Iron Council (16 page)

After that kill the stiltspear become prey.

The red sires unwrap their coddled god and recarve him as a murder spirit. They revive a death-cult. Chosen dams and tan sires dip their spear-hands in poisons that will kill with a tiny cut and will seep through their skins over a day and a night and kill them too, so they have no choice but to be suicide berserkers, against the incoming company.

Judah sees the corpses of New Crobuzon men punctured by stiltspear hands, bloated with toxin, bobbing in cul-de-sacs of greenery. If he is found with the stiltspear he will be a race-traitor, a city-traitor, and will be put to a slow, unsanctioned but approved death. Stiltspear braves ambush the men of the roadway.

They kill humans and some cactacae in threes and fours. There is a reward on each pair of stiltspear hands. Within days there are newcomers in the swamp, bloodprice hunters. They dress in apocalypse rags in defiance of all societies, renegades of a hundred
cultures. Judah sees them through the trees.

Bounty scum from Cobsea, and from Khadoh, and pirate
cactacae from Dreer Samher. There are vodyanoi, the dregs of Gharcheltist and New Crobuzon. A woman seven feet tall fights with two flails and hauls off many stiltspear dead. There are rumours of a gessin in his armour. A witch from the Firewater Straits snares many pairs of hands, makes a grotesque bouquet of them, sleeping a hunt-sleep to conjure dreamdevils that prey upon the camp.

—Go deep, Judah says again, and those still alive in the township are listening.

They head south. Red-eyes tells Judah they will find shelter among the new mongrel tribe of runaways from all the stiltspear nations.

—I will go soon, Judah tells him. Red-eyes nods, another learned gesture.

There are no children left in the township to challenge with little golems. There are only adults whose grace is now martial, who count kills and set traps. The grinding of stone and gears is unending as the works approach.

One day Judah rises and gathers all he has—notes, specimens, heliotypes and drawings—and walks out of the village, through water maze to the new industrial zone. He is unstuck. The moment has passed him.

There is a foreman at the edge of a new clearing, shouting at his crews. Judah stares. They are crude and small and hubristic, but they are reshaping the land.

The foreman nods at Judah as he passes, and tells him, —This ain’t no fuckin’ godsdamned fuckin’ lake this piece of shit is a devil. He gobs into the black water. —Eats and eats every godspitting ton of shite we put in it. It don’t have no bottom.

Axemen and flagmen, chainmen, hunters, engineers cutting trenches; cactus-people, vodyanoi, men and Remade. They work with spades and saws, picks, barrows. The swamp is thinning.

Man after man, Remade, cactus, comes with cart full of gypsum and gravelled earth and tips it from the new quay. A steam shovel spastically drops its loads. Ballast is swallowed. Waterweed and the pelage of leaves and dust is gone, the muskeg’s camouflage is defeated, its water uncovered in a spreading ring. Barrow after barrow is sucked down with a throat noise.

—See? See? the foreman says. —This godsdamned thing’s deeper than a whore’s cunt.

This was quagmire once, where mud would wrestle you in as vigorous as the constrictors. Stone hauled from the foothills rises in blocks, lapped by the thick water. They are bulwarks that hold in gravel and earth. Dry land is cut out. A road of matter has been excised, a swath of tamaracks, mangroves, runt grasses and the de-bris of spatterdock. It is a ribbon of flattened earth a score of yards wide and endlessly long, sweeping backward through wet thickets, purged of trees, tended by haulers and hewers as far as Judah can see.

There is a stretched-out tent-town. Carts are carried by mules Remade to swamp things, amphibian. Judah walks the raised road. Stumps stubble the ground, and beyond them the fingers of the swamp move. Pumps howl and drain the waterways, make them mudflats, and then these mudflats become beds for new stones. There are gangs of cactus-people, their muscles moving hugely beneath spined skins.

And there are many Remade. They do not look at the whole men, free workers, the aristocracy of this labour.

The Remade are always various. All Judah’s life. Their bodies made impossible. On the roadbed there is a man whose front pullulates with scrawny arms, each from a corpse or an amputation. Chained to him a taller man, his face stoic, a fox stitched embedded in his chest from where it snarls and bites at him in permanent
terror.

