Iron Council (38 page)

There was no one on the streets, or freakishly few, and those who there were went heads down. Past tarred houses by the Ribs, he kept the bricks of the raised railway to his left, went south, stumbling through Sunter, ready to turn on Rust Bridge to Murkside and from there to Syriac, but he saw the lights of fires and heard drumming, bugles. Nothing should be so loud at these predawn hours.

They grew louder; he felt himself going into shock, shaking hard, the weight of the helmet dragging him. South down High Chypre Hill, a street of florists and trinketeers by whose roofs the trains should come. There was a fork in the lines, where the tributary of the Dexter Line went down to Kelltree and veered east over the river to Dog Fenn. There, something was blocking his way.

Blinking till he teared in exhaustion, Ori saw in the glimmer of fires a rough barrier. He could not make sense of it. Its silhouette in that warm light was like something wild, something geographical in the city. People were moving at its top.

“Stop,” someone shouted. Ori kept walking, did not understand that the word could be meant for him.

It was a barricade of paving slabs and rubble, carts, chimneys, old doors, the overturned remnants of stalls. Tons of urban detritus had gone to make a little mountain ridge, a ten-foot-high debris cordon planted with flags. The marbled arm of a statue jutted from its flank.

“
Stop,
fucker.” A shot, a shard of concrete sounded with the ricochet. “Where you going, friend?”

Ori put his hands up high. He approached, waving.

“What’s happened? What’s going on?” he shouted, and there were jeers from the blockage.
What is he some fucker from Mafaton back from holiday?
“No papers, no kiosks, no criers where you been then, mate?” the sentry shouted. He was a man-shape in black, backlit. “Piss off home.”

“This
is
my home. Syriac. What’s
happened
? Godsdammit, how long was I between . . . This is about her, ain’t it? You’ve heard? The Mayor?” And all his excitement was back again. So much that he could hardly speak.
I might’ve been days,
he thought.
What’s happened while I’ve been gone? Did we do it? It happened. It woke them. The inspiration. Gods.
“Dammit, chaverim, let me in! Tell me what’s gone on.” He forgot cold and tiredness and stood up straight in the licking yellow light of the fires. “It’s all
happened
. . . How long ago did she die?”

“Who?”

“The
Mayor.
” Ori creased his brow. There were more calls, more shouting.
She dead? The bitch is gone? Who’s this fool, he’s a madman, I wouldn’t set your store . . .

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, mate. I think you should go now.” He heard the sound of gun-preparation.

“But what . . .”

“Listen, friend, someone can vouch for you? Because without that there’s no in, no out. You’re in no-man’s-land, and that ain’t a safe place to be. You’d best bugger off back to the Old Town, unless you give me a name. Give me a name, and we’ll check you out.” More heads were rising now; the man was being joined. An armed band, humans and other races, weapons hefted below snapping flags.

“Because you’re on the threshold now, mate, and you’re either on one side or the other. It ain’t like we just got here. Been two powers in the city for days, boy. You’ve had days to make up your mind. You’re either north”—and there were pantomime boos—“back in the old days and old ways: or you’re in here, Kelltree and Echomire and Dog fucking Fenn, in the future, which is now.

“Walk toward me slow, and keep your hands like that. Let’s have a look at you, you gormless fool.” It was almost kindly. A bottle smashed. “Come a bit closer. Welcome to the Free Territories, mate. Welcome to the New Crobuzon Collective.”

part seven

STAIN

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

“I hate that we run from them.”

“You heard, though. You heard how it was. We have to play safe. They’re armed to take us out.”

“But if we have to run from them, why by gods are we heading back to the city? It’ll be way worse.”

“It doesn’t work like that, though, does it? That’s not the idea. We send out word. By coming back, we change things. By the time we get back, it won’t be them waiting for us. It’ll be a different city.”

Cutter and the man lounged against a wall after another dance, in a cab reconfigured. It was a punitive journey, and night after night the Iron Councillors kicked against the darkness to improvised rhythms.

There had been deaths, of course, to footholds lost, to viruses and bacteria of the hinterland, and to the depredations of the inland predators, animals that unfolded in claws, teeth, cirri, and killed. Drogon went hunting with the Council’s forces, came back with the heads of strange predators, with new wounds and stories.
That one phases, so we trapped it when it went icy and I took it through the heart. That one sees with its teeth.

Cutter saw some of the new thaumaturgy the Iron Council had learned. It would not have saved them from the militia. The Council tried to make things hard for their pursuers, blowing up bridges behind them, filling trenches with rubble. Judah laid golem traps
behind the Iron Council, set to be triggered only by a company of men. He laid as many as he could—each one ate at his energy. Cutter imagined the earth buckling and unbuckling become a rock figure, a figure made of fallen trees, the water of the stream, wherever Judah had laid the trap. Its one instruction indelible and simple in place of a brain:
fight.
The substance of the inlands themselves gone not feral but organized, interceding and pounding down the militia with its blows.

