Iron Council

by China Miéville

  “We’re all racing,” he said.

  “Yeah, but some of us in the wrong direction.”

  He thought then of what it would be. Of that moment when the dispossessed, the toilers, the, yes if she wanted, yes, the commonalty heard that the Mayor, the head of the Fat Sun, the arbiter of New Crobuzon, was gone. What that would be.

  “You want to talk inspiration?” he said. He was angry again, at her monomaniac prescription. “That I’ll give you,” he said. “You’ll thank me, Jack. What we’re doing, what we’re doing . . . we need to wake people up.”

  “They’re already awake, Jack. That’s what you don’t see.”

  He shook his head.

  Bertold Sulion the Clypean Guard had lost his commitment to New Crobuzon, to the Mayor, to the law he was pledged to. Baron told them.

  “It’s bled out of him,” he said. “You ain’t trusted to much when you’re a Clypean. The oath you take says it all: I see and hear only what the Mayor and my charges allow me to. Bertold don’t know so much. But he knows the war’s being lost. And he’s seen the deals they’ll do while them he trained with fight and die. It’s all gone rancid. His loyalty’s bled out of him and there ain’t nothing left.

  “That’s the thing,” he said. He spoke with care. “It’s in you like your blood.” He patted his sternum. “And when it goes bad, when it goes septic, you might say, you bleed it out and then either something else fills it, or it leaves you empty. Sulion ain’t got nothing in him anymore. He wants to grass, and for form’s sake, he’s asking a lot of money for it, but it ain’t the money he wants. He wants to betray because he wants to betray. He wants us to help him go bad. Whether he knows it or not.”

  They were not in Badside. Here are keys for you, the note had said, pinned by one of the two-horned cesti to the wall. We have a new meeting house. An address. Ori had read the note with Enoch, and they had stared at each other. Enoch was a stupid man, but this time Ori shared his confusion. “Flag Hill?”

  At the edge of the city, at the end of the Head Line unrolling north from Perdido Street Station, Flag Hill was where the bankers and industrialists lived, the officials, the wealthiest artists. It was a landscape of wide-open ways and sumptuous houses sheer onto the streets, backing onto shared gardens. There were flowering trees and banyans spilling their knotting creepers and making them roots and trunks, emerging from between black paving.

  There had been a slum in Flag Hill for years, like an abscess: an oddity of city planning. Mayor Tremulo the Reformer, two centuries past, had ordered some streets of modest housing built on the slopes of the rise that gave the area its name, so that the heroes of the Pirate Wars, he said, could live by those they had defended. The Flag Hill rich had not welcomed the newcomers, and Mayor Tremulo’s schemes for “social merging” had been made risible. Without money what had been modest became a slum. Slate and brick went sickly. The little community of Flag Hill poor came in and out by train, while their neighbours disdained the raised rails for private hansoms, and waited for squalor to reach a critical mass. It had done so fifteen years before.

  The poor had been removed from their collapsing houses, settled in ten- and fifteen-floor blocks of concrete in Echomire and Aspic. And then their once-neighbours had moved curiously into the deserted, hollowed rookeries, and money had at last come. Some buildings had been made into houses for the new wealthy, shored up and two or three holed together: to live in reconfigured “base cottages” became a fashion. But several streets at the heart of Flag Hill’s nameless poverty district had been preserved, architecture as aspic, and made a slum museum.

  It was through this that Ori and Enoch came. They had cleaned themselves, worn their better clothes. Ori had never been to this street-long memorial to poverty. There was no rot, of course, no smell, nor had there been for more than a decade. But the windows were still broken (their shard edges reinforced by subtle braces to prevent more cracking), the walls still bowed by damp and discoloured (thaumaturgy and joists holding them at the point of their collapse).

  The houses were labelled. Brass plaques by their doors told the history of the slum, and talked of the conditions in which the inhabitants had lived. Here, Ori read, can be seen scars of the arson and accidental conflagrations that plagued the streets, forcing the locals to endure life in the spoils of fire. The house was smoked and char-dark. Its carbonised skin was sealed under a matte varnish.

