Iron Council

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 soulcannon and the efrit winds had been press-ganged and recruited solely for the war. They were not career militia. They were discomfiting, shambling reminders.

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 Fenn. Not the gang-jungle of Badside, not so bad as that, but the child Ori had run through rookeries of buildings reshaped by the ingenuity of the poor, over planks looking down on washing and outhouses. He had scavenged pennies and stivers from roadside dirt, squabbled and learned sex and the fast-spat performative slang of the Dog Fenn Dozens. Ori did not understand the geography of Nigh Sump and the uptown parts. He did not understand where children here would run. The austere houses cowed him, and he hated them for it.

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 Fenn to Badside. An apocalypse landscape of long-deserted slag and stagnant shipyards, where the keels of vessels poked from their internment in shallow waters. No one salvaged these sculptures in rust. Old Shoulder led Ori to a hangar where dirigibles were once built, and Ori waited in the shade of its mooring mast.

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.

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 innocents. Ori wondered sourly what it was the victims had done, how many they had Remade or executed. He rummaged in the gang’s box of militia spoils, the badges and contracts of office, but could find nothing of the uptown couple to tell why they had been targeted.

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 mannered. Eventually he sought them out, and realised how much he had missed their savage play.

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.”

“Running with a new crowd?” There was no accusation or venom in Petron’s tone-allegiances were fast among the bohemians. Ori shrugged.

“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 running he went to The Grocer’s Sweetheart. No one was there the first night. The second, the trapdoor was raised to him and he was let back into the Runagate Rampant meeting. The Jacks were not all the same as they had been. The Remade man he had met months back was still there. There was a vodyanoi stevedore and a crippled cactus-man Ori did not remember, a few others looking through the literature.

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 Bonnot Gang, or Toro, or Poppy’s lot or whoever you’re with now? Think people don’t know? So, so what is it you’re doing now?”

“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 running to their contacts. In the thaumaturgic listening post in the Spike, the echelon of communicators and communicatrices would be blinking fast and trying to decipher from the city’s welter of cognition which illicit topics were being spoken. Quick now, Ori thought.

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 Fenn on that ship were there because there ain’t no other jobs to do. Let loose and told to go liberate them Tesh villages.

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: shunnriders, plainclothes infiltrators. Ori had to take care. He itched at the sense that some sharpshooter might target him from the airship. But he knew the ways through these streets. Most of the audience had already disappeared in New Crobuzon’s brick tangles, careering past startled shop holders and corner-hanging vagrants to stop suddenly and walk like everyone else was walking, a few streets on. Later, a mile away on the other side of the river, Ori heard that no one had been captured or killed, and was savagely delighted.

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 planning to go into hiding were keeping their heads down, readying for the black survivalist economy of New Crobuzon, staying out of sight of their erstwhile colleagues. With the chaos in the city, he said, it would be impossible for the militia to keep track of all their men. No day passed without a strike or riot: the numbers of the unemployed were growing, there were attacks on xenians by Quillers and on Quillers by xenians and dissidents. Some in Parliament were arguing for compromise, meeting the guilds.

“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 planner.” Ori, always the best shot, had a flintlock, Enoch a double-crossbow, but neither had a chance to fire. Baron had checked and cleaned the barrels of his repeater with effortless expertise.

Young men and women, the hangers-on of the youthful Shrikes, lounged over the stairs to the Murkside attic drinking very-tea and smoking shazbah. Ori and Enoch followed Baron. Twice he was challenged by some junkie nominally on guard: twice he dismissed them with a look, a whispered threat. Ori was still turning the corner on the last mezzanine when he heard the quick-kicked splintering of wood, shouts.

Two shots had sounded already by the time he reached the door. Two boys about seventeen were fallen on ruined legs and screaming. While others ran and dropped their guns Baron kept moving. Someone shot Baron, and Ori saw blood flower on his left arm: Baron grunted and his face flashed a moment of pain and was impassive again. Two more quick shots disabled or terrified those firing, and then he was closing on the harelipped young man who gave the gang its ideas, and he shot him as Enoch and Ori stared.

He doesn’t care if he dies, Ori thought that night. Baron terrified him. He’ll kill if we tell him. He’ll kill if we let him.

