But then the wasp was gone. The air was clean. In a moment, the militia began slowly to straighten, Ori braced himself, dropped with a cry when a ghost image of the wasp returned in air again momentarily varicose, and went, and came back once more, now nothing but a vespine insinuation, and was, finally, all gone.
“It’s not the first of them,” Petron said. They had run back to The Two Maggots, where they sucked at sugared rum tea, craving warm and sweet. “You not hear about them? I thought it was stupid rumours, at first. I thought it was nonsense.”
Manifestations that killed by toxic ambience. “One was a grub-thing,” Petron said, “in Gallmarch. There was one was a tree. And one was a dagger, up Raven’s Gate way, I heard.”
“I heard of the dagger,” Ori said. He remembered some strange headline in The Beacon. “And weren’t there others? A sewing machine? Wasn’t there a candle?”
“Goddamn Tesh, isn’t it? That’s what it is. We got to end this war.”
Were the conjurations Tesh weapons? Each must cost countless psychonoms of puissance, especially if called from Tesh, and each took only a handful of victims. How could they be effective?
“Yeah but it isn’t just that, is it?” Petron said. “Not just the numbers. It’s the effect. On the mind. On morale.”
The next day Ori heard of another manifestant. It was in Serpolet. It was two people gripped together and fucking. No one could see their faces, he heard. Just saw them adangle, turning on twine, mashing their lips, their hands pushed into each other’s flesh. When they went-driven out by the attacks of the locals or not, who knew?-they left five dead, leaked and spilled on the cobbles, turned bitumen.
When at last Spiral Jacobs came to the soup-house, Ori could not believe the look of him. The old man was twisted under the weight of his own bones; his skin was rucked and wretched on him.
“Gods almighty,” Ori said gently as he ladled food. “Gods almighty, Spiral, what’s happened to you?” The vagrant looked up at him with a wonderful and open smile. There was no recognition at all. “Where you been? All this time?”
Jacobs heard the question and pulled his brows together. He thought a long time and said carefully: “Perdido Street Station.”
It was the only thing he said that night that evidenced sanity. He murmured to himself in a foreign language or in children’s noises, he smiled, drew ink spirals on his skin. At night amid the grunts and the draughts, Ori came to where Jacobs sat chattering to himself. He was nothing but silhouette when Ori spoke.
“We’ve lost you, ain’t we, Jacobs?” he said. He was stricken. He could almost feel the rise of tears. “I don’t know if you’ll come back. Where you’ve gone. I wanted, I wanted to find you to tell you thank you, for everything you done.” You can’t hear me but I can. “I got to tell you this now, because I’m going places and doing things that might, might make it so I won’t get to see you no more, Spiral. And I want you to know… that we took your money, your gift, and we’re doing it right. We’re going to make you proud. We’re going to make Jack proud. I promise you.
“What you done for me. Gods.” Spiral Jacobs jabbered and drew swirls. “To know someone who knew Jack. To have your blessing. Whether you come back or not, Spiral, you’ll always be part of this. And when it’s over and it’s done, I’ll make sure the city knows your name. If I’m here. Got my word. Thank you.” He kissed the crumpled forehead, astonished at the fragility of the skin.
That night there was no moon, and the gaslamps of Griss Fell gave out. In the dark the New Quill Party attacked the kitchen again. Ori woke to chants of “scum” and the tattoo of missiles on the wooded windows. Through a slit between boards he could see them massed. Ranks of men, studies in shadow, the brims of their bowlers low, making their eyes belts of dark. A streetful of carefully suited malignance, rows of black-cottoned shoulders padded with fighters’ muscle, tipping their hats, straightening the dark ties noosed from their white shirts. They brushed imagined dust from themselves and swung weapons.
But the vagrants’ fear was brief. Was it Militant Sundry who came for them? Was it the mixed ranks of the Caucus? Ori could not see. He only heard shouting and shots, saw the Quillers start and turn like a pack of feral clerks, and run to fight.
Ladia and the residents scattered. Ori ran for Jacobs, but to his surprise the old man walked past him with purpose but no urgency. He did not look at Ori or anywhere but ahead. He walked quickly past the last milling homeless, while at the street’s end was the sound of battle and in the dark only a rapid and ugly mass of black figures. Jacobs turned the other way, toward Saltpetre Station and the raised arches that climbed north over the city.
Ori hesitated, thinking that there was perhaps nothing left to speak to in that shell, and then realising that he wanted to see where the man would go and what he would do. In the very dark of New Crobuzon without its lamps, Ori followed Spiral Jacobs.
He did not stalk him like a hunter but merely walked a few steps behind. He tried to place his shoes down soft enough that his step was only a ghost-echo of the mendicant’s shuffling. They were the only people in the street. They walked between a fence of wood and iron on one side, damp bricks on the other, rising scores of feet above their heads. Spiral Jacobs skipped, treaded forward singing a song in an alien key, wandered back some steps, ran his fingers, poking from the cutoff ends of his gloves, over the corrugated iron and rubbed at its rust, and Ori came behind him as respectful and observant as a disciple.
With a thumb of chalk, Spiral Jacobs drew the shape that had given him his name, whispering while he did, and it was of astonishing perfection, a mathematical symbol. And then there were curlicues, smaller coils coming from its outer skin, and Jacobs ran his hand over it, and walked on.
It began to rain as Ori reached the mark Jacobs had made. It did not smear.
Past the tumbledown brick arch of Saltpetre Station and on toward Flyside into a place where the gaslamps had not given out, where guttering dirt-light returned to tan the walls and doors into grotesques. The old man wrote his shapes. He wrote on window, once, the grease of whatever he was using gripping the shine. A rut of street closed up to Ori and funnelled him through a brick arch after his idiot guru, into a wider zone of pallid light where the gas was effaced by the elyctro-barometrics, cold lurid colours, red and gold made ice in knotted glass.
They were not alone now. They were in some dream-dark landscape. Ori wondered when his city was taken, made this.
A succession. The loud sound of fiddles. Wealthy men slumming it with downtown whores fell out of the doors of drinkhalls, walking oblivious past tsotsis who eyed them and fingered ill-
concealed weapons. Up now toward a militia tower, the thrum of the skyrails as a lit pod passed over. Crowding under slowworms of lit glass spelling names and services, simple animations-a red-mouthed lady drawn with the light, replaced stutteringly with another who had raised her glass, and back again in autistic illuminant recursion. Narcotics on the corners sold in twists by macerated youths, militia in aggressive cabals, their mirrors sending the light back around the street. Anger, drunk and stupid fights, and serious fights, too.
North to Nabob Bridge, approaching Riverskin. At the edge of Flyside they passed a series of lots, open and strewn, and Ori saw the last blows of some gang-pummelling, and there was a crowd of Quillers approaching in their suits, natty and baleful, but they did not harass him, instead sneering at the students who ran by laughing, chasing motes of thaumaturgic light flying drunken as butterflies; and a catcall, and there was the lit brazier of a picket outside a chymical plant, the numbers of the strikers swollen by supporters carrying billy clubs and forks to protect them from the Quillers who eyed them but ran the numbers and walked on.