Here a crawling man spiral-shelled in iron and venting smoke. Here a woman working, because there are women among the Remade, a woman become a guttered pillar, her organic parts like afterthoughts. A man—or is it a woman?—whose flesh moves with tides, with eructations like an octopus. People with their faces relocated, bodies made of iron and rubber cables, and steam-engine arms, and animal arms, and arms that are body-length pistons on which the Remade walk, their legs replaced with monkey’s paws so they reach out from below their own waists.

The Remade haul, their overseers watching and sometimes whipping. The roadbed goes back forever through the trees.

—My stiltspear friend, the old man says. He welcomes Judah.

—My stiltspear friend, it’s good to see you. Are you come back to us? Judah nods. —I’m glad, son. It’s best. How are your clan?

Judah looks up coldly but he sees no crowing. The question is not a provocation. —Gone, Judah says. He feels his failure.

The man nods and purses his lips. —And will you show us their homestead? he says. —I want to take it down. It’ll be unacceptable if there’s a place for them to come back to. There’ll be a town here, you know. Yes there will. We sit on the subsoil of Junctiontown or Forktown or Palus Trifork, I’ve not yet decided. And I could make the stiltspear village a museum, so a half-day’s hike from the Plaza di Vapor visitors could go to see it. But I’m of a mind to raze it. So will you show me where it is?

If it is left there will be stiltspear who will want to return; children will try to find their old playgrounds.

—I’ll show you.

—Good lad. I understand and I admire you. You’ve come through something and I respect that. Did you find what you wanted? I remember when first we spoke. When I hired you, you
remember. I wanted something from you but I always thought
you wanted something from the swamp, or the stiltspear. Did you find it?

—Yes. I did.

The old man smiles and holds out his hand, and Judah gives him the sheafs of maps, of notations, of fen-lore. The old man does not say how late the information is. He flicks through it but does not say how poor it is, how inadequately Judah has kept his part of the wage-bargain. Another man comes in and speaks rapidly about a dispute, a failing deadline. The old man nods.

—We have so many problems, he says. —The foremen are angry with the city’s magisters. They have no sense of what we’re doing; they send us Remade with no capabilities. Our pilings
are breaking. Our retaining walls buckle, our trestles collapse. He smiles. —None of this surprises me.

—Welcome back, he says. —Now, are you on my payroll? Will you go back to New Crobuzon? Or stay? We’ll speak. I have to go. We’ve been so long here, with the flat behind us, the rust-eaters have caught us up. They’ve reached the trees.

Yes, there they are. Only a short time along the roadbed, which is flatter and more finished the farther back Judah goes. It has a beauty, this trained land. An oddity, this road at which the swamp claws.

A corner and a new workforce is there. Cosseted by diminished trees, like the crew that flattens the fenland but moving with unique rhythm, a syncopation of construction.

A crowd unfolds toward him. There is a rapid thudding as sleepers are dropped and then a sound like something being sliced as girders unroll from a flatcar, crews Remade and whole picking them up with tongs, a baffling dainty motion, letting them down as sledge-wielding brawnies step in and timed as perfectly as an orchestra hammer the ties and rails. Behind them all something huge and noisy vents and watches their efforts, and edges constantly forward. A train, deep among the mangroves.

It was months earlier that he first met the old man. Weather Wrightby. Crazyweather, Iron Wright. In the offices of TRT, at the recruitment meetings, with all the other young men in starch and braces.

University boys, clerks’ sons, the adventurous rich and
aspirational young men like Judah, Dog Fenn and Chimer
apprentices bored by their work, fired by children’s stories and travelogues.

—I have wanted this for decades, Wrightby said. He was compelling. The recruits were respectful of this man nearly three times their age. His money did not diminish him. —Twice I went west finding routes. Twice, sadly, I had to come home. There’s a crossing that’s still to be done. That’s the big task. This that we do now is only a start. A little tinkering southerly.

A thousand miles of track. Through rottenstone, forests and bog. Judah was cowed by Wrightby’s fervour. This undertaking is so vast it could bankrupt even such a wealth as his.

Wrightby had felt him, sounded his chest like a doctor. Handed out commissions, put teams together. —You can report to us from the swamps, boy. It’ll be tough terrain. We need to know what to expect.

That is how Judah got here.

The first journey from New Crobuzon. A team: engineers, gendarmes, scholars and rugged scouts who had looked at long-haired Judah with friendly condescension. They started two, three miles west of New Crobuzon, under heavy guard. A flatbed town carved out of the land, a range of buffers, a fan of rails.

