Iron Council - China Mieville [143]
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
People could not walk New Crobuzon’s streets without looking up. Past the aerostats and the wyrmen, the hundreds of lives—alien, indigenous, created—that teemed the city’s skies, they looked at the cold white and the austere sun, and wondered if another of those searing organic shadows would come.
“They’re still trying to parley,” Baron told the crew. He had it from Bertold, who had inferred it from the Mayor’s forays to the embassy wing with diplomats and linguists.
Ori returned to the shelter. Ladia welcomed him, but she was wary. She looked so exhausted he was shocked. As ever there were men and women the colours of dirt lying where gravity huddled them, but now the hall itself was scarred. The walls were tattooed with splinters and ripped-up paint; the windows were boarded.
“Quillers,” she told him. “Three days ago. They heard we were . . . affiliated. We were slack, Ori, left papers around. With what’s going on in Dog Fenn, I suppose, we’ve been distracted: it’s been impossible to be so careful. We got cocky.”
He made her lie down, and though she bantered with him she cried when he laid her out on the old sofa, cried and held onto him for seconds, then sniffed and patted him, made a last joke and slept. He cleaned for her. Some of the homeless helped him. “We had a play yesterday,” one broken-toothed woman said to him as she wiped the tables. “Some Flexible troupe. Come to play for us. Very good it was, though not like nothing I’d seen before. I couldn’t really hear what they was saying. But it was nice, you know, good of them to come and do that for us.”
No one had seen Jacobs for days. “He’s been around, though. He’s been busy. You seen? His mark’s all over.”
The chalk spirals that Jacobs left wherever he went, that had given him his name, continued to disseminate, gone viral. They were in all quarters, in paint and thick wax colour, in tar; they were carved onto temples, scratched on glass and the girders of the towerblocks.
“You think he really started it? Maybe he’s just copying someone else. Maybe no one started it at all. You heard how it’s turning? People are using it as a slogan. It’s been adopted.”
Ori had heard and seen it. Spirals that tailed into obscenities levelled at the government. Shouts of Spiral away! when the militia appeared. Why that and not another of the symbols that had defaced walls for years?
The old man’s corner was grey with spirals. Ink and graphite, in different sizes, the angles and directions of the curves variant, and here were spirals off spirals in intricate series. It could be a language, Ori thought. Clockwise or widdershins, stopping after so many turns, in differing directions and numbers; derivatives budded from each corkscrew whorl.
For nine nights, Ori came. He volunteered the night shift. “I got to do this,” he told Old Shoulder. “I’ll do what you need in the day, but I got to do something.”
The Toroans granted him a kind of sabbatical, without trust. As he walked, Ori would stop, fasten his shoe buckle, lean against a wall and look behind him. If not Baron, someone would be following him, he was sure: he knew that the first time he spoke to someone that his unseen watcher, his fellow Bull-runner, did not trust, he was dead. Or perhaps there was no one. He did not know what he was to his comrades.
In The Two Maggots, Petron Carrickos gave Ori a book of his poems, self-published as Flexible Press.
“Been a long damn time, Ori,” he said. He had a shade of wariness—his mouth twitched to ask Where’ve you been? You disappeared—but he bought Ori grappa and spoke to him about his projects. Petron held Runagate Rampant—not quite openly, but with the new bolshiness of the times.
Ori read a stanza aloud.
“A season here/In your flower/Petals of wood and iron/Lockstock stonedead shock of a Dog Fenn frown.” He nodded.
Petron told Ori about the Flexibles: who was doing what, who had stayed part of something, who had disappeared. “Samuel’s buggered off. He’s selling stuff in some tarty gallery