CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
People could not walk New Crobuzon’s streets without looking up. Past the aerostats and the wyrmen, the hundreds of lives-alien, indigenous, created-that teemed the city’s skies, they looked at the cold white and the austere sun, and wondered if another of those searing organic shadows would come.
“They’re still trying to parley,” Baron told the crew. He had it from Bertold, who had inferred it from the Mayor’s forays to the embassy wing with diplomats and linguists.
Ori returned to the shelter. Ladia welcomed him, but she was wary. She looked so exhausted he was shocked. As ever there were men and women the colours of dirt lying where gravity huddled them, but now the hall itself was scarred. The walls were tattooed with splinters and ripped-up paint; the windows were boarded.
“Quillers,” she told him. “Three days ago. They heard we were… affiliated. We were slack, Ori, left papers around. With what’s going on in Dog Fenn, I suppose, we’ve been distracted: it’s been impossible to be so careful. We got cocky.”
He made her lie down, and though she bantered with him she cried when he laid her out on the old sofa, cried and held onto him for seconds, then sniffed and patted him, made a last joke and slept. He cleaned for her. Some of the homeless helped him. “We had a play yesterday,” one broken-toothed woman said to him as she wiped the tables. “Some Flexible troupe. Come to play for us. Very good it was, though not like nothing I’d seen before. I couldn’t really hear what they was saying. But it was nice, you know, good of them to come and do that for us.”
No one had seen Jacobs for days. “He’s been around, though. He’s been busy. You seen? His mark’s all over.”
The chalk spirals that Jacobs left wherever he went, that had given him his name, continued to disseminate, gone viral. They were in all quarters, in paint and thick wax colour, in tar; they were carved onto temples, scratched on glass and the girders of the towerblocks.
“You think he really started it? Maybe he’s just copying someone else. Maybe no one started it at all. You heard how it’s turning? People are using it as a slogan. It’s been adopted.”
Ori had heard and seen it. Spirals that tailed into obscenities levelled at the government. Shouts of Spiral away! when the militia appeared. Why that and not another of the symbols that had defaced walls for years?
The old man’s corner was grey with spirals. Ink and graphite, in different sizes, the angles and directions of the curves variant, and here were spirals off spirals in intricate series. It could be a language, Ori thought. Clockwise or widdershins, stopping after so many turns, in differing directions and numbers; derivatives budded from each corkscrew whorl.
For nine nights, Ori came. He volunteered the night shift. “I got to do this,” he told Old Shoulder. “I’ll do what you need in the day, but I got to do something.”
The Toroans granted him a kind of sabbatical, without trust. As he walked, Ori would stop, fasten his shoe buckle, lean against a wall and look behind him. If not Baron, someone would be following him, he was sure: he knew that the first time he spoke to someone that his unseen watcher, his fellow Bull-runner, did not trust, he was dead. Or perhaps there was no one. He did not know what he was to his comrades.
In The Two Maggots, Petron Carrickos gave Ori a book of his poems, self-published as Flexible Press.
“Been a long damn time, Ori,” he said. He had a shade of wariness-his mouth twitched to ask Where’ve you been? You disappeared -but he bought Ori grappa and spoke to him about his projects. Petron held Runagate Rampant -not quite openly, but with the new bolshiness of the times.
Ori read a stanza aloud.
“A season here/In your flower/Petals of wood and iron/Lockstock stonedead shock of a Dog Fenn frown.” He nodded.
Petron told Ori about the Flexibles: who was doing what, who had stayed part of something, who had disappeared. “Samuel’s buggered off. He’s selling stuff in some tarty gallery in Salacus Fields.” He snorted. “Nelson and Drowena are still in Howl Barrow. Of course everything’s changed now, you can imagine. We’re still trying to do the shows when we can. Community stuff, in churches and halls and such.”
“And just how does the Convulsive New go down with the commonalty?” It was a keystone concept from the second Nuevist Manifesto. Ori was sardonic.
“They like the Convulsive New just fine, Ori. Just fine.”
There was an illicit congress of all the underground guilds, the militant factory workers of Smog Bend and Gross Coil, spreading, Petron said, to other industries. Delegates from foundries, shipyards, dye plants, in a secret Dog Fenn location, discussing what demands to put to Parliament.
“Caucus is talking to them, too,” he said, and Ori nodded. He did not say, as he thought, More talking, talking again, that’s the problem, ain’t it?
At a crowded canalside market in Sangwine they reached, as part of the aimless walking that Petron theorised as a reconfiguration of the city, they came to sudden screams. “What in gods’, what in gods’, “ someone was shouting, and there was a strange back-
forward surge of crowd, people running to see what was happening and fleeing again past the stalls of books and trinket jewellery.
A woman lay in shudders by the lock and the watergates, her skirt puddled, her hair crawling like worms in static that made the air shake. People stared at her and tensed, made to run in and grab her and pull her away, but they blenched at the manifestation above her.
Vapour, a slick and sickly bruise-blue-a purpling as if the world itself, the air, was bleeding beneath its skin. The air souring and, like badness in milk, particles of matter coagulating from nothing, clots of rank aether aggregated into organising shape, and then there was a moving insectile thing made of scabbed nothing and sudden shade that twisted in the air as if suspended by thread and glimmered visible and invisible and then was unquestionably there, a hook-legged thing in the colours of rot, as large as a man. A wasp, its waist bone-thin below a thorax that refracted light like mottled glass, its sting like a curved finger beckoning from its abdomen, extending and adrip.
It cleaned its legs with its intricate mouth. It turned ugly compound eyes and looked at the aghast crowd. It unfolded its limbs one by one and shuddered and was moved, though not it seemed by the motion of those legs, but still as if it dangled and some giant hand holding its line had shifted. It came closer.
The woman was seizing. Her face had gone dark. She was not breathing. There was a gasp, a choking in the front of those watching. Two others fell. A man, another woman, fitting epileptically, flecking with spittle and vomit.
“Get out of the way!” The militia. From the entrance to the market. They came firing, and the sounds of the guns broke the cold that had held people, and they scattered screaming. Ori and Petron ducked but did not run, pushed away from the noisome apparition and watched the militia fire into its corpus.
Bullets went through it, to break glass and china beyond. The woman in its shadow spat and died. In a fever of shot, the wasp trilled and scissored its limbs like a trap. The lead was taken into it with a bare ripple in its uncanny flesh, and some emerged and some was eaten. The thing was dancing in the officers’ fire. The leakage from the dead woman’s mouth was dark, her innards turned to tar.
An officer-thaumaturge cracked his fingers and made occult shapes, and filaments spun into sight between his fingers and the wasp, plasm made hexed fibres and webbing, but the predatory thing passed through the mesh, suddenly far-off or side-on or blinked closed like an eye, and in a spatter of unlight was there again and the net was evanescing. The others stricken by the wasp were still, and a seasick green was coming to the faces of the militia.