Iron Council

by China Miéville

  Magisters, even the top-rank doges, were citizens, it was always stressed, citizens like anyone. They worked masked for justice’s sake, for the anonymity of justice. Any dwelling, in any part of town, could house a servant of law. The Flag Hill house next to the gang was elegant but nondescript.

  Incongruously, at last, one early evening, with gunshots far off south—a noise New Crobuzon had grown used to, which no longer called the militia down from their dirigibles, was only part of the nightsound now—visitors began arriving. Cooks and maids and footmen left, given the night off. Not knowing their master’s job, not knowing who it was who came to him. Fops and uptown dandies arrived, dressed for a sedate party. A cactus-man in smart clothes.

  Probably the staff think he’s an orgiast, Ori thought. They think their master’s up to shenanigans, peccadilloes or drugs. The guests were militia. Clypean. Preparing for the mayor’s arrival.

  Ulliam put on a helmet. He strapped it tight and sighed. It jutted mirrors before his eyes. “Never, ever thought I’d put this on again,” he said.

  “I’m not clear,” Enoch kept saying to Ori. “I’m not clear how it is I leave.”

  “You heard him, ‘Noch, through the scullery window, over into the gardens, away.” You’ll never leave.

  “Yeah, yeah, I, I know. It’s just . . . I’m sure that’s right.”

  You’ll never leave.

  “You’ll know when it’s time to go, Ori,” Baron had said, and Ori waited. He leaned against the cracked plaster, put his head on the thin ribs of board. Step step secure aim aim shoot.

  “You understand what you’ve to do, Ori?” Baron had said. “What’s asked?”

  Why this . . . this honour? Ori wondered. Why was he placed at the mission’s heart? He was—after Baron—the best shot; and he did not expect to live, yet had not run. Perhaps that had decided Toro. None of us will live, he thought. I’d still do this a thousand damn times. He felt himself anchor.

  “You know where I’ve got to be, and you know where Shoulder’s got to be. We need someone at the top, Ori.”

  Ori’s on point, he thought. Ori, take point.

  He felt a weight of city below him, as if New Crobuzon were shackled to him as he dangled. He closed his eyes. He imagined he felt things burrowing in the house walls, through his skin. He looked over what he had done, over years. A churchbell sounded. A wyrman shouted from the sky. In Dog Fenn his friends kept fighting.

  He heard Old Shoulder come and go below. Ori did not take his head from the wall. He heard trunk-legs, the surprisingly gentle touchdown of the cactacae’s elephantine pads. Some time later reality pricked; there was a rending. He did not look round. “Evening boss,” he said. Toro had come.

  Between two and three o’clock in the morning, with the sky squid-ink dark, clouds occluding the stars and half-moon, they began.

  Toro tremored and said, “The house-hex flickered.”

  Sulion, their treacherous contact, had left one key in one lock, turned one powerful ward charm upside down and rubbed it with hexed salt, cut one clutch of wires. It was all they needed.

  With Toro’s murmured reportage, gleaned from the horns that antennaed in the ripples of thaumaturgy, Ori tracked progress.

  The gang were inside. “There’s an empath,” Toro said. “They know we’re in.” Of course there’s a damn empath, Ori thought. There’s an empath and a shockjack and a cryomance, there’s everything. He stopped because he could feel the edge of hysteria.

  There was the diversion. Ori could feel something. Steps on the stairs? Someone just beyond the wall running up and others running down. First sign of entrance, they’ll split: inner core’ll go to the Mayor, the outer squad’ll go to the incursion. They’ll move fast to get the Mayor out.

  As the militia descended, Kit must be running the first set of stairs, sweeping whatever came at him with sticky flame, running fast past the fires he started. And as behind him came Ruby and Enoch with their own weapons, laying their traps, at the same time as that first wave—that diversion—came and the bodyguards rushed to its point of entry, Ulliam was funnelling gunpowder at the base of the door, leaving a tide-mark of explosive. And there, evidence of their breach. Ori heard shooting.

  He imagined the guests moving with murderous militia grace. He hoped his comrades had surprised them enough to take some down. He even let himself hope they might get away.

