Iron Council - China Mieville [118]
Ori did not speak. He watched her and tensed only a second when it seemed one man’s anger at what he called her Tesh-love would make him violent, but she calmed him. Ori did not think she convinced everyone—he was not sure of his own feelings for the war, beyond that both sides were bastards, and that he did not care—but she did well. When the others had gone he waited and applauded her, and he was only half mocking.
“Where’s Jack?” Ori said. “The Jack who used to take these?”
“Curdin?” she said. “Gone. Militia. Snatched. No one knows.”
They were silent. She gathered her papers. Curdin was dead or jailed or who knew what.
“Sorry.”
She nodded.
“You did well.”
She nodded again. “He told me about you.” She did not look at him. “He told me a lot about you. He was disappointed you weren’t coming no more. Thought a lot of you. ‘Boy’s got the anger,’ he said. ‘Hope he knows what to do with it.’ So . . . so what’s it like on the wild side, Jack? How’s it with, with the Bonnot Gang, or Toro, or Poppy’s lot or whoever you’re with now? Think people don’t know? So, so what is it you’re doing now?”
“More than you.” But he hated his petulance and did not want to fight, so he said, “How’d you take over?” He meant You know so much, you argue well, you’ve risen to this. When last he saw her he would have been the experienced dissident, with insurrectionist philosophy: and now he had been present at deaths and was harder, and had been cut by a militia knife and knew how to talk to the danger-scum of the east city, but she knew more than him, and it had only been some weeks.
She shrugged.
“It’s the time,” she said. She tried to be dismissive, then met his eye. “Do you . . . How could you do this now? Now? What d’you think’s happening? Do you know what’s going on? Do you feel it? Five foundries went out last week, Jack. Five. The Rétif Platform of the dockers’ guild’s in talks with the vodyanoi for a cross-race union. That’s our chaverim pulling that, that’s Double-R. The next march we have we’ll make into a meeting, and we won’t have to moulder like this.” She waved at the close walls, brought her fists down on her thighs. She almost stamped. “And you’ve heard the stories. You know what’s returning? What’s coming back to us? And you choose now to go be an adventurer? To turn your back on the commonalty?”
The word made him breathe a sneer. The jargon of it, the commonalty, the commonalty that the Double-Rs spoke of so relentlessly.
“We’re doing things,” he said. Her tirade made him uneasy—or perhaps melancholic, nostalgic. He did not know of the actions and the changes that she spoke of, that he would once have been part of. But all his excitement, his pride came up in him and effaced anxiety, and he smiled. “Oh Jack,” he had said. “You don’t know what we’ll do.”
The door of the office opened and Old Shoulder and Marcus emerged, seen only by Ori. The cactus-man held Ori’s eyes and then was gone behind the curious crowd.
Carefully, not too sudden, Ori let Catlina know they were done, and they let their voices down like two people tired of arguing. Ori walked under the skyrails and the arches of the Dexter Line, the trains over his head lit up by gas, under skies awash in brown dusk, toward Badside where Toro was waiting. He walked back to his masked boss, whom he saw so rarely, whose face he never saw, leaving a dead man behind him.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Ori went to the docks of Kelltree. There was a congregation, made to look spontaneous, which the Caucus and its factions had spread word of for weeks. They could not have listed it in RR or The Forge so had relied on graffiti, handslang and rumour. The militia would close them down: the question was how long they had. A mass milled in the forefront of the Paradox Warehouse, dockworkers and a few clerks, human mostly, but all the races were there; even Remade, carefully at the edges of the crowd.
From canals that linked the docks to the river, vodyanoi watched the gathering. A few score yards away,