They approached The Terrible Magpie in Riverskin, near the cactus ghetto. Ori would not go to The Two Maggots, or any place so known as a dissidents’ hole that it would be watched. Here in Riverskin the roads were quiet gullies between damp wood houses. The worst trouble they were likely to find was from the gangs of drugged cactus youth who lounged and carved keloid tattoos into their green skins, sitting on the girders at the base of the Glasshouse as it loomed eighty yards high, a quarter of a mile across where it cut streets out of New Crobuzon like a stencil. The cactus punks watched Ori and Baron but did not accost them.

Something had happened to Baron. He said nothing explicit to make Ori wonder about his experiences, but it was in his pauses, in the ways he did not say things. A rage. Ori supposed there were as many unspeakable stories as there were men come back from war. Baron was thinking of something, of some one thing, a moment of-what? blood? death? transfiguration?-some atrocity that had made him this angry fighting man, eager to kill those who had once paid him. Ori thought of dead friends and of pain.

Each of the Caucus groups was courting Baron and the other renegade militia. With careful scorn Ori explained the agenda of the various factions. He told stories of Toro’s adventures, the crew’s works, and pulled Baron to his orbit.

Baron was a prize. The Toroans were delighted. Toro came the night Baron joined them, put a bony hand on the militiaman’s chest to welcome him.

That was the first time Ori saw how Toro travelled. When Old Shoulder and the gang were done talking, Toro lowered that carved and cast metal head and horns and pushed. The helmeted figure was leaning against nothing, against air, and then driving, straining forward, until those hexed horns caught at something, caught on it and the universe seemed to flex and stretch at two points, and Ori felt the air crack with thaumaturgy and Toro’s horns pierced the world and Toro stomped suddenly through. The split skin of reality closed again like lips, back into position, and Toro was gone.

"What does Toro do?" Ori asked Ulliam the Remade that night. "To make boss? I’m not complaining, you know that, right? I’m just saying. What does Toro do?"

Ulliam smiled.

"Hope you never find out," he said. "Without Toro, we’re nothing."

Baron brought a military savagery to the gang. When he was talking of the war he shook and barked rage; he became etched with veins. But when he went on jobs, on revenge-raids against informers, on punishment beatings against the drug gangs encroaching on Toro’s land, in the action itself he was utterly cold, mouth barely twitching as he worked without emotion on someone.