Iron Council (8 page)

CHAPTER EIGHT

No one seemed to know what had started the war with Tesh. The Runagaters had their theories, and there were official stories and the unseen machinations behind them, but among Ori’s circle no one knew quite what had started it, or even exactly when it had begun.

As the long recession had bitten, years before, merchant ships from New Crobuzon had started returning to dock reporting piratical manoeuvres against them, sudden brigandry from unknown ships. The city’s exploration and its trade were under attack. History was marked by New Crobuzon’s oscillations between autarky and engagement, but never, its wounded captains said, had its emergence into mercantilism been so punished, so unexpectedly.

After centuries of uncertainty and strange relations, the city had made understandings with the Witchocracy, and the passage of New Crobuzon ships through the Firewater Straits had been unhindered. So a sea-route was open to the grasslands and islands, the legendary places on the far side of the continent. Ships came back and said they had been to Maru’ahm. They sailed for years and brought back jewelled cakes from thousands of miles away, from the crocodile double-city called The Brothers. And then the piracy had begun, hard, and New Crobuzon came slowly to understand that it was being attacked.

The arcane Tesh ships, the barquentines and dandy catboats all raggedy with coloured cloth, whose crews wore henna and filed their teeth, had ceased coming to New Crobuzon’s docks. There was a rumour that through long-disused channels, Tesh’s secret and hidden ambassador had told the Mayor that their two states were at war.

Reports of Tesh depredations in the Firewater Straits became more common and higher-profile, in the papers and government newsposters. The Mayor had promised revenge and counterattack. Recruitment to the New Crobuzon Navy was intensified, along, Ori heard, with “booze recruitment”—press-ganging.

It was still distant, abstract: battles at sea thousands of miles off. But it had escalated. It had featured more and more in the speeches of ministers. The city’s new mercantilism was unrewarded; markets did not open for its exports; the war blocked its sources of uncommon commodities. Ships went and did not come back. New Crobuzon’s boarded-up plants did not reopen, and others closed, and the signs on their doors grew mildew that mocked their proclamations of “temporary suspension of industry.” The city was stagnant; it slumped and slummed. Survivors began to come home.

Destroyed soldiers left to beg and preach their experiences to crowds in Dog Fenn and Riverskin. Scarred, their bones crushed, cut by the enemy or in frantic battlefield surgery, they also bore stranger wounds that only Tesh’s troops could have given them.

Hundreds of the returned had been made mad, and in their mania they raved in unknown sibilant tongue, all of them across the city speaking the same words together, in time. There were men whose eyes were haemorrhaged blood-sacs but who still had sight, Ori heard, who cried without ceasing as they saw the death in everything. The crowds were afraid of the veterans, as if at their own bad conscience. Once, many months ago, Ori had come past a man haranguing the horrified crowd and showing them his arms, which were bleached a dead grey.

“You know what this is!” he was shouting at them. “You know! I was at the edge of a blast, and you see? The sawbones tried to take my arms, told me they had to go, but they just
didn’t want you to
see
. . .” He waggled his ghastly limbs like paper cutouts, and the militia came and stifled him, took him away. But Ori had seen the onlookers’ terror. Had Tesh truly remembered the lost science of colourbombs?

So many uncertainties, a spiralling-down of morale, fear in the city. New Crobuzon’s government had mobilised. For two, three years now it had been the time of the Special Offensive. There was more death and more industry. Everyone knew someone who had gone to war, or disappeared from a dockside pub. The shipyards of Tarmuth, that estuary satellite town, had begun to push out ironclads and submersibles and had spurred something of a recovery, and the mills and forges of New Crobuzon followed, war turning their gears.

Guilds and unions were outlawed capriciously, or restricted and emasculated. There were new jobs now for some of those grown used to pauperism, though competition for them was cruel. New Crobuzon was stretched out, pulled taut.

Every age had its social bandits. Jack Half-a-Prayer when Ori was a boy, Bridling in the Week of Dust, Alois and her company a century ago. Jabber himself, if one looked at it a certain way. Made strange by their context, overthrowing rules: the crowds who would spit on the Remade would have sworn themselves to Half-a-Prayer. Doubtless some were imagined by history, mean little cutpurses embellished through centuries. But some were real: Ori would swear by Jack. And now there was Toro.

