Iron Council

by China Miéville

  He heard the syncopation of the train and of something else now, a complex interfering, percussion in antiphase. Iron Council tripped the switch that Judah had laid for it and the circuit he had left went live, siphoning force from him, and only Cutter could see. Cutter watched Judah blink and gasp.

  The little blockade between the tracks, which Judah’s first shout had stopped Cutter or Ann-Hari seeing, wedged in the shingle, propped on crossties—a blockage of pins, of metal rods, of blocks—was pushed over by the Iron Council. Each piece landed hard, onto the contacts Judah had laid, and their strange precise order, their materials, made each of them fall with its own sound. They combined into a careful and exact music of breaking, snaps and tolling iron that added to the flawless beat of the train; and for seconds, for a snatch of time, there was pulse-magic, a palimpsest tempo, and in that moment of complexity, each accented block of noise intervening in time, cutting time into shape so that as the huge hunter’s head of the Iron Council emerged from the rock folds and synclines into open land the moments themselves were hacked by the noise, axed into shape, an intervention through the mechanism that sucked energy from Judah Low, the great self-taught somaturge of New Crobuzon, and crude, vigorous, ineluctable, the precision of that parcelled-up time reshaped time, was an argument in time,

  reshaped the time itself, and made it

  a golem

  time golem

  which stood into its ablife, a golem of sound and time, stood and did what it was instructed to do, its instruction become it, its instruction its existence, its command just be, and so it was. This animate figure carved out of time itself, the rough hew-marks of its making the unshaped seconds and crushed moments at its edges, the split instances where its timelimbs joined its timebody. It was. The shape of a figure in dimensions insensible even to its maker, unseen by any there; its contours, seen another way, enveloping the train.

  The time golem stood and was, ignored the linearity around it, only was. It was a violence, a terrible intrusion in the succession of moments, a clot in diachrony, and with the dumb arrogance of its existence it paid the outrage of ontology no mind.

  His face bloodied, making some beached fish-flapping motion as he crawled and smeared his gore on the earth, as he shambled like a drunk man to stand, broken by the effort of thaumaturgy, Judah Low looked into the cut and smiled. Cutter watched him.

  There was an ugly noise. The tearing and crush of a weighty impact. Ann-Hari was screaming. She ran down the scree with a wake of dust. She fell and rolled and gathered herself, tearing her clothes. Rahul stood in his own shock, looked up at the Iron Council, scant feet from him. The Councillors and runaway citizens were standing, were waiting, quite uncertain. Everyone was looking at the train.

  The perpetual train. The Iron Council itself. The renegade, returned, or returning and now waiting. Absolutely still. Absolutely unmoving in the body of the time golem. The train, its moment indurate.

  It could not always clearly be seen. The crude rips in the temporal from which the golem was made gave it edges like facets, an opalescence of injured time. From some angles the train was hard to see, or hard to think of, or difficult to remember, instant to instant. But it was unmoving.

  For yards over its chimneys the exhaust was fast as smokestone, motionless until the set billows reached the limits of the split in time, the golem’s body, and above that random barrier gusted away in drifts, the last of the effluvia escaping into history. The Councillors were still poised, their weapons were still ready, the train was bursting into the plains beyond the city, and was without motion.

  The last carriage, one of the two engines that pushed instead of pulling, had missed the protection of that cosseting unmoment, had stayed dynamic, and had been derailed and crushed against the sudden crisis of untimed matter. It had burst, scattering hot coal and debris and dying engineers. The last fringe of the car ahead of it was concertinaed and torn, and where it met the unending time golem, the edge of the wound was scored like a line.

  Ann-Hari was screaming. The Council-followers were coming in more numbers out of the rock, telling each other what had happened, sending word back: Iron Council has . . . what?

  No noise came from it. It was a huge silence shaped like women and men on a train. The Iron Council was made of quiet. Ann-Hari screamed and tried to grab it, to pull herself up onto it, and time slithered from her at the borders of the golem and sped her hand or deflected it or momentarily had the Council not there so she could not touch it, she could not touch it. She was in time. It was not, and it was beyond her. She could see it, and all the instant of her comrades, but she could not reach it. Others left behind in time were gathering around her. She was screaming.