  Ulliam blew the door. Now the street would know. But in that fearful time, perhaps they would not intercede too quickly. Some of the Clypeans must be veering to deal with this new incursion. The ground floor would be thronging. And finally, Baron would be going in.

  Ori pictured it. Such daring. He wished he could see. Swinging a line out from the first-floor window to that of the adjoining house, and Baron, in his new armour and helmet, brachiating across, letting the stepped rope drop for Old Shoulder to climb. Baron must be in the hall, attaching his charge to the banister and lighting that long fuse. And spraying oil on the stairs and lighting it so that the bulk of the militia were trapped beneath, Baron would let out a bellow, and now with Old Shoulder beside him, rivebow cocked, spitbolt ready, he must be treading up the stairs.

  The inner guard would have to look, would send a scout-squad to the top of the stair, and oh Ori could just imagine the shock and the determination when they saw Baron. He would fire and back away, drawing them out. They would be so astonished to see him, his guns poised, bunching his shoulders, in his armour and his new helmet, cast so carefully in mimicry, his rivet-scarred bull’s head.

  Toro! they would cry. Toro!

  Were they shouting that now?

  Even the Clypeans would be afraid to have so famous a bandit with them, the perpetrator of such inventive death and rebellion. They would have to attack. Ori put his ear to the plaster-dusted wood. There was scuttering beyond. “They’re going,” said Toro behind him.

  “It’s time,” said Toro.

  There was running—Ori could hear it. He drew his pepperpot revolver and saw that his hands were absolutely unshaking.

  “It’s time, now,” said Toro. The Clypean Guards would be running past the charge Baron had laid, seeing only fires below and the retreating, shooting figure of Baron in his bull’s head disguise, slamming his horns from side to side so they rang against the walls. Ori had strapped on Baron’s headgear. Can you see? he had said, and Baron had answered, Enough to kill. And enough to die. Ori did not think Baron cared.

  Old Shoulder must be firing his rivebow at any cactus militia before turning to the others; and with him, shooting with the expertise of the specialist, Baron the ersatz Bull. Drawing the militia out. Toro said again that it was time.

  It was, it was almost time, it would be time in any moment. Ori strained. Step step two three quickly quickly step fire.

  “Now,” Toro said, and this time it was true. There was a flowering of explosion. The sound of fire unfolding and the judder of masonry; dust pounced from the wall around Ori and in a chorus of downward raging housematter the stairs adjoining the topmost room to the melees below were blown by Baron’s bomb. The room beyond Ori’s wall was cut off.

  “Now,” Toro said, and stepped up beside Ori, who moved his gun into place, stood beside his boss as Toro crouched and charged, with a distorted rage-noise, pushing horns ajut and piercing this time not the world with hermetic techniques but in the most base way the wall itself. It gave without restraint. And Toro was through, and Ori was through, and standing in the wall’s lime and laths detritus in a bedroom, with men and a woman staring at them.

  Ori’s calm held. It slowed time. Motion was languid. He moved as if in water.

  A warm room, tapestries and paintings, ornate furniture, a fire, a woman and man on a chaise, another man standing, no, two men, looking at the dusting hole and at Ori and Toro. There was music. Someone was moving: a man in evening dress, his coat-tails flapping as he came with cat-grace, levelling a cane that unfolded organically into a weapon like a metal claw. He was very clo
se and Ori was curiously without fear raising his pistol and wondering if it would reach its apogee in time, if he could interrupt the oncomer.

  Toro grunted. Toro was goring forward and spitted the man from a distance, two boreholes opening in the bodyguard’s chest so he was sodden in blood and his eyes closed and he died at Ori’s feet.

  Ori moved his gun: step step, aim, one two, corner, corner. He heard shouting. The other standing man had his hands up, was shouting, “Sulion! Sulion!” Ori shot him.

  The body of their contact lay bleeding from the clean headshot. The man and the woman sat quite still and stared at the corpse. Toro raised a snubbed pistol to them, and looked through those white-shining glass eyes at Ori.

  Of course there was no expression to the cast head. No one had given Ori the order to kill Sulion. He looked at the body and did not feel vindication. Had it been a panic? Had he meant to do it? For what was this revenge? Ori did not know. He was still not shaking.

