Iron Council (6 page)

Cutter looked around them.
Come see,
he thought.
Come look at your trap.
He ran toward the tunnel exit. “What you
doing
?” his comrades shouted. “Cutter get back!”

“Stop,”
the whispersmith said, and Cutter had to stop. He screamed in anger.

“Let me
go.
I have to
check
something,” he said. His feet were rooted. “Godsdammit, let me fucking
go.
”

The whispersmith set him free. He stumbled up to the breach. With terror and care he came closer to the opening strewn with stone debris, the trash of boulders. He leaned in. He said, “Come help me. Help me find it.”

There was a sound. He could hear air moving. An exhalation from the stone.

“It’s coming,”
the whispersmith said. Drogon did not move, nor did Pomeroy or Elsie; they only watched Cutter as if they had forsaken any idea of escape.

“Come
help
me,” Cutter said, and peered into the dim. The crooning of what approached buckled him.

He saw a glistening of light. A wire taut across the threshold, extending into piled-up rocks at either side, tethered to batteries and engines Cutter knew were hidden within.

“I found it,” he shouted.

Cutter looked up and heard the dismal howling. Leaves and shreds of moss were pushed through the cleft. The noise of the
handlinger was very bad. In the fissure Cutter saw swirls of leafmould gust. He could hear staccato, a snaredrum beating and a horse’s exhalations. He slid back to his companions. “Be ready to run,” he said. “Be ready to fucking run.”

It came. Loud. A horse galloped for them. Its legs moved with such mutant rapidity that they sounded like a company. Drogon’s mount. It tore itself faster than any horse had ever run, over jags and unstable ground that turned its ankles and splintered its hoofs but it ran on through these injuries, and sweat and blood from its abrasions streaked its body. Something clamped to it. A mottlesome thing grasping its neck, a stub-tail growing maggotlike and nosing into horse-flesh.

Behind it a man emerged. A man. He stood in the air, his
arms folded; he guttered toward them at dreadful speed. He saw them. He angled down, his body motionless. They began to fire, and the man came at them so the tips of his toes bumped on the rock.

Cutter stood and fired and fell backward and slid on shale. They were all firing. The whispersmith had his feet apart and sent off rounds like an expert, a gun in each hand, Pomeroy and Elsie shot wildly, and their lead hit; they saw blood burst from the horse and the impassive man, but nothing slowed them.

The dangling man opened his mouth and spat fire. The searing breath licked the wire and made it glow, so there was an instant, a fragment of a second when the handlingers saw the metal, and their momentum took them toward it and man’s mouth and horse’s opened in alarm but they could not stop. They breached it, and came into the sun.

Rocks unfolded. The rocks turned to them. Coils unwound and sent thaumaturgic current through circuits, a stutter of valves, and a mass of pent-up energy released and did what it had been hair-trigger-primed to do, which was to make a golem.

It made with what was around it. The substance of the gap. All the matter in that puissant field was charged instantly into motion. The rocks unfolded and seemed always to have been shaped vaguely like a human, recumbent, twenty feet high, these slopes of stone-shard an arm and these brittle dried-up bushes another, and these great boulders a paunch with rock legs below and a head of baked earth.

The golem was crude and instructed with murderous simplicity. Moving with assassin speed it reached arms that weighed many tons and held the handlingers. They tried to face it. It took only minute beats of time for the golem to drive stone into the animal and break its neck, crushing the handlinger, the hand-parasite squirming in the horse’s mane.

The man was quicker. He spat fire that billowed without effect over the golem’s face. With impossible strength the man wrenched at the arm of coagulated stone and dislocated it, so the golem moved clumsily. But its grip held. Even with its arm falling off in grots, the golem pulled the dangling man down, gripped his legs with one pebbled hand and his head with another and twisted him apart.

As the host was killed, while the flung-apart corpse was still
in the air, the golem ceased, its task done. Its rocks and dust fell. They cracked and rumbled in a bloodied pile, half buried the dead horse.

The host’s ruined parts rolled into bracken and sent blood down the stones. Something was spasming beneath the suit.

“Get away,” Cutter said. “It wants another host.”

Drogon began to fire at it while the corpse still descended. The thing had just come to rest when something many-legged the purple of a bruise scuttled from its clothes. It came with arachnid gait.

