Iron Council (18 page)

Each bet now causes How some physical pain. A crowd has gathered. With the turn of a card the Maru’ahm gambler wins the life of How’s ward dæmon, and the little presence manifests as a flaming marmoset that screams and clutches How’s lapels and makes them smoulder, but bursts and is gone in a fart of soot. How is afraid. He rallies and wins a handful of clockwork gems, but in the next round the he-she turns a triple-trick and Place How can only moan. He looks insubstantial. He is growing hard to make out as he loses.

How bets aggressively. He shouts his stake, —For my horse, a year of my thought, for my man yonder. He waves at Judah, who blinks and shakes his head—
I ain’t no godsdamned stake
—but it is too late, that is just what he is, and How has played and lost and Judah is forfeit. So Judah runs.

He heads back for the railroad on his harried mule, crossing trappers’ and hunters’ trails. He has money he has stolen.

Judah passes through emptied shells of towns that were tracks’-end carnivals months before. He follows freshets swollen with snowmelt. In the coils of hills he watches the railroad, the cavalier onrush of the trains, their flared stacks bellowing blackly, full of chancers for the halfway towns.

Within three days Judah discovers that the rebis who won him is on his trail. Rumours cross the distance. So south, close to the swamp again where the workforce crawl frozen on, Judah finds
a gulch-town of gunmen. The plains are suddenly full of them, scapegrace bushrangers. The permanent dacoits of the region have been joined by newcomers made bandit by the iron road. It exerts.

In a tavern Judah buys the service of gun-layer Oil Bill, whose right hand had been a tool for the servicing of motors and is reconfigured by a gunsmith in brass with splayed barrel for a peppering of shot. He refuses to let Judah run, earns his protection money by letting the androgyne gambler catch them. There is a showdown in the freezing winter dust. As the townspeople of the punk village get out of range the gambler releases a brace of daggerpigeons that gust bladily at Oil Bill, but with a rate of fire Judah has never seen before (clockwork and coil mechanisms refilling his cannon-hand) the fReemade shreds them and fires through their feathers to send the Maru’ahmer sprawling wet and dead.

Judah runs with Oil Bill. He has neglected his golems, his stiltspear memories and the railroad itself. He sees in the brigand a hunger for the rails that reminds him of his own. The fReemade’s passion is less complex, and Judah wonders if it is a purer thing. Deep in himself, below the calm that has settled on him, he knows he must come to understand the rails.

They pay in some taverns, extort in others. Oil Bill sings songs of wandering renegades. Judah performs for him, makes golems—it is his only trick—out of the food they eat and has them dance across the table. He tries to breathe in time, to mimic the stiltspear.

Each dwelling makes its own rules and enforces them if it can. New Crobuzon does not claim the plains. It does not yet want them; it does not despatch militia here: it cedes the rights to policing and its spoils to the TRT, to Weather Wrightby and his monopoly railroad. The TRT gendarmes are the law here, but they are mercilessly liberal: their gunners guard only some mines and bartertowns.

Bill’s reputation means it is some time before anyone opposes him and Judah sees him kill again. When he does it is an act against someone foul, a snarling drunkard who threatens everyone he sees with his moving hexed tattoos, but still it is disproportionate. Judah stares at the corpse, stripped by the town’s gutterchildren.

The thing he has felt born within him, a creature of his congealed concern, flicks its tail. He does not like his companion.

Still he stays with Oil Bill, becomes a gunsman himself, in his duster, swaps his mule for a stolen horse. Because Oil Bill cannot leave the railroad alone. They tramp the winter hills. Bill brings them back to the rails endlessly.

—Look now, that there with them old trailers like that, them’s the work train’s supplies, goin’ all the way into the swamp. And them others we seen is for the sightseers from New Crobuzon come to see wild country, and that other’n with the guntowers ‘hind its engine . . . that’s the wages train. He smiles.

Judah is curious. There have been tries to rob the railroad before. Vivid and daring raids from horse riders and carriages and from fReemade shaped for speed with bevies of stolen legs, who keep up with the speeding engines and harass their firemen, boarding the train and disappearing again with snatched money.

Oil Bill’s plan might work. It is base, utterly without finesse, and it might work because Oil Bill is neither cowed nor awed by the iron road. Others have tried to shear off sections of a bridge to halt a train for ambush: Bill wants to blow the bridge while the train is on it. He wants to commit an act of war. Judah is so astonished by the plan’s imbecility that it is almost admiration.

