Iron Council (50 page)

The old rails shone back moonlight. At the edge of their vision, in the east, was a darker dark: Rudewood, closing. The lights of the train and its cooking fires shed tiny auras.

“Well?” Ann-Hari said.

“Well?”

“Yes.”

“What will you do?”

“What would
you
do?”

“I’d turn
away,
for Jabber’s sake. I’d turn and go south on the rails, not north.”

“Into the swamp?”

“For a start. If that’s what it takes to get away. To
live,
good gods, Ann-Hari. To live. They’re
waiting.
Tomorrow, maybe the next day, they’re
there.
”

“Are they? So?”

Cutter shouted. Right into the night. “ ‘So?’ Are you insane? Haven’t you
listened
to me? And what do you mean ‘Are they?’?” Abruptly he stopped. They watched each other. “You don’t believe me.”

“I don’t know.”

“You think I’m lying.”

“Now now,” she said. “Come. You’re a good friend to the Council, Cutter, we know—”

“Oh my good gods, you think I’m
lying.
So what does that mean? You think, my gods, you think
I
broke the godsdamned mirrors?”

“Cutter, now.”

“You
do.
”

“
Cutter.
You didn’t break the mirrors. I know that.”

“So what, you think I’m lying about Drogon?”

“You never wanted us to come back, Cutter. You never wanted us here. And now you tell me the militia are waiting. How do you know Drogon or this man weren’t lying? They know what you think; they know what to tell you. Maybe they want us to fear and fail.”

Cutter stopped up short. Could Weather Wrightby be trying to frighten them away?

Perhaps the Collective had won. The refugees in the stony lands beyond the city were all wrong, and the Collective was establishing new democracy, had ended the suffrage lottery, had disarmed the militia and armed the populace. And there were statues to those fallen. Parliament was being rebuilt. And there were no militia pods, the clouds had no unmarked dirigibles in them, the air was full only of wyrmen, of balloons and bunting. Perhaps Weather Wrightby wanted them not to join that new New Crobuzon.

No.
Cutter knew. He knew the truth. That was not how it was. He shook his head.

“You have to tell the Councillors,” he said.

“What do you want me to tell?” Ann-Hari said. “You want me to tell them how someone we never knew or trusted brought another man we don’t know here to tell us that the thing we always knew might be true
is
true, but gave no proof? You want that?”

Cutter felt a rise of something, some tremulous despair. “Oh my gods,” he said. “You don’t care.”

She met his stare.

Even if, she was saying, even if you are right—even if that was Drogon, and that was Weather Wrightby, even if there are ten thousand militia ranged ready—this is where we are, this is what we are. This is where we have to be. Was this her madness?

“We are the Iron Council,” she said. “We do not turn ever again.”

Cutter thought of running into the night and shouting the truth at these dissidents he had come to care for—his comrades, his chaverim, his sisters—and having them turn, begging them to turn, telling them what was waiting, what he knew, what Ann-Hari knew. He said nothing. He did not shout. He was not sure it was not a failure in him—he was not sure it was not a weakness—but he could not announce the truth. Because he knew that it would make no difference, that none of them would turn away.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

The train went slow on the old rails, the crews running ahead constantly to shore up a collapsing bank of stone, to sweep away detritus for a clear run. They welded split metal, rehammered spikes in bursts of rust. But it was not the ruin on the rails that kept them slow so much as disbelief, the theatre of where they were, what they were doing. At ten, fifteen miles an hour the perpetual train, Iron Council, went north, surrounded by cut, fangs of traprock, for New Crobuzon.

Every window was spiked with guns. The flatcars, the little grassed cemetery, the towers, the tent-towns on the rooftops were full of armed Councillors. They squatted, they sang war songs. “Tell us about New Crobuzon,” the young ones said, those born to whores while the Council was still a work-train, or to free women in Bas-Lag’s inner country, or to Iron Councillors.

