This was different.
This little fucker was mine.
It’s a windowless room, of course. He was in a chair, locked in place. His arms, his legs. He was shaking so hard, I could hear the chair rattling, though it was bolted down. An iron band filled his mouth, so all he could do was whine.
I came in. I was carrying tools. I made sure he saw them: the pliers, the solder, the blades. I made him shake even more, without touching him. Tears came out of him so fast. I waited.
“Shhh,” I said at last, through his noise. “Shhh. I have to tell you something.”
I was shaking my head: No, hush. I felt cruelty in me. Hush, I said, hush. And when he quieted, I spoke again.
“I made sure I got to take care of you,” I said. “In a minute my boss’ll be coming in to help us, and he knows what we’re going to do. But I wanted you to know that I made sure I got this job, because . . .
well, I think you know a friend of mine.”
When I said Jack’s name the traitor started mewling and making all this noise again, he was so scared, so I had to wait another minute or two, before I whispered to him, “So this... is for Jack. ”
The leader of my crew came in then, and another couple of lads, and we looked at each other, and we began. And it weren’t pretty. And I ain’t supposed to glory in that, but just this once, just this once. This was the fucker sold out Jack.
I knew it couldn’t last, Jack’s reign (because that’s what it was). I couldn’t not know it, and it made me sad. But you couldn’t fight the inevitability.
When I heard they’d caught him, I had to fight, to work hard, not to let myself show sad. Like I said, I was only a small part of the operation—I’m not a big player, and that’s more than fine by me, I don’t want to run this dangerous business. I’d rather be told what to do. But I’d taken such pride in it, you know? Hearing of what he was doing, and always knowing that I was connected. There are always networks, behind every so-called loner, and being part of one . . . well, it meant something. I’ll always carry that.
But I knew it would end, so I tried to steel myself. And I never went to see him, when they stretched him out in BilSantum Plaza, Remade again, his first Remaking gone, knowing he’d be dead before the wound healed. I wonder how many in that crowd were known to him. I heard that it went a bit wrong for the Mayor, that the crowds never jeered or threw muck at the stocks. People loved Jack. Why would I want to see him like that? I know how I want to remember him.
So the snitch, the tattletale, was in my hands, and I made sure he felt it. There are techniques—you have to know ways to stop pain, and I know them, and I withheld them.
I left that fucker red and dripping. He’ll never be the fucking same. For Jack, I thought. Try telling tales again. I did something to his tongue.
As I did it, as I dug my fingers in him, I kept thinking of when I met Half-a-Prayer.
People need something, you know, to escape. They do. They need something to make them feel free.
It’s good for us, it’s necessary. The city needs it. But there comes a time when it has to end.
Jack was going too far. And there’ll be others, I know that too.
I knew it was necessary. He really had gone too far. But I can’t talk to my workmates about this, like I say, because I don’t think they think this stuff through. They just always went on about what a bastard Half-a-Prayer was, and how he’d get his, and blah blah. I don’t think they realise that the city needs people like him, that he’s good for all of us.
People have their heroes, and gods know I don’t grudge them that. It ain’t a surprise. They—the people I mean—don’t know how hard it is to keep a city, a state like New Crobuzon going, why some of the things that get done get done. It can be harsh. If Jack gives people a reason to keep going, they should have it. So long as it don’t get out of hand, which, of course, it always does. That’s why he had to be stopped. But there’ll be another one, with more big shows, more grand gestures and thefts and the like.
People need that.
I’m grateful to Jack and his kin. If they weren’t there, and this is what I think my mates don’t understand, if they weren’t there, and all them angry people in Dog Fenn and Kelltree and Smog Bend had no one to cheer on, gods know what they’d do. That would be much worse.
So here’s a cheer for Jack Half-a-Prayer. As a spectator who enjoyed his shows, and a loyal and loving servant of this city, I toast him in his death as I did in his life. And I exacted a little revenge for him, even though I know it was past time for him to stop.
It was a basic Remaking. We took that little traitor’s legs and put engines in their place, but I made sure to do a little extra. Reshaped a suckered filament from some fish-thing’s carcasse, put it in place of his tongue. It’ll fight him. Can’t kill him, but his tongue’ll hate him till the day he’s gone. That was my present to Jack.
That’s what I did at work today.
When I met Jack he wasn’t Jack yet. My boss, he’s the master craftsman. Bio-thaumaturge. It was him did the clayflesh, who went to work. It was him took off Jack’s right hand.
But it was me held the claw. That great, outsized mantis limb, hinging chitin blades the length of my forearm. I held it on Jack’s stump while my boss made the flesh and scute run together and alloy. It was him Remade Jack, but I was part of it, and that’ll always make me proud.
I was thinking about names as I knocked off today, as I walked home through this city it’s my honour to protect. I know there are plenty who don’t understand what has to be done sometimes, and if the name of Jack Half-a-Prayer gives them pleasure, I don’t grudge them that.
Jack, the man I made. It’s his name, now, whatever he was called before.
Like I say, in the short time I knew him, before I made him and after, I never called Jack by his name nor he me. We couldn’t, not in this line of work. Whenever I spoke to Jack, I called him “Prisoner,” and answering, he called me “Sir.”
ON THE WAY TO THE FRONT
(illustrated by Liam Sharp)
THE TAIN
The light was hard. It seemed to flatten the walls of London, to push down onto the pavement with real weight. It was oppressive: it scoured colours of depth.
On the concrete river-walls of the south bank, a man was lying with his right hand over his face, squinting up through his fingers at the bleached sky. Watching the business of clouds. He had been there for some time, unmoving, supine on the wall top. It had rained for hours, intermittently, throughout the night. The city was still wet. The man was lying in rainwater. It had soaked through his clothes.
He listened, but heard nothing of interest.
Over time he turned his head, still shielding his eyes, until he was looking down at the walkway to his right, at the puddles. He watched them carefully, a little warily, as if they were animals.
Finally, he sat up and swung his legs down over the edge of the wall. The river was at his back now. He leaned forward until his head hung over the path and the dirty water that blotted it. He stared into the minute ripples.
The puddle was directly below his face, and it was blank, as he had known it would be.
He looked closer, until he could see faint patterns. A veil, the ghosts of colours and shapes moved across the thin skin of water: incomprehensible but not random, according to strange vagaries.