—The trellis at Silvergut Gap, Oil Bill says, drawing in the dirt. —Fuckin’ bridge is hundreds of yards long. We wait below, light fuses and scarper when the fuckin’ train hits the bridge. That shoddy piece of shite can’t take that. It’s coming down.

And then the plan is that the iron train will unfold in air and shatter on the frozen flint a hundred feet below, and though yes there will be huge wastage as fire takes boxes of money, and carriages are sealed shut by crushed metal, and the blood of dead trainmen and passengers stains the notes, some ingots are bound to fall free. Some guineas are sure to gust out in the wind of the cut, and Oil Bill will simply pick spoils from the ground and the air.

Oil Bill’s genius is the limits of his ambition. A greater thief would insist on taking every stiver from the coffers, could not support this idly conceived carnage. Oil Bill though does not care if the bulk is left to ruin in the broken train, so long as he can reach
some money,
and in its blithe and vast violence his plan might work.

The grub in Judah, not conscience but some nebulous virtue, moves. He feels disassociate from it, but it gnaws him. He will not follow Bill’s plan, but he cannot outfight Oil Bill so he must pretend insouciance, even as they steal powder and ride back along the Silvergut Pass by winter cactuses and weathered black rock, to where the cat’s cradle of wood arcs overhead, to pack the explosive—Bill with lack of care that makes Judah blench—to struts in the cold-hard earth. It is only after that, while they wait for a train and Bill sleeps, that Judah can move against him.

He leaves his horse and climbs the steep rocks, cresting with fingers so insensate with cold he is afraid he will lose them. He runs for near a day until he comes to a railside hut, a siding and a mail-drop, and a TRT signalman.

—The gendarmes, Judah says, waving his empty hands. —I need to get them a message.

Judah returns within a day and a night, on a new animal a mile behind the TRT rangers. When he reaches the roots of the trestle two gendarmes are dead, Bill’s blackpowder scattered.

Bill is gone. The gendarmes station a guard. Judah watches them with contempt. They are motley; they do not have the presence of the New Crobuzon Militia. These are recruits hardly distinguished from drifters and chancers, given guns and sashes in the colours of the TRT. They have little idea of how to pursue Oil Bill, and less inclination. They put a price on him.

Judah is in danger while Oil Bill is free. He joins the bloodprice hunter.

First Judah thinks the bounty man is human, but he accepts his commission with a guttural alien chuckle, flexes his neck and closes his eyes in ways that mark him as abnatural. He rides something that is not a horse but a vague equine semblance, the impression of a horse, a horse burr under the skin of the real. He shoots with a matchlock pistol that spits and mutters and is sometimes a rifle and sometimes a crossbow. He will not tell Judah his name.

They run together on their horse and their horse-bruise through the plainlands in the ripples of the rails, lands not colonised but infected, as life once infected rockpools. Four days of tracking with ideograms of hexed dust and the bounty-man finds Oil Bill, confronts him in a quarry. The white stone is marked, crosshatched with chisel lines, which make a grid behind the bandit’s head.

—You, he shouts at Judah with the rage of the stupid betrayed, and the bondsman kills him and his weapons eat the corpse.

Perhaps I will be this,
Judah thinks, and rides with the hunter. They go town to town on the trail of those the gendarmerie will not take. They stop at TRT trackside stations and sift through the wanted notices. The bounty hunter does not ask Judah to stay nor make him leave. He speaks in a sibilant whisper so quiet that Judah cannot tell if he speaks Ragamoll well or hardly at all.

He injures or kills his quarries with the spines from his weapons or with his living nets or with sudden throat-sounds, and drags the bodies back to the way stations for bounty, and asks nothing of Judah, nor provides him anything. The count of sheep-stealers and rapists and murderers goes up, money comes in. Those the unman kills are scum, but the presence in Judah is not at ease.

Three days’ ride across pale stone ways. Clots of rock like ag-gregates of grey air that burst into nothing under horseshoes. A
stripmined hole, the bodies of sappers and gendarmes, and the
entrances to tunnels where the marrow of some epochs-dead god-beast has become ore and in which a little tribe of trow live.

The Arrowhead Concerns will take what they can of the bone-load. The troglodytes have beaten off miners and made a stand, and the gendarmes want them gone. This is the commission.