Behind the train came the Councillors who could not fight. The children, the pregnant, those whose Remakings made them ill-suited. The old. They stretched a long way on the tracks, singing their own songs.

Wyrmen went overhead, went and came back screeching what they saw. Over the hours the roadbed rose, until the train was on a ridge ordering the granite-stubbled ground into this side and this side. Trees rose as they passed stumps of forest, and the things that lived in them shrieked in the canopies. Many miles west the miasma of trees became Rudewood.

The hours went fast with the mesmeric beat of train wheels that Cutter had forgotten, that the months had taken from his mind as the Iron Council crept too slowly to pick up any rhythm. The train moved just fast enough to make the noise come. The percussion of wheels, the beat of pistons. The
uh uh, uh uh,
like being tapped on the shoulder again and again, reminded of something, a nervous noise. Cutter rode the train’s anxiety.

I’ll know, in a moment I’ll know,
he said inside himself.
In a moment I’ll decide.
And the perpetual train did not stop and it brought him miles and miles closer to New Crobuzon before, it seemed, he had a chance to think.

What will happen?

He had a weapon ready. He rode in the caboose with outsiders, refugees, who were excited and terribly afraid of what was ahead. It curved, it curved, as if trying to hide its terminus.
Miles yet,
Cutter thought, but the end of the line seemed to glow darkly just out of sight.

“I need to go home. They’re waiting for me,” someone said.
Something is,
Cutter thought.
Something’s waiting for you.

I won’t stay.
It was a certainty, suddenly.
I’ll not go to that scum Drogon, but I’ll not give him my death either.
What will you do? He gave the question a voice.
I’ll run.
Where will you go?
Where I must.
And Judah Low?
If I can. If I can find him.
Judah Low.

Oh Judah oh Judah. Judah, Judah.

When the night came down as if darkness thickened the air, they did not stop. Light went from their windows across the grey plain and made the train a millipede on gaslight legs.

They must be a few tens of miles off now. Quite suddenly the tracks were clean and clear. Perhaps there had been some passage, Cutter thought; perhaps the city had had trains run the pointless distance this far and back, ferrying ghost passengers to ghost stations. Then in the bone light of such early morning he saw figures on the trackside darkness waving adzes and thick twig brooms, shouting for the train to
Go on, go on
and telling it
Welcome home.

Fugitives from New Crobuzon’s Collective. They were there in increasing numbers out of the black before the train, blinking pinned in its moony lights and waving. The day began to come. Deserters from the Collective’s war who had come through Rudewood or the dangers of the alleys west of Dog Fenn, where the militia hunted and gave out revenge. They had come to be an unskilled work party clearing the lines.

The Crobuzoners waved their hats and scarves.
Run come home,
one shouted. Some were crying. They threw dried petals on the tracks. But there were some stood and waved their arms
No,
shouted,
No they’ll kill you,
and others who wore a kind of sad pride.

They ran and leapt onto the Council. They threw winter flowers and food to the Councillors and their children, exchanged shouted words with them, dropped back. Those on the train had become stern and taciturn with history and mission, and it was their followers on foot who met the escapees and embraced them, merged.

People ran by the train, keeping pace with it, and shouted names. Bereft families.

“Nathaniel! Is he there? Nathaniel Besholm, Remade man, arms of wood. Went into the wilds with the lost train.”

“Split Nose! My father. Never came back. Where is he?”

Names and snips of histories breathed out by those for whom the return of Iron Council was not only a myth come to be real
but was a family hope redivivus. Letters addressed to those long-disappeared in exile now suddenly perhaps come back were thrown into the windows. Most were for the dead or those who had simply deserted: these were read and became messages to everyone.

It was day now—the day that the Iron Council would reach the end of the line. It was slowing, the drivers wanting every moment of the journey.

“Low the Golem-man!” one woman shouted in her old voice as they went past. “He’s been prowling around, getting everything ready for you! Come faster!”

