Iron Council

The Remade haul, their overseers watching and sometimes whipping. The roadbed goes back forever through the trees.

– My stiltspear friend, the old man says. He welcomes Judah.

– My stiltspear friend, it’s good to see you. Are you come back to us? Judah nods. -I’m glad, son. It’s best. How are your clan?

Judah looks up coldly but he sees no crowing. The question is not a provocation. -Gone, Judah says. He feels his failure.

The man nods and purses his lips. -And will you show us their homestead? he says. -I want to take it down. It’ll be unacceptable if there’s a place for them to come back to. There’ll be a town here, you know. Yes there will. We sit on the subsoil of Junctiontown or Forktown or Palus Trifork, I’ve not yet decided. And I could make the stiltspear village a museum, so a half-day’s hike from the Plaza di Vapor visitors could go to see it. But I’m of a mind to raze it. So will you show me where it is?

If it is left there will be stiltspear who will want to return; children will try to find their old playgrounds.

– I’ll show you.

– Good lad. I understand and I admire you. You’ve come through something and I respect that. Did you find what you wanted? I remember when first we spoke. When I hired you, you remember. I wanted something from you but I always thought you wanted something from the swamp, or the stiltspear. Did you find it?

– Yes. I did.

The old man smiles and holds out his hand, and Judah gives him the sheafs of maps, of notations, of fen-lore. The old man does not say how late the information is. He flicks through it but does not say how poor it is, how inadequately Judah has kept his part of the wage-bargain. Another man comes in and speaks rapidly about a dispute, a failing deadline. The old man nods.

– We have so many problems, he says. -The foremen are angry with the city’s magisters. They have no sense of what we’re doing; they send us Remade with no capabilities. Our pilings are breaking. Our retaining walls buckle, our trestles collapse. He smiles. -None of this surprises me.

– Welcome back, he says. -Now, are you on my payroll? Will you go back to New Crobuzon? Or stay? We’ll speak. I have to go. We’ve been so long here, with the flat behind us, the rust-eaters have caught us up. They’ve reached the trees.

Yes, there they are. Only a short time along the roadbed, which is flatter and more finished the farther back Judah goes. It has a beauty, this trained land. An oddity, this road at which the swamp claws.

A corner and a new workforce is there. Cosseted by diminished trees, like the crew that flattens the fenland but moving with unique rhythm, a syncopation of construction.

A crowd unfolds toward him. There is a rapid thudding as sleepers are dropped and then a sound like something being sliced as girders unroll from a flatcar, crews Remade and whole picking them up with tongs, a baffling dainty motion, letting them down as sledge-wielding brawnies step in and timed as perfectly as an orchestra hammer the ties and rails. Behind them all something huge and noisy vents and watches their efforts, and edges constantly forward. A train, deep among the mangroves.

It was months earlier that he first met the old man. Weather Wrightby. Crazyweather, Iron Wright. In the offices of TRT, at the recruitment meetings, with all the other young men in starch and braces.

University boys, clerks’ sons, the adventurous rich and aspirational young men like Judah, Dog Fe

– I have wanted this for decades, Wrightby said. He was compelling. The recruits were respectful of this man nearly three times their age. His money did not diminish him. -Twice I went west finding routes. Twice, sadly, I had to come home. There’s a crossing that’s still to be done. That’s the big task. This that we do now is only a start. A little tinkering southerly.

A thousand miles of track. Through rottenstone, forests and bog. Judah was cowed by Wrightby’s fervour. This undertaking is so vast it could bankrupt even such a wealth as his.

Wrightby had felt him, sounded his chest like a doctor. Handed out commissions, put teams together. -You can report to us from the swamps, boy. It’ll be tough terrain. We need to know what to expect.

That is how Judah got here.

The first journey from New Crobuzon. A team: engineers, gendarmes, scholars and rugged scouts who had looked at long-haired Judah with friendly condescension. They started two, three miles west of New Crobuzon, under heavy guard. A flatbed town carved out of the land, a range of buffers, a fan of rails.

Warehouses big enough to hold ships, mountains of gravel, planks from stripcutting Rudewood. A mob of humans and cactacae; khepri, their scarab heads fidgetsome; vodyanoi in the canals that linked to the city, crewing open-bottomed barges; rarer races. A garden of different limbs. Cheap deals, contracts, assignations. The Remade were corralled, shovelled like meat animals onto barred trucks. And on into the empty land, skirting the edges of the forest through cuts blasted with blackpowder, went the railroad.

