Each time cost him wages and his profile among the day-recruiters of Gross Coil. He had to space them out or he would starve, or his landlady’s indulgence would dry up. He returned to the Runagate Rampant reading group, to sit, a Jack among Jacks, and talk of the city’s iniquities. Curdin was pleased to see him. Ori was much calmer in his disagreements now. He felt his secret with pleasure. I’m not quite with you any more he thought, and felt himself a spy for Toro.

At the street corner he was greeted by a girl in a torn dress, no more than ten years old. She smiled at him as he leaned against the museum, endearing with her missing teeth. She handed him a paper cone of nuts, and when he shook his head she told him, “The gen’man already paid. Said they was for you.”

When the packet unfolded, even greasy from the roasted nuts the message written on it was legible. Seen you waiting. Bring vittles and silver from a rich man’s table. Below was a little horned circle, the sigil of Toro.

It was easier than he had thought. He watched a house in East Gidd. Eventually he paid a boy to break the windows in front, while he vaulted into the shrubbery, forced the garden door, grabbed knives and forks and chicken from the table. Dogs came, but Ori was young and had outrun dogs before.

No one would eat the greasy mess that marinated overnight in his sack. This was an examination. The next day at the usual spot he put his bag at his feet, and when he left he did not take it. He was well excited.

Mmm good, said the next note, uncurled from more street food. Now we needs money my frend forty nobles.

Ori fulfilled his commissions. He did what he was told. He was not a thief, but he knew thieves. They helped him or taught him what to do. At first he did not enjoy the anarchic adventures, running down alleys at night with bags bobbing in his hands, the shrieks of well-dressed ladies behind him.

He loathed being a lumpen cutter of purses, but he knew that anything more refined risked bringing the militia. As it was when he careered down crowded streets at twilight, the street gangs filled his wake as arranged and the officers would only plunge a little way into the rookeries, swinging truncheons.

Twice he did it, and could hardly stop his trembling. He became energised, vastly excited to be committing these acts, to be doing something palpable. The third time and the times after that, he had no fear.

He never took a stiver from the money he stole. He delivered it all to his unseen correspondent. It took several deliveries. He lost track. The robberies became routine. But he must have made his forty nobles: a new commission appeared. This time it was a wax tube, scored with grooves, that he had to take to a voxiterator booth.

Over the spit of the needle he heard a voice, faded through crackles: “All good my boy now let’s get serious let’s you bring us a militia crest.”

He saw Spiral Jacobs every week. They had developed a language of ellipsis and evasion. He was not categorical-he admitted to nothing-and Spiral Jacobs still spoke with erratic logic. Ori saw the old man’s madness was at least in part a mime.

“They’ve got me doing things,” Ori said, “your mates. They’re not the most welcoming coves, are they?”

“No they ain’t, but when they make friends with you they’re friends for life. Been at that shelter a long time. Been there a long time, wondered if I’d find anyone to introduce them to.”

Ori and Spiral Jacobs discussed politics in this careful and mediated way. Among the Runagate Rampant chaverim, Ori was quiet and watchful. Their numbers dwindled, rose again. Only one of the women from the Skulkford sweatshop still came. She spoke more and more often, with increasing knowledge.

He listened with a kind of nostalgia and wondered, How am I going to do this?

He went to Dog Fenn, where he knew the militia would be harder to find but where he could hide. It took two attempts, a lot of planning and several shekels in bribes. By night in the darkness of Barley Bridge’s girdered underside. A two-man patrol lured by a breathless street-boy telling them someone had been thrown in, while a gang of his fellows shouted. A young streetwalker wailed in the black water while trains wheezed overhead. She thrashed with genuine fear (she could not swim but was kept afloat by two vodyanoi children below her who swilled water in their submerged equivalent of giggles).

The first night the militiamen only stood at the edge and shone their lanterns at the bobbing woman while the children hollered at them to save her. They shouted for her to hang on and went to find help; and Ori emerged, dragged the disgusted prostitute out and hurried everyone away.

On the second night, an officer left his jacket and boots with his companion and waded into the cool water. The vodyanoi descended, and the woman panicked very badly and began to sink. The chaos in the water was not feigned. The children milled shrieking around the remaining militiaman, clamouring for him to help, jostling him until he bellowed and swung his truncheon, but it was too late by then. They had opened the bundle of his partner’s clothes, even still in his grip, rifled its contents.

Ori left the badge in an old shoe at Toro’s corner. When he came back two days later, someone was there to meet him.

Old Shoulder was a cactus-man. He was thin and dwarfed for his kind, shorter than Ori. They walked through the meat-market. Ori saw that prices were still rising.

“I don’t know who pointed you our way and I ain’t going to ask you,” Old Shoulder said. “Where you been before now? Who you been with?”

“Double-R,” said Ori, and Old Shoulder nodded.

“Yeah, well I ain’t going to moan about them, but you better make your choice, lad.” He looked at Ori with a face bleached the faintest green by years of sun. He made Ori feel very young. “Things go very different with our friend.” He scratched the side of his nose, extending his first and last fingers splayed into horns. “I don’t give spit about what Flex or any of his lot would have said. You can kiss good-bye to philosophising. We ain’t interested in the toil concept of worth, or graphs of the swag-slump tendency and whatnot. With Double-R it’s just more and more notions.

“I don’t care if they can lecture like we was at the university.” They stood still among the flies and the warm smell of meat, among the cries of the sellers. “What I care about’s what you do, mate. What can you do for us? What can you do for our friend?”

They had him as a messenger. He had to show his worth, picking up packages or messages that Old Shoulder left for him, ferrying them across the city without investigating them, delivering them to men or women who eyed him without trust and sent him away before they would open them.

He drank in The Two Maggots, keeping his friends among the Nuevists. He went to the Runagate Rampant discussions. Hidden histories: “Jabber: Saint or Crook?”; “Iron Councillor: The Truth behind the Stencil.” The hard young machine-knitter had become a political authority. Ori felt as if he watched everything through a window.

In the first week of Tathis, at a time of sudden cool, Old Shoulder had him as lookout. It was only at the last second that he was told what his job would be, and all his excitement came back.

They were in Bonetown. They watched evening come in livid shades through the silhouettes of the Bonetown Claws, the Ribs. The ancient bones that gave the area its name curved more than two hundred feet into the air, cracking, yellowed, mouldering at a geological pace, dwarfing the houses around them.