared for a long time, and Ori only found him after leaving messages with the shelters and the vagrants who were the old tramp’s family.

“Where did you go?” Ori said, and Spiral Jacobs was too vague to reply. The old man’s fog lifted when he spoke of his old life, of Jack Half-a-Prayer.

“How’d you come to know so much about Toro’s plans, Spiral?”

The old man laughed and bobbed his head.

Are you a friend of Toro?
Ori thought.
Do you meet and talk about the old times, talk about the Man’Tis?

“Whyn’t you just give them the money yourself?” Nothing.

“You don’t know them, do you?”

No one among the Toro-run recognised his description of Spiral. Ori asked Jacobs to tell him about Jack Half-a-Prayer.
I think you like me,
Ori thought. The mad old man looked at him with a familial care.
I think you gave me the money to help them and me both.
The weakness of Spiral’s mind came and went.

“Not seen much of you,” Petron had said in a louche cabaret pub of Howl Barrow. They ignored the gyring striptease and illicit dealings at the other tables.

“Doing things.”

“Running with a new crowd?” There was no accusation or venom in Petron’s tone—allegiances were fast among the bohemians. Ori shrugged.

“We’re doing good things, if you want to come back. The Flexibles are doing another show: ‘Rud and the Gutter and the Devil’s Embassy.’ Can’t use Rudgutter’s name, obviously, but it’s about the Midsummer Nightmares, years back: there’s rumours they tried to make some wicked deals to fix it.”

Ori listened and thought,
You’ll do a show of
me
in years to come. “Ori and the Toro-Gored Mayor.” Things’ll be different then.

Two Chaindays running he went to The Grocer’s Sweetheart. No one was there the first night. The second, the trapdoor was raised to him and he was let back into the
Runagate Rampant
meeting. The Jacks were not all the same as they had been. The Remade man he had met months back was still there. There was a vodyanoi stevedore and a crippled cactus-man Ori did not remember, a few others looking through the literature.

A woman led the meeting. She was small and intense, older than he but still young. She spoke well. She eyed him, and when her face took on an uncertain expression he remembered her: she was the knit-machinist.

She spoke about the war. It was a tense meeting. Not only
did the
Runagate Rampant
not support the war’s aims, stated or
interpreted—that position was common to the tiny dissident groups—they said they fought for New Crobuzon to lose.

“You think Tesh is any better?” someone said, angry and incredulous.

The knit-worker said, “It ain’t that we think it’s better, it’s that our prime opponents are here, right here.”

Ori did not speak. He watched her and tensed only a second when it seemed one man’s anger at what he called her Tesh-love would make him violent, but she calmed him. Ori did not think she convinced everyone—he was not sure of his own feelings for the war, beyond that both sides were bastards, and that he did not care—but she did well. When the others had gone he waited and applauded her, and he was only half mocking.

“Where’s Jack?” Ori said. “The Jack who used to take these?”

“Curdin?” she said. “Gone. Militia. Snatched. No one knows.”

They were silent. She gathered her papers. Curdin was dead or jailed or who knew what.

“Sorry.”

She nodded.

“You did well.”

She nodded again. “He told me about you.” She did not look at him. “He told me a lot about you. He was disappointed you weren’t coming no more. Thought a lot of you. ‘Boy’s got the anger,’ he said. ‘Hope he knows what to do with it.’ So . . . so what’s it like on the wild side, Jack? How’s it with, with the Bonnot Gang, or Toro, or Poppy’s lot or whoever you’re with now? Think people don’t know? So, so what is it you’re doing now?”

“More than you.” But he hated his petulance and did not want to fight, so he said, “How’d you take over?” He meant
You know so much, you argue well, you’ve risen to this.
When last he saw her he would have been the experienced dissident, with insurrectionist philosophy: and now he had been present at deaths and was harder, and had been cut by a militia knife and knew how to talk to the danger-scum of the east city, but she knew more than him, and it had only been some weeks.

She shrugged.

“It’s the time,” she said. She tried to be dismissive, then met his eye. “Do you . . . How could you do this now? Now? What d’you think’s happening? Do you know what’s going on? Do you feel it? Five foundries went out last week, Jack. Five. The Rétif Platform of the dockers’ guild’s in talks with the vodyanoi for a
cross-race union.
That’s
our
chaverim pulling that, that’s
Double-R.
The next march we have we’ll make into a meeting, and we won’t have to moulder like this.” She waved at the close walls, brought her fists down on her thighs. She almost stamped. “And you’ve heard the stories. You know what’s returning? What’s coming back to us? And you choose now to go be an adventurer? To turn your back on the commonalty?”

