Iron Council (41 page)

But it was not enough. The militia were taking Cockscomb Bridge, firing back at the train. In the east, the black spine of Parliament stabbed up, an inselberg of dark architecture, watching this and the other fights (an airship raid on the Kelltree Docks, shunn-cavalry riding their bipeds into Creekside, a Mamluk regiment of loyal Remade fighting in Echomire while the Collectivists screamed and called them traitors).

It’s time.
A whisper from the Collective’s Riverskin commanders. Under the railway arches by Saltpetre Station, a command headquarters, Frengeler, ex-militia, trained in tactics and turned to the radicals, the outstanding military thinker of the Collective, was screaming:
Decide if you want to fucking win or not. We’re out of time, do it. Blow the bridges.

There were few bridges left that crossed from Parliament territory directly into the Collective: each was a conduit they could
not afford to cede to the militia. Below the surface of the Tar,
the vodyanoi Collectivists guarding the sewer entrances sent out aquatic sappers.

None of them liked the job they had to do. None of them wanted to destroy these loved old things. They felt they must.

They found their way through the murked waters to where the arches of the bridge rose from mud, they groped, but with growing anxiety could not find their demolitions. They gripped at each other and barked their submerged tongue, but out of the dark
water came enemy shapes.
Betrayal,
someone shouted, as militia vodyanoi came at them, shamans with roiling patches of clean water, undines that gripped the Collectivists and squeezed.

A rump escaped. Their information came through:
We can’t explode the fucking bridge.

Sheer Bridge, then. But though this time the vodyanoi swimmers were careful of ambush, it was the same thing—their explosives were gone. Found gods-knew-when and removed. The plans of the Collective to cauterise the ingress of militia had been stymied.

“It’ll be the same on Mandrake Bridge, and Barrow. They’ve got
ways in.
”

And now here they were coming. With the suppressing fire of the Collective’s guns, the thanatic foci of their hexes, their boobytraps, it took the militia hours to advance through what they made a monstrous landscape, of jags that had been walls and windows without glass or purpose. But they were advancing. Cockscomb Bridge belonged to Parliament again.

As the Collectivists fell back, more barricades went up. The rubble from bombed buildings was hauled as foundation and
anything
went above it, slag from factories, sleepers, furniture, the stumps of trees from Sobek Croix. The Collectivists had to sacrifice a few streets west of Sedilia Square to focus on main streets. They sent word to the defenders of the south bank itself to prepare for invasion if the militia veered east over the bridge.

They did not. They crossed the river; and in the square they halted, commandeered buildings (one only just vacated by Collectivists, whose effects the militia began systematically to defile, throwing pissed-on heliotypes out of the windows).

In Griss Twist, the insurrectionists took decades-old rubbish from the dumps to block Sheer Bridge. Badside was being shelled, its desolate population and the token Collectivist units left to guard it conserving their ammunition. No one wanted Badside itself; but as a conduit to Echomire and Kelltree, and as the riverbank facing Dog Fenn, the Collective’s heart, it had to be defended.

In the city’s northwest, where the Dog Fenn Collectivists could not go, their sister chapters were in trouble. Something was being prepared in Tar and Canker Wedge, surely an attack on Smog Bend. Break it, with its machinofacture and its organised workers, and that chapter of the Collective was gone.

Howl Barrow was easy. “We can flatten a bunch of inverts, perverts and painters quicker than scratching our arses,” one captured militia commander had said, and his disdainful claim had become notorious. The Howl Barrow chapter would not last long, with its Nuevist squads, its battalions of militant ballet dancers, its infamous Pretty Brigade, a group of Collectivist grenadiers and musketeers all of them dollyboy man-whores in dresses and exaggerated make-up, shouting orders to each other in invert slang. At first they had been greeted with disgust; then with forbearance, as they fought without restraint; then with exasperated affection. No one wanted them to be overrun, but it was inevitable.

The militia took Cockscomb Bridge, broke the Glasshouse Gunners, and were camped on the south bank of the River Tar. They were poised to push east into the heartlands of the Dog Fenn chapter, the stronghold of the New Crobuzon Collective. There was a sense that no Collectivist would voice, that this was the start of the end.

