China Mieville
Jack
Now that things have gone the way they have, everyone's got a story. Everyone'll tell you how they or their friend, which you can see in the way they say it they want you to think means them, knew Jack.
Maybe even how they helped him, how they were part of his schemes. Mostly though of course they know that's too much and it'll just be how they or their friend was there one time and saw him running over the roofs, money flying from his swag-bags, militia trying and failing to track him down below. That sort of thing. My mate saw Jack Half-a-Prayer once, they'll say, just for a moment. As if they're being modest.
It's supposed to be respect. They reckon they're showing their respect, with everything that's happened.
They ain't, of course. They're like dogs on his corpse and they disgust me.
I tell you that so you know where I'm coming from. Because I know how what I'm about to say might sound. I want you to know where I'm coming from when I tell you that I did know Jack. I did.
I worked with him.
I was lowly, don't get me wrong, but I was part of the whole thing. And please don't think I'm talking myself up, but I swear to you I ain't being arrogant. I'm nothing important, but the work I did, in a little way, was crucial to him. That's all I'm saying. So. So you can understand that I was pretty interested when I heard we'd got our hands on the man who sold Jack out. That would be one way of putting it.
That would be mild. I made it my business to meet him, let's put it that way.
I remember the first time I heard what Jack was up to, after he escaped. He was daring enough that he got noticed. Did you hear about that Remade done that robbery? someone said to me in a pub. I was careful, couldn't show any reaction.
I'd felt something when I met Jack, you know? I respected him. He wasn't boastful, but he had a fire in him. Even so, I couldn't be sure he'd come to anything.
That first job, he got away with hundreds of nobles and gave it away on the streets. He scored himself the love of the Dog Fenn poor that way. That was what had people all excited, told them he was something else than your average gangster. He weren't the first to do that, but he was one of few.
What got me wasn't so much what he did with the money as where he stole it from. It was a government office. Where they store taxes.
Everyone knows what the security on those places is like. And I knew that there was no way he'd have done something like that without it being a screw you. He was making a point, and my good bloody gods but I admired that.
It was then, in that pub, when I realised what he'd done, how he must have made that night-raid work, how he must have climbed and crept and fought his way in, with his new body, how he must have been able to vanish, weighed down with specie, that I realised he was something. That was when I knew that
Jack Half-a-Prayer was no ordinary Remade, and no ordinary renegade.
Not many people see the Remade like I do, or like Jack did.
You know it's true. To most of you they're to be ignored or used. If you really notice them you wish you hadn't. It wasn't like that for Jack, and not just because he was Remade. I bet—I know—that Jack used to notice them, see them clear, before anything was done to him. And that's the same for me.
People walk along and see nothing but trash, Remade trash with bodies all wrong, shat out by the punishment factories. Well, I don't want to be too sentimental about it but I've no doubts at all that Jack'd have seen this woman—whose hands yes were gone and been replaced with little birds' wings—and he'd have seen an old man, not the sexless thing he'd been made into, and a young lad with eyes gone and in their place an array of dark glass and pipework and lights and the boy stumbling trying to see in ways he weren't born to but still a boy. Jack'd see people changed with engines in steam, and oily gears, and the parts of animals, and their innards or their skin altered with hexes, and all those things, but he'd have seen them under the punishment.
People walk along and see nothing but trash, Remade trash with bodies all wrong, shat out by the punishment factories. Well, I don't want to be too sentimental about it but I've no doubts at all that Jack'd have seen this woman—whose hands yes were gone and been replaced with little birds' wings—and he'd have seen an old man, not the sexless thing he'd been made into, and a young lad with eyes gone and in their place an array of dark glass and pipework and lights and the boy stumbling trying to see in ways he weren't born to but still a boy. Jack'd see people changed with engines in steam, and oily gears, and the parts of animals, and their innards or their skin altered with hexes, and all those things, but he'd have seen them under the punishment.
Jack, when it was done to him, never thought he was nothing. He'd never thought any of them were.
There was this one time. A foundry in Smog Bend, and there was a man there, some middling supervisor— this was years after Jack got free, and I only heard all this—who was causing trouble. Informing on guilders trying to recruit. There was gangs following organisers home, and scaring them so they'd not come back, or maybe retiring them permanently.
I'm not clear on the details. But the point is what Jack done.
One day the workers troop in and they take their places by the gears, but there's no klaxon. And they're waiting, but nothing happens. Now they're getting wary, they're getting very antsy. They know it's that overseer who's due in that day, so they're nervous, they ain't talking much, but they go looking. And there at the foot of the steps up to the office, there's an arrow put together out of tools. On the floor, pointing up.
So they creep up. And on the landing there's another. And there's a whole gang of men now, and they're following these arrows, soldered to the banisters, up on the walkway, trooping round the factory, until pretty much the whole workforce is up there, and they come to the end of the gangway, and there dangling is that supervisor.
He's unconscious. His mouth's all scabbed. It's sewn up, with wire.
People know right then and there what's happened, but when the man wakes up and gets unstitched he starts raving, describing the man who done this to him, and then it's certain.
That man was lucky he didn't get killed, is my thinking. There was no more trouble there for a while, I hear. That changed things. I think they called that one Jack's Whispering Stitch. It's things like that make you see why people respected Jack Half-a-Prayer. Loved him.
This is the greatest city in the world. You hear that all the time, because it's true. But it's sort of an untrue truth, for a lot of us.
I don't know where you live. If it's Dog Fenn, then knowing that Parliament's a building like nothing else, or that we've riches in the coffers that would make the rest of the world jealous, or that the scholars of
New Crobuzon could outthink the bloody gods—knowing all of that doesn't do so much. You still live in Dog Fenn, or Badside, or what have you.
But when Jack ran, the city was the greatest for Badside too.
You could see it—I could see it—in the way people walked, after Jack'd done something. I don't know how it was uptown in The Crow—I expect the well-dressed there sneered, or made a show of not caring—but where the houses lean in to each other, where the bricks shed pointing, in the shadow of the glass cactus ghetto, people walked tall. Jack was everyone's: men and women, cactus-people, khepri and vod. The wyrmen made up songs about him. The same people that would spit in the face of a
Remade beggar cheered this fReemade. In Salacus Fields they'd toast Jack by name.
You could see it—I could see it—in the way people walked, after Jack'd done something. I don't know how it was uptown in The Crow—I expect the well-dressed there sneered, or made a show of not caring—but where the houses lean in to each other, where the bricks shed pointing, in the shadow of the glass cactus ghetto, people walked tall. Jack was everyone's: men and women, cactus-people, khepri and vod. The wyrmen made up songs about him. The same people that would spit in the face of a
Remade beggar cheered this fReemade. In Salacus Fields they'd toast Jack by name.
In the short time I worked with Jack I never used his given name, nor he mine. It's in the nature of the work,
