Young men and women, the hangers-on of the youthful Shrikes, lounged over the stairs to the Murkside attic drinking very-tea and smoking shazbah. Ori and Enoch followed Baron. Twice he was challenged by some junkie nominally on guard: twice he dismissed them with a look, a whispered threat. Ori was still turning the corner on the last mezzanine when he heard the quick-kicked splintering of wood, shouts.
Two shots had sounded already by the time he reached the door. Two boys about seventeen were fallen on ruined legs and screaming. While others ran and dropped their guns Baron kept moving. Someone shot Baron, and Ori saw blood flower on his left arm: Baron grunted and his face flashed a moment of pain and was impassive again. Two more quick shots disabled or terrified those firing, and then he was closing on the harelipped young man who gave the gang its ideas, and he shot him as Enoch and Ori stared.
He doesn’t care if he dies, Ori thought that night. Baron terrified him. He’ll kill if we tell him. He’ll kill if we let him.
That ain’t a man who learnt his fighting in the wilds. The quick and brute expertise with which he swept a room, the one-two-three taking in of all corners. Baron had done this many times before, this urban violence. Baron was no recent recruit, a jobless man found a job, a rushed soldier.
What can Toro do? Ori wondered. He had never seen his boss fight.
“What’s that helmet?” he said, and Ulliam told him that Toro had come out of the punishment factories or the jail, or the wilds, or the undertown, and gone on a long and arduous search to find a craftsman and the materials, had had the helmet made: the rasulbagra it was sometimes called, the head of the bull. Ulliam told him the unbelievable stories of its powers and the way it had been made, the long dangers of its forging, the years. “Years in jail, years hunting the pieces, years wearing it,” he said. “You’ll see what it can do.”
Each of the crew had their own tasks. Ori was sent to steal rockmilk and hexed liquors from laboratories. He knew a plan was coming. He could see its glimmers in his instructions.
Get a plan of the lower floors of Parliament. Get what? Ori did not know how to start. Make friends with a clerk at the magisters’ offices. Find the name of the Mayor’s undersecretary. Get day work in Parliament, wait for more instructions.
The air of strikes and insurrection was growing: Ori felt it, detached, excited.
Spiral Jacobs came back to the soup kitchen. Ori felt a strange unburdening at the sight of him. Jacobs was lucid, shrewd that night, staring at Ori with stoat eyes.
“Your money keeps helping us,” Ori said. “But I got instructions now I can’t do nothing with.” He told. “What’s that, then?”
They were at the river wall in Griss Fell, just down from the confluence, with Strack Island and the spires of Parliament sheer out of the Gross Tar. Its lights shone grey in the evening; their reflections in the water were drab. A cat was mewing from Little Strack, stranded somehow on the stub of land in the river. Spiral Jacobs spat at the waterpillars that had marked the limits of the Old Town. They were tremendously ancient stone carvings, a winding path of stylised figures ascending, depicting events from the early histories of New Crobuzon. Where they met the water they were defaced by delinquent vodyanoi.
“They trying for different things, ain’t they?” Jacobs took Ori’s cigarillo. “They ain’t got a strategy, have they? They’re trying for all different things. Lots of ways in.” He smoked and thought and shook his head. “Damn, but this ain’t how Jack would have done it.” He laughed.
“How would Jack have done it?”
Jacobs kept looking at the glow-end of his smoke.
“Mayor can’t stay in Parliament all the time.” He spoke with care. “Someone like the Mayor, though, can’t just go walking, or riding. Has to have protection, yes? Has to trust them. Wherever they go-Jack told me this, Jack watched for this-wherever they go, Mayor’s Clypean Guard take over. They’re the only ones trusted.” He looked up. His face was not impish or playful. “Imagine if one of them were turned. Imagine if one could be bought.”
“But they’re chosen just so’s they can’t be bought…”
“History…” Jacobs spoke with terse authority. Brought Ori to a hush. “Is all full. And dripping. With the corpses. Of them who trusted the incorruptible. ”
He gave Ori a name. Ori stared while the old tramp walked away. He hobbled into view in each puddled streetlight until he reached the end of the alley and leaned, a tired old man with chalk on his fingers.
“Where do you go?” Ori said. His voice was flat by the river, did not echo between brick walls and windows but spread out and was quickly gone. “And dammit, Spiral, how d’you know these things? Come to Toro,” he said. He was excited and unnerved. “How do you do this? You’re better than any of us, come to the fucking Bull, come join us. Won’t you?”
The old man licked his lips and hovered. Would he speak? Ori saw him deciding.
“Not all Jack’s paths is dried up,” he said. “There’s ways of knowing. Ways of hearing things. I know.” Tapped his nose, comedically conspiratorial. “I know things, ain’t it? But I’m too old to be a player now, boy. Leave that to the young and angry.”
He repeated the name. He smiled again and walked away. And Ori knew he should go after him, should try again to bring him into the orbit of Toro. But there was a very strong and strange respect in him, something close to awe. Ori had taken to wearing marks on his clothes, coils mimicking the spirals Jacobs left on walls. Spiral Jacobs came and went in his strange ways, and Ori could not deny him his exits.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Old Shoulder was delighted with Ori’s information, the name, but cheerfully disbelieved his claims to its provenance.
“Drinking in the right pubs in Sheck my green arse, boy,” he said. “This is insider stuff. You ain’t telling. You’ve a contact you’re guarding. You hoarding him? Her? Some officer’s tart? You been doing some horizontal recruitment, Ori? Whatever. I don’t know what you’re doing but this is… this is gold. If it’s true. So I ain’t going to push it.
“I trust you, boy-wouldn’t have brought you in if I didn’t. So whatever you’re keeping this for, I’m thinking it’s for reasons that make sense. But I can’t say I like it. If you’re playing some game…” If you’re on another side he did not say. “Or even if you’re doing it for the right reasons but you’re just wrong, even if you just make a wrong call and mess us all up, you got to know I’d kill you.”
Ori was not even intimidated. Old Shoulder was suddenly vastly annoying to him.
He stood up carefully to the cactacae, met his eyes. “I’ll give my life for this,” he said, and it was true, he realised. “I’ll take the Mayor down, take off the fucking head of this snake-government. But you know, tell me, Shoulder. If I was playing you? If this information I got for us-that’s going to let us damn well do what we been wanting to do-if it was me setting you up, how’d you go about killing me after, Shoulder? Because you’re the one who’d be dead.”
It was a mistake. He saw Old Shoulder’s eyes. But Ori could not regret his provocation. He tried but he could not.
Baron frightened them all. They had seen that he could shoot and fight, but they were not sure if he could persuade. They briefed him with great anxiety, until he snapped at them to shut up and trust him. There was no choice.
“We need a man who knows how to speak militia to militia,” Toro said. The mechanisms or thaumaturgy of the helmet turned the words into lowing. Ori looked at the body so dwarfed by that helmet but somehow not ridiculous, dancer-tight and hard. The lamps of those featureless round eyes sprayed out light. “We’re crims,” Toro said. “Can’t talk to the militia-they’d see into us. Need someone who has no guilt. Who’s one of them. Knows barrack slang. We need a militiaman.”