Iron Council - China Mieville [175]
“Curdin, if we don’t stop this there won’t be a damn city, let alone the Collective.”
“I understand.” The Remade man’s eyes looked rubbed with sand. He was scabbed from fighting. He swayed. “What would you have me do?”
A standoff, as if they are enemies. A silence.
“The city needs this.”
“I understand, Judah. What would you have us do?”
“There must be someone, some thaumaturge, some of the kithless . . .”
“I know who makes the spirals,” someone said.
“Maybe there is, but you’ll have to find them, and don’t look at me like that Judah of course I’ll do what I can, but I don’t know where to go. It’s the end now: there ain’t no one giving orders.”
“I know who makes the spirals. I know who makes the spirals.”
Quiet, finally. It was the young woman Runagater who spoke.
“Who makes the spirals. Who’s calling something. The Tesh agent.”
“How?” Judah said. “Who?”
“I don’t know him, not really . . . but I know someone who does. He used to be a Runagater, or nearly. I know him from meetings, Curdin. You do too. Ori.”
“Ori? Who went to Toro?”
“Ori. He’s still with Toro, I think. It was Toro killed Stem-Fulcher, they reckon, for whatever bloody good it did. Toro disappeared after, but he’s been seen again. Maybe Ori’s with him. Maybe Ori can bring Toro to help.
“Ori knows who does the spirals. He told me.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Toro was a dog now, a stupid and brutalised dog following a master it hated, unable to stop. Ori considered it that way.
We did it! he had thought. For a very short time. For less than one night. Even in the sadness and the shock of learning the first Bull’s motives and her manipulations, even uncoupled as he felt himself from the movement he had thought defined him, he had been proud that the killing of the Mayor had been this great catalyst.
He thought that for a few hours, against the evidence: the rebels who had no idea Stem-Fulcher was gone, who learnt it with a cruel excitement but no great renewal of purpose, no upsurge of fight spirit. They had enough of that in those early barricade days, irrespective of what the Toroans had done. A few hours with the Collective, and Ori had known that the operation against the Mayor had been irrelevant to its birth.
Ori, Toro, pushed against the world with his helmet and split through again and again. He could move easily. He went skulking from the Collective to Parliament’s city and back again, disdaining the traps and barriers between them. He followed his quarry, like a dog. He followed Spiral Jacobs.
Well then, he had thought, the execution of the Mayor will be part of the movement. It was of the moment. The world was changed. It would be part of the momentum. Ugly, yes, but a freeing, something that would drive things forward. The Collective would be inexorable. Uptown would fall. In the Collective, the seditionists would win the delegates, and the Collectivists would win against Parliament.
The militia imposed lockdown law across what of New Crobuzon they controlled. The populace convulsed in sympathy riots, fought in some places, to join the Collective, and failed. Ori had waited. With a tumour of anxiety, he found in himself a drab certainty that the killing of the Mayor had done nothing at all.
When he was Toro, Ori moved in the darkness between reality’s pores, to emerge in the quiet of uptown, in the evenings, on Mog Hill, unseen behind the rows of sightseers. Uptowners from Chnum and Mafaton whooped as if at fireworks at the oily blossomings of explosives, at the unlight glow of witch fire from Parliament’s thaumaturges, gave childish boos at the motes of glow from hedgehexers of the Collective.
I could kill so many of you, Ori thought, time and again, for my brothers and sisters, for my dead, and found himself doing nothing.