Iron Council

by China Miéville

  “How did you know him?” Ori said.

  “Jack?” Jacobs swung his legs. They were on the Murkside shore, their thighs under the railings. In the river a tarred frame broke water, an unlit vodyanoi house. Jacobs spoke with a lilt, and Ori thought he must be hearing a song-story tradition from Jacobs’ homeland. “Jack the Man’Tis, he was a sight for sore eyes. Come through on the night-stalkers. It was him stepped up, saved this place from the dream-sickness all them years ago, ‘fore you was born. Scissored through the militia.” He snip-snipped his hand, hinging it at the wrist. “I give him things he needed. I was an informationer.”

  By the light of the gaslamps, Ori was looking at the helio. He ran his thumb over Jack Half-a-Prayer’s claw.

  “What about the others?”

  “I watch all Jack’s children. Toro’s a one with fine ideas.” Jacobs smiled. “If you knew the plans.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Can’t do that.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Ain’t me should tell you. Toro should tell you.”

  Information—a place, a day—passed between them. Ori folded the picture away.

  The New Crobuzon newspapers were full of stories of Toro. There were fanciful engravings of some terrible muscled bull-headed thing, descriptions of feral bovine roars over Mafaton and The Crow, the uptown houses and the offices of the government.

  Toro’s exploits were all named, and the journals were addicted to mentioning them. A bank’s vaults had been breached and slathered with slogans, thousands of guineas taken, of which hundreds had been distributed among the children of Badside. In The Digest Ori read:

  By great fortune, this, THE CASE OF THE BADSIDE MILLIONS, has not had so bloody an outcome as THE CASE OF THE ROLLING SECRETARY or THE CASE OF THE DROWNED DOWAGER. These earlier incidents should remind the populace that the bandit known as TORO is a coward and a murderer whose panache is all that grants him a degree of local sympathy.

  Messages reached Ori through New Crobuzon’s intricate and secret conduits. He had waited three times at the corner that Spiral Jacobs had told him, in Lichford, beneath signs to Crawfoot and Tooth Way, by the old waxwork museum. He had leaned in the sun, back against the plaster, and waited while street-children tried to sell him nuts and matches in twists of coloured paper.

  Each time cost him wages and his profile among the day-

  recruiters of Gross Coil. He had to space them out or he would starve, or his landlady’s indulgence would dry up. He returned to the Runagate Rampant reading group, to sit, a Jack among Jacks, and talk of the city’s iniquities. Curdin was pleased to see him. Ori was much calmer in his disagreements now. He felt his secret with pleasure. I’m not quite with you any more he thought, and felt himself a spy for Toro.

  At the street corner he was greeted by a girl in a torn dress, no more than ten years old. She smiled at him as he leaned against the museum, endearing with her missing teeth. She handed him a paper cone of nuts, and when he shook his head she told him, “The gen’man already paid. Said they was for you.”

  When the packet unfolded, even greasy from the roasted nuts the message written on it was legible. Seen you waiting. Bring vittles and silver from a rich man’s table. Below was a little horned circle, the sigil of Toro.

  It was easier than he had thought. He watched a house in East Gidd. Eventually he paid a boy to break the windows in front, while he vaulted into the shrubbery, forced the garden door, grabbed knives and forks and chicken from the table. Dogs came, but Ori was young and had outrun dogs before.

  No one would eat the greasy mess that marinated overnight in his sack. This was an examination. The next day at the usual spot he put his bag at his feet, and when he left he did not take it. He was well excited.

  Mmm good, said the next note, uncurled from more street food. Now we needs money my frend forty nobles.

  Ori fulfilled his commissions. He did what he was told. He was not a thief, but he knew thieves. They helped him or taught him what to do. At first he did not enjoy the anarchic adventures, running down alleys at night with bags bobbing in his hands, the shrieks of well-dressed ladies behind him.

  He loathed being a lumpen cutter of purses, but he knew that anything more refined risked bringing the militia. As it was when he careered down crowded streets at twilight, the street gangs filled his wake as arranged and the officers would only plunge a little way into the rookeries, swinging truncheons.

