Once Cutter saw him, standing in half-light at day’s end, at the front of the perpetual train. He heard Judah mutter a song-rhythm and pat his own face with one hand, clicking a syncopation with the other. There were motes around Judah’s head, unmoving, a scattered hand of specks, flies and mountain midges that did not eddy with the wind: an unnatural and profound inertia. When the train shucked and rolled a few feet on, Judah left the gust of immobile insects behind.
Wyrmen Councillors flew. They looked for the end of the zone. Some of course did not return, vanished in a fold of air or suddenly forgetful of how to fly, or ossified, or become wyrmen cubs or tangles of rope. But most came back, and after many days in the outlands half-bred from the monstrous and quotidian, they told the Iron Councillors that they were near the end.
They built their last rails along a path their geoseers said was ambulatory, would wander and confuse pursuers. With the engine newly coated with predator heads, newly charnel, and the carriages scratched and marked by their passage, the Iron Council jackknifed up a slope. Cutter found it impossible to imagine land untouched by Torque.
They crested the rise, hammers laying down last tracks, behind them the crews hauling away the iron of their passage. Cutter stared at a windblown landscape of smokestone. It was a vivid and strange place, but without that pathology, that dreadful cancer fertility of the cacotopic stain.
“Oh my gods,” Cutter heard himself say. There was cheering, spontaneous, absolute with delight. “Oh my gods and Jabber and godsdamned fuck, we’re out, we’re out.”
They took a route on the very edge, the littoral ridge that divided the fringes of the Torque from the healthy land. They hammered the metal home on the smokestone flat and came back into natural land.
The perpetual train went through the smokelands. The winds had gusted great roils, rock cumulonimbus on the anvil-tops of which they laid tracks quickly, nervous that they might revert. “Somewhere down there’s where we came in,” Judah said. The split path they had made had long been effaced in scudding stone.
Judah, Cutter and Thick Shanks walked in the lee of the solid cloud, by the edge of the cacotopos.
“Some of us are afraid,” Thick Shanks said. “Things have run away from us. Feels like we ain’t got a choice of what we’re doing.” His voice was thin in the warm wind.
“Sometimes there are no choices,” Judah said. “Sometimes it’s history decides. Just have to hope history don’t get it wrong. Look, look, isn’t that it?”
They found what they were looking for: a vertical uncoil of rock drooled with ivy and on which shrubs were stubbled. There was something different about the ground, a remnant of gouging, long-ago explosive-ploughing. A path visible under two decades’ growth.
“This is where we came through,” Judah said, “the first time.”
He stood by the cloudlike wall and tugged at a rockplant, and Cutter saw it was not a rockplant but a bone come from the stone. A sere wristbone, time-bleached leather still ragging it.
Judah said: “Was too slow.”
A man encased. Caught by a tide of smokestone. Cutter looked with wide eyes. Around the wristbone was a circle of air, a thin burrow, where the arm-meat had been, and had rotted. And inside, it must hollow in a body’s contours, emptied by grubs and bacteria. A flaw, an ossuary the shape of a man. Silted with bones and bonemeal.
“Councillor or militia. Can’t remember now, can you, Shanks? There’s others. Dotted through. Bodies in the rock.” They clambered to the top of the range. The Iron Council moved, its hammers ringing, the wyrmen like windblown leaves above it through the gushing of its smoke. Cutter watched the train progress. He saw the strangeness of its contours, its brick and stone towers, the rope bridges that linked its carriages, its carriage-mounted gardens and the smoke of its chimneys, echoes of the smokestacks at its head and tail.
A way east, long-rusted barrels of militia ordnance protruded from the stone.
In the land beyond, the land that extended to New Crobuzon itself, it was a prairie autumn. The Councillors looked carefully at the water and the woods and hills and at their charts. They could not believe where they were.
