A scarred cactus-boy begging for coins even so late while his monkey danced, the boy’s head scratched with friendly condescension by the big cactus-man leading a gang of, that must be the Militant Sundry, not quite with weapons on display (militia were near enough to see) but making a presence in that late-night decadent street and nodding in some wary camaraderie-cum-challenge to a Caucus man, who shucked handslang at a passer and disappeared into an old cold alley when a panicked militia patrol ran past, and there was a fire in the back of the alley, and huddled junkie figures, and a wyrman called and came down to land and flew again.

Men and women passed. There was drink-smell and smoke, drug residue and the shrieks and calls like birds.

Spiral Jacobs walked through it all shielded by his madness. He stopped, drew his shapes, walked on, stopped, drew, walked, on to the spired old-century cragginess of Nabob Bridge, and over quickly through Kinken where the richer khepri moieties, older money and arriviste, preserved their dreamed-up culture in the Plaza of Statues, kitsch mythic shapes in khepri-spit. The air tasted, with the ghosts of khepri conversations in wafts of chymical.

Spiral Jacobs walked the tight streets of the Old Town, the firstborn part of New Crobuzon, a V in the mud between rivers, now spilt over into metropolis dimensions. He shuffled and crooned and drew his spirals on the dark brick walls, on through Sheck, a grocertown of shopkeepers and a stronghold of New Quill, where Ori walked carefully. He saw not the bowlered Quill foot soldiers but the nervous paunchy men of defence committees, in agonies of pride at their own bravery. Through the outer edge of Spit Hearth where the prostitutes worked, streetwalkers eyeing him. Spiral Jacobs drew his coil. On one side was the window of a brothel advertising outré relaxations: on the other a mouldered poster, some radical group trying to recruit women it coyly called “those of unorthodox service professions.”

The Crow, New Crobuzon’s commercial heart, was not full. There were only a few walking so late. Spiral Jacobs, with Ori behind him, passed the arcades, tunnels through buildings neither open nor closed. They were curlicued in spiralled iron that the old man fingered with appreciation, their windows full of trinkets for the burghers.

And then Ori stopped and let Spiral continue toward the shadow, light-dappled, of the core of New Crobuzon: a castle, a factory, a town of towers; a god, some said, made by a madman intent on theogenesis. It was not a building but a mountain in the materials of building, a mongrel of styles united with illicit intelligence. The city’s five railway lines emerged from its mouths, or perhaps they congregated there, perhaps their motion was inward and they coiled together like a rat-king’s tails and knotted and made the edifice that housed them, Perdido Street Station. A ganglion of railroad.

Spiral Jacobs headed under the arch that tethered it to the militia’s central Spike, was bunking down in the brick concrete wood iron temple great and charged enough to alter the weather above it, to alter the very night.

Ori watched the old man go. Perdido Street Station did not care that the city was surging. That nothing was the same as it had been. Ori turned and for the first time in hours his ears cleared, and he heard the calls of fighting, the swallowing of fires.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

All hands, the message said. It’s now. Pinned to Ori’s door.

Old Shoulder and Toro were the only ones not there. Baron explained the plan.

“Near a week,” he said. “That’s what we got. This information’s from Bertold. We have to be careful. This”-a square of chalk-“is the top room. This is where they’ll be.

“Remember. They ain’t expecting attacks, but the Clypeans are tough. Each of you’ll be told exactly what you have to do. Understood? Remember how you get in, and what you do, and how you get out. And-listen to me-don’t alter your plan no matter what you see. Understand me? You do what you’re told, let others do what they’re told.”

Are we a cell? Ori thought. Are there others we don’t know of? Ori’s companions shifted.

Baron drew more and more lines on the plan, repeating instructions until they had become mantra. His cadences did not alter; he was like a wax recording.

There was a cache of new weapons. Repeaters, blunderbusses, firespitters. Ori watched his comrades cleaning and oiling them. He saw whose hands shook. He saw that his own did not.

Baron taught them how to take point, secure areas, with the instrumental efficiency of the militia. They walked through their parts as if blocking a play. Step up, swing, step, step, raise, secure, two three, say two officers, two three, step, turn, nod. Ori recited his strategy to himself. How are we going to do this?

“We got surprise,” said Baron. “Get through that one moment, that chink. They got nothing to hold us back. Tell you something though, Ori.” He leaned in without even gallows humour. “Won’t all of us get out. Some of us’ll die there.” He did not look afraid. He did not care if he came out.

You can feel it, can’t you? Ori thought. His untethering. Ori was stretching out as if on a stem. It might snap. He still felt in that strange nightscape with Spiral Jacobs, his valedictory to the old man, when he had walked unmolested through a city turned into some psychotic, louche, broken thing. That was where he was.

There was no urgency in him. It was not a bleak feeling. Ori was only untethered. Things troubled him distantly. Uncertainties rose in him, distantly.

There were commotions. On the warming street, criers and journal-boys ran past, far from their usual grounds, called headlines. Convocation in Dog Fenn, they shouted. Demands to Parliament. Xenian Gangs, Seditionist Caucus. The Toroans sat in the house they had bought from the estate of those they had killed. They ignored the news-vendors, the anxiety on the streets. They began to spread mess, to live in a kind of aggressive squalor. They hung their cesti on their belts; they sharpened the horns.

Magisters, even the top-rank doges, were citizens, it was always stressed, citizens like anyone. They worked masked for justice’s sake, for the anonymity of justice. Any dwelling, in any part of town, could house a servant of law. The Flag Hill house next to the gang was elegant but nondescript.

Incongruously, at last, one early evening, with gunshots far off south-a noise New Crobuzon had grown used to, which no longer called the militia down from their dirigibles, was only part of the nightsound now-visitors began arriving. Cooks and maids and footmen left, given the night off. Not knowing their master’s job, not knowing who it was who came to him. Fops and uptown dandies arrived, dressed for a sedate party. A cactus-man in smart clothes.

Probably the staff think he’s an orgiast, Ori thought. They think their master’s up to shenanigans, peccadilloes or drugs. The guests were militia. Clypean. Preparing for the mayor’s arrival.

Ulliam put on a helmet. He strapped it tight and sighed. It jutted mirrors before his eyes. “Never, ever thought I’d put this on again,” he said.

“I’m not clear,” Enoch kept saying to Ori. “I’m not clear how it is I leave.”

“You heard him, ‘Noch, through the scullery window, over into the gardens, away.” You’ll never leave.

“Yeah, yeah, I, I know. It’s just… I’m sure that’s right.”

You’ll never leave.

“You’ll know when it’s time to go, Ori,” Baron had said, and Ori waited. He leaned against the cracked plaster, put his head on the thin ribs of board. Step step secure aim aim shoot.