Iron Council (14 page)

“These are hidden ways, shortcuts—lost paths,” said the monk. “Sometimes the Moment’ll let me take them. Sometimes.” The monk sounded tired. “I said I’d take you.”

Why so fast, monk?
Cutter thought.
You don’t have to travel like this. What’s this costing you, all these secrets?

So they sped up though they walked, and shucked their packs and scrambled at the same pace they ever had. The everyday uncanny of the monk’s trails took them at increasing speeds. They passed pillars of rock in the middle of trees, and rounded them to emerge in dry plateau. The woods were threadbaring; it was as if they trod through an old and thinning tapestry.

“Through . . .
here
I think,” Qurabin would say, and their compass needles yawed haywire as they crossed leagues. They went faster than horses.

Qurabin’s efforts, Cutter understood, were apostate. Qurabin was wrenching things from the Moment’s domain of lost and hidden things. Every day Qurabin sounded lessened.

“You want to disappear.” Cutter spoke it in a tiny voice. The monk was displaced, renegade, renounced by history and home.
You want to disappear. Every lost route you uncover, you lose something—something’s hidden from you. You’ve had enough. And this is how you’ll do it. To make it mean something.
Their journey was Qurabin’s protracted suicide.

“You know what the monk’s doing,” Cutter said to Judah. “We better hope Qurabin don’t be all hidden or lost before we get where we’re going.”

“It’s close,” said Judah. He smiled then, a look of such joy that Cutter could not help but smile back.

The land was deep in grasses. Kettled glacial till, sloughs and dustbeds intermitted the low slopes. There had been so many weeks of journey. They saw mesquite copses and ruins. With the wind, the wild crops moved like sea. The monk grew weaker, more hidden, but cajoled and led them past water, past animal herds, python-sized centipedes wrapped around trees.

One day they saw things leave a trail of pollen and dust and shake the grasses like whales in shallows. Borinatch, strider, the ungulate plains nomads. A family clan, young at the front, the queen behind. The striders stood much taller than a man. They careered by with their tottering gallop, their legs unbending and swinging like crutches.

One of the sows turned a friendly bestial face and saw them, waved as she thundered past. Borinatch hands worked in strange ways. It looked as if her limb appeared and disappeared.

The travellers had become a tough crew. Their muscles were bunched; they were expert shots. Pomeroy’s cuts had stained inside, so he wore splendid dark scars. Elsie fastened a bandana about her wild hair. The men’s beards were long, their shag tied back with leather: only Drogon defied this, shaving dry every few days. They husbanded their dwindling bullets, carried fire-hard spears. They looked, Cutter thought, like adventurers, the continent’s merce-nary freebooters.

We ain’t though. There’s a damn
reason
for all our travels.

“It must be nearly Sinn, ain’t it?” he said. “Or is it already? I’ve lost track.” They tried to work through the weeks on their fingers.

One night Judah made four little figures from the earth, and with muttered cantrips he had them dance while his companions clapped to give them music. When they were done he had them bow; then they fell back into earth.

He said: “I want to tell you all that I’m grateful. I want you to know that.” They drank a toast in water. “I want to tell you . . . we’ve been going so long, it’s like the journeying’s what it’s for. But that’s not so.

“I don’t even know for sure if you believe in the Iron Council.” He smiled. “I think you do. But maybe for some of you it isn’t even about that anymore. I think you’re here because of the time in the claphouse, Elsie,” he said, and she met his eyes and nodded. “I know why you’re here,” he said to Cutter.

“Even you, maybe, Drogon . . . A stravager like you . . . Myths and hopes are your currency, right? That’s what you trade in; that’s what keeps horse-tramps moving. Are you here because you think Iron Council’s like the Marzipan Palace? Are you looking for a heaven?”

“It’s not why
I’m
here, Judah Low,” said Pomeroy. Judah smiled. “You mean the most to me, Judah, I’d die for you, but I’d not die
now.
Not with what’s happening in New Crobuzon. There’s too much at stake. I’m here because of what you say’s coming for the Council. And because I think you can stop it. That’s why I’m here.”

