Iron Council

Part Four. THE HAINTING

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The crowd were chasing a maimed man. One of the soldiers or sailors from the Tesh War. They seemed to be on every street: they had welled up as if from under stones.

No papers would say that the war had gone bad but the upswell of the wounded and ruined bespoke disasters. Ori imagined the New Crobuzon ironclads upending and sliding under water made hot by war, imagined slicks of men on the waves, gorged on by seawyrms, by sharks. There were terrible rumours. Everyone knew something of the Battle of Bad Earth and the Fight in the Sun.

The first wave of wounded were treated with fear and respect. They were militia and so not trusted, but they had fought and been ruined for the city, and there was true rage for them, and a fashion for New Crobuzon-loyal songs. What few Teshi there were in the city were murdered or went underground. Anyone with a foreign accent risked a beating.

Increasingly, criminals were conscripted instead of being Remade and jailed. Many of the cripples begging and screaming about the Tesh soulca

The veterans were welcomed and then not welcomed, unwelcomed, spurned. The militia, their erstwhile comrades, cleared them from the parks and squares uptown. Ori had seen them take a man from the petally Churchyard Square, his skin erupted and splitting from beneath with dental wedges, as he screamed about a toothbomb.

New Crobuzoners gave alms to charities that tended the thaumaturgically afflicted. There were still speeches and marches in support of the war: freedom parades they called them with their trumpeters and military floats. But the strangely wounded returnees found they were jinxes.

And those whose hurts were simple and somatic, unhexed? Scarred, stumped rather than too-limbed, blinded, with signs TESH WAR VETEREN, BROKEN FOR N. CROBUZON. Many were doubtless the everyday maimed giving their old injuries a spurious soldier’s glamour, and the resentment and anxiety of Crobuzoners about their city’s war had an outlet.

Only one voice had to raise a jeer- you was born that way, you lying fucker -and a mob might gather, and run the orthodox wounded down. It was for New Crobuzon that they did it, of course, they said- you bastard comparing yourself to our boys fighting and dying. The Murkside crowd approached the burly armless man they accused of lying, said had never been on a ship. He shouted his rank while they threw stones. Ori walked.

Other victims knew better than to raise complaint. The Remade, slave-militia built for war, survivors of their tour. Their integrated arms were decommissioned before their release on the streets of New Crobuzon. If they tried to claim that these Remakings themselves-forgetting even the wound-cut flesh, lost eyes and ill-splinted bones-were war injuries, they would be jeered at the very best. Ori walked.

It was cool summer, and he passed under lush trees until he could not hear the shouts of crowds or the man they were beating and accusing of treachery. Breezes came with him under the arches of Dark Water Station. Streets were tight like veins, houses of darkwood and white daub next to those in brick, and here one burnt-out with carbon bones jutting from uncleared ash. The walls of Pincod, in New Crobuzon’s west, drank water from the air and sweated it out, making plaster bulge like cysts. Their damp was coloured and shining.

North to where streets widened. The Piazza della Settimana di Polvere was a trimmed garden of fox-rose and tall stones, looked on by the stuccowork bay windows of Nigh Sump. Ori did not like it here. He had grown up in Dog Fe

He felt cocky challenge at the glances from the well-dressed locals. Night was coming. Ori fingered his weapons.

At the junction he saw his contacts. Old Shoulder and the others did not acknowledge him, but they walked at the same pace under the willows that softened each corner and on to Crosshatch Avenue.

It was one of the city’s prettiest places. Shops and houses pillared, studded with fossils in the old Os Tumulus style. They were fronted for a stretch by the famous glasheim, a facade of stained glass centuries old whose designs ranged across the divides of the buildings. Guards protected it, and no carts could pass over the cobblestones outside it and risk shards. Once, Ori had suggested trying to break it, as a provocation, but even Toro’s crew had seemed shocked. They were not here for that. Old Shoulder slouched toward an office.

And then the careful ballet that they had walked through so many times in the deserted warehouse: two steps, one two, Ori was by the door, and bumping, three four, into the woman Catlina; they shuffled as rehearsed; Ori tripped; Marcus slipped into the office with Shoulder as Ori and Catlina yelled, decoying.