  Twice he did it, and could hardly stop his trembling. He became energised, vastly excited to be committing these acts, to be doing something palpable. The third time and the times after that, he had no fear.

  He never took a stiver from the money he stole. He delivered it all to his unseen correspondent. It took several deliveries. He lost track. The robberies became routine. But he must have made his forty nobles: a new commission appeared. This time it was a wax tube, scored with grooves, that he had to take to a voxiterator booth.

  Over the spit of the needle he heard a voice, faded through crackles: “All good my boy now let’s get serious let’s you bring us a militia crest.”

  He saw Spiral Jacobs every week. They had developed a language of ellipsis and evasion. He was not categorical—he admitted to nothing—and Spiral Jacobs still spoke with erratic logic. Ori saw the old man’s madness was at least in part a mime.

  “They’ve got me doing things,” Ori said, “your mates. They’re not the most welcoming coves, are they?”

  “No they ain’t, but when they make friends with you they’re friends for life. Been at that shelter a long time. Been there a long time, wondered if I’d find anyone to introduce them to.”

  Ori and Spiral Jacobs discussed politics in this careful and mediated way. Among the Runagate Rampant chaverim, Ori was quiet and watchful. Their numbers dwindled, rose again. Only one of the women from the Skulkford sweatshop still came. She spoke more and more often, with increasing knowledge.

  He listened with a kind of nostalgia and wondered, How am I going to do this?

  He went to Dog Fenn, where he knew the militia would be harder to find but where he could hide. It took two attempts, a lot of planning and several shekels in bribes. By night in the darkness of Barley Bridge’s girdered underside. A two-man patrol lured by a breathless street-boy telling them someone had been thrown in, while a gang of his fellows shouted. A young streetwalker wailed in the black water while trains wheezed overhead. She thrashed with genuine fear (she could not swim but was kept afloat by two vodyanoi children below her who swilled water in their submerged equivalent of giggles).

  The first night the militiamen only stood at the edge and shone their lanterns at the bobbing woman while the children hollered at them to save her. They shouted for her to hang on and went to find help; and Ori emerged, dragged the disgusted prostitute out and hurried everyone away.

  On the second night, an officer left his jacket and boots with his companion and waded into the cool water. The vodyanoi descended, and the woman panicked very badly and began to sink. The chaos in the water was not feigned. The children milled shrieking around the remaining militiaman, clamouring for him to help, jostling him until he bellowed and swung his truncheon, but it was too late by then. They had opened the bundle of his partner’s clothes, even still in his grip, rifled its contents.

  Ori left the badge in an old shoe at Toro’s corner. When he came back two days later, someone was there to meet him.

  Old Shoulder was a cactus-man. He was thin and dwarfed for his kind, shorter than Ori. They walked through the meat-market. Ori saw that prices were still rising.

  “I don’t know who pointed you our way and I ain’t going to ask you,” Old Shoulder said. “Where you been before now? Who you been with?”

  “Double-R,” said Ori, and Old Shoulder nodded.

  “Yeah, well I ain’t going to moan about them, but you better make your choice, lad.” He looked at Ori with a face bleached the faintest green by years of sun. He made Ori feel very young. �
�Things go very different with our friend.” He scratched the side of his nose, extending his first and last fingers splayed into horns. “I don’t give spit about what Flex or any of his lot would have said. You can kiss good-bye to philosophising. We ain’t interested in the toil concept of worth, or graphs of the swag-slump tendency and whatnot. With Double-R it’s just more and more notions.

  “I don’t care if they can lecture like we was at the university.” They stood still among the flies and the warm smell of meat, among the cries of the sellers. “What I care about’s what you do, mate. What can you do for us? What can you do for our friend?”

  They had him as a messenger. He had to show his worth, picking up packages or messages that Old Shoulder left for him, ferrying them across the city without investigating them, delivering them to men or women who eyed him without trust and sent him away before they would open them.

  He drank in The Two Maggots, keeping his friends among the Nuevists. He went to the Runagate Rampant discussions. Hidden histories: “Jabber: Saint or Crook?”; “Iron Councillor: The Truth behind the Stencil.” The hard young machine-knitter had become a political authority. Ori felt as if he watched everything through a window.