The maps they inherited from when Iron Council was the TRT train became useful again. The perpetual train was still embedded in the loosest ink, the crosshatched beige that indicated uncertainty, but eastward the drawings grew more clear; stippling of brush, the watercolour wash of fen, contours of hills in precise line. This was not land on which tracks had been laid, but it was in the city’s ken. The Council could track its route through the ink.
They checked and rechecked. It was a burgeoning revelation. They were heady and astounded. “Around the long lake here. We’ve Cobsea to our south. We should avoid them, get northside of the lake as fast we can. We’ll bring Council justice to New Crobuzon.”
Even knowing the militia followed them could not cow them. “They’ve come after us. They followed us into the stain,” Judah told Cutter. “They’ve triggered a golem trap I put in the cacotopos.” No militia had ever gone so deep. This must be a dedicated squad, who realised the Council was heading back for New Crobuzon.
“We’ll go close to the hills.” Days ahead, a backbone of mountains rose and extended half a thousand miles to New Crobuzon. “We’ll skirt them; we’ll take the train through the foothills. To New Crobuzon.”
There were still months to go, but they went fast. Scouts went to see where bridges or fording were needed, where swampers had to fill wetland, where tunnellers and geothaumaturges would carve out passages. History felt quicker.
Drogon the whispersmith was alight with excitement, sounding in Cutter’s ears, telling him he could not believe that they had come through, that they had achieved this, that they were so close to being home. “Got to clock what we done,” he said. “Got to mark it. No one’s ever done this, and plenty’ve tried. There’s still a way to go, and it’s still land no one knows well, but we’ll do it.”
Judah sat on the traintop and watched this suddenly unalien landscape. “It ain’t safe,” he told Cutter. “Can’t say it’s safe at all.” He spent much time alone, listened to his voxiterator.
“Judah, Cutter,” Elsie said, “we should go back to the city.”
She was silent in these days, with Pomeroy’s death. She had found a calm that let her live in her loneliness. “We don’t know what’s happening there; we don’t know what state they’re in. We need to get them word that we’re coming. We could sway things. We could change it.”
It was a long way still, and there were many things that stood to stop them.
“She’s right.” Drogon spoke to each of them. “We need to know.”
“It ain’t no matter, I don’t think,” Judah said. “We’ll go, nearer the time. We’ll go and get a welcome ready, prepare for them.”
“But we don’t know what it’ll be there . . .”
“No. But it won’t make a difference.”
“What are you talking about, Judah?”
“It won’t make a difference.”
“Well if he ain’t going, no matter. I’ll go alone,” Drogon said. “I’m going back to the city, believe it.”
“They’ll find us, you know,” Elsie said. “Even if we veer north, Cobsea’ll likely hear of us.”
“As if the Council can’t deal with fucking Cobsea men,” Cutter said, but she interrupted.
“And if Cobsea finds us, it won’t be long before New Crobuzon does. And then we’ll have to face them again. Them as follows us, and those that’ll face us too.”
One of the carriages of the perpetual train was changing. They thought they had got through the fringe of Torque without being marked too hard, that all they had to show was the sanatorium full of the uncanny ill or dying. But some of the cacotopic miasma was slow to show effect.
There were three people in the boxcar when its Torque sarcoma began. The train was juddering through a high land of alpestrine plants and stoneforms jawing the air. One morning while s
now as fine as dust eddied and the hammerers had to warm their fingers with each strike, the door of the carriage would not open. The Councillors within could only shout through cracks in the wood.
They took an axe to it but it rebounded without scuffing paint or wood, and the Councillors knew that this was the cacotopic stain’s last fingers. But by then the voices of those within had dulled with lassitude, a surrendering up.
Through the night they became more and more languid. By the next day the car was changing its shape, was bulbous and distending, the wood straining, and the people within made contented cetacean sounds. The walls grew translucent and shapes could be seen, eddying as if in water. The planks and nails and wood-fibre opalesced then went transparent as the boxcar sagged, fat over the wheels, and the councillors inside grew more placid, moved oozily within air become thick. The debris from the store-cupboards lost their shapes and spun as impurities.