Elyctro-barometric lights were spitting all around them, making the glasheim incandesce and staining Ori and Catlina ghost colours. They abused each other, and he watched the door over her shoulder, ready to call her dog, the signal for her to draw attention with screams should anyone seem ready to look inside the office where their comrades were. They must be interrogating their quarry. Who’ve you sold out? Shoulder would be saying.

The glasheim guards approached but did not look anywhere but at him and Catlina. The shopkeepers watched wary and amused, and the uptown shoppers stared from café fronts. Ori was astonished. Didn’t they know that things were happening? How did Nigh Sump shield itself?

Soon-and the thought was uncomfortable though he strained for ruthlessness-soon Old Shoulder would kill the informant. He would do it quickly, then stab his deadness with a double-horned cestus that left marks like a bull’s gore.

There’s a war, Ori wanted to shout. Outside the city. And inside too. Does it tell you that in your papers? Instead he performed.

Toro gave them instructions, was not bitter or vicious but stressed what was necessary. This was necessary. Toro had linked the man suddenly to arrest-chains, to the towers of the militia, to the snatch-squads who predated on guildsmen and activists. The man in the office was a militiaman, a backroom-man, a nexus of informers. Old Shoulder would find out what he could, and then he would kill him.

Ori thought of the first time he had seen Toro.

It had been down to Spiral Jacobs’ money. I want to make a contribution, Ori had said, and let Old Shoulder know that this was not just another week’s hoardings. I want in, he had said, and Old Shoulder had pursed his green lips and nodded and come back to him two days later. Come now. Bring the money.

Over Barley Bridge, out of Dog Fe

The gang came. A few men and women; a Remade named Ulliam, a big man in his fifties who walked carefully, his head backward on his neck, staring behind him. More waiting. And the late light refracted by the city came through glass-fringed panes, and into its corona came Toro.

Little dusts came up with each of Toro’s steps. Toro, Ori thought, stared hard, with awe.

Toro moved like a mime, an exaggerated padding so unbullish Ori almost laughed. Toro was slighter than he, shorter, almost like a child, but walked with a precision that said I am something to fear. The thin figure was surmounted with a massive headpiece, a great bulk of iron and brass that looked too heavy to be carried by such tight little muscles, but Toro did not totter. Of course the helmet was a bull’s head.

Stylized, made from knots of metalwork, gnarled by the residue of fights. The myth, that helmet. More than dumb metal. Ori tasted hex. The horns were ivory or bone. The snout ended in a grille mimicking teeth; the exhaust pipe was a nose ring. The eyes were perfect, round, tiny portholes in tempered glass that glowed white-whether backlit or hexed, Ori could not see. He could not see human eyes behind them.

Toro stopped and raised a hand, and spoke, and from that little body had come a profound bass, an animal vibration so low that Ori was delighted. Little wisps of steam gusted from the nose ring, and Toro threw back its head. It was, Ori was astounded, it was the voice of a bull, speaking Ragamoll.

“You have something for me,” Toro said, and eager as a pilgrim Ori threw the sack of money.

“I counted it,” Old Shoulder said. “Some of it’s old, some of it’ll be a bitch to shift, but there’s a lot. He’s a good lad.”

And he was there, in. No more tests, no more fool’s jobs to prove himself.

Still junior, he was lookout or distraction, and that was enough for him. He had made himself part of something. He had not considered holding back some money, though he could live on it for a long time. Some of it came back to him anyway: they paid him to work at their crimes and insurrectionary revenge.

New Crobuzon became a new city for him. Now where he looked at streets he saw in them escapes, routes for incursions: he remembered the urban techniques of his childhood.

He had come to a more fierce existence. His heart quickened past any militia; he watched for signs on the walls. With the scatology, pornography and insults were more important marks. Chalked devices, runes and pictograms, where base thaumaturgy occurred (wards, preservers, pranks to turn milk and beer). There were sigils that were spreading by some memesis, that he saw now in all quarters: cochlear swirls and many-edged ideograms. He looked for the graffiti by which the gangs communicated. Calls to battle and parlay in terse paint slogans. Apocolypse cultism and rumour: Ecce Jabber, Vedne Save Us!, IC’s steaming home! Toro was in a hinterland between factions like the Proscribed and the Runagates, and the thief-gangs, the murderers of the east city. Toro’s crew were known to both sides.