Iron Council - China Mieville [176]
He went to the Kelltree warehouse many nights running. None of his comrades came back. He thought that Baron might have escaped, but he was sure the militiaman had not tried for that. No one came back to the rendezvous.
Ori gave his landlady promissory notes, which she accepted in kindness. Within the Collective’s bounds, everything was camaraderie. He sat with her at night and listened to the attacks. There were rumours that Parliament was using war constructs for the first time in twenty years.
He kept the armour under his bed. His bull helmet. He did not use it except to walk at night, and he did not know why. Once he horned his way through newly dangerous streets, past Collectivist guards who were drunk and others focused and sober, through the raucous night, to the soup kitchen. There was a debate among the derelicts.
Ori had been back again, in these most recent days. The roof was gone, replaced by the droppings of some masonry-riddling weaponworms Parliament had loosed. The kitchen was empty. The residues of seditionist literature, long unhidden, lay in wet scraps. Blankets were moulding.
Toro could have been a fighter for the Collective. Toro could have stood on the barricades, run boulevards between bomb-denuded trees and gored militia.
Ori did not. A lassitude took him. He was deadened by failure. In the first days, he tried to be in the Collective, to shore up its defences and learn from the public lectures, the art shows that initially proliferated: he could only lie and wonder what it was he had done. He had a literal sense of unknowing. What is it I did? What did I do?
He saw a haint in Syriac. A thick, unopened book in mottling uncolours, turning on spiderthreads of force. It sucked light and shade, killed two passersby before evanescing and leaving only a remnant of bookness that lingered another day. He was not afraid; he watched the apparition, its movements, its position, before the graffitied wall. Among the obscenities and slogans, the nonsense signs and little pictures, he saw familiar spirals.
I need to find Jacobs.
Toro could do it. Toro’s eyes could see which of the painted helicoid marks were new. There was thaumaturgy in them: they could not be effaced. When he was Toro, Ori traced backward by the marks’ ages, tracking Spiral Jacobs through a grand and ultracomplex spiral in the city itself.
Jacobs moved without difficulty between the Collective and Parliament’s city, just as Toro did. The spiral, through its recombinant coils, veered toward New Crobuzon’s core. Toro stalked at night, gathered in shadows the helmet snagged. A fortnight after the Collective was born, amid the noise of the popular committees for defence and allocation, Ori, unseen in his bull-head, came through Syriac Well and found Spiral Jacobs.
The old man was shuffling, his palette of graffiti tools in his hand. Toro followed him down an alley overshadowed by concrete. The tramp began to draw another of his coils.
Spiral Jacobs had not looked up. Had only murmured something like, “Boy, hello there, once a doubler eh, now kithless? You got out, did you then? Hello boy.” The thaumaturged iron of the helmet did not confuse him. He knew who he spoke to.
“It didn’t work like we thought,” Ori said. Plaintive, and disgusted with himself for that. “It didn’t turn out.”
“Turned out perfect.”
“What?”
“It turned, out, perfect.”
He thought the old man’s madness was asserting again, that the words were meaningless. He believed at first that that was what he thought. But anxiety rose in him. It swelled as he attended public meetings in Murkside, Echomire and Dog Fenn.
In Bull-guise, he found Jacobs again. It took him two days.
“What did you mean?” he had said. They were in Sheck, under the brick of Outer Crow Station, where he had tracked the convolutes of paint. “What did you mean it turned out perfect?”
The truth appalled him of course, but worse was that he was not surprised.
“Do you think you’re the only one, boy?” Spiral Jacobs said. “I made suggestions all over. You was the best. Well done, son.”
“What is