It was into this atmosphere, this war, that Judah, Cutter and their party entered the city.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

“Gods.
Gods.
How in the name of Jabber did you
get
here?”

Entering and leaving the New Crobuzon Collective was hard. The barricades were guarded by the tense and terrified. The sewers were patrolled. With the Parliamentarian aeronauts savaging any dirigibles not their own, with hexes protecting each side, coming in and out had become epic and dangerous.

There were lurid folk tales: the heroic guardsman who slipped out without fanfare to execute militia; the Parliamentarian unit that took a wrong turn in a backstreet maze to emerge in the middle of Collectivist territory. Now there was a story of the crusade coming, to take all the poor starvelings in the Collective away.

Of course hundreds
had
entered and left the Collective, through ill-guarded barriers, through thaumaturgy. The Mayor’s city was full of those who took the Collective’s side: in Chimer, in the industrial fringe of Lichford, areas under martial law but from which guilders, seditionists and the curious sometimes made their way into Dog Fenn or Creekside, begging entry. And the Collective itself contained many who passively or actively wished it ill, and crept out uptown or stayed as spies.

So arrivals were feted, but suspiciously. Judah and the others came from the east of the city, through the ruinous landscape by Grand Calibre Bridge. With Qurabin’s help they found hidden byways, more and more of the monk eroding with each journey. Past the barricadistes. Along brick gulches to the post office in Dog Fenn where the delegate council met. They addressed the representatives of the Caucus.

Cutter felt emptied out. So many months since he had been in New Crobuzon and now it was so new, so tremendously not as it had been. It made him think of everything, it made him think of Drey and Ihona and Fejh and Pomeroy, of the bones under the railroad tracks.

What city is this?
he had thought as they entered.

The towers of Grand Calibre Bridge, ajut and centuries broken in the water of the Gross Tar, now crowned with guns puffing lazily to send shells uptown. Badside, always squalid, reshaped and broken now by more than poverty.

Everywhere. Over the girders of Barley Bridge, the streets concatenate with the everyday, the monstrous and the beautiful. They were not quite empty. There were bandaged soldiers who watched the party from broken buildings. Members of a quickly running, now ratlike populace bent under sacks of food, under furniture and nonsense they took from one place to another. They were cowed.

The trail-dust on Cutter and his comrades meant they took curious looks—everyone was dirty but their dirt was different—but no one seemed to find it strange that they travelled together: two Remade, with four whole humans (no one could see Qurabin) pulling their exhausted mounts.

The Remade were mounts themselves. The lizard-bodied man, Rahul, was one: Ann-Hari’s agent when the Iron Council was born, whose voice Cutter had heard telling of Uzman’s death. He was in late mid-age, but still ran on those backbent legs faster than any horse. Judah had ridden him across the wildlands to the city. The other was a woman, Maribet, whose arcane Remaking had put her head on the neck of a carthorse studded with avian claws. Elsie was her rider.

Many of the young freeborn Councillors had been desperate to see New Crobuzon, but Ann-Hari had insisted that the Council itself needed every hand. They would see the city soon enough. Iron Council had sent only these emissaries.

The two Remade stared like farmboys from the Mendican Foothills. As if the geography awed them utterly. They were walking in a broken dream of their own pasts.

There were children in the streets. Wild, they made playgrounds out of destroyed architecture. Bombs had taken large parts of the city away, recast others in a bleak fantastic of pointless still-standing walls, rubble wastes, girders and thick wires uncoiled arm-thick from the ground: gardens of ruin. And amid them new kinds of beauty.

Hexes had made sculptures of brick, stained breakdown, strange colours. In one place they had made an ivied wall only half there,
a glasslike brick refraction. The cats and dogs of New Crobuzon
ran over this reshaping. They were tense, prey animals now: the Collectivists were hungry.

A strange parade. A children’s play performed on a street-
corner to an audience of parents and friends desperate and ostentatious with pride and enjoyment, as bomb sounds continued. Spirals on the walls. Complex, arcing and re-arcing. Qurabin, unseen, made a hiss, a
yes
sound.

