Word was quick, and across the city Ori knew of the attacks while they were still occurring. He knew, only minutes after it had happened, that a hard wall of militia faced the rioters from the base of their tower, and that they had been ready with men-o’-war, and that the jellyfish things had come at the crowd.
He feared for the khepri of the ghetto. “We need to get there,” Ori said, and while he and his comrades disguised their faces and pulled on guns he saw Baron look at him with cool incomprehension. Ori knew Baron was coming not because he cared about the khepri of Creekside, but only because this organisation to which he had allied himself had made a decision. “Toro’ll find us,” Ori said.
In a commandeered carriage they went fast through Echomire, under the colossal Ribs of Bonetown, across Danechi’s Bridge and through Brock Marsh, and the sky was dark-studded with dirigibles, many more than usual, black and lit against the black. There were militia on the streets, shielded, their faces hidden behind mirrors, specialist squads with hexed truncheons and blunderbusses for crowd control. Enoch whipped the pterabirds. Through the fringes of The Crow, where crowds were running to and from broken-open shopfronts and hauling away calico, jars of food, apothecaries’ remedies.
Over the roofs scant streets away was the Spike, the bleak splinter from where the militia ruled, tugged seven ways by skyrails. And beside it, its colossal paradox roofscape soaring, disappearing, soaring again into view, was Perdido Street Station.
They tore under the arches of the Sud and Sink Lines, listening to militia whistles. Stupid blind idiots, Ori thought, of the mass, the rioters out that night. Fighting the khepri, for Jabber’s sake. This is why you need us to wake you up. He checked his guns.
The first and worst flare of violence had ended when they arrived, but the ghetto was unquiet. They went through streets lit by rubbish fires. The century-old houses of Creekside had been made by and for humans, with poor materials and no care, and they sagged in toward each other like the sick. They were held by the wax and exuded byssus of the home-grubs, colossal maggoting larvae that the khepri used to reshape their dwellings. Ori and his comrades walked under houses half-seen through solid sputum that glowed fat-yellow in torchlight.
In a nameless square there was a last offensive. There were no militia, of course. Protecting the khepri was not their agenda.
Twenty or thirty men were attacking a khepri church. They had stamped to broken pieces the figure of Awesome Broodma that had stood by the entrance. It had been a poor, pathetic work, an oversized marble woman stolen or bought cheap from some human ruin, its head sawn off, supplanted with a carefully constructed headscarab in wire, thick with solder, bolted to the neck to mimic she-khepri shape. This chimera of poverty and faith lay scattered.
The men were battering at the door. Staring down from the first-floor windows were the congregation. Emotion was invisible in their insect eyes.
“Quillers,” Ori said. Most of the men wore the New Quill Party’s fighting outfits: dark business suits with trousers rolled, bowler hats that Ori knew were lined with steel. They carried razors and chains. Some had pistols. “Quillers.”
Baron moved in. His first shot pushed a hole through the hat of one New Quill attacker, flaring the armoured lining into a crocus of felt, blood and metal. The men stopped, stared at him. Gods, will we get out of this? Ori thought as he ran where he had been directed, to where masonry gave him some inadequate cover. He dropped a New Quill man and hunkered behind the stone as it pattered viciously with shots.
For a dreadful half minute the Toroans were pinned. Ori could see Baron’s implacable face, could see where Ruby and Ulliam crouched, Ulliam’s face in an anguish as he fired according to Ruby’s whispered commands. Some of their enemies had scattered, but the hardcore Quillers were focused, those with pistols covering those without as they crept closer.
And then as Ori prepared to shoot on an approaching corpulent and muscular New Quill man bulging from his inadequate suit, he heard an ugly tearing, and the air between him and the suddenly stupefied New Quillers was interrupted. As if a film of skin was stretched, the fabric of things bowed at two close points, distorting light and sound, and then the warp was a split and from out of the gash reality spat Toro.
The world resealed. Toro shouted. Crouched and pushed through the intervening feet with one shove of those horns and there was a stammering and Toro was close up to the fat Quill man whose billy club was shattering on the strange-refracting darkness that spilt from Toro’s horns. And then the horns were through the fat man, who gasped and gouted and dropped, sliding like meat off a hook.
Toro shouted and moved again that uncanny goring way, following the horns that bled the toughened dark, and was then by another man and gouged him, and the horns seemed in the night’s dim to soak up blood. Ori was astounded. A bullet from a New Quill gun pushed through the half-seen integument the horns shed and drew red, and Toro lowed, staggered back, righted and horned at the air and sent the gunman sprawling, feet away.
But though Toro took three men fast, the New Quillers still way outnumbered them, and were stoked with rage at these racetraitors. They danced in avoidance. Some lumbered, and some were consummate pugilists and gunmen. We ain’t going to get them khepri out, Ori thought.
There was the noise of fast footsteps and Ori despaired, thinking another corps of street-fighters was about to attack them. But the New Quillers were turning, and began to run when the newcomers arrived.
Cactus-women and -men; khepri with the two sputtering flails of the stingbox; raucous, frog-leaping vodyanoi. A llorgiss with three knives. Perhaps a dozen of mixed xenian races in startling solidarity. A broad cactacae woman shouted orders-“Scabeyes, Anna,” pointing at the running Quillers, “Chezh, Silur,” pointing at the church door-and the motley xenian army moved in.
Ori was stunned. The New Quillers fired but ran.
“Who the fuck are you?” one of the Toroans shouted.
“Get up, shut up,” Toro said. “Drop weapons, present yourselves.”
A vodyanoi and the llorgiss shouted to the khepri in the church, and held open the doors as the terrified captives ran out and home. Some embraced their rescuers. An unclotting drizzle of khepri males-mindless two-foot scarabs seeking the warmth and darkness-scuttled back from the door. Ori shivered. It was only now he could feel the cold. He heard the fires that gave Creekside a shifting skin of dark light. In their up-and-down illumination he saw children come out of the church with their mothers. Young she-khepri with their headscarabs flexing, their headlegs rippling in childish communication. Two khepri women carried neonates, their bodies like human newborns, their little babies’ necks shading into headgrubs that coiled fatly.
He dropped his gun hand, and a khepri, one of these militant newcomers, was running at him, the spiked flails of her stingbox leaving spirals of sparks in the air. “Wait!” Ori said.
“Aylsa.” The cactus-woman stopped her with her name. “He’s got a gun, Thumbs Ready,” said a vodyanoi, and the cactus-woman said: “I know he’s got a gun. There’s exceptions, though.”
“Exceptions?”
“They’re under protection.” Thumbs Ready pointed at Toro.
In the fight-anarchy, it was the first moment that many of the xenians had seen the armoured figure. They gasped in their different racial ways, stepped forward with camaraderie. “Bull,” they said, and made respectful greetings. “Bull.”
Toro and Thumbs Ready conferred too quiet for Ori to hear. Ori watched Baron’s face. It was immobile, taking in each xenian fighter by turn. Ori knew he was working out in what order he could take them, if he had to.