Iron Council (48 page)

They were siphoning something from the air, as their proasmae at last reached the newcomer gunmen and began to swim through them. The light golem came on. What were the militia calling?

A drizzle of luminance seemed to be pouring from the sky, very concentrate, a fine shaft just visible. It fell to the mechanism they surrounded. The light came out of the moon. The day-moon, just visible, very faint in sunlight. Out of its half-lustre came the moonlight into the machine, and at the end of the barrel a hole seemed to be opening.

In its deeps, something made of glow was moving. Cutter stared.

It took long moments to make sense of it—while he tried to march the light golem over the damage of still-exploding bombs, the wreckage left by the Councillors, who were advancing now that the yags had gone, now the proasmae were distracted by the newcomers, now the militia had lost control of their luftgeists that caused damage and death but only randomly as they gushed over the heavily protected train—but Cutter saw something in the opening. Its parameters changed, defied taxonomy. He tried to make sense of it.

Its shape altered with the seconds. A fish’s skeleton, the ribs passing ripples along the length of a body like a rope of vertebrae or like some rubberised cord. And then there was something of the bear to it, and something of the rat, and it had horns, and a great weight, and it shone as if its guts and skin, its bones were phosphorus. As if it were all cold and bright rock. A firefly, a death mask, a wooden skull.

A fegkarion. A moon elemental.

Cutter had heard of them, of course, but could not believe that this onrushing skeletal insectile animal thing he saw only half a second in three and that was a suggestion or a fold of space was the moonthing about which there were so many stories.
Oh gods, oh Jabber.

“Shanks . . . get the golem to that thing, now.”

But the golem did not walk so fast. It went through the militia at a steady pace, laid out its hands as it came. It took time to touch each man it passed, to smother their heads with its hands and pour light into them, so each burst with light, beams exploding their helmets, shining hard and for yards from their ears, their anuses, their pricks, through their clothes, making them stars, before the golem let them fall.

The fegkarion was crawling out of the nothing. “Come
on,
” Cutter said.

The elementalists were withdrawing, gathering around the moon-callers to protect them. They slashed at the golem now and drew its substance with each whip-strike, sent gouts of light spraying. Each lash snapped back Cutter’s and Thick Shanks’ heads. They bled. They kept the thing moving.

The proasmae were neglected. The last of them roared through two more gunners then took its bone-and-innard body into the wilds, following its siblings, rolling away from Drogon and Rahul. Drogon kept whispering, but by some thaumaturgy the militia no longer obeyed him. They lashed at him; they lashed at the golem.

“Come on, come on.”

Now the golem’s light-stuff legs stamped through bodies of the men attacking it, and they burst with the shining. The moon elemental was close, was corkscrewing its chill and grey-glowing self through the hole that was opened, and it was
vast,
Cutter saw, it was monstrous, and he reached and the golem reached to block the lunic cannon, wedging itself into the hole, shoving through the stuff of the elemental itself and into the engine of the machine, and golem and elemental fought, and blistering light—cold, hot, grey and magnesium-white—came welling out of nothing like sweat.

The Councillors saw the proasmae were gone, sent in their heaviest squads, their cactacae and big Remade. “Take some alive!” someone was shouting, and the cactus hacked conscious and light-comaed militia, and there was a burst, a shattering, and the moon-engine combusted in harpoons of golem-light and moonlight.

The militia were broken. Stopped by Drogon and his men, and by the light golem. The ground was scattered with dead elementarii and countless more dead from the Iron Council, with the burst residue of flesh elementals and their victims, with gobs of glow that trickled luminous into the earth. Those few militia still able rode into the wilds of Rohagi, following the slick tracks of the proasmae, which had become a wild herd: wet red blubber things prowling the dustland.

Those militia left were immobilised by bullets, by chakris or golem-light. Lying, spitting and raging at the Councillors as they came.

