Iron Council

by China Miéville

  The slowly stranging place delights Judah. On the sixth day of the iron council, as the mile-long track-stretch swallows its own tail and moves, as the train enters a dreamish landscape of bruised succulents and the summer comes down on them, a posse of gendarmes and bounty hunters arrives.

  They underestimate the council by a gross degree. They are no more than thirty men and xenians, in cracked leather and spikes, their very clothes made weapons. They come out of the vein-coloured undergrowth under the standard of the TRT, creatures like scurrying mushrooms running from them.

  The band fire, scream through their loudhailers. —Comply! Lawbreakers, surrender!

  Do they think the iron council will be cowed? Judah watches in awe at their stupidity. Twelve of them are shot fast, and the others ride away.

  —Get them, get them, get them, shouts Ann-Hari, and the fastest Remade take off with their weapons. —They know where we are!

  They can only kill six more. The others escape. —We’re marked, Uzman says. It is less than a hundred miles since they have escaped. —They’ll come for us.

  They leave traps. Barrels of blackpowder, complex batteries and fuses. They send the train between stone overhangs, and the geothaumaturges and what hedge-mancers there are cut diaglyphs into the mineral walls and lay down primed circuits so that the weight of a cart will make the rock deliquesce and pour down in cold magma to set again with the outriders of the gendarmes or militia drowned. That is the plan.

  Judah sets golem traps. Batteries, somaturgic turbines of his design, so the fallen wood or the bone-heap or the earth or split discarded ties will stand and fight for iron council.

  At night he walks the renegade railroad with Uzman and Ann-Hari, who are chary but need each other. Strategist and visionary. The perpetual train does not stop at night. The train is full of skills. Remade fix what flintlocks can be fixed, and make new weapons. In the furnaces they melt down older rails for cutters and armour. They are making their wheeled town a war-machine.

  —It won’t be long, Uzman says. —Time’ll come we probably have to abandon the train, have to run.

  —We can’t, Ann-Hari says. —Without it we have nothing.

  A group of councillors in the clerk’s car lean over vague maps—sketchy composites of myths. The darkwood desks and inlaid walls are carved and graffitied from the first days, when the drunken rebels rendered savage art.

  —Here. Uzman presses the map. —What’s this?

  —Swamp.

  Uzman moves his finger.

  —Unknown.

  —Salt flats.

  —Scree.

  —Unknown.

  —Tar pits.

  —Unknown.

  —Smokestone. Smokestone gulleys.

  Uzman chews his knuckle. He looks out of the window. Councillors haul the rails from one end of their stolen track-mile to the other.

  —Do we have any meteoromancers?

  —There’s a girl Toma. Someone shakes their head. —Can whistle up a gust dries her clothes but, you know, parlour hex really . . .

  —We need someone can raise a gale—

  —No. One of the researchers speaks. He is a young man who has grown his beard and wears the sweaty clothes of the workforce. He is shaking his head. —I know what you’re wanting. You’re thinking, through the smokestone? No. You saw what happened when Malke was caught in it? He nearly died. You saw what it was like.

  —There must be ways to know when it’s coming . . .

  The young man shrugs. —Pressure, he says. —Cracking. A few things. From geysers. He shrugs again. —We looked it up when it trapped us. It’s too many things.

  —But there are ways of telling . . .

  —Yes, but Uzman, you’re not thinking. These maps are best-guesses. We’re in the Middling Sweeps. And there’s one thing we do know that’s there. The man runs his finger up the map. The car sways. —See? What this is?

  It is a crosshatched patch of land, inked in red. Two hundred miles from them, less than a month at this absurd pace. It abuts the smokestone, or where the old cartographers thought the smokestone might be.

  —You know what that is?

  Of course Uzman does. They all do. It is the cacotopic stain.

  —You ain’t taking us to the stain, Uzman.

  —I can’t take you anywhere. The council goes where it decides it will. But I’m telling you the only thing we can do. You decide if it’s what you want or not. And if not I’ll stay and fight, and we die.