They scattered. Pomeroy’s gun boomed but the thing did not let up, and it was only feet from Elsie screaming when Drogon’s repeated shots stopped it. The whispersmith walked toward it firing as he went, three bullets sent precisely to the thing hidden in grass. He kicked it, hauled it up ragged and bloody.

It was a hand. A mottled right hand. From its wrist a short tail grew. It swung deadweight and dripping.

“Dextrier,”
the whispersmith said to Cutter.
“Warrior caste.”

There was another commotion, like some big animal was shifting through trees. Cutter turned and tried to bring unloaded guns to bear.

The noise again, and something shifted in a grove a half mile off. Something came out into the sun. A giant, an immense grey man. They watched without knowing what to do or say as it walked toward them. Cutter cried out and began to run. He picked up speed as the clay man approached and he saw someone waving to him from its back: a man who leapt down and came toward him with his arms wide, shouting something no one could hear, every one of his steps, and Cutter’s, sending up pollen and sticky insects that stained them.

Cutter ran up; the man ran down. Cutter called out; he called the man by name. Cutter was crying. “We found you,” he said. “We found you.”

part two

RETURNS

CHAPTER SIX

A window burst open high above the market. Windows everywhere opened above markets. A city of markets, a city of windows.

New Crobuzon again. Unceasing, unstintingly itself. Warm that spring, gamy: the rivers were stinking. Noisy. Uninterrupted New Crobuzon.

What circled around and over the city’s upreached fingers? Birdlife, aerial vermin, wyrmen (laughing, monkey-footed things), and airships of cool colours, and smoke and clouds. The natural
inclines of the land were all forgotten by New Crobuzon, which
rose or fell according to quite other whims: it was mazed in three dimensions. Tons of brick and wood, concrete, marble and
iron, earth, water, straw and daub, made roofs and walls.

In the days the sun burned away the colours of those walls, burned the raggedy ends of posters that covered them like feathers, making them all slowly a tea-yellow. Oddments of ink told of old entertainments, while concrete desiccated. There was the famous stencil-painting of the Iron Councillor, repeated in incompetent series by some dissident graffitist. There were skyrails, strung between jags of architecture like the broken-off pillars of some godly vault. The wires sliced air and made sound, so wind played New Crobuzon as an instrument.

Night brought new light, elyctro-barometric tubes of glowing gas, glass in convolutes, made to spell out names and words or sketch pictures in outline. A decade gone they had not existed or had been very long forgotten: now the streets after dark were all dappled by their distinct and vivid glare, washing out the gaslamps.

There was such noise. It came without remorse. There were always people everywhere. New Crobuzon.

“. . . and then the
oth
er op-er-at-or told the
form
al in-stee-gay-tor that his
suit
could not be heard the very
thought
was quite absurd . . .”

On stage chanteuse Adeleine Gladner, under her singing name Adely Gladly (pronounced to rhyme,
Aderly Gladerly
), yelled and crooned through her number “Formal Instigation” to applause and catcalls drunken but loud and totally heartfelt. She minced, kicking under her skirts (her costume a long-dated exaggeration of a streetwalker’s flounces, so she looked more coy than libertine). She shook her lace trimmings at the punters and smiled, scooping up the flowers they threw without breaking her song.

Her celebrated voice was everything it was held to be, raucous and very beautiful. The audience were hers completely. Ori Ciuraz, at the rear of the hall, was sardonic but by no means immune. He did not know the others at his table well, only to tip his glass to. They watched Adely while he watched them.

Fallybeggar’s Hall was huge, clogged with smoke and drug smells. In the boxes and raised circle were the big men and their hangers-on, and sometimes the big women too. Francine 2 the khepri queenpin came here. Ori could not see well over the fringe of plaster drakows and obscene spirits, but he knew that the figure he saw moving in that box was a player in the militia, and that that one was one of the Fishbone Brothers, and that in that one was a captain of industry.

Up close to the orchestra by the stage it was a cramped clot of men and women, polyglot and many-raced, gazing at Adely’s ankles. Ori tracked tribal boundaries.

