Iron Council

by China Miéville

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The play was defunct and done, and the militia when they came were more concerned with clearing the building than with making arrests. Ori blocked the Quillers long enough for the puppeteers to clear their pieces, and with the Flexibles he ducked backstage past brawls that were now mostly drunken, without political hatreds to refine them.

  They came out into an alley, bloodied but laughing, a mass of theatre people stuffing costumes into carpet bags, and one or two like Ori, observers. It had rained a little moments before, but the night was warm, so the film of water seemed like the city’s sweat.

  Petron Carrickos, who had been the narrator, pulled his moustache off, leaving its ghost in spirit gum above his lip, and stuck it on the alley’s lone poster, giving the revivalist whose sermons it advertised thick eyebrows. Ori went west with him and several others to Cadmium Street. They would double back and head for Salacus Fields Station without passing Fallybeggar’s entrance.

  Late but not so late, the streets where Salacus met Howl Barrow were full. There were militia on corners. Ori jostled through late window-shoppers and theatre-goers, the music-lovers at voxiterator booths, a few golems like giant marionettes, wearing their owners’ sashes. There were markings on walls. Illicit galleries and theatres, artists’ squats, signposted by graffiti for those who could read it. Salacus Fields itself was becoming colonised by the weekend bohemians. There had always been moneyed slummers, bad-boy younger children seeking tawdry redemption or dissolution, but now their visits were temporary and their transformations tourist. Ori felt contempt. Artists and musicians were moving out as agents and merchants moved in and rents rose, even while industry floundered. So to Howl Barrow.

  The streets sputtered under the bilious elyctro-barometric shopsigns. Ori nodded at the faces he knew from meetings or performances—a woman by the silversmith’s door, a thickset cactus-man handing out flyers. Brickwork buckled and held on, and leaned house on house, repaired in a patchwork of metal and cement, paint in anarchic styles, and spirals and obscenities; and coming out and over into the sky were temple spires and lookout pitches for the militia, and towerblocks. The crowds were thinning as the evening went toward deep night.

  By raised train through the roofs to Sly Station, changing platforms and bidding friends goodnight, till even Petron had gone for Mog Hill, and Ori was alone among late-night travellers sprawled on seats and smelling of gin. He stepped past some in overalls from late shifts, who turned to not look at the drunkards. Ori sat next to an older woman, and followed her gaze through dirt-stained glass into the miles of city, a fen of buildings thick with glints. The train crossed the river. The woman was staring at nothing in particular, Ori realised, and it caught his attention too—just a juddering of lights at some intersection, a kink of city.

  The windows of Ori’s street in Syriac were mostly uncurtained, and when he woke he looked out and in gaslamp-light saw large still figures standing in their houses, sleeping. It was a street colonised by cactacae. He rented from a kind, gruff she-cactus who had effortlessly hefted his bags in one greenling hand when he had moved in.

  The small-hours’ trains passed the top windows shining dimly. They went to The Downs southerly or on north up to their huge terminus, that synapse of troublesome architecture between the city’s rivers, Perdido Street Station.

  The business of night continued. The air was warm and wet, and it unstuck glue and ate at brickwork’s pointing. From the oldest parts of the city, tough hut-work, ivy-swaddled ruins in Sobek Croix. Families slept rough in warehouses at the edges of Bonetown. Brock Marsh was crossed by cats, then by a badger waddling home under cluttered shop facades. Sedate and baleful aerostats waited below clouds.

  Two rivers ran, and met, and became one big old thing, the Gross Tar, guttersome and groaning as it passed out of city limits through the stubs of a bridge, through shantytowns in New Crobuzon’s orbit, looking for the sea. The city’s illicit inhabitants came out briefly and hid again. There was midnight industry. Someone was always awake, countless someones, in towerblocks or elegant houses or the redstones of Chnum or in the xenian ghettos, in the Glasshouse or the terraces of Kinken and Creekside, configured by the khepri grubs, reshaped with brittled insect spit. Everything continued.

  There was nothing of the riot in any news-sheets the following day, or the next. It did not stop people hearing something had happened.

