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.
The man stood and walked away. Behind him the sunlight hit the Thames. It did not scatter: it did not refract on the moving river into little stabs of light. It did other things.
He walked in the centre of the paths and pavements, in clear view. His pace was quick but not panicked. A shotgun bounced on his shoulder. He swung it round and carried it to his chest, holding it as if it offered more comfort than defence.
The man crossed the river. He stopped below the arc of Grosvenor Bridge, and clambered up its girdered underside. Where it should have been a curve of shadows, the bridge was punctured, broken by thick rays of light. The man wrestled through the holes in its structure that recent events had left.
He emerged in a crater of railway lines. An explosion had spread broken bricks and sleepers in concentric circles, and the metal rails had burst and buckled into a frozen splash. The man was surrounded by them. He trudged past the bomb’s punctuation, to where they became train lines again.
Months ago, perhaps in the moment of that interruption, a train had stalled on the bridge. It remained. It looked quite unbroken: even its windows were whole. The driver’s door hung open.
The man gripped it but did not look inside, did not run his hand over the instruments. He hauled himself, with the door as a ladder, to the train’s flat roof. And then he stood up, gripping his gun, and looked.
His name was Sholl. He had been awake for three hours already that day, and still he had seen no one.
From the roof of the train, the city seemed empty.
To his south was the rubble that had been Battersea Power Station. Without it, the skyline was remarkable: a perpetual surprise. Sholl could see over the industrial park behind it—the buildings there much less damaged—to a tract of housing that looked almost as it had before the war. On the north shore, the Lister Hospital looked untouched, and the roofs of Pimlico were still sedate—but fires were burning, and trees of poisonous smoke grew over north London.
The river was clogged with wrecks. Besides the mouldering barges that had always been there jutted the bows of police boats, and the decks and barrels of sunken gunships. Inverted tugs like rusting islands.
The Thames flowed slowly around these impediments.
Light’s refusal to shimmer on its surface made the river matte as dried ink, overlaid on a cutout of London. Where the bridge’s supports met the water, they disappeared into light and darkness.
Once, in a city seemingly deserted, Sholl would have explored, in fear and loneliness. But he had grown disgusted with those feelings, and with the prurience that quickly mediated them. He walked north, along the top of the train. He would follow the tracks down past the walls of London, into Victoria Station.
From some miles off, from the direction of South Kensington, came a high mewing sound. Sholl gripped the shotgun. A multitude lifted from the distant streets, many thousands of indistinct bodies. They were not birds. The
