Iron Council

by China Miéville

  Each wall of graffiti Ori would stop and stare at with light-

  emitting Bull-mask eyes. With an effortful grunt he straightened his legs, poked into nothing, and then there he was again in a new rent scant feet away, so fast Cutter could not be sure his feet had not still dangled from the first hole as his head emerged yards off.

  “He’s here,” Ori said. “Trauka Station. Come.”

  Not a mile off. They passed near the riverwall through long-

  emptied markets, where the integuments of the stalls were left, metal ribs slotted together, a herd of skeletons.

  They were just one of the running groups that night. Into Trauka through narrow old streets in a mix of ugly architecture, under paint proclaiming Free Collective Territory and Fuck You Stem-Fulcher written then crossed out and Been done mate appended in another hand. Toro disappeared, reappeared a street from them, beckoning, splitting worldskin to keep sure of his quarry’s motion, coming back to the party to direct them. As if they were directed by a dozen identical bull-faced men throughout the city.

  The smoke and miracle-colour blood that dripped from Toro’s helmet was thick; the horns were sparking as if with friction. So much violence against ontology was straining the thaumaturgic circuits. “Come,” Toro said again, and beckoned. “Just here, two turns from here, left left, he’s moving, come now.”

  Judah stopped, quickly set down ceramic conductors and a funnel in the darkest part of a brick overhang. There was a snap of thaumaturgy. He sounded an invocatory whisper—no not an invocation—he had told Cutter that the difference was crucial—not an invocation but a creation, a constitution of matter or ideomatter. Cutter watched and Judah gathered. Cutter felt the creep of awe on his skin, watching the man for whom he felt and had always felt so animal an emotion, surely the most potent golemist in New Crobuzon, its autodidact magus.

  Darkness gathered. Judah’s mechanism sucked the dark. It shifted, a tenebrous plasma; it was dragged in a slow resentful mass, the shadows become a cloud of unlight, and like water coiling down a plughole they wound into the cone, condensing, becoming darker as they went. The bricks it left were a catastrophe of physics, utterly abnatural. No light fell on them, but with their darkness gone they were clearly visible, as if harshly illuminated, but without colour, a perfect-edged grey. The cul-de-sac had become impossible: unglowing, unlit, uncoloured visibility in the absolute dark.

  Shadows emerged from the funnel’s spigot to congeal in a shape between a body and a puddle of oil, a presence of dark, unsolid but profoundly there, a human shape of blackness. Gods, is that what you got from your study? Cutter thought. He had seen Judah animate hundreds of golems, but never one so uncorporeal. Judah raised his hands. The darkness golem stood. Eight feet of silhouette. It stepped into the night and became half-visible, a darkness on the dark that moved like a man.

  Judah gathered his equipment and whispered, “Go!” He ran, and his companions, dumbed by what they had seen, let him pass before they found their energy again. Beside him with utterly silent steps was the golem, like a gorilla made of shade.

  Left, left. Into alleys overlooked by the upreach of dark brown masonry, windows without doors, doorless brick-and-mortar cliffs that seemed a glimpse on something unfinished, the land behind the facades.

  There was Toro ahead, one horn on fire and vibrating. He called to them, but his voice was drowned by the shuddering of the helmet, the unpeeling, the splitting of his horns. Screaming and with the metal itself spitting on fire, Ori scrabbled to undo the straps. He fought the helmet free and straightened, his face rivered with sweat. “There!” He pointed.

  An old man at the far end of the street watched them, holding a paintbrush poised and dripping. He turned and shuffled with an incompetent run toward where the street curved away. Spiral Jacobs.

  “Keep him in your sights!” Ori shouted, and ran, leaving his helmet to be eaten by blue fire. Cutter saw the thaumaturged glass eyes crack, the strange colours of fire and sparks as the heat ate arcana in the metal. It did not look like a statue’s head anymore but a skull, a bovine skull on fire.

  They tried to catch Ori, who ran as if Toro’s strength were still in him. “Keep up, keep on him,” he shouted.

  At the limits of their vision, where the leftward curve shut off the long alley from their view, Jacobs moved fast despite his age and gait. Judah and Cutter followed Ori, the golem loping dark beside them, and Drogon behind, and the others in changing order. The alleyway was full of echoes, of the sounds of all their feet. There were no other sounds, no gunfire of the war, no horns or noise of the Collective or the mayor’s city. Only footsteps on winter-damp brick.

  “Where’s he going?” Ori shouted. Cutter turned and saw Rahul, two three seconds behind him, disappear momentarily around the corner and not emerge. Where was he? He had slipped beyond the influence of Jacobs’ reconfiguration, been tipped out into New Crobuzon; he would turn the corner into gods-knew-where.

  Jacobs was still running, and was that, was he laughing? They ran faster, and from over the rooftops came light and sound again. Drogon was suddenly slow, and Jacobs was walking, his paint still dripping in his hand, and the alley was ended, and his footsteps were suddenly open as he emerged into a clearing. His pursuers ran out after him. They were in cold wind, in the city again, on the other end of that impossible alleyway.

