Iron Council

Part Two. RETURNS

CHAPTER SIX

A window burst open high above the market. Windows everywhere opened above markets. A city of markets, a city of windows.

New Crobuzon again. Unceasing, unstintingly itself. Warm that spring, gamy: the rivers were stinking. Noisy. Uninterrupted New Crobuzon.

What circled around and over the city’s upreached fingers? Birdlife, aerial vermin, wyrmen (laughing, monkey-footed things), and airships of cool colours, and smoke and clouds. The natural inclines of the land were all forgotten by New Crobuzon, which rose or fell according to quite other whims: it was mazed in three dimensions. Tons of brick and wood, concrete, marble and iron, earth, water, straw and daub, made roofs and walls.

In the days the sun burned away the colours of those walls, burned the raggedy ends of posters that covered them like feathers, making them all slowly a tea-yellow. Oddments of ink told of old entertainments, while concrete desiccated. There was the famous stencil-painting of the Iron Councillor, repeated in incompetent series by some dissident graffitist. There were skyrails, strung between jags of architecture like the broken-off pillars of some godly vault. The wires sliced air and made sound, so wind played New Crobuzon as an instrument.

Night brought new light, elyctro-barometric tubes of glowing gas, glass in convolutes, made to spell out names and words or sketch pictures in outline. A decade gone they had not existed or had been very long forgotten: now the streets after dark were all dappled by their distinct and vivid glare, washing out the gaslamps.

There was such noise. It came without remorse. There were always people everywhere. New Crobuzon.

“… and then the oth er op-er-at-or told the form al in-stee-gay-tor that his suit could not be heard the very thought was quite absurd…”

On stage chanteuse Adeleine Gladner, under her singing name Adely Gladly (pronounced to rhyme, Aderly Gladerly ), yelled and crooned through her number “Formal Instigation” to applause and catcalls drunken but loud and totally heartfelt. She minced, kicking under her skirts (her costume a long-dated exaggeration of a streetwalker’s flounces, so she looked more coy than libertine). She shook her lace trimmings at the punters and smiled, scooping up the flowers they threw without breaking her song.

Her celebrated voice was everything it was held to be, raucous and very beautiful. The audience were hers completely. Ori Ciuraz, at the rear of the hall, was sardonic but by no means immune. He did not know the others at his table well, only to tip his glass to. They watched Adely while he watched them.

Fallybeggar’s Hall was huge, clogged with smoke and drug smells. In the boxes and raised circle were the big men and their hangers-on, and sometimes the big women too. Francine 2 the khepri queenpin came here. Ori could not see well over the fringe of plaster drakows and obscene spirits, but he knew that the figure he saw moving in that box was a player in the militia, and that that one was one of the Fishbone Brothers, and that in that one was a captain of industry.

Up close to the orchestra by the stage it was a cramped clot of men and women, polyglot and many-raced, gazing at Adely’s ankles. Ori tracked tribal boundaries.

A slick of vagabonds, petty thieves and their bosses, discharged foreign soldiers, discharged jailbirds, dissolute rich and tinkers, beggars, pimps and their charges, chancers, knife-grinders, poets and police agents. Humans, here and there cactus-heads poking over the crowd (allowed in only if their thorns were plucked), the scarab-heads of khepri. Cigarillos hung from mouths, and people banged their glasses or cutlery in time while waiters went between them on the sawdusted floor. At the room’s edges small groups coagulated, and one like Ori-well-used to Fallybeggar’s-could see where they overlapped and where they separated, and make out their composition.

There must be militia in the hall, but none wore uniforms. At the back the tall and muscled man, Derisov, was an agent-everyone knew it but did not know how high or how co

Closer to Ori and watching him, a table of well-turned-out young men, New Quillers, dry-spitting ostentatiously when any xenian came too close. They would hate Ori more than khepri or cactus, as he was race-renegade; and emboldened suddenly by the environs, by cosmopolitan and raucous Fallybeggar’s, Ori raised his head to meet their gazes and put his arm around the old she-vodyanoi beside him. She turned in surprise but, seeing the Quillers, gave a grunt of approval and leaned into Ori, making exaggerated eyes at him and them in turn.

“Good lad,” she said, but with his heart fast Ori would only stare at the four men who watched him. One spoke angrily to his companions but was hushed, and the one who quieted him raised his eyebrows to Ori and tapped his watch and mouthed later.

