He ran for a more than an hour. You can go a long way in that time, over the roofs of New Crobuzon.
Within fifteen minutes news had spread and I don’t know how, I don’t know how it is that the news of him running moved faster than he did himself, but that’s the way of these things. Soon enough, as Jack Half-a-Prayer tore into view over some street, he’d find people waiting, and as far as they dared, cheering.
No I never saw it but you hear about it, all the time. People could see him on the roofs, waving his Remaking so people would know it was him. Behind him squads of militia. Falling, chasing, falling, more emerging from attics, from stairways, from all over, wearing their masks, pointing weapons, and firing them, and Jack leaping over chimneypots and launching himself from dormers, leaving them behind.
Some people said he was laughing.
Bright daylight—militia visible in uniform. That’s a thing in itself. He went by the Ribs, they say, even scrambled up the bones, though of course I don’t believe that. But wherever he went, I see him sure-footed on the slates, a famous outlaw man by then, and behind him a wake of clodhopping militia, and streaks in the sky as they fire. Bullets, chakris from rivebows, spasms of black energy, ripples from the thaumaturges. Jack avoided them all. When he shot back, with the weapons he’d just taken, experimental things, he took men down.
Airships came for him, and informer wyrmen: the skies were all fussy with them. But after an hour of that chase, Jack Half-a-Prayer was gone. Bloody magnificent.
The man who sold out Half-a-Prayer was nothing. You wonder, don’t you, who could bring down the greatest bandit New Crobuzon’s ever seen. A nonentity. A no one.
It was just luck, that was all. That was what took Jack Half-a-Prayer. He weren’t outsmarted, he didn’t get sloppy, he didn’t try to go too far, nothing like that. He got unlucky. Some pissant little punk who knows someone who knows someone who knows one of Jack’s informers, some young turd doing a job, whispered messages in pubs, passing on a package, I don’t sodding know, some nothing at all, who puts it together, and not because he’s smart but because he gets lucky, where Jack’s hiding. I truly don’t know. But I’ve seen him, and he’s nothing.
I didn’t know why he gave up Half-a-Prayer. I wondered if he thought he’d be rewarded. Turned out he’d have said nothing if they hadn’t hauled him in. He’d been caught for his own little crimes—his own paltry, petty, pathetic misdemeanours—and he thought if he delivered Jack, the government would look after him, forgive him and keep him safe. Idiot man.
He thought the government would keep him out of our hands.
Most of what Jack did weren’t so obviously dramatic, of course. It was the smaller, savager stuff that had them out for him.
It ain’t that they were happy about the big swaggering thievery, the showings-off. But that ain’t what made Jack a thorn they had to pluck.
No one knows how he got the information he did, but Jack could smell militia like a hound. No matter how good their cover. Informers, colonel-informers, intriguists, provocateurs, insiders and officers—Jack could find them, no matter that their neighbours had always thought they were just retired clerks, or artists, or tramps, or perfume- sellers, or loners.
They’d be found like the victims of any other killings, their bodies dumped, under mounds of old things.
But there would always be documents, somewhere close by or left for journalists or the community, that proved the victim was militia. Awful wounds on both sides of their necks, as if ragged, serrated scissors had half closed on them. Jack the Remade, using what the city gave him.
That wasn’t alright. It wasn’t alright for Jack to think he could touch the functionaries of the government.
I know that’s how they thought. That’s when it became imperative that they bring him down. But with all their efforts, all the money they were ready to spend on bribes, all the thaumaturgy they dedicated—the channellers and scanners, the empathy-engines turned up full—in the end they got lucky, and picked up some blabbering terrified useless little turd.
I made sure it was me first went in to greet him, Jack’s snitch, after we got hold of him. I made sure we had some time alone. It weren’t pretty, but I stand by it.
It’s been a long time since I been in this secret political life. And there are conventions that are important.
One is, don’t get personal. When I apply the pressures I need to, when I do what needs to be done, it’s a job that needs doing, no matter how unpleasant. If you’re fighting the
Most of the time.
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:
“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
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
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.
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
