Reports of Tesh depredations in the Firewater Straits became more common and higher-profile, in the papers and government newsposters. The Mayor had promised revenge and counterattack. Recruitment to the New Crobuzon Navy was intensified, along, Ori heard, with “booze recruitment”-press-ganging.
It was still distant, abstract: battles at sea thousands of miles off. But it had escalated. It had featured more and more in the speeches of ministers. The city’s new mercantilism was unrewarded; markets did not open for its exports; the war blocked its sources of uncommon commodities. Ships went and did not come back. New Crobuzon’s boarded-up plants did not reopen, and others closed, and the signs on their doors grew mildew that mocked their proclamations of “temporary suspension of industry.” The city was stagnant; it slumped and slummed. Survivors began to come home.
Destroyed soldiers left to beg and preach their experiences to crowds in Dog Fenn and Riverskin. Scarred, their bones crushed, cut by the enemy or in frantic battlefield surgery, they also bore stranger wounds that only Tesh’s troops could have given them.
Hundreds of the returned had been made mad, and in their mania they raved in unknown sibilant tongue, all of them across the city speaking the same words together, in time. There were men whose eyes were haemorrhaged blood-sacs but who still had sight, Ori heard, who cried without ceasing as they saw the death in everything. The crowds were afraid of the veterans, as if at their own bad conscience. Once, many months ago, Ori had come past a man haranguing the horrified crowd and showing them his arms, which were bleached a dead grey.
“You know what this is!” he was shouting at them. “You know! I was at the edge of a blast, and you see? The sawbones tried to take my arms, told me they had to go, but they just didn’t want you to see…” He waggled his ghastly limbs like paper cutouts, and the militia came and stifled him, took him away. But Ori had seen the onlookers’ terror. Had Tesh truly remembered the lost science of colourbombs?
So many uncertainties, a spiralling-down of morale, fear in the city. New Crobuzon’s government had mobilised. For two, three years now it had been the time of the Special Offensive. There was more death and more industry. Everyone knew someone who had gone to war, or disappeared from a dockside pub. The shipyards of Tarmuth, that estuary satellite town, had begun to push out ironclads and submersibles and had spurred something of a recovery, and the mills and forges of New Crobuzon followed, war turning their gears.
Guilds and unions were outlawed capriciously, or restricted and emasculated. There were new jobs now for some of those grown used to pauperism, though competition for them was cruel. New Crobuzon was stretched out, pulled taut.
Every age had its social bandits. Jack Half-a-Prayer when Ori was a boy, Bridling in the Week of Dust, Alois and her company a century ago. Jabber himself, if one looked at it a certain way. Made strange by their context, overthrowing rules: the crowds who would spit on the Remade would have sworn themselves to Half-a-Prayer. Doubtless some were imagined by history, mean little cutpurses embellished through centuries. But some were real: Ori would swear by Jack. And now there was Toro.
Skullday, Ori ran with the Nuevists. He took his day-wages and joined them in The Two Maggots pub by Barrow Bridge, and with the beetle-spit-smeared rooftops of Kinken visible over the river they played games and argued about art. The students and exiles of the arts quarter were always happy to see Ori because he was one of a handful of real labourers in the circle. In the evening Ori and Petron and several others staged an art-incident, dressing as pantomime pigs, parading to Salacus Fields and past The Clock and Cockerel, long fallen on its honour, where the parvenus and uptown posers came to play at bohemia. The Nuevists grunted at the drinkers and shouted “Ah, nostalgia!” in porcine voices.
Dustday Ori stevedored, and drank in the evening in a workers’ pub in Skulkford. Among the smoke and beer-laughter, he missed the flamboyance of The Two Maggots. A barmaid caught his eye, and he recognised her from some illicit meeting. She folded back her apron for him to see the Runagate Rampant s in her pinny pocket, inviting him to buy, and the resentment and frustration he had felt for Curdin came back to him hard.
He shook his head so brusquely she obviously thought she had misremembered. Her eyes widened. Poor woman, he had not meant to scare her. He persuaded her that he was safe to talk to. He called her Jack. “I’m tired of it,” he whispered. “Tired of Runagate Rampant, forever saying what’s what but never doing anything, tired of waiting for change which don’t come.” He executed a ridiculous handslang parody.
“What’s the point, you saying?” she said.
“No, I know there’s a point…” Ori poked the table in fervour. “I been reading this stuff for months now. I mean… but the militia are doing something. Quillers are doing something. And the only ones on our side doing anything are nutcases like the Excess League or bandits like Toro.”
“But I mean you ain’t serious, right?” Jack let her tone come down carefully. “I mean, you know the limitations…”
“Godspit and shit, Jack, don’t start with ‘the limits of individual action’ right now. I’m just tired. Sometimes, don’t you sometimes wish you didn’t care? I mean course you want a change, we want a change, but if a change ain’t godsdamn coming, then the next thing I wish is that I didn’t care. ”
Fishday evening Ori disembarked at Saltpetre Station. In the smoggy gloaming, he went through the brickwork warrens of Griss Fell, past householders scrubbing their porches of the grit of machinofacture and graffitied coils, chatting from window to window across the little streets. In an old stable, a soup kitchen doled out bowls to a line of destitutes. Nominally the charity was run from Kinken, and keeping order were a trio of khepri armed in imitation of their guard-gods, the Tough Sisters, with crossbow and flintlock, spear and hooknet, and one with the metaclockwork stingbox.
The khepri stretched their lean and vivid women’s bodies. They spoke to each other without sound, moving the antennae and headlegs of their headscarabs, the iridescent two-foot beetles at the top of their necks. They vented chymical gusts. They turned to Ori-he was reflected in their compound eyes-and recognised him, waved him to one of the cauldrons. He began to dole out soup to patient tramps.
Kinken money had started the service, but it was kept running by locals. When the Mayor said the city could not provide for the needy, alternative structures arose. To shame New Crobuzon’s rulers or out of despair, various groupings provided social programs. They were inadequate and oversubscribed, and one spawned another as the sects competed.
In Spit Hearth they were run by the churches: care of the old and the orphaned and poor was in the hands of hierophants, monks and nuns. With their ersatz hospitals and kitchens, apostate and zealot sects built up trust that a thousand years of preaching would not have gained them. Seeing that, the New Quill party had started its own human-only relief in Sunter, to complement its street-fighting. The insurrectionists, who would be arrested instantly they went public, could not follow.
They followed Kinken money instead-it came, they heard, from Francine 2, the khepri crime-queen. It was not unknown for the captains of illicit industry to subsidise such charities: in Bonetown Mr. Motley was reputed to keep local loyalty with his own goodwill trusts. But wherever the money came from, the Griss Fell Retreat was run by locals, and the Caucus tried carefully to be known to be involved.