  Rahul was gone, and Drogon. They had stumbled and were lost somewhere in the errant geography. Cutter came forward. Judah walked and the darkness golem walked with him, step for step. Scores of yards away was Spiral Jacobs. He was not even looking at them.

  Where were they? Cutter found the moon. He looked down between towers and walls. He was half enclosed. He struggled to make sense of it: this then that monolith spired, and here a minaret, and here one much fatter studded with lights, and above them the huge lines of airships. They were outside the Collective.

  Above them an enormous column crowned with radial wires. The Spike. They were in an irregular courtyard. The walls were different stones, in different colours. A shaking came up at them through the concrete. They were high up. Cutter looked down over a spread-out skyline, over the city.

  Perdido Street Station. Of course. They were in a huge and empty amphitheatre made by chance, floored with scrub, a little wilderness on the station’s roof. Undesigned, a forgot space in the vastness. The passage that had brought them looked now not like a street but a kink in concrete.

  The wall, an edifice of huge bricks that made them feel shrunk to dolls, was broken by the remnants of wooden floors where once this open place had been interior. It was surfaced completely with spirals. A thicket rising, as high as a canopy. Some as intricate and complex as tangled briars, some the simplest snailshell patterns. Thousands. Months of industry. Cutter breathed out. From the very top of the wall descended one black line, through the forest of helix pictograms. A spiral, pinpointing this place.

  Across the brickdust and savage weeds was Jacobs, the Tesh ambassador. He was drawing marks in the air, and he was singing.

  “He’s hurried,” Qurabin said. His disembodied voice was close. “Has to move. He weren’t ready, but he’s moving now, early . . . He’ll try to force it, the thysiac, the murderspirit . . . feel! Quick,” and the voice was gone.

  Ori ran. Across waste through dead thigh-high grass that cracked with cold, the plateau open and the lights of New Crobuzon splayed beneath him. The others followed, though no one knew what to do.

  Spiral Jacobs tremored, and the air all around tremored with him. A hundred shapes began to solidify from nothing. Cutter saw a patch of milky air, a cataract, that took lumpy shape, peristalsed maggotlike and was a pale ghost stool, a three-legged kitchen thing hanging over his brow. Beside it was an insect, impossibly big, and a flower, a pot and a hand, a candle, a lamp, all the haints that had beset New Crobuzon. They looked undercooked, not quite fine, without colour, hanging and spinning. And as Cutter came closer the haints began to turn and move around each other in
decaying orbits, an impossibly complex interpenetration of silent spiral paths. The things never collided, nor touched anyone. The apparitions moved fast, centring over Spiral Jacobs. A vortex of the everyday, the uncanny quotidian.

  Ori batted at the things. They had not yet come full; they were not murderously sucking his colour. He reached Spiral Jacobs. The old man looked at him and said something: a greeting, Cutter thought.

  He watched as Ori swung his fists, and kept missing Spiral Jacobs, kept always missing, each punch consistently mistimed, misjudged. Ori screamed and went onto his knees. Judah was just behind him, and the darkness golem stepped up.

  The great thing swung its enormous shadow hands and unlight swept over Spiral Jacobs as it gripped him. It obscured him a long moment. Jacobs faltered, went obscure and dimmed, and all the ectoplasm shapes faltered with him, waning in time like dimming lamps. They came back again as he regained strength and light, and then he growled, showed anger for the first time.

  He moved his hands, and the school of moving haints changed, came together, gusted suddenly through the golem, and where they passed they left a light in the core of the thing. It staggered like a wounded man and reached to throttle Jacobs once again, mimicking Judah’s motions. The light in the darkness golem’s core was growing.

  It fell back, it stood back on its fading heels as the lantern glow in its innards effaced it. Jacobs fought free of its shade hands. He bared dark-stained teeth. The haints swarmed. Jacobs was cobwebbed with darkness the golem had left; it was choking him. He retched up a gout of empty shadows. They spilled on the ground and crept away to their natural place below blockages of light. The darkness golem fell, and Judah fell with it, and while he lay flattened and unconscious for a second the golem disappeared.

  Ori was crying, still trying to hit Jacobs, still missing. Spiral Jacobs did not look at him, turned away as the sobbing man flailed and lost his balance and flailed again. Jacobs pushed out his hand and Ori was yanked by matter and whipped to a wall. A clutch of the apparitions went through the air in a brief tentacle to slap Elsie without quite touching her, a moment’s halo of spinning uncoloured shapes around her—a bowl, a bone, a scrap of cotton. Her face greyed instantly, choked off sudden, her eyes gone bloodshot but the blood without colour. She did not fall. With a care as if she were going to bed, she settled herself to the floor, lay down and died.

  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.

&
nbsp; 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.