“You understand what you’ve to do, Ori?” Baron had said. “What’s asked?”

Why this… this honour ? Ori wondered. Why was he placed at the mission’s heart? He was-after Baron-the best shot; and he did not expect to live, yet had not run. Perhaps that had decided Toro. None of us will live, he thought. I’d still do this a thousand damn times. He felt himself anchor.

“You know where I’ve got to be, and you know where Shoulder’s got to be. We need someone at the top, Ori.”

Ori’s on point, he thought. Ori, take point.

He felt a weight of city below him, as if New Crobuzon were shackled to him as he dangled. He closed his eyes. He imagined he felt things burrowing in the house walls, through his skin. He looked over what he had done, over years. A churchbell sounded. A wyrman shouted from the sky. In Dog Fenn his friends kept fighting.

He heard Old Shoulder come and go below. Ori did not take his head from the wall. He heard trunk-legs, the surprisingly gentle touchdown of the cactacae’s elephantine pads. Some time later reality pricked; there was a rending. He did not look round. “Evening boss,” he said. Toro had come.

Between two and three o’clock in the morning, with the sky squid-ink dark, clouds occluding the stars and half-moon, they began.

Toro tremored and said, “The house-hex flickered.”

Sulion, their treacherous contact, had left one key in one lock, turned one powerful ward charm upside down and rubbed it with hexed salt, cut one clutch of wires. It was all they needed.

With Toro’s murmured reportage, gleaned from the horns that antennaed in the ripples of thaumaturgy, Ori tracked progress.

The gang were inside. “There’s an empath,” Toro said. “They know we’re in.” Of course there’s a damn empath, Ori thought. There’s an empath and a shockjack and a cryomance, there’s everything. He stopped because he could feel the edge of hysteria.

There was the diversion. Ori could feel something. Steps on the stairs? Someone just beyond the wall running up and others running down. First sign of entrance, they’ll split: inner core’ll go to the Mayor, the outer squad’ll go to the incursion. They’ll move fast to get the Mayor out.

As the militia descended, Kit must be running the first set of stairs, sweeping whatever came at him with sticky flame, running fast past the fires he started. And as behind him came Ruby and Enoch with their own weapons, laying their traps, at the same time as that first wave-that diversion-came and the bodyguards rushed to its point of entry, Ulliam was funnelling gunpowder at the base of the door, leaving a tide-mark of explosive. And there, evidence of their breach. Ori heard shooting.

He imagined the guests moving with murderous militia grace. He hoped his comrades had surprised them enough to take some down. He even let himself hope they might get away.

Ulliam blew the door. Now the street would know. But in that fearful time, perhaps they would not intercede too quickly. Some of the Clypeans must be veering to deal with this new incursion. The ground floor would be thronging. And finally, Baron would be going in.

Ori pictured it. Such daring. He wished he could see. Swinging a line out from the first-floor window to that of the adjoining house, and Baron, in his new armour and helmet, brachiating across, letting the stepped rope drop for Old Shoulder to climb. Baron must be in the hall, attaching his charge to the banister and lighting that long fuse. And spraying oil on the stairs and lighting it so that the bulk of the militia were trapped beneath, Baron would let out a bellow, and now with Old Shoulder beside him, rivebow cocked, spitbolt ready, he must be treading up the stairs.

The inner guard would have to look, would send a scout-squad to the top of the stair, and oh Ori could just imagine the shock and the determination when they saw Baron. He would fire and back away, drawing them out. They would be so astonished to see him, his guns poised, bunching his shoulders, in his armour and his new helmet, cast so carefully in mimicry, his rivet-scarred bull’s head.

Toro! they would cry. Toro!

Were they shouting that now?

Even the Clypeans would be afraid to have so famous a bandit with them, the perpetrator of such inventive death and rebellion. They would have to attack. Ori put his ear to the plaster-dusted wood. There was scuttering beyond. “They’re going,” said Toro behind him.

“It’s time,” said Toro.

There was running-Ori could hear it. He drew his pepperpot revolver and saw that his hands were absolutely unshaking.

“It’s time, now,” said Toro. The Clypean Guards would be running past the charge Baron had laid, seeing only fires below and the retreating, shooting figure of Baron in his bull’s head disguise, slamming his horns from side to side so they rang against the walls. Ori had strapped on Baron’s headgear. Can you see? he had said, and Baron had answered, Enough to kill. And enough to die. Ori did not think Baron cared.

Old Shoulder must be firing his rivebow at any cactus militia before turning to the others; and with him, shooting with the expertise of the specialist, Baron the ersatz Bull. Drawing the militia out. Toro said again that it was time.

It was, it was almost time, it would be time in any moment. Ori strained. Step step two three quickly quickly step fire.

“Now,” Toro said, and this time it was true. There was a flowering of explosion. The sound of fire unfolding and the judder of masonry; dust pounced from the wall around Ori and in a chorus of downward raging housematter the stairs adjoining the topmost room to the melees below were blown by Baron’s bomb. The room beyond Ori’s wall was cut off.

“Now,” Toro said, and stepped up beside Ori, who moved his gun into place, stood beside his boss as Toro crouched and charged, with a distorted rage-noise, pushing horns ajut and piercing this time not the world with hermetic techniques but in the most base way the wall itself. It gave without restraint. And Toro was through, and Ori was through, and standing in the wall’s lime and laths detritus in a bedroom, with men and a woman staring at them.

Ori’s calm held. It slowed time. Motion was languid. He moved as if in water.

A warm room, tapestries and paintings, ornate furniture, a fire, a woman and man on a chaise, another man standing, no, two men, looking at the dusting hole and at Ori and Toro. There was music. Someone was moving: a man in evening dress, his coat-tails flapping as he came with cat-grace, levelling a cane that unfolded organically into a weapon like a metal claw. He was very close and Ori was curiously without fear raising his pistol and wondering if it would reach its apogee in time, if he could interrupt the oncomer.

Toro grunted. Toro was goring forward and spitted the man from a distance, two boreholes opening in the bodyguard’s chest so he was sodden in blood and his eyes closed and he died at Ori’s feet.

Ori moved his gun: step step, aim, one two, corner, corner. He heard shouting. The other standing man had his hands up, was shouting, “Sulion! Sulion!” Ori shot him.

The body of their contact lay bleeding from the clean headshot. The man and the woman sat quite still and stared at the corpse. Toro raised a snubbed pistol to them, and looked through those white-shining glass eyes at Ori.

Of course there was no expression to the cast head. No one had given Ori the order to kill Sulion. He looked at the body and did not feel vindication. Had it been a panic? Had he meant to do it? For what was this revenge? Ori did not know. He was still not shaking.

Toro nodded at the door: Secure the room. Ori stepped over Sulion’s wet corpse.

The corridor ended in a charred and guttering interruption. There was fighting below. He wondered which of his friends were still alive. Oily fire slathered the walls like ivy. They had only minutes before the house became conflagration or militia thaumaturgy breached the black hole they had punched in the house.