If the militia reached that far, which Cutter thought they would. Some of them would die, but most would likely not. When they made landfall, found the Council’s trail, even the power of Judah’s great golems could not stop them coming. The militia would close on the stragglers of the Iron Council, those left behind by the train. Iron Council relied on the cacotopic zone. That was what would hide them.

“Didn’t think I’d see this again,” Judah said. They were on a crag peering over the tracks, the long dotted-out spread of men and women, riding pack mules or walking hard and fast, surrounding and joining the graders.

What if the Council changes its policy on the way?
Cutter thought.
What if we get halfway across and enough people disagree and want to go back?

There. The sun moved behind them. Its vividness seemed to green slowly as it sank, as if it were verdigrising. In the ill-seeming light they looked north and east into the cacotopic stain. They had come hundreds of miles, in weeks, and here they were, at the edge.

Cutter went white to see it. “Qurabin,” he said, “tell us a secret. What is it? What’s happening there?” Something sounded in the air like scuttling.

The monk’s voice came: “Some secrets I don’t want to know.”

There, a Torque landscape. Mussed by that ineffable bad energy, the explosion of shaping, a terrible fecundity. Vistas.
We ain’t seeing what this really is,
Cutter thought.
This is just one idea. One way of it being.

Even there in the outskirts of the cacotopos land was liminal, half-worldly geography, half some bad-dream set. It was merciless, stone horns and trees that looked like stone horns, forests of head-high mushrooms and ferns that dwarfed runt pines and, a way off, the flat of some delta where the sky seemed to push in between too-tall extrusions. Cutter could see nothing moving. That unplace
extended to the horizon. It was many miles to pass through.

Cutter did not know if he was seeing hills or insects flying close to his eye: that could not be, he knew, but the impossibility of focus confounded him. Was that a forest so far off? That went for many miles? Or was it not a forest but a tar pit? Or now perhaps not a tar pit but a sea of bones or a grid, a wall of tessellated carbon or scabmatter the size of a city.

He could not make it out. He saw a mountain and the mountain was a new shape, and the snow on its top was a colour snow should not be and was not snow but something alive and tenebrotropic. The distant stuff extended cilia that must be the size
of trees, toward oncoming darkness. Lights in the sky, stars, then birds, moons, two or three moons that were the bellies of acre-wide lightning bugs and then were gone.

“I can’t do the sense of it.” Qurabin’s voice was terrible. “There are some things the Moment of the Hidden and the Lost doesn’t know, or’s scared to say.”

The Torquescape was insinuatory, and fervent, and full of presences, animalized rock that hunted
as granite must of course hunt
and spliced impossibilities. They had all heard the stories: the cockroach tree, the chimerae of goat and ghost, reptilian insects, treeish things, trees themselves become holes in time. There was more than Cutter could bear. His eyes and mind kept trying, kept straining to contain, encompass. “How could they
do
this? Travel through this?”

“Not through,” Judah said. “They didn’t. Keep remembering that. They went just round the outside. Close enough to scare.”

“Close enough to die,” Cutter said, and Judah inclined his head.

“What things live here?” Cutter said.

“Impossible to list,” Judah said. “Each is its own thing. There are some I suppose—there are shunn, there are inchmen in the outskirts . . .”

“Where we’ll be.”

“Where we’ll be.”

They would be three weeks, perhaps, in the edges of the cacotopic zone. Three weeks pushing as close as they dared into the viral landscape. There must have been those who had passed through it before, in the half-millennium since it appeared in a spurt of pathological parturition. Cutter knew the stories of Cally the winged man; he had heard rumours of adventures in the stain.

“There must be another way,” he said. But no, they said there was not.

“It’s the only way to be safe from the militia,”
Drogon whispered.
“The only way to be sure they won’t follow us. They’ll be stranded outside. It’s basic orders: never go into the zone. And anyway—”
His intonation changed, the breath of his words faster.
“—this is how they found their way. The Council, I mean. A passage through the continent. You know how long people tried for that? A passage? Through the smokestone, the cordillera, the quaglands, the barrows? We can’t risk changing it. This might be the only way.”

A few miles in, Judah disappeared for hours in the train’s wake, returned exhausted. Cutter screamed at him not to go off alone, and Judah gave one of his saint’s smiles.

Camouflaged with brush were segments of the tracks. The scouts and graders joined them, section to section, and the train went through the outlands of the stain. Cutter clung to the perpetual train and let the wind refresh him. There were a few demons of motion left, all domesticated now, the children or grandchildren of the first wild pulse-eating dweomers who had chewed the wheels. The ethereal little fauna were cowed. Cutter watched them.

He watched the rocks and the trees, heard below the grind
of the gears and flywheels the bleatings of unseen animals. There were fights as people tried to take their turn sleeping in the cabs. The camp of graders was a tight little tent-town, in circles for safety. Still, nothing could prevent some of the effects of the cacotopic stain reaching out.

