Iron Council

A strange angst because there is such calm here now and it ca

The free men want to treat Shaun and Thick Shanks as leaders of a Remade rabble, but A

– Take your boys back in. What you think they’re doing in there? the free workers’ speaker says. He points at the tower. -Getting ready is what. To take you. Now, we made our point. If you go back now, they’ll pay us up, and there’ll be no, no penalties…

He speaks to Shaun, but it is Uzman answers.

– You’ll get your money, and you’re telling us to give this back? The train?

He laughs, and the craziness of what the free men are asking is very evident. They want these Remade to unfree themselves. Uzman laughs. -We ain’t decided yet what we do here, he says. -But we decide.

There are shouted arguments like street meetings, out of the guntower’s lines, between Remade with Remade, layers, rust-eaters together, the tu

– We can’t just wait, says Thick Shanks. -People are ru

– Give in what ? A

They raise their voices. The crowd turns to them, slowly.

– We make demands, Thick Shanks says. -They’ll bring reinforcements. We have to have demands ready.

Shaun says, -Like what? You want them to free the fucking Remade? Ain’t going to happen. Recognise the new guilds? What is it we want?

– We have to link it up, Thick Shanks says. -We send our own riders back to New Crobuzon, talk to the guilds there, make joint demands. If we can get them to back us-

– You’re dreaming. You think they’ll do that? For us?

– We have to take control of this. This is ours, now, says Uzman.

Someone jeers and makes a noise about the godsdamned Remade. A

– Shut up, she says to the heckler. -You curse the Remade, as if it make you better. Why we here? You fought. You-she gestures at the tu

A

– These Remade strike for us, so you won’t be broken. You strike against us and we against you, but these Remade are on both our damn sides. You know it. You fought for them. You scorn them now ? They won you your damn strike, and ours too, even though we strike against each other. She kisses Uzman again. Among the prostitutes, some are aghast and others are cheering. -I tell you, A

The prostitutes closest to A

– We have to link up, shouts Thick Shanks, but no one is listening to him. They are listening to his friend A

It is deep night but very few are sleeping. Judah’s golem is taller than he, held together with oil and dirty water. The old man become the Weaver’s prophet stands behind A

A gendarme comes to them from the direction of the train. He waves a truce flag. -They want to talk, says a woman on chitin wheels.

– Wait, he shouts as he walks. -We want to end this. No recrimination. We’ll talk to the TRT, get the money through. Everyone wins. You, Remade, we can talk. End your peonage early, maybe. We can talk about everything. Everything’s open.

A

Shanks is shouting to A

Uzman and Shanks are shouting at her but she is walking on into the no-man’s-land by the train. Only Judah’s golem goes with her. The tower’s guns swivel toward her. Inexpertly she brings up the flintlock. She stands with the oily dirt man, the two of them alone.

– No deal with you bastards, she shouts, and pulls the trigger, though bullets ca

Everyone drops but A

– No no no, the captain is shouting. -I didn’t-but the Remade will not wait now. They roar. Someone pulls A

There is a little war. -What are you doing ? Shanks screams at A

Remade attack the tower with guns, crude bombards and their swing-hammer limbs. They fire stone slabs and track-ends that make the tower ring. A man beside Judah, whose chin wears a fringe of crabs’ pincers, dies suddenly from gendarme shot. Judah has his golem move slowly around the belfry, disaggregating in bullet-slugs of its earth flesh.

He does not hear the shot from the heavy gun above. An overturned curricle is at one moment a cart with men and women leaning between its spokes and then is an eruption, a fire expansion of burnt knife-edged wood and blood uncoiling above a cavity bleeding smoke. Judah blinks. He sees detritus. He sees that the dark thing acrawl toward him leaving a mollusc trail is a woman, her skin blacked and redded, ink craquelure on meat. He wonders that she does not make a sound as her hair burns then knows he ca

It turns. The rebel Remade, prostitutes, and those of the free who are with them run to escape its range.

Judah stands. Slow. Steps up, and makes his golem move. The gun motors with unoiled imprecision. The golem presses its filthy self against the freightcar. It reaches up, echoing and exaggerating Judah’s little motions, pulls itself up, leaving a smear of its corpus.

The towertop gun fires again. It stabs oily smoke, and the railroad cut and the people on it, yards away, bloom. The golem ascends the tower, stamping on buttresses, on gutters. It uses the very guns that gendarmes angle down at it as handles and steps. It disregards itself, as no sane or sentient thing could, sheds itself in scabs and diminishes as it rises, but it is near the top now, weakened with sticks and railway spikes protruding from its gravel-grease skin, its very legs falling from it to land formless as excrement. The gun swivels and Judah has the golem probe its arm deep into the barrel.

It reaches to its shoulder. The gun is blocked by hex-bound golem dirt. It fires and there is a strange motion, a shuddering backward. The barrel splays in strips, the golem is a rain of filth. Ignited air and smoke fill out, the tower rocks, its tip glows and is punched brutally open, its roof unclenches into metal fingers.

Rank billows plume in a great cough, and a dead man falls from the shatter. The corpse of the gun sways. Judah is spattered with his golem’s remnants. The rebels are cheering. He ca

The renegades take the train. The gendarmes throw out their guns and come out bloody, eyes seared and dripping.

– No, no, no, Uzman shouts. He is eating coal, and his biceps are swelling. With Shanks and with A

– What now? Everywhere Judah goes he hears it.

It is the Remades’ train. They make flags for their new sudden country and wave them from the burst guntower. No one sleeps that night. The tu

– Send word back for gods’ sake, Thick Shanks says. -We have to make links, he says, and Uzman nods. Around them are other leaders of the sudden mutiny. They make their points in untrained passionate language. They decide things.

A

They choose messengers. Riders. A Remade sutured to steam-and-piston legs like spread-out fingers that run with tremendous shuddering up slopes of rock, his man-torso aflail like an unwilling passenger. Another, a muscled man made a strange six-limbed thing: he is joined below his abdomen to the neck of a great bipedal lizard, one of those the badland nomads half-tame to ride. He stands high on two back-bent legs before a stiff tail, clawed forearms just below his human skin. He has been a scout for months, ridden by a gendarme with a gun to his back.