  Toro nodded at the door: Secure the room. Ori stepped over Sulion’s wet corpse.

  The corridor ended in a charred and guttering interruption. There was fighting below. He wondered which of his friends were still alive. Oily fire slathered the walls like ivy. They had only minutes before the house became conflagration or militia thaumaturgy breached the black hole they had punched in the house.

  “We ain’t got long,” Ori said. He stood by Toro, before the last two people in the room, still sitting by the fire, watching them.

  From a voxiterator a cello suite sounded, spitting momentarily with a crack of the wax. The man was in his sixties, broad and muscled under flesh, wearing a silk robe. He had a still, clever face. He kept his eyes on Ori and the Bull with such precision Ori knew he was trying to plan. He held the hand of the woman.

  She must be close to his age—history evidenced that—but her face was almost without lines. Her hair was down-white. Ori recognised her from hundreds of heliotypes. She carried a long clay pipe as slender as a fingerbone. Its bowl still smoldered. It smelt of spice. She wore a shawl with nothing beneath. She did not cringe or glower or stare defiance. She watched with the same calm probing look as her lover.

  “I can pay you,” she said. Her voice was absolutely steady.

  “Hush,” Toro said. “Mayor Stem-Fulcher, hush now.”

  Mayor Stem-Fulcher. Ori was curious. More even than angry, or disgusted, or murderous for revenge, he was curious. This woman had ordered the Paradox Massacre, had sent the rate of Remaking higher and higher. This woman did backdoor deals with the New Quill Party, let their pogroms against xenians go uninvestigated. This was the woman who had stuffed the official guilds with informers. Presiding over a rotting polity on which countereconomies of hunger and theft grew like fungus. This woman perpetrated the war. Mayor Eliza Stem-Fulcher, La Crobuzonia, the Fat Sun Mater.

  “You know you won’t get out,” the Mayor said. Her voice was steady. She even raised her pipe, as if she would smoke. “I can give you passage.” She did not sound hopeful. She looked at her lover, and something went between them. A valediction, Ori thought, and for the first time felt a swell of something in him, a compound emotion he could not begin to parse. She knows.

  “Hush, Mayor.”

  The Mayor and her magister looked again at each other. Eliza Stem-Fulcher turned to Toro, and though she did not take her hand from the man’s she sat up some, as if formally, and she did take a draw from her pipe. She held it and closed her eyes a moment, breathed it out in a great flow from her nostrils, and she looked at Toro again and, gods, Ori thought awed, gods, she smiled.

  “What do you think you’ll do?” she said. Indulgent as a kindly schoolma’am. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  She turned square to Toro and gave another smile, drew again from the pipe, held her smoky breath, and she cocked her face quizzically and raised an eyebrow—Well?—and Toro shot her dead.

  Her lover jumped as the bullet took her, and bit his lip hard but could not control his voice, could not stop himself letting out a mew, a cat-sound that became a moan. He sat and held her hand while she emptied out, her head back on blood. Smoke uncoiling from her open mouth. Gunsmoke joined her head and Toro’s hand in a moment’s sulphur umbilicum. The man breathed out sobs and held her hand. But he made himself be done, and made himself look up at Toro.

  Ori was deep and dreamishly stunned, but he felt in him the tremors of the knowledge that they were done, and not dead. He raised the thought that gods, they might get out, they might yet. Let’s go then.

  “Watch him,” Toro said and Ori raised his gun. Toro began to unbuckle the straps that held the huge metal head in place. Ori did not understand what he saw. Toro was removing the iron. “Watch him.” The voice came again, this time uncoupled from whatever mechanisms made it so orotund, and it seemed to falter and become human.

  Something went out of the air as Toro pulled the helmet away and broke a thaumaturgic current. Toro lifted the metal off, like a diver removing the heavy brass helmet. Toro shook out her sweaty hair.

  Ori looked at the woman and his gun did not waver from the magister’s chest. He had not felt capable of surprise for a long time.