  There were front rooms and outhouses that could be entered. A FAMILY OF SIX OR EIGHT MIGHT CROWD INTO SUCH TERRIBLE SURROUNDINGS. The detritus of slum life was left in place, sterilised and dusted by attendants. IT SEEMS UNBELIEVABLE THAT IN MODERN TIMES SUCH SQUALOR COULD GO UNCHECKED.

  The house to which they had been directed was a classic of Flag Hill architecture: big, beautiful, mosaiced in painted pebbles. Ori wondered if he had misread the address, but their keys worked. Enoch was frowning. “I been here before,” he said.

  It was empty. It was a sham house. Its rooms were bone-

  colourless, as were its curtains. Enoch’s awe at the house and the gardens annoyed Ori.

  There were people on the Flag Hill streets, men in tailored jackets, women in scarves. Mostly it was humans, but not only. There were canals here, and a community of wealthy vodyanoi who passed with their jump-crawl, dressed in light waterproof mumming of suits, chewing the cheroots that humans smoked and the vodyanoi would eat. There might pass a cactus now and then, some rare uptown achiever. There were constructs here, jolting steam-

  figures that gave Ori nostalgia for his childhood when they had been everywhere. The Flag Hillers were wealthy enough to afford the licences, to have their equipment pass the assiduous tests instituted in the aftermath of the Construct War. Mostly, though, even the rich had golems.

  They walked with inhuman care, empty-eyed clay or stone or wood or wire men and women. They carried bags, they carried their owners, looking from side to side in mimicry of human motion, as if they could see through those pointless eyes, as if they did not sense mindlessly and abnaturally to follow their instructions.

  When the other Toroans arrived, they all asked the question: “What are we doing here?”

  When Baron came he was dressed as smartly as a local. He wore the lambswool, the fine sifted cotton and silk easily. They gaped.

  “Oh yes,” he said. Shaven, cleaned, smoking a prerolled cigarillo. “You’re my staff, now. Best get used to it.” He sat with his back to the wall in their new, huge, empty room, and told them about Bertold Sulion.

  Toro was with them. Ori realised it. He did not know how long that strange-silhouetted figure had been standing at the edge, with the oil-light drawing the edges of its horns. It was evening.

  “Why are we here, Bull?” he said. “Where’s Ulliam?”

  “Ulliam can’t come often. Remade would be a rarity on these streets. You’re here because I told you to be. Shut up and learn why. I’ll give you money. You get clothes. You’re servants now. Anyone sees you, you’re butlers, footmen, scullery maids. You keep yourselves clean. Got to fit in.”

  “Was Badside compromised?” Ruby said. Toro did not sit, but seemed to lean, to be resting held up on nothing. Ori could feel the hex in those horns.

  “You know what we aim to do. You know what we’ve wanted, what we build for.” Toro’s unnatural deep tones were a constant shock, a static charge. “The chair-of-the-board is in Parliament. On Strack Island. In the river. Vodyanoi militia in the water, cactus guards, officers in every chamber. Thaumaturges, the best in the city, putting up buffers and orneryblocks, charmtraps, all sorts. We ain’t getting into Parliament.

  “And then there’s the Spike, and Perdido Street Station. You-know-who has to spend a lot of time in the Spike. Commanding the militia. Or in the station. In the embassy wing, in the high-tower.” It was more than the hub of New Crobuzon’s trains. It was a town, in three dimensions, encased in brick. The vastness of its mad-made architecture disobeyed not only rules of style but, it was said, of physics. />
  “When our quarry’s there, it ain’t as if it’s just the Perdidae we got to face.” Not that they would be easy to defeat. The dedicated submilitia given over to protect the station were well-armed and trained. “Wherever the chair-of-the-board goes, the Clypeans go. They’re our worry.

  “What about in town? When did you last see any Fat Sun bigwig give a speech? They’re too scared, too busy trying to make secret peace with Tesh. So we need another strategy.” There was a long quiet.

  “You-know-who is very close, intimate with one particular magister. Magister Legus. Weekly they meet. There’s all rumours, if you know who to ask. At Legus’ private house. Where he lives as a citizen, takes off his mask. They settle down in private. Sometimes they don’t part again until the morning.

  “Happens every week, sometimes twice. In the magister’s house.