The word made him breathe a sneer. The jargon of it,
the commonalty, the commonalty
that the
Double-R
s spoke of so relentlessly.

“We’re doing things,” he said. Her tirade made him uneasy—or perhaps melancholic, nostalgic. He did not know of the actions and the changes that she spoke of, that he would once have been part of. But all his excitement, his pride came up in him and effaced anxiety, and he smiled. “Oh Jack,” he had said. “You don’t know what we’ll do.”

The door of the office opened and Old Shoulder and Marcus emerged, seen only by Ori. The cactus-man held Ori’s eyes and then was gone behind the curious crowd.

Carefully, not too sudden, Ori let Catlina know they were done, and they let their voices down like two people tired of arguing. Ori walked under the skyrails and the arches of the Dexter Line, the trains over his head lit up by gas, under skies awash in brown dusk, toward Badside where Toro was waiting. He walked back to his masked boss, whom he saw so rarely, whose face he never saw, leaving a dead man behind him.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Ori went to the docks of Kelltree. There was a congregation, made to look spontaneous, which the Caucus and its factions had spread word of for weeks. They could not have listed it in
RR
or
The Forge
so had relied on graffiti, handslang and rumour. The militia would close them down: the question was how long they had. A mass milled in the forefront of the Paradox Warehouse, dockworkers and a few clerks, human mostly, but all the races were there; even Remade, carefully at the edges of the crowd.

From canals that linked the docks to the river, vodyanoi watched the gathering. A few score yards away, hidden by roofs, was the Gross Tar, the meet of the Tar and the Canker, the wide river that bisected the east of the city. When tall ships passed, Ori could see their masts move behind the houses, their rigging over the chimneys.

Airships went over.
Quick now,
Ori thought. A wedge of men and women came through the crowd, coalescing out of randomness and moving with sudden purpose. They bundled around one man whom they pushed to the brick shed become a stage, where he vaulted up and was joined by someone Ori recognised, a Caucusist, from the Proscribed.

“Friends,” the man shouted. “We’ve someone wants to talk to you, a friend of mine,
Jack,
” and there were humourless smiles. “He wants to tell something of the war.”

They had so little time. Militia spies would be running to their contacts. In the thaumaturgic listening post in the Spike, the echelon of communicators and communicatrices would be blinking fast and trying to decipher from the city’s welter of cognition which illicit topics were being spoken.
Quick now,
Ori thought.

Looking behind him to gauge the size of the crowd, Ori was surprised to see Petron. The Nuevist was lacing his art activism with real dissidence, was risking more than late fighting in Salacus Fields. Ori was impressed.

There were Caucusists everywhere. Ori saw someone from the Excess, from the Suffragim; he saw an editor of
Runagate Rampant.
This speaker was not affiliated, and all the factions of the unstable, chaotic, infighting and comradely front had to share him. They were vying for the man.

“He has things to say,” the Proscribed man was shouting. “Jack here . . . Jack here is back from the war.”

There was an utter sudden hush. The man was a
soldier.
Ori was poised. What was this, this stupidity? Yes there was press-ganging and military Remaking, but whatever his history, this man was, formally at least, militia. And he had been invited here. He stepped forward.

“Don’t fret about me. I’m here, I’m here to tell you, of, of the real,” the man said. He was not a good speaker. But he shouted loud enough that all could hear him, and his own anxiety kept the crowd there.

He spoke fast. He had been warned he would not have long. “I ain’t spoken before to people like this,” he said and they could hear his voice trembling, this man who had carried guns and killed for New Crobuzon.

The war’s a lie (
he said
). I got my badge. (
He drew it out by his fingertips as if it were dirty. City finds that he’s a dead man, thought Ori.
) Months on them ships, we went through the Firewater Straits, on till landfall, and we thought we’d have to fight on the seas, we was trained to, sailor-soldiers, ‘acause them Tesh ships were out for us, we saw them and their weapons in flocks circling but they ain’t seen us, and it ain’t all city-loyal, the militia, not now, us from Dog Fenn on that ship were there because there ain’t no other jobs to do. Let loose and told to go liberate them Tesh villages.

