So screw the militia and screw their war. I ain’t no friends to the damn Teshi after what they done but I don’t hate them half so much as I hate them. (He pointed at the basalt column-palace of Parliament, prodding the sky with tubes and tuskish jags, profane and arrogant.) Anyone needs dying it ain’t some damn Tesh peasant, it’s them, in there, who got us here. Who’ll take them out? (He cocked his thumb, shot his finger several times toward the Parliament-a Remaking offence.) Screw their war.
And at that someone from Runagate Rampant barked, “Yeah, so fight to lose, fight for defeat,” and there was angry calling from those who saw stupidity in this. They yelled at the Runagaters that they supported Tesh, that they were agents of the Crawling Liquid, but before there were fists between the factions, the whistles of the guards went, and the crowd began to scatter. Ori wrote fast on a tear of paper.
Militia were coming. People were prepared, and they ran. Ori ran too, but not for the doors or the broken fence. He went straight for the speaker.
Pushed past the bickering Caucus members who surrounded him. Some recognised Ori, stared at him with greeting or query stillborn as he went past them to the raging soldier-Jack. Ori put
his name and his address into the speaker’s pocket, and whispered.
“Who’ll take them out?” he said. “We will. These lot won’t. Come find me.”
And then there was the burring of propellers and an airship protruded over them. Ropes spilled down and dribbled armoured militia. There were the sounds of dogs. The gates of the Paradox Warehouse were too full of people, and there was a panic. “Men-o’-war!” someone shouted, and yes there slowly rising to swell over the walls were the grotesque gland-bodies contoured with extrusions and organic holes, ridden by militia manipulating the exposed nerves of the giant filament-dangling things, flying them sedately toward the crews of Caucusists, the toxin in their tendrils dripping. Ori ran.
There would be other militia squads on the street: shunnriders, plainclothes infiltrators. Ori had to take care. He itched at the sense that some sharpshooter might target him from the airship. But he knew the ways through these streets. Most of the audience had already disappeared in New Crobuzon’s brick tangles, careering past startled shop holders and corner-hanging vagrants to stop suddenly and walk like everyone else was walking, a few streets on. Later, a mile away on the other side of the river, Ori heard that no one had been captured or killed, and was savagely delighted.
The soldier’s name was Baron. He told Ori without any sense of the secrecy and care with which the dissidents did their business. He turned up two nights later. When Ori opened his door to him, Baron was holding Ori’s paper. “Tell me then,” Baron had said. “What is it you’ll do? Who the fuck are you, chaver?”
“How come they ain’t got you yet?” Ori asked. Baron said there were hundreds of militia gone AWOL. Most of those planning to go into hiding were keeping their heads down, readying for the black survivalist economy of New Crobuzon, staying out of sight of their erstwhile colleagues. With the chaos in the city, he said, it would be impossible for the militia to keep track of all their men. No day passed without a strike or riot: the numbers of the unemployed were growing, there were attacks on xenians by Quillers and on Quillers by xenians and dissidents. Some in Parliament were arguing for compromise, meeting the guilds.
“I ain’t hiding,” said Baron. “I don’t care.”
They approached The Terrible Magpie in Riverskin, near the cactus ghetto. Ori would not go to The Two Maggots, or any place so known as a dissidents’ hole that it would be watched. Here in Riverskin the roads were quiet gullies between damp wood houses. The worst trouble they were likely to find was from the gangs of drugged cactus youth who lounged and carved keloid tattoos into their green skins, sitting on the girders at the base of the Glasshouse as it loomed eighty yards high, a quarter of a mile across where it cut streets out of New Crobuzon like a stencil. The cactus punks watched Ori and Baron but did not accost them.
Something had happened to Baron. He said nothing explicit to make Ori wonder about his experiences, but it was in his pauses, in the ways he did not say things. A rage. Ori supposed there were as many unspeakable stories as there were men come back from war. Baron was thinking of something, of some one thing, a moment of-what? blood? death? transfiguration?-some atrocity that had made him this angry fighting man, eager to kill those who had once paid him. Ori thought of dead friends and of pain.
Each of the Caucus groups was courting Baron and the other renegade militia. With careful scorn Ori explained the agenda of the various factions. He told stories of Toro’s adventures, the crew’s works, and pulled Baron to his orbit.
Baron was a prize. The Toroans were delighted. Toro came the night Baron joined them, put a bony hand on the militiaman’s chest to welcome him.
That was the first time Ori saw how Toro travelled. When Old Shoulder and the gang were done talking, Toro lowered that carved and cast metal head and horns and pushed. The helmeted figure was leaning against nothing, against air, and then driving, straining forward, until those hexed horns caught at something, caught on it and the universe seemed to flex and stretch at two points, and Ori felt the air crack with thaumaturgy and Toro’s horns pierced the world and Toro stomped suddenly through. The split skin of reality closed again like lips, back into position, and Toro was gone.
“What does Toro do?” Ori asked Ulliam the Remade that night. “To make boss? I’m not complaining, you know that, right? I’m just saying. What does Toro do?”
Ulliam smiled.
“Hope you never find out,” he said. “Without Toro, we’re nothing.”
Baron brought a military savagery to the gang. When he was talking of the war he shook and barked rage; he became etched with veins. But when he went on jobs, on revenge-raids against informers, on punishment beatings against the drug gangs encroaching on Toro’s land, in the action itself he was utterly cold, mouth barely twitching as he worked without emotion on someone.
He frightened his new gang-comrades. His machinish drive, the ease with which he gave out punishment, the way his eyes switched off and the life in them sank very deep. We ain’t nothing, Ori thought. The Toroans had thought themselves hard desperados-and yes they had done violent, murderous things in the name of change-but their anarchist anger was a vague floundering next to the cool rageless expertise of the soldier. They were in awe of him.
Ori remembered the first execution he had seen, of a captain-informer. The roughhousing had been easy. They had found the proof, the blacklists of names, the executive orders. But even with all their hatred, even with the memory of fallen brothers and sisters, even with Ulliam’s memory of the punishment factories themselves, the execution was a difficult thing. Ori had closed his eyes so as not to see the shot. They had given Ulliam the gun saying it was for his Remaking, but Ori thought it was also because Ulliam could not look at his quarry. His backward-facing head focused on nothing. And even then, Ori bet he closed his eyes when he pulled the trigger.
By contrast Baron walked in anywhere he was bid and fought who he was told to fight and killed if told to implacably. He moved like the best constructs Ori remembered from his youth: like something oiled, metal, mindless.
When the Murkside Shrikes again, with pissy provocation, started to spread into Toro’s streets, Ori, Enoch and Baron were sent to finish the incursions. “One only,” Toro said. “The one with the harelip. He’s the planner.” Ori, always the best shot, had a flintlock, Enoch a double-crossbow, but neither had a chance to fire. Baron had checked and cleaned the barrels of his repeater with effortless expertise.