“Fuck you fuck you,” one man said through the ruins of his reflective helmet. There was fear in his voice but mostly there was rage. “Fuck you, you send us through the fucking stain, you cowards, you think that’ll stop us? We lost half our force but we’re the fucking best, we can chase you wherever you go, and now we know the way through, we found our way, and maybe you got lucky with this bullshit, this bastard lightshow and fucking susurrator. We know the way.” They shot him.

They shot all the militia left alive. They buried their own dead where they could, except for one, a Remade woman famous for mediating during The Idiocy, long before. They voted her a burial on the train’s carried graveyard, in the flatcar cemetery of its greatest dead. They left the militia to rot, and some defiled the bodies.

When the sun rose again on the yag-scorched train, Cutter found Ann-Hari and the Council’s leaders. They were exhausted. Drogon, Rahul and Thick Shanks were with them. Cutter stumbled with his own tiredness. He gripped Drogon and the Remade who had carried him.

“Last time we escaped the militia,” Thick Shanks said. “This time we
beat
them. We
took them down.
” Something of his delight even entered Cutter himself, though he knew all the contingencies that had led to this victory.

“Yeah. You did.”

“We did. You . . . the light . . . all of us did it.”

“Yeah, we did, all right. We did.”

“We got out, is all,” said Rahul. Drogon whispered agreement. “We got lost. Came out of that tunnel, well, that alleyway, whatever, into the main part of the town. It took us a while to find where we were. But there was so much going on that night. We never saw nor heard a thing from you. Not from none of you. We didn’t know if you’d fixed that Teshman or not. We’d no idea. You did, didn’t you?

“It took us time to get back to the Collective, but honestly there were so many damn holes we could
walk
in. When we found out you’d gone—no, I don’t blame you at all, sister, you couldn’t have known we was coming—we had to get back.

“So we smuggled us out, and then old Drogon here goes off for two days and comes back with his brothers.”

“There ain’t so many of us horse-wanderers,”
Drogon told Cutter.
“You can get word out. I know where to find them. And they owe me.”

“Where are they now?”

“Most are gone. Some ride tomorrow. These men are
nomads
, Cutter. Give them your thanks, any coin you can share, that’s all they want.”

“We knew the militia was coming,” Rahul said. “We rode hard.”

“You came out of nowhere.”

“We came out of the trails. Drogon knows them. We came fast. I ain’t never known horses like these men’s. Where’s the monk? Talking of secret trails. Qurabin. Oh no . . . Gods. And Ori? Did
he . . . Ori? Gods, gods. And . . .”

“Elsie.”

“Oh gods. No. Oh gods.”

“I didn’t think you could do it,” Cutter said to the Councillors. “I admit that. I was wrong. I’m happy. But it ain’t enough. I told you why Judah ain’t here . . . he’s working on something. In the Collective. But it’s too fucking late.
It’s too late.
He’s trying to do what
he can.

“Listen to me.

“The Collective’s fallen. Shut your mouth, no, listen . . . The Collective was a . . . a dream, but it’s over. It failed. If it ain’t dead by now it’ll be dead in days. You understand?
Days.

“By the time the Council comes close to the city . . . the Collective’ll be dead. New Crobuzon’ll be under martial rule. And what then? Killed Stem-Fulcher, it didn’t make a spit of difference: the system won’t be beat—don’t look at me like that, I don’t like it any more’n you. And when you come rolling up saying
Hello, we’re the
inspiration,
on cue,
you know what’ll happen. You know what’ll be waiting.

“Every militiaman and -woman in New Crobuzon. Every fucking war engine, every karcist, every thaumaturge, every construct, every spy and turncoat. They’ll kill you in view of the city, and then the hope that you are—you still are—dies when you die.

“Listen. I’ll give you Judah’s message again.

“You have to turn. The Iron Council has to turn. Or leave the train. You come on to New Crobuzon, it’s suicide. You’ll die. They’ll destroy you. And that can’t be. That ain’t acceptable. Iron Council has to turn.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

“They’ll destroy you,” he said. “Do you want to die?” he said. “You owe yourself to the world, we
need
you.”

