Iron Council (36 page)

They were not alone now. They were in some dream-dark landscape. Ori wondered when his city was taken, made this.

A succession. The loud sound of fiddles. Wealthy men slumming it with downtown whores fell out of the doors of drinkhalls, walking oblivious past tsotsis who eyed them and fingered ill-
concealed weapons. Up now toward a militia tower, the thrum of the skyrails as a lit pod passed over. Crowding under slowworms of lit glass spelling names and services, simple animations—a red-mouthed lady drawn with the light, replaced stutteringly with
another who had raised her glass, and back again in autistic illuminant recursion. Narcotics on the corners sold in twists by macerated youths, militia in aggressive cabals, their mirrors sending the light back around the street. Anger, drunk and stupid fights, and serious fights, too.

North to Nabob Bridge, approaching Riverskin. At the edge of Flyside they passed a series of lots, open and strewn, and Ori saw the last blows of some gang-pummelling, and there was a crowd of Quillers approaching in their suits, natty and baleful, but they did not harass him, instead sneering at the students who ran by laughing, chasing motes of thaumaturgic light flying drunken as butterflies; and a catcall, and there was the lit brazier of a picket outside a chymical plant, the numbers of the strikers swollen by supporters carrying billy clubs and forks to protect them from the Quillers who eyed them but ran the numbers and walked on.

A scarred cactus-boy begging for coins even so late while his monkey danced, the boy’s head scratched with friendly condescension by the big cactus-man leading a gang of, that must be the Militant Sundry, not quite with weapons on display (militia were near enough to see) but making a presence in that late-night decadent street and nodding in some wary camaraderie-cum-challenge to a Caucus man, who shucked handslang at a passer and disappeared into an old cold alley when a panicked militia patrol ran past, and there was a fire in the back of the alley, and huddled junkie figures, and a wyrman called and came down to land and flew again.

Men and women passed. There was drink-smell and smoke, drug residue and the shrieks and calls like birds.

Spiral Jacobs walked through it all shielded by his madness. He stopped, drew his shapes, walked on, stopped, drew, walked, on to the spired old-century cragginess of Nabob Bridge, and over quickly through Kinken where the richer khepri moieties, older money and arriviste, preserved their dreamed-up culture in the Plaza of Statues, kitsch mythic shapes in khepri-spit. The air tasted, with the ghosts of khepri conversations in wafts of chymical.

Spiral Jacobs walked the tight streets of the Old Town, the firstborn part of New Crobuzon, a V in the mud between rivers, now spilt over into metropolis dimensions. He shuffled and crooned and drew his spirals on the dark brick walls, on through Sheck, a grocertown of shopkeepers and a stronghold of New Quill, where Ori walked carefully. He saw not the bowlered Quill foot soldiers but the nervous paunchy men of defence committees, in agonies of pride at their own bravery. Through the outer edge of Spit Hearth where the prostitutes worked, streetwalkers eyeing him. Spiral Jacobs drew his coil. On one side was the window of a brothel advertising outré relaxations: on the other a mouldered poster, some radical group trying to recruit women it coyly called “those of unorthodox service professions.”

The Crow, New Crobuzon’s commercial heart, was not full. There were only a few walking so late. Spiral Jacobs, with Ori behind him, passed the arcades, tunnels through buildings neither open nor closed. They were curlicued in spiralled iron that the old man fingered with appreciation, their windows full of trinkets for the burghers.

And then Ori stopped and let Spiral continue toward the shadow, light-dappled, of the core of New Crobuzon: a castle, a factory, a town of towers; a god, some said, made by a madman intent on theogenesis. It was not a building but a mountain in the materials of building, a mongrel of styles united with illicit intelligence. The city’s five railway lines emerged from its mouths, or perhaps they congregated there, perhaps their motion was inward and they coiled together like a rat-king’s tails and knotted and made the
edifice that housed them, Perdido Street Station. A ganglion of railroad.

Spiral Jacobs headed under the arch that tethered it to the militia’s central Spike, was bunking down in the brick concrete wood iron temple great and charged enough to alter the weather above it, to alter the very night.

Ori watched the old man go. Perdido Street Station did not care that the city was surging. That nothing was the same as it had been. Ori turned and for the first time in hours his ears cleared, and he heard the calls of fighting, the swallowing of fires.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

All hands,
the message said.
It’s now.
Pinned to Ori’s door.

