Iron Council - China Mieville [120]
And at that someone from Runagate Rampant barked, “Yeah, so fight to lose, fight for defeat,” and there was angry calling from those who saw stupidity in this. They yelled at the Runagaters that they supported Tesh, that they were agents of the Crawling Liquid, but before there were fists between the factions, the whistles of the guards went, and the crowd began to scatter. Ori wrote fast on a tear of paper.
Militia were coming. People were prepared, and they ran. Ori ran too, but not for the doors or the broken fence. He went straight for the speaker.
Pushed past the bickering Caucus members who surrounded him. Some recognised Ori, stared at him with greeting or query stillborn as he went past them to the raging soldier-Jack. Ori put
his name and his address into the speaker’s pocket, and whispered.
“Who’ll take them out?” he said. “We will. These lot won’t. Come find me.”
And then there was the burring of propellers and an airship protruded over them. Ropes spilled down and dribbled armoured militia. There were the sounds of dogs. The gates of the Paradox Warehouse were too full of people, and there was a panic. “Men-o’-war!” someone shouted, and yes there slowly rising to swell over the walls were the grotesque gland-bodies contoured with extrusions and organic holes, ridden by militia manipulating the exposed nerves of the giant filament-dangling things, flying them sedately toward the crews of Caucusists, the toxin in their tendrils dripping. Ori ran.
There would be other militia squads on the street: shunnriders, plainclothes infiltrators. Ori had to take care. He itched at the sense that some sharpshooter might target him from the airship. But he knew the ways through these streets. Most of the audience had already disappeared in New Crobuzon’s brick tangles, careering past startled shop holders and corner-hanging vagrants to stop suddenly and walk like everyone else was walking, a few streets on. Later, a mile away on the other side of the river, Ori heard that no one had been captured or killed, and was savagely delighted.
The soldier’s name was Baron. He told Ori without any sense of the secrecy and care with which the dissidents did their business. He turned up two nights later. When Ori opened his door to him, Baron was holding Ori’s paper. “Tell me then,” Baron had said. “What is it you’ll do? Who the fuck are you, chaver?”
“How come they ain’t got you yet?” Ori asked. Baron said there were hundreds of militia gone AWOL. Most of those planning to go into hiding were keeping their heads down, readying for the black survivalist economy of New Crobuzon, staying out of sight of their erstwhile colleagues. With the chaos in the city, he said, it would be impossible for the militia to keep track of all their men. No day passed without a strike or riot: the numbers of the unemployed were growing, there were attacks on xenians by Quillers and on Quillers by xenians and dissidents. Some in Parliament were arguing for compromise, meeting the guilds.
“I ain’t hiding,” said Baron. “I don’t care.”
They approached The Terrible Magpie in Riverskin, near the cactus ghetto. Ori would not go to The Two Maggots, or any place so known as a dissidents’ hole that it would be watched. Here in Riverskin the roads were quiet gullies between damp wood houses. The worst trouble they were likely to find was from the gangs of drugged cactus youth who lounged and carved keloid tattoos into their green skins, sitting on the girders at the base of the Glasshouse as it loomed eighty yards high, a quarter of a mile across where it cut streets out of New Crobuzon like a stencil. The cactus punks watched Ori and Baron but did not accost them.
Something had happened to Baron. He said nothing explicit to make Ori wonder about his experiences, but it was in his pauses, in the ways he did not say things. A rage. Ori supposed there were as many unspeakable stories as there were men come back from war. Baron was thinking of