Skullday, Ori ran with the Nuevists. He took his day-wages and joined them in The Two Maggots pub by Barrow Bridge, and with the beetle-spit-smeared rooftops of Kinken visible over the river they played games and argued about art. The students and exiles
of the arts quarter were always happy to see Ori because he was
one of a handful of real labourers in the circle. In the evening Ori and Petron and several others staged an art-incident, dressing as pantomime pigs, parading to Salacus Fields and past The Clock and Cockerel, long fallen on its honour, where the parvenus and uptown posers came to play at bohemia. The Nuevists grunted at the drinkers and shouted “Ah, nostalgia!” in porcine voices.

Dustday Ori stevedored, and drank in the evening in a workers’ pub in Skulkford. Among the smoke and beer-laughter, he missed the flamboyance of The Two Maggots. A barmaid caught his eye, and he recognised her from some illicit meeting. She folded back her apron for him to see the
Runagate Rampant
s in her pinny pocket, inviting him to buy, and the resentment and frustration he had felt for Curdin came back to him hard.

He shook his head so brusquely she obviously thought she had misremembered. Her eyes widened. Poor woman, he had not meant to scare her. He persuaded her that he was safe to talk to. He called her Jack. “I’m tired of it,” he whispered. “Tired of
Runagate Rampant,
forever saying what’s what but never
doing
anything, tired of waiting for change which don’t come.” He executed a ridiculous handslang parody.

“What’s the point, you saying?” she said.

“No, I know there’s a point . . .” Ori poked the table in fervour. “I been reading this stuff for months now. I mean . . . but the militia are doing something. Quillers are doing something. And the only ones on
our
side doing anything are nutcases like the Excess League or bandits like Toro.”

“But I mean you ain’t serious, right?” Jack let her tone come down carefully. “I mean, you know the limitations . . .”

“Godspit and
shit,
Jack, don’t start with ‘the limits of individual action’ right now. I’m just tired. Sometimes, don’t you sometimes wish you
didn’t care
? I mean course you want a change, we want a change, but if a change ain’t godsdamn coming, then the next thing I wish is that I
didn’t care.
”

Fishday evening Ori disembarked at Saltpetre Station. In the smoggy gloaming, he went through the brickwork warrens of Griss Fell, past householders scrubbing their porches of the grit of machinofacture and graffitied coils, chatting from window to window across the little streets. In an old stable, a soup kitchen doled out bowls to a line of destitutes. Nominally the charity was run from Kinken, and keeping order were a trio of khepri armed in
imitation of their guard-gods, the Tough Sisters, with crossbow
and flintlock, spear and hooknet, and one with the metaclockwork stingbox.

The khepri stretched their lean and vivid women’s bodies. They spoke to each other without sound, moving the antennae and headlegs of their headscarabs, the iridescent two-foot beetles at the top of their necks. They vented chymical gusts. They turned to Ori—he was reflected in their compound eyes—and recognised him, waved him to one of the cauldrons. He began to dole out soup to patient tramps.

Kinken money had started the service, but it was kept running by locals. When the Mayor said the city could not provide for the needy, alternative structures arose. To shame New Crobuzon’s rulers or out of despair, various groupings provided social programs. They were inadequate and oversubscribed, and one spawned another as the sects competed.

In Spit Hearth they were run by the churches: care of the old and the orphaned and poor was in the hands of hierophants, monks and nuns. With their ersatz hospitals and kitchens, apostate and zealot sects built up trust that a thousand years of preaching would not have gained them. Seeing that, the New Quill party had started its own human-only relief in Sunter, to complement its street-fighting. The insurrectionists, who would be arrested instantly they went public, could not follow.

They followed Kinken money instead—it came, they heard, from Francine 2, the khepri crime-queen. It was not unknown for the captains of illicit industry to subsidise such charities: in Bonetown Mr. Motley was reputed to keep local loyalty with his own goodwill trusts. But wherever the money came from, the Griss Fell Retreat was run by locals, and the Caucus tried carefully to be known to be involved.

