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.
Anger took him. He launched at the old man who had led him to Toro, had helped him, had had him kill. Ori kicked with all the power in him, all the strength given by the arcane helmet, gouged, and the old man did not move.
Ori could not touch Spiral Jacobs. He tried again. He could not touch him.
His anger had become despair, and even the Collectivists, even the militia a mile away who had grown inured to the noises of fighting stopped at his lowing. Ori could not touch the old man.
Spiral Jacobs was drunk. He was a real vagrant. He was just something else as well.
At last he walked away with slow near-rambling steps, and Toro, doglike, could only follow. Jacobs had walked to the centre of New Crobuzon, toward the vaults of Perdido Street Station, and Toro had followed. Ori was reduced to calling questions Spiral Jacobs would not answer.
“What were you doing?
“Why me?
“What about the others, what were they supposed to do? What’s the real plan?
“What are you doing?”
The Collective. It was a Remaking.
At first, in the upsurge of resentment, violence, surprise and contingencies, revenges, motives altruist and base, necessities, chaos and history, in the first moments of the New Crobuzon Collective, there had been those who refused to work with the Remade. Necessity had changed most of their minds.
It had been fast. Those who had agitated for the overthrowing of Parliament were stunned. The militia abandoned their places, the spikes, the pitons of the government left empty in Collective territory. Skyrails stopped. As looters ransacked militia towers, as AWOL soldiers brought out their weapons, an old word began to change. In a speech to the strikers of the Turgisadi Foundry, an agitator from the Caucus waved at the Remade workers to join the main mass and shouted, “We’re Remaking the damn city: who knows better about that than you?”
Ori knew his seditionist ex-friends, his erstwhile comrades, would be there as the commonalty rose. He could help them; as Toro he could be a weapon of the Collective.
He could not. Ori was broken. He could only find Spiral Jacobs and follow him, many nights. He felt he would remain unfinished until he had spoken to him, learnt what he had done.
“Where are the others?” he said. “What did you have us do? Why did we kill the Mayor?” Jacobs would say nothing, only walked away. Why does he want chaos?
Ori could always find him. The spirals glowed in Toro’s eyes. Ori was pathetic.
“I’m worried about you, love,” his landlady said. “You’re falling apart, anyone can see. You eating? You sleeping?”
He could not speak, could only lie for days, eating what she gave him, until his anxiety swelled and he would rise and, as Toro, find Spiral Jacobs again. That was how it was. Nights behind the strange old man.
At first he tracked him in his bull gear, moving in and out of the real. Following him in that terrible disempowered way, Ori saw weird in the old man’s own movements. He took off his helmet. Spiral Jacobs paid no mind.
Ori followed without Toro’s thaumaturgy, and still they passed somehow between Collective and Parliament’s city. In the gaslight, by vivid elyctro-barometric tubes, Spiral Jacobs walked his old-man walk on streets of night-stained brick, dark concrete, dark wood and iron, and Ori went after him, a desultory pilgrim.
Jacobs might start in Aspic, at the edge of the Collective, shambling past crowds of night-guards, turn under an arch of wattle. He might pass through a sooty alley between the backs of buildings, by shades of trees and the spires of saint-houses, and after a curve the passage might empty him and his follower into the streets of Pincod. Two minutes of walking but more than four miles from the starting point.
Ori followed Jacobs as the tramp kinked the city’s geography. He went easily between areas that were not coterminous. Later, alone, Ori tried to retrace the routes and of course could not.
From Flyside to Creekside, from Salacus Fields to St Jabber’s Mound, Spiral Jacobs made the city convenient. He quietly put this area by that, had a terrace (always momentarily empty of passersby) wind impossibly through far-apart areas. He passed in and out of the Collective without seeing barricades or militia, and Ori followed, and begged him to answer questions, and sometimes in his rage fired or knifed at the old man, and always his weapon met nothing.
I’m in trouble. Ori knew it. I’m trapped. There was something in him: his mind was rutting, he was not well, he was despairing. In the middle of this upturn, this upheaval, the Remaking of the city, he who should live this moment was stricken, was crying, was lying in bed days at a time. Something’s wrong with me.
All he could do was track Jacobs through the byways he made: and sit alone, sometimes weep. He was crushed by a weight, while things changed, while the first days-of excitement, construction, arguments and street-meetings-became days of injury, of losses, became embattlement, became terror, became a sense of end.
The Collectivists’ resolution grew for a last stand, for something they knew was coming. Ori lay, and walked the violent streets and saw the initial spreading of the Collective halt, and reverse. Saw the militia encroach. Nightly another barricade was lost. The militia took the kilns on Pigsty Street, the stables of Helianthus Avenue, the arcades of Sunter. The Collective was shrinking. Ori, Toro, lay alone.