Iron Council

When he tried to think it in words, Cutter could not make it clear. They had come-he had come-so far, at such cost, to warn the Council that it should flee: how could it possibly face the city?

But though he could not express it, Cutter felt the logic of return. He felt it swell as A

The Councillors cheered her and shouted her name, and shouted “New Crobuzon.”

Elsie and Pomeroy exulted. They had never expected this. Qurabin made a sound of pleasure, no more supportive of New Crobuzon than of the Tesh who had betrayed the monastery, and impressed by the Councillors and their welcome. Qurabin was glad to be part of whatever exertion this would be. Drogon was delighted. Judah was silent, proud and frightened.

Cutter saw Judah’s fear. You need it to be a legend, don’t you? he thought. This troubles you, this it-coming-back. You love it for wanting to, but you need it safe, the thing you made. Something we can dream of. Judah would do anything for the Iron Council, anything at all. Cutter saw that. Judah’s love for it was complete.

They took the town down, broke their mud-and-wattle, their meeting houses, turned them to dust. They gathered what crops they could. There were plenty of those among the Councillors who were outraged.

The perpetual train, even with its new rolling stock in the strange materia of the wide lands, its rough wood and mineral cars, could not contain all the Councillors. There were hundreds who would be, again, camp followers, nomads in the train’s trail. A few would not come. Some went for the hills, or insisted they would stay as farmers in the settled land, surrounded by remnants of the torn-up iron road.

“You’ll die,” Judah told them, “when they come.” And they responded with bluff and bravado. It would come to nothing, Cutter thought, when the New Crobuzon Militia appeared, its most powerful and well-armed squads, to where they thought they would find their quarry and instead met fifty aging farmers. He watched them, knowing they were dead. May they kill you quick.

Cutter did not know if A

Judah was with A

The next day they gathered: there was Cutter in the outskirt land where wild grass was crushed by the train and by the farmers. And there brawny Pomeroy swinging his weapon playfully, like a scythe, and Elsie her arm around her man’s waist, and Drogon in his brimmed hat leading the mount he had persuaded the horse-

husbanders of the Iron Council to give him, his lips moving and Cutter not sure to whom he spoke, and there the grass fluttered as Qurabin moved along secret ways revealed by his or her strange godling, and out ahead arm-in-arm walked A

Behind them the Iron Council came. They would fall into line soon, would help lay tracks, help break the stone and wind through the sarsen blocks of the lowlands, but for now they walked ahead. The ellipse of iron was unwinding, the Councillors were track-

layers again. And scouts and water dowsers, hunters and graders, but above all layers of track, who uncoiled the edge of their town and put it down again in a straight line, back along land that bore still the faint trace of their arrival.

Way to their west came predatory militia, soldiers wanting only to destroy them. The Iron Council shuddered, and went on, went east, headed for New Crobuzon, home.

That was how it had been. And then to this edge, this most literal badland.

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