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CHAPTER NINETEEN
Civilisations had been in the tablelands through which they passed, in this strange puna. The Iron Council, tracking back in head-on collision with its own history, passed through ruins.
Something that had perhaps once been a temple, a town of temples. In the shadow of a cratered ziggurat they laid their tracks, and the vent of their engines rose over the vines. They drove home spikes and split corroded marble gods in the rootmass. The Iron Council made the dead home shiver with hammer-blows. It sooted the bas-reliefs of battles in heaven. The Iron Council cut through the ivy-clotted city, towers gone to moulder.
“I know a man from a long time gone,” Judah had said to the committee. “We used to be partners. He was a government man for a time, works for some big concern now, but still has his ears open. He and me have history, and sometimes he needs golems for his work. And when he comes to me for that, we talk.”
Judah had told Cutter of these strange conversations, Pe
The committee listened. There were the middle-aged, and Remades who remembered New Crobuzon, women who had once been the camp’s whores: but more than half the delegates were young, had been children or unborn when the Council was made. They watched Judah speak.
“There are always rumours. I asked him, like I know how to do, so he thinks he’s offering it to me. He told me what was happening. You know there’s war against Tesh.” They did not know the details, but so big a war as this made Bas-Lag shudder, and stories reached the Iron Council by bush-adventurers.
“There’s slaughter in the Firewater Straits: they call it the Sanguine Straits now. They broke the Witchocracy’s thalassomach hex, and the navy’s pushing ships through, all the way around the coast. Thousands of miles. But another expedition set off, weeks back. Below the warships. Ictineos. Maybe grindylow-led, I don’t know. But they’re coming. It’d take a long time, but they must be nearly here. Might have made landfall.
“They never forgot you in the city, you know. They never forgot Iron Council. Long live. People whisper the words. Your name’s on walls. Parliament never forgave you, never forgot what you done. And now they know where you are.”
He had waited for their alarm to subside.
“You couldn’t stay hid forever. You knew it. I don’t know how they know. Godspit, it’s been more’n twenty years, it could be anything. A wanderer tells another tells another tells another: it could have been one of your own, finding their way back to New Crobuzon, caught and interrogated. It could be a spy.” He spoke over the noise that spurred. “Far-seeing on a new scale. I don’t know. Point is they know where you are. They found you. I don’t even know how long they’ve known. But they’d never get a troop across the cacotopic stain, or through the Galaggi Veldt and forests and whatever- we had Qurabin.” But we didn’t at first, Judah, Cutter thought. What were you pla
“They’re coming all the way round, by sea. They’re trying to get past Tesh, up past Maru’ahm, and they’ll land on the edge of the grasslands. They’ll come at you not from the east but the west. They could never do that till now.
“Sisters, Councillors, comrades. You’re about to be attacked. And there’ll be no quarter. They’re coming to destroy you. They can’t allow you to continue. You got away. And sisters… now more than ever they need to finish it.”
It was hard for Judah to make the Councillors understand about the chaos in New Crobuzon. The older ones remembered their own strikes and the great shucking off in which they culminated, but New Crobuzon itself was an old old memory and thousands of miles away. Judah tried to make the troubles live to them. “There is something happening,” he said.
“They have to bring you back in pieces. So they can say to the citizens, See what we done. See what we do to them as tries to rise. See what’s been done to your Council.
“They’re coming to destroy you. It’s time to move, to relay the tracks. You have to go. You could go north-I don’t know. Take it up to the tundra. An ice-train with the bear-riders. Up to the Cold Claws. I don’t know. Hide again. But you have to go. Because they’ve found you, they’re coming for you, and they won’t stop till you’re gone.”
“Yeah, they could hide,” Drogon said in Cutter’s ear, sudden and insistent. “Or there’s another possibility. They could come back. Tell them they have to come back. Tell them.”
He did not whisper it as an instruction, but he spoke so urgently, with such sudden fervour, that Cutter obeyed him.
For days the Council was stu
“We should stay. We can take whatever comes,” the younger Councillors declared, and their parents, the Remade, strove to tell their children what New Crobuzon was.