That ain’t a man who learnt his fighting in the wilds. The quick and brute expertise with which he swept a room, the one-two-three taking in of all corners. Baron had done this many times before, this urban violence. Baron was no recent recruit, a jobless man found a job, a rushed soldier.

What can Toro do? Ori wondered. He had never seen his boss fight.

“What’s that helmet?” he said, and Ulliam told him that Toro had come out of the punishment factories or the jail, or the wilds, or the undertown, and gone on a long and arduous search to find a craftsman and the materials, had had the helmet made: the rasulbagra it was sometimes called, the head of the bull. Ulliam told him the unbelievable stories of its powers and the way it had been made, the long dangers of its forging, the years. “Years in jail, years hunting the pieces, years wearing it,” he said. “You’ll see what it can do.”

Each of the crew had their own tasks. Ori was sent to steal rockmilk and hexed liquors from laboratories. He knew a plan was coming. He could see its glimmers in his instructions.

Get a plan of the lower floors of Parliament. Get what? Ori did not know how to start. Make friends with a clerk at the magisters’ offices. Find the name of the Mayor’s undersecretary. Get day work in Parliament, wait for more instructions.

The air of strikes and insurrection was growing: Ori felt it, detached, excited.

Spiral Jacobs came back to the soup kitchen. Ori felt a strange unburdening at the sight of him. Jacobs was lucid, shrewd that night, staring at Ori with stoat eyes.

“Your money keeps helping us,” Ori said. “But I got instructions now I can’t do nothing with.” He told. “What’s that, then?”

They were at the river wall in Griss Fell, just down from the confluence, with Strack Island and the spires of Parliament sheer out of the Gross Tar. Its lights shone grey in the evening; their reflections in the water were drab. A cat was mewing from Little Strack, stranded somehow on the stub of land in the river. Spiral Jacobs spat at the waterpillars that had marked the limits of the Old Town. They were tremendously ancient stone carvings, a winding path of stylised figures ascending, depicting events from the early histories of New Crobuzon. Where they met the water they were defaced by delinquent vodyanoi.

“They trying for different things, ain’t they?” Jacobs took Ori’s cigarillo. “They ain’t got a strategy, have they? They’re trying for all different things. Lots of ways in.” He smoked and thought and shook his head. “Damn, but this ain’t how Jack would have done it.” He laughed.

“How would Jack have done it?”

Jacobs kept looking at the glow-end of his smoke.

“Mayor can’t stay in Parliament all the time.” He spoke with care. “Someone like the Mayor, though, can’t just go walking, or riding. Has to have protection, yes? Has to trust them. Wherever they go-Jack told me this, Jack watched for this-wherever they go, Mayor’s Clypean Guard take over. They’re the only ones trusted.” He looked up. His face was not impish or playful. “Imagine if one of them were turned. Imagine if one could be bought.”

“But they’re chosen just so’s they can’t be bought…”

“History…” Jacobs spoke with terse authority. Brought Ori to a hush. “Is all full. And dripping. With the corpses. Of them who trusted the incorruptible. ”

He gave Ori a name. Ori stared while the old tramp walked away. He hobbled into view in each puddled streetlight until he reached the end of the alley and leaned, a tired old man with chalk on his fingers.

“Where do you go?” Ori said. His voice was flat by the river, did not echo between brick walls and windows but spread out and was quickly gone. “And dammit, Spiral, how d’you know these things? Come to Toro,” he said. He was excited and unnerved. “How do you do this? You’re better than any of us, come to the fucking Bull, come join us. Won’t you?”

The old man licked his lips and hovered. Would he speak? Ori saw him deciding.

“Not all Jack’s paths is dried up,” he said. “There’s ways of knowing. Ways of hearing things. I know.” Tapped his nose, comedically conspiratorial. “I know things, ain’t it? But I’m too old to be a player now, boy. Leave that to the young and angry.”

He repeated the name. He smiled again and walked away. And Ori knew he should go after him, should try again to bring him into the orbit of Toro. But there was a very strong and strange respect in him, something close to awe. Ori had taken to wearing marks on his clothes, coils mimicking the spirals Jacobs left on walls. Spiral Jacobs came and went in his strange ways, and Ori could not deny him his exits.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Old Shoulder was delighted with Ori’s information, the name, but cheerfully disbelieved his claims to its provenance.