  Toro was Remade, of course. She turned her head. She was turned to wire by her middle years and by whatever traumas had made her Toro. Her face was set and animal hungry. She did not look at Ori. She sat, on a footstool, in front of the magister, laid her bull helmet to one side.

  A child’s arms emerged from her. One from each side of her face. One over each brow. A baby’s arms that moved listlessly, tangling and untangling in her lank hair. They had been stretched out, one inside each horn, in the helmet. They waved next to her face like spiders’ pedipalps.

  She sat and closed her eyes, stretched out her arms and the baby’s arms. She was quiet some moments.

  “Legus,” she said. “I know you’re grieving now, but I need you to listen to me.” Without the distortion, Ori could hear her accent from the southwest of the city was strong. She pointed at the magister’s eyes and then at her own: Look at me. She held her gun gently at his belly.

  “I’ll tell you my story. I want you to understand why I’m here.” A little sucking sound came out of the Mayor as gas or blood moved. She stared at the ceiling with the concentration of the dead. “I’ll tell you. Maybe you know already. But listen.

  “It’s hard to find out your true name, like it’s supposed to be, but it can be done. There’s a black market in onomastics. But if it’s consolation, yours stayed hidden well. Magister Legus. I been trying to find out a long time.

  “I came out of jail more than a decade ago. Graduated, we called it. The rumours, what we learn inside. We had something on every magister there is. You hear things. Drugs, boys, girls, blackmail. Nonsense, some of it. Legus, they said to me, Legus is a wily sod. You know he fucks the home secretary? As she was then.” She nodded at the cooling Stem-Fulcher. “That was information that never went away. Heard it often enough from those I trusted, inside and outside.

  “Know how hard I been working on this, Legus?” She would not use his real name. “Getting myself ready. Had to fight to get my helmet made.” The child-arms patted her forehead. “I made myself; I been readying for years. To be exact, Legus,” she said, “you made me. Do you remember?”

  “More than two decades gone. You remember those big old towers in Ketch Heath? Yes, you remember. That’s where I lived. I killed my darling. You remember, Magister? My girl Cecile.

  “She cried and cried and cried and I was crying too and then I took her and I think maybe it was that I was shaking her to make her shush, I don’t remember, but she was gone when I remember again. And I took her down held close to keep her warm, to a sawbones worked gratis every other Blueday, but of course that didn’t work.

  “And then there you were.” She leaned in. “You remember now?”

  He did not. Of the thousands he had sentenced to Remaking, how could he remember one? Ori watched Legus. Toro reached up, tu
gged with a parent’s unthinking gentle playfulness at the child’s hand.

  “You told me it was so I didn’t forget. I didn’t forget.” She leaned forward again and Cecile’s arms stretched out, toward Magister Legus holding the Mayor’s dead hand. There was noise. Their bomb-cavity was being breached. Toro pulled on her cestus. “It was her birthday just two weeks gone,” she said. “She’s older now than I was when I had her. My little girl.”

  She stood and put her gun to Legus’ temple. Legus gripped Stem-Fulcher’s hand and opened his mouth but did not speak.

  “From me,” she said. She did not sound angry. “From the men you made machines, the women you made monsters. Tanks, snailgirls, panto-horses, industry engines. And from all them you locked away in the toilets you call jails. And from all them on the run in case you find them. And from me, and from Cecile—and yes it was me, my hands done it, and that’s mine to feel. Cecile don’t grow, and she don’t rest. My girl. So this is from her too.”

  She kept her pistol barrel to his head and punched him once then many times with her spiked cestus, and he grunted and gave out a blood retch and his face went ugly and he put up his hand not to ward her but in a reaching for something, not to interrupt the bihorned jabs—those he took, gripping his lover’s hand so hard her dead fingers splayed. He could not stop himself barking at the pain and spilling more blood down his front as Toro punched him in a miserable repetition, shoving horns into his gullet and heart, and her baby’s hands reached out above her onslaught and played with the dying magister’s hair.

  Ori stood still while it was done and for a long time afterward. He waited for Toro to move—this small woman, with her south-city accent, her old grudge. After a minute or more when she did not, only sat with her head down while the magister put out his blood around her, he spoke.