Iron Council - China Mieville [145]
“It’s not the first of them,” Petron said. They had run back to The Two Maggots, where they sucked at sugared rum tea, craving warm and sweet. “You not hear about them? I thought it was stupid rumours, at first. I thought it was nonsense.”
Manifestations that killed by toxic ambience. “One was a grub-thing,” Petron said, “in Gallmarch. There was one was a tree. And one was a dagger, up Raven’s Gate way, I heard.”
“I heard of the dagger,” Ori said. He remembered some strange headline in The Beacon. “And weren’t there others? A sewing machine? Wasn’t there a candle?”
“Goddamn Tesh, isn’t it? That’s what it is. We got to end this war.”
Were the conjurations Tesh weapons? Each must cost countless psychonoms of puissance, especially if called from Tesh, and each took only a handful of victims. How could they be effective?
“Yeah but it isn’t just that, is it?” Petron said. “Not just the numbers. It’s the effect. On the mind. On morale.”
The next day Ori heard of another manifestant. It was in Serpolet. It was two people gripped together and fucking. No one could see their faces, he heard. Just saw them adangle, turning on twine, mashing their lips, their hands pushed into each other’s flesh. When they went—driven out by the attacks of the locals or not, who knew?—they left five dead, leaked and spilled on the cobbles, turned bitumen.
When at last Spiral Jacobs came to the soup-house, Ori could not believe the look of him. The old man was twisted under the weight of his own bones; his skin was rucked and wretched on him.
“Gods almighty,” Ori said gently as he ladled food. “Gods almighty, Spiral, what’s happened to you?” The vagrant looked up at him with a wonderful and open smile. There was no recognition at all. “Where you been? All this time?”
Jacobs heard the question and pulled his brows together. He thought a long time and said carefully: “Perdido Street Station.”
It was the only thing he said that night that evidenced sanity. He murmured to himself in a foreign language or in children’s noises, he smiled, drew ink spirals on his skin. At night amid the grunts and the draughts, Ori came to where Jacobs sat chattering to himself. He was nothing but silhouette when Ori spoke.
“We’ve lost you, ain’t we, Jacobs?” he said. He was stricken. He could almost feel the rise of tears. “I don’t know if you’ll come back. Where you’ve gone. I wanted, I wanted to find you to tell you thank you, for everything you done.” You can’t hear me but I can. “I got to tell you this now, because I’m going places and doing things that might, might make it so I won’t get to see you no more, Spiral. And I want you to know . . . that we took your money, your gift, and we’re doing it right. We’re going to make you proud. We’re going to make Jack proud. I promise you.
“What you done for me. Gods.” Spiral Jacobs jabbered and drew swirls. “To know someone who knew Jack. To have your blessing. Whether you come back or not, Spiral, you’ll always be part of this. And when it’s over and it’s done, I’ll make sure the city knows your name. If I’m here. Got my word. Thank you.” He kissed the crumpled forehead, astonished at the fragility of the skin.
That night there was no moon, and the gaslamps of Griss Fell gave out. In the dark the New Quill Party attacked the kitchen again. Ori woke to chants of “scum” and the tattoo of missiles on the wooded windows. Through a slit between boards he could see them massed. Ranks of men, studies in shadow, the brims of their bowlers low, making their eyes belts of dark. A streetful of carefully suited malignance, rows of black-cottoned shoulders padded with fighters’ muscle, tipping their hats, straightening the dark ties noosed from their white shirts. They brushed imagined dust from themselves and swung weapons.
But the vagrants’ fear was brief. Was it Militant Sundry who came for them? Was it the mixed ranks of the Caucus? Ori could not see. He only heard shouting