Iron Council

A

– I ain’t a client, he tells her. She shrugs. He can see it is not venality that motivates her.

Spring again, and there is a strong smell of burning metal by the points. It has been slow going in the cold, but now as men shed clothes the pace improves and the railmen get closer to the graders.

They are in the great vegas that surround Cobsea. The perpetual train comes with the growing heat into a merciless flat region of alkali dust that sets in eyes and mouths like rheum, that stinks like embalming fluid. It seems to hold warmth so the crews go from winter cold and are pitched into a dry heat. The train-town is bedraggled. The herds of beef-animals develop sores. Their meat is foul. There is a constant caravan of water carts going miles to siphon off the streams and rivers they find.

The land is alive. It hollows beneath them, reveals the craw and feeders of huge dust-sucking predators. The land bucks. There is an earthstorm, disks of rock careering skyward, buffeting the train. -We’re in the badlands now. Everyone is saying it.

Research crews return from the desert of skin-soft dust, whipping their camel into spitty terror, and in their cart lies a man stiff with the muck that coats them all, no, he is a statue, no, he is covered with accretions, tumours of stone. They embed him, a man-shape whose lips are trembling.

– It came out of the ground…

– We thought it was mist…

– We thought it was smoke from a fire…

It is smokestone that has vented up and quickly set. They have to chisel him free. Flesh comes with the carapace.

Days later, the perpetual train comes to the residue of that drift. There are languid striae of smoke, utterly still. Stone in impossible spindly shapes, wafting, insinuate billows, coil and smog recoil. Harder than basalt, rock fumes.

It has drifted across the roadbed, and the biggest men take their mallets to the new formations. They grip fossilized moments of wind, and it looks as if they clamber the sides of a cloud. The smokestone comes away in tiny shards, and over the hours they clear a path just wide enough for the tracks. They split a passage through fog.

They are harried by fReemade who raid with what seems rampaging petulance. The fReemade are not the enemy! says a new spate of handwritten posters, but it is hard for the workers to hear that as they see the aftermaths of the attacks.

Judah ca

The ground kinks toward higher rocks and trees. The grading crews are nearby, slowed by the sudden gnarlings in the way; they have met tu

A tide approaches, a rill of brown. It is a forestful of insects fleeing the graders and the cutters.

Men swear and try to cover themselves. The insects buffet the crews, millions of tough bodies: their chitin cuts. They are big as cactus thumbs. Mindlessly they fight the train. They immolate themselves in the gears and beneath the wheels, and the tracks become slippery with oily carnage. Pipes vent sand for traction.

From behind the perpetual train comes a welling-up of shrieks as the insects reach the whores and few beggars who have come this far, the cattle, the economy stretched back on the rails.

Through the unhomely little forest. The graders are ensnarled with these skeletal trees. The earth has fought them and they have slowed. The graders meet the tu

Land wrinkles into a lip of stone two hundred feet high, too steep for rails. The roadbed pushes into a gaping, almost-finished tu

There are Remade everywhere on the bridge. The scaffold reaches down to the crevasse bottom. The bridgemen wave up at the newcomers above. There is a great convivial joining.

Crews have worked months in the bone-coloured trees. They are like men made of the dust. The rust-eaters and the stokers on the huge engine are pied with the dirt of travel. Clerks and scientists lean from their cabs as the train stops; the wyrmen above wheel. The train’s semiferal cats highstep.

There is a huge celebration that night, the tu

There are differences in the crews. Judah sees how the tu

Judah and his team lay tracks into the tu

There is nothing else for them to do. They clean the train, uselessly, scout the land a few miles, widen a well. But they ca

The graders can work. They can continue cutting beyond the ravine, toward Cobsea, still more than a hundred miles of hard wilderness away. But before they go, they want to be paid, and once again there is no money.

Very quickly, everyone knows there has been another clogging in the cash-pipes. The tu

What is it? It is not a slowdown or confrontation; nothing is happening except an accretion of anger, looks held too long. The tu

A tu

That night Judah goes to the hollow where the men who fuck men gather, and when he comes back Thick Shanks is waiting. -Meeting going on, he says. -Not us, them. He indicates the lights in the perpetual train’s guntower. -We got to think. They sending riders back along the line, telling Wrightby to send money now.

There is a fight the next day with sledgehammers, between two cactus-men so massive the overseers can only watch the vegetable men crush each other’s wood-fibre bones. -Something’s happening, says A

A scattered few handwritten Runagate Rampant s are left at the mouth of the hill. Each day and night another fight or some petty act of anger, a headlight of the perpetual train shattered, obscenities carved into the paint.

Daily the graders gather and refuse to cross the ravine. Their foremen find other work for them. The graders are not striking, but are refusing to do what they are supposed to. They will sweep away the detritus of the tu

And then there is a night. The length of the train and at the black of the tu

– What’s that?

Judah looks up. People are staring, heading up the rock hill. They seem pulled; they move in little stuttering steps.

– What is it? Judah says, but the man he asks only shouts and points up the hill. -Look look! he says. -Come, it’s there.

There is a noise along the ridgeback of the slope as if the stones and the very bushes are resonant, are singing an aberrant hymn. People on the incline shout and begin to scramble back again, in a river of scree. Falling men careen into their friends. Judah grips roots and keeps his feet.

The tremulous song, the sound of the wilderness anxious, is loud. There is a spider above him. No no that is not, that is not a spider that great shape that ca

– Weaver.

– Weaver.

They say it. Their voices are beyond fear, quite stripped by awe.

Weaver. The spiders that are not gods but are nearly, that are something so other, so much farther than men or xenian, than dæmon, than archon, that they are unthinkable, their power, their motives, their meanings as opaque as iron. Creatures who fight murder die and reconfigure everything for beauty, for the intricacy of the web that is the world they see, a concatenation of threads in impossible spiral symmetry.

Songs about Weavers fill Judah’s head. Nonsense-fears for children- He promised me her hand in mine, / then smothered her in all his twine, / the Weaver swine -absurdities and pantomime foolery. Looking up at this thing glowing unlight or is it light over the rock edge he knows the songs for the atoms, the infinitely tiny specks of stupidity they are.