Iron Council

by China Miéville

  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 te
rror.

  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.