What?
Cutter looked back. Up from inside him was a suspicion.
What?

“Don’t fear,” someone shouted. “Listen, we’re only hiding, us Collectivists, we’re waiting, we’re behind the militia lines waiting for you,” but Cutter was looking for the woman who had spoken of Judah.

There isn’t far.
They would be there by noon perhaps, at the end of the line, to the ranks of military in the sidings.
Only a few miles left. “I’ve a plan,” Judah said. Gods. Gods. He’s here.

Overhead the Iron Council wyrmen flew in both directions. Their outflyers would soon be at the city.

Cutter was on horseback, the easy long gallop he had learnt over the months he’d become a wilderness man. He could almost keep up with Ann-Hari, who rode Rahul the Remade.

Rahul’s strides pounded, and he ran below the scree and pebble litter with the risen wall of the roadbed a windbreak beside him, dandelions and weeds in its slanted flank. Cutter rode where the wind was most resentful, throwing dust in his eyes. He ignored it. He pushed on under clouds that moved with sudden urgency and sowed rain nearby. He looked to the tracks, he looked ahead. He was beside the rail.

“Just come with me then if you want,” he had said to Ann-Hari. “Prove me wrong. You can always come back. But if I’m right, I’m telling you . . . I’m telling you Judah has something planned.” And though Ann-Hari had been exasperated there was in his urgency and the uncertain valence of his concern—was he excited, anxious, angry?—something that struck her and had her ride with him.

He had failed Judah, and he had to see him, unsure as he was what he sought to do—to persuade Judah to turn the Council if he could, to explain himself, to have him accept Cutter’s regret that he had failed. When the horse-guards blocked him he demanded they summon Ann-Hari. “You have to let me go,” he said. “Give me a fucking horse. Judah’s ahead! I have to see him!”

She affected impatience but he saw her start. She said she would come. “Whatever. Escort me if you don’t trust me, I don’t care, but there’s only a few hours left, and I have to fucking see him.”

What’s he doing?

Then. In the lands nearest New Crobuzon. Where rivers crossed under the raised road, and the stones that gave cover were gnawed by acid rain. Foothills stretched out their legs and rucked up the land in untidy grass, where the piceous thick of Rudewood like a black and black-green rash tided toward the train’s path and even in places stretched sparse little hands of forest to the edges of the track. Cutter, Rahul and Ann-Hari passed through trees and tree-shadow.

The perpetual train was quickly invisible behind them, the rails, newly renewed, meandering. Cutter rode as if he were alone, beside the metal raised like proud flesh, like slub in the land’s weft. There were some refugees still lining the iron who waved him on, but most had run to be with the train itself. He ignored the halloos—
Where’s the Council? Come to save us? They’re ahead, boy, be careful.
He kept his stare to the tracks, the trackside. The train was no more than an hour behind him.

He felt as if New Crobuzon sucked him in, as if its gravity—the denseness of brick, cement, wood, iron, the vista of roofs, stippling of smoke and chymical lights—as if its gravity took him. The stoned land rose like floodtide toward the line, and Cutter’s horse descended past a place where the roadbed and the country were level. Rahul was beside him. By a meadow of boulders Cutter saw a barge passing. They were near the farmlands. He watched the trackside. The occasional mechanism where a signal might have stood, some meter to read the speed or passage of trains. Here a clutch of stones and metal debris in the train’s path or by its side.

A flock of wyrmen tore back from New Crobuzon, scattered below the fast clouds and screeched at them. “They waiting! Thousands and thousands and thousands! Rows of ’em! No!”

Cutter and Rahul were racing on the eastern side of the tracks, eating the distance, so fast Cutter became hypnotised with it, until after a last turn of rocks the tracks converged at the end of suddenly bleak flatrock land, a stony pool and low marsh where there were wading birds as grey as the environs. At the end of the perfect
perspective was a township of sidings, where the rails fanned.
The smoke of workshops, the winter-dulled corrugate iron of train sheds, the sprawled terminus at the edge of New Crobuzon. Cutter sounded and heard Rahul sound too, become a single mass in the distance, one organism of pikes and cannon, clouded light reflected from thousands of masks, were the militia.

