Iron Council

by China Miéville

  In The Two Maggots, Petron Carrickos gave Ori a book of his poems, self-published as Flexible Press.

  “Been a long damn time, Ori,” he said. He had a shade of wariness—his mouth twitched to ask Where’ve you been? You disappeared—but he bought Ori grappa and spoke to him about his projects. Petron held Runagate Rampant—not quite openly, but with the new bolshiness of the times.

  Ori read a stanza aloud.

  “A season here/In your flower/Petals of wood and iron/Lockstock stonedead shock of a Dog Fenn frown.” He nodded.

  Petron told Ori about the Flexibles: who was doing what, who had stayed part of something, who had disappeared. “Samuel’s buggered off. He’s selling stuff in some tarty gallery in Salacus Fields.” He snorted. “Nelson and Drowena are still in Howl Barrow. Of course everything’s changed now, you can imagine. We’re still trying to do the shows when we can. Community stuff, in churches and halls and such.”

  “And just how does the Convulsive New go down with the commonalty?” It was a keystone concept from the second Nuevist Manifesto. Ori was sardonic.

  “They like the Convulsive New just fine, Ori. Just fine.”

  There was an illicit congress of all the underground guilds, the militant factory workers of Smog Bend and Gross Coil, spreading, Petron said, to other industries. Delegates from foundries, shipyards, dye plants, in a secret Dog Fenn location, discussing what demands to put to Parliament.

  “Caucus is talking to them, too,” he said, and Ori nodded. He did not say, as he thought, More talking, talking again, that’s the problem, ain’t it?

  At a crowded canalside market in Sangwine they reached, as part of the aimless walking that Petron theorised as a reconfiguration of the city, they came to sudden screams. “What in gods’, what in gods’, “ someone was shouting, and there was a strange back-

  forward surge of crowd, people running to see what was happening and fleeing again past the stalls of books and trinket jewellery.

  A woman lay in shudders by the lock and the watergates, her skirt puddled, her hair crawling like worms in static that made the air shake. People stared at her and tensed, made to run in and grab her and pull her away, but they blenched at the manifestation above her.

  Vapour, a slick and sickly bruise-blue—a purpling as if the world itself, the air, was bleeding beneath its skin. The air souring and, like badness in milk, particles of matter coagulating from nothing, clots of rank aether aggregated into organising shape, and then there was a moving insectile thing made of scabbed nothing and sudden shade that twisted in the air as if suspended by thread and glimmered visible and invisible and then was unquestionably there, a hook-legged thing in the colours of rot, as large as a man. A wasp, its waist bone-thin below a thorax that refracted light like mottled glass, its sting like a curved finger beckoning from its abdomen, extending and adrip.

  It cleaned its legs with its intricate mouth. It turned ugly compound eyes and looked at the aghast crowd. It unfolded its limbs one by one and shuddered and was moved, though not it seemed by the motion of those legs, but still as if it dangled and some giant hand holding its line had shifted. It came closer.

  The woman was seizing. Her face had gone dark. She was not breathing. There was a gasp, a choking in the front of those watching. Two others fell. A man, another woman, fitting epileptically, flecking with spittle and vomit.

  “Get out of the way!” The militia. From the entrance to the market. They came firing, and the sounds of the guns broke the cold that had held people, and they scattered screaming. Ori and Petron ducked but did not run, pushed away from the noisome apparition and watched the militia fire into its corpus.

  Bullets went through it, to break glass and china beyond. The woman in its shadow spat and died. In a fever of shot, the wasp trilled and scissored its limbs like a trap. The lead was taken into it with a bare ripple in its uncanny flesh, and some emerged and some was eaten. The thing was dancing in the officers’ fire. The leakage from the dead woman’s mouth was dark, her innards turned to tar.

  An officer-thaumaturge cracked his fingers and made occult shapes, and filaments spun into sight between his fingers and the wasp, plasm made hexed fibres and webbing, but the predatory thing passed through the mesh, suddenly far-off or side-on or blinked closed like an eye, and in a spatter of unlight was there again and the net was evanescing. The others stricken by the wasp were still, and a seasick green was coming to the faces of the militia.

