He thought that for a few hours, against the evidence: the rebels who had no idea Stem-Fulcher was gone, who learnt it with a cruel excitement but no great renewal of purpose, no upsurge of fight spirit. They had enough of that in those early barricade days, irrespective of what the Toroans had done. A few hours with the Collective, and Ori had known that the operation against the Mayor had been irrelevant to its birth.

Ori, Toro, pushed against the world with his helmet and split through again and again. He could move easily. He went skulking from the Collective to Parliament’s city and back again, disdaining the traps and barriers between them. He followed his quarry, like a dog. He followed Spiral Jacobs.

Well then, he had thought, the execution of the Mayor will be part of the movement. It was of the moment. The world was changed. It would be part of the momentum. Ugly, yes, but a freeing, something that would drive things forward. The Collective would be inexorable. Uptown would fall. In the Collective, the seditionists would win the delegates, and the Collectivists would win against Parliament.

The militia imposed lockdown law across what of New Crobuzon they controlled. The populace convulsed in sympathy riots, fought in some places, to join the Collective, and failed. Ori had waited. With a tumour of anxiety, he found in himself a drab certainty that the killing of the Mayor had done nothing at all.

When he was Toro, Ori moved in the darkness between reality’s pores, to emerge in the quiet of uptown, in the evenings, on Mog Hill, unseen behind the rows of sightseers. Uptowners from Chnum and Mafaton whooped as if at fireworks at the oily blossomings of explosives, at the unlight glow of witch fire from Parliament’s thaumaturges, gave childish boos at the motes of glow from hedgehexers of the Collective.

I could kill so many of you, Ori thought, time and again, for my brothers and sisters, for my dead, and found himself doing nothing.

He went to the Kelltree warehouse many nights running. None of his comrades came back. He thought that Baron might have escaped, but he was sure the militiaman had not tried for that. No one came back to the rendezvous.

Ori gave his landlady promissory notes, which she accepted in kindness. Within the Collective’s bounds, everything was camaraderie. He sat with her at night and listened to the attacks. There were rumours that Parliament was using war constructs for the first time in twenty years.

He kept the armour under his bed. His bull helmet. He did not use it except to walk at night, and he did not know why. Once he horned his way through newly dangerous streets, past Collectivist guards who were drunk and others focused and sober, through the raucous night, to the soup kitchen. There was a debate among the derelicts.