With a few Caucusists from various tendencies working together alongside the unaffiliated, it could be fractious. The activists had to whisper their tea-break debates.

Ori spooned broth into bowls. He recognised the faces of many of the outcasts; he knew some of their names. Many were Remade. A woman whose eyes had been taken in punishment, her face a skin seal from nose to hairline, shuffled past holding the rag-coat of her companion. Mostly human but not all, there were other races too, on hard times. An ancient cactus-man, his spines withered and brittle. Men and women scarred. There were some whose minds were gone, who sang hymns or yammered nonsense words, or asked questions that made no sense. “Are you a doubler?” a lank-haired oldster asked everyone who passed, the ancient remains of some accent still audible. “Are you a doubler? Are you excessive? Are you proscribed? Are you a doubler, son?”

“Ori. Come for absolution?” Ladia was the full-timer on duty. She teased all the volunteers that they came only to unload guilt. She was not stupid—she knew their allegiances. When Ori took a break, she joined him and poured liquor in his tea. He knew their conversation could not be heard over the table manners of the starving.

“You’re like Toro,” he told her. “You’re the only ones
doing
anything, making changes
here,
now.”

“I knew it. I knew you was here because you felt guilty,” she said. She made it light. “Doing your bit.”

He finished his shift, and kept his patience. Ori muttered to those momentarily in his care. Some smiled and spoke back to him; some cussed him with alcohol or very-tea on their breath. “Are you excessive? Are you proscribed? Are you a doubler?” the insistent old man said to him. Ori took his bowl away.

“You are,” the old man said. “You
are
a doubler. You’re a doubler, you little terror.” The man smiled like a saint and was pointing at Ori’s midriff, where his shirt had fallen forward and exposed
his belt, and tucked into it a folded copy of
Runagate Rampant, Double-R.

Ori tucked his shirt back in, careful not to be furtive. He washed the bowls at the pump (the man chuckling and pulling at his beard, and saying
you are, you doubler
at Ori’s back). He did another round of the room, made it slow, offering last dabs of bread, and came back to the laughing man.

“I am,” he said, conversational and quiet. “I’m a doubler, but it’s best you keep that down, mate. I’d rather not everyone knows, understand? Keep it secret, eh?”

“Oh yes.” The man’s manner changed quite suddenly. The cunning of madness came over him, and he lowered his voice. “Oh yes, we can do that, isn’t it? Good people them doublers. You doublers. And them excessive, and free and proscribed.”

The Excess Faction, the Free Union, the League of the
Proscribed—it was not just
Runagate Rampant;
the old man was itemising groups in the Caucus.

“Good people but
blather,
” he said and snapped his hand open and shut like a talkative mouth. “All a bit blatheration.” Ori smiled and nodded. “They like talking. And you know, that’s all right, talking’s good. Ain’t always . . . blather.”

“Who’s the old boy?” Ori said to Ladia.

“Spiral Jacobs,” she said. “Poor old mad sod. Has he found someone to talk to? Has he decided he likes you, Ori? Decided you’re proscribed, or free, a doubler?” Ori stared at her, could not tell if she knew what she was saying. “Has he started on at you about arms or tongues?” She shouted, “Arms and tongues, Spiral!” and waggled her arms and stuck out her tongue, and the old man crowed and did the same. “He’s for the first, against the second, as I recall,” she said to Ori. “Has he chanted for you? ‘Too much yammer, not enough hammer.’ “

As Ori left that evening, another of the volunteers met him at the door, a kind and stupid man. “Saw you talking to Ladia about Spiral Jacobs,” he said. He grinned. He whispered, “Heard what they say about him? What he used to do? He was with Jack Half-a-Prayer! Swear to Jabber. He was in Jack’s crew, and he knew Scarface, and he got away.”

CHAPTER NINE

The next night Spiral Jacobs was not at the shelter, nor the next. The pleasure and surprise with which Ladia greeted Ori began to change. He saw her watch him to make sure he was not dealing drugs or contraband, but he worked hard, and she could only be puzzled.