  But then the wasp was gone. The air was clean. In a moment, the militia began slowly to straighten, Ori braced himself, dropped with a cry when a ghost image of the wasp returned in air again momentarily varicose, and went, and came back once more, now nothing but a vespine insinuation, and was, finally, all gone.

  “It’s not the first of them,” Petron said. They had run back to The Two Maggots, where they sucked at sugared rum tea, craving warm and sweet. “You not hear about them? I thought it was stupid rumours, at first. I thought it was nonsense.”

  Manifestations that killed by toxic ambience. “One was a grub-thing,” Petron said, “in Gallmarch. There was one was a tree. And one was a dagger, up Raven’s Gate way, I heard.”

  “I heard of the dagger,” Ori said. He remembered some strange headline in The Beacon. “And weren’t there others? A sewing machine? Wasn’t there a candle?”

  “Goddamn Tesh, isn’t it? That’s what it is. We got to end this war.”

  Were the conjurations Tesh weapons? Each must cost countless psychonoms of puissance, especially if called from Tesh, and each took only a handful of victims. How could they be effective?

  “Yeah but it isn’t just that, is it?” Petron said. “Not just the numbers. It’s the effect. On the mind. On morale.”

  The next day Ori heard of another manifestant. It was in Serpolet. It was two people gripped together and fucking. No one could see their faces, he heard. Just saw them adangle, turning on twine, mashing their lips, their hands pushed into each other’s flesh. When they went—driven out by the attacks of the locals or not, who knew?—they left five dead, leaked and spilled on the cobbles, turned bitumen.

  When at last Spiral Jacobs came to the soup-house, Ori could not believe the look of him. The old man was twisted under the weight of his own bones; his skin was rucked and wretched on him.

  “Gods almighty,” Ori said gently as he ladled food. “Gods almighty, Spiral, what’s happened to you?” The vagrant looked up at him with a wonderful and open smile. There was no recognition at all. “Where you been? All this time?”

  Jacobs heard the question and pulled his brows together. He thought a long time and said carefully: “Perdido Street Station.”

  It was the only thing he said that night that evidenced sanity. He murmured to himself in a foreign language or in children’s noises, he smiled, drew ink spirals on his skin. At night amid the grunts and the draughts, Ori came to where Jacobs sat chattering to himself. He was nothing but silhouette when Ori spoke.

  “We’ve lost you, ain’t we, Jacobs?” he said. He was stricken. He could almost feel the rise of tears. “I don’t know if you’ll come back. Where you’ve gone. I wanted, I wanted to find you to tell you thank you, for everything you done.” You can’t hear me but I can. “I got to tell you this now, because I’m going places and doing things that might, might make it so I won’t get to see you no more, Spiral. And I want you to know . . . that we took your money, your gift, and we’re doing it right. We’re going to make you proud. We’re going to make Jack proud. I promise you.

  “What you done for me. Gods.” Spiral Jacobs jabbered and drew swirls. “To know someone who knew Jack. To have your blessing. Whether you come back or not, Spiral, you’ll always be part of this. And when it’s over and it’s done, I’ll make sure the city knows your name. If I’m here. Got my word. Thank you.” He kissed the crumpled forehead, astonished at the fragility of the skin.

  That night there was no moon, and the gaslamps of Griss Fell gave out. In the dark the New
Quill Party attacked the kitchen again. Ori woke to chants of “scum” and the tattoo of missiles on the wooded windows. Through a slit between boards he could see them massed. Ranks of men, studies in shadow, the brims of their bowlers low, making their eyes belts of dark. A streetful of carefully suited malignance, rows of black-cottoned shoulders padded with fighters’ muscle, tipping their hats, straightening the dark ties noosed from their white shirts. They brushed imagined dust from themselves and swung weapons.

  But the vagrants’ fear was brief. Was it Militant Sundry who came for them? Was it the mixed ranks of the Caucus? Ori could not see. He only heard shouting and shots, saw the Quillers start and turn like a pack of feral clerks, and run to fight.

  Ladia and the residents scattered. Ori ran for Jacobs, but to his surprise the old man walked past him with purpose but no urgency. He did not look at Ori or anywhere but ahead. He walked quickly past the last milling homeless, while at the street’s end was the sound of battle and in the dark only a rapid and ugly mass of black figures. Jacobs turned the other way, toward Saltpetre Station and the raised arches that climbed north over the city.

