Iron Council - China Mieville [123]
The old man licked his lips and hovered. Would he speak? Ori saw him deciding.
“Not all Jack’s paths is dried up,” he said. “There’s ways of knowing. Ways of hearing things. I know.” Tapped his nose, comedically conspiratorial. “I know things, ain’t it? But I’m too old to be a player now, boy. Leave that to the young and angry.”
He repeated the name. He smiled again and walked away. And Ori knew he should go after him, should try again to bring him into the orbit of Toro. But there was a very strong and strange respect in him, something close to awe. Ori had taken to wearing marks on his clothes, coils mimicking the spirals Jacobs left on walls. Spiral Jacobs came and went in his strange ways, and Ori could not deny him his exits.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Old Shoulder was delighted with Ori’s information, the name, but cheerfully disbelieved his claims to its provenance.
“Drinking in the right pubs in Sheck my green arse, boy,” he said. “This is insider stuff. You ain’t telling. You’ve a contact you’re guarding. You hoarding him? Her? Some officer’s tart? You been doing some horizontal recruitment, Ori? Whatever. I don’t know what you’re doing but this is . . . this is gold. If it’s true. So I ain’t going to push it.
“I trust you, boy—wouldn’t have brought you in if I didn’t. So whatever you’re keeping this for, I’m thinking it’s for reasons that make sense. But I can’t say I like it. If you’re playing some game . . .” If you’re on another side he did not say. “Or even if you’re doing it for the right reasons but you’re just wrong, even if you just make a wrong call and mess us all up, you got to know I’d kill you.”
Ori was not even intimidated. Old Shoulder was suddenly vastly annoying to him.
He stood up carefully to the cactacae, met his eyes. “I’ll give my life for this,” he said, and it was true, he realised. “I’ll take the Mayor down, take off the fucking head of this snake-government. But you know, tell me, Shoulder. If I was playing you? If this information I got for us—that’s going to let us damn well do what we been wanting to do—if it was me setting you up, how’d you go about killing me after, Shoulder? Because you’re the one who’d be dead.”
It was a mistake. He saw Old Shoulder’s eyes. But Ori could not regret his provocation. He tried but he could not.
Baron frightened them all. They had seen that he could shoot and fight, but they were not sure if he could persuade. They briefed him with great anxiety, until he snapped at them to shut up and trust him. There was no choice.
“We need a man who knows how to speak militia to militia,” Toro said. The mechanisms or thaumaturgy of the helmet turned the words into lowing. Ori looked at the body so dwarfed by that helmet but somehow not ridiculous, dancer-tight and hard. The lamps of those featureless round eyes sprayed out light. “We’re crims,” Toro said. “Can’t talk to the militia—they’d see into us. Need someone who has no guilt. Who’s one of them. Knows barrack slang. We need a militiaman.”
There were militia quarters about the city. Some were hidden. All were protected with hex and firepower. But near each one were militia pubs, and all the dissidents knew which they were.
Bertold Sulion, the man whose name Spiral Jacobs had given Ori, and which Ori had given to his comrades, was, Jacobs said, a dissatisfied Clypean Guard, loyalty becoming nihilism or greed. He would be stationed in Parliament itself, by or in the Mayor’s quarter. And that meant the pubs below the skyrails and the militia tower at the wedge of Brock Marsh, where the rivers converged.
Brock Marsh, the magician’s arrondissement. Oldest part of an old city. In the north, with pebbled streets and yawing wooden lean-tos full of charmed equipment, karcists, bionumanists, physicists