CHAPTER SEVEN
The play was defunct and done, and the militia when they came were more concerned with clearing the building than with making arrests. Ori blocked the Quillers long enough for the puppeteers to clear their pieces, and with the Flexibles he ducked backstage past brawls that were now mostly drunken, without political hatreds to refine them.
They came out into an alley, bloodied but laughing, a mass of theatre people stuffing costumes into carpet bags, and one or two like Ori, observers. It had rained a little moments before, but the night was warm, so the film of water seemed like the city’s sweat.
Petron Carrickos, who had been the narrator, pulled his moustache off, leaving its ghost in spirit gum above his lip, and stuck it on the alley’s lone poster, giving the revivalist whose sermons it advertised thick eyebrows. Ori went west with him and several others to Cadmium Street. They would double back and head for Salacus Fields Station without passing Fallybeggar’s entrance.
Late but not so late, the streets where Salacus met Howl Barrow were full. There were militia on corners. Ori jostled through late window-shoppers and theatre-goers, the music-lovers at voxiterator booths, a few golems like giant marionettes, wearing their owners’ sashes. There were markings on walls. Illicit galleries and theatres, artists’ squats, signposted by graffiti for those who could read it. Salacus Fields itself was becoming colonised by the weekend bohemians. There had always been moneyed slummers, bad-boy younger children seeking tawdry redemption or dissolution, but now their visits were temporary and their transformations tourist. Ori felt contempt. Artists and musicians were moving out as agents and merchants moved in and rents rose, even while industry floundered. So to Howl Barrow.
The streets sputtered under the bilious elyctro-barometric shopsigns. Ori nodded at the faces he knew from meetings or performances-a woman by the silversmith’s door, a thickset cactus-man handing out flyers. Brickwork buckled and held on, and leaned house on house, repaired in a patchwork of metal and cement, paint in anarchic styles, and spirals and obscenities; and coming out and over into the sky were temple spires and lookout pitches for the militia, and towerblocks. The crowds were thinning as the evening went toward deep night.
By raised train through the roofs to Sly Station, changing platforms and bidding friends goodnight, till even Petron had gone for Mog Hill, and Ori was alone among late-night travellers sprawled on seats and smelling of gin. He stepped past some in overalls from late shifts, who turned to not look at the drunkards. Ori sat next to an older woman, and followed her gaze through dirt-stained glass into the miles of city, a fen of buildings thick with glints. The train crossed the river. The woman was staring at nothing in particular, Ori realised, and it caught his attention too-just a juddering of lights at some intersection, a kink of city.
The windows of Ori’s street in Syriac were mostly uncurtained, and when he woke he looked out and in gaslamp-light saw large still figures standing in their houses, sleeping. It was a street colonised by cactacae. He rented from a kind, gruff she-cactus who had effortlessly hefted his bags in one greenling hand when he had moved in.
The small-hours’ trains passed the top windows shining dimly. They went to The Downs southerly or on north up to their huge terminus, that synapse of troublesome architecture between the city’s rivers, Perdido Street Station.
The business of night continued. The air was warm and wet, and it unstuck glue and ate at brickwork’s pointing. From the oldest parts of the city, tough hut-work, ivy-swaddled ruins in Sobek Croix. Families slept rough in warehouses at the edges of Bonetown. Brock Marsh was crossed by cats, then by a badger waddling home under cluttered shop facades. Sedate and baleful aerostats waited below clouds.
Two rivers ran, and met, and became one big old thing, the Gross Tar, guttersome and groaning as it passed out of city limits through the stubs of a bridge, through shantytowns in New Crobuzon’s orbit, looking for the sea. The city’s illicit inhabitants came out briefly and hid again. There was midnight industry. Someone was always awake, countless someones, in towerblocks or elegant houses or the redstones of Chnum or in the xenian ghettos, in the Glasshouse or the terraces of Kinken and Creekside, configured by the khepri grubs, reshaped with brittled insect spit. Everything continued.
There was nothing of the riot in any news-sheets the following day, or the next. It did not stop people hearing something had happened.
Ori made it known to the right people that he had been there. Passing the shops and pubs of Syriac he saw that he was seen, and knew that some who glanced at him-the woman here, the vodyanoi, the man or cactus-man, even the Remade there-were with the Caucus. Not showing his excitement, Ori might pat his chest gently with a fist in surreptitious greeting, which they might ignore or might thump back at him. Between themselves the Caucusers flashed complicated finger-shapes, messages in downtown handslang Ori could not decipher. He told himself they were perhaps about him.
The Caucus, in its closed and hidden session, talking about him. He knew it wasn’t so, but it delighted him to think it. Yes, his friends were Nuevists, but not decadent or wastrel nor satisfied only to shock. He thought of the Caucus, delegates from all the factions, breaking off from consideration of strategy and rebellion, breaking off from evasion of the militia and their informers, to commend Ori Ciuraz and his friends for a fine provocation. It wouldn’t happen, but he liked it.
In Gross Coil, Ori took what day-work came his way. He hauled and delivered for food and poor pay. Gun-grey components of some military machine that must be heading around the coast and through the Meagre Sea and the straits and on to the distant war. He worked at whatever siding or yard, whatever wreckers would take him, unloading barges by Mandrake Bridge, and when the days were done he drank with workmates become temporary friends.
He was young, so the foremen bullied him, but nervously. They were edged with unease. There were all the troubles. Tense times for the factories of Gross Coil, for Kelltree and Echomire. Past the foundry on Tuthen Way, Ori saw scars from fires on the ground, where in recent weeks pickets had been. The walls were marked with sigils of dissidence. Toro; The Man’Tis lives!; the stencilled councillor. Bullet holes marked walls at the Tricorn Fork, where less than a year before the militia had faced down hundreds of marchers.
It had started at the Paradox Concerns, in unorganised complaint at some dismissals, and then had been on the streets with great speed, and shop floors in the surrounds were fractured as others joined the demonstrators, whose slogans had veered from reinstatement of friends to increased wages, then were suddenly denunciations of the Mayor and of the suffrage lottery, were demands for votes. Bottles were thrown, and caustic phlogiston; there were shots-the militia shot back or started it-and sixteen people were dead. Chalked homages appeared regularly at the junction and were cleaned away. Ori touched his fist gently to his chest as he passed the site of the Paradox Massacre.
On Chainday he went to The Grocer’s Sweetheart. A bit before eight, two men left the taproom and did not come back. Others followed, in casual and random order. Ori drank the last of his beer and went as if for the privy, but seeing he was not followed he turned down a damp-mottled corridor, lifted a trapdoor down into the basement. Those assembled in the dark looked and did not greet him, almost as much suspicion as welcome on their faces.