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The stronger the somaturge, the greater the mass they can control. Soon they are setting upper limits to weight. Nothing heavier than a large dog can fight. Judah wonders how much he could control if he chose.
As organisers, bookie and top golemachist, Pe
Every time his golems move, Judah feels his co
It is a sweet winter. Judah takes A
They walk in the frost-glazed shopping streets of The Crow, which are strung with ropes of lights and winter flowers. They drink hot chocolate mulled with rum. A
Good-bye, Judah thinks, and smiles back.
When snow comes, for a few hours it effaces all the edges of architecture: the tight-coiled cornices of old churches, dark stone buttresses and all the countless poured and moulded concrete and brick terraces, and workers’ cottages too mean or crude to have any style at all. They become undulations below snow; then they are themselves again, as they sweat off sleet.
Judah dresses in the exaggerated clobber of a street-success. When he walks, the Dog Fe
A
– … a brutal winter, he reads from The Quarrel. - Those men still in the swamp spend much of their time acurse at the cold, but they have at least the advantage that the stiltspear, perfidious wetland savages, have retreated and no longer harry them. Messages from the south suggest construction crews from Myrshock are, despite less punitive weather, making poor progress…
– What is Myrshock? A
He makes her a map. -Three branches, he says, drawing the upside down and slanting Y. -New Crobuzon. Myrshock on the coast of the Meagre Sea. Cobsea in the plains. A track out from each, meeting in the swamps. Five hundred miles down from New Crobuzon, half as much again to each of the others.
Judah disguises his own fascination with the rails as indulging A
The road has not yet forked. Reports tell of brief and costly strikes. Some writers argue that the TRT gendarmerie is defunct, unable to control its workforce or subdue the little principalities it comes to. The Mayor must end the subleasing of authority, they say. It is time for New Crobuzon’s militia to police the tracks. No one thinks this will happen. The government is against it.
– The strikers complain of the weather, Judah reads. -They strike against the chill. What would they have the TRT do? Does not the whole of the workforce, the overseers, the Remade, Wrightby himself, feel the same cold?
– No, says A
Judah looks at her. She is eating a sugared plum.
She shrugs. -No, they don’t.
Judah studies. With Pe
– … what we do is an intervention, Pe
Judah thinks of the stiltspear, and of the railroad. He still breathes his stiltspear whisper when he makes his golems move. Increasingly he understands this science. It obsesses him.
They fail to pay the right officer, and the golem-wrestling hall is raided. It is not hard for the masked militia to find among the crowd shazbah and very-tea, and even, they say, dreamshit. The organisers give money where they have to, and while Pe
Golemetry is interruption. Golemetry is matter made to view itself anew, given a command that organises it, a task. How to make the field in his absence? How to prepare and make it wait?
He buys batteries, switches and wires, he buys timers, he tries to think. The journals are reporting accounting wrongs at the TRT. Someone is insinuating scandal.
It is days since Judah has seen A
She has liked New Crobuzon, has looked on it with passion and interest, but for her all its mass and history-its accreted stones and struggle-could only ever be an adjunct to the iron road. It is the rails that are A
A
The golem fights bore him. Pe
Judah knows his moment has gone, and that Pe
For some weeks Pe
In the markets full of old and stolen books he asks for volumes on golems. He spends many shekels on useless crap and some on great works with which he struggles.
What is it I’ve done? he thinks. He does not understand his own skills at all. I made a golem from gas. Can I make a golem from even less solid things? Golemetry’s an argument, an intervention, so will I intervene and make a golem in darkness or in death, in elyctricity, in sound, in friction, in ideas or hopes?