They don’t want us. I seen things . . . What they done to us. What we done back. (
There was a restive stirring somewhere in the streets and a brief incoming of Caucus scouts handslanging frantically to the Proscribed man and he whispered to the speaker. Ori got ready to run. The militia renegade gabbled in anger.
) It ain’t no war for liberty, nor for the Teshi, they hate us and we, we fucking hated them I tell you, and it was a, it’s
carnage
there, just plain murder, they sending their children out stuffed full of hex to make us melt, I had my men
melt
on me, and I done things . . . You don’t know what it is, in Tesh. They ain’t like us. Jabber, I done things to people . . . (
The Proscribed man hurried him, pulled him to the shed’s edge.
)

So screw the militia and screw their war. I ain’t no friends to the damn Teshi after what they done but I don’t hate them half so much as I hate
them.
(
He pointed at the basalt column-palace of Parliament, prodding the sky with tubes and tuskish jags, profane and arrogant.
) Anyone needs dying it ain’t some damn Tesh peasant, it’s them, in there, who got us here. Who’ll take them out? (
He cocked his thumb, shot his finger several times toward the Parliament—a Remaking offence.
) Screw their war.

And at that someone from
Runagate Rampant
barked, “Yeah, so fight to lose, fight for defeat,” and there was angry calling from those who saw stupidity in this. They yelled at the Runagaters that they supported Tesh, that they were agents of the Crawling Liquid, but before there were fists between the factions, the whistles of the guards went, and the crowd began to scatter. Ori wrote fast on a tear of paper.

Militia were coming. People were prepared, and they ran. Ori ran too, but not for the doors or the broken fence. He went straight for the speaker.

Pushed past the bickering Caucus members who surrounded him. Some recognised Ori, stared at him with greeting or query stillborn as he went past them to the raging soldier-Jack. Ori put
his name and his address into the speaker’s pocket, and whispered.

“Who’ll take them out?” he said. “We will. These lot won’t. Come find me.”

And then there was the burring of propellers and an airship protruded over them. Ropes spilled down and dribbled armoured militia. There were the sounds of dogs. The gates of the Paradox Warehouse were too full of people, and there was a panic. “Men-o’-war!” someone shouted, and yes there slowly rising to swell over the walls were the grotesque gland-bodies contoured with extrusions and organic holes, ridden by militia manipulating the exposed nerves of the giant filament-dangling things, flying them sedately toward the crews of Caucusists, the toxin in their tendrils dripping. Ori ran.

There would be other militia squads on the street: shunnriders, plainclothes infiltrators. Ori had to take care. He itched at the sense that some sharpshooter might target him from the airship. But he knew the ways through these streets. Most of the audience had already disappeared in New Crobuzon’s brick tangles, careering past startled shop holders and corner-hanging vagrants to stop suddenly and walk like everyone else was walking, a few streets on. Later, a mile away on the other side of the river, Ori heard that no one had been captured or killed, and was savagely delighted.

The soldier’s name was Baron. He told Ori without any sense of the secrecy and care with which the dissidents did their business. He turned up two nights later. When Ori opened his door to him, Baron was holding Ori’s paper. “Tell me then,” Baron had said. “What is it you’ll do? Who the fuck
are
you, chaver?”

“How come they ain’t got you yet?” Ori asked. Baron said there were hundreds of militia gone AWOL. Most of those planning to go into hiding were keeping their heads down, readying for the black survivalist economy of New Crobuzon, staying out of sight of their erstwhile colleagues. With the chaos in the city, he said, it would be impossible for the militia to keep track of all their men. No day passed without a strike or riot: the numbers of the unemployed were growing, there were attacks on xenians by Quillers and on Quillers by xenians and dissidents. Some in Parliament were arguing for compromise, meeting the guilds.

“I ain’t hiding,” said Baron. “I don’t care.”

They approached The Terrible Magpie in Riverskin, near the cactus ghetto. Ori would not go to The Two Maggots, or any place so known as a dissidents’ hole that it would be watched. Here in Riverskin the roads were quiet gullies between damp wood houses. The worst trouble they were likely to find was from the gangs of drugged cactus youth who lounged and carved keloid tattoos into their green skins, sitting on the girders at the base of the Glasshouse as it loomed eighty yards high, a quarter of a mile across where it cut streets out of New Crobuzon like a stencil. The cactus punks watched Ori and Baron but did not accost them.

Something had happened to Baron. He said nothing explicit to make Ori wonder about his experiences, but it was in his pauses, in the ways he did not say things. A rage. Ori supposed there were as many unspeakable stories as there were men come back from war. Baron was thinking of something, of some
one thing,
a moment of—what? blood? death? transfiguration?—some atrocity that had made him this angry fighting man, eager to kill those who had once paid him. Ori thought of dead friends and of pain.