“Drinking in the right pubs in Sheck my green arse, boy,” he said. “This is insider stuff. You ain’t telling. You’ve a contact you’re guarding. You hoarding him? Her? Some officer’s tart? You been doing some horizontal recruitment, Ori? Whatever. I don’t know what you’re doing but this is… this is gold. If it’s true. So I ain’t going to push it.

“I trust you, boy-wouldn’t have brought you in if I didn’t. So whatever you’re keeping this for, I’m thinking it’s for reasons that make sense. But I can’t say I like it. If you’re playing some game…” If you’re on another side he did not say. “Or even if you’re doing it for the right reasons but you’re just wrong, even if you just make a wrong call and mess us all up, you got to know I’d kill you.”

Ori was not even intimidated. Old Shoulder was suddenly vastly annoying to him.

He stood up carefully to the cactacae, met his eyes. “I’ll give my life for this,” he said, and it was true, he realised. “I’ll take the Mayor down, take off the fucking head of this snake-government. But you know, tell me, Shoulder. If I was playing you? If this information I got for us-that’s going to let us damn well do what we been wanting to do-if it was me setting you up, how’d you go about killing me after, Shoulder? Because you’re the one who’d be dead.”

It was a mistake. He saw Old Shoulder’s eyes. But Ori could not regret his provocation. He tried but he could not.

Baron frightened them all. They had seen that he could shoot and fight, but they were not sure if he could persuade. They briefed him with great anxiety, until he snapped at them to shut up and trust him. There was no choice.

“We need a man who knows how to speak militia to militia,” Toro said. The mechanisms or thaumaturgy of the helmet turned the words into lowing. Ori looked at the body so dwarfed by that helmet but somehow not ridiculous, dancer-tight and hard. The lamps of those featureless round eyes sprayed out light. “We’re crims,” Toro said. “Can’t talk to the militia-they’d see into us. Need someone who has no guilt. Who’s one of them. Knows barrack slang. We need a militiaman.”

There were militia quarters about the city. Some were hidden. All were protected with hex and firepower. But near each one were militia pubs, and all the dissidents knew which they were.

Bertold Sulion, the man whose name Spiral Jacobs had given Ori, and which Ori had given to his comrades, was, Jacobs said, a dissatisfied Clypean Guard, loyalty becoming nihilism or greed. He would be stationed in Parliament itself, by or in the Mayor’s quarter. And that meant the pubs below the skyrails and the militia tower at the wedge of Brock Marsh, where the rivers converged.

Brock Marsh, the magician’s arrondissement. Oldest part of an old city. In the north, with pebbled streets and yawing wooden lean-tos full of charmed equipment, karcists, bionumanists, physicists and all-trade thaumaturges lived. In the south of the borough, though, the elixirs did not so fill the drains; there was not such a pall of hex-stench in the air. The scientists and their parasite industries petered out below thrumming skyrails and pods. Strack Island and Parliament emerged from the river close-by. It was in this region that the Clypean Guards would drink.

It was a drab few streets of concrete blocks and girders, industrial, distressed by age and unkempt. In the pubs of the area-in The Defeated Enemy, in The Badger, in The Compass and Carrot-Baron went to be a frequenter, to find Sulion.

The headlines of The Quarrel and The Beacon told of slow triumphs in the Firewater Straits, the defeat of Teshi shunboats and the emancipation of the serf towns in Tesh’s demesne. There were unclear heliotypes of villagers and Crobuzoner militia exchanging smiles, the militia helping rebuild a food store, a militia surgeon tending a peasant child.

The Forge, a Caucus paper, found another officer like Baron, on the run. He told the war differently. “And even with all the things we’re doing that he’s talking about,” Baron said, “we ain’t winning. We ain’t going to win. ” Ori was not certain that was not the main basis of his anger.

“Baron reminds me of things I seen,” said Ulliam. “And not in a good way.” It was night in Pelorus Fields, in the south of New Crobuzon. A quiet little haunt of the clerks, office men, with enclaves like prosperous villages, garden squares unflowered in the cold, cosy fountains, fat churches and devotionals to Jabber. Bucolic hideouts jutted off from the busyness of Wynion Street, with its shoe markets and tea dens.

Ulliam and Ori took a risk in being there. With the growth in strikes and unlaw, Pelorus Fields felt sieged. As Parliamentarians met with the guilds, whose demands became more organised, as the Caucus spoke out from its unsubtle front organs, Pelorus Fields was anxious. Its respectable citizens patrolled, nightly, in Committees for the Defence of Decency. Frightened copywriters and actuaries running down xenians and the shabby-dressed, Remade who did not show deference.