The carriage became a vast membranous cell, three nuclei still vaguely shaped like men and women afloat in cytoplasm. They watched and waved stubby arm-flagella at their comrades. Some Councillors wanted to decouple the grotesquerie, let it roll away and thrive or denature according to its new biology, but others said they’re our sisters in there and would not let them. The long train continued with the corpulent amoebic thing rippling with the movement of passage, its innard inhabitants smiling.
“What in Jabber’s name is it?” Cutter asked Qurabin.
“Not in Jabber’s name anything. I don’t know. There are things I don’t want to trade myself for. And even if I did, there are secrets that have no meaning, questions without answers. It is what it is.”
A fortnight after they had left the cacotopic zone, they met their first eastlanders for twenty years. A little group of nomads emerging from the hills. A fReemade gang, twenty or thirty strong. They were a wild mix, including a rare vodyanoi-Remade among the men and women reshaped for industry or display.
They came with wary courtesy to the train. “We met your scouts,” their leader said. She was amended with organic whips. She stared and stared, and it took Cutter a long time to realise that what he saw in her eyes was awe. “They said you was coming.”
The Remade of the Council looked at her and her brigands. “It’s all change,” the fReemade said that night at a meagre feast. “Something’s going on in the city. It’s under some siege. Tesh, I think. And something else, going on inside.” But they were too far, had been too many years from the town that made them, to know details. New Crobuzon was almost the legend to them that it was to the Iron Councillors.
They did not go with the Council: they wished them their friendship and went on to their rootless robbing life in the hills, but the next fReemade the Council came to did join. They came to show respect, to worship (Cutter could see it) the self-made Remade town, and stayed as citizens, Councillors themselves. When the Iron Council came to the northern shores of the lake that would shield them from Cobsea, they were met by the first fReemade to have sought them out deliberately.
Word must be passing along the strange byways of the continent, the paths between communities and itinerants. Cutter imagined it an infection. Threads of rumour, a fibroma knotting Rohagi together. Iron Council is coming! Iron Council is back!
The Council was fracturing. Their momentum was such that they could not have turned away. The closer they came to the metropolis, the more anxious, hesitant the older Councillors were. “We know what it’s like,” they’d say. “We know what it is there.” And the more certain, messianic, their children became. Those who had never seen the city were eager to visit on it something: what was it, a retribution? An anger? Justice, it might have been.
They would lead the track-laying, young men who might not have the enhanced strength of their parents but who swung their hammers with energy and hunger. The Remade put down tracks with them, but the older Councillors were the followers now.
Ann-Hari was different. She gloried. She was insistent, demanding they go faster. She would stand on outcrops, clamber with crude grace up overhanging hillocks and gnarls and gesture the perpetual train on as if she controlled it, conductor of a steam symphony.
It was so fast, suddenly: they carved on, scouts warning of this small gorge, that stream. Work-crews built hybrid forms of New Crobuzon traditions and oddities from the west—trellis bridges anchored with thick greenery, supports not of stone but of solid colour, that could only be crossed when light shone on them.
“There’s war!” a fReemade told them. “Tesh says it’s stopped its attacks, and then it hasn’t. They say there’s two envoys from New Crobuzon, asking different terms. New Crobuzon don’t speak with one voice no more.”
If the fReemade out here know we’re coming, Cutter thought, there’s no way them in New Crobuzon don’t. Word gets out. When will we face them?
Every few days Judah would spasm as the militia following them triggered his traps. With each, a few more of the soldiers might be taken, but a few days later another of the traps would go and prove they were coming. Judah tracked their progress in his own moments of weakness.
“They’re there,” he said finally. “I recognise that one. They’re definitely in the cacotopos. I can’t believe they followed us there. They must be desperate to get us.” What would a golem be, made of Torqued materia? With ablife channelled through that bleak matrix?
The stretched-out crew of graders and track-layers went north and east, and though they took their rails and crossties with them they left a land permanently tainted by their passage: a litter of metal parts, scars of railroad. The sky became colder, and through the darkness of the air massif became visible, leagues north. Dark drizzle came.
