Iron Council

by China Miéville

  “And there’ll be no militia now,” Judah said. “They know we’re coming, but with the city in revolt they won’t spare anything to face us down. When we come, there’ll be a new government. We’ll be a . . . a coda to the insurgency. A commonwealth of New Crobuzon.”

  “It’s been hard,” said one of the refugees, uncertainly. “The Collective’s under fire. Parliament’s come back hard . . .”

  “Oh oh oh.” No one saw who spoke. The sounds ebbed up suddenly. “Oh, now.

  “What’s this?”

  The voice was Qurabin’s. Cutter looked for the fold in air, saw a flit of gusting.

  “What’s this?” The pilgrim-refugees were open-eyed in fear of this bodiless voice. “You said there were attacks, Tesh attacks. Manifestations? What kind? And what is this? This, this, this here?”

  A buffeting, the stained leather of a newcomer’s bag belling with Qurabin’s tug. The woman moaned at what she thought some ghost, and Cutter snapped at her as Qurabin repeated, “What is that mark?” She looked in idiot fear at the complex gyral design on her bag.

  “That? That’s a sign of freedom. Freedom spiral, that is. It’s all over the city.”

  “Oh oh oh.”

  “What is it, what is it, Qurabin?”

  “What are the Tesh attacks?” The monk’s voice was calmer but still very fast. Cutter and Elsie stiffened; Ann-Hari’s concern grew; Judah slowly folded as he saw something was happening.

  “No, no, this . . . I remember this. I need to, I have to, I’ll ask . . .” The monk’s voice wavered. There was an infolding sense, colours. Qurabin was asking something of the Moment of Secrets. There was silence. The refugees looked fearful.

  “How is Tesh attacking?” Qurabin’s voice came back strong. “You said manifestations? Is it colour-sucked things, presences? Emptinesses in the shape of things in the world—animals, plants, hands, everything? And people gone, sickened by them and dead? They come out of nothing, unglow, is it? And they’re still coming. Yes?”

  “What is it? Qurabin for Jabber’s sake . . .”

  “Jabber?” There was a hysteria to the monk’s voice. Qurabin was moving, the locus of his sound bobbing among them. “Jabber can’t help, no, no. More to come, there’s more to come. And he has you thinking those are signs for freedom. The spiral. Oh.”

  Cutter started—the voice was right up close to him. He felt a gust of breath.

  “I’m Tesh, remember. I know. The things that are coming in your city, the haints—they aren’t attacks, they’re ripples. Of an event that hasn’t yet come. They’re spots in time and place. Something’s coming, dropped into time like water, and these have splashed back. And where they land, these little droplets come like maggoty things to suck at the world. Something’s coming soon, and these, these, these spirals, these curlicues are bringing it.

  “Someone is loose in New Crobuzon. This is ambassadormagik. The little manifs are nothing. Tesh want more than that. They’re going to end your city. These spirals—they’re the marks of a hecatombist.”

  Qurabin had to explain several times.

  “Who left that mark is a purveyor of many thaumaturgies. Of which this is the last. This is the finishing of the law. This will take your city and, and will wipe your city clean. Understand that.”

  “These are freedom spirals,” said a refugee, and Cutter all but cuffed him to be quiet.

  “They say Tesh is talking? They say there are negotiations? No no no. If there are, they are ploy. This is the final thing they will do. Their last attack. Months of preparation, huge energy. This will end everything. No more wars for New Crobuzon. Not ever again.”

  “What is it, what will it be?”

  But Qurabin did not answer that.

  “There will be no more wars and no more peace,” Qurabin said. “And more ripples will come, spattered, on the other side of the event. The last drops. Manifestations in the nothing left after your city’s gone. They’ll wipe it out.”

  It was very cold, and the wind that ran down from the chines snatched smoke from their food-fires. Before and behind them, Councillors bunked in their ironside town. There were the noises of mountain animals. There was talking, and the settling metal of the sleeping train.

  “What can we do?” Judah was in horror.