  At the head of the train, reaching with his brawny thorned arm, was Thick Shanks. He was staring at the massed militia in the distance. He was smiling, his mouth open. Beside him a laughing man whose string of spittle was stretched to the point of snapping. The train was occluded with suspended unmoving dust. Its headlights relucent, their shed light absolute and unwavering. Ann-Hari raged and tried and failed to rejoin Thick Shanks and the Iron Council.

  Cutter looked on the impossibility. He jumped when Judah put his hands on him.

  “Come,” said the somaturge. His voice was not Judah’s. A torn-up ruined thing that came up with blood and sputum, though he still smiled. “Come. I saved them. Come.”

  “How long? Will it last?” Cutter heard his quaver.

  “Don’t know. Perhaps till things are ready.”

  “They died.” Cutter pointed at the train’s rear. Judah turned his head away.

  “It’s what it is. I did all I could. Gods, I saved them. You saw.” He rose. He held his stomach. He let out a gasp. He swayed and left a spatter pattern around him. The daylight seemed to strengthen him. He reached, and Cutter gave him his hand, and they began to descend, Judah lolling as if he were stitched from old cloth, down into the rocks, hidden from the tracks. In the very far off, noise said that the militia were coming. That they saw something was not as it should be, and were coming.

  Cutter and Judah climbed down, away.

  part ten

  THE MONUMENT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Scuffing and stumbling over little fox-trails, holding Judah while he dry-retched and pulling Judah’s hair back from his aging face, Cutter wanted the moments not to end. In a shallow brook he washed Judah’s blood away. Judah Low did not pay him any notice, but breathed and spread out his fingers. While this time lasted Cutter could dissemble, could make himself believe that he thought it would end well.

  By a sideling creep they went very slowly toward New Crobuzon. Cutter took them a long way from the route of the militia, whom they could see and hear approaching the frozen train. Cutter thought of the hundreds of Councillors who must be running, looking for hides in the rocks, heading swampward. The city refugees among them. The warren of stone forms must be full of the frightened.

  “Judah,” he said. He breathed the name. He did not know what emotion it was he spoke with. He thought of those killed by what Judah had done. “Judah.”

  They were hardly subtle or secretive; they left what must, Cutter thought, be blatant trails of footfalls and blood and broken branches. He hunkered under Judah, took the tall man’s weight. Other Councillors must have climbed out of the cut and down into the outside land, but by some quirk of geography or timing Cutter and Judah seemed alone, hauling over gorse and through dry wintered brush. They were alone in the landscape. Spirits. When they came to open level land they would look and miles off see the advance of the militia. Once a vantage gave Cutter a look at the perpetual train. He saw it, slightly out of the world, as if reality bowed under its weight, as if it were at the bottom of a pit. He saw it quite unmoving.

  With the slow move of the shadows, Cutter saw the winter day grow older. He knew that things must be changing, time creeping around the timeless. I am here, under Judah’s arm. I am taking him back to New Crobuzon.
The knowing in him that it would not last was a thorn.

  I’ll not ask you anything. I’ll not ask you why you did what you did. Ain’t got time. But even unbidden Judah began to speak.

  “There was nothing that could be done, not really. Nothing to keep them from harm. History had gone on. It was the wrong time.” He was very calm. He spoke not to Cutter but to the world. Like one delirious. He was still utterly weak, but he spoke strongly. “History’d gone and that was . . . I never knew! I never knew I could do it. It was so hard, all the planning, trying to work it out, such learning, and it was . . . so—” He shook his hands at his head. “—so draining . . .”

  “All right, Judah, all right.” Cutter patted him and did not take his hand away. Held Judah. He filled suddenly, closed his eyes, blinked it down. What a pair we are, he thought, and actually laughed, and Judah laughed too.

  New Crobuzon’s that way. Cutter directed their walk.

