Iron Council (45 page)

The haints were maelstroming so fast they lost visible integrity, seemed to melt to a kind of swirling oil. Spiral Jacobs drew another shape and everything convulsed. Ori was shuddering from the wall where he was embedded, making little sounds.

Judah woke. Spiral Jacobs moved his hands. There were no haints now; instead the air was a dilute milk of their residue tracked through with vapour trails. Jacobs was shaking with effort, hauling something out of nothing, vividly trembling. As if from behind a rock, from underwater, a presence began to insinuate.

It was very small, or very big and very far away, and then it was perhaps much bigger than Cutter had thought or much closer, and moving very slowly or tremendously fast over a huge distance. He could not make out its parameters. He could see nothing. He heard it. He could see nothing. The thing made sound. The thing Spiral Jacobs was bringing, the murderspirit, the citykiller, he heard it howl. It came round and round like a rising vine, growing or rising up as if uncoiling from a well. It made a metal howl.

Cutter saw the lights of the city change below them. As the
unseen palpable thing approached, the buildings glowered. New Crobuzon’s architecture glared. The streetlamps and the lights of industry became the glints in eyes.

The beast was manifesting in New Crobuzon itself. It was pushing itself into New Crobuzon’s skin. Or was it waking what had been there always? Cutter could tell the thing was nearing them because the wall, the concrete beside them, did not change but looked to him suddenly like the flank of an animal tensed to attack. The Tesh thing was making the city itself a predator, rousing the hunt instincts of the metropolis.

How big, how big, when does it reach the top?
Cutter thought. He felt a sleepiness, a bled-out emergent death.

“I know your gods,” Qurabin said. The thing kept coming. The buildings tensed. Spiral Jacobs looked suddenly afraid.

Qurabin was only a voice, moving through the empty space. The monk sounded hysterical, aggressive, eager to fight. Qurabin taunted Spiral Jacobs. Had she or he still known Tesh, Cutter was certain that was what he would have heard, that glottal and interruptive language. Ragamoll was all that was left to Qurabin.

“Jinxing . . . it’s easy to intimidate them as don’t know what it is, yes? But what if you face one as does, eh? Another Teshi? Who can find out Teshi secrets? Your secrets?”

Spiral Jacobs shouted something.

“I don’t understand you no more, mate,” Qurabin said, but Cutter was sure the ambassador had said
traitor.

“Know who I am?” Qurabin said.

“Aye, I know who y’are,” shouted Jacobs, and he pushed out his hands sending a swirl of the buttery haint-stuff at where the voice came from, but the whirling air met no resistance. “You’re a Momentist blatherer.”

Judah was trying to stand, was burrowing his hands in dirt that shook with the incoming spirit-thing. He was trying to raise a golem, any golem, something.

“It’s coming,” Cutter shouted. It was coming out of its burrow into the real, it was unfolding into more and more impossible conjunctions. The dimensions of the bricks and the edges of the walls strained as it came close. Architecture stirred.

“Your godlings and demiurgii all live in the Moments, Teshman. And my Moment knows.” Qurabin’s voice was tremendous, louder than the oncoming of the murder-thing. Spiral Jacobs spat and his spit sent a cuffing wave through the milk-white disturbance. Qurabin roared, and began to shout.

“Tekke Vogu,” the monk said, “please tell me—” and the voice disappeared as Qurabin slipped into whatever place it was where the Moment lived and listened.

Nothing moved; the oncoming spirit seemed poised. And then Qurabin sounded again with a gasp, a terrible pain, because these were huge secrets to uncover. What it cost, Cutter could not imagine, but the monk learnt something. As the twitching filigree of the Phasma Urbomach unrolled into regular space, making the bricks, the spires and weathervanes and night-slates of New Crobuzon terrible teeth and claws, waking the surrounds so that Cutter gasped
in terror, Qurabin let loose hidden knowledge and the thing was
snatched
back down toward the nothing it had come from. It strained to emerge.

Judah sent a grass-and-earth golem stumbling toward Jacobs, but it was shuddered to dust before it got close. He reached out, tried to make a golem in the air, but whiteness clogged him.

Spiral Jacobs cursed in Tesh, and Qurabin screamed and the spirit began to crawl back again, but with a last plea, a last hollering for knowledge, Qurabin made the dire and mass-murderous visitant begin to slide away. As Spiral Jacobs cursed the thinning air that very air disgorged a figure. Blood-faced and exhausted, Qurabin the monk smiled through wounds, without language, only barking a seal’s gasps, without
eyes,
Cutter saw. These were the cost of all the secrets that had saved them. Qurabin reached out and gripped Jacobs the ambassador and whispered what must be the last word left to the renegade Tesh, stepped back into a true secret, a hidden place, into the domain of Tekke Vogu. The air winked behind them, and they, and in a swallowing of space the Urbomach, were gone.

