Iron Council

CHAPTER TWENTY

The Monstrous Without-and Within. New Crobuzon’s Twin Enemies: The Watcher and the Treacherous. Night of Shame.

The newspapers declaimed. They brought out extra-large fonts for their condemnations of the EyeSky Riots. There were heliotypes of the dead barricaded in shops and smothered by smoke, crushed in falls from windows, shot.

In The Grocer’s Sweetheart on the Chainday after, Ori expected the Runagate Rampant meeting to be overflowing, but no one was there. He came back the next night and the next, looking for a face he remembered. At last on Dustday he saw the knit-worker, gathering money, whispering in the landlord’s ear.

“Jack,” said Ori. She turned, untrusting, and her face only opened a very little when she saw it was him.

“Jack,” she said.

“It’ll have to be fast,” she said. “I have to go. Wine, then, go on.

“Spiralling down, eh?” she said, pointing at the coil-marks on his clothes. “I see them all over now. They’ve gone from walls to clothes. Cactus punks are wearing them, Nuevists, radicals. What do they mean?”

“A link,” he said carefully. “To Half-a-Prayer. I know the man who started them.”

“I heard of him, I think…”

“He’s a friend of mine. I know him well.” There was silence. They drank. “Missed the meeting.”

“There ain’t no meetings now. You mad, Ori… Jack?” She was horrified. “I’m sorry, Jack,” she said, “really sorry. Curdin told me your name. And where you live. He shouldn’t have done, but he was keen I be able to get Double-R to you, if need be. I told no one.”

He contained his shock, shook his head.

“The meetings?” he said, and she forgot her contrition quickly.

“Why would we have meetings?” she said. “When it’s going on?” Ori shook his head, and she gave a sound almost a sob. “Jack, Jack… Jabber’s sake. What are you doing? Weren’t you there?”

“Godsdammit, of course I was. I was in Creekside. I was…” He lowered his voice. “Who are the Militant Sundry, any damn way? I was trying to stand up for the godsdamned khepri your bloody brainless commonalty were busy trying to butcher.”

“The Sundry? Well, if you was xenian and all you’d had in your corner were the comprador bastards in the Divers Tendency, wouldn’t you turn somewhere else? And don’t you dare. Don’t you dare scorn people. You know the Quillers take up the human dust. Even your friend Petron knows that-and don’t bloody look at me like that, Jack, everyone knows his name, he was in the Flexibles. And I ain’t sure of all the bloody lunacies the Nuevists do, faddling about dressed as animals, silly bloody games, but I’d trust him. I don’t know as I’d trust you, Jack, and that’s a sad thing, because it ain’t that I think you don’t want what I want. I know you do. But I don’t trust your judgement. I think you’re a fool, Jack.”

Ori was not even outraged. He was used to the arrogance of the Runagates. He looked at her with cool annoyance, and, yes, a residue of respect, a due she had inherited from Curdin.

“While you’re playing prophets, Jack,” he said, “keep your eyes open. When I move… you’ll know. We have plans.”

“They say Iron Council’s coming back.”

Her face had taken on such joy.

“It’s coming back.”

All the things Ori could think to say were obvious. He did not want to insult her, so he tried to think of something else to say, but could not.

“It’s a fairy tale,” he said.

“It ain’t.”

“A fable. There’s no Iron Council.”

“They want you to think that. If there’s no Iron Council, then we ain’t never took power. But if there is, and there is, we did it before, we can do it again.”

“Good Jabber, listen to yourself…”

“You telling me you never seen the helios? What do you think that was? You think they built the bloody train by marching alongside each other, women, whores, at the front? Children riding the damn cab hood?”

“Something happened, of course it did, but they were put down. It was a strike is all. They’re long dead-”

She was laughing. “You don’t know, you don’t know. They wanted them dead, and they want them dead again, but they’re coming back. Someone from the Caucus set out for them. We got a message. Why’d they be going, if not to tell them to return?

“Haven’t you seen the graffiti?” she said. “All over. Along with all them coils and spirals you’re wearing. IC You. Iron Council, You. It’s coming back, and even just knowing that’s a godsdamned inspiration.”

“People want them, they’ll find them, they’ll believe in them, Jack…”

“What you don’t know,” she said, and didn’t even look angry anymore, “is that we’re moving. If you could hear the Caucus.” She sipped her drink. She looked at him, some kind of challenge. She’s sitting on the damn Caucus. The cabal of insurrectionists, the truce of the factions and the unaligned.

“There are those in Parliament trying to cosy up, you know. They can’t admit it, but there are factories where we decide if people go to work or not. They want to negotiate. Parliament ain’t the only decider in New Crobuzon anymore. There’s two powers now.”

The knit-worker stretched her hand across the table.

“Madeleina,” she said deliberately. “Di Farja.”

He shook her hand, moved by her trust. “Ori,” he said, as if she didn’t know.

“I tell you something, Ori. We’re in a race. The Caucus is in a race to get things ready. It’ll be weeks or months yet. And we won’t just go round and round-we’re making it a race to something. We ain’t stupid, you know. We’re racing to build what we have to, chains of-” She looked around. “-chains of command, communication. Last night was the start. There’s a way to go, but it’s started. The war’s going sour, they say. The maimed’ll fill the streets. If Tesh could send over that-” She closed her eyes and held her breath, retrospectively aghast. “-that thing, that sky-born witness, what else might they do? Time… we ain’t got much time.

“And the Iron Council’s coming back,” she said. “When people hear that, it’ll go off.”

Maybe we’re all together, Ori thought with a plaintiveness that troubled him. Maybe the Caucus race is our race too…

“We’re all racing,” he said.

“Yeah, but some of us in the wrong direction.”

He thought then of what it would be. Of that moment when the dispossessed, the toilers, the, yes if she wanted, yes, the commonalty heard that the Mayor, the head of the Fat Sun, the arbiter of New Crobuzon, was gone. What that would be.

