Iron Council

– I will put aside money that you would earn if you were free, whole men, and there will be a place for you when this railroad is done. A retreat. In the city if they’ll have it but in these wild lands, near your road, if New Crobuzon is so damned deaf as not to hear what is needed. I will not have you worked to death. There’ll be a cabin for you, and baths, and good food, and you can see out your days there. Think I’m a liar? Think I lie to you?

– No more of this, now. The road’s stalled. Would you halt it? Men, men… You aren’t blasphemers I don’t believe, but this is an unholy thing you do though your reasons are understandable. I don’t blame you, but you’re holding back something the world deserves. Come now. An end to this.

Judah stands. He has his golem come nearer Weather Wrightby in its stuttering railway walk.

– Don’t be fools, comes Uzman’s voice from his hide. -Are you soft, you fucking soft ? You think Wrightby gives a damn? But he is cut off by other shouts. Someone is shooting. Someone is screaming.

– We can’t win this, says Judah aloud, though no one is listening. He stands on the rocks and makes his traintrack golem run.

He makes it run like a steam man, with the metal chewing sound of its gear-thighs. It stamps through an increasing bullet-rain leaving huge footprints, and it runs and leaps, throws itself, falls in a punitive wood-and-metal mass, breaking the bones of the gendarmes. Judah ca

– Fall back fall back, Shanks or Shaun or someone, some thrown-up general is calling, but fall back where? There is nowhere to go. The gendarmes scatter under the punishment of blackpowder, but their weapons are so much the stronger, they ca

But there is ruckus from around the curve. Something.

– What, what the, what is…? Judah says. The TRT men are pulling back toward their train, and now there is the sound of other fighting.

From the way they have come, from the history in the roadbed, come noises Judah has never heard before. Something is approaching in a staccato onrush, a drumming on the flattened stone. A cavalry of striders. The borinatch. Moving at a speed that awes, their legs taller than the tallest men, unhinging, stiff unguligrade motion of spasms and lurching, turning by pinpoint acrobatics, twisting on their hooves.

They lurch with inhuman grace closer, their faces masks between baboons and wood-carvings, and insectlike and haunting. They come among the gendarmes, dwarfing them and spi

They grope through dimensions, their limbs become unseen, reaching across gaps of space much too wide and grabbing gendarmes or punching them through their skin. The striders attack with weapons extant in whatever other plane it is they touch, that are visible for instants only as purple flowers or silver liquid faces, and where they strike the gendarmes are cut and crushed and diminished in complex ways and scream without sound and stumble over angles of earth that should never trouble them.

There are scores of the striders, a fighting band. Riding among them is the Remade scout on the lizard’s body, sent from the train and ordered to reach New Crobuzon.

The gendarmes are pulling back, killed and wounded in grotesque ways by the striders’ spectral maces. Judah ca

When did she have time? Judah ca

The lizard-mount scout has not been on the mission he was given; he has been on a different task, on A

– See, see? A

– I told them like you said, the lizard-man says. -I told them what TRT was doing, begged help.

– You went against the council, Uzman says to her. She holds his look and waits until the silence is discomfiting, and then in her accented Ragamoll she says, -We go.

– You went against the council.

– Saved us.

People are gathering.

– This ain’t your queendom.

A

– You went against the council.

Judah speaks. His own voice shocks him. Everyone looks at him. The legs of a golem in earth shift behind him and drum their unfinished heels in mild tantrum. -Uzman, he says. -You’re right, but listen.

– Without the council, what are we? Uzman says.

Judah nods. -Without it what are we? I know, I know. She shouldn’t have gone against it. But Uzman, you seen what they done. They ain’t going to hold back. They’ve come to end us, Uzman. What we going to do?

– We needed others, Uzman says. -We needed the city guilds. We could have had them…

– It’s too late now, Judah says. -We won’t know, will we? We won’t find out. We have to go. We can’t beat them now.

– You want us to go fReemade? Uzman says. He is loud. -I’m a fucking insurrectionist, Judah. You want me to run like a bandit? He is raging. Shooting still sounds. -You want us to take off into the damn hills like we’re afraid? That what you want? Fuck you, and you, A

– We have nothing, says Judah.

– We have everything, says A

They look at each other.

– We don’t give up what we have, says A

She points into the darkness of the tu

The strikers of the iron council join her. Even Uzman can do nothing else.

Waving many-planed hands, the striders go. -Thank you thank you, Judah shouts.

In the mountain’s stomach, the train punches through the last veil of stone. The tu

The train rolls on to the skeletal bridge that has been so quickly made to meet it. The train shudders and lists. The bridge moves. The train reels, drunkard. Judah does not breathe.

It moves firmer, continues across that so-spindly accretion of girders. The train passes high over the dreadful valley, breathing smoke above it, over the yards of swaying make-do bridge to the original structure, and the movement stops.

The train crosses. It is on the earth, on the other side of the mountain.

The rebels step over the awful trellis, children crying as their mothers hold them. With each wind the people are still, but they all of them come across, and no one falls.

They are the cactus-men, the freeanole humans, one two scarab-head khepri, camp followers and drifters, a flock of the wyrmen low in the sky staring with the enthusiasm of dogs, stranger races, renegade llorgiss and a mute hotchi, and hundreds and hundreds of the Remade, in every shape of flesh. They are firemen, engineers and brakemen, those who were clerks, the few overseers who changed sides early enough, the hunters, bridge-builders, the scouts and scientists who will not leave their laboratory, the prostitutes, tu

Their wealth and history is embedded in the train. They are a town moving. It is their moment in iron and grease. They control it. Iron council. The motion of the council begins.

It is the same motion that has brought them so far. It is exactly the same. The carts full of rails and ties unload and the crews drop them in position and they are spaced and the rails are taken out and hauled and dropped and hammered with careful rhythm, one two three, down. Ahead race the grading crews; but this long flat land has only a few extrusions that are cleared easily, and they do not sweep away all the bric-a-brac of stones and nature that they would have done before.

It is just the same motion, and it is utterly new. The urgency is drunken. The pace faster by orders of magnitude. The ties are thrown down much farther apart, only just enough to hold the train. These rails will not last. They are not meant to. The roadbed they are building is only a sketch, a ghost in the land. The train creeps like a child.

As the rails come clear, ground clean by the weight of the train, the men and women take them up again. They are pulled by mules past the storage and workshop cars where hundreds more are stacked, past the railroad and the train itself, to the front, into the glare of the engine’s lamp eyes. And there they are unloaded. And the track-layers lay them down again.

Miles of track, reused, reused, it is the train’s future and its present, and it emerges a fraction more scarred as history and is hauled up again and becomes another future. The train carries its track with it, picking it up and laying it down: a sliver, a moment of railroad. No longer a line split through time, but contingent and fleeting, recurring beneath the train, leaving only its footprint.

They move at speeds that eclipse anything they have achieved. A mile a day has been their benchmark, and this is many times that. Now the huge Remade woman who was freakish and kept from the tracks before is welcomed with her one-blow hammering. The tracks lay down, come up, lay down, come up. They protrude hundreds of yards before and behind the train.