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?
There was no one on the streets, or freakishly few, and those who there were went heads down. Past tarred houses by the Ribs, he kept the bricks of the raised railway to his left, went south, stumbling through Sunter, ready to turn on Rust Bridge to Murkside and from there to Syriac, but he saw the lights of fires and heard drumming, bugles. Nothing should be so loud at these predawn hours.
They grew louder; he felt himself going into shock, shaking hard, the weight of the helmet dragging him. South down High Chypre Hill, a street of florists and trinketeers by whose roofs the trains should come. There was a fork in the lines, where the tributary of the Dexter Line went down to Kelltree and veered east over the river to Dog Fenn. There, something was blocking his way.
Blinking till he teared in exhaustion, Ori saw in the glimmer of fires a rough barrier. He could not make sense of it. Its silhouette in that warm light was like something wild, something geographical in the city. People were moving at its top.
“Stop,” someone shouted. Ori kept walking, did not understand that the word could be meant for him.
It was a barricade of paving slabs and rubble, carts, chimneys, old doors, the overturned remnants of stalls. Tons of urban detritus had gone to make a little mountain ridge, a ten-foot-high debris cordon planted with flags. The marbled arm of a statue jutted from its flank.
“ Stop, fucker.” A shot, a shard of concrete sounded with the ricochet. “Where you going, friend?”
Ori put his hands up high. He approached, waving.
“What’s happened? What’s going on?” he shouted, and there were jeers from the blockage. What is he some fucker from Mafaton back from holiday? “No papers, no kiosks, no criers where you been then, mate?” the sentry shouted. He was a man-shape in black, backlit. “Piss off home.”
“This is my home. Syriac. What’s happened? Godsdammit, how long was I between… This is about her, ain’t it? You’ve heard? The Mayor?” And all his excitement was back again. So much that he could hardly speak. I might’ve been days, he thought. What’s happened while I’ve been gone? Did we do it? It happened. It woke them. The inspiration. Gods. “Dammit, chaverim, let me in! Tell me what’s gone on.” He forgot cold and tiredness and stood up straight in the licking yellow light of the fires. “It’s all happened… How long ago did she die?”
“Who?”
“The Mayor. ” Ori creased his brow. There were more calls, more shouting. She dead? The bitch is gone? Who’s this fool, he’s a madman, I wouldn’t set your store…
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, mate. I think you should go now.” He heard the sound of gun-preparation.
“But what…”
“Listen, friend, someone can vouch for you? Because without that there’s no in, no out. You’re in no-man’s-land, and that ain’t a safe place to be. You’d best bugger off back to the Old Town, unless you give me a name. Give me a name, and we’ll check you out.” More heads were rising now; the man was being joined. An armed band, humans and other races, weapons hefted below snapping flags.
“Because you’re on the threshold now, mate, and you’re either on one side or the other. It ain’t like we just got here. Been two powers in the city for days, boy. You’ve had days to make up your mind. You’re either north”-and there were pantomime boos-“back in the old days and old ways: or you’re in here, Kelltree and Echomire and Dog fucking Fenn, in the future, which is now.
“Walk toward me slow, and keep your hands like that. Let’s have a look at you, you gormless fool.” It was almost kindly. A bottle smashed. “Come a bit closer. Welcome to the Free Territories, mate. Welcome to the New Crobuzon Collective.”
Part Seven. STAIN
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
“I hate that we run from them.”
“You heard, though. You heard how it was. We have to play safe. They’re armed to take us out.”
“But if we have to run from them, why by gods are we heading back to the city? It’ll be way worse.”
“It doesn’t work like that, though, does it? That’s not the idea. We send out word. By coming back, we change things. By the time we get back, it won’t be them waiting for us. It’ll be a different city.”
Cutter and the man lounged against a wall after another dance, in a cab reconfigured. It was a punitive journey, and night after night the Iron Councillors kicked against the darkness to improvised rhythms.
There had been deaths, of course, to footholds lost, to viruses and bacteria of the hinterland, and to the depredations of the inland predators, animals that unfolded in claws, teeth, cirri, and killed. Drogon went hunting with the Council’s forces, came back with the heads of strange predators, with new wounds and stories. That one phases, so we trapped it when it went icy and I took it through the heart. That one sees with its teeth.