  “Where shall we go, Judah?”

  “Take me home,” Judah said, and Cutter filled again.

  “Yes,” he said carefully. “Let me take you home.”

  Their little dissimulation, that they might make it. A long way around, up toward the rises behind the trainyard, where they might find a way north of the TRT sidings and eastward to New Crobuzon’s slum suburbs. To Chimer, say, or on up through the foothills to the River Tar and the barge nomads and low merchants with whom they might take a ride and be pulled in past Raven’s Gate, past Creekside and the remnants of the khepri ghetto, under the rails, to Smog Bend, into the innards of New Crobuzon. Cutter walked them north, as if that might be their plan.

  What was that, Judah? What was that you did? Cutter remembered Judah’s talk of the noncorporeal golems, the stiltspear and their arcane golemetry. I didn’t know you could do that, Judah.

  They saw people. “You’re going the wrong way, mate,” one caravanner said. Cutter and Judah pushed past them. The cart wheels scuffed and turned the earth and receded. Cutter looked up at birds. More. A little more. A little longer. He did not have any sense of to whom or to what he was pleading. Judah leant on him, and Cutter held him up.

  “Look at you,” he said. “Look at you.” He wiped dirt off Judah’s face, onto his own clothes. “Look at you.”

  A second tiny wave of runaways approached. This time all variegated. Humans with handcarts, a vodyanoi panting out of water. A fat she-cactus carrying a prodigious club. She hefted it at Cutter and Judah but set it down again when she saw them more closely. There were two khepri, their skinny women’s bodies swaddled in shawls so they moved with tiny steps, conversing with their headscarabs, the iridescent beetles on their thin necks moving headlegs and mandibles in sign, emitting gusts of chymical meaning. Behind them, a kind of punctuation mark to this random Collective, was a construct.

  Cutter stared at it. Even Judah looked, through the fug of his exhaustion. It waddled toward and past them on the ruts.

  Limbs, a trunk and head in rough human configuration, its body an iron tube, its head featured in pewter and glass. One arm was its own original, the other some later repair in a scrubbed, lighter steel. From a vent like a cluster of cigars it jetted breaths of smoke. It raised its cylinder legs and placed them down with inhuman precision. Wedged over what would be its shoulder it carried a bundle dangling on the end of a staff.

  One of the city’s rare legal constructs, the servant or plaything of someone rich? An underground machine, an illegal, hidden for years? What are you? Did it follow its owner into exile, was its meticulous stomping progress simple obedience to a mathematised rule in its analytical engine? Cutter watched it with the superstition of someone grown up after the Construct War.

  It turned its head with a whinge of metal. It took them in with eyes that were milky and melancholy, and though it was absurd to think that some self-organised viral mind moved in the flywheels behind that glass, Cutter had a moment where he felt that, in the fall of the Collective, New Crobuzon had gone so grim that even the machines were running. The construct continued, and Cutter led Judah away.

  They had some miles to go still. There was sound. The militia must, Cutter thought, have been by the paused Iron Council for hours. The sound came closer. Cutter tightened his eyes shut. The time was ending, as he had known it would.

  In a little stone-cluttered clearance he and Judah came to face Rahul and, on his animal back, Ann-Hari. Her teeth were bared. She held a repeater pistol.

  “Judah,” she said. She dismounted. “Judah.”

  Cutter patted himself until he found his gun, tried unsteadily to raise it. Rahul crossed to him with spurt-quick lizard steps and held him in his saurian arms. He leant forward at the waist and took Cutter’s weapon away. He tapped Cutter’s face with brusque kindness. He moved, dragging Cutter as if he were his parent. Cutter protested, but so weakly it was as if he said nothing. He was almost sure his gun would not have fired. That it would have been clogged, or unloaded.

  Judah swayed and watched Ann-Hari. He smiled at her with his vatic calm. Ann-Hari trembled. Cutter tried to say something, to stop this, but no one paid notice.

  “Why?” Ann-Hari said, and came forward. She stood close to Judah Low. She was teary.