Judah watches while his companion unpacks chymicals. He tries to feel equanimity. Nothing moves, not bird nor dust nor cloud. It is as if time is waiting. Judah turns and feels it start again sluggishly as the bounty hunter prepares a huge pot with distillates and oils and hoods it, over a fire, trails a leather tube to the entrance of the cave, anchors it in place with rubber and skin sealing off the air inside. It is the end of night. The fire and the brass cauldron cover them in moving tan light. The bounty-man mixes poisons.

In the mountain’s belly the trow must be waiting. They must be watching, Judah thinks. They must know that something is coming. He thinks, he cannot do otherwise, of the stiltspear and their hopeless unkenning resistance. He is cold, but inside him the worm of uncertainty, the oddity that is not a conscience but an
awareness
of wrong, a
goodness,
is uncoiling. He sighs. —Lie down, he tells it.
—Lie down. But the oddity will not lie down.

It moves in him and secretes disgust and anger he is sure are not
his,
but that stain him, and whether they are his or not he feels them. They well up in him. He thinks of the stiltspear cubs, and the trow in the little mountain.

The chymicals are mixing and boiling, and the bounty hunter adds compounds till the red muddish mixture burps gas and a caustic oily smoke begins suddenly to pour from it and is funnelled into the mine. The hunter waits. Poison howls into the tunnels, the liquid boiling at enormous speed.

Judah’s rage takes him. He hesitates more seconds and will always be aware of the cubic yards of murderous gas he lets free in that time, then walks to the cauldron, staying upwind, and puts his left hand below the hood, above the rim, into the smoke. The bounty hunter is horrified and uncomprehending.

The gas is acid and hot and Judah screams as his skin splits, but he does not withdraw his hand, and he makes his scream into a chant, and he forces all the energies he has learnt and all the techniques he has stolen up from his innards and focuses them with the glass-pure nugget of hate and revenge he finds in him and channels and lets go with a cathexis purer and stronger than he has ever felt before, and thaumaturgic energies pour from him and make a golem.

A smoke golem, a gas golem, a golem of particles and poisoned air.

Judah falls back holding his ravaged hand. The smoke still spews from the pot but it does not vent into the tunnels, it collects and rolls in a bolus of pollution over the lip, and retreats back out of the hood and the pipe. The smoke crawls from the pot with evanescent limbs like monkeys’ or lions’ that retract again and emerge, and the cloud stands as a two- three- four- one- none-footed hulk of moiling and it steps or rolls or flies against the wind at the bounty hunter, following Judah’s agonised direction.

He has never created anything this size before. It is unwieldy and unstable, and the wind tugs grots of it away so it shrinks as it advances but not fast enough to be gone by the time it reaches the hunter, who is firing at it and uselessly through it, sending thin coils of it out with the paths of bullets like brief spines, not seeing Judah beyond, not seeing how he moves his hands and puppeteers the golem. The thing twitches a gas tail. It hugs the bounty hunter in a mindless surround so he cannot but breathe the golem’s substance, and his inhuman skin and the delicate membranes within him pustulate and break apart and he drowns on his liquescent lungs.

When the unman is dead, Judah has the diminishing golem leap high, and he releases it to the wind and it spasms and is gone. He bandages his hand and robs the bounty hunter’s corpse. It smells just very faintly of the gas.

Judah does not know how much of the trow town the smoke has envenomed. He knows this is only one day. He knows the Arrowhead Concerns will have the TRT send another bounty hunter to this boneyard and will find the detritus of this failed poisoning, this dead. Judah knows the trow will be eradicated and their homes lost to history, but he will not be party to it, and he has tried to stand in its way.

The trow will die. If he could leave something behind for them. If he could give these rocks a guardian shape and make it wait, to wake when it is needed. The bounty hunter’s unhorse runs from him and into rock, leaving an animal-shaped bruise of lichen.

I’m done here,
thinks Judah. His hand trembles; he trembles.
I’ve done in a man or something that looks like a man.
He is exhausted with the effort of his somaturgy, of sustaining the thing’s shape, of killing. He shakes with fear and awe at what he has done, that he could do such a thing, that he could make a golem not from clay but from heavy air.
I’m done out here in these wilding lands. They’re wilding because we’re here.
He cannot believe what he has been able to do.