“You want to talk inspiration?” he said. He was angry again, at her monomaniac prescription. “That I’ll give you,” he said. “You’ll thank me, Jack. What we’re doing, what we’re doing… we need to wake people up. ”

“They’re already awake, Jack. That’s what you don’t see.”

He shook his head.

Bertold Sulion the Clypean Guard had lost his commitment to New Crobuzon, to the Mayor, to the law he was pledged to. Baron told them.

“It’s bled out of him,” he said. “You ain’t trusted to much when you’re a Clypean. The oath you take says it all: I see and hear only what the Mayor and my charges allow me to. Bertold don’t know so much. But he knows the war’s being lost. And he’s seen the deals they’ll do while them he trained with fight and die. It’s all gone rancid. His loyalty’s bled out of him and there ain’t nothing left.

“That’s the thing,” he said. He spoke with care. “It’s in you like your blood.” He patted his sternum. “And when it goes bad, when it goes septic, you might say, you bleed it out and then either something else fills it, or it leaves you empty. Sulion ain’t got nothing in him anymore. He wants to grass, and for form’s sake, he’s asking a lot of money for it, but it ain’t the money he wants. He wants to betray because he wants to betray. He wants us to help him go bad. Whether he knows it or not.”

They were not in Badside. Here are keys for you, the note had said, pinned by one of the two-horned cesti to the wall. We have a new meeting house. An address. Ori had read the note with Enoch, and they had stared at each other. Enoch was a stupid man, but this time Ori shared his confusion. “Flag Hill?”

At the edge of the city, at the end of the Head Line unrolling north from Perdido Street Station, Flag Hill was where the bankers and industrialists lived, the officials, the wealthiest artists. It was a landscape of wide-open ways and sumptuous houses sheer onto the streets, backing onto shared gardens. There were flowering trees and banyans spilling their knotting creepers and making them roots and trunks, emerging from between black paving.

There had been a slum in Flag Hill for years, like an abscess: an oddity of city planning. Mayor Tremulo the Reformer, two centuries past, had ordered some streets of modest housing built on the slopes of the rise that gave the area its name, so that the heroes of the Pirate Wars, he said, could live by those they had defended. The Flag Hill rich had not welcomed the newcomers, and Mayor Tremulo’s schemes for “social merging” had been made risible. Without money what had been modest became a slum. Slate and brick went sickly. The little community of Flag Hill poor came in and out by train, while their neighbours disdained the raised rails for private hansoms, and waited for squalor to reach a critical mass. It had done so fifteen years before.

The poor had been removed from their collapsing houses, settled in ten- and fifteen-floor blocks of concrete in Echomire and Aspic. And then their once-neighbours had moved curiously into the deserted, hollowed rookeries, and money had at last come. Some buildings had been made into houses for the new wealthy, shored up and two or three holed together: to live in reconfigured “base cottages” became a fashion. But several streets at the heart of Flag Hill’s nameless poverty district had been preserved, architecture as aspic, and made a slum museum.

It was through this that Ori and Enoch came. They had cleaned themselves, worn their better clothes. Ori had never been to this street-long memorial to poverty. There was no rot, of course, no smell, nor had there been for more than a decade. But the windows were still broken (their shard edges reinforced by subtle braces to prevent more cracking), the walls still bowed by damp and discoloured (thaumaturgy and joists holding them at the point of their collapse).

The houses were labelled. Brass plaques by their doors told the history of the slum, and talked of the conditions in which the inhabitants had lived. Here, Ori read, can be seen scars of the arson and accidental conflagrations that plagued the streets, forcing the locals to endure life in the spoils of fire. The house was smoked and char-dark. Its carbonised skin was sealed under a matte varnish.

There were front rooms and outhouses that could be entered. AFAMILY OF SIX OR EIGHT MIGHT CROWD INTO SUCH TERRIBLE SURROUNDINGS. The detritus of slum life was left in place, sterilised and dusted by attendants. IT SEEMS UNBELIEVABLE THAT IN MODERN TIMES SUCH SQUALOR COULD GO UNCHECKED.

The house to which they had been directed was a classic of Flag Hill architecture: big, beautiful, mosaiced in painted pebbles. Ori wondered if he had misread the address, but their keys worked. Enoch was frowning. “I been here before,” he said.

It was empty. It was a sham house. Its rooms were bone-

colourless, as were its curtains. Enoch’s awe at the house and the gardens annoyed Ori.

There were people on the Flag Hill streets, men in tailored jackets, women in scarves. Mostly it was humans, but not only. There were canals here, and a community of wealthy vodyanoi who passed with their jump-crawl, dressed in light waterproof mumming of suits, chewing the cheroots that humans smoked and the vodyanoi would eat. There might pass a cactus now and then, some rare uptown achiever. There were constructs here, jolting steam-

figures that gave Ori nostalgia for his childhood when they had been everywhere. The Flag Hillers were wealthy enough to afford the licences, to have their equipment pass the assiduous tests instituted in the aftermath of the Construct War. Mostly, though, even the rich had golems.

They walked with inhuman care, empty-eyed clay or stone or wood or wire men and women. They carried bags, they carried their owners, looking from side to side in mimicry of human motion, as if they could see through those pointless eyes, as if they did not sense mindlessly and abnaturally to follow their instructions.

When the other Toroans arrived, they all asked the question: “What are we doing here?”

When Baron came he was dressed as smartly as a local. He wore the lambswool, the fine sifted cotton and silk easily. They gaped.

“Oh yes,” he said. Shaven, cleaned, smoking a prerolled cigarillo. “You’re my staff, now. Best get used to it.” He sat with his back to the wall in their new, huge, empty room, and told them about Bertold Sulion.

Toro was with them. Ori realised it. He did not know how long that strange-silhouetted figure had been standing at the edge, with the oil-light drawing the edges of its horns. It was evening.

“Why are we here, Bull?” he said. “Where’s Ulliam?”

