Iron Council

There was more word of that trouble the farther east they went. “The war’s over,” a man told them. His shieling had become a station, his porch a platform. His nearest neighbours had travelled miles from their lowland holdings to be with him when the Iron Council came through. His fields were a sidings yard full of men and women. The farmers and the wilds people watched with stern pleasure.

“The war’s done. They told me. They warred with Tesh, ain’t it? Well it’s over, and we won.” We? You never set foot in New Crobuzon, man. You never been a hundred miles from it. “They did something and they beat them and now the Tesh want peace. Do I know what? The what? What’s a Collective?”

New Crobuzon had done something. The story came back again. A secret mission, some said, an assassination. Something had been halted and life had changed, the Teshi had been restrained, forced into negotiation or surrender. Something stopped Tesh’s plans? Cutter thought wryly. Fancy. And that triumph, it seemed, had bolstered Parliament and the mayor, had bled support from the Collective. That he could not be wry about. That he could not think about.

“The strikers? They’re finished. The government sorted them out.”

Through the rained-on downs came a spread of runaways from the city. They came and lived in the small towns by which the Iron Council was passing; they repopulated the deserted cow-towns they found, the residues of the old railway rush. The Council might come out of the low hills in an industrious multitude and lay down tracks along the preflattened paths, along the reclaimed main roads. New inhabitants would emerge from what had been the saloon, a church, a bawdyhouse, and stare as over hours (their progress faster daily) the crews put down the sleepers and rails on old horsetracks and passed where stagecoaches and drifters had been.

“Did you hear?” They heard the same stories scores of times. There must have been escapees from the Parliamentarian quarters too, but no one said so: everyone was a Collectivist, on the run from the militia. Sure you’re not some two-bit spiv? Cutter thought cynically. Sure you’re really an organiser like you claim?

“Did you hear?” That the war’s over, that we beat the Tesh, and that when we beat the Tesh the Mayor took control again, and everything was sorted, and the Collective went under?

Yes, we heard. Though it was disputed.

They were entertained in these revenant towns, with sex and New Crobuzon cooking. “What have you come for? Did you not hear? Did you hear? There ain’t no Collective no more. Only dregs, some terrorists in Dog Fe

Some of those who had left to be wanderers in the waste-some of the young-joined the perpetual train, to return to New Crobuzon, only weeks after their escape. “Tell us about the Iron Council!” they insisted, and their new compatriots told all their stories.

There were rumours of new kithless, unique powers. “Did you hear,” Cutter heard, “about the golem-man Low?”

“What?” he said, crossing to where the refugee spoke.

“Golem-man Low, he’s got an army of made men. He’s making them of clay in his cellar, ready to take over the city. He’s been seen, outside New Crobuzon, in the rail yards, on the sidings, by the tracks. He’s got plans.”

They came closer, and the escaped they met were more and more recent out of the city. “It’s done,” one said. “There ain’t no Collective anymore. Wish to gods there was.”

That night Cutter looked for Drogon and realised that the whispersmith had gone. He walked the length of the train, sent messages and queries, but there was nothing.

It was possible the susurrator was off riding, hunting, on a mission of his own, but Cutter was very suddenly certain that Drogon had gone. That they were close enough to New Crobuzon, that the horseman had had enough, and had ridden, his adventures with the Iron Council over.

Is that all? Such a slow deflation, such a lacklustre end. Was that all you wanted, Drogon? Not tempted to say good-bye?

Cutter prepared to leave. It could not be long. He felt a hollowness, a preemptive loss. He wondered how and where the militia would confront them and destroy the Council. The Remade and their families and comrades, the Councillors, all knew what was coming. Their track-laying songs became martial. They oiled their guns; the forges at trackside and in the carriages turned out weapons. The Iron Councillors carried made and stolen guns. The glass and brass foci of ordnance-shamanism. Racks of spears and west-coast weapons.

“We’ll gather people with us, we’ll be an army, we’ll sweep in. We’ll turn things around.” Cutter winced to hear the dreams. “We’re bringing history.”

There was a drip of people across the land, on their way anywhere, without plans but away from the carnage of New Crobuzon.

