Iron Council

by China Miéville

  Skullday, Ori ran with the Nuevists. He took his day-wages and joined them in The Two Maggots pub by Barrow Bridge, and with the beetle-spit-smeared rooftops of Kinken visible over the river they played games and argued about art. The students and exiles of the arts quarter were always happy to see Ori because he was one of a handful of real labourers in the circle. In the evening Ori and Petron and several others staged an art-incident, dressing as pantomime pigs, parading to Salacus Fields and past The Clock and Cockerel, long fallen on its honour, where the parvenus and uptown posers came to play at bohemia. The Nuevists grunted at the drinkers and shouted “Ah, nostalgia!” in porcine voices.

  Dustday Ori stevedored, and drank in the evening in a workers’ pub in Skulkford. Among the smoke and beer-laughter, he missed the flamboyance of The Two Maggots. A barmaid caught his eye, and he recognised her from some illicit meeting. She folded back her apron for him to see the Runagate Rampants in her pinny pocket, inviting him to buy, and the resentment and frustration he had felt for Curdin came back to him hard.

  He shook his head so brusquely she obviously thought she had misremembered. Her eyes widened. Poor woman, he had not meant to scare her. He persuaded her that he was safe to talk to. He called her Jack. “I’m tired of it,” he whispered. “Tired of Runagate Rampant, forever saying what’s what but never doing anything, tired of waiting for change which don’t come.” He executed a ridiculous handslang parody.

  “What’s the point, you saying?” she said.

  “No, I know there’s a point . . .” Ori poked the table in fervour. “I been reading this stuff for months now. I mean . . . but the militia are doing something. Quillers are doing something. And the only ones on our side doing anything are nutcases like the Excess League or bandits like Toro.”

  “But I mean you ain’t serious, right?” Jack let her tone come down carefully. “I mean, you know the limitations . . .”

  “Godspit and shit, Jack, don’t start with ‘the limits of individual action’ right now. I’m just tired. Sometimes, don’t you sometimes wish you didn’t care? I mean course you want a change, we want a change, but if a change ain’t godsdamn coming, then the next thing I wish is that I didn’t care.”

  Fishday evening Ori disembarked at Saltpetre Station. In the smoggy gloaming, he went through the brickwork warrens of Griss Fell, past householders scrubbing their porches of the grit of machinofacture and graffitied coils, chatting from window to window across the little streets. In an old stable, a soup kitchen doled out bowls to a line of destitutes. Nominally the charity was run from Kinken, and keeping order were a trio of khepri armed in imitation of their guard-gods, the Tough Sisters, with crossbow and flintlock, spear and hooknet, and one with the metaclockwork stingbox.

  The khepri stretched their lean and vivid women’s bodies. They spoke to each other without sound, moving the antennae and headlegs of their headscarabs, the iridescent two-foot beetles at the top of their necks. They vented chymical gusts. They turned to Ori—he was reflected in their compound eyes—and recognised him, waved him to one of the cauldrons. He began to dole out soup to patient tramps.

  Kinken money had started the service, but it was kept running by locals. When the Mayor said the city could not provide for the needy, alternative structures arose. To shame New Crobuzon’s rulers or out of despair, various groupings provided social programs. They were inadequate and oversubscribed, and one spawned another as the sects competed.

  In Spit Hearth they were run by the churches: care of the old and the orphaned and poor was in the hands of hierophants, monks and nuns. With their ersatz hospitals and kitchens, apostate and zealot sects built up trust that a thousand years of preaching would not have gained them. Seeing that, the New Quill party had started its own human-only relief in Sunter, to complement its street-fighting. The insurrectionists, who would be arrested instantly they went public, could not follow.

  They followed Kinken money instead—it came, they heard, from Francine 2, the khepri crime-queen. It was not unknown for the captains of illicit industry to subsidise such charities: in Bonetown Mr. Motley was reputed to keep local loyalty with his own goodwill trusts. But wherever the money came from, the Griss Fell Retreat was run by locals, and the Caucus tried carefully to be known to be involved.

  With a few Caucusists from various tendencies working together alongside the unaffiliated, it could be fractious. The activists had to whisper their tea-break debates.

