Iron Council

Part Eight. THE REMAKING

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

The Battle of Cockscomb Bridge started early. A sun that looked watered-down lit amassing troops on either side of the river. Cockscomb, a thousand years old and built up with houses, joined Riverskin on the south of the Tar to Petty Coil north. The Collective fought very hard for Cockscomb Bridge. After the first astonishing days, when for a brief moment most of the south of New Crobuzon had been at least officially in Collective control, their zone had been eroded. Now, weeks later, Cockscomb Bridge was the westernmost point controlled by the Collective’s Dog Fe

Lookouts from the Flyside Militia Tower, long occupied by the insurgents, verified the movements of militia units before dawn, and the insurrectionist tacticians mobilised forces from several boroughs. The militia came from The Crow, through Spit Hearth where those renegade hierophants who had not left or gone into hiding said prayers for one or other or both sides, and on to the déclassé collapse of Petty Coil. There in the decaying baroque of Misdirect Square, looked on by architecture once sumptuous now a little absurd with its blistered paint and falling-down facades, the militia fa

Across the water the Collective’s troops came, battalions named for their areas. “Wynion Way, to me.” “Silverback Street, left flank.” Each corps identified by a scrap of coloured cloth, a sash, green for Wynion, grey for Silverback. Each officer wore a bandana in their colour, though their men and women would recognise them, having voted them in. They were mixed platoons, of all races. And Remade.

Rumours about militia tactics abounded. “There’ll be men-o’-war.” “There’ll be handlingers.” “There’ll be drakows.” “They’ve done a deal with Tesh-there’ll be haints on the bridge.” Heading each Collective unit were ex-militia, who had trained their new comrades as quick and thorough as they could. Where populist enthusiasm had resulted in someone utterly callow, untrained or useless voted in as officer, and where misplaced loyalty let them retain their position, some ex-soldier was quietly installed as advisor, to whisper tactics.

Dirigibles gathered like carrion fish at the edges of Parliament airspace, overlooking the Collective, beyond the reach of explosive harpoons, of grenades or squads of Collectivist wyrmen. The lookouts on the south watched carefully for signs that the aerostats would do a bombing run.

The standoff continued. There was anxiety among the Dog Fe

“Howl Barrow’ll fall today.” The isolation of the three sections from each other had crippled them. After the first excitement-

frenetic weeks, the militia had cut the street-corridors linking Flyside to Howl Barrow, had taken Kinken, separating Howl Barrow from Skulkford and the Smog Bend chapter. There had been some attempts at air-corridors, but the Collective’s dirigibles could not defeat or bypass those of Parliament. The three rebellious areas were separated, and messages passed between them by desperate and unreliable means.

“Howl Barrow’s gone.” It was the smallest of the chapters, one without industry, without factories or armouries. Howl Barrow was the revolt of the bohemians, and while their fervour was real, they had little beyond enthusiasm and some weakling thaumaturgy to resist the militia. At one time Dog Fe

Before noon one of those who had refused to leave Cockscomb Bridge emerged from his cellar waving a white flag, and was shot by the militia. There were screams just audible from other houses. “We have to get them out,” Collectivists muttered. These citizens had been in their care.

Perhaps the militia were trying to draw the Collective onto the bridge. Perhaps those who had idiotically stayed behind had ceded their right to protection. Still, the officers tried to plan rescues.

A messenger came with orders from the tactics council. The leader of Wynion Way was a fierce young woman who, like other officers, carried a shield on which was nailed the torn-off streetsign for which her troop was named. She moved her men and women toward the bridge with their aging ca

So many debates over the pure-race squads! When the gangs of khepri guard sisters had come and said they would fight for the Collective, when the cactus squads had offered themselves as heavy infantry, some of the officers argued hard against it. “We’re Collectivists!” they had said. “Not cactus or human or Remade or vodyanoi or whatever! We stand and fight together.” And it was an impressive, even moving position, but it did not always make sense. “Would the chaver,” a vodyanoi delegate had, to laughter, asked one of the most strident human ultraequalitarian anarchs, “like to join me tonight as we trawl the riverbed for militia bombs?”

