Iron Council - China Mieville [115]
He felt cocky challenge at the glances from the well-dressed locals. Night was coming. Ori fingered his weapons.
At the junction he saw his contacts. Old Shoulder and the others did not acknowledge him, but they walked at the same pace under the willows that softened each corner and on to Crosshatch Avenue.
It was one of the city’s prettiest places. Shops and houses pillared, studded with fossils in the old Os Tumulus style. They were fronted for a stretch by the famous glasheim, a facade of stained glass centuries old whose designs ranged across the divides of the buildings. Guards protected it, and no carts could pass over the cobblestones outside it and risk shards. Once, Ori had suggested trying to break it, as a provocation, but even Toro’s crew had seemed shocked. They were not here for that. Old Shoulder slouched toward an office.
And then the careful ballet that they had walked through so many times in the deserted warehouse: two steps, one two, Ori was by the door, and bumping, three four, into the woman Catlina; they shuffled as rehearsed; Ori tripped; Marcus slipped into the office with Shoulder as Ori and Catlina yelled, decoying.
Elyctro-barometric lights were spitting all around them, making the glasheim incandesce and staining Ori and Catlina ghost colours. They abused each other, and he watched the door over her shoulder, ready to call her dog, the signal for her to draw attention with screams should anyone seem ready to look inside the office where their comrades were. They must be interrogating their quarry. Who’ve you sold out? Shoulder would be saying.
The glasheim guards approached but did not look anywhere but at him and Catlina. The shopkeepers watched wary and amused, and the uptown shoppers stared from café fronts. Ori was astonished. Didn’t they know that things were happening? How did Nigh Sump shield itself?
Soon—and the thought was uncomfortable though he strained for ruthlessness—soon Old Shoulder would kill the informant. He would do it quickly, then stab his deadness with a double-horned cestus that left marks like a bull’s gore.
There’s a war, Ori wanted to shout. Outside the city. And inside too. Does it tell you that in your papers? Instead he performed.
Toro gave them instructions, was not bitter or vicious but stressed what was necessary. This was necessary. Toro had linked the man suddenly to arrest-chains, to the towers of the militia, to the snatch-squads who predated on guildsmen and activists. The man in the office was a militiaman, a backroom-man, a nexus of informers. Old Shoulder would find out what he could, and then he would kill him.
Ori thought of the first time he had seen Toro.
It had been down to Spiral Jacobs’ money. I want to make a contribution, Ori had said, and let Old Shoulder know that this was not just another week’s hoardings. I want in, he had said, and Old Shoulder had pursed his green lips and nodded and come back to him two days later. Come now. Bring the money.
Over Barley Bridge, out of Dog Fenn to Badside. An apocalypse landscape of long-deserted slag and stagnant shipyards, where the keels of vessels poked from their internment in shallow waters. No one salvaged these sculptures in rust. Old Shoulder led Ori to a hangar where dirigibles were once built, and Ori waited in the shade of its mooring mast.
The gang came. A few men and women; a Remade named Ulliam, a big man in his fifties who walked carefully,