“This ain’t a band of striders,” they said. “This ain’t horse-thieves. This is a different thing. Listen to Low.”
“Yeah, but we’ve techniques now, that, no disrespect to Mr. Low, he don’t know about. Moss-magic, cirriomancy-does he know about them?” Thaumaturgy learnt from arcane natives. Their parents shook their heads.
“This is New Crobuzon. Forget that. It ain’t like that.”
Judah unwrapped the braced mirror that Cutter had brought him. “There’s only one,” he said. “The other’s broken and without it this isn’t a weapon. But even if we had another, it wouldn’t be enough. You have to go.”
They had sent the cleverest of the wyrmen to watch the coast hundreds of miles off. A week passed. “Found nothing,” the first said when it came back, and Judah had grown angry. “They’re coming,” he said.
He refused to advise anything specific. Drogon, though, had become maniacal in his desire for the Council to return. He told the Councillors again and again that it was their duty to return. It was a strange fervour.
Cutter went to dances. The raucousness of them calmed him, the drunk young men and women kicking to peasant waltzes. He swapped partners and drank and ate their drugged fruit. He went with a tough young man he could grab and handfuck and even kiss so long as it was some kind of boys’ play, not sex but wrestling or somesuch. Afterward, wiping his hand, he found the man talkative about what Iron Council should do.
“Everyone knows we’ll leave,” he said. “What, we going to ignore Judah Low? And some say go up and some say down, and no one’s sure which way we’ll head, but me and more and more others, we’ve another plan. We been thinking. We say don’t go north or south, we say go east. Back along the tracks we left. We say it’s time to go home. Back to New Crobuzon.”
It was not Drogon’s doing, Cutter realised. It was a native desire.
“I think something is coming,” Qurabin said, a disembodied voice.
Drogon said, “They know it’s coming. And more and more of them want to head for New Crobuzon.”
“No,” Judah said. Cutter saw many things in him: a pride, a fear and anger, exasperation, confusion. “No, they’re insane. They’ll die. If they can’t face one New Crobuzon battalion, how’ll they face the city? It don’t make any sense to run from the militia to the militia. They can’t come back.”
“That ain’t what they’re banking on. You fired them up, didn’t you? With all your talk about what’s happening. They think they might tip the balance, Judah. And I think they might be right. They want to return to crowds, throwing petals at the rails. They want to come home to a new city.”
“No,” said Judah, but Cutter saw excitement in Pomeroy, in Elsie. He felt something of it through his own sardonics and reserve.
There was a clamour to go back. “It’s a matter of speed,” one old Remade woman said. “When we come here we laid down spare iron, so as if we needed to get away, they were waiting. Well, we’ve people coming for us now, and we’ve a lot of miles between us and safety, and we need speed. Them tracks is waiting. A mile here, two there. Be idiocy not to use them.” She pretended pragmatism.
Judah argued, but he was proud, Cutter saw, of his Council’s desire to return, to be something in this New Crobuzon moment. He wanted to dissuade them out of fear, but he wanted not to-Cutter saw this-for a sense of history.
“You don’t know,” he said, and he spoke gently. “You don’t know what it’ll be, what’ll be happening there. We need you to survive. It’s more important than anything. I’ve been your damn bard, and I need you to survive.”
“This ain’t-forgive me, Mr. Low, with all respect-this ain’t about what you need but what we need. We can’t take the bastards on their way, so if we’re to run, let’s make our ru
A
I am not New Crobuzon born, she told them, and expounded her life in brute oratory. “I never knew I could have a country: Iron Council is my country, and what do I care about New Crobuzon? But Iron Council is an ungrateful child, and I ever loved ungrateful children. New Crobuzon deserves no gratitude-I been there and I know-and we are the child that freed ourselves. No other did. And all the other children are ungrateful now, and we can help them.”
To Cutter it was as if Judah’s party had liberated the Iron Council, had uncoupled it from some restraint, that it was taken by a tendency long immanent. Whatever reasons they gave, the Councillors arguing to go back seemed to voice something embedded, that they had wanted a long time. They were avid at the insurgency Judah described.