Iron Council

“You’ll have to.”

Cutter and Thick Shanks braced themselves each on their rock shaft. It was a little after dawn. The moon was still visible, pale and high. As the sun rose its light struck their mirrors, and Cutter angled his down, directing his beam at the cross-mark he had made on the ground. Thick Shanks did the same, as Cutter had shown him, and the spots of intensified sunlight roamed like nervous animals over scrub and dust, to blend on the X.

Hundreds of Councillors prepared to fight, spread out in waves to trenches and earthworks, propped rifles. Cutter turned west, to where the militia would come.

It was not long. At first he saw only dust. Cutter looked through his telescope. They were still tiny, and they did seem to be very few.

A flock of wyrmen set out to harass them, carrying acid and drop-knives. Behind them the dirigible followed with the snake-armed pilot and two volunteers as strafe-gu

A frantic Councillor came out of the stony lands. He stumbled to them, could not speak for moments, silenced by exhaustion and fear.

“I got trapped,” he said at last. “They took my missus. There was eight of us. They made something come out of the earth, they made something come out of us. ” He screamed. People looked at each other. I fucking told you, Cutter thought. He felt despair. I bastard told you that this weren’t simple like it looked.

Two miles off, the wyrmen came close to the militia on their horses. The riders carried no equipment anyone could see. Moved in formation. There was a strange instant, and the wyrmen were pulled one by one out of the air.

For a long few seconds there was no sound. Then-“What…?” “Did…?” “I think that, did you…?” Not yet fear. Still incomprehension. Cutter did not know what had happened, but he knew that fear would come soon.

A last wyrman lurched in the air, wrestling, swaddled in a caul of dirty nothing. Cutter saw it by a smear of the particles it carried, a thrombus of feral air. Cutter knew what was happening.

“Where did they go ?” someone shouted.

The wyrmen fought air that overwhelmed them, pulled them apart in marauding currents.

The dirigible was close to the militia, and a line of bullet-dust stretched out across the ground toward them. And then the bullets broke off, and with a sudden violent dancing the vessel tipped mightily up, pitching in the air as if a ship on an unstable sea. For seconds it paused, then began to fall, not as if with gravity but as if fighting, as if the turning motors and air-propellors were struggling. The airship was hauled out of the sky by some brutal hand, broke apart.

Shapes began to organise around the militia as they approached, out of the air or the earth or the fire of the torches they carried. Close enough now to see. All the officers were moving their hands in invocation. Cutter could see the ruins of their uniforms, the split and splintered helmets, scratches and Torque-stains where leather had become something else. The horses were dappled with blood and slather. Their passage through the cacotopic zone had marked them.

There were scores, despite what depredations must have culled them. Made mad by what they had suffered, ready to revenge against these renegades whose flight had dragged them into the cacotopos. No wonder they were so light-armed, no wonder so few. They did not need equipment or ordnance when they called up their weapons out of the surrounds and the matter of the world.

Cutter saw their arcane whips. He saw them shaping the air. He knew it was luftgeists that had brought down the wyrmen and the dirigible, air elementals of tremendous power. This was a corps of invocators, whose weapons were the presences they raised. Beast-handlers, of a preternatural kind. A cadre of elementarii.

Cutter was shouting at his chaverim. He saw some understood. Some were startled into fear.

There were no elementalists in the Iron Council. One man had a tiny captive yag that lived in a jar, a fire-spirit no larger than a match-flame. Those few vodyanoi with undines were bound to them by agreement; they could not control them. But there were some who understood what they were facing.

The elementarii were ranging out, each subgroup preparing its calling. It had to be, Cutter thought. People who could fight without hauling weapons. It had to be either elementalists or karcists, and dæmons are too unsure. Gods damn, a cadre of elementalists. That New Crobuzon would risk losing these men showed how profound was the government’s desire to end the Council.

“Come on, let’s do it,” he shouted to Thick Shanks, and wound the metaclockwork engine as well as he could. He focused the reflected light, levelled the beam, could not stop staring over his shoulder at the attack coming.

Which will it be? Cutter thought. Fulmen? Shudners? Undines? Lightning or stone or freshwater elementals, but of course it might be others: metal, sun, wood or fire. Or one whose elemental status was uncertain or disputed: elements made by history, born out of nothing and become real. Would it be a concrete elemental, a glass elemental? What would it be?