Of course they would not be persuaded. They continued, pushed through the buckled land leaving the scabs of fight behind them. Cutter showed horror that they would not do as he said, but he had expected nothing else. He made his case and the Iron Councillors answered him in various ways.

Some gave the kind of idiot triumphalism that enraged him. “We beat New Crobuzon before, we’ll do it again!” they might
say. Cutter would stare uncomprehending because he saw that they
knew
what they said was untrue, that it would not be that way.
They knew.

Others were more thought-through. They gave him pause.

“What would we be?” Thick Shanks said. The cactus-man etched a cicatrix into the skin of his inner arm, cutting a snake shape with an animal’s tooth. “What would you have us be, bandits? We lived free in a republic we made. You want me to give that up, be a bloody wilderness hobo? I’d rather die fighting, Cutter.”

“We have a responsibility,” Ann-Hari said. Cutter never felt eased in her presence. The fervour in her unnerved him—it made him tired and uncertain of himself, as though she might win him over against his own will. He knew he was jealous—no one had had such an effect on Judah Low as Ann-Hari.

“We’re a dream,” she said. “The dream of the commons. Everything came to this, everything came here. We got to here. This is what we are. History’s pushing us.”

What does that
mean
?
he thought.
What are you
saying
?

“It’s time for us to push through. Whatever happens. We have to come back now, you see?” That was all she would say.

The whispersmith’s friends, his fellow cavalry, disappeared on their horses Remade and whole, becoming dustclouds as they headed east, south. Drogon stayed. Cutter was not sure why.

“What do you want this lot to do? You been in the city . . . you know we’ll be killed if we go.”

“They’ll be killed maybe.”
Drogon shrugged.
“They know what’s happening. Who’m I to stop them? They can’t stop now. You set
yourself on a rail and it comes to be what you do. They have to keep going.”

This ain’t about argument,
Cutter thought. He was horrified
by what seemed to him quiescence.
If they tried to argue it, they’d lose . . . but even though they
know
that, they still go on . . . because in going against the facts, they change them.
It was a methodology of decision utterly unlike his own, unlike how he could ever think. Was it rational? He could not tell.

The Iron Council progressed through a landscape made of mist. The scarps and hillocks, the layers of trees seemed momentary thickenings of water in the air, seemed to curdle out of the vapour as the perpetual train came, and dissipate again in its aftermath.

They moved through scenery that was abruptly familiar, that jogged old memories. This was New Crobuzon country. Siskins went between dripping haw-bushes. This was a New Crobuzon winter. They were a few weeks away.

“We had a man once, years and years ago,” Ann-Hari said to Cutter. “When the Weaver came to us, before we was Council, and told us secrets. The man went mad, so he could only talk about the spider. He was like a prophet. But then he was boring, and then not even boring, just nothing. We didn’t even hear him, you see? We heard nothing when he spoke.

“You’re like that. ‘Turn back, turn back.’ “ She smiled. “We don’t hear you no more, man.”

I’ve a mission,
Cutter thought.
I’ve failed.
Knowing that his lover had expected it did nothing to stop his sadness.

He became a ghost. He was respected—one of the world-crossers, who had come to save Iron Council. His dissidence now, his insistence that the Council would die, was treated with polite uninterest.
I’m a ghost.

Cutter could have left. He could have taken a horse from the township’s stables and ridden. He would have found the foothills, the deserted tracks, Rudewood, he would have come to New Crobuzon. He could not.
I’m here now
was all he could think. He would run only when he had to.

He had seen the maps. The Council would go on east leaving spike-holes and the debris of track-pressed shale, recycling the iron road, and would at last hit the remains of the railway scores of miles south of New Crobuzon. And there they would couple to what remained of the old tracks, and steam on, and within hours would approach the city.

Cutter would run when he had to. But not now.

“We are a hope,” Ann-Hari said.

Perhaps she’s right. The train will come, the last of the Collective will rise, and the government will fall.