  “If you want . . . if you want to fix it, you have to find him. The one who’s doing this, who’s calling things. We have to find him. We have to stop him.

  “You—we—have to get back to New Crobuzon. We have to go now.”

  part eight

  THE REMAKING

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  The Battle of Cockscomb Bridge started early. A sun that looked watered-down lit amassing troops on either side of the river. Cockscomb, a thousand years old and built up with houses, joined Riverskin on the south of the Tar to Petty Coil north. The Collective fought very hard for Cockscomb Bridge. After the first astonishing days, when for a brief moment most of the south of New Crobuzon had been at least officially in Collective control, their zone had been eroded. Now, weeks later, Cockscomb Bridge was the westernmost point controlled by the Collective’s Dog Fenn chapter.

  Lookouts from the Flyside Militia Tower, long occupied by the insurgents, verified the movements of militia units before dawn, and the insurrectionist tacticians mobilised forces from several boroughs. The militia came from The Crow, through Spit Hearth where those renegade hierophants who had not left or gone into hiding said prayers for one or other or both sides, and on to the déclassé collapse of Petty Coil. There in the decaying baroque of Misdirect Square, looked on by architecture once sumptuous now a little absurd with its blistered paint and falling-down facades, the militia fanned out. Light went in thousands of directions from their mirrors. They wheeled cannons and motorguns to point at the old stones of the Cockscomb, and waited.

  Across the water the Collective’s troops came, battalions named for their areas. “Wynion Way, to me.” “Silverback Street, left flank.” Each corps identified by a scrap of coloured cloth, a sash, green for Wynion, grey for Silverback. Each officer wore a bandana in their colour, though their men and women would recognise them, having voted them in. They were mixed platoons, of all races. And Remade.

  Rumours about militia tactics abounded. “There’ll be men-o’-war.” “There’ll be handlingers.” “There’ll be drakows.” “They’ve done a deal with Tesh—there’ll be haints on the bridge.” Heading each Collective unit were ex-militia, who had trained their new comrades as quick and thorough as they could. Where populist enthusiasm had resulted in someone utterly callow, untrained or useless voted in as officer, and where misplaced loyalty let them retain their position, some ex-soldier was quietly installed as advisor, to whisper tactics.

  Dirigibles gathered like carrion fish at the edges of Parliament airspace, overlooking the Collective, beyond the reach of explosive harpoons, of grenades or squads of Collectivist wyrmen. The lookouts on the south watched carefully for signs that the aerostats would do a bombing run.

  The standoff continued. There was anxiety among the Dog Fenn chapter that this was a decoy, that some other great attack was about to occur somewhere else. Runners went to Sheer Bridge and the barricades south of Bonetown and Mog Hill, the shanties east of Grand Calibre Bridge, but they found nothing. In the midmorning the hand-claps of explosions began—the day’s bombardments against each of the Collective’s three chapters.

  “Howl Barrow’ll fall today.” The isolation of the three sections from each other had crippled them. After the first excitement-

  frenetic weeks, the militia had cut the street-corridors linking Flyside to Howl Barrow, had taken Kinken, separating Howl Barrow from Skulkford and the Smog Bend chapter. There had been some attempts at air-corridors, but the Collective’s dirigibles could not defeat or bypass those of Parliament. The three rebellious areas were separated, and messages passed between them by desperate and unreliable means.

  “Howl Barrow’s gone.” It was the smallest of th
e chapters, one without industry, without factories or armouries. Howl Barrow was the revolt of the bohemians, and while their fervour was real, they had little beyond enthusiasm and some weakling thaumaturgy to resist the militia. At one time Dog Fenn would have sent troops through the sewers and buried roads of the undercity to join their comrades in Howl Barrow, but that would be a luxury now. They could only listen to bursts of masonry as the area was attacked. “Maybe Smoggers’ll go help them,” some said, but it was not a real hope. Smog Bend could send no one. The artists’ commune was doomed.