Old Shoulder and Toro were the only ones not there. Baron explained the plan.

“Near a week,” he said. “That’s what we got. This information’s from Bertold. We have to be careful. This”—a square of chalk—“is the top room. This is where they’ll be.

“Remember. They ain’t expecting attacks, but the Clypeans are tough. Each of you’ll be told exactly what you have to do. Understood? Remember how you get in, and what you do, and how you get out. And—listen to me—don’t alter your plan no matter what you see. Understand me? You do what you’re told, let others do what they’re told.”

Are we a cell?
Ori thought.
Are there others we don’t know of?
Ori’s companions shifted.

Baron drew more and more lines on the plan, repeating instructions until they had become mantra. His cadences did not alter; he was like a wax recording.

There was a cache of new weapons. Repeaters, blunderbusses, firespitters. Ori watched his comrades cleaning and oiling them. He saw whose hands shook. He saw that his own did not.

Baron taught them how to take point, secure areas, with the
instrumental efficiency of the militia. They walked through their parts as if blocking a play.
Step up, swing, step, step, raise, secure,
two three, say two officers, two three, step, turn, nod.
Ori recited his strategy to himself.
How are we going to do this?

“We got surprise,” said Baron. “Get through that one moment, that chink. They got nothing to hold us back. Tell you something though, Ori.” He leaned in without even gallows humour. “Won’t all of us get out. Some of us’ll die there.” He did not look afraid. He did not care if he came out.

You can feel it, can’t you?
Ori thought. His untethering. Ori was stretching out as if on a stem. It might snap. He still felt in that strange nightscape with Spiral Jacobs, his valedictory to the old man, when he had walked unmolested through a city turned into some psychotic, louche, broken thing. That was where he was.

There was no urgency in him. It was not a bleak feeling. Ori was only untethered. Things troubled him distantly. Uncertainties rose in him, distantly.

There were commotions. On the warming street, criers and journal-boys ran past, far from their usual grounds, called headlines.
Convocation in Dog Fenn,
they shouted.
Demands to Parliament. Xenian Gangs, Seditionist Caucus.
The Toroans sat in the house they had bought from the estate of those they had killed. They ignored the news-vendors, the anxiety on the streets. They began to spread mess, to live in a kind of aggressive squalor. They hung their cesti on their belts; they sharpened the horns.

Magisters, even the top-rank doges, were citizens, it was always stressed, citizens like anyone. They worked masked for justice’s sake, for the anonymity of justice. Any dwelling, in any part of town, could house a servant of law. The Flag Hill house next to the gang was elegant but nondescript.

Incongruously, at last, one early evening, with gunshots far off south—a noise New Crobuzon had grown used to, which no longer called the militia down from their dirigibles, was only part of the nightsound now—visitors began arriving. Cooks and maids and footmen left, given the night off. Not knowing their master’s job, not knowing who it was who came to him. Fops and uptown dandies arrived, dressed for a sedate party. A cactus-man in smart clothes.

Probably the staff think he’s an orgiast,
Ori thought.
They think their master’s up to shenanigans, peccadilloes or drugs.
The guests were militia. Clypean. Preparing for the mayor’s arrival.

Ulliam put on a helmet. He strapped it tight and sighed. It jutted mirrors before his eyes. “Never, ever thought I’d put this on again,” he said.

“I’m not clear,” Enoch kept saying to Ori. “I’m not clear how it is I leave.”

“You heard him, ‘Noch, through the scullery window, over into the gardens, away.”
You’ll never leave.

“Yeah, yeah, I, I know. It’s just . . . I’m sure that’s right.”

You’ll never leave.

“You’ll know when it’s time to go, Ori,” Baron had said, and Ori waited. He leaned against the cracked plaster, put his head on the thin ribs of board.
Step step secure aim aim shoot.

“You understand what you’ve to do, Ori?” Baron had said. “What’s asked?”

Why this . . . this
honour
?
Ori wondered. Why was he placed at the mission’s heart? He was—after Baron—the best shot; and he did not expect to live, yet had not run. Perhaps that had decided Toro.
None of us will live,
he thought.
I’d still do this a thousand damn times.
He felt himself anchor.

