There were militia quarters about the city. Some were hidden. All were protected with hex and firepower. But near each one were militia pubs, and all the dissidents knew which they were.
Bertold Sulion, the man whose name Spiral Jacobs had given Ori, and which Ori had given to his comrades, was, Jacobs said, a dissatisfied Clypean Guard, loyalty becoming nihilism or greed. He would be stationed in Parliament itself, by or in the Mayor’s quarter. And that meant the pubs below the skyrails and the militia tower at the wedge of Brock Marsh, where the rivers converged.
Brock Marsh, the magician’s arrondissement. Oldest part of an old city. In the north, with pebbled streets and yawing wooden lean-tos full of charmed equipment, karcists, bionumanists, physicists and all-trade thaumaturges lived. In the south of the borough, though, the elixirs did not so fill the drains; there was not such a pall of hex-stench in the air. The scientists and their parasite industries petered out below thrumming skyrails and pods. Strack Island and Parliament emerged from the river close-by. It was in this region that the Clypean Guards would drink.
It was a drab few streets of concrete blocks and girders, industrial, distressed by age and unkempt. In the pubs of the area-in The Defeated Enemy, in The Badger, in The Compass and Carrot-Baron went to be a frequenter, to find Sulion.
The headlines of The Quarrel and The Beacon told of slow triumphs in the Firewater Straits, the defeat of Teshi shunboats and the emancipation of the serf towns in Tesh’s demesne. There were unclear heliotypes of villagers and Crobuzoner militia exchanging smiles, the militia helping rebuild a food store, a militia surgeon tending a peasant child.
The Forge, a Caucus paper, found another officer like Baron, on the run. He told the war differently. “And even with all the things we’re doing that he’s talking about,” Baron said, “we ain’t winning. We ain’t going to win. ” Ori was not certain that was not the main basis of his anger.
“Baron reminds me of things I seen,” said Ulliam. “And not in a good way.” It was night in Pelorus Fields, in the south of New Crobuzon. A quiet little haunt of the clerks, office men, with enclaves like prosperous villages, garden squares unflowered in the cold, cosy fountains, fat churches and devotionals to Jabber. Bucolic hideouts jutted off from the busyness of Wynion Street, with its shoe markets and tea dens.
Ulliam and Ori took a risk in being there. With the growth in strikes and unlaw, Pelorus Fields felt sieged. As Parliamentarians met with the guilds, whose demands became more organised, as the Caucus spoke out from its unsubtle front organs, Pelorus Fields was anxious. Its respectable citizens patrolled, nightly, in Committees for the Defence of Decency. Frightened copywriters and actuaries running down xenians and the shabby-dressed, Remade who did not show deference.
But there were places like Boland’s. “Show a bit of care, ladies, gents,” was all Boland would say to the Nuevist poets, the dissidents, who came for his coffees and to hide behind ivy-lush windows. Ori and Ulliam sat together. Ulliam’s chair faced away from Ori’s so his backward face was forward.
“I seen men take a room like that before,” Ulliam said. “It was men like that done this to me.
“It’s why Toro didn’t send me to Motley’s-I used to work for him. Long, long time ago.” He indicated his neck.
“What did they Remake you for? Why that way?” It showed trust to ask. Ulliam did not blench at the query, showed no shock. He laughed.
“Ori, you wouldn’t believe me, boy. You can’t have been more than a baby, if you was even born. I can’t tell you it all now; it’s done and gone. I was a herder, of sorts.” He laughed again. “I’ve seen things. Oh, the animals I guarded. Nothing scares me no more. Except, you know… when I saw Baron come into that room. I won’t say I was scared again but I remembered what it was, to feel that way.
“Do you think about what we’ll do, when we do this?” he asked later. “This job? The chair-of-the-board?” Ori shook his head.
“We’ll change things. Push it all the way.” Excitement rose in him as it always did, with speed. “When we cut off the head and watch it fall, we’ll wake people up. Nothing’ll stop us.” We’ll change everything. We’ll change history. We’ll wake the city up, and they’ll free themselves.
When they left and walked a few careful feet apart (whole and Remade could not fraternise in Pelorus Fields) they heard screaming from a few streets away, heard a woman running, her voice coming over the nightlit slates of Wynion Street. It just come, it just come, she shouted, and Ori and Ulliam looked at each other tense and wondered if they should go to her, but the sound became crying and then faded, and when they turned north they could not find her.
On Dockday the twelfth of Octuary, something came in front of the cold summer sun. Later Ori could not remember if he had seen the moment of its arrival or if he had only heard it so many times he had made it a memory.
He was in a train. On the Sink Line, passing over the shantytown of Spatters, toward the incline and grand houses of Vaudois Hill. Someone farther on in the carriage gave a shriek that he ignored, but others came then, too, and he looked up through the window.
They were raised, the train on arches, so they pushed through chimneys like little swells, minarets, towers with damp-splintered skins like swamp trees. They saw clearly across to the east and the morning sun spreading shadows and thick light, and at its centre something was swimming. A figure tiny in the core of the sun’s glare and made of the deepest silhouette, neither human nor ciliated plankton nor rapid startling bird but all of them and other things, in turn or at one instant. It moved with an impossible crawl, straight out, emerging from the sun with a swimming motion that used all of its contradicting limbs.
A spit of chymical fear hit Ori’s face from the khepri woman beside him, and he blinked till it dissipated. Later he learnt that wherever people stood in the city, from Flag Hill north, to Barrackham seven miles south, every compass point, they all saw the thing swim straight for them, growing in the heart of the sun.
It came closer, occluding the light so the city was drabbed. A dancing, swimming thing. The train was slowing-they would stop before Lich Sitting Station. The driver must have seen the sun and stopped in terror.
The sky over New Crobuzon shimmered like grease. Like plasma. The thing stuttered, palsied between sizes, was dwarfed by the sun around it and then for one dreadful instant was there above the heads of everyone in the city so looming, so massive it dwarfed New Crobuzon itself and all there was that moment was an eye with starred iris in baleful alien colours looking straight down between all the buildings, onto all the streets, into the eyes of everyone staring up at it so there was a tremendous, city-wide scream of fear, and then the thing was gone.
Ori heard his own shout. His eyes hurt, and it took him seconds to realise the sun was burning them, that he was staring where the thing had been, and now there was only the sun again. All that day he saw through the ghost of green colours, where his sight was burnt.
That evening there were riots in Smog Bend. The raged workforce of the factories ran for St. Jabber’s Mound, to assault the militia tower for something-failing to protect them from that dreadful haint vision. Others ran for Creekside, and the khepri ghetto, to punish the outlanders there, as if they had sent the apparition. The stone idiocy of this had the Caucusers in the crowd screaming, but they could not hold back the armed few who went to punish the xenians.