“Ulliam can’t come often. Remade would be a rarity on these streets. You’re here because I told you to be. Shut up and learn why. I’ll give you money. You get clothes. You’re servants now. Anyone sees you, you’re butlers, footmen, scullery maids. You keep yourselves clean. Got to fit in.”

“Was Badside compromised?” Ruby said. Toro did not sit, but seemed to lean, to be resting held up on nothing. Ori could feel the hex in those horns.

“You know what we aim to do. You know what we’ve wanted, what we build for.” Toro’s unnatural deep tones were a constant shock, a static charge. “The chair-of-the-board is in Parliament. On Strack Island. In the river. Vodyanoi militia in the water, cactus guards, officers in every chamber. Thaumaturges, the best in the city, putting up buffers and orneryblocks, charmtraps, all sorts. We ain’t getting into Parliament.

“And then there’s the Spike, and Perdido Street Station. You-know-who has to spend a lot of time in the Spike. Commanding the militia. Or in the station. In the embassy wing, in the high-tower.” It was more than the hub of New Crobuzon’s trains. It was a town, in three dimensions, encased in brick. The vastness of its mad-made architecture disobeyed not only rules of style but, it was said, of physics.

“When our quarry’s there, it ain’t as if it’s just the Perdidae we got to face.” Not that they would be easy to defeat. The dedicated submilitia given over to protect the station were well-armed and trained. “Wherever the chair-of-the-board goes, the Clypeans go. They’re our worry.

“What about in town? When did you last see any Fat Sun bigwig give a speech? They’re too scared, too busy trying to make secret peace with Tesh. So we need another strategy.” There was a long quiet.

“You-know-who is very close, intimate with one particular magister. Magister Legus. Weekly they meet. There’s all rumours, if you know who to ask. At Legus’ private house. Where he lives as a citizen, takes off his mask. They settle down in private. Sometimes they don’t part again until the morning.

“Happens every week, sometimes twice. In the magister’s house.

“The house next door.”

Tumult. How do you know ? someone was shouting, and You can’t, and Whose is this place? How did you get this? and on.

Ori had a memory. Something in him flinched from an understanding, unsettling, that veered close and was gone again and then was back. Ori saw others remembering, not sure what it was they remembered, not threading things together.

“It was hard to find out the true name behind a nom de jure,” Toro was saying. “But I did it. Took me a long time. Tracked him down.” Ori heard through gauze.

“This is the house…” Ori said, and then said nothing more. No one heard him and he was glad of that. He did not know what he wanted to do. He did not know what he felt.

This is the house where the old couple lived. That I heard about, the job you did, months ago, soon after I gave you the money. That the papers railed at. You killed them, or Old Shoulder did or one of us, and it weren’t that they was militia at all. They was rich, but you wouldn’t do them for that. It weren’t because they was rich but because of where they lived. You needed them gone so you could buy this house. That’s what you did with Jacobs’ money.

Ori felt gutted. He swallowed many times.

He sat hard on his own instincts. Something welled in him. All the uncertainty, the desperate lack of knowledge, then the weight of knowledge but vacillation of ideas, the shameful hash of theory that had sent him to the Runagaters, to all the different sects and dissidents, looking for something to ground him, a political home, which he had found in the anger and anarchist passion of Toro. His uncertainty came back. He knew what he felt-that this was a dreadful thing, that he was aghast-but he remembered the exhortations to contextualise, always to have context, that the Runagaters above all had always stressed.

If one death’ll stop ten, ain’t it better? If two deaths’ll save a city?

He was still. He had a sense that he did not know best, that he had to learn, that he was a better man in this collective than out, that he must understand why this had happened before he judged. Toro watched him. Turned to Old Shoulder. Ori saw the cactus-man set his face. They can see I know.

“Ori. Listen to me.”

The others watched without comprehension.

“Yes,” Toro lowed. Ori felt like a schoolchild before a teacher, so disempowered, so ill-at-ease. He felt truly sick. Toro’s thaumaturged drone felt through his skin.

“Yes,” Old Shoulder said. “This is the house. They were old, rich, alone, no one to inherit, it’d be sold. But no, it ain’t good. Don’t presume, Ori, that there’s no guilt and pain.

“We get in that house beside us… we’re done. We win. We win. ” Under the cactus’s words, Toro began to roar. It was a sound that went from beast-noise to the cry of elyctricity and iron under strain. It lasted a long time, and though it was not loud it took over the room and Ori’s head and stopped him thinking until it ebbed again and he was staring into Toro’s phosphorescent glass eyes.

“If we win, we take the city,” Old Shoulder said. “Take off the head. How many do we save then?” One by one, the other Toroans were understanding.

“You think other things weren’t tried? The magister’s house is closed. We can’t lie in wait there. The boss can’t push in, even with the horns. Some ward blocks us. Weapons won’t go through: not a bullet, a blast, a stone. It’s packed hard with charms. Because of who comes to visit. The sewers are stuffed with ghuls-no way in there there. It’s what we had to do. Think about it. You want out of this, now?”

How did I become the one to be asked? Don’t the others have to decide? But they were looking to him. Even Enoch had come to it now, and was open-mouthed thinking of what he had acted as lookout for, that night. Old Shoulder and Baron watched Ori. Tension drew the cactus-man up and stiff. Baron was relaxed. They would not let Ori walk, of course. He knew that. If he did not go along with this, he was dead. Even if he stayed, perhaps. If they thought they could not trust him.

Everything that was necessary was necessary. It was a tenet of the dissidents. And yes of course that necessary had to be fought over, debated and won. But they were so close. That they had found egress to a place their target would be alone, unwarded, vulnerable, where they could finally give their gift to New Crobuzon, was a towering thing. If it took two deaths to make it happen… could Ori stand in the way of history? Something in him blenched. It was necessary, he thought. He bowed his head.

On the top floor, the wall adjoining Magister Legus’ property had been precisely excavated. Inches of plaster and thin wood were swept away. The wall was dug out.

