Iron Council

On the roofs at the north end of the bridge a thaumaturge rose, a Brock Marsh rebel come to defend the Collective. His body was aglow with corposant. It flared without sound in cobalt, and he barked and a gob of the colour sputtered, flew with butterfly flight to the frontmost militia gun, and it arced and took over the ca

The men and the gun brittled, cracks spread across them, and one by one gun and men shattered. The ground where they had been was dusted with shards of them, quite dry.

Another cheer, and the leader of Wynion Way came forward firing a musket, but the handlinger flew down, spi

“Fall back! Now!”

The Glasshouse Gu

“Get the fuck back now!” The militia were coming. The Glasshouse Gu

The dextrier spat but too early. It burned through several clotheslines. A cactus-man sent a machete into the host, shouted triumph. It was a huge knife; it ground deep into the human meat, sent him down. The cactacae kicked and stamped the parasite and host with tree-trunk feet. The Gu

The weary cactus fighters began to retreat, toward their approaching weapons. The last of the Gu

A train came tearing over the city on the close-by rail-bridge, within a few yards of the Cockscomb. At the north shore the rails were blocked by a barricade, but south of Petty Coil Station, the Sud Line was the Collective’s. The train stopped beside the bridge, and from its windows Collectivists fired grenades, directed by a shantytown garuda on updrafts over the bomb fires. The missiles ruined more and more of the Cockscomb Bridge skyline, and broke apart the militia lines.

But it was not enough. The militia were taking Cockscomb Bridge, firing back at the train. In the east, the black spine of Parliament stabbed up, an inselberg of dark architecture, watching this and the other fights (an airship raid on the Kelltree Docks, shu

It’s time. A whisper from the Collective’s Riverskin commanders. Under the railway arches by Saltpetre Station, a command headquarters, Frengeler, ex-militia, trained in tactics and turned to the radicals, the outstanding military thinker of the Collective, was screaming: Decide if you want to fucking win or not. We’re out of time, do it. Blow the bridges.

There were few bridges left that crossed from Parliament territory directly into the Collective: each was a conduit they could not afford to cede to the militia. Below the surface of the Tar, the vodyanoi Collectivists guarding the sewer entrances sent out aquatic sappers.

None of them liked the job they had to do. None of them wanted to destroy these loved old things. They felt they must.

They found their way through the murked waters to where the arches of the bridge rose from mud, they groped, but with growing anxiety could not find their demolitions. They gripped at each other and barked their submerged tongue, but out of the dark water came enemy shapes. Betrayal, someone shouted, as militia vodyanoi came at them, shamans with roiling patches of clean water, undines that gripped the Collectivists and squeezed.

A rump escaped. Their information came through: We can’t explode the fucking bridge.

Sheer Bridge, then. But though this time the vodyanoi swimmers were careful of ambush, it was the same thing-their explosives were gone. Found gods-knew-when and removed. The plans of the Collective to cauterise the ingress of militia had been stymied.

“It’ll be the same on Mandrake Bridge, and Barrow. They’ve got ways in. ”

And now here they were coming. With the suppressing fire of the Collective’s guns, the thanatic foci of their hexes, their boobytraps, it took the militia hours to advance through what they made a monstrous landscape, of jags that had been walls and windows without glass or purpose. But they were advancing. Cockscomb Bridge belonged to Parliament again.

As the Collectivists fell back, more barricades went up. The rubble from bombed buildings was hauled as foundation and anything went above it, slag from factories, sleepers, furniture, the stumps of trees from Sobek Croix. The Collectivists had to sacrifice a few streets west of Sedilia Square to focus on main streets. They sent word to the defenders of the south bank itself to prepare for invasion if the militia veered east over the bridge.

They did not. They crossed the river; and in the square they halted, commandeered buildings (one only just vacated by Collectivists, whose effects the militia began systematically to defile, throwing pissed-on heliotypes out of the windows).

In Griss Twist, the insurrectionists took decades-old rubbish from the dumps to block Sheer Bridge. Badside was being shelled, its desolate population and the token Collectivist units left to guard it conserving their ammunition. No one wanted Badside itself; but as a conduit to Echomire and Kelltree, and as the riverbank facing Dog Fe

In the city’s northwest, where the Dog Fe

Howl Barrow was easy. “We can flatten a bunch of inverts, perverts and painters quicker than scratching our arses,” one captured militia commander had said, and his disdainful claim had become notorious. The Howl Barrow chapter would not last long, with its Nuevist squads, its battalions of militant ballet dancers, its infamous Pretty Brigade, a group of Collectivist grenadiers and musketeers all of them dollyboy man-whores in dresses and exaggerated make-up, shouting orders to each other in invert slang. At first they had been greeted with disgust; then with forbearance, as they fought without restraint; then with exasperated affection. No one wanted them to be overrun, but it was inevitable.

The militia took Cockscomb Bridge, broke the Glasshouse Gu

It was into this atmosphere, this war, that Judah, Cutter and their party entered the city.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

“Gods. Gods. How in the name of Jabber did you get here?”

Entering and leaving the New Crobuzon Collective was hard. The barricades were guarded by the tense and terrified. The sewers were patrolled. With the Parliamentarian aeronauts savaging any dirigibles not their own, with hexes protecting each side, coming in and out had become epic and dangerous.

There were lurid folk tales: the heroic guardsman who slipped out without fanfare to execute militia; the Parliamentarian unit that took a wrong turn in a backstreet maze to emerge in the middle of Collectivist territory. Now there was a story of the crusade coming, to take all the poor starvelings in the Collective away.

Of course hundreds had entered and left the Collective, through ill-guarded barriers, through thaumaturgy. The Mayor’s city was full of those who took the Collective’s side: in Chimer, in the industrial fringe of Lichford, areas under martial law but from which guilders, seditionists and the curious sometimes made their way into Dog Fe

So arrivals were feted, but suspiciously. Judah and the others came from the east of the city, through the ruinous landscape by Grand Calibre Bridge. With Qurabin’s help they found hidden byways, more and more of the monk eroding with each journey. Past the barricadistes. Along brick gulches to the post office in Dog Fe

Cutter felt emptied out. So many months since he had been in New Crobuzon and now it was so new, so tremendously not as it had been. It made him think of everything, it made him think of Drey and Ihona and Fejh and Pomeroy, of the bones under the railroad tracks.

What city is this? he had thought as they entered.

The towers of Grand Calibre Bridge, ajut and centuries broken in the water of the Gross Tar, now crowned with guns puffing lazily to send shells uptown. Badside, always squalid, reshaped and broken now by more than poverty.

Everywhere. Over the girders of Barley Bridge, the streets concatenate with the everyday, the monstrous and the beautiful. They were not quite empty. There were bandaged soldiers who watched the party from broken buildings. Members of a quickly ru

The trail-dust on Cutter and his comrades meant they took curious looks-everyone was dirty but their dirt was different-but no one seemed to find it strange that they travelled together: two Remade, with four whole humans (no one could see Qurabin) pulling their exhausted mounts.

The Remade were mounts themselves. The lizard-bodied man, Rahul, was one: A