Iron Council - China Mieville [116]
Little dusts came up with each of Toro’s steps. Toro, Ori thought, stared hard, with awe.
Toro moved like a mime, an exaggerated padding so unbullish Ori almost laughed. Toro was slighter than he, shorter, almost like a child, but walked with a precision that said I am something to fear. The thin figure was surmounted with a massive headpiece, a great bulk of iron and brass that looked too heavy to be carried by such tight little muscles, but Toro did not totter. Of course the helmet was a bull’s head.
Stylized, made from knots of metalwork, gnarled by the residue of fights. The myth, that helmet. More than dumb metal. Ori tasted hex. The horns were ivory or bone. The snout ended in a grille mimicking teeth; the exhaust pipe was a nose ring. The eyes were perfect, round, tiny portholes in tempered glass that glowed white—whether backlit or hexed, Ori could not see. He could not see human eyes behind them.
Toro stopped and raised a hand, and spoke, and from that little body had come a profound bass, an animal vibration so low that Ori was delighted. Little wisps of steam gusted from the nose ring, and Toro threw back its head. It was, Ori was astounded, it was the voice of a bull, speaking Ragamoll.
“You have something for me,” Toro said, and eager as a pilgrim Ori threw the sack of money.
“I counted it,” Old Shoulder said. “Some of it’s old, some of it’ll be a bitch to shift, but there’s a lot. He’s a good lad.”
And he was there, in. No more tests, no more fool’s jobs to prove himself.
Still junior, he was lookout or distraction, and that was enough for him. He had made himself part of something. He had not considered holding back some money, though he could live on it for a long time. Some of it came back to him anyway: they paid him to work at their crimes and insurrectionary revenge.
New Crobuzon became a new city for him. Now where he looked at streets he saw in them escapes, routes for incursions: he remembered the urban techniques of his childhood.
He had come to a more fierce existence. His heart quickened past any militia; he watched for signs on the walls. With the scatology, pornography and insults were more important marks. Chalked devices, runes and pictograms, where base thaumaturgy occurred (wards, preservers, pranks to turn milk and beer). There were sigils that were spreading by some memesis, that he saw now in all quarters: cochlear swirls and many-edged ideograms. He looked for the graffiti by which the gangs communicated. Calls to battle and parlay in terse paint slogans. Apocolypse cultism and rumour: Ecce Jabber, Vedne Save Us!, IC’s steaming home! Toro was in a hinterland between factions like the Proscribed and the Runagates, and the thief-gangs, the murderers of the east city. Toro’s crew were known to both sides.
Twice Ori negotiated with gangsters. He went with Old Shoulder and the Remade Ulliam to beg-threaten the crew of razor-eyed boys called the Murkside Shrikes, asking them to stay away from the docks where their nihilist depredations risked bringing the militia. Ori looked at the Shrikes with naked hate but paid them off as Toro had instructed. Once he went alone to Bonetown, and in the sight of the huge age-cracked chest-cage he made a careful deal with Mr. Motley’s vizier, buying a bulk quantity of shazbah. He did not know what Toro did with it.
He rarely saw Toro. For stretches it was a dull and insular life. They did not read as the Runagaters had read. His new comrades played games in the Badside warehouse, went “scouting,” which was walking without aim. No one ever quite spoke their ultimate plan, their target; no one ever quite said what they wanted to do. No one ever said the Mayor’s name or even the word mayor, but instead chair-of-the-board or pigboss: speaking the truth had become a shibboleth. When d’you suppose we might ah help our-friend-at-the-head-of-the-meeting take a permanent sabbatical downstairs?