Iron Council

Part Five. RETREAD

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

“Here. This is it, here. The edge of it. The edge of the cacotopic stain.”

Long before that the arc-flight of buzzards was disrupted. They scattered. The coy unfolding walk of a jaguar faltered and the cat erupted, was gone. Dust and black smoke sent animals away. Hundreds of years changed at the arrival of that crude loudness.

Through an opening-up of earth, like a bacillus, some little organic thread sullying blood, infecting landscape, came the Iron Council. A steaming and sniffing metal animal god. As once they did years before, figures before it laid down rails, and others cleared its tracks, and others recycled them, took the left-behind path and hauled it in the path of the sounding engine.

Wherever it went it was intruder. It was never part of the land. It was an incursion of history in stubby hillside woodland and the thicker tree-pelt of real forest, valleys between mountains, canyon-plains horned randomly with monadnocks. It intruded in unca

An apparition. A town of men and women hacked at the ground, rendered it just flat enough to lay tracks. They were invaders.

Like their ancestors the first Councillors, some of whom were their own younger selves, they were muscled, weathered, expert. Remade, whole, cactus, alien other, a consummate industry, the rail-carriers with their tongs, the dropping of sleepers, hammer-blows tight enough to dance to.

They wore skins; they wore smocks and trousers made from sacks resewn. They wore jewels made of railway metal, and sang mongrel songs, bastards of decades-old construction chanties, and new lays telling their own story.

West we came to find a place to

Rest to go without a trace and

Live our lives Remade and free to

Give ourselves our liberty

In the centre of the swarm, hundreds of figures attending to its complex fussy needs, protected by guards, lookouts at the hills and treetops and in the air, came the cause of it all, the train. Marked by time. It was altered. The train had gone feral.

The abattoirs, the bunks, the guntower, the library, the mess hall, the work-cabs, all the old carriages were there, but changed. They were crenellated, baroque and topped with dovecots. Rope bridges joined new towers on different carriages and sagged and went tight at the slight curving of the Iron Council’s path. Siege engines were bolted to the roofs. New windows were cut into the carriages’ sides. Some were thickened with ivy and waxy vines, spilling from them as if they were old churches, winding the length of the guntower. Two of the flatbeds were filled with kitchen gardens full of herbs. Two others were also earth-filled, but only grass grew on them, between gravestones. A little pack of half-tame motion demons bit playfully at the Council’s wheels.

There were new carriages, one built all of water-smoothed driftwood, caulked with resin, tottering on spare, newly smelted or reclaimed wheels. Cars for alien Councillors, mobile pools for water-dwellers. The train was long, pushed and pulled by its engines. Two in the back, two at the front, their smokestacks all amended with metal flanges, painted and stained in crushed-earth colours to mimic flames. And at the very front of the train the largest, behind its flaring guard-skirt, was so amended and reshaped with crude art that it looked to have distended over the years, almost buckled with gigantism.

Its headlamps were eyes now, predictably, bristling with thick wire lashes, its cowcatcher a jawful of protruding teeth. The huge tusks of wilderness animals were strapped and bolted to them. The front nub of its chimney wore a huge welded nose, the smokestack ajut from it in nonsense anatomy. Sharpened girders gave it horns. And behind that enormous unwieldy face the engine was crowded with trophies and totems. The skulls and chitin headcases of a menagerie glared dead ferocity from its flanks: toothy and agape, flat, eyeless, horned, lamprey-mouthed with cilia-teeth, bone-ridged, shockingly human, intricate. Where they had them the trophies’ skins were ta

They cut their way on the echo of another path. Sometimes it was gone from view, or geography had twisted in the decades. They might spend hours splitting rocks by the side of hill-shadowed lakes to reach a fissure and, hacking through bramble and the outskirts of bosk, part crabgrass and uncover the ghost of a roadbed, the root-claimed ridge on which years ago they had come the other way. They found caches of rails, savaged by years, and sleepers, some still laid, covered in greased tarpaulin that had stained the earth. They placed their tracks to meet the ends waiting for them.

We left these, the oldsters who had been there at the laying said. I remember now. To make it easier. You never know, we said, when we might have to come back. The left-behind rails sped them. Gifts from their young selves, wrapped in oilcloth in rock-toothed country.