But there were places like Boland’s. “Show a bit of care, ladies, gents,” was all Boland would say to the Nuevist poets, the dissidents, who came for his coffees and to hide behind ivy-lush windows. Ori and Ulliam sat together. Ulliam’s chair faced away from Ori’s so his backward face was forward.

“I seen men take a room like that before,” Ulliam said. “It was men like that done this to me.

“It’s why Toro didn’t send me to Motley’s-I used to work for him. Long, long time ago.” He indicated his neck.

“What did they Remake you for? Why that way?” It showed trust to ask. Ulliam did not blench at the query, showed no shock. He laughed.

“Ori, you wouldn’t believe me, boy. You can’t have been more than a baby, if you was even born. I can’t tell you it all now; it’s done and gone. I was a herder, of sorts.” He laughed again. “I’ve seen things. Oh, the animals I guarded. Nothing scares me no more. Except, you know… when I saw Baron come into that room. I won’t say I was scared again but I remembered what it was, to feel that way.

“Do you think about what we’ll do, when we do this?” he asked later. “This job? The chair-of-the-board?” Ori shook his head.

“We’ll change things. Push it all the way.” Excitement rose in him as it always did, with speed. “When we cut off the head and watch it fall, we’ll wake people up. Nothing’ll stop us.” We’ll change everything. We’ll change history. We’ll wake the city up, and they’ll free themselves.

When they left and walked a few careful feet apart (whole and Remade could not fraternise in Pelorus Fields) they heard screaming from a few streets away, heard a woman running, her voice coming over the nightlit slates of Wynion Street. It just come, it just come, she shouted, and Ori and Ulliam looked at each other tense and wondered if they should go to her, but the sound became crying and then faded, and when they turned north they could not find her.

On Dockday the twelfth of Octuary, something came in front of the cold summer sun. Later Ori could not remember if he had seen the moment of its arrival or if he had only heard it so many times he had made it a memory.

He was in a train. On the Sink Line, passing over the shantytown of Spatters, toward the incline and grand houses of Vaudois Hill. Someone farther on in the carriage gave a shriek that he ignored, but others came then, too, and he looked up through the window.

They were raised, the train on arches, so they pushed through chimneys like little swells, minarets, towers with damp-splintered skins like swamp trees. They saw clearly across to the east and the morning sun spreading shadows and thick light, and at its centre something was swimming. A figure tiny in the core of the sun’s glare and made of the deepest silhouette, neither human nor ciliated plankton nor rapid startling bird but all of them and other things, in turn or at one instant. It moved with an impossible crawl, straight out, emerging from the sun with a swimming motion that used all of its contradicting limbs.

A spit of chymical fear hit Ori’s face from the khepri woman beside him, and he blinked till it dissipated. Later he learnt that wherever people stood in the city, from Flag Hill north, to Barrackham seven miles south, every compass point, they all saw the thing swim straight for them, growing in the heart of the sun.

It came closer, occluding the light so the city was drabbed. A dancing, swimming thing. The train was slowing-they would stop before Lich Sitting Station. The driver must have seen the sun and stopped in terror.

The sky over New Crobuzon shimmered like grease. Like plasma. The thing stuttered, palsied between sizes, was dwarfed by the sun around it and then for one dreadful instant was there above the heads of everyone in the city so looming, so massive it dwarfed New Crobuzon itself and all there was that moment was an eye with starred iris in baleful alien colours looking straight down between all the buildings, onto all the streets, into the eyes of everyone staring up at it so there was a tremendous, city-wide scream of fear, and then the thing was gone.

Ori heard his own shout. His eyes hurt, and it took him seconds to realise the sun was burning them, that he was staring where the thing had been, and now there was only the sun again. All that day he saw through the ghost of green colours, where his sight was burnt.

That evening there were riots in Smog Bend. The raged workforce of the factories ran for St. Jabber’s Mound, to assault the militia tower for something-failing to protect them from that dreadful haint vision. Others ran for Creekside, and the khepri ghetto, to punish the outlanders there, as if they had sent the apparition. The stone idiocy of this had the Caucusers in the crowd screaming, but they could not hold back the armed few who went to punish the xenians.

