Free Iron Council by China Miéville Page B

to win.
    They were inaudible over the shouting. Food pelted the stage. A disturbance, and the master of ceremonies came on, his suit rumpled. He was hurried, almost pushed on by a thin young man—
a clerk from the Office of Censorship who listened backstage through all registered performances. His job had abruptly stopped being routine.
    “Enough, you have to stop,” shouted the MC and tried to pull the puppets away. “I’ve been informed, this performance is
over.
” He was shocked out of his pompous patter. Thrown scraps hit him, so he cowered even more than he already was. The supporters of
the Flexibles were few but loud, and they were demanding the
show continue, but seeing Fallybeggar’s man lose control the young
censor himself stepped up and spoke to the audience.
    “This performance is cancelled. This troupe is guilty of Rudeness to New Crobuzon in the Second Degree, and is hereby disbanded pending an enquiry.”
Fuck you, shame, get off, show must go on. What rudeness? What rudeness?
The young censor was quite unintimidated, and was damned if he’d put this dissidence into words. “The militia have been called, and on their arrival, all still here will be deemed complicit with the performance. Please leave the premises immediately.” The mood was too mean for dispersal.
    There was more glass in the air and the screams that told it had landed. Quillers were targeting the stage, Ori saw, heading to beat the performers, and he pushed himself up and indicated to nearby friends and they headed off to intercept the knuckle-cracking Quillers, and the riot blossomed.
    Adely Gladly ran out, already in her risqué costume, and shouted for peace. Ori saw her, just before he split his fist on the back of some Quill-scum head, then looked back at the matter in hand. On the stage the Flexible Puppet Theatre were scooping all their props out of the way. Over the noise of beating and shouts and percussions of glass the wonderful voice of the Dog Fenn Songbird begged for the fighting to stop, and no one paid her any notice.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    The play was defunct and done, and the militia when they came were more concerned with clearing the building than with making arrests. Ori blocked the Quillers long enough for the puppeteers to clear their pieces, and with the Flexibles he ducked backstage past brawls that were now mostly drunken, without political hatreds to refine them.
    They came out into an alley, bloodied but laughing, a mass of theatre people stuffing costumes into carpet bags, and one or two like Ori, observers. It had rained a little moments before, but the night was warm, so the film of water seemed like the city’s sweat.
    Petron Carrickos, who had been the narrator, pulled his moustache off, leaving its ghost in spirit gum above his lip, and stuck it on the alley’s lone poster, giving the revivalist whose sermons it advertised thick eyebrows. Ori went west with him and several others to Cadmium Street. They would double back and head for Salacus Fields Station without passing Fallybeggar’s entrance.
    Late but not so late, the streets where Salacus met Howl Barrow were full. There were militia on corners. Ori jostled through late window-shoppers and theatre-goers, the music-lovers at voxiterator booths, a few golems like giant marionettes, wearing their
owners’ sashes. There were markings on walls. Illicit galleries and theatres, artists’ squats, signposted by graffiti for those who could read it. Salacus Fields itself was becoming colonised by the weekend bohemians. There had always been moneyed slummers, bad-boy younger children seeking tawdry redemption or dissolution, but now their visits were temporary and their transformations tourist. Ori felt contempt. Artists and musicians were moving out as agents and merchants moved in and rents rose, even while industry floundered. So to Howl Barrow.
    The streets sputtered under the bilious elyctro-barometric shopsigns. Ori nodded at the faces he knew