Iron Council

Twice Ori negotiated with gangsters. He went with Old Shoulder and the Remade Ulliam to beg-threaten the crew of razor-eyed boys called the Murkside Shrikes, asking them to stay away from the docks where their nihilist depredations risked bringing the militia. Ori looked at the Shrikes with naked hate but paid them off as Toro had instructed. Once he went alone to Bonetown, and in the sight of the huge age-cracked chest-cage he made a careful deal with Mr. Motley’s vizier, buying a bulk quantity of shazbah. He did not know what Toro did with it.

He rarely saw Toro. For stretches it was a dull and insular life. They did not read as the Runagaters had read. His new comrades played games in the Badside warehouse, went “scouting,” which was walking without aim. No one ever quite spoke their ultimate plan, their target; no one ever quite said what they wanted to do. No one ever said the Mayor’s name or even the word mayor, but instead chair-of-the-board or pigboss: speaking the truth had become a shibboleth. When d’you suppose we might ah help our-friend-at-the-head-of-the-meeting take a permanent sabbatical downstairs? one of them might say, and they would debate the Mayor’s routine and check their weapons.

Ori did not always know what his comrades were doing. Sometimes he would learn only when he heard or read of another heist, the freeing of prisoners from a punishment factory, the murder of some rich old couple in Flag Hill. That last outraged the papers, who excoriated Toro for the killing of i

With Spiral Jacobs’ contribution they had money to bribe, and bribe well, though the bulk of the cash Toro took for some expensive mysterious project. The Toroans trawled for information and contacts. Ori tried to rebuild his own network. He had neglected his old friends. He had not seen Petron for weeks, or any of the Nuevists. He had felt with a new dissident aggression that they were too frivolous, their interventions ma

And he learnt from them. Realised how fast he uncoupled from rumour when he spent all his days with the crew. So once a week he went back to the Griss Fell soup kitchen. He decided he would return to the Runagate Rampant meetings.

He had tried not to neglect Spiral Jacobs. The man was not easy to find. He disappeared for a long time, and Ori only found him after leaving messages with the shelters and the vagrants who were the old tramp’s family.

“Where did you go?” Ori said, and Spiral Jacobs was too vague to reply. The old man’s fog lifted when he spoke of his old life, of Jack Half-a-Prayer.

“How’d you come to know so much about Toro’s plans, Spiral?”

The old man laughed and bobbed his head.

Are you a friend of Toro? Ori thought. Do you meet and talk about the old times, talk about the Man’Tis?

“Whyn’t you just give them the money yourself?” Nothing.

“You don’t know them, do you?”

No one among the Toro-run recognised his description of Spiral. Ori asked Jacobs to tell him about Jack Half-a-Prayer. I think you like me, Ori thought. The mad old man looked at him with a familial care. I think you gave me the money to help them and me both. The weakness of Spiral’s mind came and went.

“Not seen much of you,” Petron had said in a louche cabaret pub of Howl Barrow. They ignored the gyring striptease and illicit dealings at the other tables.

“Doing things.”

“Ru

“We’re doing good things, if you want to come back. The Flexibles are doing another show: ‘Rud and the Gutter and the Devil’s Embassy.’ Can’t use Rudgutter’s name, obviously, but it’s about the Midsummer Nightmares, years back: there’s rumours they tried to make some wicked deals to fix it.”

Ori listened and thought, You’ll do a show of me in years to come. “Ori and the Toro-Gored Mayor.” Things’ll be different then.

Two Chaindays ru

A woman led the meeting. She was small and intense, older than he but still young. She spoke well. She eyed him, and when her face took on an uncertain expression he remembered her: she was the knit-machinist.

She spoke about the war. It was a tense meeting. Not only did the Runagate Rampant not support the war’s aims, stated or interpreted-that position was common to the tiny dissident groups-they said they fought for New Crobuzon to lose.

“You think Tesh is any better?” someone said, angry and incredulous.

The knit-worker said, “It ain’t that we think it’s better, it’s that our prime opponents are here, right here.”