Only the opalescence in the air was left. It began to thicken, moving and congealing like eggwhite in hot water, into a stinking solidity. It inspissated, fell in clots, mucal rain, and the sky and air was empty.

A silence gathered, then ebbed, and Cutter heard the shoot-sounds of the war again. He rolled in the debris, saw Judah gather himself all groggy and sodden with the smell of haint-dissolution. Saw Ori, unmoving, tethered somehow to brick, bleeding. The body of Elsie, a greyed nothing. Saw nothing in the air. Cutter saw that Qurabin, Spiral Jacobs and his city-killing thing were gone.

CHAPTER THIRTY

They called and whispered for Qurabin but the monk was definitely gone. “With the Moment now,” Judah said.

Elsie was colour-bled and dead. Ori was sutured to a wall, his skin become brick where it met the brick. Blood crusted the join. He was dead too.

Ori’s eyes were very open, would not close. Cutter felt huge sorrow for the young man. He tried to convince himself that there was peace in Ori’s expression, something settled.
You rest,
he thought.
You rest.

They worked their slow way around their enclosure and found a hole in the stonework. There was no wall in New Crobuzon without its flaw. Through back tunnels, through metal-floored walkways and ladders, they entered Perdido Street Station. They had to leave their dead friends in the hidden garden. They could do nothing else.

In the enormous girdered cavern of Perdido Street Station, its vast central concourse, Judah and Cutter discarded their weapons and tried to clean their haint-fouled clothes, milled with late-night travellers and militia. They took a train.

They ricketed over the middling townscape of Ludmead with late-shift workers. When the cupolas of New Crobuzon University rose in the windows to the north, they got out at Sedim Junction Station. When at last the platforms were silent, Cutter led Judah onto the forking trainlines, toward the Kelltree and Dog Fenn branches. With the half-moon weak above the city’s lights, they crept onto the rails and set out south.

Some lines jutted into Collective territory—the Collective tried to run its own short services to match Triesti’s, from Syriac Rising to Saltpetre, Low Falling Mud to Rim. The conventional trains and those waving Collective flags would approach each other on the same lines, would halt above the many-angled roofs, a few yards apart, each on its side of barricades thrown across the lines themselves.

The Ribs curled hugely into the sky. Halfway up their length, scores of yards above the train lines, was the ragged jag where one of the Ribs had been broken by firing. The sharded edge of the break was a cleaner white, already yellowing. In the streets below Cutter saw the torn hole in the terrace where the broken end had fallen, crushing houses. It lay there still in the hole, among bomb damage, tons of bone ruin.

They walked an empty stretch of unclaimed railroad, chimneypots up from the street morass like periscopes peering curious, until they saw the piles of debris blocking the tracks. There were torches. Below in the alleyways was fighting, the incursion of the militia as the Collective’s barricadistes withdrew and fell back a few streets, firing from street kiosks, voxiterator booths, from behind iron pillars.

A war train was approaching from beyond the barricade—they could see its lights and the gush of it. It fired as it came, sending shells into the militia in the streets. It came up from the south, from Kelltree’s docks.

“Halt, you fuckers!” came from the barrier. Cutter was ready to beg entrance, but Judah spoke in a huge voice, coming out of
stupor.

“Do you know who you’re talking to, chaver? Let me through,
now.
I’m
Judah Low.
I’m
Judah Low.
”

Ori’s landlady let them in. “I don’t know if he’ll be coming back,” Cutter said, and she looked away and thinned her green lips, nodded. “I’ll clean up later,” she said. “He’s a good boy. I like him. Your friends are here.”

Curdin and Madeleina were in Ori’s room. Madeleina wore tears. She sat by the bed and did not make a sound. Curdin lay soaking blood into the mattress. He sweated.

“Are we saved?” he said when Judah and Cutter came in. He did not wait. “Got pretty harsh out there.” They sat with him. Judah put his head in his hands. “We had some hostages, some priests, some members of Parliament, Fat Sunners, the old Mayor’s party. And the crowd was . . . It got ugly.” He shook his head.

“He’s dead, or dying,” Curdin said. He tapped his rear legs. “This one. The man inside me. That was the worst of it.” He backheeled his own ruined hindleg.