Word was quick, and across the city Ori knew of the attacks while they were still occurring. He knew, only minutes after it had happened, that a hard wall of militia faced the rioters from the base of their tower, and that they had been ready with men-o’-war, and that the jellyfish things had come at the crowd.

He feared for the khepri of the ghetto. “We need to get there,” Ori said, and while he and his comrades disguised their faces and pulled on guns he saw Baron look at him with cool incomprehension. Ori knew Baron was coming not because he cared about the khepri of Creekside, but only because this organisation to which he had allied himself had made a decision. “Toro’ll find us,” Ori said.

In a commandeered carriage they went fast through Echomire, under the colossal Ribs of Bonetown, across Danechi’s Bridge and through Brock Marsh, and the sky was dark-studded with dirigibles, many more than usual, black and lit against the black. There were militia on the streets, shielded, their faces hidden behind mirrors, specialist squads with hexed truncheons and blunderbusses for crowd control. Enoch whipped the pterabirds. Through the fringes of The Crow, where crowds were running to and from broken-open shopfronts and hauling away calico, jars of food, apothecaries’ remedies.

Over the roofs scant streets away was the Spike, the bleak splinter from where the militia ruled, tugged seven ways by skyrails. And beside it, its colossal paradox roofscape soaring, disappearing, soaring again into view, was Perdido Street Station.

They tore under the arches of the Sud and Sink Lines, listening to militia whistles. Stupid blind idiots, Ori thought, of the mass, the rioters out that night. Fighting the khepri, for Jabber’s sake. This is why you need us to wake you up. He checked his guns.

The first and worst flare of violence had ended when they arrived, but the ghetto was unquiet. They went through streets lit by rubbish fires. The century-old houses of Creekside had been made by and for humans, with poor materials and no care, and they sagged in toward each other like the sick. They were held by the wax and exuded byssus of the home-grubs, colossal maggoting larvae that the khepri used to reshape their dwellings. Ori and his comrades walked under houses half-seen through solid sputum that glowed fat-yellow in torchlight.

In a nameless square there was a last offensive. There were no militia, of course. Protecting the khepri was not their agenda.

Twenty or thirty men were attacking a khepri church. They had stamped to broken pieces the figure of Awesome Broodma that had stood by the entrance. It had been a poor, pathetic work, an oversized marble woman stolen or bought cheap from some human ruin, its head sawn off, supplanted with a carefully constructed headscarab in wire, thick with solder, bolted to the neck to mimic she-khepri shape. This chimera of poverty and faith lay scattered.

The men were battering at the door. Staring down from the first-floor windows were the congregation. Emotion was invisible in their insect eyes.

“Quillers,” Ori said. Most of the men wore the New Quill Party’s fighting outfits: dark business suits with trousers rolled, bowler hats that Ori knew were lined with steel. They carried razors and chains. Some had pistols. “Quillers.”

Baron moved in. His first shot pushed a hole through the hat of one New Quill attacker, flaring the armoured lining into a crocus of felt, blood and metal. The men stopped, stared at him. Gods, will we get out of this? Ori thought as he ran where he had been directed, to where masonry gave him some inadequate cover. He dropped a New Quill man and hunkered behind the stone as it pattered viciously with shots.

For a dreadful half minute the Toroans were pinned. Ori could see Baron’s implacable face, could see where Ruby and Ulliam crouched, Ulliam’s face in an anguish as he fired according to Ruby’s whispered commands. Some of their enemies had scattered, but the hardcore Quillers were focused, those with pistols covering those without as they crept closer.

And then as Ori prepared to shoot on an approaching corpulent and muscular New Quill man bulging from his inadequate suit, he heard an ugly tearing, and the air between him and the suddenly stupefied New Quillers was interrupted. As if a film of skin was stretched, the fabric of things bowed at two close points, distorting light and sound, and then the warp was a split and from out of the gash reality spat Toro.

The world resealed. Toro shouted. Crouched and pushed through the intervening feet with one shove of those horns and there was a stammering and Toro was close up to the fat Quill man whose billy club was shattering on the strange-refracting darkness that spilt from Toro’s horns. And then the horns were through the fat man, who gasped and gouted and dropped, sliding like meat off a hook.