Judah Low taught Cutter to lay tracks.

They had come quietly, the draggled party, into the grasses, when first they had come. They had reached their destination stu

Under uncoiling clouds in a grassland were miles of garden. Dense crops abutting each other, bounded by an iron ellipsis of tracks. Beyond the rails other fields were scattered, dissipating and merging with wild flora.

The guides led them there, the grass unsealing and sealing again. They watched all the figures working at their husbandry. A farmland, out here where there was nothing. Most of the party was mute. Judah smiled without ceasing, and muttered Long live. Men and women came along the paths, by sod huts that fringed the railroad, all the topography of normality, an everyday farmstead village, passed through by a train.

Judah watched the locals, and when they came close enough he would laugh and shout Long live, and they would nod in response.

“Hello, hello, hello,” Judah said as a very young child neared, its father half-watching from where he sharpened a scythe. Judah squatted. “Hello, hello, little comrade, little sister, little chaver,” he said. He made a benediction with his hand. “What’s it like, hey?”

And then he stepped back and simply sounded in happiness. The noise he made had been without syllables or shape, was nude delight, as he heard metal wincing and saw clouds of soot spoor, and as the train, the Iron Council, came through the grass. As the towering and shaking iron wood rope and found-sculpture wheeled town rolled out of the grasses and came at them.

They dropped what they carried. “Iron Council.” “Iron Council.” Each of them said it as the tusked train came.

It came, repeating its few-miles, as it had for so long, neither sedentary nor nomadic, describing its home. It was stopping.

“I’m Judah Low,” he shouted. He went toward it as if it were drawing in to a station. “I’m Judah Low.” Someone had stepped from the engine cab, and Cutter had heard a shout, a greeting whose words he could not pick apart but that had made Judah run and scream and scream a name. “A

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

There had been marshland. Camouflaged fens where what seemed earth and crabgrass became suddenly only a layer of plant on thick water. The Iron Councillors laid down rock fragments, pontoons, sunk pillars quickly cut from woods. They saw copses of stumps weathered by more than two decades and interspersed with neonate trees, where they had taken timber on their way out. The Iron Council moved slowly on rails just above or just below the water. The train became a sedate creature of the shallows. Below it, around it, came noises of bolotnyi and bog-things.

Pomeroy laid tracks. Elsie went with the foragers. Qurabin came at night to the travellers and told them things she or he had found in the hills and swamps. Secret things. In the monk’s slow surrender to the cost of revelations, Cutter sensed a sadness, a coward’s eagerness to die. Qurabin had lost everything and was dissolving into the world with pointless worship.

Drogon the whispersmith was a guard. One of the gunmen who watched the Council in its gushing steaming progress. Cutter was with Judah-he would not let him go. They put down tracks together.

Judah was a fairy tale. The children would come to watch him, and not only them but men and women who had not been born when the Iron Council crossed the world. He was kind. He would make golems for them, which delighted them. They had all heard of his golems. They sang to him once, around a fire, as vaguely animal trees tried to shy from the sound.

They sang Judah a story of Judah. They sang in chanty counterpoint about when he fixed the soldiers with a mud monster and saved the Iron Council, and then how he went into the desert and made an army, and then how he went to the under-hill court of the king of the trow and made a woman out of the princess’ bedsheet and how the sheet and trow had swapped places and how Judah Low had eloped with the troglodyte princess and gone across the sea.

At night Cutter pressed himself to Judah and the older man would sometimes respond, with his beneficent restraint. Cutter would push into Judah or open to him. On the nights they were not together, Judah was with A

“I got your message,” Judah had said, the first night, when they arrived. “Your cylinder. Rahul’s voice. About Uzman. Long live.”

“Long live.”

Uzman died suddenly, she told him, a swift shutdown, of his organic or pipework tubes they never knew.

“You still have the voxiterator?”

“How many messages you got from us?”

“Four.”

“We sent nine. Give them to someone going to the coast to trade, to give to a ship, that says it’s going south, that might go through the straits, that might get past Tesh, that might get to Myrshock, and then to New Crobuzon. I wonder which ones you got.”

“I have them with me. You can tell me what I missed.”