Still empty land, only a few half-kept orchards, a few groves of temperate fruit-trees. There was a moment of transition. They were in the wilds, in unsafe lands, and then with a sudde

The graders and scouts returned. “Yonder. Just beyond.” Over stone-flecked undulations. “The old rails. Down to Junctiontown, in the swamps. And up to New Crobuzon.”

Two days away. Every moment they continued, Cutter expected a deployment of New Crobuzon troops to emerge from the tu

“Low the golemer’s been seen, he’s in the hills, he’s watching over us. He’s by the old rails.”

Oh yes? Has he? Cutter was sour. He was very lonely. Where are you, Judah? He did not know what to do.

In small numbers, some Councillors-the older, mostly, the first generation, who remembered the punishment factories-left. Not many, but enough to be felt. They would go into the hills to scout for wood or food and would not come back. Their comrades, their sisters, shook their heads with scorn and care. Not everyone was unafraid, or willing or able to ignore their fear.

I’ll decide the plan when I see the old rails, Cutter told himself, but then he walked with the track-layers as they bent the iron road through gaps between sediment and basalt stanchions and through the V the graders had cut in soft displaced earth and there, there, there wetly ashine, black but glowing, were the rails. More than twenty years old. Curving away, drawn together by perspective, slipped through geography. The metal path. The crossties were bucked by neglect but held the rails down.

The Councillors gave a cheer that was reedy in the cold wet air but that continued a long time. The track-layers waved their tools. The Remade gesticulated their unshaped limbs. The road to New Crobuzon. That old road. Left to moulder when the collapse of money and the stockpiles in warehouses had made an end to the TRT boom. They had been left to the shifting ground-Cutter could see where the banks of the cut had bowed and buried the metal. They were ru

In some places the iron had been stolen by salvagers. The Council would have to lay down some from its own stock. The Iron Council had come this way before, unborn, when it was just a train. The wet of the stones, the dark and glistening way. Cutter stared. And what was it? What was happening in his city? Where the Collective was fighting? How should he run?

Judah, you bastard, where are you?

The hammermen laid down the rails, and with careful measured sideswipes of their mallets, they put in curves. They made bends, gently, so that their tracks came out of the west and skewed gradually through the banks of the train-gash up and onto the roadbed of the old rails.

This is all a postlude, Cutter thought. This is all happening after the story.

The Collective was falling or fallen and all there was was this unfolding of violence. We’ll swing it, change it, Cutter thought with sad scorn, in the voice of a Councillor.

The greatest moment in the history of New Crobuzon. Laid low by war and by the end of war, which was gods help me my doing, our doing. But what could we do? Could we let the city fall? The Collective would have fallen anyway, he told himself, but he was not sure of that. He drew icons in the earth, making trains in outline, men and women ru

There were guards around the sprawling train-town now for fear of militia and of the bandits. Mostly the brigands that came, fReemade and whole, came to join the Council. They arrived daily, wondering if they had to audition, show their worth. The Councillors welcomed them, though some fretted about spies. There was too much chaos in those last days to worry. Cutter saw newcomers everywhere, with their tentative enthusiasm. Once with a start he thought he saw a man attached backward on a horse’s neck.

Walking back through the cold at night, through a startled gust of rock pigeons, Cutter heard a voice. Deep in his ear.

“Come up here. I’ve something to tell you. Quiet. Please. Quietly.”

“Drogon?” Nothing but the idiot fluting of the birds. “Drogon?” Only small stones skittering.

It was not a command but a request. The susurrator could have made him come, but had only asked.

Drogon was waiting in the dark hills overlooking the train.

“I thought you’d gone,” Cutter said. “Where’d you go?”

Drogon stood with an old white-haired man. He held a gun, though it was not aimed.

“This one?” the old man said, and Drogon nodded.

“Who’s this?” said Cutter. The old man held his arms behind his back. He wore an old-fashioned waistcoat. He was eighty or more, stood tall, looked at Cutter sternly, kindly.

“Who is this Drogon? Who the fuck are you?”

“Now, lad…”

“Quiet,” said Drogon peremptorily in Cutter’s ear. The old man was speaking.