  —It’s the stain.

  —No, no it ain’t the stain. It’s the edges. It’s the outskirts.

  Uzman has a look on him. He stands and seems to glimmer. He sweats from the heat of his own pipes, eats coal. His lips are black.

  —It ain’t the stain. We have to go through the smokestone flats—

  —If they’re there.

  —If they’re there. We have to go through the smokestone flats, and beyond that’s the outskirts of the cacotopos. Even if they got through the stone, no one’ll follow us there.

  —And you know why, Uzman, right? For good damn reason.

  —We got no choice. No, that ain’t so. We run. Leave the train to rot. Run be fReemade. Or we can keep it. All our sweat. The road. But if we keep it, we have to go do this. We have to make it out, far away, or we die. We have to go west. And west of here? He prods the waxed chart. —The cacotopic zone. Just the edges.

  He sounds as if he is pleading.

  —People’ve dipped in there before. We’ll be all right. We have to.

  He pleads.

  —Just the edges.

  It opened a half millennium before, a rift through which spilt great masses of the feral cancerous force, Torque. A badland beyond understanding. Where men might become rat-things made of glass and rats devilish potentates or unnatural sounds and jaguars and trees might become moments that could not have happened, might become impossible angles. Where monsters go and are born. Where the land, and the air, and time are sick.

  —It’s no matter, anyway, someone says. —We ain’t got no meteoromancers, and we ain’t got anyone can call up air elementals, and we ain’t going through smokestone without someone can push wind.

  Judah leans on the table; his fringe dances before his eyes. He looks down at the ink landscape.

  —Well, he says. —Well now.

  Somaturgy, golemetry, is an intervention. Making servants from unlive matter is about persuasion, insinuation. A strategy of life-giving.

  —Well now.

  I can make a golem out of air, thinks Judah. A clutch of air in the air. Have it run with us. Air running through air. It will exhaust him. But he knows he can get them passage through the smoke.

  Judah knows that they will go.

  He walks with Uzman, and a golem walks with them. Shambling vegetable pulp. They are a strange troika: the Remade sending steam from the pipes that burrow him; Judah tall and bony, his beard like a furring of dirt; the golem putting down its shapeless feet. The train slips forward in tiny motions.

  The moonlight is the colour of lipid fluid, as if the night has an unclosing wound. Behind them Judah sees the train and the train and the train farting smoke, clanging, like some lumpen orchestra of drums and bells. A half mile ahead are Remade laying track, and ahead of them the teams performing a cursory groundbreaking. Behind the railroad is disassembled, and there are hundreds of followers like pilgrims.

  Judah sees everything as a city. New Crobuzon has taught him that. He watches the train skirt a curling crust of land and sees the curve and edge of river walls, the warehouse walls by the Tar. He sees a half-fallen tree and remembers a drunken New Crobuzon man leaning at the same angle.

  We don’t choose what we remember, Judah thinks, what stays with us. He carries New Crobuzon with him, even now he is a citizen of this new vagrant sanctuary.

  —Smokestone won’t do it, Uzman says. The perpetual train sighs. —The militia’ll break that down, fly over that. It ain’t about the smokestone, it�
�s the cacotopic stain. That’s what’ll hide us.

  The next day a sortie of the gendarmes kills fifty of the council’s stragglers and are gone before any Remade can counterattack. Wyrmen scream that they were shot at. In their rough inventive grammar they say what they have seen, spread their wings to show bullet holes in their tough skin.

  It is hot. They come into a stretch of space, an upland of good thick earth.

  —What are they? There is a panic. —Something’s come for us!

  Animals are keeping pace with the train, snapping at the wheels. No not animals or if animals ones that melt and re-form and emerge from the ground and through which light shines. Bullets go through them ignored.

  Judah watches them with building pleasure once his fear goes. Each time the train moves on again the little length of its track, the things return.

