Iron Council

They run together on their horse and their horse-bruise through the plainlands in the ripples of the rails, lands not colonised but infected, as life once infected rockpools. Four days of tracking with ideograms of hexed dust and the bounty-man finds Oil Bill, confronts him in a quarry. The white stone is marked, crosshatched with chisel lines, which make a grid behind the bandit’s head.

– You, he shouts at Judah with the rage of the stupid betrayed, and the bondsman kills him and his weapons eat the corpse.

Perhaps I will be this, Judah thinks, and rides with the hunter. They go town to town on the trail of those the gendarmerie will not take. They stop at TRT trackside stations and sift through the wanted notices. The bounty hunter does not ask Judah to stay nor make him leave. He speaks in a sibilant whisper so quiet that Judah ca

He injures or kills his quarries with the spines from his weapons or with his living nets or with sudden throat-sounds, and drags the bodies back to the way stations for bounty, and asks nothing of Judah, nor provides him anything. The count of sheep-stealers and rapists and murderers goes up, money comes in. Those the unman kills are scum, but the presence in Judah is not at ease.

Three days’ ride across pale stone ways. Clots of rock like ag-gregates of grey air that burst into nothing under horseshoes. A stripmined hole, the bodies of sappers and gendarmes, and the entrances to tu

The Arrowhead Concerns will take what they can of the bone-load. The troglodytes have beaten off miners and made a stand, and the gendarmes want them gone. This is the commission.

Judah watches while his companion unpacks chymicals. He tries to feel equanimity. Nothing moves, not bird nor dust nor cloud. It is as if time is waiting. Judah turns and feels it start again sluggishly as the bounty hunter prepares a huge pot with distillates and oils and hoods it, over a fire, trails a leather tube to the entrance of the cave, anchors it in place with rubber and skin sealing off the air inside. It is the end of night. The fire and the brass cauldron cover them in moving tan light. The bounty-man mixes poisons.

In the mountain’s belly the trow must be waiting. They must be watching, Judah thinks. They must know that something is coming. He thinks, he ca

It moves in him and secretes disgust and anger he is sure are not his, but that stain him, and whether they are his or not he feels them. They well up in him. He thinks of the stiltspear cubs, and the trow in the little mountain.

The chymicals are mixing and boiling, and the bounty hunter adds compounds till the red muddish mixture burps gas and a caustic oily smoke begins suddenly to pour from it and is fu

Judah’s rage takes him. He hesitates more seconds and will always be aware of the cubic yards of murderous gas he lets free in that time, then walks to the cauldron, staying upwind, and puts his left hand below the hood, above the rim, into the smoke. The bounty hunter is horrified and uncomprehending.

The gas is acid and hot and Judah screams as his skin splits, but he does not withdraw his hand, and he makes his scream into a chant, and he forces all the energies he has learnt and all the techniques he has stolen up from his i

A smoke golem, a gas golem, a golem of particles and poisoned air.

Judah falls back holding his ravaged hand. The smoke still spews from the pot but it does not vent into the tu

He has never created anything this size before. It is unwieldy and unstable, and the wind tugs grots of it away so it shrinks as it advances but not fast enough to be gone by the time it reaches the hunter, who is firing at it and uselessly through it, sending thin coils of it out with the paths of bullets like brief spines, not seeing Judah beyond, not seeing how he moves his hands and puppeteers the golem. The thing twitches a gas tail. It hugs the bounty hunter in a mindless surround so he ca

When the unman is dead, Judah has the diminishing golem leap high, and he releases it to the wind and it spasms and is gone. He bandages his hand and robs the bounty hunter’s corpse. It smells just very faintly of the gas.

Judah does not know how much of the trow town the smoke has envenomed. He knows this is only one day. He knows the Arrowhead Concerns will have the TRT send another bounty hunter to this boneyard and will find the detritus of this failed poisoning, this dead. Judah knows the trow will be eradicated and their homes lost to history, but he will not be party to it, and he has tried to stand in its way.

The trow will die. If he could leave something behind for them. If he could give these rocks a guardian shape and make it wait, to wake when it is needed. The bounty hunter’s unhorse runs from him and into rock, leaving an animal-shaped bruise of lichen.

I’m done here, thinks Judah. His hand trembles; he trembles. I’ve done in a man or something that looks like a man. He is exhausted with the effort of his somaturgy, of sustaining the thing’s shape, of killing. He shakes with fear and awe at what he has done, that he could do such a thing, that he could make a golem not from clay but from heavy air. I’m done out here in these wilding lands. They’re wilding because we’re here. He ca

Judah scatters the pots and the guttering fire. He turns back for the iron road.

In something like a fugue he is taken by the wake of the trains. He meets the roadbed in some utterly lonely place. His horse is tired. It shivers in snow-dust. Judah goes to the hills, to a village overlooking the track labourers.

Though the men are provided for, though even so far from tracks’-end there is a tribe of prostitutes in their tent brothels, men from the grading teams and the rock-crushers come up sometimes to the tiny village of goatherds where Judah sits and watches. The local girls go with the New Crobuzon men, though their families impotently disapprove and fight and get beaten down. The villagers tend their wounded and weather these intrusions. -What can we do? they say. They are blighted by forbearance, by restraint.

A new calm has embedded in Judah since the line was cut into his swamps. He looks at the world through glass.

He becomes some kind of storyteller of the city to his goatherd hosts. They let him live in the wickiup encampments. They are grateful that he is not as brutish as the men of the perpetual train. They ask him questions in their barbarous Ragamoll.

– Is true the road make milk sour?

– Is true it kill young in the womb?

– Is true it make fish in river bad?

– What’s name of the road?

– I was at its end, Judah says. What is the name of the road? The question startles him.

He has found a young woman from the hillside peasants who lies with him. Her name is A

Judah wants her with him. A

A

Her clipped Downs Ragamoll is changing. She uses city slang, steals it from the hammermen. Judah can see the calm and ruthless intelligence under her giddiness, her voracious acquisition. He shows her the golems he can make, that still grow in strength and size. She is entertained but no more than by a thousand other things.

There is bad blood among the camp followers. The whores who have dutifully followed these men, splitting from the perpetual train to work with these mountain diggers, are affronted by their new rural rivals, these farmgirls who expect no pay. Some of the workers themselves are threatened by these newly voracious young women who do not sell or even give sex but take it. They know no rules. They have yet to learn taboos: some even try to go with the camp’s prisoners, the shackled Remade. The Remade are terrified by this, and go to their overseers.

One cold night A