Iron Council - China Mieville [144]
“And just how does the Convulsive New go down with the commonalty?” It was a keystone concept from the second Nuevist Manifesto. Ori was sardonic.
“They like the Convulsive New just fine, Ori. Just fine.”
There was an illicit congress of all the underground guilds, the militant factory workers of Smog Bend and Gross Coil, spreading, Petron said, to other industries. Delegates from foundries, shipyards, dye plants, in a secret Dog Fenn location, discussing what demands to put to Parliament.
“Caucus is talking to them, too,” he said, and Ori nodded. He did not say, as he thought, More talking, talking again, that’s the problem, ain’t it?
At a crowded canalside market in Sangwine they reached, as part of the aimless walking that Petron theorised as a reconfiguration of the city, they came to sudden screams. “What in gods’, what in gods’, “ someone was shouting, and there was a strange back-
forward surge of crowd, people running to see what was happening and fleeing again past the stalls of books and trinket jewellery.
A woman lay in shudders by the lock and the watergates, her skirt puddled, her hair crawling like worms in static that made the air shake. People stared at her and tensed, made to run in and grab her and pull her away, but they blenched at the manifestation above her.
Vapour, a slick and sickly bruise-blue—a purpling as if the world itself, the air, was bleeding beneath its skin. The air souring and, like badness in milk, particles of matter coagulating from nothing, clots of rank aether aggregated into organising shape, and then there was a moving insectile thing made of scabbed nothing and sudden shade that twisted in the air as if suspended by thread and glimmered visible and invisible and then was unquestionably there, a hook-legged thing in the colours of rot, as large as a man. A wasp, its waist bone-thin below a thorax that refracted light like mottled glass, its sting like a curved finger beckoning from its abdomen, extending and adrip.
It cleaned its legs with its intricate mouth. It turned ugly compound eyes and looked at the aghast crowd. It unfolded its limbs one by one and shuddered and was moved, though not it seemed by the motion of those legs, but still as if it dangled and some giant hand holding its line had shifted. It came closer.
The woman was seizing. Her face had gone dark. She was not breathing. There was a gasp, a choking in the front of those watching. Two others fell. A man, another woman, fitting epileptically, flecking with spittle and vomit.
“Get out of the way!” The militia. From the entrance to the market. They came firing, and the sounds of the guns broke the cold that had held people, and they scattered screaming. Ori and Petron ducked but did not run, pushed away from the noisome apparition and watched the militia fire into its corpus.
Bullets went through it, to break glass and china beyond. The woman in its shadow spat and died. In a fever of shot, the wasp trilled and scissored its limbs like a trap. The lead was taken into it with a bare ripple in its uncanny flesh, and some emerged and some was eaten. The thing was dancing in the officers’ fire. The leakage from the dead woman’s mouth was dark, her innards turned to tar.
An officer-thaumaturge cracked his fingers and made occult shapes, and filaments spun into sight between his fingers and the wasp, plasm made hexed fibres and webbing, but the predatory thing passed through the mesh, suddenly far-off or side-on or blinked closed like an eye, and in a spatter of unlight was there again and the net was evanescing. The others stricken by the wasp were still, and a seasick green was coming to the faces of the militia.
But then the wasp was gone. The air was clean. In a moment, the militia began slowly to straighten, Ori braced himself, dropped with a cry when a ghost image of the wasp