  Before noon one of those who had refused to leave Cockscomb Bridge emerged from his cellar waving a white flag, and was shot by the militia. There were screams just audible from other houses. “We have to get them out,” Collectivists muttered. These citizens had been in their care.

  Perhaps the militia were trying to draw the Collective onto the bridge. Perhaps those who had idiotically stayed behind had ceded their right to protection. Still, the officers tried to plan rescues.

  A messenger came with orders from the tactics council. The leader of Wynion Way was a fierce young woman who, like other officers, carried a shield on which was nailed the torn-off streetsign for which her troop was named. She moved her men and women toward the bridge with their aging cannon, and opposite the militia began also to approach. From the south came the Glasshouse Gunners, a platoon of cactacae men.

  So many debates over the pure-race squads! When the gangs of khepri guard sisters had come and said they would fight for the Collective, when the cactus squads had offered themselves as heavy infantry, some of the officers argued hard against it. “We’re Collectivists!” they had said. “Not cactus or human or Remade or vodyanoi or whatever! We stand and fight together.” And it was an impressive, even moving position, but it did not always make sense. “Would the chaver,” a vodyanoi delegate had, to laughter, asked one of the most strident human ultraequalitarian anarchs, “like to join me tonight as we trawl the riverbed for militia bombs?”

  And if the vodyanoi had to be given the freedom to operate together (though each corps, the equalitarianists insisted, contained one symbolic and powerless officer from another race, as a comradely reminder), was it not absurd to deny that to others? Wouldn’t a crew of khepri trained in stingboxes be less likely to inadvertently hurt their own?

  In the case of cactacae it became expedient: squads of the very strong were needed. Only the most augmented Remade could join them, with their agreement. The Glasshouse Gunners had agreed: with the tens of cactacae were two Remade, swollen with grafted muscle and oiled metal. “Rescue raid,” they were told, and under cover of Collective attack, lobbing powderbombs, pyrogenics and thaumaturgic compounds, the Glasshouse Gunners went onto the bridge. They swept the houses for inhabitants, and where they found them they funnelled them to safety through holes they blew in the walls between the terraced buildings.

  There was little movement on the militia side. Though they fired, burst holes in the stone, shearing off faces of houses to display subsiding rooms, the militia were waiting for something. The Collective began to advance, emboldened, and laid down suppressing counterattack while their scouts (hotchi, wyrmen, acrobatic humans) went rooftop or airborne to watch what was coming. Then the militia ranks parted and there were three men adangle, clots of handflesh clamped to their throats. Handlingers.

  There was no washing on Cockscomb Bridge, but there were still lines drooped over the street studded with pegs like wizened fruit, and they shuddered as the shelling continued. At the sight of the flying men the line of Collectivists almost broke.

  Parliament’s handlingers were dressed in suits and bowlers, their trousers a shade too short. A strange scare tactic. Were these the bodies of condemned New Quillers? Could they be volunteers, about whom there were rumours? Men and women whose loyalty to New Crobuzon’s government was so absolute they sacrificed themselves to be vessels for the handlingers? A holy rightist suicide. Probably these were just the executed dressed in costumes to cause foreboding.

  Seeing them loom, thaumaturgicked and fire-spitting, stronger than cactacae, they seemed supra-Quillers, nightmares of reaction. The costumes raised memories of the Night of the Kinken Shards, when the New Quill Party had overrun the khepri ghetto in a storm of murder, shattering spit-sculptures in the Plaza of Statues, stamping the mindless males and butchering the women until they trod a ground of glass needles, ichor, blood. After that attack, so frenzied that respectable uptown opinion was horrified, the militia had come in to protect those few khepri not fled or murdered. But the Quillers did not have to flee: they were allowed to leave in an orderly and triumphant way.

  Now Quillers or what looked like them were bearing down from the sky. The Collectivists stepped quickly into the lees of the bomb-shaken houses. They coughed in the dust of millennium-old bricks.

  From the south, running the length of the bridge unnaturally fast to join them, came a thin and naked man. Clamped not to his neck or his head but to his face, fingers spread over his eyes and nose, was a dark left hand. A sinistral.

