Iron Council

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For all their help with this book, I owe my deepest gratitude to Emma Bircham, Mark Bould, Andrew Butler, Mic Cheetham, Deanna Hoak, Simon Kavanagh, Peter Lavery, Claudia Lightfoot, Farah Mendelsohn, Jemima Miéville, Gillian Redfearn, Max Schaefer, Chris Schluep, and Jesse Soodalter. Huge thanks also to Nick Mamatas and Mehitobel Wilson, and to everyone at Macmillan and Del Rey for all their work.

Though as always I am indebted to countless writers, for this book I must especially thank William Durbin, John Ehle, Jane Gaskell, Zane Grey, Sembène Ousmane, Tim Powers, T. F. Powys, and Frank Spearman.

In years gone, women and men are cutting a line across the dirtland and dragging history with them. They are still, with fight-shouts setting their mouths. They are in rough and trenches of rock, in forests, in scrub, brick shadows. They are always coming.

And in years long gone someone stands on a knuckle of granite, a clenched-up mountain fist. Trees cover the peak as if a spume of forest has settled. He is above a green world while feathered and tough-skinned fauna speck the air below him and pay no mind.

Up past pillars of batholith is the path he has made, and abutting it tarpaulin bivouacs. There are men and fire, little neutered cousin to the conflagrations that fertilize woodlands.

The man apart is in wind that frosts this old moment in place forever while breath cold-congeals on his beard. He consults mercury sluggish in its glass, a barometer and inch-marked cord. He locates himself and the men with him above the belly of the world and in a mountain autumn.

They have ascended. Columns of men have faltered against gravity, tight-knotted dangling in the lee of silicate walls and corners. Servants of their equipment, they have carried the brass, wood and glass oddments like dumb nabobs across the world.

The man apart breathes in the moment long gone, listens to the coughs of mountain animals, the beat of jostling trees. Where ravines are he has plumbed lines to bring them to order and know them, has marked them and annotated his drawings, and learning the parameters of the peneplain or open-sided corries, the tributary canyons, creeks, rivers and fern-scruffed pampas, he has made them beautiful. Where pines or ash are tethered and he notes the radius of a curve, the land humbles him.

Cold takes six of his men and leaves them white and hard in make-do graves. Githwings rinse the party with blood, and bears and tenebrae leave them depleted and men broken and crying unfound in darkness and mules fall and excavations fail and there are drownings and indigens who trustlessly murder but those are all other moments. In this long-gone time there is only a man above the trees. West, mountains block his way, but in this moment they are miles yet.

Only wind speaks to him, but he knows his name is raised in abuse and respect. His wake is disputation. In the built hilltops of his city his endeavours split families. Some say they speak for gods and that he is proud. He is an insult on the world’s face and his plans and route are an abomination.

The man watches night colonise. (It is a long time since this moment.) He watches the spits of shadows, and before he hears the tin clatter of his men at supper or smells the cooked rock vermin he will eat with them, there is only he and the mountain and the night and his books with renderings of everything he has seen and measurements of these disinterested heights and his want.

He smiles not cunning nor sated nor secure, but in joy because he knows his plans are holy.