  In the first week of Tathis, at a time of sudden cool, Old Shoulder had him as lookout. It was only at the last second that he was told what his job would be, and all his excitement came back.

  They were in Bonetown. They watched evening come in livid shades through the silhouettes of the Bonetown Claws, the Ribs. The ancient bones that gave the area its name curved more than two hundred feet into the air, cracking, yellowed, mouldering at a geological pace, dwarfing the houses around them.

  There was to be a delivery to the kingpin Motley. Ori could not even see where his gang would intercept it. He was exhilarated. He watched and watched, but no militia came. He could see to the clearing below the bones, to the city scrub where acrobats and print-vendors were counting their takings, oblivious to the monstrous ribcage above them.

  He watched nothing, frantic, wishing he had a pistol. Young men passed in a gang and eyed him, decided not to bother. No one approached. The whistle stayed in his tense fist. He had no idea anything had even started till Old Shoulder tapped him from behind, jerking him violently, and said, “Home again, boy. Job’s done.” That was all.

  Ori could not have said when he was made a member. Old Shoulder began to introduce him to others, to muttered discussions.

  In the pubs, in the tarry shacks and mazes of Lichford, Ori talked tactics with Toro’s crew. He was a probationer. He felt a queasy guilt when his new companions mocked the Caucus— “the people’s pomp” they called it—or Runagate Rampant. He still went to Double-R’s under-pub discussions, but unlike his many months there, he could see the impact of his new activities immediately. They were in the papers. Ori had been lookout on what they called the Case of the Bonetown Sting.

  He was paid, with each haul. Not much, but enough to compensate for the wages he was missing, and then a little more. In The Two Maggots and Fallybeggar’s, he bought generous rounds, and the Nuevists toasted him. It made him feel nostalgic.

  And in Lichford, he had new companions—Old Shoulder, Ulliam, Ruby, Enoch, Kit. There was an élan to Toro’s outlaw gang. Their lives were different, were richer and more tenuous, because they were being risked.

  If they catch me now they won’t just lock me up, Ori thought. They’ll Remake me for sure, at least. Probably I’m dead.

  There were strikes most weeks in Gross Coil now. There was trouble in Smog Bend. Quillers had attacked the khepri ghetto in Creekside. The militia went into Dog Fenn, Riverskin and Howl Barrow, took unioners and petty crooks and Nuevists away. The foremost exponent of DripDrip poetry was beaten to death in one such raid, and his funeral became a small riot. Ori went, and threw stones with the mourners.

  Ori felt as if he were waking. His city was a hallucination. He could bite down on the air; he could wring tension out of it. Daily he passed pickets, chanted with them.

  “It’s gearing up,” Old Shoulder said. He sounded gleeful. “When we get it done—when our friend can finally get through and, uh, meet up with you-know-who . . .”

  The gang glanced, and Ori saw several quick looks his way. They were not sure they should be speaking in front of him. But they could not keep themselves quiet. He was careful, did not give in to his desire to ask them Who? Who is I-know-who?

  But Old Shoulder was staring at a streetside fixing-post, its fat pillar many-skinned in ancient posters. There was one block-printed heliotype, a stark rendition of a familiar face, and Old Shoulder was looking at it as he spoke, and Ori understood what he was being told. “We’ll finish it all off,” the old cactus-man said. “We’ll change everything when our friend meets a certain someone.”

  He had not seen Spiral Jacobs for days. When at last Ori tracked him down, the tramp was distracted. He had not been to the shelter in a long time. He looked exhausted, more unkempt and dirty even than usual.

  Ori followed leads from other forgotten men and women to find him, at last, in The Crow. He was shuffling between the great shops of the city’s central district, its statues, facades of grand marble and scrubbed white stone. Jacobs had chalk in his hand, and every few steps he would stop and murmur to himself, and draw some very faint and meaningless sign upon the wall.

  “Spiral,” Ori said, and the old vagrant turned, his rage at the interruption making Ori start. It was a moment before Spiral Jacobs composed himself.