On Skullday, as Ori swept the shelter floor, he heard, “Are you proscribed? Are you a doubler?” Spiral Jacobs saw him and smiled and said, “There’s the boy. There you are, ain’t you, you—” and he blinked and raised one finger and winked. He leaned in and whispered “You doubler.”

One try,
thought Ori. He made himself sceptical. One piece of indulgence for this casualty. Only when the food was all distributed and the first homeless families were coming in from begging or thievery to doss down did Ori idle to Spiral’s side.

“Buy you a drink sometime?” Ori said. “Sounds like you and me’ve interests in common. Could chat about stuff. About doubling. About our friend Jack.”

“Our friend, yes. Jack.”

The man lay down in a blanket. Ori’s patience diminished. Spiral Jacobs was digging something out, a bit of paper, dirt ground into its cross of folds. He showed Ori, with a child’s grin.

It was cool when Ori walked home. He traced the route of the railway, by tracks carried over the slates on loops of brick, arches like a sea-snake. Light like gaslight or candlelight spilt from a train’s dirty windows and sent shadows convulsing over the angled roofscape to hide, darkness creeping out again from behind chimneys in the engine’s wake.

Ori walked fast with his head down and hands in pockets when he passed militia. He felt their eyes on him. They were difficult to see, their uniforms woven through with trow yarns that ate what light there was and excreted darkness. At night the clearest thing about them was their weaponry: they were armed, it seemed, at random, and in the dim he could see their batons or stingboxes, their dirks, rotating pistols.

He remembered twelve years ago, before the slump, to the Construct War, when for the first time in a century the militia tradition of covert policing—networks of spies, informants, plainclothes officers and decentralised fear—had become inadequate, and they had gone unhidden and uniformed. Ori did not remember the roots of the crisis. A child among others, with his boisterous gang he had mounted the roofs of Petty Coil and Brock Marsh on the Tar’s north shore, and watched the militia barrage the Griss Twist dumps.

With children’s aggression they had joined in the purge of the city’s constructs, the panicked hounding of the clockwork and steam-powered cleaners suddenly deemed enemy. Mobs cornered and destroyed the welded, soldered things. Most of the constructs could only stand patient while they were torn apart, their glass trod into dust, their cables ripped.

There were some few that fought. The reason for the war. Infected with viral consciousness, programmes that should not be, that had infected New Crobuzon’s constructs, the gears of their analytical engines turning in heretic combinations to spin a cold machine sentience. Thinking motors for which self-preservation was a predicate, that raised their metal, wood and pipework limbs against their erstwhile owners. Ori never saw it.

The militia had levelled Griss Twist’s jungle of trash. They shelled it, rinsing it with fire, advancing in wrecking teams through the melt and ash-scape. There had been some kind of factory there for the pernicious programmes, and it and the monstrous mind behind it were destroyed. It had been a demon or something, or a council of the aware constructs and their flesh followers.

There were still constructs and difference engines in the city, but far fewer, strictly licenced. An economy of golems had half replaced them, making a few thaumaturges rich. Griss Twist’s dumps were still bone-white and blackened wreckage. They were out of bounds, and New Crobuzon’s children would climb or creep in and take souvenirs, and tell each other that the dumps were haunted by the ghosts of the machines. But the most lasting result of the crisis, Ori thought, was that the militia still went unhidden. It was only months after the Construct War that the recession riots had begun, and few of the militia had ever afterward gone back to plainclothes disguise.

Ori could not decide if it was better or worse. There were those among the rebels who argued each way, that emerging was an expression of militia strength or of weakness.

The paper Spiral Jacobs had showed Ori was a heliotype, taken long ago, of two men standing on the rooftops by Perdido Street Station. A poor print, washed out by light and feathery with age, its exposure too slow, its subjects wearing motion-coronas. But recognisable. Spiral Jacobs white-bearded, looking old even then, wearing the same madman’s grin. And beside him a man whose face was turning and hazed, who raised his arms to the camera, stretched the fingers of his left hand. His right arm was unfolding, was a brutal and massive mantis claw.

Early the next morning, as the tramps were ushered out of the centre, Ori was waiting.

“Spiral,” he said as the man came out scratching and wrapped his blanket around him. The old man blinked in daylight.