“Deeper’n that, hexes kick in,” Old Shoulder said. He touched the exposed surface with tremendous care. He was looking at Ori. Ori made his face unmoving. He listened. Toro had been preparing for weeks. Do you have other gangs? Ori thought, with an emotion he could not come close to identifying. Or are we your only ones? Whose name is this house in? It ain’t as if you bought it as yourself, is it?

Baron was talking, with his instrumental precision. I better listen, Ori realised. This is the plan.

“Sulion’s close to caving. We’re buying two things: information, of who’s where and what their tactics are, and a first move. Without him at the door, we’re dead.”

This is militia techniques, Ori thought, that’s what I’m learning. Once again, Ori wondered how many militia there were who had been to the war and had come back with such bitterness as this, so full of it. What they would do. He watched Baron and realised that everything in Baron led him to this, that he had no plans beyond this, that this would be his revenge.

An epidemic of murders. That’s what we’ll see. If those AWOL and back from the wars don’t have outlets. And the New Quill will recruit, too. They’ll recruit men like this. Jabber help us. And Ori’s eagerness to take off the head of the government came back strong. Soon, he thought. Soon.

He felt as if he might lose himself. He had to tell himself several times, until he was sure of it, that he was where he was meant to be.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

People could not walk New Crobuzon’s streets without looking up. Past the aerostats and the wyrmen, the hundreds of lives-alien, indigenous, created-that teemed the city’s skies, they looked at the cold white and the austere sun, and wondered if another of those searing organic shadows would come.

“They’re still trying to parley,” Baron told the crew. He had it from Bertold, who had inferred it from the Mayor’s forays to the embassy wing with diplomats and linguists.

Ori returned to the shelter. Ladia welcomed him, but she was wary. She looked so exhausted he was shocked. As ever there were men and women the colours of dirt lying where gravity huddled them, but now the hall itself was scarred. The walls were tattooed with splinters and ripped-up paint; the windows were boarded.

“Quillers,” she told him. “Three days ago. They heard we were… affiliated. We were slack, Ori, left papers around. With what’s going on in Dog Fenn, I suppose, we’ve been distracted: it’s been impossible to be so careful. We got cocky.”

He made her lie down, and though she bantered with him she cried when he laid her out on the old sofa, cried and held onto him for seconds, then sniffed and patted him, made a last joke and slept. He cleaned for her. Some of the homeless helped him. “We had a play yesterday,” one broken-toothed woman said to him as she wiped the tables. “Some Flexible troupe. Come to play for us. Very good it was, though not like nothing I’d seen before. I couldn’t really hear what they was saying. But it was nice, you know, good of them to come and do that for us.”

No one had seen Jacobs for days. “He’s been around, though. He’s been busy. You seen? His mark’s all over.”

The chalk spirals that Jacobs left wherever he went, that had given him his name, continued to disseminate, gone viral. They were in all quarters, in paint and thick wax colour, in tar; they were carved onto temples, scratched on glass and the girders of the towerblocks.

“You think he really started it? Maybe he’s just copying someone else. Maybe no one started it at all. You heard how it’s turning? People are using it as a slogan. It’s been adopted.”

Ori had heard and seen it. Spirals that tailed into obscenities levelled at the government. Shouts of Spiral away! when the militia appeared. Why that and not another of the symbols that had defaced walls for years?

The old man’s corner was grey with spirals. Ink and graphite, in different sizes, the angles and directions of the curves variant, and here were spirals off spirals in intricate series. It could be a language, Ori thought. Clockwise or widdershins, stopping after so many turns, in differing directions and numbers; derivatives budded from each corkscrew whorl.

For nine nights, Ori came. He volunteered the night shift. “I got to do this,” he told Old Shoulder. “I’ll do what you need in the day, but I got to do something.”

The Toroans granted him a kind of sabbatical, without trust. As he walked, Ori would stop, fasten his shoe buckle, lean against a wall and look behind him. If not Baron, someone would be following him, he was sure: he knew that the first time he spoke to someone that his unseen watcher, his fellow Bull-runner, did not trust, he was dead. Or perhaps there was no one. He did not know what he was to his comrades.

In The Two Maggots, Petron Carrickos gave Ori a book of his poems, self-published as Flexible Press.

“Been a long damn time, Ori,” he said. He had a shade of wariness-his mouth twitched to ask Where’ve you been? You disappeared -but he bought Ori grappa and spoke to him about his projects. Petron held Runagate Rampant -not quite openly, but with the new bolshiness of the times.

Ori read a stanza aloud.

“A season here/In your flower/Petals of wood and iron/Lockstock stonedead shock of a Dog Fenn frown.” He nodded.

Petron told Ori about the Flexibles: who was doing what, who had stayed part of something, who had disappeared. “Samuel’s buggered off. He’s selling stuff in some tarty gallery in Salacus Fields.” He snorted. “Nelson and Drowena are still in Howl Barrow. Of course everything’s changed now, you can imagine. We’re still trying to do the shows when we can. Community stuff, in churches and halls and such.”

“And just how does the Convulsive New go down with the commonalty?” It was a keystone concept from the second Nuevist Manifesto. Ori was sardonic.

“They like the Convulsive New just fine, Ori. Just fine.”

There was an illicit congress of all the underground guilds, the militant factory workers of Smog Bend and Gross Coil, spreading, Petron said, to other industries. Delegates from foundries, shipyards, dye plants, in a secret Dog Fenn location, discussing what demands to put to Parliament.

“Caucus is talking to them, too,” he said, and Ori nodded. He did not say, as he thought, More talking, talking again, that’s the problem, ain’t it?

At a crowded canalside market in Sangwine they reached, as part of the aimless walking that Petron theorised as a reconfiguration of the city, they came to sudden screams. “What in gods’, what in gods’, “ someone was shouting, and there was a strange back-

forward surge of crowd, people running to see what was happening and fleeing again past the stalls of books and trinket jewellery.