  Demons of motion. They are not attacking but playing. Delighting like porpoises, they dive out of the earth and roll around the turning wheels. They eat the rhythm, the ka ka ka of turning iron on iron. After millennia of snapping up only the quickstep of plains hunters and prey, the demons are drunk on the heavy beat. They evanesce out of colours in the near-shapes of foxes and rockrats, the only animals they have seen. They learn the newcomers, and as hours pass the motion demons mimic humans and cactacae inexpertly, to the track-layers’ delight.

  —Look, lookit, it’s you, that’s your ugly bonce, that is.

  The skittish things manifest and dive wheelward to eat more. If Councillors detrain, demons pullulate about their feet, eating the echoes of their steps. One woman dances, and the air goes alive with the rapture of motion-demons now-seen-now-unseen gorging on her tempo. Soon the perpetual train is girdled with shuffling figures: Remade, the freeanole women who were once whores, cactacae overcoming their grimness. They dance by the train, keeping pace in capers, in barley-mows and lilly-gins. Their feet are thronged by demons catching the light. It is a contest: the most complex, repeated, perfect rhythms are the best food.

  The sunlight is the colour of the grass it dries. Judah smiles at the train and the dancers, and at the motion demons. It is a strange pastoral, a harvest procession it looks like, amid scruffs of pampas grass and the dead creeks, the big train shunting in spasms toward worshippers who lay down its way. As if the tracks are a leash, they haul it in like some tamed wilderness animal, and around the suddenly docile iron beast are hundreds of celebrants kicking up summer dust. The kinetophages tremble around their ankles like spume. Judah thinks of the energy they find in rhythm. Pulse-magic. What strange calories there are in repeated sounds.

  Judah looks and loves the iron council. He unfolds a tripod. He is not a good heliotypist, but he knows as he frames the shamble of legs and iron and late sun that this one will come out clean. Movement-blurred and developed crudely in the tiny darkroom, but above what will be a ghost-mass of legs and demons he knows that the perpetual train and the smiles and bodies of the dancers will be clear. He has fixed them in sepia ink, frozen them like the stiltspear with their golem song.

  An aerostat comes out of the east. It approaches with its sedate, predatory bobbing, makes its way fatly toward them.

  The thuggish wyrmen yelp and blather obscenities as they fly. They become specks against the distended whale of leather; they buzz its gondola, make it sway a little. Judah hears flat sounds like paper bags bursting that must be gunshot, and the wyrmen scatter. They drop. They fall where they are, folding their wings and plummeting in unison, curving toward the train, and there is a crumbling sound, a huge clearing of the throat, and glass and black smoke gust out of the aerostat windows.

  —Yes, Uzman says.

  The dirigible rocks. Gunpowder smog swells from the underbelly. It will limp home to New Crobuzon, or to the base over the horizon, where attack squads of militia are waiting for directions. Where other airships are stationed. Bigger warflots with bombs to drop. With windows that clay-pot grenades won’t breach.

  New Crobuzon has found them. That night there is a meeting, and it is beyond chaos. Ideas clamour with ideas. It is all shouting. The women who had been whores have delegated Ann-Hari to speak for them.

  Others find them. Out of the grasslands come figures. The iron council is shedding word of its own self along songlines no one can see. It draws the dispossessed, the outlawed.

  FReemade. A little tribe. Escapees from New Crobuzon, feral a long time. The leader is a man without arms, with useless ornamental beetle wings. There is a man with rubberised pincers, a man who wears a crocodile’s snout, a huge cur with the head of a pretty woman. The dog’s is a male body. By the skins they wear and the jewellery of holed stones on sinews, by their complexions like wood and tea, Judah knows they have been fReemade for years.

  —We heard about you, one man says. He and his family are staring at the train. They are not looking at the guards, nor at Judah, nor at his golem made of the bones of meat-birds. —You’re going west, they say. You’re crossing the world.

  —They say, he says, —you’re building a new life. Out of sight.

  —We come to ask, he says, and pauses. —We come to ask . . . the man says.

  And Judah, mandated by the council, nods: yes you can join us.

