"I tell you something, Ori. We’re in a race. The Caucus is in a race to get things ready. It’ll be weeks or months yet. And we won’t just go round and round-we’re making it a race to something. We ain’t stupid, you know. We’re racing to build what we have to, chains of-" She looked around. "-chains of command, communication. Last night was the start. There’s a way to go, but it’s started. The war’s going sour, they say. The maimed’ll fill the streets. If Tesh could send over that-" She closed her eyes and held her breath, retrospectively aghast. "-that thing, that sky-born witness, what else might they do? Time… we ain’t got much time.

"And the Iron Council’s coming back," she said. "When people hear that, it’ll go off."

Maybe we’re all together, Ori thought with a plaintiveness that troubled him. Maybe the Caucus race is our race too…

"We’re all racing," he said.

"Yeah, but some of us in the wrong direction."

He thought then of what it would be. Of that moment when the dispossessed, the toilers, the, yes if she wanted, yes, the commonalty heard that the Mayor, the head of the Fat Sun, the arbiter of New Crobuzon, was gone. What that would be.

"You want to talk inspiration?" he said. He was angry again, at her monomaniac prescription. "That I’ll give you," he said. "You’ll thank me, Jack. What we’re doing, what we’re doing… we need to wake people up. "

"They’re already awake, Jack. That’s what you don’t see."

He shook his head.

Bertold Sulion the Clypean Guard had lost his commitment to New Crobuzon, to the Mayor, to the law he was pledged to. Baron told them.

"It’s bled out of him," he said. "You ain’t trusted to much when you’re a Clypean. The oath you take says it all: I see and hear only what the Mayor and my charges allow me to. Bertold don’t know so much. But he knows the war’s being lost. And he’s seen the deals they’ll do while them he trained with fight and die. It’s all gone rancid. His loyalty’s bled out of him and there ain’t nothing left.