Toro shouted and moved again that uncanny goring way, following the horns that bled the toughened dark, and was then by another man and gouged him, and the horns seemed in the night’s dim to soak up blood. Ori was astounded. A bullet from a New Quill gun pushed through the half-seen integument the horns shed and drew red, and Toro lowed, staggered back, righted and horned at the air and sent the gunman sprawling, feet away.

But though Toro took three men fast, the New Quillers still way outnumbered them, and were stoked with rage at these racetraitors. They danced in avoidance. Some lumbered, and some were consummate pugilists and gunmen. We ain’t going to get them khepri out, Ori thought.

There was the noise of fast footsteps and Ori despaired, thinking another corps of street-fighters was about to attack them. But the New Quillers were turning, and began to run when the newcomers arrived.

Cactus-women and -men; khepri with the two sputtering flails of the stingbox; raucous, frog-leaping vodyanoi. A llorgiss with three knives. Perhaps a dozen of mixed xenian races in startling solidarity. A broad cactacae woman shouted orders-“Scabeyes, Anna,” pointing at the running Quillers, “Chezh, Silur,” pointing at the church door-and the motley xenian army moved in.

Ori was stunned. The New Quillers fired but ran.

“Who the fuck are you?” one of the Toroans shouted.

“Get up, shut up,” Toro said. “Drop weapons, present yourselves.”

A vodyanoi and the llorgiss shouted to the khepri in the church, and held open the doors as the terrified captives ran out and home. Some embraced their rescuers. An unclotting drizzle of khepri males-mindless two-foot scarabs seeking the warmth and darkness-scuttled back from the door. Ori shivered. It was only now he could feel the cold. He heard the fires that gave Creekside a shifting skin of dark light. In their up-and-down illumination he saw children come out of the church with their mothers. Young she-khepri with their headscarabs flexing, their headlegs rippling in childish communication. Two khepri women carried neonates, their bodies like human newborns, their little babies’ necks shading into headgrubs that coiled fatly.

He dropped his gun hand, and a khepri, one of these militant newcomers, was running at him, the spiked flails of her stingbox leaving spirals of sparks in the air. “Wait!” Ori said.

“Aylsa.” The cactus-woman stopped her with her name. “He’s got a gun, Thumbs Ready,” said a vodyanoi, and the cactus-woman said: “I know he’s got a gun. There’s exceptions, though.”

“Exceptions?”

“They’re under protection.” Thumbs Ready pointed at Toro.

In the fight-anarchy, it was the first moment that many of the xenians had seen the armoured figure. They gasped in their different racial ways, stepped forward with camaraderie. “Bull,” they said, and made respectful greetings. “Bull.”

Toro and Thumbs Ready conferred too quiet for Ori to hear. Ori watched Baron’s face. It was immobile, taking in each xenian fighter by turn. Ori knew he was working out in what order he could take them, if he had to.

“Out, out, out,” Toro said suddenly. “You done so well, tonight. You saved people tonight.” There were no khepri left in the tumbledown church. “Now you got to go. I’ll see you back there. Go quickly.” Ori realised he was breathing hard, that he was bloodied from wounds, exhausted and shaking. “Go, get back, we’ll debrief. Tonight, Creekside’s protected by the Militant Sundry. Humans with weapons are legitimate targets.”

In the Badside hide. Dawn was pushing at the walls. They lay and fixed each other with unguent and bandages.

“Baron don’t care, you know,” Ori said. He spoke quietly to Old Shoulder while they made nepenthe-spiced tea. “I saw him. He didn’t care if them khepri women died. He didn’t care if them Quillers got them. He don’t care about anything. He scares me.”

“Scares me too, boy.”

“Why’s Toro keep him? Why’s he here?”

Old Shoulder looked at him over the pot, spooned resin in and honeyed it.

“He’s here, boy… because he hates the chair-of-the-board more than we do. He’ll do whatever he has to, to bring you-know-who down. It was you brought him, Jabber’s sake. You was right to. We can keep an eye on him.”

Ori said nothing.

“I know what I’m doing,” Old Shoulder said. “We can keep him watched.”

Ori said nothing.

Fires in Howl Barrow, in Echomire, in Murkside. Riots in Creekside and Dog Fenn. Race-hate in the ghetto, ineffectual powder grenades thrown from a Sud Line train at the Glasshouse, cracking two more of its frames. The Caucus put out posters deploring the attacks.

