Free Iron Council by China Miéville

were elegantly manoeuvred, but they should have been—were designed to be—wooden players in traditionalist moral tales, not these little provocateurs whose puppeteers had them speak back tartly to the narrator, contradict him (always in the puppets’ traditional register, a cod-childish language of compound nouns and onomatopoeia), and dance to the noise and mum lewdness as far as their joints and strings would allow.
    Images, even animations—pictures in such quick cycles that they jumped and ran or fired their guns—came in stuttering succession onto the screen. The narrator harangued the audience and argued with the puppets and the other actors, and over growing dissent from the stalls the story of Jack Half-a-Prayer emerged in chaotic form. This stilled the angry crowd somewhat—it was a popular story, and they wanted to see what this anarchic Nuevist crew would do with it.
    The barebones introduction was familiar. “No one of us’ll forget, I’m sure,” the narrator said and he was right, no one could, it was only twenty years ago. The puppets sketched it out. Some obscure betrayal and Jack Half-a-Prayer, the legendary Jack, the fReemade boss, was caught. They cut his great mantis claw from his right hand—they’d given it to him in the punishment factories, but he’d used it against them, so they took it away. The puppets made this a scene gruesome with red-ribbon blood.
    Of course the militia always said he was a bandit and a murderer, and he did kill, no one doubted that. But like most versions of the story, this one showed him as he was remembered: champion-rogue, hero. Jack got caught and it was a sad story, and the censors let the people have it so.
    It wasn’t quite a public hanging they gave him—that wasn’t in the constitution—but they found a way to show him off. They’d tethered him on a giant stocks in BilSantum Plaza outside Perdido Street Station for days, and the overseer had used his whip at the slightest wriggle, deeming it resistance. They paid people to jeer, it was mostly agreed. Plenty of Crobuzoners came and didn’t cheer at all. There were those who said it was not the real Jack—
he’s no claw, they’ve found some poor bugger and lopped off his hand, is all
—but their tone was more despairing than convinced.
    The puppets came and went in front of the little plywood whipping post to which the wooden Jack was strapped.
    And then
da-da-da-da-da
went the metal drum. All of the actors on the stage began to shout and gesture at the militia-puppets, and the screen came up with the word everyone! and even the
sceptical audience played along and began to shout
over here, over here.
That was how it had been—a diversion from some in the crowd, orchestrated or chance was debated, though Ori had his own thoughts. As the militia dangled across the little puppet-stage, Ori remembered.
    It was a young memory, a child’s memory—he did not know why he had been in the plaza or with whom. It was the first time for years the militia had been seen like that in their uniforms, had been a forerunner of their turn from covert policing, and in a grey wedge they had targeted the shouting segment of crowd. The overseer had drawn a flintlock and dropped his whip and joined them, and left the tethered figure.
    Ori did not remember seeing the rough man who had ascended toward Jack Half-a-Prayer until he was near the top. He had a vivid image of him, but he did not know if that was his six-year-old’s memory or one constructed from all the reports he had later heard. The man—here came his puppet now, look, on the stage, while
the militia’s backs were turned—had been distinctive. Hairless, viciously scarred, pocked as if by decades of ferocious acne, his eyes sunken and wide, dressed in rags, a scarf pulled over his mouth and nose to hide him.
    The puppet that skulked exaggeratedly up the steps called out to Jack Half-a-Prayer with a harsh voice, a twenty-year-old echo of the real man’s