A woman lay in shudders by the lock and the watergates, her skirt puddled, her hair crawling like worms in static that made the air shake. People stared at her and tensed, made to run in and grab her and pull her away, but they blenched at the manifestation above her.

Vapour, a slick and sickly bruise-blue-a purpling as if the world itself, the air, was bleeding beneath its skin. The air souring and, like badness in milk, particles of matter coagulating from nothing, clots of rank aether aggregated into organising shape, and then there was a moving insectile thing made of scabbed nothing and sudden shade that twisted in the air as if suspended by thread and glimmered visible and invisible and then was unquestionably there, a hook-legged thing in the colours of rot, as large as a man. A wasp, its waist bone-thin below a thorax that refracted light like mottled glass, its sting like a curved finger beckoning from its abdomen, extending and adrip.

It cleaned its legs with its intricate mouth. It turned ugly compound eyes and looked at the aghast crowd. It unfolded its limbs one by one and shuddered and was moved, though not it seemed by the motion of those legs, but still as if it dangled and some giant hand holding its line had shifted. It came closer.

The woman was seizing. Her face had gone dark. She was not breathing. There was a gasp, a choking in the front of those watching. Two others fell. A man, another woman, fitting epileptically, flecking with spittle and vomit.

“Get out of the way!” The militia. From the entrance to the market. They came firing, and the sounds of the guns broke the cold that had held people, and they scattered screaming. Ori and Petron ducked but did not run, pushed away from the noisome apparition and watched the militia fire into its corpus.

Bullets went through it, to break glass and china beyond. The woman in its shadow spat and died. In a fever of shot, the wasp trilled and scissored its limbs like a trap. The lead was taken into it with a bare ripple in its uncanny flesh, and some emerged and some was eaten. The thing was dancing in the officers’ fire. The leakage from the dead woman’s mouth was dark, her innards turned to tar.

An officer-thaumaturge cracked his fingers and made occult shapes, and filaments spun into sight between his fingers and the wasp, plasm made hexed fibres and webbing, but the predatory thing passed through the mesh, suddenly far-off or side-on or blinked closed like an eye, and in a spatter of unlight was there again and the net was evanescing. The others stricken by the wasp were still, and a seasick green was coming to the faces of the militia.

But then the wasp was gone. The air was clean. In a moment, the militia began slowly to straighten, Ori braced himself, dropped with a cry when a ghost image of the wasp returned in air again momentarily varicose, and went, and came back once more, now nothing but a vespine insinuation, and was, finally, all gone.

“It’s not the first of them,” Petron said. They had run back to The Two Maggots, where they sucked at sugared rum tea, craving warm and sweet. “You not hear about them? I thought it was stupid rumours, at first. I thought it was nonsense.”

Manifestations that killed by toxic ambience. “One was a grub-thing,” Petron said, “in Gallmarch. There was one was a tree. And one was a dagger, up Raven’s Gate way, I heard.”

“I heard of the dagger,” Ori said. He remembered some strange headline in The Beacon. “And weren’t there others? A sewing machine? Wasn’t there a candle?”

“Goddamn Tesh, isn’t it? That’s what it is. We got to end this war.”

Were the conjurations Tesh weapons? Each must cost countless psychonoms of puissance, especially if called from Tesh, and each took only a handful of victims. How could they be effective?

“Yeah but it isn’t just that, is it?” Petron said. “Not just the numbers. It’s the effect. On the mind. On morale.”

The next day Ori heard of another manifestant. It was in Serpolet. It was two people gripped together and fucking. No one could see their faces, he heard. Just saw them adangle, turning on twine, mashing their lips, their hands pushed into each other’s flesh. When they went-driven out by the attacks of the locals or not, who knew?-they left five dead, leaked and spilled on the cobbles, turned bitumen.

When at last Spiral Jacobs came to the soup-house, Ori could not believe the look of him. The old man was twisted under the weight of his own bones; his skin was rucked and wretched on him.

“Gods almighty,” Ori said gently as he ladled food. “Gods almighty, Spiral, what’s happened to you?” The vagrant looked up at him with a wonderful and open smile. There was no recognition at all. “Where you been? All this time?”

Jacobs heard the question and pulled his brows together. He thought a long time and said carefully: “Perdido Street Station.”

It was the only thing he said that night that evidenced sanity. He murmured to himself in a foreign language or in children’s noises, he smiled, drew ink spirals on his skin. At night amid the grunts and the draughts, Ori came to where Jacobs sat chattering to himself. He was nothing but silhouette when Ori spoke.

“We’ve lost you, ain’t we, Jacobs?” he said. He was stricken. He could almost feel the rise of tears. “I don’t know if you’ll come back. Where you’ve gone. I wanted, I wanted to find you to tell you thank you, for everything you done.” You can’t hear me but I can. “I got to tell you this now, because I’m going places and doing things that might, might make it so I won’t get to see you no more, Spiral. And I want you to know… that we took your money, your gift, and we’re doing it right. We’re going to make you proud. We’re going to make Jack proud. I promise you.

“What you done for me. Gods.” Spiral Jacobs jabbered and drew swirls. “To know someone who knew Jack. To have your blessing. Whether you come back or not, Spiral, you’ll always be part of this. And when it’s over and it’s done, I’ll make sure the city knows your name. If I’m here. Got my word. Thank you.” He kissed the crumpled forehead, astonished at the fragility of the skin.

That night there was no moon, and the gaslamps of Griss Fell gave out. In the dark the New Quill Party attacked the kitchen again. Ori woke to chants of “scum” and the tattoo of missiles on the wooded windows. Through a slit between boards he could see them massed. Ranks of men, studies in shadow, the brims of their bowlers low, making their eyes belts of dark. A streetful of carefully suited malignance, rows of black-cottoned shoulders padded with fighters’ muscle, tipping their hats, straightening the dark ties noosed from their white shirts. They brushed imagined dust from themselves and swung weapons.

