Iron Council - China Mieville [177]
“Go away, boy,” the tramp said. “You don’t make something like this. It weren’t me done this. I been doing other things. And what you done—frippery. Just go.”
Ori was bewildered then debased. Everything the Toroans had done was a sideshow. Toro, Baron, his comrades . . . he did not understand what they had been used for, but he knew they had been used. His insides pitched. He could not breathe.
Without anger—with sudden calm—Ori knew he must kill Jacobs. For revenge, the protection of his city—he was not sure. He came close. He raised a crossbow pistol. The old man did not move. Ori aimed at his eye. The man did not move.
Ori fired and air rushed with the bolt, and Spiral Jacobs was unmoved, staring with two unbloodied eyes. The quarrel was embedded in the wall. Ori drew a pistol with clustered barrels. One by one the bullets he fired at Spiral Jacobs hit the ground or the wall. They would not touch the old man. Ori put his gun away and punched at Spiral Jacobs’ head, and though Jacobs had not moved Ori hit air.
Anger took him. He launched at the old man who had led him to Toro, had helped him, had had him kill. Ori kicked with all the power in him, all the strength given by the arcane helmet, gouged, and the old man did not move.
Ori could not touch Spiral Jacobs. He tried again. He could not touch him.
His anger had become despair, and even the Collectivists, even the militia a mile away who had grown inured to the noises of fighting stopped at his lowing. Ori could not touch the old man.
Spiral Jacobs was drunk. He was a real vagrant. He was just something else as well.
At last he walked away with slow near-rambling steps, and Toro, doglike, could only follow. Jacobs had walked to the centre of New Crobuzon, toward the vaults of Perdido Street Station, and Toro had followed. Ori was reduced to calling questions Spiral Jacobs would not answer.
“What were you doing?
“Why me?
“What about the others, what were they supposed to do? What’s the real plan?
“What are you doing?”
The Collective. It was a Remaking.
At first, in the upsurge of resentment, violence, surprise and contingencies, revenges, motives altruist and base, necessities, chaos and history, in the first moments of the New Crobuzon Collective, there had been those who refused to work with the Remade. Necessity had changed most of their minds.
It had been fast. Those who had agitated for the overthrowing of Parliament were stunned. The militia abandoned their places, the spikes, the pitons of the government left empty in Collective territory. Skyrails stopped. As looters ransacked militia towers, as AWOL soldiers brought out their weapons, an old word began to change. In a speech to the strikers of the Turgisadi Foundry, an agitator from the Caucus waved at the Remade workers to join the main mass and shouted, “We’re Remaking the damn city: who knows better about that than you?”
Ori knew his seditionist ex-friends, his erstwhile comrades, would be there as the commonalty rose. He could help them; as Toro he could be a weapon of the Collective.
He could not. Ori was broken. He could only find Spiral Jacobs and follow him, many nights. He felt he would remain unfinished until he had spoken to him, learnt what he had done.
“Where are the others?” he said. “What did you have us do? Why did we kill the Mayor?” Jacobs would say nothing, only walked away. Why does he want chaos?
Ori could always find him. The spirals glowed in Toro’s eyes. Ori was pathetic.
“I’m worried about you, love,” his landlady said. “You’re falling apart, anyone can see. You eating? You sleeping?”
He could not speak, could only lie for days, eating what she gave him, until his anxiety swelled and he would rise and, as Toro, find Spiral Jacobs again. That was how it was. Nights behind the strange old man.
At first he tracked him in his bull