There’s a war, Ori wanted to shout. Outside the city. And inside too. Does it tell you that in your papers? Instead he performed.

Toro gave them instructions, was not bitter or vicious but stressed what was necessary. This was necessary. Toro had linked the man suddenly to arrest-chains, to the towers of the militia, to the snatch-squads who predated on guildsmen and activists. The man in the office was a militiaman, a backroom-man, a nexus of informers. Old Shoulder would find out what he could, and then he would kill him.

Ori thought of the first time he had seen Toro.

It had been down to Spiral Jacobs’ money. I want to make a contribution, Ori had said, and let Old Shoulder know that this was not just another week’s hoardings. I want in, he had said, and Old Shoulder had pursed his green lips and nodded and come back to him two days later. Come now. Bring the money.

Over Barley Bridge, out of Dog Fenn to Badside. An apocalypse landscape of long-deserted slag and stagnant shipyards, where the keels of vessels poked from their internment in shallow waters. No one salvaged these sculptures in rust. Old Shoulder led Ori to a hangar where dirigibles were once built, and Ori waited in the shade of its mooring mast.

The gang came. A few men and women; a Remade named Ulliam, a big man in his fifties who walked carefully, his head backward on his neck, staring behind him. More waiting. And the late light refracted by the city came through glass-fringed panes, and into its corona came Toro.

Little dusts came up with each of Toro’s steps. Toro, Ori thought, stared hard, with awe.

Toro moved like a mime, an exaggerated padding so unbullish Ori almost laughed. Toro was slighter than he, shorter, almost like a child, but walked with a precision that said I am something to fear. The thin figure was surmounted with a massive headpiece, a great bulk of iron and brass that looked too heavy to be carried by such tight little muscles, but Toro did not totter. Of course the helmet was a bull’s head.

Stylized, made from knots of metalwork, gnarled by the residue of fights. The myth, that helmet. More than dumb metal. Ori tasted hex. The horns were ivory or bone. The snout ended in a grille mimicking teeth; the exhaust pipe was a nose ring. The eyes were perfect, round, tiny portholes in tempered glass that glowed white-whether backlit or hexed, Ori could not see. He could not see human eyes behind them.

Toro stopped and raised a hand, and spoke, and from that little body had come a profound bass, an animal vibration so low that Ori was delighted. Little wisps of steam gusted from the nose ring, and Toro threw back its head. It was, Ori was astounded, it was the voice of a bull, speaking Ragamoll.