Iron Council

Looking behind him to gauge the size of the crowd, Ori was surprised to see Petron. The Nuevist was lacing his art activism with real dissidence, was risking more than late fighting in Salacus Fields. Ori was impressed.

There were Caucusists everywhere. Ori saw someone from the Excess, from the Suffragim; he saw an editor of Runagate Rampant. This speaker was not affiliated, and all the factions of the unstable, chaotic, infighting and comradely front had to share him. They were vying for the man.

“He has things to say,” the Proscribed man was shouting. “Jack here… Jack here is back from the war.”

There was an utter sudden hush. The man was a soldier. Ori was poised. What was this, this stupidity? Yes there was press-ganging and military Remaking, but whatever his history, this man was, formally at least, militia. And he had been invited here. He stepped forward.

“Don’t fret about me. I’m here, I’m here to tell you, of, of the real,” the man said. He was not a good speaker. But he shouted loud enough that all could hear him, and his own anxiety kept the crowd there.

He spoke fast. He had been warned he would not have long. “I ain’t spoken before to people like this,” he said and they could hear his voice trembling, this man who had carried guns and killed for New Crobuzon.

The war’s a lie (he said ). I got my badge. (He drew it out by his fingertips as if it were dirty. City finds that he’s a dead man, thought Ori. ) Months on them ships, we went through the Firewater Straits, on till landfall, and we thought we’d have to fight on the seas, we was trained to, sailor-soldiers, ‘acause them Tesh ships were out for us, we saw them and their weapons in flocks circling but they ain’t seen us, and it ain’t all city-loyal, the militia, not now, us from Dog Fe

They don’t want us. I seen things… What they done to us. What we done back. (There was a restive stirring somewhere in the streets and a brief incoming of Caucus scouts handslanging frantically to the Proscribed man and he whispered to the speaker. Ori got ready to run. The militia renegade gabbled in anger. ) It ain’t no war for liberty, nor for the Teshi, they hate us and we, we fucking hated them I tell you, and it was a, it’s carnage there, just plain murder, they sending their children out stuffed full of hex to make us melt, I had my men melt on me, and I done things… You don’t know what it is, in Tesh. They ain’t like us. Jabber, I done things to people… (The Proscribed man hurried him, pulled him to the shed’s edge. )

So screw the militia and screw their war. I ain’t no friends to the damn Teshi after what they done but I don’t hate them half so much as I hate them. (He pointed at the basalt column-palace of Parliament, prodding the sky with tubes and tuskish jags, profane and arrogant. ) Anyone needs dying it ain’t some damn Tesh peasant, it’s them, in there, who got us here. Who’ll take them out? (He cocked his thumb, shot his finger several times toward the Parliament-a Remaking offence. ) Screw their war.

And at that someone from Runagate Rampant barked, “Yeah, so fight to lose, fight for defeat,” and there was angry calling from those who saw stupidity in this. They yelled at the Runagaters that they supported Tesh, that they were agents of the Crawling Liquid, but before there were fists between the factions, the whistles of the guards went, and the crowd began to scatter. Ori wrote fast on a tear of paper.

Militia were coming. People were prepared, and they ran. Ori ran too, but not for the doors or the broken fence. He went straight for the speaker.

Pushed past the bickering Caucus members who surrounded him. Some recognised Ori, stared at him with greeting or query stillborn as he went past them to the raging soldier-Jack. Ori put

his name and his address into the speaker’s pocket, and whispered.

“Who’ll take them out?” he said. “We will. These lot won’t. Come find me.”

And then there was the burring of propellers and an airship protruded over them. Ropes spilled down and dribbled armoured militia. There were the sounds of dogs. The gates of the Paradox Warehouse were too full of people, and there was a panic. “Men-o’-war!” someone shouted, and yes there slowly rising to swell over the walls were the grotesque gland-bodies contoured with extrusions and organic holes, ridden by militia manipulating the exposed nerves of the giant filament-dangling things, flying them sedately toward the crews of Caucusists, the toxin in their tendrils dripping. Ori ran.