In these damp wilds they were not the only people. There were homesteads, little wood houses built on hills, one every few days. A few acres of sloped and stony ground raked beyond the dark underhangs of hills. Orchards, root vegetables, paddocks of dirt-coloured sheep. The hill farmers and families of loners would come out as the Council took its hours to pass them. They stared, skin milky with inbreeding, in the deepest incomprehension at the great presence. Sometimes they would bring goods to barter.

There must be some tradetowns but the Council did not pass any. The news of them—of the rogue train appearing from the west, escorted by an army of fReemade and their children, all of them proud—crossed the wet country by rumour’s byways.

Word’ll reach New Crobuzon. Maybe they’ll come for us soon.

“Did you hear?” one toothless farmer woman asked them. She offered them applewood-cured ham, for what money they had (arcane westland doubloons) and a memento of the train (they gave her a greased cog that she took as reverential as if it were a holy book). “I heard of you. Did you hear?” She gave them proud passage through her paltry lands, insisting they carve their road through the middle of her field. “You’ll be ploughing for me,” she said. “Did you hear? They say that there’s trouble in New Crobuzon.”

Could mean the Collective’s done. Could mean it’s winning. Could mean anything.

There was more word of that trouble the farther east they went. “The war’s over,” a man told them. His shieling had become a station, his porch a platform. His nearest neighbours had travelled miles from their lowland holdings to be with him when the Iron Council came through. His fields were a sidings yard full of men and women. The farmers and the wilds people watched with stern pleasure.

“The war’s done. They told me. They warred with Tesh, ain’t it? Well it’s over, and we won.”
We? You never set foot in New Crobuzon, man. You never been a hundred miles from it.
“They did something and they beat them and now the Tesh want peace. Do I know what? The what? What’s a Collective?”

New Crobuzon had done something. The story came back again. A secret mission, some said, an assassination. Something had been halted and life had changed, the Teshi had been restrained, forced into negotiation or surrender.
Something stopped Tesh’s plans?
Cutter thought wryly.
Fancy.
And that triumph, it seemed, had bolstered Parliament and the mayor, had bled support from the Collective. That he could not be wry about. That he could not think about.

“The strikers? They’re finished. The government sorted them out.”

Through the rained-on downs came a spread of runaways from the city. They came and lived in the small towns by which the Iron Council was passing; they repopulated the deserted cow-towns they found, the residues of the old railway rush. The Council might come out of the low hills in an industrious multitude and lay down tracks along the preflattened paths, along the reclaimed main roads. New inhabitants would emerge from what had been the
saloon, a church, a bawdyhouse, and stare as over hours (their progress faster daily) the crews put down the sleepers and rails on old horsetracks and passed where stagecoaches and drifters had been.

“Did you hear?” They heard the same stories scores of times. There must have been escapees from the Parliamentarian quarters too, but no one said so: everyone was a Collectivist, on the run from the militia.
Sure you’re not some two-bit spiv?
Cutter thought cynically.
Sure you’re really an organiser like you claim?

“Did you hear?”
That the war’s over, that we beat the Tesh, and that when we beat the Tesh the Mayor took control again, and everything was sorted, and the Collective went under?

Yes, we heard.
Though it was disputed.

They were entertained in these revenant towns, with sex and New Crobuzon cooking. “What have you come for? Did you not hear? Did you hear? There ain’t no Collective no more. Only dregs, some terrorists in Dog Fenn, a few streets here or there.” “That ain’t what I heard, I heard it was there and still fighting.” “You’re coming to help, to fight for the Collective? I wouldn’t go back. It’s a damn
war
there.” “I’d go back. Can I come? Can I come with you?”

Some of those who had left to be wanderers in the waste—some of the young—joined the perpetual train, to return to New Crobuzon, only weeks after their escape. “Tell us about the Iron Council!” they insisted, and their new compatriots told all their stories.

There were rumours of new kithless, unique powers. “Did you hear,” Cutter heard, “about the golem-man Low?”

“What?” he said, crossing to where the refugee spoke.