He could see already the coils of dust moving against any wind, extending air limbs. The luftgeists. The militia began to bring into being other things.

Sun? Darkness?

They threw all their torches to the ground, and the fire enlarged as if each individual flame loomed much larger than it should, so the ground was impossibly alight, and from the prodigious fire, with a tremendous cry of pleasure, came things like dogs or great apes made of the flames. A pack of yags, fire elementals that bounded in a motion between loping and burning. Cutter saw unridden horses corralled and chanted over and giving out equine screams. One by one they shuddered and let out dying wet noises and unfolded from inside: out of their shuddering carcasses came leaping creatures of their sinew and muscle and their organs all reconfigured into bloody skinless predators: proasmae, the flesh elementals.

Air, fire, flesh ran and turned in animal excitement. A line of militia drew whips occult-tempered, and cracked them, sending the elementals rearing in fear, delight and challenge. The whips snapped like heavy leather and elyctricity, like shadows. When they cracked the noise made dark light.

The elementarii cajoled their charges forward. Air and fire and flesh came. Councillors screamed. They fired and their shells burst among the elementals. Without strategy, pushed by panic, they triggered Judah’s golem traps.

With automaton motion golems unfolded out of the earth and the metal and wood debris of the railroad. There were not so many as there were elementals, and each of them drew on Judah’s powers. Wherever he was, he must have felt a burst of sudden draining. And soon he’ll feel more, Cutter thought, and tried to focus the mirror.

A bomb exploded in the path of the yags, and they disappeared amid its copse of high flames, and their cries were unca

Cutter felt the murmur of clockwork in the mirror, gears uncoiling in discombobulant dimensions. He felt the mirror moving as if it were a baby.

“Unlock your engine,” he shouted, and when Thick Shanks did Cutter felt another tugging. He held his mirror hard and saw Thick Shanks doing the same. The recombinant light their reflections made was waxing.

It was curling, growing around itself. It was something in itself, something real, with dimensions, something that moved. Cutter saw the fishlike swimming presence, a thing roaming out of nothing and made of the hard light, shining like a sun. He felt his strength haemorrhage from him. “We’ve got it,” he shouted. “Take it to them.”

Thick Shanks and he kept their mirrors angled at each other and moved them in time, and the presence of glutinous light followed, dragged over the ground as they turned to face the elementarii. Something terrible was happening. The militia whipmen had come forward, cajoling the elementals at the ends of their lashes, and though the outer lines of the Councillors were laying down fire with everything they had, the proasmae were coming.

Missiles tore into the creatures of slabbed-together muscle, burrowing into them so they refolded and spat out the nuggets of lead and the honed flint or iron blades. The proasmae, the flesh elementals, called up out of the stuff of the horses, reached the earthwork barrier.

They rolled up it, they were amoeboid, they were urchinlike, studded with bones they made limbs, they made themselves suddenly humanoid or like some unski

They dived into the men’s flesh. They dived and poured themselves through the Councillors’ skin, emptying into flesh-stuff, swimming in the i

“Jabber preserve us,” Cutter said.

He pulled at the speculum, and felt resistance. He and Thick Shanks pulled their mirrors at different speeds and the thing between them began to pull apart, to split resentfully, strings of light-matter stretching out between its parts like mucus. Cutter shouted, “Back, back your end, pull it back together!” They struggled to reaggregate the light golem.

The strikes of the militia’s gnoscourges reached much longer than it seemed they should. Yards up the luftgeists screeched and were galvanised into aggression as the elementarii corrected them. They swept down, invisible. They forced the Councillors who shot and slashed pointlessly to breathe them, shoved into their lungs and burst them.

A salvo of attacks, bombs, a rush of weak thaumaturgy, and the militia regrouped. One was hit; one only was killed. The yags faced the first of the golems, a huge figure of stone and the stumps of iron rails. Yags wrestled it, hugged it, and their fire corpi re-formed and enveloped the golem and began to bend its hard black metal with the intensity of their heat. It spilled into a pool, trying still to fight as its matter collapsed. It ran in rivulets, streams of molten golem.