But the vagrants’ fear was brief. Was it Militant Sundry who came for them? Was it the mixed ranks of the Caucus? Ori could not see. He only heard shouting and shots, saw the Quillers start and turn like a pack of feral clerks, and run to fight.

Ladia and the residents scattered. Ori ran for Jacobs, but to his surprise the old man walked past him with purpose but no urgency. He did not look at Ori or anywhere but ahead. He walked quickly past the last milling homeless, while at the street’s end was the sound of battle and in the dark only a rapid and ugly mass of black figures. Jacobs turned the other way, toward Saltpetre Station and the raised arches that climbed north over the city.

Ori hesitated, thinking that there was perhaps nothing left to speak to in that shell, and then realising that he wanted to see where the man would go and what he would do. In the very dark of New Crobuzon without its lamps, Ori followed Spiral Jacobs.

He did not stalk him like a hunter but merely walked a few steps behind. He tried to place his shoes down soft enough that his step was only a ghost-echo of the mendicant’s shuffling. They were the only people in the street. They walked between a fence of wood and iron on one side, damp bricks on the other, rising scores of feet above their heads. Spiral Jacobs skipped, treaded forward singing a song in an alien key, wandered back some steps, ran his fingers, poking from the cutoff ends of his gloves, over the corrugated iron and rubbed at its rust, and Ori came behind him as respectful and observant as a disciple.

With a thumb of chalk, Spiral Jacobs drew the shape that had given him his name, whispering while he did, and it was of astonishing perfection, a mathematical symbol. And then there were curlicues, smaller coils coming from its outer skin, and Jacobs ran his hand over it, and walked on.

It began to rain as Ori reached the mark Jacobs had made. It did not smear.

Past the tumbledown brick arch of Saltpetre Station and on toward Flyside into a place where the gaslamps had not given out, where guttering dirt-light returned to tan the walls and doors into grotesques. The old man wrote his shapes. He wrote on window, once, the grease of whatever he was using gripping the shine. A rut of street closed up to Ori and funnelled him through a brick arch after his idiot guru, into a wider zone of pallid light where the gas was effaced by the elyctro-barometrics, cold lurid colours, red and gold made ice in knotted glass.

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.

“Hush, Mayor.”

The Mayor and her magister looked again at each other. Eliza Stem-Fulcher turned to Toro, and though she did not take her hand from the man’s she sat up some, as if formally, and she did take a draw from her pipe. She held it and closed her eyes a moment, breathed it out in a great flow from her nostrils, and she looked at Toro again and, gods, Ori thought awed, gods, she smiled.

“What do you think you’ll do?” she said. Indulgent as a kindly schoolma’am. “What do you think you’re doing?”

She turned square to Toro and gave another smile, drew again from the pipe, held her smoky breath, and she cocked her face quizzically and raised an eyebrow- Well?- and Toro shot her dead.

Her lover jumped as the bullet took her, and bit his lip hard but could not control his voice, could not stop himself letting out a mew, a cat-sound that became a moan. He sat and held her hand while she emptied out, her head back on blood. Smoke uncoiling from her open mouth. Gunsmoke joined her head and Toro’s hand in a moment’s sulphur umbilicum. The man breathed out sobs and held her hand. But he made himself be done, and made himself look up at Toro.

Ori was deep and dreamishly stunned, but he felt in him the tremors of the knowledge that they were done, and not dead. He raised the thought that gods, they might get out, they might yet. Let’s go then.

“Watch him,” Toro said and Ori raised his gun. Toro began to unbuckle the straps that held the huge metal head in place. Ori did not understand what he saw. Toro was removing the iron. “Watch him.” The voice came again, this time uncoupled from whatever mechanisms made it so orotund, and it seemed to falter and become human.

Something went out of the air as Toro pulled the helmet away and broke a thaumaturgic current. Toro lifted the metal off, like a diver removing the heavy brass helmet. Toro shook out her sweaty hair.

Ori looked at the woman and his gun did not waver from the magister’s chest. He had not felt capable of surprise for a long time.

Toro was Remade, of course. She turned her head. She was turned to wire by her middle years and by whatever traumas had made her Toro. Her face was set and animal hungry. She did not look at Ori. She sat, on a footstool, in front of the magister, laid her bull helmet to one side.

A child’s arms emerged from her. One from each side of her face. One over each brow. A baby’s arms that moved listlessly, tangling and untangling in her lank hair. They had been stretched out, one inside each horn, in the helmet. They waved next to her face like spiders’ pedipalps.

She sat and closed her eyes, stretched out her arms and the baby’s arms. She was quiet some moments.

“Legus,” she said. “I know you’re grieving now, but I need you to listen to me.” Without the distortion, Ori could hear her accent from the southwest of the city was strong. She pointed at the magister’s eyes and then at her own: Look at me. She held her gun gently at his belly.

“I’ll tell you my story. I want you to understand why I’m here.” A little sucking sound came out of the Mayor as gas or blood moved. She stared at the ceiling with the concentration of the dead. “I’ll tell you. Maybe you know already. But listen.

“It’s hard to find out your true name, like it’s supposed to be, but it can be done. There’s a black market in onomastics. But if it’s consolation, yours stayed hidden well. Magister Legus. I been trying to find out a long time.

“I came out of jail more than a decade ago. Graduated, we called it. The rumours, what we learn inside. We had something on every magister there is. You hear things. Drugs, boys, girls, blackmail. Nonsense, some of it. Legus, they said to me, Legus is a wily sod. You know he fucks the home secretary? As she was then.” She nodded at the cooling Stem-Fulcher. “That was information that never went away. Heard it often enough from those I trusted, inside and outside.

“Know how hard I been working on this, Legus?” She would not use his real name. “Getting myself ready. Had to fight to get my helmet made.” The child-arms patted her forehead. “I made myself; I been readying for years. To be exact, Legus,” she said, “you made me. Do you remember?”