  Ori spooned broth into bowls. He recognised the faces of many of the outcasts; he knew some of their names. Many were Remade. A woman whose eyes had been taken in punishment, her face a skin seal from nose to hairline, shuffled past holding the rag-coat of her companion. Mostly human but not all, there were other races too, on hard times. An ancient cactus-man, his spines withered and brittle. Men and women scarred. There were some whose minds were gone, who sang hymns or yammered nonsense words, or asked questions that made no sense. “Are you a doubler?” a lank-haired oldster asked everyone who passed, the ancient remains of some accent still audible. “Are you a doubler? Are you excessive? Are you proscribed? Are you a doubler, son?”

  “Ori. Come for absolution?” Ladia was the full-timer on duty. She teased all the volunteers that they came only to unload guilt. She was not stupid—she knew their allegiances. When Ori took a break, she joined him and poured liquor in his tea. He knew their conversation could not be heard over the table manners of the starving.

  “You’re like Toro,” he told her. “You’re the only ones doing anything, making changes here, now.”

  “I knew it. I knew you was here because you felt guilty,” she said. She made it light. “Doing your bit.”

  He finished his shift, and kept his patience. Ori muttered to those momentarily in his care. Some smiled and spoke back to him; some cussed him with alcohol or very-tea on their breath. “Are you excessive? Are you proscribed? Are you a doubler?” the insistent old man said to him. Ori took his bowl away.

  “You are,” the old man said. “You are a doubler. You’re a doubler, you little terror.” The man smiled like a saint and was pointing at Ori’s midriff, where his shirt had fallen forward and exposed his belt, and tucked into it a folded copy of Runagate Rampant, Double-R.

  Ori tucked his shirt back in, careful not to be furtive. He washed the bowls at the pump (the man chuckling and pulling at his beard, and saying you are, you doubler at Ori’s back). He did another round of the room, made it slow, offering last dabs of bread, and came back to the laughing man.

  “I am,” he said, conversational and quiet. “I’m a doubler, but it’s best you keep that down, mate. I’d rather not everyone knows, understand? Keep it secret, eh?”

  “Oh yes.” The man’s manner changed quite suddenly. The cunning of madness came over him, and he lowered his voice. “Oh yes, we can do that, isn’t it? Good people them doublers. You doublers. And them excessive, and free and proscribed.”

  The Excess Faction, the Free Union, the League of the Proscribed—it was not just Runagate Rampant; the old man was itemising groups in the Caucus.

  “Good people but blather,” he said and snapped his hand open and shut like a talkative mouth. “All a bit blatheration.” Ori smiled and nodded. “They like talking. And you know, that’s all right, talking’s good. Ain’t always . . . blather.”

  “Who’s the old boy?” Ori said to Ladia.

  “Spiral Jacobs,” she said. “Poor old mad sod. Has he found someone to talk to? Has he decided he likes you, Ori? Decided you’re proscribed, or free, a doubler?” Ori stared at her, could not tell if she knew what she was saying. “Has he started on at you about arms or tongues?” She shouted, “Arms and tongues, Spiral!” and waggled her arms and stuck out her tongue, and the old man crowed and did the same. “He’s for the first, against the second, as I recall,” she said to Ori. “Has he chanted for you? ‘Too much yammer, not enough hammer.’ “

  As Ori left that evening, another of the volunteers met him at the door,
a kind and stupid man. “Saw you talking to Ladia about Spiral Jacobs,” he said. He grinned. He whispered, “Heard what they say about him? What he used to do? He was with Jack Half-a-Prayer! Swear to Jabber. He was in Jack’s crew, and he knew Scarface, and he got away.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  The next night Spiral Jacobs was not at the shelter, nor the next. The pleasure and surprise with which Ladia greeted Ori began to change. He saw her watch him to make sure he was not dealing drugs or contraband, but he worked hard, and she could only be puzzled.

  On Skullday, as Ori swept the shelter floor, he heard, “Are you proscribed? Are you a doubler?” Spiral Jacobs saw him and smiled and said, “There’s the boy. There you are, ain’t you, you—” and he blinked and raised one finger and winked. He leaned in and whispered “You doubler.”

