No one had seen Jacobs for days. "He’s been around, though. He’s been busy. You seen? His mark’s all over."

The chalk spirals that Jacobs left wherever he went, that had given him his name, continued to disseminate, gone viral. They were in all quarters, in paint and thick wax colour, in tar; they were carved onto temples, scratched on glass and the girders of the towerblocks.

"You think he really started it? Maybe he’s just copying someone else. Maybe no one started it at all. You heard how it’s turning? People are using it as a slogan. It’s been adopted."

Ori had heard and seen it. Spirals that tailed into obscenities levelled at the government. Shouts of Spiral away! when the militia appeared. Why that and not another of the symbols that had defaced walls for years?

The old man’s corner was grey with spirals. Ink and graphite, in different sizes, the angles and directions of the curves variant, and here were spirals off spirals in intricate series. It could be a language, Ori thought. Clockwise or widdershins, stopping after so many turns, in differing directions and numbers; derivatives budded from each corkscrew whorl.

For nine nights, Ori came. He volunteered the night shift. "I got to do this," he told Old Shoulder. "I’ll do what you need in the day, but I got to do something."

The Toroans granted him a kind of sabbatical, without trust. As he walked, Ori would stop, fasten his shoe buckle, lean against a wall and look behind him. If not Baron, someone would be following him, he was sure: he knew that the first time he spoke to someone that his unseen watcher, his fellow Bull-runner, did not trust, he was dead. Or perhaps there was no one. He did not know what he was to his comrades.

In The Two Maggots, Petron Carrickos gave Ori a book of his poems, self-published as Flexible Press.

"Been a long damn time, Ori," he said. He had a shade of wariness-his mouth twitched to ask Where’ve you been? You disappeared -but he bought Ori grappa and spoke to him about his projects. Petron held Runagate Rampant -not quite openly, but with the new bolshiness of the times.

Ori read a stanza aloud.

"A season here/In your flower/Petals of wood and iron/Lockstock stonedead shock of a Dog Fenn frown." He nodded.

Petron told Ori about the Flexibles: who was doing what, who had stayed part of something, who had disappeared. "Samuel’s buggered off. He’s selling stuff in some tarty gallery in Salacus Fields." He snorted. "Nelson and Drowena are still in Howl Barrow. Of course everything’s changed now, you can imagine. We’re still trying to do the shows when we can. Community stuff, in churches and halls and such."