  “The house next door.”

  Tumult. How do you know? someone was shouting, and You can’t, and Whose is this place? How did you get this? and on.

  Ori had a memory. Something in him flinched from an understanding, unsettling, that veered close and was gone again and then was back. Ori saw others remembering, not sure what it was they remembered, not threading things together.

  “It was hard to find out the true name behind a nom de jure,” Toro was saying. “But I did it. Took me a long time. Tracked him down.” Ori heard through gauze.

  “This is the house . . .” Ori said, and then said nothing more. No one heard him and he was glad of that. He did not know what he wanted to do. He did not know what he felt.

  This is the house where the old couple lived. That I heard about, the job you did, months ago, soon after I gave you the money. That the papers railed at. You killed them, or Old Shoulder did or one of us, and it weren’t that they was militia at all. They was rich, but you wouldn’t do them for that. It weren’t because they was rich but because of where they lived. You needed them gone so you could buy this house. That’s what you did with Jacobs’ money.

  Ori felt gutted. He swallowed many times.

  He sat hard on his own instincts. Something welled in him. All the uncertainty, the desperate lack of knowledge, then the weight of knowledge but vacillation of ideas, the shameful hash of theory that had sent him to the Runagaters, to all the different sects and dissidents, looking for something to ground him, a political home, which he had found in the anger and anarchist passion of Toro. His uncertainty came back. He knew what he felt—that this was a dreadful thing, that he was aghast—but he remembered the exhortations to contextualise, always to have context, that the Runagaters above all had always stressed.

  If one death’ll stop ten, ain’t it better? If two deaths’ll save a city?

  He was still. He had a sense that he did not know best, that he had to learn, that he was a better man in this collective than out, that he must understand why this had happened before he judged. Toro watched him. Turned to Old Shoulder. Ori saw the cactus-man set his face. They can see I know.

  “Ori. Listen to me.”

  The others watched without comprehension.

  “Yes,” Toro lowed. Ori felt like a schoolchild before a teacher, so disempowered, so ill-at-ease. He felt truly sick. Toro’s thaumaturged drone felt through his skin.

  “Yes,” Old Shoulder said. “This is the house. They were old, rich, alone, no one to inherit, it’d be sold. But no, it ain’t good. Don’t presume, Ori, that there’s no guilt and pain.

  “We get in that house beside us . . . we’re done. We win. We win.” Under the cactus’s words, Toro began to roar. It was a sound that went from beast-noise to the cry of elyctricity and iron under strain. It lasted a long time, and though it was not loud it took over the room and Ori’s head and stopped him thinking until it ebbed again and he was staring into Toro’s phosphorescent glass eyes.

  “If we win, we take the city,” Old Shoulder said. “Take off the head. How many do we save then?” One by one, the other Toroans were understanding.

  “You think other things weren’t tried? The magister’s house is closed. We can’t lie in wait there. The boss can’t push in, even with the horns. Some ward blocks us. Weapons won’t go through: not a bullet, a blast, a stone. It’s packed hard with charms. Because of who comes to visit. The sewers are stuffed with ghuls—no way in there there. It’s what we had to do. Think about it. You want out of this, now?”

  How did I become the one to be asked? Don’t the others have to decide? But they were looking to him. Even Enoch had come to it now, and was open-mouthed thinking of what he had acted as lookout for, that night. Old Shoulder and Baron watched Ori. Tension drew the cactus-man up and stiff. Baron was relaxed. They would not let Ori walk, of course. He knew that. If he did not go along with this, he was dead. Even if he stayed, perhaps. If they thought they could not trust him.

  Everything that was necessary was necessary. It was a tenet of the dissidents. And yes of course that necessary had to be fought over, debated and won. But they were so close. That they had found egress to a place their target would be alone, unwarded, vulnerable, where they could finally give their gift to New Crobuzon, was a towering thing. If it took two deaths to make it happen . . . could Ori stand in the way of history? Something in him blenched. It was necessary, he thought. He bowed his head.

  On the top floor, the wall adjoining Magister Legus’ property had been precisely excavated. Inches of plaster and thin wood were swept away. The wall was dug out.