“What happened at the tower in Jabber’s Mound?”

“Three sallies: first time they got the militia running, made it into the base. Then got beat back. Same as always.”

Some weird thaumaturgy in Aspic Hole; self-defence committees of the terrified respectable in Barrackham, in Chnum, in Nigh Sump where they were attacked by what everyone said was a mob of Remade.

“What a damn night. Gods.” Things were breaking.

“And all because of that thing, that sun-thing.”

“Nah, not really.”

A critical mass of fear was what it had been, what it had released-a terror and a rage that found outlet. Protect us, people had shouted, tearing at the mechanisms that claimed to look after them. “It was just a catalyst,” Ori said.

“What in the name of Jabber and his godsdamn saints was that thing?”

“I know.” Whenever Baron spoke his comrades were quiet. “I know, or at least I know what I think it is, and I think so because it’s what the militia and the Mayor think too.

“What they call a witnessing. Remote viewer. Tesh camera. Come to see what we’re about. The state of us.”

They were aghast.

“I told you. We ain’t winning the war. It ain’t as powerful as that-it didn’t touch us, did it? The war ain’t over yet. But yes, they’re spying on us. And as well as all them normal spies they must have, they ain’t afraid to show us, now, they’re watching. They got strange gris-gris, the Tesh. Their science ain’t ours. They’ve eyeballed us. There’ll be more.”

At the other end of the world, around the corners of coastlines, where physics, thaumaturgy, geography were different, where rock was gas, where settlements were built on the bones of exploration, where traders and pioneers had died at the savage justice of the western Rohagi, where there were cities and states and monarchies without cognates in Crobuzoner philosophy, a war was being fought. The militia exerting New Crobuzon’s claims, fighting for territories and commodity chains, for theories, they said. Fighting for something unclear. And in response to bullets, the powderbombs, the thaumaturgy, burncurs and elementalists of New Crobuzon, Tesh, City of the Crawling Liquid, had sent this witnessing, to learn them.

“How?” Ori said. “New Crobuzon… It’s the strongest… ain’t it?”

“You going to swallow that?” Enoch jeered. He sounded tired. “New Crobuzon, greatest city-state in the world, and that? Horseshit…”

“No it ain’t,” said Baron, and they were quiet again. “He’s right. New Crobuzon is the strongest state in Bas-Lag. But sometimes it ain’t the strongest wins. And especially when the stronger thinks, because it’s stronger, that it ain’t got to try to fight.

“We’re getting outfought. And the government knows it. And they don’t like it, and they’re going to try to turn it into a victory, but here’s the thing: they know they have to end this. They’re going to sue for peace.”

The sun kept rising, and its light through the warehouse windows reached at sharper and sharper angles and took them one at a time, tangled in their hair and shone from Old Shoulder’s skin. Ori felt warm for the first time in hours.

“They’re going to surrender?”

Of course they would not. Not explicitly-not in the speeches they would give, not in their history books or in the loyal newspapers. It would be a historic compromise, a nuanced strategy of magnificent precision. But even many of those loyal to the Mayor’s Fat Sun Party and the partners in the Urban Unity Government would balk. They would know-everyone would know-what had been done. That New Crobuzon, however the Mayor put it, had been defeated.

“They’re trying to now,” Baron said, “but they don’t even know how to speak to the Teshi. We ain’t had contact with our mission there for years. And gods know there must be Teshi afuckingplenty in New Crobuzon now, but they ain’t got no clue who, where they are. The embassy’s always been empty. Teshi don’t do things that way. They’re trying thaumaturgy, message-boats, dirigibles… they’ll do whatever they bloody have to. They’ll try pigeon before long. They want a meeting. No one’s going to know what’s damn-well being done till they turn round and tell us ‘Good news, the Mayor’s brought peace.’ And in the meantime the poor bastards in the boats and on the ground’ll keep fighting and dying.”

Under alien skies. Ori felt vertigo.

“How do you know?” said Old Shoulder. He was standing, his legs locked, his arms folded. “How do you know what they think, Baron?”

Baron smiled. Ori looked down and hoped he would not see that smile again.

“ ’Cause of who I’m talking to, Shoulder. You know how I know. After all them bloody pints I sunk in Brock Marsh, I know because I been talking to my new best friend, Bertold Sulion.”