It was late spring. Dirigibles puttered overhead, sweep-

surveying the landscape, tracking the iron way. At the train window Judah watched the wilderness.

The train was full with recruits: labourers on wood benches, the prison-trucks of the Remade. Judah sat with other surveyors. He listened to the pistons. The squat, simple trains within New Crobuzon were always accelerating or slowing, only ever jerking between stations. There was no time for them to pick up pace, to maintain it and create this new sound, this utterly new beat of a speeding train.

They passed a village: an odd and ugly sight. Sidings slid toward it, and Judah could see the original wattle-and-daub dwellings alongside rapidly thrown-up wood houses. It must have trebled in size within a year.

– Frenzy, said one man. -Can’t last. They’ll be crying within two years. Every piece-of-shit town we pass gives the railroad money, or some syndicate from New Crobuzon comes down, takes it over, pays Wrightby’s railroad so’s they get the damn rails. They can’t all make it. Some towns are going to die.

– Or be killed, another said, and they laughed. -Before we even broke ground they started building. There’s a township to the west, Salve, built by men from Wrightby’s own Transcontinental Railroad Trust, if you please. They drew up the plans for this Myrshock-Cobsea route with Iron Wright hisself, got their town ready for him. From nothing. A halfway place before the swamp junction.

– Only there was some shenanigans, Jabber knows what, and Iron Wright isn’t talking to them. So now we’ll be skirting away and no iron road’s coming to Salve. The men laughed. -Still there. Still modern. Cold-dead empty. The youngest ghost-town in Rohagi.

Judah imagined music halls, a bathhouse, visited only by dust, eaten by creepers.

They stopped at a newly bloated township, and hawkers rushed for the train. They held up cheap food, cheap clothes, hand-printed gazetteers promising a bestiary and maps of the newly opening lands. They sold rail-end papers-Judah bought one, a roughly inked sheet The Wheelhouse, thick with errors in spelling and grammar. It was full of workers’ complaints, contumely about the failings of the Remade, scatology and hand-drawn pornography.

The rails angled southwest by churned mud and rubbish where a temporary town had been dismantled, on to rocks and grasslands. Once the train scaled a ravine on a new trestled bridge that swayed under them.

They switchbacked up inclines where they had to but mostly the train went straight-deviations were failures. Where stone reared it was split, become scree-edged furrows stained by smoke. To the west, mountains overlooked them. The Bezhek Peaks, girdled in shadow. When the train began to slow again, it was for the end of the line.

There were people in those wilds. Many women, in hill-dirted petticoats. Some carried children. Suddenly they were hundreds, in a tent city close to the bright rails. Streetwalkers bizarrely displaced to the desolate landscape.

The sun lowered and there were fires. Judah thought of the people left behind, the dead, diseased and killed, the children abandoned or smothered, buried by the line. They slowed past a herd of cattle, mongrel, stringy and subtly Remade, a grex breed. The box capra chew and live on what poor food there is, their cross-slit eyes betraying goat affinities. At last, ahead of the whoretown and the cattle, was the perpetual train.

Judah had walked its length, skirting the crews. It was a rolling-stock town, an industrial citylet that crawled. At the end of a no-man’s-land of empty rails, he saw the work. New Crobuzon reaching so far. The leviathan unfolding of metal, the greatest city in Bas-Lag rolling out its new iron tongue, licking at the cities across the plains.

Then there were days of trekking beyond the edge of iron. Judah’s party passed the carts of the tie-layers. Crews cut down copses, treated and shaped the slabs, piled them in mounds and hauled them. Beyond the ties, the roadbed was bare rock-shards. Walking the sleepers it had seemed a ladder across the earth: now it was a road. It furrowed through high land and rose above low. They were a long way behind the graders.

For five days they were alone but for birds. It was an unca

Tu

The Remade, with limbs become pistons and jackhammers, were deafened by their own labours. One was a man whose arms were replaced with the outsized splayed claws of a mole: there was no way he could scrape through this stone but the crews had made him a mascot, and he sat in the tu