Iron Council

Most of the freeandwhole have run. Some are members of this new town, resentful of the Remade suddenly their equals but held by a deep query, by What will happen? They are part of this train-assembly, a gathering. There are some as committed as the Remade, part of the sabotage crews who go back to tear up the tracks behind them. Those drivers, firemen and brakers left teach the Remade.

They reverse through landscape they have altered. It was never stable, afflicted with life in hex tides. They go over places where the ground, when they cut it, was stone and that is now dappled lizard’s skin, bleeding milklike blood where rails are spiked. There are places where the earth has become like the cover of a book, and shards of paper spurt from the spike-wounds. They dismantle the rails to block their pursuers.

A reversed industry. They turn their expertise to the road’s dismantling, levering up spikes, shouldering rails and ties piles, scattering the stones. They plough up the roadbed and return home.

But-They took the barricade down, the scouts soon come and tell them. -They brought rails and sleepers. They’re building the track again. Within three days the gendarmes will reach the camp.

There are lights in the tu

– What did you do? Judah says.

– We’re finishing the tu

Her influence is spreading. A

The last yards of rock are being ground through in the dark wet mountain. Judah looks down at the bridge. The new work is something laughable, a quick flimsy lattice of metal and wood thrown up beyond the stumps of proper construction. It is ersatz; it is only just bridge.

Judah is one of a conclave-it surprises him-struggling for strategy. They meet in the hills: Shaun, Uzman, A

Every night in the gaslamps the workers gather. First it was convivial-liquor, dice and liaisons-but as the gendarmes come closer, and as Uzman debates strategy in the overlooking ground, the parties change. The men of the train name each other brother.

A

– You ain’t a worker on this road, a man says. -You ain’t nothing but a mountain whore. This ain’t your damn congress, it’s ours.

A

– not to speak. she says. -If I am not to speak who has the right?-What but on us? What but on the backs of me and mine have we built these rails? We are become history. There’s no backward now. No way back. You know what we have to do. Where we should go.

When she is done no one can speak for seconds, until someone mutters respect.

– Brothers, let’s vote.

Uzman tells them that whichever way they see it, whatever they claim to themselves, A

– Ain’t ru

– It’s ru

– It’s something new. We’re something new, she says, and Uzman shakes his head.

– This is ru

They unbolt the guntower and guide the train into the tu

In the heat of the morning the sound of other hammers and steam comes. The gendarmes’ train. They see smoke over the heat-dead trees.

The workers gather in the tu

Uzman, the grassroots general, gives orders they choose to obey. A hundreds-strong army of Remade and the freeanole now committed: those few clerks, scientists and bureaucrats who have not run; weak geoempaths; a few others-the camp followers, the mad and unemployable, and the prostitutes whose exhaustion started this. They come out into the night, ready. The train hides in the hole in the hill.

It is cool before dawn. The gendarmes come over ridges and around the bend. They come on foot, in plated carts pulled by Remade horses, in single-person aerostats, balloons above them and propellers on their back. They career through the air, and bear down on the track-layers’ hides.

They drop grenades. It is astounding. The train people are shrieking. They ca

Those with guns fire. One, two gendarmes snap and bleed out of the sky, haul their strange aircraft out of range, or loll in death in their harnesses, flying or coming down at random. But they keep coming. They roast the air with firethrowers.

– Crush them, Uzman urges, and his troops roll down logs and boulders as the gendarmes regroup and fire arbalests. Thaumaturges on either side make the air oscillate, make patches of grey swim up from nothing to stain the real, send arrows of energy spitting like water in fat that hit and do strange things. It is a chaos of fighting. A constant coughing of shot and screams, and gendarmes fall, but the strikers do in many greater numbers.

There are moments. A troupe of cactacae step forward and only wince as bullets break their skins. They terrorise the gendarmes, who run before the huge flora, but though the officers have no rivebows they have caustics that scorch the cactus skin.

– We’re rabble, Uzman says, and looks in despair. A

Judah has made a golem. He sends it out toward the gendarmes. It is a thing made of the railway itself. It is made of handcars, the odds of rails and ties. Its hands are gears. It wears a grill for teeth. Its eyes are something of glass.

The golem walks out of the tu

As it goes, the fighting seems to quiet. The ugly and incompetent warfare pauses. The golem passes the dead. Only the railway thing seems to move.

And then it stops walking, and Judah shudders in shock because he has not told it to. A new cart comes, carrying an older man and protectors. The man halloos them kindly. Weather Wrightby.

One man beside Weather wears charms. A thaumaturge. He stares at the golem and moves his hands.

Is it you who stopped it? Judah ca

Weather Wrightby stands amid the fighting. Of course he must be cosseted in hexes to turn bullets, but it is a powerful thing to see. He talks to the hills. The golem stands yards from him, as if facing him in a gunfight, and Weather Wrightby talks to it, too, as if he is talking to the railroad.

– Men, men, he shouts. He pats the air. Slowly his gendarmes lower guns. -What are you doing? he says. -We know what’s happening here. We don’t need all this. Who ordered firing on these men? Who ordered this?

– We must fix this, he says. -This mess. It’s money, they tell me. And it’s the harshness of the overseers. He lifts a sack from the cart. -Money, he says. -We have payment for those free and whole still here. It’s time you all were paid. It’s been too long, and I’m sorry for that. I can’t control the flows of cash, but I’ve done all I can to bring you what’s yours.

Judah says nothing. He makes the golem move its head, a little piece of theatre.