Iron Council - China Mieville [139]
The knit-worker stretched her hand across the table.
“Madeleina,” she said deliberately. “Di Farja.”
He shook her hand, moved by her trust. “Ori,” he said, as if she didn’t know.
“I tell you something, Ori. We’re in a race. The Caucus is in a race to get things ready. It’ll be weeks or months yet. And we won’t just go round and round—we’re making it a race to something. We ain’t stupid, you know. We’re racing to build what we have to, chains of—” She looked around. “—chains of command, communication. Last night was the start. There’s a way to go, but it’s started. The war’s going sour, they say. The maimed’ll fill the streets. If Tesh could send over that—” She closed her eyes and held her breath, retrospectively aghast. “—that thing, that sky-born witness, what else might they do? Time . . . we ain’t got much time.
“And the Iron Council’s coming back,” she said. “When people hear that, it’ll go off.”
Maybe we’re all together, Ori thought with a plaintiveness that troubled him. Maybe the Caucus race is our race too . . .
“We’re all racing,” he said.
“Yeah, but some of us in the wrong direction.”
He thought then of what it would be. Of that moment when the dispossessed, the toilers, the, yes if she wanted, yes, the commonalty heard that the Mayor, the head of the Fat Sun, the arbiter of New Crobuzon, was gone. What that would be.
“You want to talk inspiration?” he said. He was angry again, at her monomaniac prescription. “That I’ll give you,” he said. “You’ll thank me, Jack. What we’re doing, what we’re doing . . . we need to wake people up.”
“They’re already awake, Jack. That’s what you don’t see.”
He shook his head.
Bertold Sulion the Clypean Guard had lost his commitment to New Crobuzon, to the Mayor, to the law he was pledged to. Baron told them.
“It’s bled out of him,” he said. “You ain’t trusted to much when you’re a Clypean. The oath you take says it all: I see and hear only what the Mayor and my charges allow me to. Bertold don’t know so much. But he knows the war’s being lost. And he’s seen the deals they’ll do while them he trained with fight and die. It’s all gone rancid. His loyalty’s bled out of him and there ain’t nothing left.
“That’s the thing,” he said. He spoke with care. “It’s in you like your blood.” He patted his sternum. “And when it goes bad, when it goes septic, you might say, you bleed it out and then either something else fills it, or it leaves you empty. Sulion ain’t got nothing in him anymore. He wants to grass, and for form’s sake, he’s asking a lot of money for it, but it ain’t the money he wants. He wants to betray because he wants to betray. He wants us to help him go bad. Whether he knows it or not.”
They were not in Badside. Here are keys for you, the note had said, pinned by one of the two-horned cesti to the wall. We have a new meeting house. An address. Ori had read the note with Enoch, and they had stared at each other. Enoch was a stupid man, but this time Ori shared his confusion. “Flag Hill?”
At the edge of the city, at the end of the Head Line unrolling north from Perdido Street Station, Flag Hill was where the bankers and industrialists lived, the officials, the wealthiest artists. It was a landscape of wide-open ways and sumptuous houses sheer onto the streets, backing onto shared gardens. There were flowering trees and banyans spilling their knotting creepers and making them roots and trunks, emerging from between black paving.
There had been a slum in Flag Hill for years, like an abscess: an oddity of city planning. Mayor Tremulo the Reformer, two centuries past, had ordered some streets of modest housing built on the slopes of the rise that gave the area its name, so that the heroes of the Pirate Wars, he said, could live by those they had defended. The Flag Hill rich had not welcomed the newcomers, and Mayor Tremulo’s schemes for “social merging” had been made risible. Without money what had been modest became a slum. Slate and brick went sickly. The little community of