  Ori hesitated, thinking that there was perhaps nothing left to speak to in that shell, and then realising that he wanted to see where the man would go and what he would do. In the very dark of New Crobuzon without its lamps, Ori followed Spiral Jacobs.

  He did not stalk him like a hunter but merely walked a few steps behind. He tried to place his shoes down soft enough that his step was only a ghost-echo of the mendicant’s shuffling. They were the only people in the street. They walked between a fence of wood and iron on one side, damp bricks on the other, rising scores of feet above their heads. Spiral Jacobs skipped, treaded forward singing a song in an alien key, wandered back some steps, ran his fingers, poking from the cutoff ends of his gloves, over the corrugated iron and rubbed at its rust, and Ori came behind him as respectful and observant as a disciple.

  With a thumb of chalk, Spiral Jacobs drew the shape that had given him his name, whispering while he did, and it was of astonishing perfection, a mathematical symbol. And then there were curlicues, smaller coils coming from its outer skin, and Jacobs ran his hand over it, and walked on.

  It began to rain as Ori reached the mark Jacobs had made. It did not smear.

  Past the tumbledown brick arch of Saltpetre Station and on toward Flyside into a place where the gaslamps had not given out, where guttering dirt-light returned to tan the walls and doors into grotesques. The old man wrote his shapes. He wrote on window, once, the grease of whatever he was using gripping the shine. A rut of street closed up to Ori and funnelled him through a brick arch after his idiot guru, into a wider zone of pallid light where the gas was effaced by the elyctro-barometrics, cold lurid colours, red and gold made ice in knotted glass.

  They were not alone now. They were in some dream-dark landscape. Ori wondered when his city was taken, made this.

  A succession. The loud sound of fiddles. Wealthy men slumming it with downtown whores fell out of the doors of drinkhalls, walking oblivious past tsotsis who eyed them and fingered ill-

  concealed weapons. Up now toward a militia tower, the thrum of the skyrails as a lit pod passed over. Crowding under slowworms of lit glass spelling names and services, simple animations—a red-mouthed lady drawn with the light, replaced stutteringly with another who had raised her glass, and back again in autistic illuminant recursion. Narcotics on the corners sold in twists by macerated youths, militia in aggressive cabals, their mirrors sending the light back around the street. Anger, drunk and stupid fights, and serious fights, too.

  North to Nabob Bridge, approaching Riverskin. At the edge of Flyside they passed a series of lots, open and strewn, and Ori saw the last blows of some gang-pummelling, and there was a crowd of Quillers approaching in their suits, natty and baleful, but they did not harass him, instead sneering at the students who ran by laughing, chasing motes of thaumaturgic light flying drunken as butterflies; and a catcall, and there was the lit brazier of a picket outside a chymical plant, the numbers of the strikers swollen by supporters carrying billy clubs and forks to protect them from the Quillers who eyed them but ran the numbers and walked on.

  A scarred cactus-boy begging for coins even so late while his monkey danced, the boy’s head scratched with friendly condescension by the big cactus-man leading a gang of, that must be the Militant Sundry, not quite with weapons on display (militia were near enough to see) but making a presence in that late-night decadent street and nodding in some wary camaraderie-cum-challenge to a Caucus man, who shucked handslang at a passer and disappeared into an old cold alley when a panicked militia patrol ran past, and there was a fire in the back of the alley, and huddled junkie figures, and a wyrman called and came down to land and flew again.

  Men and women passed. There was drink-smell and smoke, drug residue and the shrieks and calls like birds.

  Spiral Jacobs walked through it all shielded by his madness. He stopped, drew his shapes, walked on, stopped, drew, walked, on to the spired old-century cragginess of Nabob Bridge, and over quickly through Kinken where the richer khepri moieties, older money and arriviste, preserved their dreamed-up culture in the Plaza of Statues, kitsch mythic shapes in khepri-spit. The air tasted, with the ghosts of khepri conversations in wafts of chymical.

