“We ain’t got long,” Ori said. He stood by Toro, before the last two people in the room, still sitting by the fire, watching them.

From a voxiterator a cello suite sounded, spitting momentarily with a crack of the wax. The man was in his sixties, broad and muscled under flesh, wearing a silk robe. He had a still, clever face. He kept his eyes on Ori and the Bull with such precision Ori knew he was trying to plan. He held the hand of the woman.

She must be close to his age-history evidenced that-but her face was almost without lines. Her hair was down-white. Ori recognised her from hundreds of heliotypes. She carried a long clay pipe as slender as a fingerbone. Its bowl still smoldered. It smelt of spice. She wore a shawl with nothing beneath. She did not cringe or glower or stare defiance. She watched with the same calm probing look as her lover.

“I can pay you,” she said. Her voice was absolutely steady.

“Hush,” Toro said. “Mayor Stem-Fulcher, hush now.”

Mayor Stem-Fulcher. Ori was curious. More even than angry, or disgusted, or murderous for revenge, he was curious. This woman had ordered the Paradox Massacre, had sent the rate of Remaking higher and higher. This woman did backdoor deals with the New Quill Party, let their pogroms against xenians go uninvestigated. This was the woman who had stuffed the official guilds with informers. Presiding over a rotting polity on which countereconomies of hunger and theft grew like fungus. This woman perpetrated the war. Mayor Eliza Stem-Fulcher, La Crobuzonia, the Fat Sun Mater.

“You know you won’t get out,” the Mayor said. Her voice was steady. She even raised her pipe, as if she would smoke. “I can give you passage.” She did not sound hopeful. She looked at her lover, and something went between them. A valediction, Ori thought, and for the first time felt a swell of something in him, a compound emotion he could not begin to parse. She knows.

“Hush, Mayor.”

The Mayor and her magister looked again at each other. Eliza Stem-Fulcher turned to Toro, and though she did not take her hand from the man’s she sat up some, as if formally, and she did take a draw from her pipe. She held it and closed her eyes a moment, breathed it out in a great flow from her nostrils, and she looked at Toro again and, gods, Ori thought awed, gods, she smiled.

“What do you think you’ll do?” she said. Indulgent as a kindly schoolma’am. “What do you think you’re doing?”

She turned square to Toro and gave another smile, drew again from the pipe, held her smoky breath, and she cocked her face quizzically and raised an eyebrow- Well?- and Toro shot her dead.

Her lover jumped as the bullet took her, and bit his lip hard but could not control his voice, could not stop himself letting out a mew, a cat-sound that became a moan. He sat and held her hand while she emptied out, her head back on blood. Smoke uncoiling from her open mouth. Gunsmoke joined her head and Toro’s hand in a moment’s sulphur umbilicum. The man breathed out sobs and held her hand. But he made himself be done, and made himself look up at Toro.

Ori was deep and dreamishly stunned, but he felt in him the tremors of the knowledge that they were done, and not dead. He raised the thought that gods, they might get out, they might yet. Let’s go then.

“Watch him,” Toro said and Ori raised his gun. Toro began to unbuckle the straps that held the huge metal head in place. Ori did not understand what he saw. Toro was removing the iron. “Watch him.” The voice came again, this time uncoupled from whatever mechanisms made it so orotund, and it seemed to falter and become human.

Something went out of the air as Toro pulled the helmet away and broke a thaumaturgic current. Toro lifted the metal off, like a diver removing the heavy brass helmet. Toro shook out her sweaty hair.

Ori looked at the woman and his gun did not waver from the magister’s chest. He had not felt capable of surprise for a long time.

Toro was Remade, of course. She turned her head. She was turned to wire by her middle years and by whatever traumas had made her Toro. Her face was set and animal hungry. She did not look at Ori. She sat, on a footstool, in front of the magister, laid her bull helmet to one side.

A child’s arms emerged from her. One from each side of her face. One over each brow. A baby’s arms that moved listlessly, tangling and untangling in her lank hair. They had been stretched out, one inside each horn, in the helmet. They waved next to her face like spiders’ pedipalps.

She sat and closed her eyes, stretched out her arms and the baby’s arms. She was quiet some moments.

“Legus,” she said. “I know you’re grieving now, but I need you to listen to me.” Without the distortion, Ori could hear her accent from the southwest of the city was strong. She pointed at the magister’s eyes and then at her own: Look at me. She held her gun gently at his belly.

“I’ll tell you my story. I want you to understand why I’m here.” A little sucking sound came out of the Mayor as gas or blood moved. She stared at the ceiling with the concentration of the dead. “I’ll tell you. Maybe you know already. But listen.

“It’s hard to find out your true name, like it’s supposed to be, but it can be done. There’s a black market in onomastics. But if it’s consolation, yours stayed hidden well. Magister Legus. I been trying to find out a long time.

“I came out of jail more than a decade ago. Graduated, we called it. The rumours, what we learn inside. We had something on every magister there is. You hear things. Drugs, boys, girls, blackmail. Nonsense, some of it. Legus, they said to me, Legus is a wily sod. You know he fucks the home secretary? As she was then.” She nodded at the cooling Stem-Fulcher. “That was information that never went away. Heard it often enough from those I trusted, inside and outside.

“Know how hard I been working on this, Legus?” She would not use his real name. “Getting myself ready. Had to fight to get my helmet made.” The child-arms patted her forehead. “I made myself; I been readying for years. To be exact, Legus,” she said, “you made me. Do you remember?”

“More than two decades gone. You remember those big old towers in Ketch Heath? Yes, you remember. That’s where I lived. I killed my darling. You remember, Magister? My girl Cecile.

“She cried and cried and cried and I was crying too and then I took her and I think maybe it was that I was shaking her to make her shush, I don’t remember, but she was gone when I remember again. And I took her down held close to keep her warm, to a sawbones worked gratis every other Blueday, but of course that didn’t work.

“And then there you were.” She leaned in. “You remember now?”

He did not. Of the thousands he had sentenced to Remaking, how could he remember one? Ori watched Legus. Toro reached up, tugged with a parent’s unthinking gentle playfulness at the child’s hand.

“You told me it was so I didn’t forget. I didn’t forget.” She leaned forward again and Cecile’s arms stretched out, toward Magister Legus holding the Mayor’s dead hand. There was noise. Their bomb-cavity was being breached. Toro pulled on her cestus. “It was her birthday just two weeks gone,” she said. “She’s older now than I was when I had her. My little girl.”

She stood and put her gun to Legus’ temple. Legus gripped Stem-Fulcher’s hand and opened his mouth but did not speak.

“From me,” she said. She did not sound angry. “From the men you made machines, the women you made monsters. Tanks, snailgirls, panto-horses, industry engines. And from all them you locked away in the toilets you call jails. And from all them on the run in case you find them. And from me, and from Cecile-and yes it was me, my hands done it, and that’s mine to feel. Cecile don’t grow, and she don’t rest. My girl. So this is from her too.”