Water was rationed, but still every day crews led by the council’s few vodyanoi dowsers would set out to find potable streams—they went south, always, away from the Torque and the danger. And still every few days one or other would return ragged and stammering, carrying the remnants of someone lost, or bundling someone who had changed. Torque touched at night with its fingers of alterity.

“She was fine till we headed home,” the hunters might shout, holding a Remade woman who shook so ceaselessly hard and fast that the blur of her limbs and head half-solidified and she was a faintly screaming mass of quasi-solid flesh. “Shadowphage,” they might say, indicating the terrified boy from whom light shone too brightly, the inside of his open mouth as clear and illuminated as the crown of his head. People came back who had become gnawed by the radula of impossibly fast vermiform predators. The Iron Council passed over footprints: the stiletto holes of an echinoid rex, the strange tracks of an inchman, pounded earth in clumps four or five yards apart.

Of the Torque- or animal-wounded they saved those they could, in the cattle-truck become a sanatorium. Others they buried. In their tradition, they laid them ahead of the tracks. Once, digging a grave, they disturbed the bones of one of their ancestors, one of the Council dead on the outward journey, and with tremendous respect they begged her pardon and laid the newly died down with her forever.

“This can’t be right,” Cutter raged. “How many will this take? How many have to die?”

“Cutter, Cutter,” Ann-Hari said. “Hush you. It’s a terrible thing. But if we stayed, faced militia, we all die. And Cutter . . . so many more were killed the first time. So many more. We’re getting better at this. The perpetual train sends out safety. It’s charmed.” Every day the heads of new predators were hung from the train. It became a grotesque museum of the hunt.

When Cutter saw Drogon, the whispersmith was in a state of constant amazement. He relished the hunt even in these badlands, and everywhere they went he watched so closely, tracking their passage through splits and rockways, watching the movement of the cacotopic zone. He was committing it to memory, trying to understand it. That was one way. Cutter preferred another: wanted this time to be done, wanted only to have it end.

He went with crews scavenging for wood and ground-coal, peat, anything for the boilers. He went with his companions, searching for water.

The diviner emerged from the water-tank car given over to the vodyanoi. His name was Shuechen. He was sour and taciturn as stereotype said vodyanoi always were. Cutter liked that. His own brusqueness, cynicism and temper predisposed him to atrabilious vodyanoi.

As they rode, Shuechen swinging in his water-filled saddlesac, the dowser told them about the debates, the factions among
the Councillors, the argument over the Council’s new direction.
Ex-Runagaters, cynics, the young, the fearful old. There was uncertainty growing as to whether this was the best strategy, he said.

Shuech would put his big palms flat and sniff the earth, slapping it and listening to its echoes. He led them three hours from the train. Clean water came out of the rocks and gathered in a basin surrounded by roots so minimally touched by Torque that Cutter could imagine he was back in Rudewood. When he did, loss broke him a long moment.

They filled their water-sacks but then it was night, fast as a rag thrown over the sun, and quickly they made camp. They did not light a fire. “Not near the zone,” Shuech said.

Gripped together against a punitive rocky cold, the two Remade made Cutter’s party tell them about New Crobuzon. “Rudgutter’s dead? Can’t say it’s a shock. That bastard was Mayor forever. And now it’s
Stem-Fulcher
? Gods help us.”

They were stunned by the changes. “The militia patrol
openly
? In uniform? What in hell happened?” Pomeroy gave a brief history of the Construct War, the attack on the dumps, the rumours of what was within. It did not sound real, even to Cutter, who remembered it.

For a long time they straight refused to believe what Cutter told them of the handlingers.

“We was
chased
by one,” he said. “I’m telling you. During one
of the riot crises a few years back Stem-Fulcher announced that they’ve, whatever,
made contact,
and that they were all misunderstood.” The handlingers, figures of terror for centuries, the feral hands come from corpses (some said), who were devils escaped from hell (some said), who took over the minds of their hosts and made their bodies into something much more than they had been. If the condemned are to die anyway, Stem-Fulcher had said, and the city is in need of help the handlingers can give, it is foolish sentimentality not to draw an obvious conclusion. And of course they would be tightly controlled.

Even so the announcement had spurred new riots out of disgust, the abortive Handlinger Revolt. The crowd who would have taken boats across the Gross Tar to assault Parliament were defeated by those they were protesting, men and women suddenly rising from their masses and spitting fire, dextrier handlingers wearing the meat of the condemned.

Cutter talked late. He was very afraid of changing. “What if Torque gets out here?” he kept saying, and the Remade reassured him differently, one saying that if your number was up it was
up, the other that they were far enough that they should be all
right.

That night they were attacked.

Cutter woke to ripping and opened his eyes into grey moonlight and a face staring at his own. He thought it had come with him from his dreams. He heard shooting. He hauled himself away from the expression bearing down on him, a quizzical and monstrous look.