Iron Council

Shanks is shouting to A

Uzman and Shanks are shouting at her but she is walking on into the no-man’s-land by the train. Only Judah’s golem goes with her. The tower’s guns swivel toward her. Inexpertly she brings up the flintlock. She stands with the oily dirt man, the two of them alone.

– No deal with you bastards, she shouts, and pulls the trigger, though bullets ca

Everyone drops but A

– No no no, the captain is shouting. -I didn’t-but the Remade will not wait now. They roar. Someone pulls A

There is a little war. -What are you doing? Shanks screams at A

Remade attack the tower with guns, crude bombards and their swing-hammer limbs. They fire stone slabs and track-ends that make the tower ring. A man beside Judah, whose chin wears a fringe of crabs’ pincers, dies suddenly from gendarme shot. Judah has his golem move slowly around the belfry, disaggregating in bullet-slugs of its earth flesh.

He does not hear the shot from the heavy gun above. An overturned curricle is at one moment a cart with men and women leaning between its spokes and then is an eruption, a fire expansion of burnt knife-edged wood and blood uncoiling above a cavity bleeding smoke. Judah blinks. He sees detritus. He sees that the dark thing acrawl toward him leaving a mollusc trail is a woman, her skin blacked and redded, ink craquelure on meat. He wonders that she does not make a sound as her hair burns then knows he ca

It turns. The rebel Remade, prostitutes, and those of the free who are with them run to escape its range.

Judah stands. Slow. Steps up, and makes his golem move. The gun motors with unoiled imprecision. The golem presses its filthy self against the freightcar. It reaches up, echoing and exaggerating Judah’s little motions, pulls itself up, leaving a smear of its corpus.

The towertop gun fires again. It stabs oily smoke, and the railroad cut and the people on it, yards away, bloom. The golem ascends the tower, stamping on buttresses, on gutters. It uses the very guns that gendarmes angle down at it as handles and steps. It disregards itself, as no sane or sentient thing could, sheds itself in scabs and diminishes as it rises, but it is near the top now, weakened with sticks and railway spikes protruding from its gravel-grease skin, its very legs falling from it to land formless as excrement. The gun swivels and Judah has the golem probe its arm deep into the barrel.

It reaches to its shoulder. The gun is blocked by hex-bound golem dirt. It fires and there is a strange motion, a shuddering backward. The barrel splays in strips, the golem is a rain of filth. Ignited air and smoke fill out, the tower rocks, its tip glows and is punched brutally open, its roof unclenches into metal fingers.

Rank billows plume in a great cough, and a dead man falls from the shatter. The corpse of the gun sways. Judah is spattered with his golem’s remnants. The rebels are cheering. He ca

The renegades take the train. The gendarmes throw out their guns and come out bloody, eyes seared and dripping.

– No, no, no, Uzman shouts. He is eating coal, and his biceps are swelling. With Shanks and with A

– What now? Everywhere Judah goes he hears it.

It is the Remades’ train. They make flags for their new sudden country and wave them from the burst guntower. No one sleeps that night. The tu

– Send word back for gods’ sake, Thick Shanks says. -We have to make links, he says, and Uzman nods. Around them are other leaders of the sudden mutiny. They make their points in untrained passionate language. They decide things.

A

They choose messengers. Riders. A Remade sutured to steam-and-piston legs like spread-out fingers that run with tremendous shuddering up slopes of rock, his man-torso aflail like an unwilling passenger. Another, a muscled man made a strange six-limbed thing: he is joined below his abdomen to the neck of a great bipedal lizard, one of those the badland nomads half-tame to ride. He stands high on two back-bent legs before a stiff tail, clawed forearms just below his human skin. He has been a scout for months, ridden by a gendarme with a gun to his back.

– Go, says Uzman. -Stay by the tracks. Out of sight. Get to the towns. Get to the workcamps, get to Junctiontown. And Jabber and fuck, get to New Crobuzon. Tell them. Tell the new guilds. Tell them we need help. Have them come. If they support us, down tools for us, we can win this. Remade and free-bring them all.

– Uzman, they say and nod, as if his name itself is an affirmative.

The horse riders go in wheels of dust, the steam-insect man in an instant of scuttling speed. The gnarled and reptile-paced man accelerates over shreds of heather by the roadbed. Birds and other things that fly watch them. The ones that are not birds veer with the zigzag spasms of fish in the sea.

The prostitutes let some men come to them in strict conditions, unarmed, guard-women nearby. Since Uzman and A

– New Crobuzon’s full of it, A

Remade fucking. What happens when someone gets the punishment factory, what, always his wife leave him?

– Supposed to. It ain’t decorum.

– They doing it all over the city, like they doing cross-sex, khepri, human, vods.

– True, Judah says. -But you ain’t supposed to admit it. These women… your women… they’re letting us see.

She looks to the moon. She lets the moon go over her. She watches its last light over the skeletal bridge. -City guilds can’t help us here, she says. -This is new.

Torches move on the girders below them. The bridge builders have returned to work, without overseers.

– What did you tell them? says Judah.

– The truth, says A

Sunup, after three days, the steam-spider Remade returns. He sucks up water before he can speak.

– They’re coming, he says. -Gendarmes. Hundreds. In a new train. A commandeered passenger train, he tells them, emptied of the sightseers and chancers come to explore the continent’s interior.