“Golem-man Low, he’s got an army of made men. He’s making them of clay in his cellar, ready to take over the city. He’s been seen, outside New Crobuzon, in the rail yards, on the sidings, by the tracks. He’s got plans.”

They came closer, and the escaped they met were more and more recent out of the city. “It’s done,” one said. “There ain’t no Collective anymore. Wish to gods there was.”

That night Cutter looked for Drogon and realised that the whispersmith had gone. He walked the length of the train, sent messages and queries, but there was nothing.

It was possible the susurrator was off riding, hunting, on a mission of his own, but Cutter was very suddenly certain that Drogon had gone. That they were close enough to New Crobuzon, that the horseman had had enough, and had ridden, his adventures with the Iron Council over.

Is that all?
Such a slow deflation, such a lacklustre end.
Was that all you wanted, Drogon? Not tempted to say good-bye?

Cutter prepared to leave. It could not be long. He felt a hollowness, a preemptive loss. He wondered how and where the militia would confront them and destroy the Council. The Remade and their families and comrades, the Councillors, all knew what was coming. Their track-laying songs became martial. They oiled their guns; the forges at trackside and in the carriages turned out weapons. The Iron Councillors carried made and stolen guns. The glass and brass foci of ordnance-shamanism. Racks of spears and west-coast weapons.

“We’ll gather people with us, we’ll be an army, we’ll sweep in. We’ll turn things around.” Cutter winced to hear the dreams. “We’re bringing history.”

There was a drip of people across the land, on their way anywhere, without plans but away from the carnage of New Crobuzon.

Still empty land, only a few half-kept orchards, a few groves of temperate fruit-trees. There was a moment of transition. They were in the wilds, in unsafe lands, and then with a suddenness and a strange anticlimax they were in domesticated country. They knew they were close.

The graders and scouts returned. “Yonder. Just beyond.” Over stone-flecked undulations. “The old rails. Down to Junctiontown, in the swamps. And up to New Crobuzon.”

Two days away. Every moment they continued, Cutter expected a deployment of New Crobuzon troops to emerge from the tunnels and flint hides of that damp region, but they did not come. How long would he stay? He had tried to dissuade them. Would he handle the mirror one more time?

“Low the golemer’s been seen, he’s in the hills, he’s watching over us. He’s by the old rails.”

Oh yes? Has he?
Cutter was sour. He was very lonely.
Where are you, Judah?
He did not know what to do.

In small numbers, some Councillors—the older, mostly, the first generation, who remembered the punishment factories—left. Not many, but enough to be felt. They would go into the hills to scout for wood or food and would not come back. Their comrades, their sisters, shook their heads with scorn and care. Not everyone was unafraid, or willing or able to ignore their fear.

I’ll decide the plan when I see the old rails,
Cutter told himself,
but then he walked with the track-layers as they bent the iron
road through gaps between sediment and basalt stanchions and through the V the graders had cut in soft displaced earth and
there, there, there wetly ashine, black but glowing, were the rails.
More than twenty years old. Curving away, drawn together by perspective, slipped through geography. The metal path. The crossties were bucked by neglect but held the rails down.

The Councillors gave a cheer that was reedy in the cold wet air but that continued a long time. The track-layers waved their tools. The Remade gesticulated their unshaped limbs. The road to New Crobuzon. That old road. Left to moulder when the collapse of money and the stockpiles in warehouses had made an end to the TRT boom. They had been left to the shifting ground—Cutter could see where the banks of the cut had bowed and buried the metal. They were running grounds for wild things.

In some places the iron had been stolen by salvagers. The Council would have to lay down some from its own stock. The Iron Council had come this way before, unborn, when it was just a train. The wet of the stones, the dark and glistening way. Cutter stared. And what was it? What was happening in his city? Where the Collective was fighting? How should he run?

Judah, you bastard, where are you?

The hammermen laid down the rails, and with careful measured sideswipes of their mallets, they put in curves. They made bends, gently, so that their tracks came out of the west and skewed gradually through the banks of the train-gash up and onto the roadbed of the old rails.