Judah nodded, and sighed. “That’s what I want to say. This is greater than any of us. Iron Council . . .” He was silent for very long. “It’s tough, because that’s how it’s had to be. But it’s the Council. It’s Iron Council. And the governors of New Crobuzon—I don’t know how—they’ve found it. My contact, my erstwhile friend, he had every reason not to tell me but he did, thank Jabber. They’ve found it, after all this time. Long enough that plenty of citizens aren’t sure it ever existed, and thousands more think it’s long gone.

“Chaverim . . . friends . . . We’re going to save Iron Council.”

The next day Qurabin had a long conversation with the Moment. The unfindable monk cried, supplicated, made a desolate sound.

At last Cutter spoke. “Monk,” he said. “Monk, what happened? Are you there? Are you gone?”

“It’s not hidden anymore,” Qurabin said in a voice that was deadened. “I know where to find it. But it cost . . . I lost my own language.”

Qurabin had been left only with Ragamoll, the brash infant tongue of the travellers.

“I remember my mother,” Qurabin said quietly. “I remember what she whispered to me. But I don’t know what it means.” There was no horror in the voice. Only a passionless assent. “One thing is lost, another found. I know where to go.”

They went uncanny routes. The sky’s colour fluxed.

It was a Chainday when the plain fell away and they realised they had been rising a long time; the ground had angled and they walked a hackberried butte in thin air. Before them was a basin in red laterite, a canyon that widened into land too vast to be a valley, where the continent had shrugged itself apart. From behind one long stone fin, black smoke was spoiling the air.

Judah stood at the edge of the cliff and looked down at the fumes that did not come from grassfires and howled. A noise of such pure feral joy it was as if he was thrown back through history, as if no human, no sentient thing, should feel such absolute emotion. Judah bayed.

He did not slow. He descended fast and did not wait for his companions but headed off along faint foot-lines in the prairie. Cutter caught him up but did not try to speak. Thick light like syrup went across the sierra.

Someone shouted at them and they were taunted by echoes. A query, a command in several different languages, in rapid change. And then their own. Ragamoll, nearly two thousand miles from home. Cutter gasped. Three figures stood from some hide.

“Hold it, hold it,” one shouted. “Speak Ragamoll?”

Cutter showed he was not holding his weapons. He nodded his head in strange delight. The young man spoke with a hybrid accent, something else shaping his phonemes beside the familiar snarl of the south city, of Dog Fenn, of backstreet New Crobuzon.

Judah was running toward the three: a woman, and a man, and a gnarled cactus. The sun was going down behind them, so they were shadowed, and Cutter could see them only as cutouts. Stumbling toward them his arms upraised, Judah must be drenched
in late-day light as they saw him, awash with it, creasing his face against it, ambered. Judah was laughing and shouting.

“Yes, yes, yes, we speak Ragamoll!” he said. “Yes, we’re of your party! Sisters! Sisters!” He gave that cry again and was so clearly no threat, so obviously in a delirium of warmth and relief that the human guards stepped forward and opened their arms to him, to receive him as a guest.
“Sisters!”
he said. “I’m back, I’m
home,
it’s me.
Long live Iron Council!
Gods and Jabber and, and, and in Uzman’s name . . .” They started at that. Judah embraced them one by one, and then he turned, his eyes streaming, and smiled without mediation, without face, a smile Cutter had never seen him wear.

“We’re here,” Judah said. “Long live, long live. We’re here.”

anamnesis

THE PERPETUAL TRAIN

With each step water and the roots of waterweeds snag him. It is years ago and Judah Low is young and in the wetlands.

—Again, he says. That is all. There is no
please
and no need for it. This language is deep-structured with courtesy. To be rude takes effortful and irregular declensions.

