Iron Council

Judah dresses in the exaggerated clobber of a street-success. When he walks, the Dog Fe

A

– … a brutal winter, he reads from The Quarrel. - Those men still in the swamp spend much of their time acurse at the cold, but they have at least the advantage that the stiltspear, perfidious wetland savages, have retreated and no longer harry them. Messages from the south suggest construction crews from Myrshock are, despite less punitive weather, making poor progress…

– What is Myrshock? A

He makes her a map. -Three branches, he says, drawing the upside down and slanting Y. -New Crobuzon. Myrshock on the coast of the Meagre Sea. Cobsea in the plains. A track out from each, meeting in the swamps. Five hundred miles down from New Crobuzon, half as much again to each of the others.

Judah disguises his own fascination with the rails as indulging A

The road has not yet forked. Reports tell of brief and costly strikes. Some writers argue that the TRT gendarmerie is defunct, unable to control its workforce or subdue the little principalities it comes to. The Mayor must end the subleasing of authority, they say. It is time for New Crobuzon’s militia to police the tracks. No one thinks this will happen. The government is against it.

– The strikers complain of the weather, Judah reads. -They strike against the chill. What would they have the TRT do? Does not the whole of the workforce, the overseers, the Remade, Wrightby himself, feel the same cold?

– No, says A

Judah looks at her. She is eating a sugared plum.

She shrugs. -No, they don’t.

Judah studies. With Pe

– … what we do is an intervention, Pe

Judah thinks of the stiltspear, and of the railroad. He still breathes his stiltspear whisper when he makes his golems move. Increasingly he understands this science. It obsesses him.

They fail to pay the right officer, and the golem-wrestling hall is raided. It is not hard for the masked militia to find among the crowd shazbah and very-tea, and even, they say, dreamshit. The organisers give money where they have to, and while Pe

Golemetry is interruption. Golemetry is matter made to view itself anew, given a command that organises it, a task. How to make the field in his absence? How to prepare and make it wait?

He buys batteries, switches and wires, he buys timers, he tries to think. The journals are reporting accounting wrongs at the TRT. Someone is insinuating scandal.

It is days since Judah has seen A

She has liked New Crobuzon, has looked on it with passion and interest, but for her all its mass and history-its accreted stones and struggle-could only ever be an adjunct to the iron road. It is the rails that are A

A

The golem fights bore him. Pe

Judah knows his moment has gone, and that Pe

For some weeks Pe

In the markets full of old and stolen books he asks for volumes on golems. He spends many shekels on useless crap and some on great works with which he struggles.

What is it I’ve done? he thinks. He does not understand his own skills at all. I made a golem from gas. Can I make a golem from even less solid things? Golemetry’s an argument, an intervention, so will I intervene and make a golem in darkness or in death, in elyctricity, in sound, in friction, in ideas or hopes?

Judah takes a few commissions. For the eccentric rich who disdain the clanking of constructs, he makes beautifully realised men and women in wire and sand-filled leather. He charges a great deal: they tire him.

He walks the city at the behest of the grub, the oddity in him that will not be still. He is tugged by it; he feels it seeing through him. It’s a strong goodness in me, he thinks without arrogance, but it’s an intruder. I don’t feel it as my own. Does that make me good? Does that make me better? Does it make me wicked?

Judah thinks of A

Judah, Judah, Judah. He thinks his name. Something will happen.

Products are created or remembered from the Full Years. In the arts there is a languid flux. New Crobuzon is full of building, its docks with ships. Shops carry novel commodities. Beside the poster-kiosks booths appear like wildflowers, in a spate of marketing, die-stamped signs of a man holding his hand to his mouth and shouting.

– What are these? Judah asks and enters. There is a chair, an engine, a range of lettered and numbered buttons, a tube and earpiece. He reads instructions, puts his coin into the slot. There is a list of titles.

THE MAYOR’S NEW YEAR SPEECH.

THE PITY IT’S A DITTY

TREBUSCHAND SYMPHONETTE

And others. He summons a music-hall song, “Rather the Poorhouse,” puts his ear to the trumpet and listens quite rapt to something that has been held back snapping into place, a potential energy unlocked, the unwrapping of sound with a thudding; and then he starts as a noise emerges and it is the song, some unknown chorus girl, the nuances of her voice imprisoned behind crackling but unmistakably a voice and unquestionably singing. Judah can hear all the words.

– And if it means the poorhouse dear that’s right the poor house do you hear that’s what I’ll do to stick with you to keep you near my deary dear. Judah can hear all of them trapped.

It is wax that makes sound physical. He is absolutely fevered by this. The wax can make sound wait and recur.

A new technology, the taming of time. They are using it for the endless, endless recursion of street songs. Judah wants it for another reason. He looks at the notes he made in the swamp. He is all breathless energy, and he feels New Crobuzon ebbing from him.

How many times have I missed the moment power spoke? He thinks of those who have died because he has seen a moment coming, has known that the bounty hunters or the militia or the rails or the gas will come, and has frozen before ineluctability. I am frightened of time.

But time’s heartbeat has been stopped by these entertainers. They have pickled these pasts. His parasite goodness stirs, his saintly i

Suddenly it is easy to kick New Crobuzon off; his months there become memories effortlessly.

He writes to his few clients. He writes to Pe

There is one more technique he is eager to achieve. In Kinken he talks to khepri in the workshops, spoken questions and their handwritten answers, has them tell him what they will of their metaclockwork. He buys thaumaturgic batteries and charges them exhaustingly from his own veins.

It takes him a few tries. He sets up a tripwire by the falling-down house where the street-children who love him live. The sky is just changing when the first of them wakes and goes to steal breakfast. Her dirty feet break the filament and with a hum and snap the circuit co