“Doubler! You the doubler!”

It cost Ori a day’s wages. He had to pay for a cab to take the weak old man to Flyside, where Ori did not know anyone. Spiral prattled to himself. Ori bought breakfast in a square below the Flyside Militia Tower, with the skyrails hundreds of feet overhead linking the tower to the Spike in the city’s heart. Spiral Jacobs ate for a long time without speaking.

“Too much yammering, not enough hammering, Spiral. Ain’t that the truth? Too much of this—” Ori stuck out his tongue.
“—not enough of this.” He clenched his fist.

“Hammer, don’t yammer,” the tramp said agreeably and ate a grilled tomato.

“Is that what Jack said?”

Spiral Jacobs stopped chewing and looked up slyly.

“Jack? I’ll Jack you,” he said. “What you want to know about Jack?” The accent, that indistinct trace of something foreign, resonated for a second more loudly.

“He hammered not yammered, didn’t he, Jack did?” Ori said. “Ain’t that right? Sometimes you want someone to hammer, to do something, don’t you?”

“We had half a prayer with Jack,” said the old man, and smiled very sadly, all the madness momentarily gone. “He was our best. I love him and his children.”

His children?

“His children?”

“Them as came after. Bully for them.”

“Yes.”

“Bully for them, Toro.”

“Toro?”

In Spiral Jacobs’s eyes Ori saw real derangement, a dark sea of loneliness, cold, liquor and drugs. But thoughts still swam there, cunning as barracuda, their movements the twitchings of the tramp’s face.
He’s sounding me out,
thought Ori.
He’s testing me for something.

“If I’d been there a little older, I’d’ve been Jack’s man,” Ori said. “He’s the boss, always was. I’d have followed him. You know, I saw him die.”

“Jack don’t die, son.”

“I saw him.”

“Aye like
that
maybe, but, you know, people like Jack they don’t die.”

“Where is he now, then?”

“I think Jack’s looking and smiling at you doublers, but there’s others, friends of ours, mates of mine, he’s thinking, ‘Bully for them!’ “ The old man clucked laughter.

“Friends of yours?”

“Aye, friends of mine. With big plans! I know all about it. Once a friend of Jack’s, always, and a friend of all his kin too.”

“Who are you friends with?” Ori wanted to know, but Jacobs would say nothing. “What plans? Who are your friends?” The old man finished his food, running his fingers through the residue of egg and sucking them. He did not notice or care that Ori was there; he reclined and rested, and then, without looking at his companion, he shuffled into the overcast day.

Ori tracked him. It was not furtive. He simply walked a few steps behind Spiral Jacobs, and followed him home. A languorous route. By Shadrach Street through the remnants of the market to the clamour of Aspic Hole, where a few fruiterers and butchers had stalls.

Spiral Jacobs spoke to many he passed. He was given food and a few coins.

Ori watched the society of vagabonds. Grey-faced women and men in clothes like layers of peeling skin greeted Jacobs or cursed him with the fervour of siblings. In the charred shade of a firegutted office, Jacobs passed bottles for more than an hour among the vagrants of Aspic Hole, while Ori tried to understand him.

Once a group of girls and boys, roughnecks every one, a vodyanoi girl kick-leaping and even a young city garuda among them, came to throw stones. Ori stepped up, but the tramps shouted
and waved with almost ritualised aggression and soon the children went.

Spiral Jacobs headed back east toward the Gross Tar, toward the brick holes and the Griss Fell shelter that were as much as anything his home. Ori watched him stumble, watched him rifle through piles of rubbish at junctions. He watched what Jacobs picked out: bewildering debris. Ori considered each piece carefully, as if Spiral Jacobs was a message to him from another time, that he might with care decrypt. A text in flesh.

The wiry little figure went through New Crobuzon’s traffic, past carts piled with vegetables from the farmlands and the Grain Spiral. Hummock bridges took him over canals where barges ferried anthracite, and through the afternoon crowds, children, bickering shoppers, the beggars, a handful of golems, shabby-gentile shopkeepers scrubbing graffitied helixes and radical slogans from their sidings, between damp walls that rose and seemed to crumble, their bricks to effervesce into the air.

