Spiral Jacobs walked the tight streets of the Old Town, the firstborn part of New Crobuzon, a V in the mud between rivers, now spilt over into metropolis dimensions. He shuffled and crooned and drew his spirals on the dark brick walls, on through Sheck, a grocertown of shopkeepers and a stronghold of New Quill, where Ori walked carefully. He saw not the bowlered Quill foot soldiers but the nervous paunchy men of defence committees, in agonies of pride at their own bravery. Through the outer edge of Spit Hearth where the prostitutes worked, streetwalkers eyeing him. Spiral Jacobs drew his coil. On one side was the window of a brothel advertising outré relaxations: on the other a mouldered poster, some radical group trying to recruit women it coyly called "those of unorthodox service professions."

The Crow, New Crobuzon’s commercial heart, was not full. There were only a few walking so late. Spiral Jacobs, with Ori behind him, passed the arcades, tunnels through buildings neither open nor closed. They were curlicued in spiralled iron that the old man fingered with appreciation, their windows full of trinkets for the burghers.

And then Ori stopped and let Spiral continue toward the shadow, light-dappled, of the core of New Crobuzon: a castle, a factory, a town of towers; a god, some said, made by a madman intent on theogenesis. It was not a building but a mountain in the materials of building, a mongrel of styles united with illicit intelligence. The city’s five railway lines emerged from its mouths, or perhaps they congregated there, perhaps their motion was inward and they coiled together like a rat-king’s tails and knotted and made the edifice that housed them, Perdido Street Station. A ganglion of railroad.

Spiral Jacobs headed under the arch that tethered it to the militia’s central Spike, was bunking down in the brick concrete wood iron temple great and charged enough to alter the weather above it, to alter the very night.

Ori watched the old man go. Perdido Street Station did not care that the city was surging. That nothing was the same as it had been. Ori turned and for the first time in hours his ears cleared, and he heard the calls of fighting, the swallowing of fires.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Two

All hands, the message said. It’s now. Pinned to Ori’s door.

Old Shoulder and Toro were the only ones not there. Baron explained the plan.

"Near a week," he said. "That’s what we got. This information’s from Bertold. We have to be careful. This"-a square of chalk-"is the top room. This is where they’ll be.