Iron Council - China Mieville [141]
“Was Badside compromised?” Ruby said. Toro did not sit, but seemed to lean, to be resting held up on nothing. Ori could feel the hex in those horns.
“You know what we aim to do. You know what we’ve wanted, what we build for.” Toro’s unnatural deep tones were a constant shock, a static charge. “The chair-of-the-board is in Parliament. On Strack Island. In the river. Vodyanoi militia in the water, cactus guards, officers in every chamber. Thaumaturges, the best in the city, putting up buffers and orneryblocks, charmtraps, all sorts. We ain’t getting into Parliament.
“And then there’s the Spike, and Perdido Street Station. You-know-who has to spend a lot of time in the Spike. Commanding the militia. Or in the station. In the embassy wing, in the high-tower.” It was more than the hub of New Crobuzon’s trains. It was a town, in three dimensions, encased in brick. The vastness of its mad-made architecture disobeyed not only rules of style but, it was said, of physics.
“When our quarry’s there, it ain’t as if it’s just the Perdidae we got to face.” Not that they would be easy to defeat. The dedicated submilitia given over to protect the station were well-armed and trained. “Wherever the chair-of-the-board goes, the Clypeans go. They’re our worry.
“What about in town? When did you last see any Fat Sun bigwig give a speech? They’re too scared, too busy trying to make secret peace with Tesh. So we need another strategy.” There was a long quiet.
“You-know-who is very close, intimate with one particular magister. Magister Legus. Weekly they meet. There’s all rumours, if you know who to ask. At Legus’ private house. Where he lives as a citizen, takes off his mask. They settle down in private. Sometimes they don’t part again until the morning.
“Happens every week, sometimes twice. In the magister’s house.
“The house next door.”
Tumult. How do you know? someone was shouting, and You can’t, and Whose is this place? How did you get this? and on.
Ori had a memory. Something in him flinched from an understanding, unsettling, that veered close and was gone again and then was back. Ori saw others remembering, not sure what it was they remembered, not threading things together.
“It was hard to find out the true name behind a nom de jure,” Toro was saying. “But I did it. Took me a long time. Tracked him down.” Ori heard through gauze.
“This is the house . . .” Ori said, and then said nothing more. No one heard him and he was glad of that. He did not know what he wanted to do. He did not know what he felt.
This is the house where the old couple lived. That I heard about, the job you did, months ago, soon after I gave you the money. That the papers railed at. You killed them, or Old Shoulder did or one of us, and it weren’t that they was militia at all. They was rich, but you wouldn’t do them for that. It weren’t because they was rich but because of where they lived. You needed them gone so you could buy this house. That’s what you did with Jacobs’ money.
Ori felt gutted. He swallowed many times.
He sat hard on his own instincts. Something welled in him. All the uncertainty, the desperate lack of knowledge, then the weight of knowledge but vacillation of ideas, the shameful hash of theory that had sent him to the Runagaters, to all the different sects and dissidents, looking for something to ground him, a political home, which he had found in the anger and anarchist passion of Toro. His uncertainty came back. He knew what he felt—that this was a dreadful thing, that he was aghast—but he remembered the exhortations to contextualise, always to have context, that the Runagaters above all had always stressed.
If one death’ll stop ten, ain’t it better? If two deaths’ll save a city?
He was still. He had a sense that he did not know best, that he had to learn, that he was a better man in this collective than out, that