Iron Council

“Where’s he going?” Ori shouted. Cutter turned and saw Rahul, two three seconds behind him, disappear momentarily around the corner and not emerge. Where was he? He had slipped beyond the influence of Jacobs’ reconfiguration, been tipped out into New Crobuzon; he would turn the corner into gods-knew-where.

Jacobs was still ru

Rahul was gone, and Drogon. They had stumbled and were lost somewhere in the errant geography. Cutter came forward. Judah walked and the darkness golem walked with him, step for step. Scores of yards away was Spiral Jacobs. He was not even looking at them.

Where were they? Cutter found the moon. He looked down between towers and walls. He was half enclosed. He struggled to make sense of it: this then that monolith spired, and here a minaret, and here one much fatter studded with lights, and above them the huge lines of airships. They were outside the Collective.

Above them an enormous column crowned with radial wires. The Spike. They were in an irregular courtyard. The walls were different stones, in different colours. A shaking came up at them through the concrete. They were high up. Cutter looked down over a spread-out skyline, over the city.

Perdido Street Station. Of course. They were in a huge and empty amphitheatre made by chance, floored with scrub, a little wilderness on the station’s roof. Undesigned, a forgot space in the vastness. The passage that had brought them looked now not like a street but a kink in concrete.

The wall, an edifice of huge bricks that made them feel shrunk to dolls, was broken by the remnants of wooden floors where once this open place had been interior. It was surfaced completely with spirals. A thicket rising, as high as a canopy. Some as intricate and complex as tangled briars, some the simplest snailshell patterns. Thousands. Months of industry. Cutter breathed out. From the very top of the wall descended one black line, through the forest of helix pictograms. A spiral, pinpointing this place.

Across the brickdust and savage weeds was Jacobs, the Tesh ambassador. He was drawing marks in the air, and he was singing.

“He’s hurried,” Qurabin said. His disembodied voice was close. “Has to move. He weren’t ready, but he’s moving now, early… He’ll try to force it, the thysiac, the murderspirit… feel! Quick,” and the voice was gone.

Ori ran. Across waste through dead thigh-high grass that cracked with cold, the plateau open and the lights of New Crobuzon splayed beneath him. The others followed, though no one knew what to do.

Spiral Jacobs tremored, and the air all around tremored with him. A hundred shapes began to solidify from nothing. Cutter saw a patch of milky air, a cataract, that took lumpy shape, peristalsed maggotlike and was a pale ghost stool, a three-legged kitchen thing hanging over his brow. Beside it was an insect, impossibly big, and a flower, a pot and a hand, a candle, a lamp, all the haints that had beset New Crobuzon. They looked undercooked, not quite fine, without colour, hanging and spi

Ori batted at the things. They had not yet come full; they were not murderously sucking his colour. He reached Spiral Jacobs. The old man looked at him and said something: a greeting, Cutter thought.

He watched as Ori swung his fists, and kept missing Spiral Jacobs, kept always missing, each punch consistently mistimed, misjudged. Ori screamed and went onto his knees. Judah was just behind him, and the darkness golem stepped up.

The great thing swung its enormous shadow hands and unlight swept over Spiral Jacobs as it gripped him. It obscured him a long moment. Jacobs faltered, went obscure and dimmed, and all the ectoplasm shapes faltered with him, waning in time like dimming lamps. They came back again as he regained strength and light, and then he growled, showed anger for the first time.

He moved his hands, and the school of moving haints changed, came together, gusted suddenly through the golem, and where they passed they left a light in the core of the thing. It staggered like a wounded man and reached to throttle Jacobs once again, mimicking Judah’s motions. The light in the darkness golem’s core was growing.

It fell back, it stood back on its fading heels as the lantern glow in its i

Ori was crying, still trying to hit Jacobs, still missing. Spiral Jacobs did not look at him, turned away as the sobbing man flailed and lost his balance and flailed again. Jacobs pushed out his hand and Ori was yanked by matter and whipped to a wall. A clutch of the apparitions went through the air in a brief tentacle to slap Elsie without quite touching her, a moment’s halo of spi

The haints were maelstroming so fast they lost visible integrity, seemed to melt to a kind of swirling oil. Spiral Jacobs drew another shape and everything convulsed. Ori was shuddering from the wall where he was embedded, making little sounds.