Once there was a panic, someone as they walked past screaming and running from a patch of moving colour, crying “A haint! A haint!” But it was fresh graffiti, ink sliding down, that had shocked the woman. She laughed, embarrassed. A klaxon sounded and an aerostat had hauled piscine over the Collective and drizzled bombs with coughs of collapsing mortar; those on the streets started and looked wary but more resigned than afraid.

There were countless styles on the streets. A last flowering of impoverished dandyism.

What
is
this place?
thought Cutter.
I cannot believe I’m here. I cannot believe I’m back. We’re
back.

He saw Judah. Judah was destroyed. His face was absolute with misery.
Is this what we won?
Cutter saw him wonder.

In the later days of their journey, close to the city, Iron Council’s emissaries had met scores of refugees, poor and not-poor, from downtown and uptown. Out in the open land, they were only the lost. “Too much terror,” one had told them, not knowing who they were, assuming them explorers. “It ain’t the same,” the Crobuzoners said.

“It was something in the first days,” a woman said. She held a baby. “I’d have stayed. It weren’t easy, but it was something. Emptying the prisons and the punishment factories, hearing Tarmuth had gone, getting messages from its Collective, till it fell. The food run out and next thing we’re eating rat. Time to go.”

A terrified shopkeeper from Sheck claimed the Collective had gathered all the rich from the south of Aspic when they had taken it, stolen their houses, shot the men, raped the women and shot them too, and were raising the children as slaves.

“I’m gone,” he said. “What if they win? What if they kill Mayor Triesti like they did Stem-Fulcher? I’m gone for Cobsea. They appreciate an industrious man.”

Through streets Cutter had once known now made strange by mortars, with neglected bunting in the colours of factions, with signs proclaiming idiot theories or new churches, new things, new ways of being, split and peeling. The raucousness and vigour were gone from the streets but still sensible in echo, in the buildings themselves: palimpsests of history, epochs, wars, other revolts embedded in their stones.

There were sixteen Caucusers in the delegate council. Five could be found. They stared. They hugged the newcomers. They wept.

“I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it.”

They each gripped Judah for what he had done, finding Iron Council, and Cutter and Elsie for finding Judah and bringing him back. They greeted Drogon. Judah told them Qurabin was with them, described the monk as a renegade from Tesh, and they looked in unease and waved at the air.

And then the Remade. The Iron Councillors.

One by one, the Caucusers of New Crobuzon’s Collective gripped the hands or tail-like limb of the Councillors, awed, abject, let out murmurs of solidarity. “Decades,” one whispered, holding Rahul, who reciprocated with unexpected gentleness in his lower, reptile arms. “You came back. Chaver, where you been? Gods. We been
waiting.
”

There were too many things to ask.
What has it been? Where have you been? How do you live? Do you miss us?
These questions and others filled the room in ghost unspoken form. When at last someone spoke, it was to say, “Why have you come back?”

Cutter knew some of the delegates. An old cactus-woman called Swelled Eyelid, a Proscribed, he remembered; a man Terrimer, whose affiliation he did not know; and Curdin.

Curdin, a leader of the Runagates Rampant, had been Remade.

There were fashions in Remaking. Cutter had seen this shape before. Pantomime horses, people called them. Curdin had been made quadruped. Behind his own, another pair of legs shuffled uncertainly, bent at their waist, their human torso horizontal and submerging into the flesh above Curdin’s arse as if he were opaque water. Another man had been embedded in him.

“They broke me out,” he said to Cutter quietly. “When it started. When the Collective took over. They emptied the punishment factories. Too late for me.”

“Curdin,” Judah said. “Curdin, what is this? What’s happening? Is this the Collective?”

“It was,” Curdin said. “It
was.
”

“Why’s the Council coming
back
?”

“We’re being targeted,” Judah said. “New Crobuzon fought its way through the Firewater Straits for us. They found out where we are. They’ve wanted us for years. Curdin, they’re chasing us
through the cacotopic stain.
The Council’s a way off yet, but it’s coming. We came to tell you, and to see—”

“You sure you’re still being followed? Through the stain? How did you
come through the damn stain
?”