  “They’d be dead,” said Judah.

  “You don’t know. You don’t know.”

  “Yes. You saw. You saw. You know what would have happened.”

  “You don’t know, Judah, gods damn you . . .”

  Cutter had never seen Ann-Hari so raging, so uncontrolled. He wanted to speak but he could not because this was not his instant.

  Judah looked at Ann-Hari and hid any fear, looked at her with an utterness of attention that snagged Cutter’s insides. Don’t end now, like this. Rahul’s arms around him were protective.

  “Ann-Hari,” Judah said, his voice gentle though he must know. “Would you have had them die? Would you have died? I tried to turn you, we tried to . . .” You knew they wouldn’t, thought Cutter. “They’re safe now. They’re safe now. The Iron Council remains.”

  “You’ve pickled us, you bastard . . .”

  “You’d all have died . . .”

  “End it.”

  “I don’t know how. I wouldn’t, besides—you know that.”

  “End it.”

  “No. You’d all have died.”

  “You’ve no fucking right, Judah . . .”

  “You’d have died.”

  “Maybe.” She spit the word. A long quiet followed. “Maybe we’d have died. But you don’t know. You don’t know there weren’t Collectivists waiting behind them militia ready to take them, now all scared off because of what you done. You don’t know that they weren’t there, you don’t know who wouldn’t have been inspired when we come, too late or not. See? Too late or not, they might have been. See, Judah? You see? Whether we died or not.”

  “I had . . . it’s the Council. I had to make them, you, safe . . .”

  “It’s not yours to choose, Judah. Not yours.”

  He moved his arms slightly out from his sides, stood square to her, looked down at her. The connection between them remained, a line of force. They seemed to draw in energy from the surrounds. Judah stared at her with patience, a readiness.

  “It was not yours, Judah Low. You never understood that. You never knew.” She raised her pistol and Cutter made a sound and moved in Rahul’s grip. She pressed it against Judah’s chest. He did not flinch. “The thing in you . . . You did not create the Iron Council, Judah Low. It was never yours.” She stepped back and raised the pistol till he stared into its mouth. “And maybe you’ll die not understanding, Judah. Judah Low. Iron Council was never yours. You don’t get to choose. You don’t decide when is the right time, when it fits your story. This was the time we were here. We knew. We decided. And you don’t know, and now we don’t either, we’ll never know what would have happened. You stole all those people from themselves.”

  “I did it,” Judah whispered, “for you, for the Iron Council. To save it.” />
  “That I know,” she said. She spoke quietly, but her voice still shook. “But we were never yours, Judah. We were something real, and we came in our time, and we made our decision, and it was not yours. Whether we were right or wrong, it was our history. You were never our augur Judah. Never our saviour.

  “And you won’t hear this, you can’t, but this now isn’t because you’re a sacrifice to anything. This isn’t how it needed to be. This is because you had no right.”

  Cutter heard the end in her voice and saw Ann-Hari’s hand move. Now, he thought. Now Judah, stop her.

  In the tiny splintered instant that she tightened her hand he thought: Now.

  Call an earth golem. Judah could focus and drag from the hard earth before him a grey earth golem that would rise, levering itself out of the stuff of its own substance with weeds and weed-debris hanging still to it, the hillside itself become moving, and it could intervene. It could stand between Judah and Ann-Hari and take her bullet, stop it with the density of its matter, then reach and cuff the gun away and grip her close so that she could not fight and Judah would be safe from her, and could have the golem walk her away or keep her motionless while he turned with Cutter and they went on around the roots where trees had been torn up and past the powdering rocks to New Crobuzon.

  An air golem. One hard gust of ab-live wind to close Ann-Hari’s eyes and make her aim falter. An obedient figure made of air to stand before the Iron Councillor and throw her clothes into her face, to channel very hard and fast into the barrels of her pistol, to ruin any shots. And as the air around displaced by the dance of the new presence made whorls of dust rise and the gusting of dry leaf-matter where it still scabbed bushes, Judah and Cutter could leave.