Iron Council (37 page)

“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.”

She kept her pistol barrel to his head and punched him once then many times with her spiked cestus, and he grunted and gave out a blood retch and his face went ugly and he put up his hand not to ward her but in a reaching for something, not to interrupt the bihorned jabs—those he took, gripping his lover’s hand so hard her dead fingers splayed. He could not stop himself barking at the pain and spilling more blood down his front as Toro punched him in a miserable repetition, shoving horns into his gullet and heart, and her baby’s hands reached out above her onslaught and played with the dying magister’s hair.

Ori stood still while it was done and for a long time afterward. He waited for Toro to move—this small woman, with her south-city accent, her old grudge. After a minute or more when she did not, only sat with her head down while the magister put out his blood around her, he spoke.

“Come on,” Ori said. There was the sound of approach. “We have to go.”

She did turn to him, though he thought at first she would not. She looked with the effort of one waking and shook her head as if she did not understand his language. She did not speak, but she gave him to understand that she was going nowhere, that she was done.

“And, and . . .” Some pride or respect meant Ori would not have himself sound plaintive or aghast, and he spoke only when he knew his voice would level. “And this was the only way, then, eh? Us?”
Ruby,
he was saying,
Ulliam, Kit, all of them down there, did they have to be part of this? Baron, godsdammit, and Old Shoulder. Gods know who’s died for you.

She gestured at the stiffening Mayor.

“We done what they wanted. We done what they come here
to do.”

“Yes.”
Yes but it isn’t the same. It was a sideshow, it wasn’t what you were here for, and that’s different, it makes it different.

Does it? Didn’t we
win
?

A middle-aged woman from the working-class estates of southwest New Crobuzon sat by two blood-glazed corpses. A young man from Dog Fenn held a gun uneasily and listened to his enemies getting closer. Everything was different.

“I want to
go,
” he said, shaking suddenly as all the anxiety he had dulled welled in him. He felt himself want again, for the first time in many days. And what it was he wanted, was to get out.

“So go.”

From the bitten-out hole through which they had come in he could hear hammering, sledgehammers taken to the doors of their empty house and echoing up its stairwells.

“You’ve
killed
me!”

“For Jabber’s sake, Ori, go.” She kicked her helmet at him. It jerked, rocked on its horns. He looked at it, at her, at it, picked it up. “Hexes are down. Go.” It was very heavy.

“I don’t know how to use this. What do I
do
?”

“Just push. Just push.”

There were shouts from the approaching militia.

“You’re giving me your helmet?”

She screamed at him. She said
Go!
but it stopped being a word, was quickly more animal than that, was only misery. He backed away and looked at the sticky emitting dead who kept her company, the way she sat, too tired even to tug her baby’s hands.

“You shouldn’t have done this,” he said. “You shouldn’t have used us like this. You used us hard. You had no right.” He lifted the mask, faltered under it. He hated how he sounded. “You killed them. Probably me too. It was . . . Was an honour to run with you.” He heard what must be grapples. Militia climbing. He heard them shout the Mayor’s name. “You shouldn’t have done this. I’m glad you . . . you got what you wanted. Shouldn’t have done it this way, but we got what we meant to, too.” He lowered the mask to his shoulders and tried to effect some militant salute, but Toro was not looking at him.

When the helmet settled it lightened. It felt like cloth. He had no talent for thaumaturgy, but even he could feel the metal thick with it. He looked through crystal that lightened the room, brought edges clear; he pulled the buckles tight under his shoulders, felt himself enhanced.

He gasped. Little needles spoked into his neck; his fingers gripped the metal. The sacrifice, the blood to power this iron head.
How do I do this?
he tried to shout. He felt extrusions of metal under his teeth and tried to bite or push them one way or another, feeling them still wet with the woman’s spit. His voice dinned in his own ears.

Push.
Ori stood as he had seen her do and shoved with new-powerful thighs, jerked forward, staggered, balanced, tried again. He braced the tips of the horns against the wall and strained and only embedded them in the wood. People were running toward
the door.
Push,
she had said.
Where am I pushing to?

In his eagerness, his desperate sudden want to be alive, he reached for an urgency, envisioned his home, his little room. He thought of it and alchemised the want into a focus, and when
he ploughed forward again he clenched his eyes and teeth and felt the hankering coalesce in two blistering nodes where the horns met his forehead, and he pushed again and felt something catch, a sensual rupture like splitting taut wax paper. He gasped, and the substance of the air began to part for him and like water tension it tried to draw him in.

Ori paused at the edge of the little ontic abomination, the hole, while the universe strained. Ahead of him was distressed darkness. He twisted, keeping the horns in the wound he had made, and tried to catch the eyes of the woman with the child’s arms playing pat-a-cake on her cheeks. She did not look at him. She did not look at the corpses she had made.

The militia were at the door. Ori pushed, let the momentum take him, into the rift he had made, out of that room where the most notorious thief and murderer of a generation quietly wept, where the ruler of New Crobuzon grew stiff, and

he was for a moment a long moment in a wrinkle, in an innard of time, of the world, his synapses gone sluggard so he felt his backwash of panic like slow clouding water as he thought what if he had the strength to break the surface of the universe and slip grubbish into the mortar between instants between cells of the real but what if he did not have the power to emerge again and was lost in the flesh of dimensions, a microbe in the protean, in spaceandtime?

What then?

But his push continued, and a long long time and an instant after the first split, he felt another; the membrane parted for him again, on the other side, and disgorged him like a splinter. He fell through and to the ground slippery, wet with reality’s blood, his
inexpert passage having done trauma in its passing, blood that evanesced in iridescent skeins, a pavonine moment in the air that was gone, and left Ori disoriented and dry again, and in

an alley scattered with rubbish.

For a long time he lay bleating weakly, until the feeling like overwhelming motion sickness subsided, and strength seeped back to him.

He could not fathom where he was. He was giddy. In his Toro getup, aware that it made him a target.
I’ll rest soon,
he thought through fog. His forehead hurt, in points at the bases of the horns. He had come through, but nowhere near where he wanted to go.

Ori could feel a chill, but it did not trouble him. He stumbled and looked up as he came through entangled alleyways, and there was a line intersecting his path, nightblack arches that even Toro’s eyes could not see into, the brick and the dorsal crest of the elevated railroad. And beyond, tooth-yellow in the gaslamps that underlit them, the soffit of the Ribs. Ori was in Bonetown.

He lay for hours. The sky was grey-lit when he woke. When he removed the helmet he almost blacked out, and had to lean and breathe in a cavity below the railway. Silence unnerved him. He heard a few of the sounds that made the city whisper, but the bricks against which he leaned were still. They conducted no vibrations. The New Crobuzon trains should run all night, but there were none.

Ori made his jacket a kind of satchel for the helmet, he pocketed his pistol, and stumbled out toward the Bonetown Ribs.

The air seemed sultry, wire-tight.
What’s happening?
He could not believe word had spread so fast, in fact he did
not
believe it. With a gust his excitement turned bad, and foreboding filled him.
What has happened?