Iron Council

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.

Make her gun a golem. Turn the very pistol itself into a small and quick golem and have it close its mouth, have it eat the bullet before it spat it away, and then Judah might have the thing twist in Ann-Hari’s hand and turn with what limited motion its shape allowed it, and point up into her face, a threat, and give Judah the time, while Ann-Hari was paralysed with that surprise and the menace of her own weapon, give him the time to get away, with Cutter, over the rise and the pathway.

Make the bullet a golem. And it could fall. Make her clothes golems. They might trip her. Make a golem of those scattered little dead trees. Make a golem of clouds. Of the shadows, of her own shadow. Make another sound golem. Make a golem of sound and time to keep her unmoving. It was very cold. Sing your rhythms again fast to make a golem of still time and stop her up and we’ll go.

But Judah did nothing and Ann-Hari pulled her trigger.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

It was by the Tar that Cutter regained the city. A night entry. Slowly and under new laws, the New Crobuzon authorities were reopening riverine trade. The barge-rangers were waiting to establish new runs. Cutter came back into New Crobuzon disguised in a coal-smeared overall, piloting a fat low-slung boat.

Around him the houses spread out from the wind of the river, tens then hundreds, and he heard their sounds and remembered them, the settling of architecture, and knew he was coming home. The bargeman he had bribed to crew him was eager for Cutter to leave. With the repeating cough of the engine they came past the tarry houses of Raven’s Gate, the khepri warren of Creekside, the houses disguised by mucal addenda, and under the old brick bridges of New Crobuzon, while the boat left a rainbow discharge on the water.

Airships went. They stalked on searchlight legs. A fat glare pinioned the boat then blinked off, twice.

He walked through the warehouses of Smog Bend, the bleached brick, the stained concrete. Past creosote, past bitumen and mouldered posters, past the dumps of building matter, powdered glass and stone, into streets once held by the Collective. Cutter walked past the lots where there had been meetings of residents voting noisily on everything. Now they were as they had been, little wildernesses of concrete-splitting bramble and cow-parsley, wildnesses for the insects. There were spirals on the walls. Rain was washing them away.

Days later and Cutter knew the new rules, knew how to avoid the militia who patrolled the streets and locked down Creekside and Murkside and above all Dog Fenn. They said there were still pockets of Collectivist treachery, and they were ruthless in their hunt.

Cutter said nothing when he saw the squads emerge from broken buildings with men and women screaming their innocence or occasionally rebellion. He kept his eyes down. Numb as he was, he negotiated the checkpoints, offering his forgeries without fear, because he did not care if he was challenged, and when he was not he would walk on without triumph.

Uptown had its beauty. BilSantum Plaza, Perdido Street Station. It was as if there had been no war. The spirals were smears. Perdido Street Station loomed like a god over the city. Cutter looked up at its roofscape, at where he had been.

In the last days of the Collective there had been a desperate copy of the skyrail attack. A train heavy with explosives had set out from Saltpetre Station, accelerating toward Perdido Street Station with a dream of immolating the vast edifice. It would never have happened. The Collectivist who drove it on his suicide mission, brave with drink and the assuredness of death, had rammed the blockade at Sly Station and powered on toward Spit Bazaar, but the militia had detonated the train as it approached, tearing a hole in the stitching of arches that went the length of New Crobuzon. The Sud Line was severed and was being slowly rebuilt.

The posters on the kiosks, the newspapers, the wax proclamations that were free in the voxiterator booths told of the government’s triumphs: Tesh’s tribute payments, their war apologies, the rebirth of community. Hard, hopeful times, they said. There was word of new projects, expeditions across the continent. The promise of a new economy, of expansion. Cutter wandered. Creekside was a ruin. The khepri bodies left after the Quiller Massacre had been cleared, but there were stains still on some walls. In places the phlegm integuments exuded by home-grubs had been cracked and burnt, revealing the brick underneath.

Cutter wandered and watched the reconstruction. Throughout the centre of New Crobuzon were the holes torn by armaments, the thickets of concrete, mortar and broken marble, new raggedy passages linking alleys, paved with rubble. In Barrackham the militia tower’s tip was swathed in scaffolding like cuckoo-spit. The drooping severed skyrail was gone. It would be restrung when the Barrackham Tower stood again.

In Mog Hill, near enough the Collective’s old ground but just outside the militarised zone so not subject to martial law or curfew, Cutter found lodging. He gave his new name. Paid with the proceeds from his day-work, in areas he had not frequented in his life before.