  “Deeper’n that, hexes kick in,” Old Shoulder said. He touched the exposed surface with tremendous care. He was looking at Ori. Ori made his face unmoving. He listened. Toro had been preparing for weeks. Do you have other gangs? Ori thought, with an emotion he could not come close to identifying. Or are we your only ones? Whose name is this house in? It ain’t as if you bought it as yourself, is it?

  Baron was talking, with his instrumental precision. I better listen, Ori realised. This is the plan.

  “Sulion’s close to caving. We’re buying two things: information, of who’s where and what their tactics are, and a first move. Without him at the door, we’re dead.”

  This is militia techniques, Ori thought, that’s what I’m learning. Once again, Ori wondered how many militia there were who had been to the war and had come back with such bitterness as this, so full of it. What they would do. He watched Baron and realised that everything in Baron led him to this, that he had no plans beyond this, that this would be his revenge.

  An epidemic of murders. That’s what we’ll see. If those AWOL and back from the wars don’t have outlets. And the New Quill will recruit, too. They’ll recruit men like this. Jabber help us. And Ori’s eagerness to take off the head of the government came back strong. Soon, he thought. Soon.

  He felt as if he might lose himself. He had to tell himself several times, until he was sure of it, that he was where he was meant to be.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  People could not walk New Crobuzon’s streets without looking up. Past the aerostats and the wyrmen, the hundreds of lives—alien, indigenous, created—that teemed the city’s skies, they looked at the cold white and the austere sun, and wondered if another of those searing organic shadows would come.

  “They’re still trying to parley,” Baron told the crew. He had it from Bertold, who had inferred it from the Mayor’s forays to the embassy wing with diplomats and linguists.

  Ori returned to the shelter. Ladia welcomed him, but she was wary. She looked so exhausted he was shocked. As ever there were men and women the colours of dirt lying where gravity huddled them, but now the hall itself was scarred. The walls were tattooed with splinters and ripped-up paint; the windows were boarded.

  “Quillers,” she told him. “Three days ago. They heard we were . . . affiliated. We were slack, Ori, left papers around. With what’s going on in Dog Fenn, I suppose, we’ve been distracted: it’s been impossible to be so careful. We got cocky.”

  He made her lie down, and though she bantered with him sh
e cried when he laid her out on the old sofa, cried and held onto him for seconds, then sniffed and patted him, made a last joke and slept. He cleaned for her. Some of the homeless helped him. “We had a play yesterday,” one broken-toothed woman said to him as she wiped the tables. “Some Flexible troupe. Come to play for us. Very good it was, though not like nothing I’d seen before. I couldn’t really hear what they was saying. But it was nice, you know, good of them to come and do that for us.”

  No one had seen Jacobs for days. “He’s been around, though. He’s been busy. You seen? His mark’s all over.”

  The chalk spirals that Jacobs left wherever he went, that had given him his name, continued to disseminate, gone viral. They were in all quarters, in paint and thick wax colour, in tar; they were carved onto temples, scratched on glass and the girders of the towerblocks.

  “You think he really started it? Maybe he’s just copying someone else. Maybe no one started it at all. You heard how it’s turning? People are using it as a slogan. It’s been adopted.”

  Ori had heard and seen it. Spirals that tailed into obscenities levelled at the government. Shouts of Spiral away! when the militia appeared. Why that and not another of the symbols that had defaced walls for years?

  The old man’s corner was grey with spirals. Ink and graphite, in different sizes, the angles and directions of the curves variant, and here were spirals off spirals in intricate series. It could be a language, Ori thought. Clockwise or widdershins, stopping after so many turns, in differing directions and numbers; derivatives budded from each corkscrew whorl.

  For nine nights, Ori came. He volunteered the night shift. “I got to do this,” he told Old Shoulder. “I’ll do what you need in the day, but I got to do something.”

  The Toroans granted him a kind of sabbatical, without trust. As he walked, Ori would stop, fasten his shoe buckle, lean against a wall and look behind him. If not Baron, someone would be following him, he was sure: he knew that the first time he spoke to someone that his unseen watcher, his fellow Bull-runner, did not trust, he was dead. Or perhaps there was no one. He did not know what he was to his comrades.