CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Toro was a dog now, a stupid and brutalised dog following a master it hated, unable to stop. Ori considered it that way.

We did it! he had thought. For a very short time. For less than one night. Even in the sadness and the shock of learning the first Bull’s motives and her manipulations, even uncoupled as he felt himself from the movement he had thought defined him, he had been proud that the killing of the Mayor had been this great catalyst.

He thought that for a few hours, against the evidence: the rebels who had no idea Stem-Fulcher was gone, who learnt it with a cruel excitement but no great renewal of purpose, no upsurge of fight spirit. They had enough of that in those early barricade days, irrespective of what the Toroans had done. A few hours with the Collective, and Ori had known that the operation against the Mayor had been irrelevant to its birth.

Ori, Toro, pushed against the world with his helmet and split through again and again. He could move easily. He went skulking from the Collective to Parliament’s city and back again, disdaining the traps and barriers between them. He followed his quarry, like a dog. He followed Spiral Jacobs.

Well then, he had thought, the execution of the Mayor will be part of the movement. It was of the moment. The world was changed. It would be part of the momentum. Ugly, yes, but a freeing, something that would drive things forward. The Collective would be inexorable. Uptown would fall. In the Collective, the seditionists would win the delegates, and the Collectivists would win against Parliament.

The militia imposed lockdown law across what of New Crobuzon they controlled. The populace convulsed in sympathy riots, fought in some places, to join the Collective, and failed. Ori had waited. With a tumour of anxiety, he found in himself a drab certainty that the killing of the Mayor had done nothing at all.

When he was Toro, Ori moved in the darkness between reality’s pores, to emerge in the quiet of uptown, in the evenings, on Mog Hill, unseen behind the rows of sightseers. Uptowners from Chnum and Mafaton whooped as if at fireworks at the oily blossomings of explosives, at the unlight glow of witch fire from Parliament’s thaumaturges, gave childish boos at the motes of glow from hedgehexers of the Collective.

I could kill so many of you, Ori thought, time and again, for my brothers and sisters, for my dead, and found himself doing nothing.

He went to the Kelltree warehouse many nights running. None of his comrades came back. He thought that Baron might have escaped, but he was sure the militiaman had not tried for that. No one came back to the rendezvous.

Ori gave his landlady promissory notes, which she accepted in kindness. Within the Collective’s bounds, everything was camaraderie. He sat with her at night and listened to the attacks. There were rumours that Parliament was using war constructs for the first time in twenty years.

He kept the armour under his bed. His bull helmet. He did not use it except to walk at night, and he did not know why. Once he horned his way through newly dangerous streets, past Collectivist guards who were drunk and others focused and sober, through the raucous night, to the soup kitchen. There was a debate among the derelicts.

Ori had been back again, in these most recent days. The roof was gone, replaced by the droppings of some masonry-riddling weaponworms Parliament had loosed. The kitchen was empty. The residues of seditionist literature, long unhidden, lay in wet scraps. Blankets were moulding.

Toro could have been a fighter for the Collective. Toro could have stood on the barricades, run boulevards between bomb-denuded trees and gored militia.

Ori did not. A lassitude took him. He was deadened by failure. In the first days, he tried to be in the Collective, to shore up its defences and learn from the public lectures, the art shows that initially proliferated: he could only lie and wonder what it was he had done. He had a literal sense of unknowing. What is it I did? What did I do?

He saw a haint in Syriac. A thick, unopened book in mottling uncolours, turning on spiderthreads of force. It sucked light and shade, killed two passersby before evanescing and leaving only a remnant of bookness that lingered another day. He was not afraid; he watched the apparition, its movements, its position, before the graffitied wall. Among the obscenities and slogans, the nonsense signs and little pictures, he saw familiar spirals.

I need to find Jacobs.

Toro could do it. Toro’s eyes could see which of the painted helicoid marks were new. There was thaumaturgy in them: they could not be effaced. When he was Toro, Ori traced backward by the marks’ ages, tracking Spiral Jacobs through a grand and ultracomplex spiral in the city itself.

Jacobs moved without difficulty between the Collective and Parliament’s city, just as Toro did. The spiral, through its recombinant coils, veered toward New Crobuzon’s core. Toro stalked at night, gathered in shadows the helmet snagged. A fortnight after the Collective was born, amid the noise of the popular committees for defence and allocation, Ori, unseen in his bull-head, came through Syriac Well and found Spiral Jacobs.

The old man was shuffling, his palette of graffiti tools in his hand. Toro followed him down an alley overshadowed by concrete. The tramp began to draw another of his coils.

Spiral Jacobs had not looked up. Had only murmured something like, “Boy, hello there, once a doubler eh, now kithless? You got out, did you then? Hello boy.” The thaumaturged iron of the helmet did not confuse him. He knew who he spoke to.

“It didn’t work like we thought,” Ori said. Plaintive, and disgusted with himself for that. “It didn’t turn out.”

“Turned out perfect.”

“What?”

“It turned, out, perfect.”

He thought the old man’s madness was asserting again, that the words were meaningless. He believed at first that that was what he thought. But anxiety rose in him. It swelled as he attended public meetings in Murkside, Echomire and Dog Fenn.

In Bull-guise, he found Jacobs again. It took him two days.

“What did you mean?” he had said. They were in Sheck, under the brick of Outer Crow Station, where he had tracked the convolutes of paint. “What did you mean it turned out perfect?”

The truth appalled him of course, but worse was that he was not surprised.

“Do you think you’re the only one, boy?” Spiral Jacobs said. “I made suggestions all over. You was the best. Well done, son.”

“What is it you wanted?” Ori said in Toro’s guttural voice, but he knew the answer, he realised. Jacobs wanted chaos. “Who are you? Why did you make the Collective?” Jacobs looked at him with something it took Ori seconds to recognise as contempt.

“Go away, boy,” the tramp said. “You don’t make something like this. It weren’t me done this. I been doing other things. And what you done- frippery. Just go.”

Ori was bewildered then debased. Everything the Toroans had done was a sideshow. Toro, Baron, his comrades… he did not understand what they had been used for, but he knew they had been used. His insides pitched. He could not breathe.

Without anger-with sudden calm-Ori knew he must kill Jacobs. For revenge, the protection of his city-he was not sure. He came close. He raised a crossbow pistol. The old man did not move. Ori aimed at his eye. The man did not move.

Ori fired and air rushed with the bolt, and Spiral Jacobs was unmoved, staring with two unbloodied eyes. The quarrel was embedded in the wall. Ori drew a pistol with clustered barrels. One by one the bullets he fired at Spiral Jacobs hit the ground or the wall. They would not touch the old man. Ori put his gun away and punched at Spiral Jacobs’ head, and though Jacobs had not moved Ori hit air.