Iron Council

“I tried, Judah, honestly, though your plan’s madness. But there’s no one spare. Everyone’s protecting the Collective. I don’t blame them, and I’m going to join them. We’ve a couple of weeks left, no more.”

Madeleina looked agonised but she did not say anything.

“I can’t help you, Judah,” Curdin continued. “But I’ll tell you something. When you left and there were rumours why, I thought you were… not mad, stupid. A stupid, stupid man. I never thought you could find the Iron Council. I would have bet it was long gone, nothing but a rotten train in the middle of a desert. Full of skeletons.

“I was wrong, Judah. And you, and all of you, done something I never thought could be done. I won’t say the Collective is because of you, because it ain’t. All I’ll say is that word that the Iron Council was coming… well, it changed things. Even when we thought it was just a rumour, even when I thought it was a myth, it still felt like something was… it was different. Maybe we heard you were coming a little bit too soon. Maybe that’s what happened. But it changed things.

“But I don’t quite trust you, Judah. Oh, gods, don’t get me wrong, I ain’t saying you’re a traitor. You always helped us, with golems, with money… but you watch from outside. Like you get to be pleased with us. It ain’t right, Judah.

“I wish you luck. If you’re right, and maybe you are, then you’d better win. But I ain’t coming to fight with you. I fight for the Collective. If you win and the Collective loses, I don’t want to live anyway.” Though it must be hyperbole, Cutter drew himself up at that, in respect.

“How you plan on finishing this, Judah?”

Judah pursed his lips. “I’ll have something,” he said.

“You’ll have what?”

“I’ll have something. And there’s someone here who knows what to do. Who knows Tesh magic.”

“I know, I know,” Qurabin said suddenly and loud. “The Moment I worship will tell me things. Will help me. It’s a Tesh thing. My Moment knows the gods this consul might call.”

“Consul?” Madeleina said, and when Judah told her that Spiral Jacobs was the ambassador of Tesh, Curdin laughed. Not a pleasant laugh.

“Yon Teshi’ll know what to do, is that it?” Curdin came close on his clumsy four legs. “You’re going to die, Judah,” he said. He spoke with true sadness. “If you’re right, you’re going to die. Good luck.”

Curdin shook each of their hands and left. Madeleina went with him.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Though winter it was suddenly warm. Unseasonal was not the word-it was unca

Two nights they walked the streets, behind Ori, who stopped and stared at all the graffiti. Each night they did not find Spiral Jacobs, Qurabin’s distress became animal. Toro would trace a finger along Spiral’s marks, find signs, nod and lower his head, shove and be gone for long minutes, and then would return and shake his head: No, no sign.

Once he could not find him; once he found him but in the farthest north of the city, in the quiets of Flag Hill, scrawling his marks, unafraid of Ori as ever. There was no way for the others to get to him. Ori tracked Spiral Jacobs around the city, but until he came back to the Dog Fe

Each day they had to live knowing the agent of the city’s destruction was walking free, that they could not touch him. They tried where they could to protect the streets of the Collective. From the river’s shores they saw a fight between two trains traveling alongside on the Dexter Line, a Collectivist and a militia, shooting into each other’s windows as they went.

There was a lightning raid by dirigibles scattering leaflets. PEOPLE OF THE SO-CALLED “COLLECTIVE,” they said. THE GOVERNMENT OF MAYOR TRIESTI WILL NOT TOLERATE THE MASS-MURDER AND CARNAGE YOU HAVE UNLEASHED ON NEW CROBUZON. AFTER THE OUTRAGE OF THE BARRACKHAM TOWER ALL CITIZENS NOT ACTIVELY SEEKING ESCAPE ARE DEEMED COMPLICIT IN THE DESPICABLE POLICIES OF YOUR COMMITTEES. APPROACH THE MILITIA WITH HANDS CLEAR AND UP, HALLOOING YOUR SURRENDER, and so on.

The third night. There they were, on the streets, with hundreds of Collectivists, a last wave of mobilizations, of every race. Little snips of magic, prestidigitation of light, chromathaumaturgy sending up pretences of birds made of radiance. The rebels made the night a carnival, as it had once been.

Everywhere people were ru

Qurabin was moaning. Low but always audible.

“Something’s happening,” Cutter said to no one.

They passed Bohrum Junction where houses converged in a wedge of antique architecture, past dry fountains where war orphans played some catchpe

Rahul came with saurian gait, knives in each human hand, his muscular reptile claws clenching. “Come come on,” said Qurabin.

Each wall of graffiti Ori would stop and stare at with light-

emitting Bull-mask eyes. With an effortful grunt he straightened his legs, poked into nothing, and then there he was again in a new rent scant feet away, so fast Cutter could not be sure his feet had not still dangled from the first hole as his head emerged yards off.

“He’s here,” Ori said. “Trauka Station. Come.”

Not a mile off. They passed near the riverwall through long-

emptied markets, where the integuments of the stalls were left, metal ribs slotted together, a herd of skeletons.

They were just one of the ru

The smoke and miracle-colour blood that dripped from Toro’s helmet was thick; the horns were sparking as if with friction. So much violence against ontology was straining the thaumaturgic circuits. “Come,” Toro said again, and beckoned. “Just here, two turns from here, left left, he’s moving, come now.”

Judah stopped, quickly set down ceramic conductors and a fu

Darkness gathered. Judah’s mechanism sucked the dark. It shifted, a tenebrous plasma; it was dragged in a slow resentful mass, the shadows become a cloud of unlight, and like water coiling down a plughole they wound into the cone, condensing, becoming darker as they went. The bricks it left were a catastrophe of physics, utterly abnatural. No light fell on them, but with their darkness gone they were clearly visible, as if harshly illuminated, but without colour, a perfect-edged grey. The cul-de-sac had become impossible: unglowing, unlit, uncoloured visibility in the absolute dark.

Shadows emerged from the fu

Judah gathered his equipment and whispered, “Go!” He ran, and his companions, dumbed by what they had seen, let him pass before they found their energy again. Beside him with utterly silent steps was the golem, like a gorilla made of shade.

Left, left. Into alleys overlooked by the upreach of dark brown masonry, windows without doors, doorless brick-and-mortar cliffs that seemed a glimpse on something unfinished, the land behind the facades.

There was Toro ahead, one horn on fire and vibrating. He called to them, but his voice was drowned by the shuddering of the helmet, the unpeeling, the splitting of his horns. Screaming and with the metal itself spitting on fire, Ori scrabbled to undo the straps. He fought the helmet free and straightened, his face rivered with sweat. “There!” He pointed.

An old man at the far end of the street watched them, holding a paintbrush poised and dripping. He turned and shuffled with an incompetent run toward where the street curved away. Spiral Jacobs.

“Keep him in your sights!” Ori shouted, and ran, leaving his helmet to be eaten by blue fire. Cutter saw the thaumaturged glass eyes crack, the strange colours of fire and sparks as the heat ate arcana in the metal. It did not look like a statue’s head anymore but a skull, a bovine skull on fire.

They tried to catch Ori, who ran as if Toro’s strength were still in him. “Keep up, keep on him,” he shouted.

At the limits of their vision, where the leftward curve shut off the long alley from their view, Jacobs moved fast despite his age and gait. Judah and Cutter followed Ori, the golem loping dark beside them, and Drogon behind, and the others in changing order. The alleyway was full of echoes, of the sounds of all their feet. There were no other sounds, no gunfire of the war, no horns or noise of the Collective or the mayor’s city. Only footsteps on winter-damp brick.