“We’ve not shaken them off. They may be depleted, but they’re still coming. Even if Parliament doesn’t believe that the Council’s returning, their assassins are after us.”

“But why are you
here
?”

“Because of you, of course. Gods
damn,
Curdin. I knew something was happening when I left. I knew, and when the Council heard about it, they knew it was time to come home. To be part of this.”

But you wanted to stay away, Judah.
Cutter looked at him, with a strange sense.

“We’re coming back. We’re going to join the Collective.”

Though there was joy in the faces of the Caucusers, Cutter swore he saw something ambivalent in all of them.

“There ain’t a Collective.”

“You
shut
your damn
mouth,
” said others instantly, rounding on Curdin, and, “The
fuck
you say.” Even the other Runagaters looked shocked, but Curdin raised himself up on four tiptoes and shouted.

“We
know
it. We’ve weeks, at the most. We’ve nothing left. They’ve cut us off, they’re killing Smog Bend, Howl Barrow’s probably gone. We’re less than a fifth of the committee—half the others don’t know what they want, or want to
make peace,
for gods’ sake, with the Mayor, as if Parliament wants that now. We’re
over.
We’re just living out days. And now you want to drag the godsdamned
Iron Council
into this? You want to bring it down?”

“Chaver.” It was a young woman who spoke, a Runagater. Her voice shook. “You won’t like what I’m going to say.”

“No this
ain’t
because of what’s done to me . . .”

“Yes, it is. You been
Remade,
chaver, and it’s a sick thing, and it’s made you despair, and I ain’t saying I’d do it any differently, and I ain’t saying we’ll win for sure, but I am damn well saying that you don’t decide now that we’re done. You better godsdamned fight with us, Curdin.”

“Wait.” Judah’s mouth moved with a panic of collapsing plans. “Listen listen. Whatever the, whatever it is, whatever’s happening, you have to know that ain’t the reason we’re here. We have a job to do. Listen.

“Listen.

“New Crobuzon will fall.

“We heard—listen, please—we heard about the manifestations, your haints. They haven’t stopped, have they?”

“No but they grow smaller . . .”

“Yeah. For the same reason there aren’t droplets just around a splash. Because something’s getting close. Tesh
ain’t suing for peace.
Whether they’re talking to you, or Parliament, or both or whatever . . . they ain’t making peace, they’re preparing for the end. The haints ain’t the weapon. Something else is. It’s in the spirals.”

When at last they understood, they thought him mad. But not in fact for long.

“You think this is a whim?” Cutter raged at them. “You got any idea what we went through to get here? Any idea at all? What we’re trying to do here? The spirals are calling down fucking
fire
on you. On Parliament, Collective, all.”

They believed him, but Curdin laughed when Judah asked for help.

“What do you want from us, Judah? We ain’t got troops. I mean we do, but who’s ‘we’? I can’t control the Collective’s fighters. If I try to tell them what we need, they’ll think—even godsdamned now—that it’s a sodding ploy from a Runagater, trying to take over the Collective. I ain’t a military commander; I couldn’t control them. Or do you want
Runagaters
? Specifically?” He looked at his factionists.

“There’s a few left. Kirriko Street Irregulars is ours, but who the fuck knows how to contact them? The others are at the front. They’re on the barricades, Judah. What would you have me do?
You think we can call a godsdamned meeting of the delegates, explain the situation? We’re breaking down, Judah—it’s each district for itself. We have to hold off the militia.”

“Curdin, if we don’t stop this there won’t be a damn
city,
let alone the Collective.”

“I understand.” The Remade man’s eyes looked rubbed with sand. He was scabbed from fighting. He swayed. “What would you have me do?”

A standoff, as if they are enemies. A silence.

“The city needs this.”

“I
understand,
Judah. What would you have us
do
?”

“There must be someone, some thaumaturge, some of the
kithless . . .”

“I know who makes the spirals,” someone said.

“Maybe there is, but you’ll have to find them, and don’t look at me like that Judah of
course
I’ll do what I can, but I don’t know where to go. It’s the end now: there ain’t no one giving orders.”

“I know who makes the spirals. I know who makes the spirals.”

Quiet, finally. It was the young woman Runagater who spoke.