Warehouses big enough to hold ships, mountains of gravel, planks from stripcutting Rudewood. A mob of humans and cactacae; khepri, their scarab heads fidgetsome; vodyanoi in the canals that linked to the city, crewing open-bottomed barges; rarer races. A garden of different limbs. Cheap deals, contracts, assignations. The Remade were corralled, shovelled like meat animals onto barred trucks. And on into the empty land, skirting the edges of the forest through cuts blasted with blackpowder, went the railroad.

It was late spring. Dirigibles puttered overhead, sweep-
surveying the landscape, tracking the iron way. At the train window Judah watched the wilderness.

The train was full with recruits: labourers on wood benches, the prison-trucks of the Remade. Judah sat with other surveyors. He listened to the pistons. The squat, simple trains within New Crobuzon were always accelerating or slowing, only ever jerking between stations. There was no time for them to pick up pace, to maintain it and create this new sound, this utterly new beat of a speeding train.

They passed a village: an odd and ugly sight. Sidings slid toward it, and Judah could see the original wattle-and-daub dwellings alongside rapidly thrown-up wood houses. It must have trebled in size within a year.

—Frenzy, said one man. —Can’t last. They’ll be crying within two years. Every piece-of-shit town we pass gives the railroad money, or some syndicate from New Crobuzon comes down, takes it over, pays Wrightby’s railroad so’s they get the damn rails. They can’t all make it. Some towns are going to die.

—Or be killed, another said, and they laughed. —Before we even broke ground they started building. There’s a township to
the west, Salve, built by men from Wrightby’s own Transcontinental Railroad Trust, if you please. They drew up the plans for this
Myrshock-Cobsea route with Iron Wright hisself, got their town ready for him. From nothing. A halfway place before the swamp junction.

—Only there was some shenanigans, Jabber knows what, and Iron Wright isn’t talking to them. So now we’ll be skirting away and no iron road’s coming to Salve. The men laughed. —Still there. Still modern. Cold-dead empty. The youngest ghost-town in Rohagi.

Judah imagined music halls, a bathhouse, visited only by dust, eaten by creepers.

They stopped at a newly bloated township, and hawkers rushed for the train. They held up cheap food, cheap clothes, hand-printed gazetteers promising a bestiary and maps of the newly opening lands. They sold rail-end papers—Judah bought one, a roughly inked sheet
The Wheelhouse,
thick with errors in spelling and grammar. It was full of workers’ complaints, contumely about the failings of the Remade, scatology and hand-drawn pornography.

The rails angled southwest by churned mud and rubbish where a temporary town had been dismantled, on to rocks and grasslands. Once the train scaled a ravine on a new trestled bridge that swayed under them.

They switchbacked up inclines where they had to but mostly the train went straight—deviations were failures. Where stone reared it was split, become scree-edged furrows stained by smoke. To the west, mountains overlooked them. The Bezhek Peaks, girdled in shadow. When the train began to slow again, it was for the end of the line.

There were people in those wilds. Many women, in hill-dirted petticoats. Some carried children. Suddenly they were hundreds, in a tent city close to the bright rails. Streetwalkers bizarrely displaced to the desolate landscape.

The sun lowered and there were fires. Judah thought of the people left behind, the dead, diseased and killed, the children abandoned or smothered, buried by the line. They slowed past a herd of cattle, mongrel, stringy and subtly Remade, a grex breed. The
box capra
chew and live on what poor food there is, their cross-slit eyes betraying goat affinities. At last, ahead of the whoretown and the cattle, was the perpetual train.

Judah had walked its length, skirting the crews. It was a rolling-stock town, an industrial citylet that crawled. At the end of a
no-man’s-land of empty rails, he saw the work. New Crobuzon reaching so far. The leviathan unfolding of metal, the greatest city in Bas-Lag rolling out its new iron tongue, licking at the cities across the plains.

Then there were days of trekking beyond the edge of iron. Judah’s party passed the carts of the tie-layers. Crews cut down copses, treated and shaped the slabs, piled them in mounds and hauled them. Beyond the ties, the roadbed was bare rock-shards. Walking the sleepers it had seemed a ladder across the earth: now it was a road. It furrowed through high land and rose above low. They were a long way behind the graders.