Ori was not afraid. His own tribe were near. He almost nodded at the Quiller in sarky challenge, but such complicity revolted him and he turned away. He could see his friends and comrades at their arguments, disagreeing more fiercely than the painters, but they would come together to fight with him if needed. And there were several of them. The Quillers could not face the insurrectionists.

The crowd were raving for Adely by now, singing along with her show-opener and making delighted pitter-patter motions with their fingers as she concluded-“once a gain, in the raaaaain ”-and then becoming delirious with applause. The Quillers, artists, and all the other grouplets joined in with no restraint.

“Oh now thank you all, oh you’re my darlings, oh you are,” she said into the cheers and, professional as she was, they could hear her. She said: “I came out here to say good evening and ask you all to show a bit of willing to them who’s come up here tonight, give ’em a good welcome, let ’em know you love ’em. It’s their first time, some of ’em, and we all know what the first time’s like, don’t we? Bit of a disappointment, ain’t it, girls?” They broke up with laughter at that, and in anticipation because it was so obvious a lead-in to her song “Are You Done?” And yes, there was the familiar comedy hoboy quacking like a duck, the opening bars, and Adely drew in a big breath, paused, then shouted “Later!” and ran offstage, to lighthearted boos and shouts of tease!

The first act came into the lights. A singing family, two children done up as dolls and their mother playing a pianospiel. Most of the audience ignored them.

Cow, thought Ori. She came on, Adely, and seemed so generous ushering in the begi

The harmony threesome gave way to a dancer. He was aging but agile, and Ori out of politeness paid attention, but he was one of only a few. Then a singing comedian, a poor hack who would have been jeered with or without Adely’s intervention.

All the entertainers were pure, unRemade human stock. It concerned Ori-he did not know if it was coincidence that with these Quillers looking on there were no xenian performers. Was the New Quill Party pulling strings at Fallybeggar’s? The suspicion was hateful.

At last the useless comedian was done. It was time for the final warm-up. THE FLEXIBLE PUPPET THEATRE, it said on the handbills. PERFORMING THE SAD AND INSTRUCTIONAL TALE OF JACK HALF-A -PRAYER. It was them Ori had come to see. He was not there for Adely Gladly.

There were minutes of preparations behind the curtain, while the audience chatted about the main event, the Dog Fe

When the velvet finally parted it did so without brass or percussion, and the performers waited, so for seconds there was no notice, until a couple of little gasps as the tobacco smoke seemed to clear and show the stage-within-a-stage. There were oaths. Ori saw one of the Quillers stand.

There was the usual-the cart-sized puppet theatre with its little carved figures in garish clothes stock-still on their stage-but the miniature wings and proscenium arch had been torn off, and the puppeteers stood in plain view dressed too-nearly like militia officers in dark grey. And the stage was littered with other things, strange debris. A sheet was stretched and hammered taut and on it some magic lantern was projecting newspaper print. There were people onstage whose roles were unclear, a gang of actors, and musicians, the Flexibles disdaining the house orchestra for an unkempt trio who wore pipes and flutes and held drumsticks by pieces of sheet steel.

Ori flashed his upturned thumb at the stage. His friends were standing dead still and silent until the mutters grew intrusive and slightly threatening, and from the back came a shout of piss off. And then with a massive, painful sound, someone pounded the metal. Instantly and underneath that still-reverberating noise another music-man struck a lovely, lively tune half-modelled on street-chants, and his companion played the steel gently like a snare. An actor stepped forward-he was immaculate in a suit, waxed moustaches-bowed slightly, tipped his hat to the ladies in the front row, and bellowed an obscenity just-hidden from the censor by a consonant inserted at its begi

And there was outrage again. But these Flexibles were consummate-arrogant pranksters yes but serious-and they played their audience with skill, so that after every such imposition was quick and fu

No one was sure what it was they were seeing, this structureless thing of shouts and broken-up lines and noises, and cavalcades of intricate incomprehensible costumes. The puppets were elegantly manoeuvred, but they should have been-were designed to be-wooden players in traditionalist moral tales, not these little provocateurs whose puppeteers had them speak back tartly to the narrator, contradict him (always in the puppets’ traditional register, a cod-childish language of compound nouns and onomatopoeia), and dance to the noise and mum lewdness as far as their joints and strings would allow.