  Ori made it known to the right people that he had been there. Passing the shops and pubs of Syriac he saw that he was seen, and knew that some who glanced at him—the woman here, the vodyanoi, the man or cactus-man, even the Remade there—were with the Caucus. Not showing his excitement, Ori might pat his chest gently with a fist in surreptitious greeting, which they might ignore or might thump back at him. Between themselves the Caucusers flashed complicated finger-shapes, messages in downtown handslang Ori could not decipher. He told himself they were perhaps about him.

  The Caucus, in its closed and hidden session, talking about him. He knew it wasn’t so, but it delighted him to think it. Yes, his friends were Nuevists, but not decadent or wastrel nor satisfied only to shock. He thought of the Caucus, delegates from all the factions, breaking off from consideration of strategy and rebellion, breaking off from evasion of the militia and their informers, to commend Ori Ciuraz and his friends for a fine provocation. It wouldn’t happen, but he liked it.

  In Gross Coil, Ori took what day-work came his way. He hauled and delivered for food and poor pay. Gun-grey components of some military machine that must be heading around the coast and through the Meagre Sea and the straits and on to the distant war. He worked at whatever siding or yard, whatever wreckers would take him, unloading barges by Mandrake Bridge, and when the days were done he drank with workmates become temporary friends.

  He was young, so the foremen bullied him, but nervously. They were edged with unease. There were all the troubles. Tense times for the factories of Gross Coil, for Kelltree and Echomire. Past the foundry on Tuthen Way, Ori saw scars from fires on the ground, where in recent weeks pickets had been. The walls were marked with sigils of dissidence. Toro; The Man’Tis lives!; the stencilled councillor. Bullet holes marked walls at the Tricorn Fork, where less than a year before the militia had faced down hundreds of marchers.

  It had started at the Paradox Concerns, in unorganised complaint at some dismissals, and then had been on the streets with great speed, and shop floors in the surrounds were fractured as others joined the demonstrators, whose slogans had veered from reinstatement of friends to increased wages, then were suddenly denunciations of the Mayor and of the suffrage lottery, were demands for votes. Bottles were thrown, and caustic phlogiston; there were shots—the militia shot back or started it—and sixteen people were dead. Chalked homages appeared regularly at the junction and were cleaned away. Ori touched his fist gently to his chest as he passed the site of the Paradox Massacre.

  On Chainday he went to The Grocer’s Sweetheart. A bit before eight, two men left the taproom and did not come back. Others followed, in casual and random order. Ori drank the last of his beer and went as if for the privy, but seeing he was not followed he turned down a damp-mottled corridor, lifted a trapdoor down into the basement. Those assembled in the dark looked and did not greet him, almost as much suspicion as welcome on their faces.

  “Chaverim,” he said to them. A category stolen from an old language. “Chaver,” they said back—comrade, equal, conspirator.

  One Remade man, and it was the first time he had come. His arms were crossed at the wrists and were fused, and when he clenched and unclenched his fingers it was as if he imitated a bird.

  There were two women from a sweatshop under the Skulkford railway arches, knit-machine workers, by a docker and a machinist, and a vodyanoi clerk in light-cloth mimicry of a human suit that he could wear in the water, complete with stitched-on tie. A cactus-man stood. The barrels of cheap beer and wine served as tables for dissident publications: a crumpled Shout, The Forge,
and several copies of the best-known seditionist sheet, Runagate Rampant.

  “Chaverim, I want to thank you for coming.” A middle-aged man spoke with calm authority. “I want to welcome our new friend Jack.” He nodded at the Remade. “War with Tesh. Militia infiltration. Free trade unions. The strike at Purrill’s Bakery. I’ve word on each of those. But I want to take a few minutes to talk about my approach—our approach, Double-R’s approach—to the question of race.” He glanced at the vodyanoi, at the cactus-man, and began to speak.

  It was these introductions, these discussions, that had first brought Ori close to the Runagate Rampant circles. He had bought a copy every fortnight for three months from a fruit-seller in Murkside, and eventually the man had asked him whether he was interested in talking through the issues covered, had directed Ori to these hidden meetings. Ori had been a regular, raising more points and objections, engaging with more enthusiasm—and eventually less—until after one meeting, while they were alone, with affecting trust the convenor had told Ori his real name, Curdin. Ori had responded, though like everyone they still went by Jack to each other within the meetings.

