Iron Council - China Mieville [122]
He doesn’t care if he dies, Ori thought that night. Baron terrified him. He’ll kill if we tell him. He’ll kill if we let him.
That ain’t a man who learnt his fighting in the wilds. The quick and brute expertise with which he swept a room, the one-two-three taking in of all corners. Baron had done this many times before, this urban violence. Baron was no recent recruit, a jobless man found a job, a rushed soldier.
What can Toro do? Ori wondered. He had never seen his boss fight.
“What’s that helmet?” he said, and Ulliam told him that Toro had come out of the punishment factories or the jail, or the wilds, or the undertown, and gone on a long and arduous search to find a craftsman and the materials, had had the helmet made: the rasulbagra it was sometimes called, the head of the bull. Ulliam told him the unbelievable stories of its powers and the way it had been made, the long dangers of its forging, the years. “Years in jail, years hunting the pieces, years wearing it,” he said. “You’ll see what it can do.”
Each of the crew had their own tasks. Ori was sent to steal rockmilk and hexed liquors from laboratories. He knew a plan was coming. He could see its glimmers in his instructions.
Get a plan of the lower floors of Parliament. Get what? Ori did not know how to start. Make friends with a clerk at the magisters’ offices. Find the name of the Mayor’s undersecretary. Get day work in Parliament, wait for more instructions.
The air of strikes and insurrection was growing: Ori felt it, detached, excited.
Spiral Jacobs came back to the soup kitchen. Ori felt a strange unburdening at the sight of him. Jacobs was lucid, shrewd that night, staring at Ori with stoat eyes.
“Your money keeps helping us,” Ori said. “But I got instructions now I can’t do nothing with.” He told. “What’s that, then?”
They were at the river wall in Griss Fell, just down from the confluence, with Strack Island and the spires of Parliament sheer out of the Gross Tar. Its lights shone grey in the evening; their reflections in the water were drab. A cat was mewing from Little Strack, stranded somehow on the stub of land in the river. Spiral Jacobs spat at the waterpillars that had marked the limits of the Old Town. They were tremendously ancient stone carvings, a winding path of stylised figures ascending, depicting events from the early histories of New Crobuzon. Where they met the water they were defaced by delinquent vodyanoi.
“They trying for different things, ain’t they?” Jacobs took Ori’s cigarillo. “They ain’t got a strategy, have they? They’re trying for all different things. Lots of ways in.” He smoked and thought and shook his head. “Damn, but this ain’t how Jack would have done it.” He laughed.
“How would Jack have done it?”
Jacobs kept looking at the glow-end of his smoke.
“Mayor can’t stay in Parliament all the time.” He spoke with care. “Someone like the Mayor, though, can’t just go walking, or riding. Has to have protection, yes? Has to trust them. Wherever they go—Jack told me this, Jack watched for this—wherever they go, Mayor’s Clypean Guard take over. They’re the only ones trusted.” He looked up. His face was not impish or playful. “Imagine if one of them were turned. Imagine if one could be bought.”
“But they’re chosen just so’s they can’t be bought . . .”
“History . . .” Jacobs spoke with terse authority. Brought Ori to a hush. “Is all full. And dripping. With the corpses. Of them who trusted the incorruptible.”
He gave Ori a name. Ori stared while the old tramp walked away. He hobbled into view in each puddled streetlight until he reached the end of the alley and leaned, a tired old man with chalk on his fingers.
“Where do you go?” Ori said. His