“Sometimes it seemed to want to go somewhere. There’s a knot in my belly. I wonder whether this was a dead man, or whether they left him alive in there. Whether his brain’s in there, in the dark. He’d be mad, wouldn’t he? I was either half-corpse, or half-madman. I might have been a
prison.
”

He coughed—there was blood. No one spoke a long time.

“I wish, you know I really wish you’d been here in the early days.” He looked at the ceiling. “We didn’t know what we were doing. People on the streets were moving much faster than the Caucus. Even some militia were coming over to us. We had to run to catch up.

“We put on lectures and hundreds came. The cactacae voted to show people inside the Glasshouse. I won’t tell you everything was all right because it weren’t. But we was trying.”

Silence again. Madeleina kept her eyes on his face.

“Chaos. Concessionists wanted to meet the Mayor, Suitors wanted peace whatever cost. The Victorians screaming that we had to
crush
Tesh: they thought the city’d gone pusillanimous. A core of Caucus. And provocateurs.” He smiled. “We had plans. We made mistakes. When we took over the banks, the Caucus didn’t argue hard enough, or we argued wrong, because we ended up
borrowing
little bits with
by your leave.
Never mind it should have been ours to start with.”

He was quiet so long Cutter thought he had died.

“Once, it was something else,” he said. “I wish you’d seen it. Where’s Rahul gone? I wanted to tell him.

“Well he or his’ll see something, I suppose. They’re still coming, ain’t they? Gods know what they’ll face.” He shook as if chuckling, emitting no sound. “The militia must know Iron Council’s coming. It’s
good
that they’re coming. I’m sorry it’s later than we’d have liked. We were thinking of them, when we did what we did. I hope we made them proud.”

By noon he was in a coma. Madeleina watched him.

She said: “It was him tried to stop the mob, when they took revenge against the hostages. He tried to step in.”

“Listen to me,” Judah said to Cutter. They were in the hallway. All Judah’s uncertainty was gone. He was hard as one of his own iron golems. “The Collective is dead. No, listen, be quiet. It’s
dead
and if Iron Council comes here it’ll be dead too. They’ve no chance. The militia’ll amass on the borders, where the trains come in. They’ll just wait. By the time the Council gets here—be, what, four weeks at least?—the Collective’ll be gone. And the militia’ll pour everything into killing Iron Council.

“Cutter. I won’t let them. I won’t. Listen to me. You have to tell them. You have to get back and tell them. They have to go. Send the train up north, find a way into the mountains. I don’t know. Maybe they have to desert the train, be fReemade. Whatever. But they can’t come into the city.

“Be
quiet.
” Cutter had been about to speak but he closed his mouth hard. He had never seen Judah like this: all the beatific calm was gone, and something stone-hard remained. “Be quiet and listen. You have to go now. Get out of the city
however you damn well can,
and find them. If Rahul or Drogon or anyone finds their way back I’ll send them after you. But Cutter, you have to stop the train from coming.”

“What about you?”

Judah’s face set. He seemed wistful.

“You might fail, Cutter. And if you do, I might, just, be able to do something.”

“You know how to use the mirrors, don’t you? You remember? Because those militia . . . they’ve come all the way through the cacotopic zone. They’ll reach the Council. And I ain’t sure, but I bet I know what they are, what they’d have to be to be hardcore enough to take us, but travel quick and light like they’ve done. If I’m right you’ll have to do what you can, Cutter. You’ll have to show the Council. Do right by me, Cutter.”

“And you? What are you going to do? While I’m off persuading the damn Council.”

“I said. I’ve an idea—something for safety’s sake. A last plan. Because by Jabber and by gods and by everything, Cutter, I will
not
let this happen. Stop them. But if you don’t, I’ll be here, with my plan.
Do right by me, Cutter.
”

Bastard,
Cutter thought, tearing up, trying to speak.
Bastard to say that to me. You know what you are to me.
Bastard. He felt his chest hollow, felt as if he were falling inside, as if his very fucking
innards
were straining for Judah.

“Love you, Judah,” he said. He looked away. “Love you. Do what I can.”
I love you so much Judah. I’d die for you.
He wept without sob or sound, furious at it, trying to wipe it away.

Judah kissed him. Judah straightened, kind, implacable, held Cutter gently by the chin and tilted his head up. Cutter saw the damp on the wallpaper, saw the doorframe, looked at Judah’s stubble all grey, the man’s thin face. Judah kissed him and Cutter heard a sound from his own throat, and was enraged at himself and then also at Judah.
You bastard,
he thought or tried to think at the kiss, but he could not make himself. He would do what Judah asked.
I love you Judah.