  Nomads in numbers. Criminals and runaways. Plains races and outsiders—striders who wordlessly lope trainside, even a garuda easing out of the sky and made air marshal over the quarrelsome wyrmen. The iron council absorbs them.

  They are surrounded by strange, unlikely truces between armed fReemade toughs and the borinatch braves who swing by the train with their unlikely grace. We are protected, Judah thinks. They’re here to give us gods-speed. To help us go.

  The bounty hunters harry them three more times in quick, vicious raids. The gunmen ride away before there can be much retribution.

  —This ain’t nothing, Uzman says to Judah. —We got more coming. He harangues the iron council at night in the headlights. Ann-Hari takes his side, and though the stokers and the engineers complain that they can see their stocks of coal dwindling, though the workers are exhausted, the council agrees to more speed. The tracks are laid all night and day, by men and women in an anaesthesia of tiredness, dreaming while they swing their hammers.

  The iron road eats the miles. At night the train’s moving illumination makes the rockforms shift, as if they are trying to get away. Insects and things the size of insects perform a rhythm of their bodies on lantern glass, become flame-bursts where they find a way inside. The train is a line of dark light on the night plains.

  The earth feels uneasy. The council tenses. Newcomers are targeted, are told they are spies. Judah helps an intervening crowd stop one terror-struck angry man beating a fReemade newcomer to death, and in their admonishments and the counter-beating they give him, neither Judah nor any other person acknowledges that the man might be right, that there are spies with them.

  At the edge of the plain is the landform they want. A smokestone range. The unmoving brume shapes grow slowly clearer. A posse treks on to blast a path through the solid mist.

  The perpetual train is a fortress. Its strange guntower is scabbed with new metal. All the councillors carry clubs, sharpen them into spears, splints of stone with rag handles. Crude and eccentric rifles. The council is waiting.

  Inside Judah the thing shifts, and he knows that though it is not the time yet, he will leave.

  They pass the outskirts of the smokestone hills. An abrupt change of landscape into something dreamish and unsettling, where wisp-shapes rise in basalt-hard congelation, clotted clouds on which the tough fauna of the smokestone run. There are plumes, fountainheads where geysers of smoke have poured and set near-instantly. The roadbed goes between them, through a solfatara of vented gases.

  The iron council graders have blasted passage. The elegance of set smokestone is interrupted with the base simplicity of jag-edged holes.

  Mostly the stonemass is caught as billows, but there are pillars that corkscrew faintly and become wisps at their peak, where
leaks of smokestone have gusted in very still air. The train passes under arcs where currents have blown smokestone up from the ground and down again.

  The roadbed is extended, the tracks laid through, taken up again. The uncanny landscape is beautiful and discomfiting. The ground could crack and gush at them, a mist that would set in their lungs and statue them in agony. There is no smoking, no cooking; the train moves only in sudden lurches, clearing its exhaust as fast as it can: there can be no smoke distractions. Judah waits ready to release an air golem. The stone around them might evanesce again, as smokestone sometimes does, after an hour or a thousand years of being rock.

  Out of the horizon the army comes on Remade horses, camels, steaming jitneys that grind on many wheels. They come in formation into the smokestone. The wyrmen of the iron council track them, flying higher than smokestone might set.

  The graders blast the capricious geography. They watch anxious and inexpert for any sign that they have split a smokestone seam.

  Other crews lay huge charges in holes they carefully dig, directed by the crawling geoempath. She licks the dirt with animal sounds, in some crude ecstatic trance. Hers is not a strong or focused talent, and trying for such powerful prehension of the earth debases her to it.

  Iron Councillors build barricades in a yardang between set faces of cloud. A mile off are the smoke and downlaid and uptaken rails of the perpetual train. Uzman and Ann-Hari are on board, while Judah and Thick Shanks and hundreds of others are ambushers.

  They can see the army now. Judah is drained after his preparations. He is already so tired that his dreams are slipping into his thoughts. He must return to iron council as soon as he can. It needs his protection. He has built a golem trap on the cowcatcher, has told them how to trip it should the silicate mist appear, but a golem of air will not last without his shepherding.