Iron Council - China Mieville [153]
She gestured at the stiffening Mayor.
“We done what they wanted. We done what they come here to do.”
“Yes.” Yes but it isn’t the same. It was a sideshow, it wasn’t what you were here for, and that’s different, it makes it different.
Does it? Didn’t we win?
A middle-aged woman from the working-class estates of southwest New Crobuzon sat by two blood-glazed corpses. A young man from Dog Fenn held a gun uneasily and listened to his enemies getting closer. Everything was different.
“I want to go,” he said, shaking suddenly as all the anxiety he had dulled welled in him. He felt himself want again, for the first time in many days. And what it was he wanted, was to get out.
“So go.”
From the bitten-out hole through which they had come in he could hear hammering, sledgehammers taken to the doors of their empty house and echoing up its stairwells.
“You’ve killed me!”
“For Jabber’s sake, Ori, go.” She kicked her helmet at him. It jerked, rocked on its horns. He looked at it, at her, at it, picked it up. “Hexes are down. Go.” It was very heavy.
“I don’t know how to use this. What do I do?”
“Just push. Just push.”
There were shouts from the approaching militia.
“You’re giving me your helmet?”
She screamed at him. She said Go! but it stopped being a word, was quickly more animal than that, was only misery. He backed away and looked at the sticky emitting dead who kept her company, the way she sat, too tired even to tug her baby’s hands.
“You shouldn’t have done this,” he said. “You shouldn’t have used us like this. You used us hard. You had no right.” He lifted the mask, faltered under it. He hated how he sounded. “You killed them. Probably me too. It was . . . Was an honour to run with you.” He heard what must be grapples. Militia climbing. He heard them shout the Mayor’s name. “You shouldn’t have done this. I’m glad you . . . you got what you wanted. Shouldn’t have done it this way, but we got what we meant to, too.” He lowered the mask to his shoulders and tried to effect some militant salute, but Toro was not looking at him.
When the helmet settled it lightened. It felt like cloth. He had no talent for thaumaturgy, but even he could feel the metal thick with it. He looked through crystal that lightened the room, brought edges clear; he pulled the buckles tight under his shoulders, felt himself enhanced.
He gasped. Little needles spoked into his neck; his fingers gripped the metal. The sacrifice, the blood to power this iron head. How do I do this? he tried to shout. He felt extrusions of metal under his teeth and tried to bite or push them one way or another, feeling them still wet with the woman’s spit. His voice dinned in his own ears.
Push. Ori stood as he had seen her do and shoved with new-powerful thighs, jerked forward, staggered, balanced, tried again. He braced the tips of the horns against the wall and strained and only embedded them in the wood. People were running toward the door. Push, she had said. Where am I pushing to?
In his eagerness, his desperate sudden want to be alive, he reached for an urgency, envisioned his home, his little room. He thought of it and alchemised the want into a focus, and when he ploughed forward again he clenched his eyes and teeth and felt the hankering coalesce in two blistering nodes where the horns met his forehead, and he pushed again and felt something catch, a sensual rupture like splitting taut wax paper. He gasped, and the substance of the air began to part for him and like water tension it tried to draw him in.
Ori paused at the edge of the little ontic abomination, the hole, while the universe strained. Ahead of him was distressed darkness. He twisted, keeping the horns in the wound he had made, and tried to catch the eyes of the woman with the child’s arms playing pat-a-cake on her cheeks. She did not look at him. She did not look