Iron Council

Judah sat on the traintop and watched this suddenly unalien landscape. “It ain’t safe,” he told Cutter. “Can’t say it’s safe at all.” He spent much time alone, listened to his voxiterator.

“Judah, Cutter,” Elsie said, “we should go back to the city.”

She was silent in these days, with Pomeroy’s death. She had found a calm that let her live in her loneliness. “We don’t know what’s happening there; we don’t know what state they’re in. We need to get them word that we’re coming. We could sway things. We could change it.”

It was a long way still, and there were many things that stood to stop them.

“She’s right.” Drogon spoke to each of them. “We need to know.”

“It ain’t no matter, I don’t think,” Judah said. “We’ll go, nearer the time. We’ll go and get a welcome ready, prepare for them.”

“But we don’t know what it’ll be there…”

“No. But it won’t make a difference.”

“What are you talking about, Judah?”

“It won’t make a difference.”

“Well if he ain’t going, no matter. I’ll go alone,” Drogon said. “I’m going back to the city, believe it.”

“They’ll find us, you know,” Elsie said. “Even if we veer north, Cobsea’ll likely hear of us.”

“As if the Council can’t deal with fucking Cobsea men,” Cutter said, but she interrupted.

“And if Cobsea finds us, it won’t be long before New Crobuzon does. And then we’ll have to face them again. Them as follows us, and those that’ll face us too.”

One of the carriages of the perpetual train was changing. They thought they had got through the fringe of Torque without being marked too hard, that all they had to show was the sanatorium full of the unca

There were three people in the boxcar when its Torque sarcoma began. The train was juddering through a high land of alpestrine plants and stoneforms jawing the air. One morning while snow as fine as dust eddied and the hammerers had to warm their fingers with each strike, the door of the carriage would not open. The Councillors within could only shout through cracks in the wood.

They took an axe to it but it rebounded without scuffing paint or wood, and the Councillors knew that this was the cacotopic stain’s last fingers. But by then the voices of those within had dulled with lassitude, a surrendering up.

Through the night they became more and more languid. By the next day the car was changing its shape, was bulbous and distending, the wood straining, and the people within made contented cetacean sounds. The walls grew translucent and shapes could be seen, eddying as if in water. The planks and nails and wood-fibre opalesced then went transparent as the boxcar sagged, fat over the wheels, and the councillors inside grew more placid, moved oozily within air become thick. The debris from the store-cupboards lost their shapes and spun as impurities.

The carriage became a vast membranous cell, three nuclei still vaguely shaped like men and women afloat in cytoplasm. They watched and waved stubby arm-flagella at their comrades. Some Councillors wanted to decouple the grotesquerie, let it roll away and thrive or denature according to its new biology, but others said they’re our sisters in there and would not let them. The long train continued with the corpulent amoebic thing rippling with the movement of passage, its i

“What in Jabber’s name is it?” Cutter asked Qurabin.

“Not in Jabber’s name anything. I don’t know. There are things I don’t want to trade myself for. And even if I did, there are secrets that have no meaning, questions without answers. It is what it is.”

A fortnight after they had left the cacotopic zone, they met their first eastlanders for twenty years. A little group of nomads emerging from the hills. A fReemade gang, twenty or thirty strong. They were a wild mix, including a rare vodyanoi-Remade among the men and women reshaped for industry or display.

They came with wary courtesy to the train. “We met your scouts,” their leader said. She was amended with organic whips. She stared and stared, and it took Cutter a long time to realise that what he saw in her eyes was awe. “They said you was coming.”

The Remade of the Council looked at her and her brigands. “It’s all change,” the fReemade said that night at a meagre feast. “Something’s going on in the city. It’s under some siege. Tesh, I think. And something else, going on inside.” But they were too far, had been too many years from the town that made them, to know details. New Crobuzon was almost the legend to them that it was to the Iron Councillors.

They did not go with the Council: they wished them their friendship and went on to their rootless robbing life in the hills, but the next fReemade the Council came to did join. They came to show respect, to worship (Cutter could see it) the self-made Remade town, and stayed as citizens, Councillors themselves. When the Iron Council came to the northern shores of the lake that would shield them from Cobsea, they were met by the first fReemade to have sought them out deliberately.

