Iron Council

She gestured at the stiffening Mayor.

“We done what they wanted. We done what they come here to do.”

“Yes.” Yes but it isn’t the same. It was a sideshow, it wasn’t what you were here for, and that’s different, it makes it different.

Does it? Didn’t we win ?

A middle-aged woman from the working-class estates of southwest New Crobuzon sat by two blood-glazed corpses. A young man from Dog Fe

“I want to go, ” he said, shaking suddenly as all the anxiety he had dulled welled in him. He felt himself want again, for the first time in many days. And what it was he wanted, was to get out.

“So go.”

From the bitten-out hole through which they had come in he could hear hammering, sledgehammers taken to the doors of their empty house and echoing up its stairwells.

“You’ve killed me!”

“For Jabber’s sake, Ori, go.” She kicked her helmet at him. It jerked, rocked on its horns. He looked at it, at her, at it, picked it up. “Hexes are down. Go.” It was very heavy.

“I don’t know how to use this. What do I do ?”

“Just push. Just push.”

There were shouts from the approaching militia.

“You’re giving me your helmet?”

She screamed at him. She said Go! but it stopped being a word, was quickly more animal than that, was only misery. He backed away and looked at the sticky emitting dead who kept her company, the way she sat, too tired even to tug her baby’s hands.

“You shouldn’t have done this,” he said. “You shouldn’t have used us like this. You used us hard. You had no right.” He lifted the mask, faltered under it. He hated how he sounded. “You killed them. Probably me too. It was… Was an honour to run with you.” He heard what must be grapples. Militia climbing. He heard them shout the Mayor’s name. “You shouldn’t have done this. I’m glad you… you got what you wanted. Shouldn’t have done it this way, but we got what we meant to, too.” He lowered the mask to his shoulders and tried to effect some militant salute, but Toro was not looking at him.

When the helmet settled it lightened. It felt like cloth. He had no talent for thaumaturgy, but even he could feel the metal thick with it. He looked through crystal that lightened the room, brought edges clear; he pulled the buckles tight under his shoulders, felt himself enhanced.

He gasped. Little needles spoked into his neck; his fingers gripped the metal. The sacrifice, the blood to power this iron head. How do I do this? he tried to shout. He felt extrusions of metal under his teeth and tried to bite or push them one way or another, feeling them still wet with the woman’s spit. His voice di

Push. Ori stood as he had seen her do and shoved with new-powerful thighs, jerked forward, staggered, balanced, tried again. He braced the tips of the horns against the wall and strained and only embedded them in the wood. People were ru

In his eagerness, his desperate sudden want to be alive, he reached for an urgency, envisioned his home, his little room. He thought of it and alchemised the want into a focus, and when he ploughed forward again he clenched his eyes and teeth and felt the hankering coalesce in two blistering nodes where the horns met his forehead, and he pushed again and felt something catch, a sensual rupture like splitting taut wax paper. He gasped, and the substance of the air began to part for him and like water tension it tried to draw him in.

Ori paused at the edge of the little ontic abomination, the hole, while the universe strained. Ahead of him was distressed darkness. He twisted, keeping the horns in the wound he had made, and tried to catch the eyes of the woman with the child’s arms playing pat-a-cake on her cheeks. She did not look at him. She did not look at the corpses she had made.

The militia were at the door. Ori pushed, let the momentum take him, into the rift he had made, out of that room where the most notorious thief and murderer of a generation quietly wept, where the ruler of New Crobuzon grew stiff, and

he was for a moment a long moment in a wrinkle, in an i

What then?

But his push continued, and a long long time and an instant after the first split, he felt another; the membrane parted for him again, on the other side, and disgorged him like a splinter. He fell through and to the ground slippery, wet with reality’s blood, his inexpert passage having done trauma in its passing, blood that evanesced in iridescent skeins, a pavonine moment in the air that was gone, and left Ori disoriented and dry again, and in

an alley scattered with rubbish.

For a long time he lay bleating weakly, until the feeling like overwhelming motion sickness subsided, and strength seeped back to him.

He could not fathom where he was. He was giddy. In his Toro getup, aware that it made him a target. I’ll rest soon, he thought through fog. His forehead hurt, in points at the bases of the horns. He had come through, but nowhere near where he wanted to go.