Each of the Caucus groups was courting Baron and the other renegade militia. With careful scorn Ori explained the agenda of the various factions. He told stories of Toro’s adventures, the crew’s works, and pulled Baron to his orbit.

Baron was a prize. The Toroans were delighted. Toro came the night Baron joined them, put a bony hand on the militiaman’s chest to welcome him.

That was the first time Ori saw how Toro travelled. When Old Shoulder and the gang were done talking, Toro lowered that carved and cast metal head and horns and pushed. The helmeted figure was leaning against nothing, against air, and then driving, straining forward, until those hexed horns caught at something, caught on it and the universe seemed to flex and stretch at two points,
and Ori felt the air crack with thaumaturgy and Toro’s horns pierced the world and Toro stomped suddenly through. The split skin of reality closed again like lips, back into position, and Toro was gone.

“What does Toro
do
?” Ori asked Ulliam the Remade that night. “To make boss? I’m not complaining, you know that, right? I’m just saying. What does Toro do?”

Ulliam smiled.

“Hope you never find out,” he said. “Without Toro, we’re nothing.”

Baron brought a military savagery to the gang. When he was talking of the war he shook and barked rage; he became etched with veins. But when he went on jobs, on revenge-raids against informers, on punishment beatings against the drug gangs encroaching on Toro’s land, in the action itself he was utterly cold, mouth barely twitching as he worked without emotion on someone.

He frightened his new gang-comrades. His machinish drive, the ease with which he gave out punishment, the way his eyes switched off and the life in them sank very deep.
We ain’t nothing,
Ori thought. The Toroans had thought themselves hard desperados—and yes they had done violent, murderous things in the name of change—but their anarchist anger was a vague floundering next to the cool rageless expertise of the soldier. They were in awe of him.

Ori remembered the first execution he had seen, of a captain-informer. The roughhousing had been easy. They had found the proof, the blacklists of names, the executive orders. But even with all their hatred, even with the memory of fallen brothers and sisters, even with Ulliam’s memory of the punishment factories themselves, the execution was a difficult thing. Ori had closed his eyes so as not to see the shot. They had given Ulliam the gun saying it was for his Remaking, but Ori thought it was also because Ulliam could not look at his quarry. His backward-facing head focused on nothing. And even then, Ori bet he closed his eyes when he pulled the trigger.

By contrast Baron walked in anywhere he was bid and fought who he was told to fight and killed if told to implacably. He moved like the best constructs Ori remembered from his youth: like something oiled, metal, mindless.

When the Murkside Shrikes again, with pissy provocation, started to spread into Toro’s streets, Ori, Enoch and Baron were sent to finish the incursions. “One only,” Toro said. “The one with the harelip. He’s the planner.” Ori, always the best shot, had a flintlock, Enoch a double-crossbow, but neither had a chance to fire. Baron had checked and cleaned the barrels of his repeater with effortless expertise.

Young men and women, the hangers-on of the youthful Shrikes, lounged over the stairs to the Murkside attic drinking very-tea and smoking shazbah. Ori and Enoch followed Baron. Twice he was challenged by some junkie nominally on guard: twice he dismissed them with a look, a whispered threat. Ori was still turning the corner on the last mezzanine when he heard the quick-kicked splintering of wood, shouts.

Two shots had sounded already by the time he reached the door. Two boys about seventeen were fallen on ruined legs and screaming. While others ran and dropped their guns Baron kept moving. Someone shot Baron, and Ori saw blood flower on his left arm: Baron grunted and his face flashed a moment of pain and was impassive again. Two more quick shots disabled or terrified those firing, and then he was closing on the harelipped young man who gave the gang its ideas, and he shot him as Enoch and Ori stared.

He doesn’t care if he dies,
Ori thought that night. Baron terrified him.
He’ll kill if we tell him. He’ll kill if we let him.

That ain’t a man who learnt his fighting in the wilds.
The quick and brute expertise with which he swept a room, the one-two-three taking in of all corners. Baron had done this many times before, this urban violence. Baron was no recent recruit, a jobless man found a job, a rushed soldier.

What can Toro do?
Ori wondered. He had never seen his boss fight.

“What’s that helmet?” he said, and Ulliam told him that Toro had come out of the punishment factories or the jail, or the wilds, or the undertown, and gone on a long and arduous search to find a craftsman and the materials, had had the helmet made: the rasulbagra it was sometimes called, the head of the bull. Ulliam told him the unbelievable stories of its powers and the way it had been made, the long dangers of its forging, the years. “Years in jail, years hunting the pieces, years wearing it,” he said. “You’ll see what it can do.”