Iron Council

His arm came up. It did not matter. He was no threat. What they had told him did not matter. The militia are waiting -he had said that for weeks. Everyone knew he thought that. However suddenly certain he was, it was what he had always said. Why would this change the Iron Council’s messianic plans?

There was another reason Drogon and Wrightby had left him alive. They still thought he might turn. They thought he might get out, leave the Council as it steamed toward its carnage and its end, and join them. And he hated them for that but also thought, What am I? What am I that they think that of me?

He cried some. He did not know if it was the effort of breaking the hex, or something else. He saw himself as Drogon must have seen him: his sneers and loneliness making him seem a traitor in waiting.

The mirrors had been taken out of their careful wrapping in the armoury car. The glass was veined, the tain made dust. Cutter wanted to tell someone what had happened, but he was afraid of the bitterness in him, the miserable certainty of an expectation fulfilled-he was afraid that for all the real loss of it he would seem to crow. He hated it in him. He knew Drogon had sensed it. It was why they had approached him.

He took the broken mirrors to A

The old rails shone back moonlight. At the edge of their vision, in the east, was a darker dark: Rudewood, closing. The lights of the train and its cooking fires shed tiny auras.

“Well?” A

“Well?”

“Yes.”

“What will you do?”

“What would you do?”

“I’d turn away, for Jabber’s sake. I’d turn and go south on the rails, not north.”

“Into the swamp?”

“For a start. If that’s what it takes to get away. To live, good gods, A

“Are they? So?”

Cutter shouted. Right into the night. “ ‘So?’ Are you insane? Haven’t you listened to me? And what do you mean ‘Are they?’?” Abruptly he stopped. They watched each other. “You don’t believe me.”

“I don’t know.”

“You think I’m lying.”

“Now now,” she said. “Come. You’re a good friend to the Council, Cutter, we know-”

“Oh my good gods, you think I’m lying. So what does that mean? You think, my gods, you think I broke the godsdamned mirrors?”

“Cutter, now.”

“You do. ”

“ Cutter. You didn’t break the mirrors. I know that.”

“So what, you think I’m lying about Drogon?”

“You never wanted us to come back, Cutter. You never wanted us here. And now you tell me the militia are waiting. How do you know Drogon or this man weren’t lying? They know what you think; they know what to tell you. Maybe they want us to fear and fail.”

Cutter stopped up short. Could Weather Wrightby be trying to frighten them away?

Perhaps the Collective had won. The refugees in the stony lands beyond the city were all wrong, and the Collective was establishing new democracy, had ended the suffrage lottery, had disarmed the militia and armed the populace. And there were statues to those fallen. Parliament was being rebuilt. And there were no militia pods, the clouds had no unmarked dirigibles in them, the air was full only of wyrmen, of balloons and bunting. Perhaps Weather Wrightby wanted them not to join that new New Crobuzon.

No. Cutter knew. He knew the truth. That was not how it was. He shook his head.

“You have to tell the Councillors,” he said.

“What do you want me to tell?” A

Cutter felt a rise of something, some tremulous despair. “Oh my gods,” he said. “You don’t care.”

She met his stare.

Even if, she was saying, even if you are right-even if that was Drogon, and that was Weather Wrightby, even if there are ten thousand militia ranged ready-this is where we are, this is what we are. This is where we have to be. Was this her madness?

“We are the Iron Council,” she said. “We do not turn ever again.”

Cutter thought of ru

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

The train went slow on the old rails, the crews ru

Every window was spiked with guns. The flatcars, the little grassed cemetery, the towers, the tent-towns on the rooftops were full of armed Councillors. They squatted, they sang war songs. “Tell us about New Crobuzon,” the young ones said, those born to whores while the Council was still a work-train, or to free women in Bas-Lag’s i

Behind the train came the Councillors who could not fight. The children, the pregnant, those whose Remakings made them ill-suited. The old. They stretched a long way on the tracks, singing their own songs.

Wyrmen went overhead, went and came back screeching what they saw. Over the hours the roadbed rose, until the train was on a ridge ordering the granite-stubbled ground into this side and this side. Trees rose as they passed stumps of forest, and the things that lived in them shrieked in the canopies. Many miles west the miasma of trees became Rudewood.

The hours went fast with the mesmeric beat of train wheels that Cutter had forgotten, that the months had taken from his mind as the Iron Council crept too slowly to pick up any rhythm. The train moved just fast enough to make the noise come. The percussion of wheels, the beat of pistons. The uh uh, uh uh, like being tapped on the shoulder again and again, reminded of something, a nervous noise. Cutter rode the train’s anxiety.

I’ll know, in a moment I’ll know, he said inside himself. In a moment I’ll decide. And the perpetual train did not stop and it brought him miles and miles closer to New Crobuzon before, it seemed, he had a chance to think.

What will happen?

He had a weapon ready. He rode in the caboose with outsiders, refugees, who were excited and terribly afraid of what was ahead. It curved, it curved, as if trying to hide its terminus. Miles yet, Cutter thought, but the end of the line seemed to glow darkly just out of sight.

“I need to go home. They’re waiting for me,” someone said. Something is, Cutter thought. Something’s waiting for you.

I won’t stay. It was a certainty, suddenly. I’ll not go to that scum Drogon, but I’ll not give him my death either. What will you do? He gave the question a voice. I’ll run. Where will you go? Where I must. And Judah Low? If I can. If I can find him. Judah Low.

Oh Judah oh Judah. Judah, Judah.

When the night came down as if darkness thickened the air, they did not stop. Light went from their windows across the grey plain and made the train a millipede on gaslight legs.

They must be a few tens of miles off now. Quite suddenly the tracks were clean and clear. Perhaps there had been some passage, Cutter thought; perhaps the city had had trains run the pointless distance this far and back, ferrying ghost passengers to ghost stations. Then in the bone light of such early morning he saw figures on the trackside darkness waving adzes and thick twig brooms, shouting for the train to Go on, go on and telling it Welcome home.

Fugitives from New Crobuzon’s Collective. They were there in increasing numbers out of the black before the train, blinking pi

The Crobuzoners waved their hats and scarves. Run come home, one shouted. Some were crying. They threw dried petals on the tracks. But there were some stood and waved their arms No, shouted, No they’ll kill you, and others who wore a kind of sad pride.

They ran and leapt onto the Council. They threw winter flowers and food to the Councillors and their children, exchanged shouted words with them, dropped back. Those on the train had become stern and taciturn with history and mission, and it was their followers on foot who met the escapees and embraced them, merged.

People ran by the train, keeping pace with it, and shouted names. Bereft families.

“Nathaniel! Is he there? Nathaniel Besholm, Remade man, arms of wood. Went into the wilds with the lost train.”

“Split Nose! My father. Never came back. Where is he?”

Names and snips of histories breathed out by those for whom the return of Iron Council was not only a myth come to be real but was a family hope redivivus. Letters addressed to those long-disappeared in exile now suddenly perhaps come back were thrown into the windows. Most were for the dead or those who had simply deserted: these were read and became messages to everyone.

It was day now-the day that the Iron Council would reach the end of the line. It was slowing, the drivers wanting every moment of the journey.

“Low the Golem-man!” one woman shouted in her old voice as they went past. “He’s been prowling around, getting everything ready for you! Come faster!”

What? Cutter looked back. Up from inside him was a suspicion. What?

“Don’t fear,” someone shouted. “Listen, we’re only hiding, us Collectivists, we’re waiting, we’re behind the militia lines waiting for you,” but Cutter was looking for the woman who had spoken of Judah.