Ori did not speak. He watched her and tensed only a second when it seemed one man’s anger at what he called her Tesh-love would make him violent, but she calmed him. Ori did not think she convinced everyone-he was not sure of his own feelings for the war, beyond that both sides were bastards, and that he did not care-but she did well. When the others had gone he waited and applauded her, and he was only half mocking.

“Where’s Jack?” Ori said. “The Jack who used to take these?”

“Curdin?” she said. “Gone. Militia. Snatched. No one knows.”

They were silent. She gathered her papers. Curdin was dead or jailed or who knew what.

“Sorry.”

She nodded.

“You did well.”

She nodded again. “He told me about you.” She did not look at him. “He told me a lot about you. He was disappointed you weren’t coming no more. Thought a lot of you. ‘Boy’s got the anger,’ he said. ‘Hope he knows what to do with it.’ So… so what’s it like on the wild side, Jack? How’s it with, with the Bo

“More than you.” But he hated his petulance and did not want to fight, so he said, “How’d you take over?” He meant You know so much, you argue well, you’ve risen to this. When last he saw her he would have been the experienced dissident, with insurrectionist philosophy: and now he had been present at deaths and was harder, and had been cut by a militia knife and knew how to talk to the danger-scum of the east city, but she knew more than him, and it had only been some weeks.

She shrugged.

“It’s the time,” she said. She tried to be dismissive, then met his eye. “Do you… How could you do this now? Now? What d’you think’s happening? Do you know what’s going on? Do you feel it? Five foundries went out last week, Jack. Five. The Rétif Platform of the dockers’ guild’s in talks with the vodyanoi for a cross-race union. That’s our chaverim pulling that, that’s Double-R. The next march we have we’ll make into a meeting, and we won’t have to moulder like this.” She waved at the close walls, brought her fists down on her thighs. She almost stamped. “And you’ve heard the stories. You know what’s returning? What’s coming back to us? And you choose now to go be an adventurer? To turn your back on the commonalty?”

The word made him breathe a sneer. The jargon of it, the commonalty, the commonalty that the Double-R s spoke of so relentlessly.

“We’re doing things,” he said. Her tirade made him uneasy-or perhaps melancholic, nostalgic. He did not know of the actions and the changes that she spoke of, that he would once have been part of. But all his excitement, his pride came up in him and effaced anxiety, and he smiled. “Oh Jack,” he had said. “You don’t know what we’ll do.”

The door of the office opened and Old Shoulder and Marcus emerged, seen only by Ori. The cactus-man held Ori’s eyes and then was gone behind the curious crowd.

Carefully, not too sudden, Ori let Catlina know they were done, and they let their voices down like two people tired of arguing. Ori walked under the skyrails and the arches of the Dexter Line, the trains over his head lit up by gas, under skies awash in brown dusk, toward Badside where Toro was waiting. He walked back to his masked boss, whom he saw so rarely, whose face he never saw, leaving a dead man behind him.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Ori went to the docks of Kelltree. There was a congregation, made to look spontaneous, which the Caucus and its factions had spread word of for weeks. They could not have listed it in RR or The Forge so had relied on graffiti, handslang and rumour. The militia would close them down: the question was how long they had. A mass milled in the forefront of the Paradox Warehouse, dockworkers and a few clerks, human mostly, but all the races were there; even Remade, carefully at the edges of the crowd.

From canals that linked the docks to the river, vodyanoi watched the gathering. A few score yards away, hidden by roofs, was the Gross Tar, the meet of the Tar and the Canker, the wide river that bisected the east of the city. When tall ships passed, Ori could see their masts move behind the houses, their rigging over the chimneys.

Airships went over. Quick now, Ori thought. A wedge of men and women came through the crowd, coalescing out of randomness and moving with sudden purpose. They bundled around one man whom they pushed to the brick shed become a stage, where he vaulted up and was joined by someone Ori recognised, a Caucusist, from the Proscribed.

“Friends,” the man shouted. “We’ve someone wants to talk to you, a friend of mine, Jack, ” and there were humourless smiles. “He wants to tell something of the war.”

They had so little time. Militia spies would be ru