“More than two decades gone. You remember those big old towers in Ketch Heath? Yes, you remember. That’s where I lived. I killed my darling. You remember, Magister? My girl Cecile.

“She cried and cried and cried and I was crying too and then I took her and I think maybe it was that I was shaking her to make her shush, I don’t remember, but she was gone when I remember again. And I took her down held close to keep her warm, to a sawbones worked gratis every other Blueday, but of course that didn’t work.

“And then there you were.” She leaned in. “You remember now?”

He did not. Of the thousands he had sentenced to Remaking, how could he remember one? Ori watched Legus. Toro reached up, tugged with a parent’s unthinking gentle playfulness at the child’s hand.

“You told me it was so I didn’t forget. I didn’t forget.” She leaned forward again and Cecile’s arms stretched out, toward Magister Legus holding the Mayor’s dead hand. There was noise. Their bomb-cavity was being breached. Toro pulled on her cestus. “It was her birthday just two weeks gone,” she said. “She’s older now than I was when I had her. My little girl.”

She stood and put her gun to Legus’ temple. Legus gripped Stem-Fulcher’s hand and opened his mouth but did not speak.

“From me,” she said. She did not sound angry. “From the men you made machines, the women you made monsters. Tanks, snailgirls, panto-horses, industry engines. And from all them you locked away in the toilets you call jails. And from all them on the run in case you find them. And from me, and from Cecile-and yes it was me, my hands done it, and that’s mine to feel. Cecile don’t grow, and she don’t rest. My girl. So this is from her too.”

She kept her pistol barrel to his head and punched him once then many times with her spiked cestus, and he grunted and gave out a blood retch and his face went ugly and he put up his hand not to ward her but in a reaching for something, not to interrupt the bihorned jabs-those he took, gripping his lover’s hand so hard her dead fingers splayed. He could not stop himself barking at the pain and spilling more blood down his front as Toro punched him in a miserable repetition, shoving horns into his gullet and heart, and her baby’s hands reached out above her onslaught and played with the dying magister’s hair.

Ori stood still while it was done and for a long time afterward. He waited for Toro to move-this small woman, with her south-city accent, her old grudge. After a minute or more when she did not, only sat with her head down while the magister put out his blood around her, he spoke.

“Come on,” Ori said. There was the sound of approach. “We have to go.”

She did turn to him, though he thought at first she would not. She looked with the effort of one waking and shook her head as if she did not understand his language. She did not speak, but she gave him to understand that she was going nowhere, that she was done.

“And, and…” Some pride or respect meant Ori would not have himself sound plaintive or aghast, and he spoke only when he knew his voice would level. “And this was the only way, then, eh? Us?” Ruby, he was saying, Ulliam, Kit, all of them down there, did they have to be part of this? Baron, godsdammit, and Old Shoulder. Gods know who’s died for you.

She gestured at the stiffening Mayor.

“We done what they wanted. We done what they come here to do.”

“Yes.” Yes but it isn’t the same. It was a sideshow, it wasn’t what you were here for, and that’s different, it makes it different.

Does it? Didn’t we win ?

A middle-aged woman from the working-class estates of southwest New Crobuzon sat by two blood-glazed corpses. A young man from Dog Fenn held a gun uneasily and listened to his enemies getting closer. Everything was different.

“I want to go, ” he said, shaking suddenly as all the anxiety he had dulled welled in him. He felt himself want again, for the first time in many days. And what it was he wanted, was to get out.

“So go.”

From the bitten-out hole through which they had come in he could hear hammering, sledgehammers taken to the doors of their empty house and echoing up its stairwells.

“You’ve killed me!”

“For Jabber’s sake, Ori, go.” She kicked her helmet at him. It jerked, rocked on its horns. He looked at it, at her, at it, picked it up. “Hexes are down. Go.” It was very heavy.

“I don’t know how to use this. What do I do?”

“Just push. Just push.”

There were shouts from the approaching militia.

“You’re giving me your helmet?”

She screamed at him. She said Go! but it stopped being a word, was quickly more animal than that, was only misery. He backed away and looked at the sticky emitting dead who kept her company, the way she sat, too tired even to tug her baby’s hands.

“You shouldn’t have done this,” he said. “You shouldn’t have used us like this. You used us hard. You had no right.” He lifted the mask, faltered under it. He hated how he sounded. “You killed them. Probably me too. It was… Was an honour to run with you.” He heard what must be grapples. Militia climbing. He heard them shout the Mayor’s name. “You shouldn’t have done this. I’m glad you… you got what you wanted. Shouldn’t have done it this way, but we got what we meant to, too.” He lowered the mask to his shoulders and tried to effect some militant salute, but Toro was not looking at him.

When the helmet settled it lightened. It felt like cloth. He had no talent for thaumaturgy, but even he could feel the metal thick with it. He looked through crystal that lightened the room, brought edges clear; he pulled the buckles tight under his shoulders, felt himself enhanced.

He gasped. Little needles spoked into his neck; his fingers gripped the metal. The sacrifice, the blood to power this iron head. How do I do this? he tried to shout. He felt extrusions of metal under his teeth and tried to bite or push them one way or another, feeling them still wet with the woman’s spit. His voice dinned in his own ears.

Push. Ori stood as he had seen her do and shoved with new-powerful thighs, jerked forward, staggered, balanced, tried again. He braced the tips of the horns against the wall and strained and only embedded them in the wood. People were running toward the door. Push, she had said. Where am I pushing to?

In his eagerness, his desperate sudden want to be alive, he reached for an urgency, envisioned his home, his little room. He thought of it and alchemised the want into a focus, and when he ploughed forward again he clenched his eyes and teeth and felt the hankering coalesce in two blistering nodes where the horns met his forehead, and he pushed again and felt something catch, a sensual rupture like splitting taut wax paper. He gasped, and the substance of the air began to part for him and like water tension it tried to draw him in.