New Crobuzon was wrecked. Its statues broken, districts stained and blistered by fire, whole streets become facades, the buildings eviscerated. Houses, churches, factories, foundries as hollow and brittle as old skulls. Wrecks floated in the rivers.

He knew how to become part of the whispering networks again, even broken as they were. Even now when no one spoke to anyone with trust, when citizens strove not to see each other’s eyes as they passed, he knew how. Even now when a quickly clenched fist risked being interpreted as handslang and the militia might be called or there might be a quick vigilante killing to save the area from renegade insurgents and the death squads they would bring. Cutter was careful and patient. Two weeks after his return he found Madeleina.

“It’s better now,” she said. “But in the first weeks, gods.

“Bodies by walls, every one of them ‘resisting,’ they said, while they were taken away. Resisting by tripping, or asking a moment’s rest, or spitting, resisting by not coming fast enough when they were told.

“Up by the Arrowhead Pits, in the foothills,” she said, “Camp Sutory. It’s where they keep the Collectivists. Thousands. No one knows how many. There’s an annex: go in, you don’t come out, so they say. When they’re done asking questions.

“Some of us escaped.”

She listed those she had known, and what had happened to them. Cutter recognised some of the names. He could not tell if Madeleina trusted him, or was past care.

“We need to tell what happened,” she said. “It’s what we have to do. But if we tell the truth, those that weren’t here will think we’re lying. Exaggerating. So… do we make it less bad than it was, to be believed? Does that make sense?” She was very tired. He made her tell him all the story, everything about the fall of the Collective.

When he found out how long ago it had been it would have been easy for him to say to himself, There was no one to fight for the Council, but he did not. He did not because they could not know what might have happened, because it had not been allowed to. They could not know what Judah’s intervention had done.

There were ten thousand rumours in New Crobuzon about the Iron Council.

Cutter went often to the slow-sculpture garden in Ludmead, to sit alone amid the art dedicated to the godling of patience. The gardens were ruined. The sculpted lawns and thickets were interrupted by huge sedimentary stones, each of them veined with layers and cracks, each carefully prepared: shafts drilled precisely, caustic agents dripped in, for a slight and so-slow dissolution of rock in exact planes, so that over years of weathering, slabs would fall in layers, coming off with the rain, and at very last taking their long-planned shapes. Slow-sculptors never disclosed what they had prepared, and their art revealed itself only long after their deaths.

He had always hated the sedateness of these gardens, but now that they were ruined he found them a comfort. Some Collectivist or sympathiser punks had climbed the wall weeks ago, before Dog Fenn had fallen, and taken chisels to several of the larger stones. With cheerful imprecision and disrespect they had made crude and quick and vulgar figures, lively and ugly, ground filthy and dissident slogans into their skins. They had ruined the meticulous boring and acid-work of the artists, preempting the erosion-sculptures with pornographic clowns. Cutter sat and leaned against a new stone figure stroking an oversized cock, carved out of what might have been intended as a swan or a boat or a flower or anything at all.

He did not remember much of that time in the hills. The grip of Rahul. Holding him while-did he flail? Did he cry? He suspected that yes he had cried and flailed. He had been held till exhaustion dropped him.

He remembered Ann-Hari walking, disappearing, not looking at him. He remembered her mounting Rahul and having him return to the rocks. “Back,” she had said. “The Council,” and what that meant he had not known. He had not even heard her at the time. Only later when he was done mourning.

Was she at large? Had she looked for and found death? He had seen them disappear, Ann-Hari and Remade Rahul, toward the stones where the Iron Council waited. It was the last time he saw them.

When he had been able to, Cutter had strained to move Judah. He had wanted to bury him. He had tried not to look Judah in his broken face. Finally he pulled him off the animal-track. Without looking, by touch, Cutter had closed Judah’s eyes. He had held Judah’s colding hand and had not been able to bring himself to touch the leather lips with his own though he so wanted to, so had kissed his own fingers instead and brought them a long time to Judah’s breathless mouth. As if, if he waited long enough, Judah would have to move.

He had made a cairn over him. He could only think it in small moments.

The Council did not move. Cutter had not yet been to see it, though he knew he would, but everyone in New Crobuzon knew its state. Judah’s death had not released it from its synchronic jail. The newspapers had outlandish theories for what had happened. Torque-residue was the most common suggestion, after its plunge through the cacotopic zone. Cutter was sure there were those in the government who knew the truth.

He would go to see it, when he could. He thought of Ann-Hari, walking the stone, riding Rahul.