  One try, thought Ori. He made himself sceptical. One piece of indulgence for this casualty. Only when the food was all distributed and the first homeless families were coming in from begging or thievery to doss down did Ori idle to Spiral’s side.

  “Buy you a drink sometime?” Ori said. “Sounds like you and me’ve interests in common. Could chat about stuff. About doubling. About our friend Jack.”

  “Our friend, yes. Jack.”

  The man lay down in a blanket. Ori’s patience diminished. Spiral Jacobs was digging something out, a bit of paper, dirt ground into its cross of folds. He showed Ori, with a child’s grin.

  It was cool when Ori walked home. He traced the route of the railway, by tracks carried over the slates on loops of brick, arches like a sea-snake. Light like gaslight or candlelight spilt from a train’s dirty windows and sent shadows convulsing over the angled roofscape to hide, darkness creeping out again from behind chimneys in the engine’s wake.

  Ori walked fast with his head down and hands in pockets when he passed militia. He felt their eyes on him. They were difficult to see, their uniforms woven through with trow yarns that ate what light there was and excreted darkness. At night the clearest thing about them was their weaponry: they were armed, it seemed, at random, and in the dim he could see their batons or stingboxes, their dirks, rotating pistols.

  He remembered twelve years ago, before the slump, to the Construct War, when for the first time in a century the militia tradition of covert policing—networks of spies, informants, plainclothes officers and decentralised fear—had become inadequate, and they had gone unhidden and uniformed. Ori did not remember the roots of the crisis. A child among others, with his boisterous gang he had mounted the roofs of Petty Coil and Brock Marsh on the Tar’s north shore, and watched the militia barrage the Griss Twist dumps.

  With children’s aggression they had joined in the purge of the city’s constructs, the panicked hounding of the clockwork and steam-powered cleaners suddenly deemed enemy. Mobs cornered and destroyed the welded, soldered things. Most of the constructs could only stand patient while they were torn apart, their glass trod into dust, their cables ripped.

  There were some few that fought. The reason for the war. Infected with viral consciousness, programmes that should not be, that had infected New Crobuzon’s constructs, the gears of their analytical engines turning in heretic combinations to spin a cold machine sentience. Thinking motors for which self-preservation was a predicate, that raised their metal, wood and pipework limbs against their erstwhile owners. Ori never saw it.

  The militia had levelled Griss Twist’s jungle of trash. They shelled it, rinsing it with fire, advancing in wrecking teams through the melt and ash-scape. There had been some kind of factory there for the pernicious programmes, and it and the monstrous mind behind it were destroyed. It had been a demon or something, or a council of the aware constructs and their flesh followers.

  There were still constructs and difference engines in the city, but far fewer, strictly licenced. An economy of golems had half replaced them, making a few thaumaturges rich. Griss Twist’s dumps were still bone-white and blackened wreckage. They were out of bounds, and New Crobuzon’s children would climb or creep in and take souvenirs, and tell each other that the dumps were haunted by the ghosts of the machines. But the most lasting result of the crisis, Ori thought, was that the militia still went unhidden. It was only months after the Construct War that the recession riots had begun, and few of the militia had ever afterward gone back to plainclothes disguise.

  Ori could not decide if it was better or worse. There were those among the rebels who argued each way, that emerging was an expression of militia strength or of weakness.

  The paper Spiral Jacobs had showed Ori was a heliotype, taken long ago, of two men standing on the rooftops by Perdido Street Station. A poor print, washed out by light and feathery with age, its exposure too slow, its subjects wearing motion-coronas. But recognisable. Spiral Jacobs white-bearded, looking old even then, wearing the same madman’s grin. And beside him a man whose face was turning and hazed, who raised his arms to the camera, stretched the fingers of his left hand. His right arm was unfolding, was a brutal and massive mantis claw.

  Early the next morning, as the tramps were ushered out of the centre, Ori was waiting.

  “Spiral,” he said as the man came out scratching and wrapped his blanket around him. The old man blinked in daylight.

  “Doubler! You the doubler!”

  It cost Ori a day’s wages. He had to pay for a cab to take the weak old man to Flyside, where Ori did not know anyone. Spiral prattled to himself. Ori bought breakfast in a square below the Flyside Militia Tower, with the skyrails hundreds of feet overhead linking the tower to the Spike in the city’s heart. Spiral Jacobs ate for a long time without speaking.