Judah woke. Spiral Jacobs moved his hands. There were no haints now; instead the air was a dilute milk of their residue tracked through with vapour trails. Jacobs was shaking with effort, hauling something out of nothing, vividly trembling. As if from behind a rock, from underwater, a presence began to insinuate.

It was very small, or very big and very far away, and then it was perhaps much bigger than Cutter had thought or much closer, and moving very slowly or tremendously fast over a huge distance. He could not make out its parameters. He could see nothing. He heard it. He could see nothing. The thing made sound. The thing Spiral Jacobs was bringing, the murderspirit, the citykiller, he heard it howl. It came round and round like a rising vine, growing or rising up as if uncoiling from a well. It made a metal howl.

Cutter saw the lights of the city change below them. As the unseen palpable thing approached, the buildings glowered. New Crobuzon’s architecture glared. The streetlamps and the lights of industry became the glints in eyes.

The beast was manifesting in New Crobuzon itself. It was pushing itself into New Crobuzon’s skin. Or was it waking what had been there always? Cutter could tell the thing was nearing them because the wall, the concrete beside them, did not change but looked to him suddenly like the flank of an animal tensed to attack. The Tesh thing was making the city itself a predator, rousing the hunt instincts of the metropolis.

How big, how big, when does it reach the top? Cutter thought. He felt a sleepiness, a bled-out emergent death.

“I know your gods,” Qurabin said. The thing kept coming. The buildings tensed. Spiral Jacobs looked suddenly afraid.

Qurabin was only a voice, moving through the empty space. The monk sounded hysterical, aggressive, eager to fight. Qurabin taunted Spiral Jacobs. Had she or he still known Tesh, Cutter was certain that was what he would have heard, that glottal and interruptive language. Ragamoll was all that was left to Qurabin.

“Jinxing… it’s easy to intimidate them as don’t know what it is, yes? But what if you face one as does, eh? Another Teshi? Who can find out Teshi secrets? Your secrets?”

Spiral Jacobs shouted something.

“I don’t understand you no more, mate,” Qurabin said, but Cutter was sure the ambassador had said traitor.

“Know who I am?” Qurabin said.

“Aye, I know who y’are,” shouted Jacobs, and he pushed out his hands sending a swirl of the buttery haint-stuff at where the voice came from, but the whirling air met no resistance. “You’re a Momentist blatherer.”

Judah was trying to stand, was burrowing his hands in dirt that shook with the incoming spirit-thing. He was trying to raise a golem, any golem, something.

“It’s coming,” Cutter shouted. It was coming out of its burrow into the real, it was unfolding into more and more impossible conjunctions. The dimensions of the bricks and the edges of the walls strained as it came close. Architecture stirred.

“Your godlings and demiurgii all live in the Moments, Teshman. And my Moment knows.” Qurabin’s voice was tremendous, louder than the oncoming of the murder-thing. Spiral Jacobs spat and his spit sent a cuffing wave through the milk-white disturbance. Qurabin roared, and began to shout.

“Tekke Vogu,” the monk said, “please tell me-” and the voice disappeared as Qurabin slipped into whatever place it was where the Moment lived and listened.

Nothing moved; the oncoming spirit seemed poised. And then Qurabin sounded again with a gasp, a terrible pain, because these were huge secrets to uncover. What it cost, Cutter could not imagine, but the monk learnt something. As the twitching filigree of the Phasma Urbomach unrolled into regular space, making the bricks, the spires and weathervanes and night-slates of New Crobuzon terrible teeth and claws, waking the surrounds so that Cutter gasped in terror, Qurabin let loose hidden knowledge and the thing was snatched back down toward the nothing it had come from. It strained to emerge.

Judah sent a grass-and-earth golem stumbling toward Jacobs, but it was shuddered to dust before it got close. He reached out, tried to make a golem in the air, but whiteness clogged him.

Spiral Jacobs cursed in Tesh, and Qurabin screamed and the spirit began to crawl back again, but with a last plea, a last hollering for knowledge, Qurabin made the dire and mass-murderous visitant begin to slide away. As Spiral Jacobs cursed the thi