Iron Council

“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, cu

“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, ru

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 asTHE CASE OF THE ROLLING SECRETARY orTHE CASE OF THE DROWNED DOWAGER. These earlier incidents should remind the populace that the bandit known asTORO 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, ru

He loathed being a lumpen cutter of purses, but he knew that anything more refined risked bringing the militia. As it was when he careered down crowded streets at twilight, the street gangs filled his wake as arranged and the officers would only plunge a little way into the rookeries, swinging truncheons.

Twice he did it, and could hardly stop his trembling. He became energised, vastly excited to be committing these acts, to be doing something palpable. The third time and the times after that, he had no fear.

He never took a stiver from the money he stole. He delivered it all to his unseen correspondent. It took several deliveries. He lost track. The robberies became routine. But he must have made his forty nobles: a new commission appeared. This time it was a wax tube, scored with grooves, that he had to take to a voxiterator booth.

Over the spit of the needle he heard a voice, faded through crackles: “All good my boy now let’s get serious let’s you bring us a militia crest.”

He saw Spiral Jacobs every week. They had developed a language of ellipsis and evasion. He was not categorical-he admitted to nothing-and Spiral Jacobs still spoke with erratic logic. Ori saw the old man’s madness was at least in part a mime.

“They’ve got me doing things,” Ori said, “your mates. They’re not the most welcoming coves, are they?”

“No they ain’t, but when they make friends with you they’re friends for life. Been at that shelter a long time. Been there a long time, wondered if I’d find anyone to introduce them to.”

Ori and Spiral Jacobs discussed politics in this careful and mediated way. Among the Runagate Rampant chaverim, Ori was quiet and watchful. Their numbers dwindled, rose again. Only one of the women from the Skulkford sweatshop still came. She spoke more and more often, with increasing knowledge.

He listened with a kind of nostalgia and wondered, How am I going to do this?

He went to Dog Fe