There would be other militia squads on the street: shu

The soldier’s name was Baron. He told Ori without any sense of the secrecy and care with which the dissidents did their business. He turned up two nights later. When Ori opened his door to him, Baron was holding Ori’s paper. “Tell me then,” Baron had said. “What is it you’ll do? Who the fuck are you, chaver?”

“How come they ain’t got you yet?” Ori asked. Baron said there were hundreds of militia gone AWOL. Most of those pla

“I ain’t hiding,” said Baron. “I don’t care.”

They approached The Terrible Magpie in Riverskin, near the cactus ghetto. Ori would not go to The Two Maggots, or any place so known as a dissidents’ hole that it would be watched. Here in Riverskin the roads were quiet gullies between damp wood houses. The worst trouble they were likely to find was from the gangs of drugged cactus youth who lounged and carved keloid tattoos into their green skins, sitting on the girders at the base of the Glasshouse as it loomed eighty yards high, a quarter of a mile across where it cut streets out of New Crobuzon like a stencil. The cactus punks watched Ori and Baron but did not accost them.

Something had happened to Baron. He said nothing explicit to make Ori wonder about his experiences, but it was in his pauses, in the ways he did not say things. A rage. Ori supposed there were as many unspeakable stories as there were men come back from war. Baron was thinking of something, of some one thing, a moment of-what? blood? death? transfiguration?-some atrocity that had made him this angry fighting man, eager to kill those who had once paid him. Ori thought of dead friends and of pain.

Each of the Caucus groups was courting Baron and the other renegade militia. With careful scorn Ori explained the agenda of the various factions. He told stories of Toro’s adventures, the crew’s works, and pulled Baron to his orbit.

Baron was a prize. The Toroans were delighted. Toro came the night Baron joined them, put a bony hand on the militiaman’s chest to welcome him.

That was the first time Ori saw how Toro travelled. When Old Shoulder and the gang were done talking, Toro lowered that carved and cast metal head and horns and pushed. The helmeted figure was leaning against nothing, against air, and then driving, straining forward, until those hexed horns caught at something, caught on it and the universe seemed to flex and stretch at two points, and Ori felt the air crack with thaumaturgy and Toro’s horns pierced the world and Toro stomped suddenly through. The split skin of reality closed again like lips, back into position, and Toro was gone.

“What does Toro do ?” Ori asked Ulliam the Remade that night. “To make boss? I’m not complaining, you know that, right? I’m just saying. What does Toro do?”

Ulliam smiled.

“Hope you never find out,” he said. “Without Toro, we’re nothing.”

Baron brought a military savagery to the gang. When he was talking of the war he shook and barked rage; he became etched with veins. But when he went on jobs, on revenge-raids against informers, on punishment beatings against the drug gangs encroaching on Toro’s land, in the action itself he was utterly cold, mouth barely twitching as he worked without emotion on someone.

He frightened his new gang-comrades. His machinish drive, the ease with which he gave out punishment, the way his eyes switched off and the life in them sank very deep. We ain’t nothing, Ori thought. The Toroans had thought themselves hard desperados-and yes they had done violent, murderous things in the name of change-but their anarchist anger was a vague floundering next to the cool rageless expertise of the soldier. They were in awe of him.

Ori remembered the first execution he had seen, of a captain-informer. The roughhousing had been easy. They had found the proof, the blacklists of names, the executive orders. But even with all their hatred, even with the memory of fallen brothers and sisters, even with Ulliam’s memory of the punishment factories themselves, the execution was a difficult thing. Ori had closed his eyes so as not to see the shot. They had given Ulliam the gun saying it was for his Remaking, but Ori thought it was also because Ulliam could not look at his quarry. His backward-facing head focused on nothing. And even then, Ori bet he closed his eyes when he pulled the trigger.

By contrast Baron walked in anywhere he was bid and fought who he was told to fight and killed if told to implacably. He moved like the best constructs Ori remembered from his youth: like something oiled, metal, mindless.

When the Murkside Shrikes again, with pissy provocation, started to spread into Toro’s streets, Ori, Enoch and Baron were sent to finish the incursions. “One only,” Toro said. “The one with the harelip. He’s the pla