Ori could feel a chill, but it did not trouble him. He stumbled and looked up as he came through entangled alleyways, and there was a line intersecting his path, nightblack arches that even Toro’s eyes could not see into, the brick and the dorsal crest of the elevated railroad. And beyond, tooth-yellow in the gaslamps that underlit them, the soffit of the Ribs. Ori was in Bonetown.

He lay for hours. The sky was grey-lit when he woke. When he removed the helmet he almost blacked out, and had to lean and breathe in a cavity below the railway. Silence u

Ori made his jacket a kind of satchel for the helmet, he pocketed his pistol, and stumbled out toward the Bonetown Ribs.

The air seemed sultry, wire-tight. What’s happening? He could not believe word had spread so fast, in fact he did not believe it. With a gust his excitement turned bad, and foreboding filled him. What has happened?

There was no one on the streets, or freakishly few, and those who there were went heads down. Past tarred houses by the Ribs, he kept the bricks of the raised railway to his left, went south, stumbling through Sunter, ready to turn on Rust Bridge to Murkside and from there to Syriac, but he saw the lights of fires and heard drumming, bugles. Nothing should be so loud at these predawn hours.

They grew louder; he felt himself going into shock, shaking hard, the weight of the helmet dragging him. South down High Chypre Hill, a street of florists and trinketeers by whose roofs the trains should come. There was a fork in the lines, where the tributary of the Dexter Line went down to Kelltree and veered east over the river to Dog Fe

Blinking till he teared in exhaustion, Ori saw in the glimmer of fires a rough barrier. He could not make sense of it. Its silhouette in that warm light was like something wild, something geographical in the city. People were moving at its top.

“Stop,” someone shouted. Ori kept walking, did not understand that the word could be meant for him.

It was a barricade of paving slabs and rubble, carts, chimneys, old doors, the overturned remnants of stalls. Tons of urban detritus had gone to make a little mountain ridge, a ten-foot-high debris cordon planted with flags. The marbled arm of a statue jutted from its flank.

“ Stop, fucker.” A shot, a shard of concrete sounded with the ricochet. “Where you going, friend?”

Ori put his hands up high. He approached, waving.

“What’s happened? What’s going on?” he shouted, and there were jeers from the blockage. What is he some fucker from Mafaton back from holiday? “No papers, no kiosks, no criers where you been then, mate?” the sentry shouted. He was a man-shape in black, backlit. “Piss off home.”

“This is my home. Syriac. What’s happened ? Godsdammit, how long was I between… This is about her, ain’t it? You’ve heard? The Mayor?” And all his excitement was back again. So much that he could hardly speak. I might’ve been days, he thought. What’s happened while I’ve been gone? Did we do it? It happened. It woke them. The inspiration. Gods. “Dammit, chaverim, let me in! Tell me what’s gone on.” He forgot cold and tiredness and stood up straight in the licking yellow light of the fires. “It’s all happened … How long ago did she die?”

“Who?”

“The Mayor. ” Ori creased his brow. There were more calls, more shouting. She dead? The bitch is gone? Who’s this fool, he’s a madman, I wouldn’t set your store…

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, mate. I think you should go now.” He heard the sound of gun-preparation.

“But what…”

“Listen, friend, someone can vouch for you? Because without that there’s no in, no out. You’re in no-man’s-land, and that ain’t a safe place to be. You’d best bugger off back to the Old Town, unless you give me a name. Give me a name, and we’ll check you out.” More heads were rising now; the man was being joined. An armed band, humans and other races, weapons hefted below snapping flags.

“Because you’re on the threshold now, mate, and you’re either on one side or the other. It ain’t like we just got here. Been two powers in the city for days, boy. You’ve had days to make up your mind. You’re either north”-and there were pantomime boos-“back in the old days and old ways: or you’re in here, Kelltree and Echomire and Dog fucking Fe

“Walk toward me slow, and keep your hands like that. Let’s have a look at you, you gormless fool.” It was almost kindly. A bottle smashed. “Come a bit closer. Welcome to the Free Territories, mate. Welcome to the New Crobuzon Collective.”