  “Yes, yes,” Curdin was saying, “I think that’s right, Jack, but the question is why?”

  Ori unfolded his Runagate Rampant, read it in snippets. Exhortations for unity in action that he had seen before, angry and illuminating analyses, columns and columns of strikes. Each workplace, each two or three people who had put their tools down, won or lost, a gathering of twenty or a hundred, a half-hour walkout, the disappearance of every guildsmember or suspected unioner. A catalogue of every dispute, murderous or paltry. It bored him.

  There were stories missing. Ori’s frustrations with the meet-ings was growing. Nothing was happening here. It was elsewhere, though, fleetingly. As in Fallybeggar’s.

  He tapped his Runagate Rampant. “Where’s Toro?” he said. “Toro took another one. I heard it. In Chnum. Him and his crew took out the guards, shot the magister that lived there. Why’s that not in here?”

  “Jack . . . it’s clear what we say about Toro,” Curdin said. “We had the column last-but-one issue. We don’t . . . it ain’t the way we’d do things . . .”

  “I know, Jack, I know. You criticise. Carp at him.”

  The convenor said nothing.

  “Toro’s out there and he’s doing something, yeah? He’s fighting, and he’s not waiting like you keep waiting. And you sit and wait, and tell him he’s getting ahead of himself?”

  “It’s not like that. I won’t snip at anyone fighting the magisters, or the militia, or the Mayor, but Toro can’t change things on his own, or with his little crew, Jack . . .”

  “Yeah but he’s changing something.”

  “Not enough.”

  “But he’s changing something.”

  Ori respected Curdin, had learnt so much from him and his pamphlets, he did not want to alienate him. But the complacency of his convenor had begun to infuriate him. The man was more than twice his age—was he just old? They sat and glowered at each other wordlessly while the others looked back and forth between them.

  Afterward Ori apologised for his bad temper. “It’s nothing to me,” said Curdin. “Be as rude as you want. But I tell you the truth, Jack”—they were alone and he corrected himself—“I tell you the truth, Ori. I’m worried. Seems to me you’re going down a certain road. All your plays and puppets . . .” He shook his head and sighed. “I ain’t against it, I swear to you, I heard what happened at Fallybeggar’s and, you know, good on you, on your friends. But shock and shooting ain’t enough. Let me ask you something. Your friends the Flexible Puppeteers—why’d they choose that name?”

  “You know why.”

  “No I don’t. I know it’s a homage, and I’m glad for that, but why him, why not Seshech or Billy le Ginsen, why not Poppy Lutkin?”

  “Because we’d get arrested if we tried that.”

  “Don’t play stupid, lad. You know what I mean—there’s scores of names you could’ve chose to send a message, to piss in the Mayor’s bath, but you honoured him. The founding editor of Runagate Rampant—not The Forge or Toilers’ War or The Bodkin. Why him?” Curdin tapped his paper against his thigh. “I’ll tell you why, lad—whether you know it or not, he’s the one scares the powers. Because he was right. About factions, about war, about the plurality. And Bill and Poppy and Neckling Verdant, and them others—Toro, Ori, Toro and his band and all, even Jack Half-a-Prayer—good people, chaverim, but on stuff like this their strategy’s for shit. Ben was right, and Toro’s wrong.”

  Ori heard arrogance, or commitment, or fervour, or analysis in Curdin’s voice. Angry as he was, he did not care to disentangle them.

  “You going to sneer at Half-a-Prayer now?”

  “I didn’t mean that, I ain’t saying that . . .”

  “Godspit, who you think you are? Toro’s doing things, Curdin. He’s making things happen. You—you’re talking, Double-R’s just talking. And Benjamin Flex is dead. Been dead for a long time.”

  “You ain’t being fair,” he heard Curdin say. “You ain’t hardly got fluff on your chin, and you’re telling me about Benjamin Flex, for Jabber’s sake.” And his voice was not unkind. He meant it lightly, but Ori was outraged.

  “At least I done something!” he shouted. “At least I’m doing something.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  No one seemed to know what had started the war with Tesh. The Runagaters had their theories, and there were official stories and the unseen machinations behind them, but among Ori’s circle no one knew quite what had started it, or even exactly when it had begun.