Here, perhaps three hundred miles west of the stub of the New Crobuzon railway, they were met by refugees. Not fReemade but recent citizens, come in a huddled rainwet congress out of the mist to run the last mile toward the growling engine, abasing before it like pilgrims. It was they who told Ann-Hari and Judah and the Iron Councillors what had happened in New Crobuzon, what was still happening, the story of the Collective.
“Oh my good gods,” said Elsie. “We did it. It’s happened. It’s happened. Oh my gods.” She was rapt. Judah’s face was open.
“It rose in Dog Fenn,” a refugee said. “Came up out of nowhere.”
“That ain’t the case,” another said. “We knew you was coming—the Council. We had to get ready for you, some said.”
They were terribly cowed before the Iron Council. These runaways were speaking to the figures they had seen so many times, for years, in the famous heliotype. They had to be cajoled into talking.
“So there’s no wages: people are hungry. There’s the war, and ex-militia telling what it’s really like, and there are Tesh attacks. We feel like we ain’t safe at all and the city ain’t keeping us . . . And we hear that someone’s gone to find the Iron Council.” Judah’s face moved to hear it.
“There are Tesh attacks?” Cutter said. The man nodded.
“Yes. Manifestations. And you know, the government’s saying it’s going to sort out the Tesh, going to end the war, but it’s chaos, and no one knows if they’re doing what they say. There’s another demonstration to Parliament to demand protection, and there’s them in the crowd yelling for more than that, giving out their leaflets. Caucus people, I think. But out come the men-o’-war, and the shunn, and the militia come down on us.
“And someone starts saying there’s a handlinger at the front. And people started fighting.
“I wasn’t there—I heard about it, is all. There was dead all over the streets. And when people got the militia on the run . . . All over the city come up barricades. Time for us to do what we needed, on our own. We didn’t need the militia. Keep them out.
“It was after that we heard the Mayor was dead.”
Delegates from all the districts had gathered in a collective, called and recalled in excitement and panic as the downtowners realised there was no suffrage lottery, that each of
them had direct power. After some days the anti-Parliament had curtailed that rude democracy; but only, they swore, because they were in a double war. Most in the Collective were eager to negotiate with Tesh, not caring who controlled what in the seas south.
“Why are you here?” the Councillors asked.
The New Crobuzoners looked down and up again and said that the fierceness of the fighting had driven them away, that there were many exiles. They had been walking for weeks, trying to find the Iron Council.
They were not Caucusers nor collectivists, Cutter thought, only people who had found they were part of a dissident town-within-a-town and under fire, who had run with their possessions in their barrows. They had sought the Council not with a theory or politics, but with the awe of religious petitioners. Cutter disdained them. But Judah was all joy.
“It’s happened, it’s happening,” Judah said. His voice was thick. “The rising, the second Contumancy, we’ve done it. Because of what we did. The Iron Council . . . it was an inspiration . . . When they heard we were coming . . .”
Ann-Hari was staring at him. He seemed to wear a halation in the last of the light. He spoke as if he were reading a poem. “We made this thing years ago and it laid its tracks through history, left its marks. And then we did this to New Crobuzon.”
He looked astounding, a very beautiful thing. He looked transformed. But Cutter knew he was wrong. We didn’t do this, Judah. They did. In New Crobuzon. With or without the Council.
“Now,” Judah said. “We ride into the city, we join them. We aren’t so far from the last of the rails. Jabber, gods, we’ll ride into a changed city, we’ll be part of change. We’re bringing a cargo. We’re bringing history.”
Yes, and no, Judah. Yes we are. But they’ve got their own history already.
Cutter had come not for the Iron Council, but for Judah. It was a guilt he could never forget. I’m not here for history, he thought. Low mountain pikes looked down on him. In a cold river, the Iron Council vodyanoi were swimming, while the train idled in its strath. I’m here for you.
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