“You know where I’ve got to be, and you know where Shoulder’s got to be. We need someone at the top, Ori.”

Ori’s on point,
he thought.
Ori, take point.

He felt a weight of city below him, as if New Crobuzon were shackled to him as he dangled. He closed his eyes. He imagined he felt things burrowing in the house walls, through his skin. He looked over what he had done, over years. A churchbell sounded.
A wyrman shouted from the sky. In Dog Fenn his friends kept
fighting.

He heard Old Shoulder come and go below. Ori did not take his head from the wall. He heard trunk-legs, the surprisingly gentle touchdown of the cactacae’s elephantine pads. Some time later reality pricked; there was a rending. He did not look round. “Evening boss,” he said. Toro had come.

Between two and three o’clock in the morning, with the sky squid-ink dark, clouds occluding the stars and half-moon, they began.

Toro tremored and said, “The house-hex flickered.”

Sulion, their treacherous contact, had left one key in one lock, turned one powerful ward charm upside down and rubbed it with hexed salt, cut one clutch of wires. It was all they needed.

With Toro’s murmured reportage, gleaned from the horns that antennaed in the ripples of thaumaturgy, Ori tracked progress.

The gang were inside. “There’s an empath,” Toro said. “They know we’re in.”
Of course there’s a damn empath,
Ori thought.
There’s an empath and a shockjack and a cryomance, there’s everything.
He stopped because he could feel the edge of hysteria.

There was the diversion. Ori could feel something. Steps on the stairs? Someone just beyond the wall running up and others running down.
First sign of entrance, they’ll split: inner core’ll go to the Mayor, the outer squad’ll go to the incursion. They’ll move fast to get the Mayor out.

As the militia descended, Kit must be running the first set
of stairs, sweeping whatever came at him with sticky flame, running fast past the fires he started. And as behind him came Ruby and Enoch with their own weapons, laying their traps, at the same time as that first wave—that diversion—came and the bodyguards rushed to its point of entry, Ulliam was funnelling gunpowder at the base of the door, leaving a tide-mark of explosive. And
there,
evidence of their breach. Ori heard shooting.

He imagined the guests moving with murderous militia grace. He hoped his comrades had surprised them enough to take some down. He even let himself hope they might get away.

Ulliam blew the door. Now the street would know. But in that fearful time, perhaps they would not intercede too quickly. Some of the Clypeans must be veering to deal with this new incursion. The ground floor would be thronging. And finally, Baron would be going in.

Ori pictured it. Such daring. He wished he could see. Swinging a line out from the first-floor window to that of the adjoining house, and Baron, in his new armour and helmet, brachiating across, letting the stepped rope drop for Old Shoulder to climb. Baron must be in the hall, attaching his charge to the banister and lighting that long fuse. And spraying oil on the stairs and lighting it so that the bulk of the militia were trapped beneath, Baron would let out a bellow, and now with Old Shoulder beside him, rivebow cocked, spitbolt ready, he must be treading up the stairs.

The inner guard would have to look, would send a scout-squad to the top of the stair, and oh Ori could just imagine the shock
and the determination when they saw Baron. He would fire and back away, drawing them out. They would be so astonished to see him, his guns poised, bunching his shoulders, in his armour and his new helmet, cast so carefully in mimicry, his rivet-scarred bull’s head.

Toro!
they would cry.
Toro!

Were they shouting that now?

Even the Clypeans would be afraid to have so famous a bandit with them, the perpetrator of such inventive death and rebellion. They would have to attack. Ori put his ear to the plaster-dusted wood. There was scuttering beyond. “They’re going,” said Toro behind him.

“It’s time,” said Toro.

There was running—Ori could hear it. He drew his pepperpot revolver and saw that his hands were absolutely unshaking.

“It’s time, now,” said Toro. The Clypean Guards would be running past the charge Baron had laid, seeing only fires below and the retreating, shooting figure of Baron in his bull’s head disguise, slamming his horns from side to side so they rang against the walls. Ori had strapped on Baron’s headgear.
Can you see?
he had said, and Baron had answered,
Enough to kill.
And enough to die. Ori did not think Baron cared.

Old Shoulder must be firing his rivebow at any cactus militia before turning to the others; and with him, shooting with the expertise of the specialist, Baron the ersatz Bull. Drawing the militia out. Toro said again that it was time.

