Iron Council

The first night the militiamen only stood at the edge and shone their lanterns at the bobbing woman while the children hollered at them to save her. They shouted for her to hang on and went to find help; and Ori emerged, dragged the disgusted prostitute out and hurried everyone away.

On the second night, an officer left his jacket and boots with his companion and waded into the cool water. The vodyanoi descended, and the woman panicked very badly and began to sink. The chaos in the water was not feigned. The children milled shrieking around the remaining militiaman, clamouring for him to help, jostling him until he bellowed and swung his truncheon, but it was too late by then. They had opened the bundle of his partner’s clothes, even still in his grip, rifled its contents.

Ori left the badge in an old shoe at Toro’s corner. When he came back two days later, someone was there to meet him.

Old Shoulder was a cactus-man. He was thin and dwarfed for his kind, shorter than Ori. They walked through the meat-market. Ori saw that prices were still rising.

“I don’t know who pointed you our way and I ain’t going to ask you,” Old Shoulder said. “Where you been before now? Who you been with?”

“Double-R,” said Ori, and Old Shoulder nodded.

“Yeah, well I ain’t going to moan about them, but you better make your choice, lad.” He looked at Ori with a face bleached the faintest green by years of sun. He made Ori feel very young. “Things go very different with our friend.” He scratched the side of his nose, extending his first and last fingers splayed into horns. “I don’t give spit about what Flex or any of his lot would have said. You can kiss good-bye to philosophising. We ain’t interested in the toil concept of worth, or graphs of the swag-slump tendency and whatnot. With Double-R it’s just more and more notions.

“I don’t care if they can lecture like we was at the university.” They stood still among the flies and the warm smell of meat, among the cries of the sellers. “What I care about’s what you do, mate. What can you do for us? What can you do for our friend?”

They had him as a messenger. He had to show his worth, picking up packages or messages that Old Shoulder left for him, ferrying them across the city without investigating them, delivering them to men or women who eyed him without trust and sent him away before they would open them.

He drank in The Two Maggots, keeping his friends among the Nuevists. He went to the Runagate Rampant discussions. Hidden histories: “Jabber: Saint or Crook?”; “Iron Councillor: The Truth behind the Stencil.” The hard young machine-knitter had become a political authority. Ori felt as if he watched everything through a window.

In the first week of Tathis, at a time of sudden cool, Old Shoulder had him as lookout. It was only at the last second that he was told what his job would be, and all his excitement came back.

They were in Bonetown. They watched evening come in livid shades through the silhouettes of the Bonetown Claws, the Ribs. The ancient bones that gave the area its name curved more than two hundred feet into the air, cracking, yellowed, mouldering at a geological pace, dwarfing the houses around them.

There was to be a delivery to the kingpin Motley. Ori could not even see where his gang would intercept it. He was exhilarated. He watched and watched, but no militia came. He could see to the clearing below the bones, to the city scrub where acrobats and print-vendors were counting their takings, oblivious to the monstrous ribcage above them.

He watched nothing, frantic, wishing he had a pistol. Young men passed in a gang and eyed him, decided not to bother. No one approached. The whistle stayed in his tense fist. He had no idea anything had even started till Old Shoulder tapped him from behind, jerking him violently, and said, “Home again, boy. Job’s done.” That was all.

Ori could not have said when he was made a member. Old Shoulder began to introduce him to others, to muttered discussions.

In the pubs, in the tarry shacks and mazes of Lichford, Ori talked tactics with Toro’s crew. He was a probationer. He felt a queasy guilt when his new companions mocked the Caucus- “the people’s pomp” they called it-or Runagate Rampant. He still went to Double-R ’s under-pub discussions, but unlike his many months there, he could see the impact of his new activities immediately. They were in the papers. Ori had been lookout on what they called the Case of the Bonetown Sting.

He was paid, with each haul. Not much, but enough to compensate for the wages he was missing, and then a little more. In The Two Maggots and Fallybeggar’s, he bought generous rounds, and the Nuevists toasted him. It made him feel nostalgic.

