Iron Council

A

Judah has never seen her so meek. He knows that this is only a small thing. No one has died, and likely will not-the blade is tiny. Now the locals know the rules, and no one will remember A

They go two days’ walk to a dying station, to the trains. They have third-class seats. Judah watches A

He is back, and blinking like a countryman at New Crobuzon. A

All A

She has never seen khepri before. -There are women here who’ve heads like bugs, she tells him. She visits the Ribs. -They’re bigger’n the biggest trees ever grew. They’re old and harder than stone, bones way up over the roofs, something dead and the whole city’s its grave.

A

There is a station in Rudewood on the useless tracks. It has › long been deserted. Judah knows of it, but has never seen it. A

She tells him about the Fuchsia House, about BilSantum Plaza and the Gargoyle Park, the domed cactus ghetto, the zoological gardens, and many of these things he last visited in his youth if ever. She tells him all the races that she sees. She loves the markets.

Judah makes enough to eat, entertaining crowds with his hedge-magic golemetry. One day he makes a more sturdy figure from wood, with loose chain joints. He attaches strings to her limbs and now while his thaumaturgy makes her dance, he waggles a frame as if he is manipulating her. Judah makes noticeably more when punters think him a puppeteer than when they think he is animating matter.

In rooms by the Kelltree Docks, they are woken each morning by the sirens of factories and the slow stampede of the workforce. A

She likes to walk. Judah walks miles with her, between onlooking houses, in the shadows of all the crossbred architecture. She asks him why things are built as they are, and he does not know the answers. Once he is with her as a khepri couple pass, their sashes plaited together, their headlegs rippling and sprays of bitter air emitted around them, their chymical whisperings. Judah feels A

It is boomtime. There is money, and there is competition for pavement change. Judah dances his puppets beside singers and instrumentalists, tumblers and artists in chalk.

It is winter but the city is freakishly warm. It is a languid season. In the red of tinted flares Judah’s golem performs for the students in Ludmead. The undergraduates are overwhelmingly young men, well-dressed uptown boys and a few studious clerks’ sons, but there are women among them, and even a few xenians. They walk by Judah’s high-stepping wooden dancer. He is only a little older than most of them.

Some give him stivers, marks and shekels: most give him nothing. One young man attuned to the figure’s movements and the flows of thaumaturgons stops and sees that the marionette is a fake.

– This is what I do, he says. -This is what we do here. I’m in the damned somaturgy programme. You got the face to come here and palm off your jury-rigged hexes?

– Match me then, Judah says.

Which is how the stiltspear sport of golem wrestling comes to New Crobuzon.

The little crowd of students watch while the arrogant boy squints over his glasses at Judah, who is all ruddy and sinewed-muscled scrawn, dressed in third- and fourth-hand rags. Though they bray support for their classmate Judah senses their ambivalence, and realises these moneyed sons would almost rather their fellow, a middling boy from a journeyman family, lose to him the utter outsider. Sheer class sympathy almost makes him walk away, but money is being counted and his own odds are good: he bets on himself.

He whispers to his golem, stutter-hisses at it like the stiltspear, and it takes the undergraduate’s earth-man apart. It is not a hard win.

Judah counts his money. The loser swallows several times and approaches him. He has grace and intelligence. -Good win, he says. He even smiles. -You’ve some techniques, and some power to you. I never seen anyone conjure a golem like that.

– I didn’t learn here.

– I see that.

– Try again? Another match?

– Yes! Yes! Again! It is one of the other students. -Come back tomorrow, puppetman, and we’ll do it again, and we’ll find a better damn ’turge than Pe

Neither Judah nor Pe

It will never challenge the glad’ circuses, the illegal blood-halls of Cadnebar’s and its imitators, where enthusiasts of real brawl sports can watch knife bouts, two-on-cactus hack matches and bite fights. But Pe

At first it is mostly students in the plasmic sciences come to the meets, then some of their professors. Then as word gets out autodidact somaturges and gutter hexers from the falling-down parts of town arrive. The sport is not particularly illegal but nor is it sanctioned, and like most such activities it is always on the point of being ba

They are unlikely heroes, the enthusiasts: intense, nervous and studious. They meet in venues of increasing size. They specialise, stud their creations in blades or slabs of tin armour, or give them bodkin legs and serrated dorsal ridges. These are golemachs, fighting constructions, matched against each other weight for weight.

Judah tops the rankings. He does not find it hard to win. His spare and coarse stiltspear techniques work. He loses a handful of times, but in that unforgiving laboratory he is quick to improve.

– You’ve a rare talent, Judah, says Pe

Pe

– You’re strong, he says to Judah.

Twice A

Judah likes wi

He is a star, Swamp-Taught Low. Another is Lothaniel Durayne, a professor of somaturgy who fights his feline tar-golems as Loth the Catman. They relish these stage names. There is the Dandler, a quiet woman Pe

The stronger the somaturge, the greater the mass they can control. Soon they are setting upper limits to weight. Nothing heavier than a large dog can fight. Judah wonders how much he could control if he chose.

As organisers, bookie and top golemachist, Pe

Every time his golems move, Judah feels his co

It is a sweet winter. Judah takes A

They walk in the frost-glazed shopping streets of The Crow, which are strung with ropes of lights and winter flowers. They drink hot chocolate mulled with rum. A

Good-bye, Judah thinks, and smiles back.

When snow comes, for a few hours it effaces all the edges of architecture: the tight-coiled cornices of old churches, dark stone buttresses and all the countless poured and moulded concrete and brick terraces, and workers’ cottages too mean or crude to have any style at all. They become undulations below snow; then they are themselves again, as they sweat off sleet.