Iron Council - China Mieville [35]
Ori tracked him. It was not furtive. He simply walked a few steps behind Spiral Jacobs, and followed him home. A languorous route. By Shadrach Street through the remnants of the market to the clamour of Aspic Hole, where a few fruiterers and butchers had stalls.
Spiral Jacobs spoke to many he passed. He was given food and a few coins.
Ori watched the society of vagabonds. Grey-faced women and men in clothes like layers of peeling skin greeted Jacobs or cursed him with the fervour of siblings. In the charred shade of a firegutted office, Jacobs passed bottles for more than an hour among the vagrants of Aspic Hole, while Ori tried to understand him.
Once a group of girls and boys, roughnecks every one, a vodyanoi girl kick-leaping and even a young city garuda among them, came to throw stones. Ori stepped up, but the tramps shouted and waved with almost ritualised aggression and soon the children went.
Spiral Jacobs headed back east toward the Gross Tar, toward the brick holes and the Griss Fell shelter that were as much as anything his home. Ori watched him stumble, watched him rifle through piles of rubbish at junctions. He watched what Jacobs picked out: bewildering debris. Ori considered each piece carefully, as if Spiral Jacobs was a message to him from another time, that he might with care decrypt. A text in flesh.
The wiry little figure went through New Crobuzon’s traffic, past carts piled with vegetables from the farmlands and the Grain Spiral. Hummock bridges took him over canals where barges ferried anthracite, and through the afternoon crowds, children, bickering shoppers, the beggars, a handful of golems, shabby-gentile shopkeepers scrubbing graffitied helixes and radical slogans from their sidings, between damp walls that rose and seemed to crumble, their bricks to effervesce into the air.
When after a long time deep colours leeched across the sky, they had reached Trauka Station. The railway cut overhead at an angle that ignored the terraces below it. Spiral Jacobs looked at Ori again.
“How did you know him?” Ori said.
“Jack?” Jacobs swung his legs. They were on the Murkside shore, their thighs under the railings. In the river a tarred frame broke water, an unlit vodyanoi house. Jacobs spoke with a lilt, and Ori thought he must be hearing a song-story tradition from Jacobs’ homeland. “Jack the Man’Tis, he was a sight for sore eyes. Come through on the night-stalkers. It was him stepped up, saved this place from the dream-sickness all them years ago, ‘fore you was born. Scissored through the militia.” He snip-snipped his hand, hinging it at the wrist. “I give him things he needed. I was an informationer.”
By the light of the gaslamps, Ori was looking at the helio. He ran his thumb over Jack Half-a-Prayer’s claw.
“What about the others?”
“I watch all Jack’s children. Toro’s a one with fine ideas.” Jacobs smiled. “If you knew the plans.”
“Tell me.”
“Can’t do that.”
“Tell me.”
“Ain’t me should tell you. Toro should tell you.”
Information—a place, a day—passed between them. Ori folded the picture away.
The New Crobuzon newspapers were full of stories of Toro. There were fanciful engravings of some terrible muscled bull-headed thing, descriptions of feral bovine roars over Mafaton and The Crow, the uptown houses and the offices of the government.
Toro’s exploits were all named, and the journals were addicted to mentioning them. A bank’s vaults had been breached and slathered with slogans, thousands of guineas taken, of which hundreds had been distributed among the children of Badside. In The Digest Ori read:
By great fortune, this, THE CASE OF THE BADSIDE MILLIONS, has not had so bloody an outcome as THE CASE OF THE ROLLING SECRETARY or THE CASE OF THE DROWNED DOWAGER. These earlier incidents should remind the populace that the bandit known as TORO is a coward and