  Civil wars made for unlikely allies. There were those few handlingers that for whatever reasons opposed their brothersisters—whether odd altruism or a politic calculation, the Collective’s negotiators never knew. It may have sickened the negotiators to do deals with these symbols of corruption and parasite cunning, but they would turn nothing down now. Especially as several of the handlinger turncoats were sinistrals.

  The three militia handlingers were dextriers, warriors, but for all their power they veered when they saw it was a sinistral on the man’s face. They tried to get out of range, but the Collectivist hand-linger jumped up higher than a human should and snapped his fingers. One dark-suited man spasmed as the sinistral shut down the dextrier’s assimilation gland. It became nothing but a blind five-fingered beast clutching a brain-dead man who fell out of the sky, his bowler hat a coda behind him, into the slow and dirty river Tar.

  A second snap from the sinistral’s fingers and the nude handlinger sent another of the flying men palsied and down, to spread out red on the cobbles. The Collectivists cheered. But the third loyalist handlinger had flown in fast under eaves unseen, and as the sinistral began to turn its host away from its burst victim, the dextrier opened its man’s mouth and spatseared.

  Inky gusts of flame uncoiled and rolled over the nude man’s skin, darking him and sending his fat spitting, and the sinistral screamed in its host’s voice and psychically in its own, making receptives for a half mile wince. It dropped and burnt up, fire-ruined.

  The militia motorguns opened and the air became a shredder. The Collectivists dropped behind stone as the dextrier flew unconcerned through the firing, its body jerking, protecting its hand-body with the contingent flesh it borrowed.

  On the roofs at the north end of the bridge a thaumaturge rose, a Brock Marsh rebel come to defend the Collective. His body was aglow with corposant. It flared without sound in cobalt, and he barked and a gob of the colour sputtered, flew with butterfly flight to the frontmost militia gun, and it arced and took over the cannoneers who staggered and pulled their masks from faces gone bleached and blind.

  The men and the gun brittled, cracks spread across them, and one by one gun and men shattered. The ground where they had been was dusted with shards of them, quite dry.

  Another cheer, and the leader of Wynion Way came forward firing a musket, but the handlinger flew down, spinning as it did, heavy black boots flailing. It flew into a column of Collectivists with a kind of angry playfulness, smashing them and spitting fire in an incandescent spiral, leaving brutalised dead and dying and fire-stained walls.

  “Fall back! Now!”

  The Glasshouse Gunners emerged on the streeted bridge and started to retreat, firing rivebows into the militia, who were no longer waiting, were beginning to advance dragging carronade with them. Their motorguns started again. The handlinger and the Collectivist thaumaturge faced each other. The man raised his fists to send out
a bolt; the handlinger sent him burning out of the air.

  “Get the fuck back now!” The militia were coming. The Glasshouse Gunners turned and in a sudden rage stormed them. The ranks of huge thorned fighters were tremendous. The militia faltered.

  The dextrier spat but too early. It burned through several clotheslines. A cactus-man sent a machete into the host, shouted triumph. It was a huge knife; it ground deep into the human meat, sent him down. The cactacae kicked and stamped the parasite and host with tree-trunk feet. The Gunners’ random line was enfiladed and, even armoured in crude-cast metal, the motorgun bullets tore at them.

  The weary cactus fighters began to retreat, toward their approaching weapons. The last of the Gunners was a Remade human. He wore a mottlesome thing on his foot. His cactus comrades turned to him, and he spat fire across their faces. They had killed the host but not the handlinger. It had crept onto him.

  A train came tearing over the city on the close-by rail-bridge, within a few yards of the Cockscomb. At the north shore the rails were blocked by a barricade, but south of Petty Coil Station, the Sud Line was the Collective’s. The train stopped beside the bridge, and from its windows Collectivists fired grenades, directed by a shantytown garuda on updrafts over the bomb fires. The missiles ruined more and more of the Cockscomb Bridge skyline, and broke apart the militia lines.

  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.