  They sat in BilSantum Plaza among the jugglers. In the warm colours of the evening, Perdido Street Station loomed beside them, its variegated architecture unsettling, massive and impressive, the five railway lines spreading out of its raised arch-mouths like light from a star. The Spike, the militia minaret, soared up from its western side. Perdido Street Station seemed to lean on it like a man on a staff.

  Ori looked at the seven skyrails that stretched from the Spike’s summit. He looked along one tugged to the southeast, over the red-light district and the salubrious Spit Hearth, over the scholars’ quarter of Brock Marsh, to another tower, and on to Strack Island, to Parliament itself, surrounded by the conjoining rivers.

  “It’s the Mayor,” said Ori, while Spiral Jacobs seemed not to listen, only to play with his chalk and think whatever he wanted to think. “Toro’s crew are fed up with taking out militia corporals and what-have-you. They want to kick things off. They’re going to kill the Mayor.”

  It might have seemed that Spiral Jacobs was too gone to care, but Ori saw his eyes. He saw that gummy mouth open and shut. Was it a surprise? What else was there for the people’s bandit to do?

  And though Ori might have told himself that he let Spiral know only for some kind of duty, out of some sense that the old fighter, Jack Half-a-Prayer’s comrade, deserved to know, there was more than that. Spiral Jacobs was involved, had in his random way ushered Ori to this brutal and liberatory political act. A plan like this, Ori said, would take guts and strength and information and money. This was the start. Come for the soup tomorrow, said Spiral Jacobs suddenly, promise me.

  Ori did. And perhaps he knew what was in the bag that Jacobs brought him. Opening it in his room much later, alone by his candle, he could not silence his gasps.

  Money. In rolls and tight wraps. A huge haul of coins and notes, in scores of currencies. Shekels, nobles and guineas, yes, the newest decades old, but there were ducats too, dollars and rupees and sandnotes and arcane bawbees, square coins, little ingots from maritime provinces, from Shankell, from Perrick Nigh and from cities Ori was not sure he believed in. It was the dregs of a highwayman’s life, or a pirate’s.

  A contribution, said the note enclosed. To help with a Good Plan. In Jack’s memory.

  part three

  WINE LAND

  CHAPTER TEN

  The golem watched the sleeping travellers. It stood by the embers taller than a man or a cactus-man. Thickset, with arms too long that hung in front of it, vaguely simia
n. Its stance was buckled, its back hunched into a saddle. Its clay skin was sun-cracked.

  With dawn the golem was blundered across by woken insects. It did not move. Burrs and spores blew over the sleepers in their hollow. Breezes prickled their flesh. They were north of the relentless heat.

  Drogon rose first. When the others woke he was gone, scouting, and Pomeroy and Elsie went too, to leave Cutter alone with the golem’s master.

  Cutter said, “You shouldn’t have left. Judah, you shouldn’t have gone.”

  Judah said, “Did you get the money I left?”

  “Of course I got the money, and I got your instructions too, but I fucking didn’t follow them, did I? And ain’t you glad? With what I brought you?” He slapped his pack. “They weren’t ready when you left.”

  “And now one’s broken.” Judah smiled sadly. “One’s not enough.”

  “Broken?” Cutter was stricken. He had dragged the equipment so far.

  “You shouldn’t have gone, Judah, not without me.” Cutter breathed hard. “You should have waited for me.”

  Cutter kissed him, with the urgency that always came when he did, a desperation. Judah responded as he always did—with something like affection and something like patience.

  Even now, Cutter realised with wonder, Judah Low seemed not quite focused on what was before him. It had been that way as long as Cutter had known him. A typical distracted researcher in something or other, Cutter had thought at first. Cutter’s shop was in Brock Marsh, and scholars were his customers. He had been surprised when he traced the remains of some downtown accent in Judah’s voice.

  More than ten years ago they had met. Cutter had emerged from his back room to see Judah looking at the esoterica crammed on darkwood shelves: notebooks, metaclockwork, vegetable secrets. A tall thin man with dry, uncut hair, much Cutter’s senior, his face weathered, his eyes always open wide at whatever he saw. It was shortly after the war in the dumps, after Cutter had been made to surrender his cleaning construct. He was washing his own floors, and was in a bad mood. He had been rude.