Ori paused at the edge of the little ontic abomination, the hole, while the universe strained. Ahead of him was distressed darkness. He twisted, keeping the horns in the wound he had made, and tried to catch the eyes of the woman with the child’s arms playing pat-a-cake on her cheeks. She did not look at him. She did not look at the corpses she had made.

The militia were at the door. Ori pushed, let the momentum take him, into the rift he had made, out of that room where the most notorious thief and murderer of a generation quietly wept, where the ruler of New Crobuzon grew stiff, and

he was for a moment a long moment in a wrinkle, in an innard of time, of the world, his synapses gone sluggard so he felt his backwash of panic like slow clouding water as he thought what if he had the strength to break the surface of the universe and slip grubbish into the mortar between instants between cells of the real but what if he did not have the power to emerge again and was lost in the flesh of dimensions, a microbe in the protean, in spaceandtime?

What then?

But his push continued, and a long long time and an instant after the first split, he felt another; the membrane parted for him again, on the other side, and disgorged him like a splinter. He fell through and to the ground slippery, wet with reality’s blood, his inexpert passage having done trauma in its passing, blood that evanesced in iridescent skeins, a pavonine moment in the air that was gone, and left Ori disoriented and dry again, and in

an alley scattered with rubbish.

For a long time he lay bleating weakly, until the feeling like overwhelming motion sickness subsided, and strength seeped back to him.

He could not fathom where he was. He was giddy. In his Toro getup, aware that it made him a target. I’ll rest soon, he thought through fog. His forehead hurt, in points at the bases of the horns. He had come through, but nowhere near where he wanted to go.

Ori could feel a chill, but it did not trouble him. He stumbled and looked up as he came through entangled alleyways, and there was a line intersecting his path, nightblack arches that even Toro’s eyes could not see into, the brick and the dorsal crest of the elevated railroad. And beyond, tooth-yellow in the gaslamps that underlit them, the soffit of the Ribs. Ori was in Bonetown.

He lay for hours. The sky was grey-lit when he woke. When he removed the helmet he almost blacked out, and had to lean and breathe in a cavity below the railway. Silence unnerved him. He heard a few of the sounds that made the city whisper, but the bricks against which he leaned were still. They conducted no vibrations. The New Crobuzon trains should run all night, but there were none.

Ori made his jacket a kind of satchel for the helmet, he pocketed his pistol, and stumbled out toward the Bonetown Ribs.

The air seemed sultry, wire-tight. What’s happening? He could not believe word had spread so fast, in fact he did not believe it. With a gust his excitement turned bad, and foreboding filled him. What has happened?

There was no one on the streets, or freakishly few, and those who there were went heads down. Past tarred houses by the Ribs, he kept the bricks of the raised railway to his left, went south, stumbling through Sunter, ready to turn on Rust Bridge to Murkside and from there to Syriac, but he saw the lights of fires and heard drumming, bugles. Nothing should be so loud at these predawn hours.

They grew louder; he felt himself going into shock, shaking hard, the weight of the helmet dragging him. South down High Chypre Hill, a street of florists and trinketeers by whose roofs the trains should come. There was a fork in the lines, where the tributary of the Dexter Line went down to Kelltree and veered east over the river to Dog Fenn. There, something was blocking his way.

Blinking till he teared in exhaustion, Ori saw in the glimmer of fires a rough barrier. He could not make sense of it. Its silhouette in that warm light was like something wild, something geographical in the city. People were moving at its top.

“Stop,” someone shouted. Ori kept walking, did not understand that the word could be meant for him.

It was a barricade of paving slabs and rubble, carts, chimneys, old doors, the overturned remnants of stalls. Tons of urban detritus had gone to make a little mountain ridge, a ten-foot-high debris cordon planted with flags. The marbled arm of a statue jutted from its flank.

“ Stop, fucker.” A shot, a shard of concrete sounded with the ricochet. “Where you going, friend?”

Ori put his hands up high. He approached, waving.

“What’s happened? What’s going on?” he shouted, and there were jeers from the blockage. What is he some fucker from Mafaton back from holiday? “No papers, no kiosks, no criers where you been then, mate?” the sentry shouted. He was a man-shape in black, backlit. “Piss off home.”

“This is my home. Syriac. What’s happened? Godsdammit, how long was I between… This is about her, ain’t it? You’ve heard? The Mayor?” And all his excitement was back again. So much that he could hardly speak. I might’ve been days, he thought. What’s happened while I’ve been gone? Did we do it? It happened. It woke them. The inspiration. Gods. “Dammit, chaverim, let me in! Tell me what’s gone on.” He forgot cold and tiredness and stood up straight in the licking yellow light of the fires. “It’s all happened… How long ago did she die?”

“Who?”

“The Mayor. ” Ori creased his brow. There were more calls, more shouting. She dead? The bitch is gone? Who’s this fool, he’s a madman, I wouldn’t set your store…

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, mate. I think you should go now.” He heard the sound of gun-preparation.

“But what…”

“Listen, friend, someone can vouch for you? Because without that there’s no in, no out. You’re in no-man’s-land, and that ain’t a safe place to be. You’d best bugger off back to the Old Town, unless you give me a name. Give me a name, and we’ll check you out.” More heads were rising now; the man was being joined. An armed band, humans and other races, weapons hefted below snapping flags.

“Because you’re on the threshold now, mate, and you’re either on one side or the other. It ain’t like we just got here. Been two powers in the city for days, boy. You’ve had days to make up your mind. You’re either north”-and there were pantomime boos-“back in the old days and old ways: or you’re in here, Kelltree and Echomire and Dog fucking Fenn, in the future, which is now.

“Walk toward me slow, and keep your hands like that. Let’s have a look at you, you gormless fool.” It was almost kindly. A bottle smashed. “Come a bit closer. Welcome to the Free Territories, mate. Welcome to the New Crobuzon Collective.”