Iron Council

“And you won’t hear this, you can’t, but this now isn’t because you’re a sacrifice to anything. This isn’t how it needed to be. This is because you had no right.”

Cutter heard the end in her voice and saw A

In the tiny splintered instant that she tightened her hand he thought: Now.

Call an earth golem. Judah could focus and drag from the hard earth before him a grey earth golem that would rise, levering itself out of the stuff of its own substance with weeds and weed-debris hanging still to it, the hillside itself become moving, and it could intervene. It could stand between Judah and A

An air golem. One hard gust of ab-live wind to close A

Make her gun a golem. Turn the very pistol itself into a small and quick golem and have it close its mouth, have it eat the bullet before it spat it away, and then Judah might have the thing twist in A

Make the bullet a golem. And it could fall. Make her clothes golems. They might trip her. Make a golem of those scattered little dead trees. Make a golem of clouds. Of the shadows, of her own shadow. Make another sound golem. Make a golem of sound and time to keep her unmoving. It was very cold. Sing your rhythms again fast to make a golem of still time and stop her up and we’ll go.

But Judah did nothing and A

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

It was by the Tar that Cutter regained the city. A night entry. Slowly and under new laws, the New Crobuzon authorities were reopening riverine trade. The barge-rangers were waiting to establish new runs. Cutter came back into New Crobuzon disguised in a coal-smeared overall, piloting a fat low-slung boat.

Around him the houses spread out from the wind of the river, tens then hundreds, and he heard their sounds and remembered them, the settling of architecture, and knew he was coming home. The bargeman he had bribed to crew him was eager for Cutter to leave. With the repeating cough of the engine they came past the tarry houses of Raven’s Gate, the khepri warren of Creekside, the houses disguised by mucal addenda, and under the old brick bridges of New Crobuzon, while the boat left a rainbow discharge on the water.

Airships went. They stalked on searchlight legs. A fat glare pinioned the boat then blinked off, twice.

He walked through the warehouses of Smog Bend, the bleached brick, the stained concrete. Past creosote, past bitumen and mouldered posters, past the dumps of building matter, powdered glass and stone, into streets once held by the Collective. Cutter walked past the lots where there had been meetings of residents voting noisily on everything. Now they were as they had been, little wildernesses of concrete-splitting bramble and cow-parsley, wildnesses for the insects. There were spirals on the walls. Rain was washing them away.

Days later and Cutter knew the new rules, knew how to avoid the militia who patrolled the streets and locked down Creekside and Murkside and above all Dog Fe

Cutter said nothing when he saw the squads emerge from broken buildings with men and women screaming their i

Uptown had its beauty. BilSantum Plaza, Perdido Street Station. It was as if there had been no war. The spirals were smears. Perdido Street Station loomed like a god over the city. Cutter looked up at its roofscape, at where he had been.

In the last days of the Collective there had been a desperate copy of the skyrail attack. A train heavy with explosives had set out from Saltpetre Station, accelerating toward Perdido Street Station with a dream of immolating the vast edifice. It would never have happened. The Collectivist who drove it on his suicide mission, brave with drink and the assuredness of death, had rammed the blockade at Sly Station and powered on toward Spit Bazaar, but the militia had detonated the train as it approached, tearing a hole in the stitching of arches that went the length of New Crobuzon. The Sud Line was severed and was being slowly rebuilt.

The posters on the kiosks, the newspapers, the wax proclamations that were free in the voxiterator booths told of the government’s triumphs: Tesh’s tribute payments, their war apologies, the rebirth of community. Hard, hopeful times, they said. There was word of new projects, expeditions across the continent. The promise of a new economy, of expansion. Cutter wandered. Creekside was a ruin. The khepri bodies left after the Quiller Massacre had been cleared, but there were stains still on some walls. In places the phlegm integuments exuded by home-grubs had been cracked and burnt, revealing the brick underneath.

Cutter wandered and watched the reconstruction. Throughout the centre of New Crobuzon were the holes torn by armaments, the thickets of concrete, mortar and broken marble, new raggedy passages linking alleys, paved with rubble. In Barrackham the militia tower’s tip was swathed in scaffolding like cuckoo-spit. The drooping severed skyrail was gone. It would be restrung when the Barrackham Tower stood again.

In Mog Hill, near enough the Collective’s old ground but just outside the militarised zone so not subject to martial law or curfew, Cutter found lodging. He gave his new name. Paid with the proceeds from his day-work, in areas he had not frequented in his life before.

New Crobuzon was wrecked. Its statues broken, districts stained and blistered by fire, whole streets become facades, the buildings eviscerated. Houses, churches, factories, foundries as hollow and brittle as old skulls. Wrecks floated in the rivers.

He knew how to become part of the whispering networks again, even broken as they were. Even now when no one spoke to anyone with trust, when citizens strove not to see each other’s eyes as they passed, he knew how. Even now when a quickly clenched fist risked being interpreted as handslang and the militia might be called or there might be a quick vigilante killing to save the area from renegade insurgents and the death squads they would bring. Cutter was careful and patient. Two weeks after his return he found Madeleina.

“It’s better now,” she said. “But in the first weeks, gods.

“Bodies by walls, every one of them ‘resisting,’ they said, while they were taken away. Resisting by tripping, or asking a moment’s rest, or spitting, resisting by not coming fast enough when they were told.

“Up by the Arrowhead Pits, in the foothills,” she said, “Camp Sutory. It’s where they keep the Collectivists. Thousands. No one knows how many. There’s an a

“Some of us escaped.”

She listed those she had known, and what had happened to them. Cutter recognised some of the names. He could not tell if Madeleina trusted him, or was past care.

“We need to tell what happened,” she said. “It’s what we have to do. But if we tell the truth, those that weren’t here will think we’re lying. Exaggerating. So… do we make it less bad than it was, to be believed? Does that make sense?” She was very tired. He made her tell him all the story, everything about the fall of the Collective.

When he found out how long ago it had been it would have been easy for him to say to himself, There was no one to fight for the Council, but he did not. He did not because they could not know what might have happened, because it had not been allowed to. They could not know what Judah’s intervention had done.

There were ten thousand rumours in New Crobuzon about the Iron Council.

Cutter went often to the slow-sculpture garden in Ludmead, to sit alone amid the art dedicated to the godling of patience. The gardens were ruined. The sculpted lawns and thickets were interrupted by huge sedimentary stones, each of them veined with layers and cracks, each carefully prepared: shafts drilled precisely, caustic agents dripped in, for a slight and so-slow dissolution of rock in exact planes, so that over years of weathering, slabs would fall in layers, coming off with the rain, and at very last taking their long-pla

He had always hated the sedateness of these gardens, but now that they were ruined he found them a comfort. Some Collectivist or sympathiser punks had climbed the wall weeks ago, before Dog Fe

He did not remember much of that time in the hills. The grip of Rahul. Holding him while-did he flail? Did he cry? He suspected that yes he had cried and flailed. He had been held till exhaustion dropped him.

He remembered A