A slick of vagabonds, petty thieves and their bosses, discharged foreign soldiers, discharged jailbirds, dissolute rich and tinkers, beggars, pimps and their charges, chancers, knife-grinders, poets and police agents. Humans, here and there cactus-heads poking over the crowd (allowed in only if their thorns were plucked), the scarab-heads of khepri. Cigarillos hung from mouths, and people banged their glasses or cutlery in time while waiters went between them on the sawdusted floor. At the room’s edges small groups coagulated, and one like Ori—well-used to Fallybeggar’s—could see where they overlapped and where they separated, and make out their composition.

There must be militia in the hall, but none wore uniforms.
At the back the tall and muscled man, Derisov, was an agent—everyone knew it but did not know how high or how connected he was, so would not risk killing him. Near him a group of artists, debating their schools and movements with sectarian passion.

Closer to Ori and watching him, a table of well-turned-out young men, New Quillers, dry-spitting ostentatiously when any xenian came too close. They would hate Ori more than khepri or cactus, as he was race-renegade; and emboldened suddenly by the environs, by cosmopolitan and raucous Fallybeggar’s, Ori raised
his head to meet their gazes and put his arm around the old
she-vodyanoi beside him. She turned in surprise but, seeing the Quillers, gave a grunt of approval and leaned into Ori, making exaggerated eyes at him and them in turn.

“Good lad,” she said, but with his heart fast Ori would only stare at the four men who watched him. One spoke angrily to his companions but was hushed, and the one who quieted him raised his eyebrows to Ori and tapped his watch and mouthed
later.

Ori was not afraid. His own tribe were near. He almost nodded at the Quiller in sarky challenge, but such complicity revolted him and he turned away. He could see his friends and comrades at their arguments, disagreeing more fiercely than the painters, but they would come together to fight with him if needed. And there were several of them. The Quillers could not face the insurrectionists.

The crowd were raving for Adely by now, singing along with her show-opener and making delighted pitter-patter motions with their fingers as she concluded—“once a
gain,
in the
raaaaain
”—and then becoming delirious with applause. The Quillers, artists, and
all the other grouplets joined in with no restraint.

“Oh now thank you all, oh you’re my darlings, oh you are,” she said into the cheers and, professional as she was, they could hear her. She said: “I came out here to say good evening and ask you all to show a bit of willing to them who’s come up here tonight, give ’em a good welcome, let ’em know you love ’em. It’s their first time, some of ’em, and we all know what the first time’s like, don’t we? Bit of a disappointment, ain’t it, girls?” They broke up with laughter
at that, and in anticipation because it was so obvious a lead-in to her song “Are You Done?” And yes, there was the familiar comedy hoboy quacking like a duck, the opening bars, and Adely drew in a big breath, paused, then shouted “Later!” and ran offstage, to lighthearted boos and shouts of
tease!

The first act came into the lights. A singing family, two children done up as dolls and their mother playing a pianospiel. Most of the audience ignored them.

Cow,
thought Ori. She came on, Adely, and seemed so generous ushering in the beginners. But the crowd were there for her, so her little surprise opener could only weigh heavy on those who had to follow. She’d made them disappointments, no matter how good they were. Hard enough to come before a big name without sabotage like that, however sweetly done. Everyone would be limping through their acts, the audience eager to get back to Adely.

The harmony threesome gave way to a dancer. He was aging but agile, and Ori out of politeness paid attention, but he was one of only a few. Then a singing comedian, a poor hack who would have been jeered with or without Adely’s intervention.

All the entertainers were pure, unRemade human stock. It concerned Ori—he did not know if it was coincidence that with these Quillers looking on there were no xenian performers. Was the New Quill Party pulling strings at Fallybeggar’s? The suspicion was hateful.

At last the useless comedian was done. It was time for the final warm-up. T
HE
F
LEXIBLE
P
UPPET
T
HEATRE
, it said on the handbills. P
ERFORMING THE
S
AD AND
I
NSTRUCTIONAL
T
ALE OF
J
ACK
H
ALF-A
-P
RAYER
. It was them Ori had come to see. He was not there for Adely Gladly.

There were minutes of preparations behind the curtain, while the audience chatted about the main event, the Dog Fenn Songbird. Ori knew what the Flexible Puppet Theatre were getting ready, and he smiled.