—Again, he says and the stiltspear child shows him what it has made. Its eyebrows flex in what he knows to be a smile and it opens its hand and a stiltspear toy made of mud and waterlilies stands between its fingers. The child pinches it to shape and sings to it in a tiny wordless trilling, and makes it move. The figurine has only one motion, flexing and unflexing its stem legs. It does it several times before bursting.

They stand at the edges of wide space edged with gnarly treelife and intricately fronded byways, random canals. Boughs hide passages, and vegetation is so thick and so heavy, so saturated with the water of the swamp it is glutinous, it is like a viscid liquid dripping from the branches and briefly coagulates in the shape of leaves.

The swamp mimics all landscapes. It opens into meadows and it can be forest. There are places where mud solidifies enough to pile into swamp-mountains. Tunnels below the rootstuff, floored in water, pitch and labyrinth. There are dead places where bleached trees jut from rank water. Tribes of mosquito and blackfly come to Judah and bleed him terribly.

To Judah the fen air is not oppressive. It is like a caul. In the months he has lived there Judah has learnt to feel cosseted by it. For all his bites gone septic and his diarrhoea, he loves the swamp. He looks up through clouds thin as watered milk, to a late sun. He feels himself greened, mildewed and inhabited by infusoria, a host, a landscape as well as a life.

The child dips its hand with the grace of its species. Its fingers are radial from its little palm, a star. It clenches in its way: hinges its tapered digits like the petals of a closing flower, into a point. Nails concatenate, its hand become a spearhead.

The stiltspear young walks quadruped from Judah Low. It turns its head on a neck that is all sinews and wordlessly queries whether he will come, and he does, with the slushing clumsiness that the stiltspear indulge as if he is neonate.

When the child walks, its limbs precisely pierce the water. Judah Low seems to drag the swamp with him and scar it with a wide wake. He is lucky the dams and sires of this stiltspear piglet let him go with it, as every moment he walks he attracts attentions it would be better to avoid. The black caiman and constrictors must hear his passage as the thrashes of something wounded.

The stiltspear commune have tolerated and even welcomed him because of the time he saved two youngsters from some rearing glade predator. It came for him, he still believes, but veered for the little duo who when it rose hissing and slick with bog had frozen and whose camouflage glands had secreted thaumaturgons such that they might have been tree-stumps not silent children, but the creature had been too close to be dissuaded.

But Judah had shouted and banged together his specimen pot and cudgel, shockingly alien in the dim quiet of the bayou. He could not have frightened the thing—a towering amalgam of sea lion and jaguar and salamander with finned flanges that could have broken his skull—but he confused it. It had burrowed below the waterweed.

Since then, since the pair he saved had run home and sang the story in a quickly constructed cavatina to stress its truth, Judah has been tolerated.

The stiltspear do not often speak. Days can pass.

Their commune has no name. Its hutlets rise from the reeds and water and are conjoined with walkways and slung with hammocks, and other rooms are sunk in pits in the sodden ground. Insects the size of Judah’s fist amble through the air, purring like big stupid cats. The stiltspear will skewer and eat them.

Stiltspears’ coats of oily down bead with swamp muck. They move like wading birds. They are like birds, and like scrawny cats, with unmoving, near-unfeatured faces.

Sires sing worshipful lays if they are red sires and build tools and reed-houses and tend the mangrove farms if they are tan sires. The dams hunt, one leg at a time raising so slow they have dried
by the time the spread-out claws emerge, so no drips trouble the surface as the asterisk of fingers come together into a stiletto that poises over its reflection. Until some fat fish or frog passes and everything is still and the hand lances back into the water and is instantly withdrawn, the fingers opened, the game spiked on the stiltspear’s wrist, a prey bracelet dripping blood.

Between houses, stiltspear young play with mud-made golems as children in New Crobuzon play marbles and shove-stiver. Judah makes notes, takes heliotypes. He is no xenologist. He does not know how to decide what is important. All these charms—the stiltspears’ instinct camouflage, their golems, their herbalist physic, their unsticking of moments—he wants to investigate.