“Oh my gods.”
Judah, where are you?

The troops waited.

“Where’s Judah?” Ann-Hari said. She was staring at the waiting men, miles off, and Cutter saw, good gods, he saw a challenge in her, a fight-light in her eye. A smile.

“We must have missed him. Come on, I swear he’s here . . .”

“You know nothing, don’t you, you don’t know nothing . . .”

“Godsdammit, Ann-Hari, we can find him.”
Why are we looking? What will he do?

The train would come from the sheltering stone gulley out into that plateau with the New Crobuzon Militia waiting. Cutter saw the train. Come and come through, and the faces of all the Councillors pale when they saw what waited for them, but set with the knowledge that there was nothing else to be done. By the time they slowed the engine the militia would be on them. Nothing was possible except a last bravery, a tough pugnacious death. The knowledge would come over them, and the sweating and terrored faces of all the hundreds of Councillors on the train would toughen again, and the train would speed up. It would accelerate toward the enemy.

Come
on,
we taken the militia twice before, we can do it again,
would come the shouts, lies that everyone would gratefully pretend to believe. Some would whisper to their gods or dead ancestors or lovers, kiss charms that would not protect them. They would shout,
Iron Council!
and
For the Collective!
and
Remaking!

The Iron Council, the perpetual train, would howl, smoke streaming, the whistles of its cabin shrill, the sounds of its guns a tempest of bullets. The train would come into the zone of the New Crobuzon guns, and in bucking fire and the stretch and split of metal, in the agony shouts of burning dissidents, of fReemade, as hot death took them, Iron Council would end.

Gods, gods.

The Councillors rode back toward the train a few hundred yards. Cutter forced a slower pace. He watched the metal.
Last chance.
A mile, no more, into the cosseting of the stone surrounds. Again wyrmen overhead, but these ones speaking with different accents, these were
city
wyrmen come to greet the newcomers. “Come, come,” they shouted. “We’re waiting. Behind militia. For you.” They wheeled and went back toward some trackside machinery. Cutter rode.

“Ann-Hari.” A call from the edge of the gulch, twenty feet above. Cutter looked up and it was Judah.

Cutter let out a sound. He stopped his horse as Rahul stopped and he and Ann-Hari looked up. Judah Low was standing. He moved in agitation, craving their attention.

“Ann, Ann-Hari,” Judah shouted. “Cutter.” He beckoned hugely.

“Judah,” Cutter said.

“Come up, come up. What are you
doing
here? What are you doing? Gods, come up.”

Rahul’s great lizard weight could not take the incline, which slithered under him. He could only wait by the tracks as Cutter and Ann-Hari gripped handhold stubs of roots, ascended, stood, Cutter keeping his head down as long as he could so it was only at the very last that he raised his shale-grey face and looked at Judah Low.

Judah was looking at Ann-Hari with an opaque expression. He embraced her a long time, as Cutter watched. Cutter licked his lips. Cutter waited. Judah turned to him and with something at least half a smile gripped him too, and Cutter let Judah for a tiny moment take his weight. Cutter closed his eyes and rested his head, then made himself stand back again. They could see the tracks’ exit from the raised land.

They watched, the three of them, watched each other. Here he was, the tall thin grey-haired man Judah Low.
What are you?
Cutter thought. Around Judah were signs that he had been waiting. A water bottle. The obscure debris of his golem craft. A telescope.

In this place there was no one around them. The last cut before the city. Wyrmen went overhead again and circled, and shouted hysterical warnings as they went.

“What you been doing?” Cutter said. “What are you
doing
? They wouldn’t stop, Judah, they wouldn’t turn. I tried . . .”