Cutter tells Madeleina about Judah Low, and she listens with wordless sympathy for which he is broken with gratitude. One night she takes him with her to an abattoir in Ketch Heath. They go carefully, roundabout routes. There is a cat-howl as they come close. The animals are coming back, now they are not meat. Once there in the dark slaughterhouse, Cutter steps with di Farja over gutters of cloying blood, and in the hollow churchlike echoes, the ring of the now-empty meathooks against each other, in the smoulder from the fireboxes of the grinders, she shows him the hidden doors and the little printing press beyond.

They work together that night, turning the handles, making sure the ink does not clot. They turn out many hundreds of copies in the dark.

RUNAGATE RAMPANT.

LUNUARY 1806.

“Order reigns in New Crobuzon!” You stupid lackeys. Your order is built on sand. Tomorrow the Iron Council will move on again, and to your horror it will proclaim with its whistle blaring: We say: We were, we are, we will be.

Now through pathways in the strewn wires and razored wires that litter this open zone this flat land outside the city split by a seam of rail we come in numbers. Under the moon in grey or without it gathered in the dog drab of unlit night we will come.

There. There we will come to Iron Council. There we will come to the perpetual train, truly perpetual now perhaps poised always poised forever just about its wheels just about to finish turning. It waits. By its iron axles are devils of motion, waiting an eternal second.

Past guards patrolling a border. Where there are runnels beneath the wires we slip through, where there are none we cut or climb very careful, cushioned with rag. Through the selvage of history toward that moment become a place, that history instant a splinter in now, under now’s skin.

We are incessant despite the penalties. Old women, young, men, human cactus khepri hotchi vodyanoi and Remade, even Remade. Here in the environs of the train those Remade who make the dangerous pilgrimage are given something, are for these yards around this moment equals. And scores of children. Rude little roughnecks, orphans living animal in New Crobuzon’s streets self-organised in troupes to come to this strange playground. Through runoff and flyblown trains made of rust, the aggregate of industry in the TRT sidings, reaccreting power as its new projects begin, through beetle-tracked wasteland, through miles of greyed nothing and stones like the ghosts of stones the alley children come to the Iron Council.

There is a circuit. There are routes to be followed.

Climb the scree slopes to look down on the flash-frozen smoking from the chimneys. Stand on the very tongue of tracks between the iron to look into the face of the train. Slow circle widdershins the whole Council, a some-minutes’ walk. No one can touch it. Everyone tries. Time slips around it. They are coming. Everyone can see it. The Iron Council is not stopped it is onrushing it is immanent and we see it only in this one moment. Circle it.

The engine smokestack towered and flared, a belch of black, keeping its shape, swept back fast by the wind embedded in that moment. We come in close scant hairs from the protuberance of animal-head horns and the blades of the warriors who wait, stand close up, stare at the Councillors preparing with shouts set on them.

That one is Thick Shanks. That big, age-discoloured cactus-man, him at the engine’s window. He helped make Iron Council all the time ago. Here he is to bring it home.

There is a route from Councillor to Councillor, given names. Here is Spitter whose excited shout has left saliva spray in a parabolic fringe around his mouth; here is Leapfrog who has jumped from one carriage top toward another and hangs over the gap midway in her arc; here is the Gunner from whose rifle has emerged a bullet, ajut six inches from the barrel. The tradition is to stop, wave your hand between unmoving missile and gun.

Some of us knew these Councillors once. There is a woman who comes many times to speak to the same man, her father, come back to her, unmoving in history. She is not the only one who visits family.

The ivy-tower skirted with rust dust and smoke the cattletrucks made bunks and bedlam, panelled laboratory cars messhalls arsenals and church, here open-topped flatcars full of earth, gardens and a graveyard with its cenotaph, a cab whittled from driftwood and the bulbous triple-nucleated plasmic sac left where Torque warped those inside, the final engine with its snarl of metal teeth where the moment ended. These paused Council cars wait to salvage us.

We play around them; we come to them. Some come to pray. The ground around the Iron Council is a litter of written pleas.

The militia and their scientists and their thaumaturges try to send through violence, but the time golem only is, and is unhurt by their crude attacks. We come back again, again, again.

Years might pass and we will tell the story of the Iron Council and how it was made, how it made itself and went, and how it came back, and is coming, is still coming. Women and men cut a line across the dirtland and dragged history out and back across the world. They are still with shouts setting their mouths and we usher them in. They are coming out of the trenches of rock toward the brick shadows. They are always coming.