  As the long recession had bitten, years before, merchant ships from New Crobuzon had started returning to dock reporting piratical manoeuvres against them, sudden brigandry from unknown ships. The city’s exploration and its trade were under attack. History was marked by New Crobuzon’s oscillations between autarky and engagement, but never, its wounded captains said, had its emergence into mercantilism been so punished, so unexpectedly.

  After centuries of uncertainty and strange relations, the city had made understandings with the Witchocracy, and the passage of New Crobuzon ships through the Firewater Straits had been unhindered. So a sea-route was open to the grasslands and islands, the legendary places on the far side of the continent. Ships came back and said they had been to Maru’ahm. They sailed for years and brought back jewelled cakes from thousands of miles away, from the crocodile double-city called The Brothers. And then the piracy had begun, hard, and New Crobuzon came slowly to understand that it was being attacked.

  The arcane Tesh ships, the barquentines and dandy catboats all raggedy with coloured cloth, whose crews wore henna and filed their teeth, had ceased coming to New Crobuzon’s docks. There was a rumour that through long-disused channels, Tesh’s secret and hidden ambassador had told the Mayor that their two states were at war.

  Reports of Tesh depredations in the Firewater Straits became more common and higher-profile, in the papers and government newsposters. The Mayor had promised revenge and counterattack. Recruitment to the New Crobuzon Navy was intensified, along, Ori heard, with “booze recruitment”—press-ganging.

  It was still distant, abstract: battles at sea thousands of miles off. But it had escalated. It had featured more and more in the speeches of ministers. The city’s new mercantilism was unrewarded; markets did not open for its exports; the war blocked its sources of uncommon commodities. Ships went and did not come back. New Crobuzon’s boarded-up plants did not reopen, and others closed, and the signs on their doors grew mildew that mocked their proclamations of “temporary suspension of industry.” The city was stagnant; it slumped and slummed. Survivors began to come home.

  Destroyed soldiers left to beg and preach their experiences to crowds in Dog Fenn and Riverskin. Scarred, their bones crushed, cut by the enemy or in frantic battlefield surgery, they also bore stranger wounds that only Tesh’s troops could have given them.

  Hundreds of the re
turned had been made mad, and in their mania they raved in unknown sibilant tongue, all of them across the city speaking the same words together, in time. There were men whose eyes were haemorrhaged blood-sacs but who still had sight, Ori heard, who cried without ceasing as they saw the death in everything. The crowds were afraid of the veterans, as if at their own bad conscience. Once, many months ago, Ori had come past a man haranguing the horrified crowd and showing them his arms, which were bleached a dead grey.

  “You know what this is!” he was shouting at them. “You know! I was at the edge of a blast, and you see? The sawbones tried to take my arms, told me they had to go, but they just didn’t want you to see . . .” He waggled his ghastly limbs like paper cutouts, and the militia came and stifled him, took him away. But Ori had seen the onlookers’ terror. Had Tesh truly remembered the lost science of colourbombs?

  So many uncertainties, a spiralling-down of morale, fear in the city. New Crobuzon’s government had mobilised. For two, three years now it had been the time of the Special Offensive. There was more death and more industry. Everyone knew someone who had gone to war, or disappeared from a dockside pub. The shipyards of Tarmuth, that estuary satellite town, had begun to push out ironclads and submersibles and had spurred something of a recovery, and the mills and forges of New Crobuzon followed, war turning their gears.

  Guilds and unions were outlawed capriciously, or restricted and emasculated. There were new jobs now for some of those grown used to pauperism, though competition for them was cruel. New Crobuzon was stretched out, pulled taut.

  Every age had its social bandits. Jack Half-a-Prayer when Ori was a boy, Bridling in the Week of Dust, Alois and her company a century ago. Jabber himself, if one looked at it a certain way. Made strange by their context, overthrowing rules: the crowds who would spit on the Remade would have sworn themselves to Half-a-Prayer. Doubtless some were imagined by history, mean little cutpurses embellished through centuries. But some were real: Ori would swear by Jack. And now there was Toro.