  Spiral Jacobs walked the tight streets of the Old Town, the firstborn part of New Crobuzon, a V in the mud between rivers, now spilt over into metropolis dimensions. He shuffled and crooned and drew his spirals on the dark brick walls, on through Sheck, a grocertown of shopkeepers and a stronghold of New Quill, where Ori walked carefully. He saw not the bowlered Quill foot soldiers but the nervous paunchy men of defence committees, in agonies of pride at their own bravery. Through the outer edge of Spit Hearth where the prostitutes worked, streetwalkers eyeing him. Spiral Jacobs drew his coil. On one side was the window of a brothel advertising outré relaxations: on the other a mouldered poster, some radical group trying to recruit women it coyly called “those of unorthodox service professions.”

  The Crow, New Crobuzon’s commercial heart, was not full. There were only a few walking so late. Spiral Jacobs, with Ori behind him, passed the arcades, tunnels through buildings neither open nor closed. They were curlicued in spiralled iron that the old man fingered with appreciation, their windows full of trinkets for the burghers.

  And then Ori stopped and let Spiral continue toward the shadow, light-dappled, of the core of New Crobuzon: a castle, a factory, a town of towers; a god, some said, made by a madman intent on theogenesis. It was not a building but a mountain in the materials of building, a mongrel of styles united with illicit intelligence. The city’s five railway lines emerged from its mouths, or perhaps they congregated there, perhaps their motion was inward and they coiled together like a rat-king’s tails and knotted and made the edifice that housed them, Perdido Street Station. A ganglion of railroad.

  Spiral Jacobs headed under the arch that tethered it to the militia’s central Spike, was bunking down in the brick concrete wood iron temple great and charged enough to alter the weather above it, to alter the very night.

  Ori watched the old man go. Perdido Street Station did not care that the city was surging. That nothing was the same as it had been. Ori turned and for the first time in hours his ears cleared, and he heard the calls of fighting, the swallowing of fires.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  All hands, the message said. It’s now. Pinned to Ori’s door.

  Old Shoulder and Toro were the only ones not there. Baron explained the plan.

  “Near a week,” he said. “That’s what we got. This information’s from Bertold. We have to be careful. This”—a square of chalk—“is the top room. This is where they’ll be.

  “Remember. They ain’t expecting attacks, but the Clypeans are tough. Each of you’ll be told exactly what you have to do. Understood? Remember how you get in, and what you do, and how you get out. And—listen to me—don’t alter your pl
an no matter what you see. Understand me? You do what you’re told, let others do what they’re told.”

  Are we a cell? Ori thought. Are there others we don’t know of? Ori’s companions shifted.

  Baron drew more and more lines on the plan, repeating instructions until they had become mantra. His cadences did not alter; he was like a wax recording.

  There was a cache of new weapons. Repeaters, blunderbusses, firespitters. Ori watched his comrades cleaning and oiling them. He saw whose hands shook. He saw that his own did not.

  Baron taught them how to take point, secure areas, with the instrumental efficiency of the militia. They walked through their parts as if blocking a play. Step up, swing, step, step, raise, secure, two three, say two officers, two three, step, turn, nod. Ori recited his strategy to himself. How are we going to do this?

  “We got surprise,” said Baron. “Get through that one moment, that chink. They got nothing to hold us back. Tell you something though, Ori.” He leaned in without even gallows humour. “Won’t all of us get out. Some of us’ll die there.” He did not look afraid. He did not care if he came out.

  You can feel it, can’t you? Ori thought. His untethering. Ori was stretching out as if on a stem. It might snap. He still felt in that strange nightscape with Spiral Jacobs, his valedictory to the old man, when he had walked unmolested through a city turned into some psychotic, louche, broken thing. That was where he was.

  There was no urgency in him. It was not a bleak feeling. Ori was only untethered. Things troubled him distantly. Uncertainties rose in him, distantly.

  There were commotions. On the warming street, criers and journal-boys ran past, far from their usual grounds, called headlines. Convocation in Dog Fenn, they shouted. Demands to Parliament. Xenian Gangs, Seditionist Caucus. The Toroans sat in the house they had bought from the estate of those they had killed. They ignored the news-vendors, the anxiety on the streets. They began to spread mess, to live in a kind of aggressive squalor. They hung their cesti on their belts; they sharpened the horns.