Word must be passing along the strange byways of the continent, the paths between communities and itinerants. Cutter imagined it an infection. Threads of rumour, a fibroma knotting Rohagi together. Iron Council is coming! Iron Council is back!

The Council was fracturing. Their momentum was such that they could not have turned away. The closer they came to the metropolis, the more anxious, hesitant the older Councillors were. “We know what it’s like,” they’d say. “We know what it is there.” And the more certain, messianic, their children became. Those who had never seen the city were eager to visit on it something: what was it, a retribution? An anger? Justice, it might have been.

They would lead the track-laying, young men who might not have the enhanced strength of their parents but who swung their hammers with energy and hunger. The Remade put down tracks with them, but the older Councillors were the followers now.

A

It was so fast, suddenly: they carved on, scouts warning of this small gorge, that stream. Work-crews built hybrid forms of New Crobuzon traditions and oddities from the west-trellis bridges anchored with thick greenery, supports not of stone but of solid colour, that could only be crossed when light shone on them.

“There’s war!” a fReemade told them. “Tesh says it’s stopped its attacks, and then it hasn’t. They say there’s two envoys from New Crobuzon, asking different terms. New Crobuzon don’t speak with one voice no more.”

If the fReemade out here know we’re coming, Cutter thought, there’s no way them in New Crobuzon don’t. Word gets out. When will we face them?

Every few days Judah would spasm as the militia following them triggered his traps. With each, a few more of the soldiers might be taken, but a few days later another of the traps would go and prove they were coming. Judah tracked their progress in his own moments of weakness.

“They’re there,” he said finally. “I recognise that one. They’re definitely in the cacotopos. I can’t believe they followed us there. They must be desperate to get us.” What would a golem be, made of Torqued materia? With ablife cha

The stretched-out crew of graders and track-layers went north and east, and though they took their rails and crossties with them they left a land permanently tainted by their passage: a litter of metal parts, scars of railroad. The sky became colder, and through the darkness of the air massif became visible, leagues north. Dark drizzle came.

Here, perhaps three hundred miles west of the stub of the New Crobuzon railway, they were met by refugees. Not fReemade but recent citizens, come in a huddled rainwet congress out of the mist to run the last mile toward the growling engine, abasing before it like pilgrims. It was they who told A

“Oh my good gods,” said Elsie. “We did it. It’s happened. It’s happened. Oh my gods.” She was rapt. Judah’s face was open.

“It rose in Dog Fe

“That ain’t the case,” another said. “We knew you was coming-the Council. We had to get ready for you, some said.”

They were terribly cowed before the Iron Council. These runaways were speaking to the figures they had seen so many times, for years, in the famous heliotype. They had to be cajoled into talking.

“So there’s no wages: people are hungry. There’s the war, and ex-militia telling what it’s really like, and there are Tesh attacks. We feel like we ain’t safe at all and the city ain’t keeping us… And we hear that someone’s gone to find the Iron Council.” Judah’s face moved to hear it.

“There are Tesh attacks?” Cutter said. The man nodded.

“Yes. Manifestations. And you know, the government’s saying it’s going to sort out the Tesh, going to end the war, but it’s chaos, and no one knows if they’re doing what they say. There’s another demonstration to Parliament to demand protection, and there’s them in the crowd yelling for more than that, giving out their leaflets. Caucus people, I think. But out come the men-o’-war, and the shu

“And someone starts saying there’s a handlinger at the front. And people started fighting.

“I wasn’t there-I heard about it, is all. There was dead all over the streets. And when people got the militia on the run… All over the city come up barricades. Time for us to do what we needed, on our own. We didn’t need the militia. Keep them out.

“It was after that we heard the Mayor was dead.”

Delegates from all the districts had gathered in a collective, called and recalled in excitement and panic as the downtowners realised there was no suffrage lottery, that each of them had direct power. After some days the anti-Parliament had curtailed that rude democracy; but only, they swore, because they were in a double war. Most in the Collective were eager to negotiate with Tesh, not caring who controlled what in the seas south.