  “Too much yammering, not enough hammering, Spiral. Ain’t that the truth? Too much of this—” Ori stuck out his tongue. “—not enough of this.” He clenched his fist.

  “Hammer, don’t yammer,” the tramp said agreeably and ate a grilled tomato.

  “Is that what Jack said?”

  Spiral Jacobs stopped chewing and looked up slyly.

  “Jack? I’ll Jack you,” he said. “What you want to know about Jack?” The accent, that indistinct trace of something foreign, resonated for a second more loudly.

  “He hammered not yammered, didn’t he, Jack did?” Ori said. “Ain’t that right? Sometimes you want someone to hammer, to do something, don’t you?”

  “We had half a prayer with Jack,” said the old man, and smiled very sadly, all the madness momentarily gone. “He was our best. I love him and his children.”

  His children?

  “His children?”

  “Them as came after. Bully for them.”

  “Yes.”

  “Bully for them, Toro.”

  “Toro?”

  In Spiral Jacobs’s eyes Ori saw real derangement, a dark sea of loneliness, cold, liquor and drugs. But thoughts still swam there, cunning as barracuda, their movements the twitchings of the tramp’s face. He’s sounding me out, thought Ori. He’s testing me for something.

  “If I’d been there a little older, I’d’ve been Jack’s man,” Ori said. “He’s the boss, always was. I’d have followed him. You know, I saw him die.”

  “Jack don’t die, son.”

  “I saw him.”

  “Aye like that maybe, but, you know, people like Jack they don’t die.”

  “Where is he now, then?”

  “I think Jack’s looking and smiling at you doublers, but there’s others, friends of ours, mates of mine, he’s thinking, ‘Bully for them!’ “ The old man clucked laughter.

  “Friends of yours?”

  “Aye, friends of mine. With big plans! I know all about it. Once a friend of Jack’s, always, and a friend of all his kin too.”

  “Who are you friends with?” Ori wanted to know, but Jacobs would say nothing. “What plans? Who are your friends?” The old man finished his food, running his fingers through the residue of egg and sucking them. He did not notice or care that Ori was there; he reclined and rested, and then, without looking at h
is companion, he shuffled into the overcast day.

  Ori tracked him. It was not furtive. He simply walked a few steps behind Spiral Jacobs, and followed him home. A languorous route. By Shadrach Street through the remnants of the market to the clamour of Aspic Hole, where a few fruiterers and butchers had stalls.

  Spiral Jacobs spoke to many he passed. He was given food and a few coins.

  Ori watched the society of vagabonds. Grey-faced women and men in clothes like layers of peeling skin greeted Jacobs or cursed him with the fervour of siblings. In the charred shade of a firegutted office, Jacobs passed bottles for more than an hour among the vagrants of Aspic Hole, while Ori tried to understand him.

  Once a group of girls and boys, roughnecks every one, a vodyanoi girl kick-leaping and even a young city garuda among them, came to throw stones. Ori stepped up, but the tramps shouted and waved with almost ritualised aggression and soon the children went.

  Spiral Jacobs headed back east toward the Gross Tar, toward the brick holes and the Griss Fell shelter that were as much as anything his home. Ori watched him stumble, watched him rifle through piles of rubbish at junctions. He watched what Jacobs picked out: bewildering debris. Ori considered each piece carefully, as if Spiral Jacobs was a message to him from another time, that he might with care decrypt. A text in flesh.

  The wiry little figure went through New Crobuzon’s traffic, past carts piled with vegetables from the farmlands and the Grain Spiral. Hummock bridges took him over canals where barges ferried anthracite, and through the afternoon crowds, children, bickering shoppers, the beggars, a handful of golems, shabby-gentile shopkeepers scrubbing graffitied helixes and radical slogans from their sidings, between damp walls that rose and seemed to crumble, their bricks to effervesce into the air.

  When after a long time deep colours leeched across the sky, they had reached Trauka Station. The railway cut overhead at an angle that ignored the terraces below it. Spiral Jacobs looked at Ori again.