It was, it was almost time, it would be time in any moment. Ori strained.
Step step two three quickly quickly step fire.

“Now,” Toro said, and this time it was true. There was a flowering of explosion. The sound of fire unfolding and the judder of masonry; dust pounced from the wall around Ori and in a chorus of downward raging housematter the stairs adjoining the topmost room to the melees below were blown by Baron’s bomb. The room beyond Ori’s wall was cut off.

“Now,” Toro said, and stepped up beside Ori, who moved his gun into place, stood beside his boss as Toro crouched and charged, with a distorted rage-noise, pushing horns ajut and piercing this time not the world with hermetic techniques but in the most base way the wall itself. It gave without restraint. And Toro was through, and Ori was through, and standing in the wall’s lime and laths detritus in a bedroom, with men and a woman staring at them.

Ori’s calm held. It slowed time. Motion was languid. He moved as if in water.

A warm room, tapestries and paintings, ornate furniture, a
fire, a woman and man on a chaise, another man standing, no, two men, looking at the dusting hole and at Ori and Toro. There was music. Someone was moving: a man in evening dress, his coat-tails flapping as he came with cat-grace, levelling a cane that unfolded organically into a weapon like a metal claw. He was very close and Ori was curiously without fear raising his pistol and wondering if it would reach its apogee in time, if he could interrupt the oncomer.

Toro grunted. Toro was goring forward and spitted the man from a distance, two boreholes opening in the bodyguard’s chest so he was sodden in blood and his eyes closed and he died at Ori’s feet.

Ori moved his gun:
step step, aim, one two, corner, corner.
He heard shouting. The other standing man had his hands up, was shouting, “Sulion! Sulion!” Ori shot him.

The body of their contact lay bleeding from the clean headshot. The man and the woman sat quite still and stared at the corpse. Toro raised a snubbed pistol to them, and looked through those white-shining glass eyes at Ori.

Of course there was no expression to the cast head. No one had given Ori the order to kill Sulion. He looked at the body and did not feel vindication. Had it been a panic? Had he meant to do it? For what was this revenge? Ori did not know. He was still not shaking.

Toro nodded at the door:
Secure the room.
Ori stepped over Sulion’s wet corpse.

The corridor ended in a charred and guttering interruption. There was fighting below. He wondered which of his friends were still alive. Oily fire slathered the walls like ivy. They had only minutes before the house became conflagration or militia thaumaturgy breached the black hole they had punched in the house.

“We ain’t got long,” Ori said. He stood by Toro, before the last two people in the room, still sitting by the fire, watching them.

From a voxiterator a cello suite sounded, spitting momentarily with a crack of the wax. The man was in his sixties, broad and muscled under flesh, wearing a silk robe. He had a still, clever face. He kept his eyes on Ori and the Bull with such precision Ori knew he was trying to plan. He held the hand of the woman.

She must be close to his age—history evidenced that—but her face was almost without lines. Her hair was down-white. Ori recognised her from hundreds of heliotypes. She carried a long clay pipe as slender as a fingerbone. Its bowl still smoldered. It smelt of spice. She wore a shawl with nothing beneath. She did not cringe or glower or stare defiance. She watched with the same calm probing look as her lover.

“I can pay you,” she said. Her voice was absolutely steady.

“Hush,” Toro said. “Mayor Stem-Fulcher, hush now.”

Mayor Stem-Fulcher. Ori was curious. More even than angry, or disgusted, or murderous for revenge, he was curious. This woman had ordered the Paradox Massacre, had sent the rate of Remaking higher and higher. This woman did backdoor deals with the New Quill Party, let their pogroms against xenians go uninvestigated. This was the woman who had stuffed the official guilds with informers. Presiding over a rotting polity on which countereconomies of hunger and theft grew like fungus. This woman perpetrated the war. Mayor Eliza Stem-Fulcher, La Crobuzonia, the Fat Sun Mater.

“You know you won’t get out,” the Mayor said. Her voice was steady. She even raised her pipe, as if she would smoke. “I can give you passage.” She did not sound hopeful. She looked at her lover, and something went between them.
A valediction,
Ori thought, and for the first time felt a swell of something in him, a compound emotion he could not begin to parse.
She knows.