When the velvet finally parted it did so without brass or percussion, and the performers waited, so for seconds there was no notice, until a couple of little gasps as the tobacco smoke seemed to clear and show the stage-within-a-stage. There were oaths. Ori saw one of the Quillers stand.

There was the usual—the cart-sized puppet theatre with its little carved figures in garish clothes stock-still on their stage—but the miniature wings and proscenium arch had been torn off, and the puppeteers stood in plain view dressed too-nearly like militia officers in dark grey. And the stage was littered with other things, strange debris. A sheet was stretched and hammered taut and on it some magic lantern was projecting newspaper print. There were people onstage whose roles were unclear, a gang of actors, and musicians, the Flexibles disdaining the house orchestra for an unkempt trio who wore pipes and flutes and held drumsticks by pieces of sheet steel.

Ori flashed his upturned thumb at the stage. His friends were standing dead still and silent until the mutters grew intrusive and slightly threatening, and from the back came a shout of
piss off.
And then with a massive, painful sound, someone pounded the metal. Instantly and underneath that still-reverberating noise another music-man struck a lovely, lively tune half-modelled on street-chants, and his companion played the steel gently like a snare.
An actor stepped forward—he was immaculate in a suit, waxed moustaches—bowed slightly, tipped his hat to the ladies in the front row, and bellowed an obscenity just-hidden from the censor by a consonant inserted at its beginning, an unconvincing nonsense-word.

And there was outrage again. But these Flexibles were consummate—arrogant pranksters yes but serious—and they played their audience with skill, so that after every such imposition was quick and funny dialogue, or jaunty music, and it was hard to
sustain anger. But it was an extraordinary challenge or series of challenges and the crowd vacillated between bewilderment and discontent. Ori realised it was a question of how much of the play they could get done before it was unsafe to perform.

No one was sure what it was they were seeing, this structureless thing of shouts and broken-up lines and noises, and cavalcades of intricate incomprehensible costumes. The puppets were elegantly manoeuvred, but they should have been—were designed to be—wooden players in traditionalist moral tales, not these little provocateurs whose puppeteers had them speak back tartly to the narrator, contradict him (always in the puppets’ traditional register, a cod-childish language of compound nouns and onomatopoeia), and dance to the noise and mum lewdness as far as their joints and strings would allow.

Images, even animations—pictures in such quick cycles that they jumped and ran or fired their guns—came in stuttering succession onto the screen. The narrator harangued the audience and argued with the puppets and the other actors, and over growing dissent from the stalls the story of Jack Half-a-Prayer emerged in chaotic form. This stilled the angry crowd somewhat—it was a popular story, and they wanted to see what this anarchic Nuevist crew would do with it.

The barebones introduction was familiar. “No one of us’ll forget, I’m sure,” the narrator said and he was right, no one could, it was only twenty years ago. The puppets sketched it out. Some obscure betrayal and Jack Half-a-Prayer, the legendary Jack, the fReemade boss, was caught. They cut his great mantis claw from his right hand—they’d given it to him in the punishment factories, but he’d used it against them, so they took it away. The puppets made this a scene gruesome with red-ribbon blood.

Of course the militia always said he was a bandit and a murderer, and he did kill, no one doubted that. But like most versions of the story, this one showed him as he was remembered: champion-rogue, hero. Jack got caught and it was a sad story, and the censors let the people have it so.

It wasn’t quite a public hanging they gave him—that wasn’t in the constitution—but they found a way to show him off. They’d tethered him on a giant stocks in BilSantum Plaza outside Perdido Street Station for days, and the overseer had used his whip at the slightest wriggle, deeming it resistance. They paid people to jeer, it was mostly agreed. Plenty of Crobuzoners came and didn’t cheer at all. There were those who said it was not the real Jack—
he’s no claw, they’ve found some poor bugger and lopped off his hand, is all
—but their tone was more despairing than convinced.

The puppets came and went in front of the little plywood whipping post to which the wooden Jack was strapped.

And then
da-da-da-da-da
went the metal drum. All of the actors on the stage began to shout and gesture at the militia-puppets, and the screen came up with the word everyone! and even the
sceptical audience played along and began to shout
over here, over here.
That was how it had been—a diversion from some in the crowd, orchestrated or chance was debated, though Ori had his own thoughts. As the militia dangled across the little puppet-stage, Ori remembered.