When after a long time deep colours leeched across the sky, they had reached Trauka Station. The railway cut overhead at an angle that ignored the terraces below it. Spiral Jacobs looked at Ori again.

“How did you know him?” Ori said.

“Jack?” Jacobs swung his legs. They were on the Murkside shore, their thighs under the railings. In the river a tarred frame broke water, an unlit vodyanoi house. Jacobs spoke with a lilt, and Ori thought he must be hearing a song-story tradition from Jacobs’ homeland. “Jack the Man’Tis, he was a sight for sore eyes. Come through on the night-stalkers. It was him stepped up, saved this place from the dream-sickness all them years ago, ‘fore you was born. Scissored through the militia.” He snip-snipped his hand, hinging it at the wrist. “I give him things he needed. I was an informationer.”

By the light of the gaslamps, Ori was looking at the helio. He ran his thumb over Jack Half-a-Prayer’s claw.

“What about the others?”

“I watch all Jack’s children. Toro’s a one with fine ideas.” Jacobs smiled. “If you knew the plans.”

“Tell me.”

“Can’t do that.”

“Tell me.”

“Ain’t me should tell you. Toro should tell you.”

Information—a place, a day—passed between them. Ori folded the picture away.

The New Crobuzon newspapers were full of stories of Toro. There were fanciful engravings of some terrible muscled bull-headed thing, descriptions of feral bovine roars over Mafaton and The Crow, the uptown houses and the offices of the government.

Toro’s exploits were all named, and the journals were addicted to mentioning them. A bank’s vaults had been breached and slathered with slogans, thousands of guineas taken, of which hundreds had been distributed among the children of Badside. In
The Digest
Ori read:

By great fortune, this,
THE CASE OF THE BADSIDE MILLIONS
,
has not had so bloody an outcome as
THE CASE OF THE
ROLLING SECRETARY
or
THE CASE OF THE DROWNED DOWAGER.
These earlier incidents should remind the populace that
the bandit known as
TORO
is a coward and a murderer whose
panache
is all that grants him a degree of local sympathy.

Messages reached Ori through New Crobuzon’s intricate and secret conduits. He had waited three times at the corner that Spiral Jacobs had told him, in Lichford, beneath signs to Crawfoot and Tooth Way, by the old waxwork museum. He had leaned in the sun, back against the plaster, and waited while street-children tried to sell him nuts and matches in twists of coloured paper.

Each time cost him wages and his profile among the day-
recruiters of Gross Coil. He had to space them out or he would starve, or his landlady’s indulgence would dry up. He returned to the
Runagate Rampant
reading group, to sit, a Jack among Jacks, and talk of the city’s iniquities. Curdin was pleased to see him. Ori was much calmer in his disagreements now. He felt his secret with pleasure.
I’m not quite with you any more
he thought, and felt himself a spy for Toro.

At the street corner he was greeted by a girl in a torn dress, no more than ten years old. She smiled at him as he leaned against
the museum, endearing with her missing teeth. She handed him a paper cone of nuts, and when he shook his head she told him, “The gen’man already paid. Said they was for you.”

When the packet unfolded, even greasy from the roasted nuts the message written on it was legible.
Seen you waiting. Bring vittles and silver from a rich man’s table.
Below was a little horned circle, the sigil of Toro.

It was easier than he had thought. He watched a house in East Gidd. Eventually he paid a boy to break the windows in front, while he vaulted into the shrubbery, forced the garden door, grabbed knives and forks and chicken from the table. Dogs came, but Ori was young and had outrun dogs before.

No one would eat the greasy mess that marinated overnight in his sack. This was an examination. The next day at the usual spot he put his bag at his feet, and when he left he did not take it. He was well excited.

Mmm good,
said the next note, uncurled from more street food.
Now we needs money my frend forty nobles.

Ori fulfilled his commissions. He did what he was told. He was not a thief, but he knew thieves. They helped him or taught him what to do. At first he did not enjoy the anarchic adventures, running down alleys at night with bags bobbing in his hands, the shrieks of well-dressed ladies behind him.