And if the vodyanoi had to be given the freedom to operate together (though each corps, the equalitarianists insisted, contained one symbolic and powerless officer from another race, as a comradely reminder), was it not absurd to deny that to others? Wouldn’t a crew of khepri trained in stingboxes be less likely to inadvertently hurt their own?

In the case of cactacae it became expedient: squads of the very strong were needed. Only the most augmented Remade could join them, with their agreement. The Glasshouse Gu

There was little movement on the militia side. Though they fired, burst holes in the stone, shearing off faces of houses to display subsiding rooms, the militia were waiting for something. The Collective began to advance, emboldened, and laid down suppressing counterattack while their scouts (hotchi, wyrmen, acrobatic humans) went rooftop or airborne to watch what was coming. Then the militia ranks parted and there were three men adangle, clots of handflesh clamped to their throats. Handlingers.

There was no washing on Cockscomb Bridge, but there were still lines drooped over the street studded with pegs like wizened fruit, and they shuddered as the shelling continued. At the sight of the flying men the line of Collectivists almost broke.

Parliament’s handlingers were dressed in suits and bowlers, their trousers a shade too short. A strange scare tactic. Were these the bodies of condemned New Quillers? Could they be volunteers, about whom there were rumours? Men and women whose loyalty to New Crobuzon’s government was so absolute they sacrificed themselves to be vessels for the handlingers? A holy rightist suicide. Probably these were just the executed dressed in costumes to cause foreboding.

Seeing them loom, thaumaturgicked and fire-spitting, stronger than cactacae, they seemed supra-Quillers, nightmares of reaction. The costumes raised memories of the Night of the Kinken Shards, when the New Quill Party had overrun the khepri ghetto in a storm of murder, shattering spit-sculptures in the Plaza of Statues, stamping the mindless males and butchering the women until they trod a ground of glass needles, ichor, blood. After that attack, so frenzied that respectable uptown opinion was horrified, the militia had come in to protect those few khepri not fled or murdered. But the Quillers did not have to flee: they were allowed to leave in an orderly and triumphant way.

Now Quillers or what looked like them were bearing down from the sky. The Collectivists stepped quickly into the lees of the bomb-shaken houses. They coughed in the dust of mille

From the south, ru

Civil wars made for unlikely allies. There were those few handlingers that for whatever reasons opposed their brothersisters-whether odd altruism or a politic calculation, the Collective’s negotiators never knew. It may have sickened the negotiators to do deals with these symbols of corruption and parasite cu

The three militia handlingers were dextriers, warriors, but for all their power they veered when they saw it was a sinistral on the man’s face. They tried to get out of range, but the Collectivist hand-linger jumped up higher than a human should and snapped his fingers. One dark-suited man spasmed as the sinistral shut down the dextrier’s assimilation gland. It became nothing but a blind five-fingered beast clutching a brain-dead man who fell out of the sky, his bowler hat a coda behind him, into the slow and dirty river Tar.

A second snap from the sinistral’s fingers and the nude handlinger sent another of the flying men palsied and down, to spread out red on the cobbles. The Collectivists cheered. But the third loyalist handlinger had flown in fast under eaves unseen, and as the sinistral began to turn its host away from its burst victim, the dextrier opened its man’s mouth and spatseared.

Inky gusts of flame uncoiled and rolled over the nude man’s skin, darking him and sending his fat spitting, and the sinistral screamed in its host’s voice and psychically in its own, making receptives for a half mile wince. It dropped and burnt up, fire-ruined.

The militia motorguns opened and the air became a shredder. The Collectivists dropped behind stone as the dextrier flew unconcerned through the firing, its body jerking, protecting its hand-body with the contingent flesh it borrowed.