And in Lichford, he had new companions-Old Shoulder, Ulliam, Ruby, Enoch, Kit. There was an élan to Toro’s outlaw gang. Their lives were different, were richer and more tenuous, because they were being risked.

If they catch me now they won’t just lock me up, Ori thought. They’ll Remake me for sure, at least. Probably I’m dead.

There were strikes most weeks in Gross Coil now. There was trouble in Smog Bend. Quillers had attacked the khepri ghetto in Creekside. The militia went into Dog Fe

Ori felt as if he were waking. His city was a hallucination. He could bite down on the air; he could wring tension out of it. Daily he passed pickets, chanted with them.

“It’s gearing up,” Old Shoulder said. He sounded gleeful. “When we get it done-when our friend can finally get through and, uh, meet up with you-know-who…”

The gang glanced, and Ori saw several quick looks his way. They were not sure they should be speaking in front of him. But they could not keep themselves quiet. He was careful, did not give in to his desire to ask them Who? Who is I-know-who?

But Old Shoulder was staring at a streetside fixing-post, its fat pillar many-ski

He had not seen Spiral Jacobs for days. When at last Ori tracked him down, the tramp was distracted. He had not been to the shelter in a long time. He looked exhausted, more unkempt and dirty even than usual.

Ori followed leads from other forgotten men and women to find him, at last, in The Crow. He was shuffling between the great shops of the city’s central district, its statues, facades of grand marble and scrubbed white stone. Jacobs had chalk in his hand, and every few steps he would stop and murmur to himself, and draw some very faint and meaningless sign upon the wall.

“Spiral,” Ori said, and the old vagrant turned, his rage at the interruption making Ori start. It was a moment before Spiral Jacobs composed himself.

They sat in BilSantum Plaza among the jugglers. In the warm colours of the evening, Perdido Street Station loomed beside them, its variegated architecture unsettling, massive and impressive, the five railway lines spreading out of its raised arch-mouths like light from a star. The Spike, the militia minaret, soared up from its western side. Perdido Street Station seemed to lean on it like a man on a staff.

Ori looked at the seven skyrails that stretched from the Spike’s summit. He looked along one tugged to the southeast, over the red-light district and the salubrious Spit Hearth, over the scholars’ quarter of Brock Marsh, to another tower, and on to Strack Island, to Parliament itself, surrounded by the conjoining rivers.

“It’s the Mayor,” said Ori, while Spiral Jacobs seemed not to listen, only to play with his chalk and think whatever he wanted to think. “Toro’s crew are fed up with taking out militia corporals and what-have-you. They want to kick things off. They’re going to kill the Mayor.”

It might have seemed that Spiral Jacobs was too gone to care, but Ori saw his eyes. He saw that gummy mouth open and shut. Was it a surprise? What else was there for the people’s bandit to do?

And though Ori might have told himself that he let Spiral know only for some kind of duty, out of some sense that the old fighter, Jack Half-a-Prayer’s comrade, deserved to know, there was more than that. Spiral Jacobs was involved, had in his random way ushered Ori to this brutal and liberatory political act. A plan like this, Ori said, would take guts and strength and information and money. This was the start. Come for the soup tomorrow, said Spiral Jacobs suddenly, promise me.

Ori did. And perhaps he knew what was in the bag that Jacobs brought him. Opening it in his room much later, alone by his candle, he could not silence his gasps.

Money. In rolls and tight wraps. A huge haul of coins and notes, in scores of currencies. Shekels, nobles and guineas, yes, the newest decades old, but there were ducats too, dollars and rupees and sandnotes and arcane bawbees, square coins, little ingots from maritime provinces, from Shankell, from Perrick Nigh and from cities Ori was not sure he believed in. It was the dregs of a highwayman’s life, or a pirate’s.

A contribution, said the note enclosed. To help with a Good Plan. In Jack’s memory.