Iron Council (25 page)

—This is running, he says.

They unbolt the guntower and guide the train into the tunnel. They take up the tracks behind them. There is still blasting and scraping from inside the hill, and construction on the strange new bridge. The work is frantic.

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 tunnel, among the cleavage of chiselled edges, minutely variant planes. The light makes shadows where vectors of stones meet.

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 cannot believe that this is how it starts. They are deafened and bloodied. This is how it begins. A cascade of clay splinters and sooty fire.

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. Ann-Hari says nothing. She looks beyond the gendarmes, beyond the tower of smoke where their train is coming.

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 tunnel. It is impervious. It treads with the care of a man.

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 cannot tell.

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.

—And you Remade. Weather Wrightby smiles a sad smile. —I don’t know, he says. —I don’t know. You are indentured men. I don’t make laws. You have debts to the factories that made you. Your lives are not your own. Your money . . . you have no money. But understand. Understand that I don’t think ill of you or blame you for this. I understand that you are reasonable men. We will fix this.

—I cannot pay you: the law will not allow me. But I can put money aside. The TRT cares for its workforce. I will not have my good Remade men suffer the needless harshness of ignorant foremen. I blame myself for this predicament. I was not listening hard enough, and I apologise to you for that.

—We will put structures in hand. We will have an ombudsman to listen, who can punish overseers not worthy of the badge. We will fix this, understand?

—I will put aside money that you would earn if you were free, whole men, and there will be a place for you when this railroad is done. A retreat. In the city if they’ll have it but in these wild lands, near your road, if New Crobuzon is so damned deaf as not to hear what is needed. I will not have you worked to death. There’ll be a cabin for you, and baths, and good food, and you can see out your days there. Think I’m a liar? Think I lie to you?

—No more of this, now. The road’s stalled. Would you halt it? Men, men . . . You aren’t blasphemers I don’t believe, but this is an unholy thing you do though your reasons are understandable. I don’t blame you, but you’re holding back something the world deserves. Come now. An end to this.

Judah stands. He has his golem come nearer Weather Wrightby in its stuttering railway walk.

—Don’t be
fools,
comes Uzman’s voice from his hide. —Are you soft, you fucking
soft
? You think Wrightby gives a damn? But he is cut off by other shouts. Someone is shooting. Someone is screaming.

—We can’t win this, says Judah aloud, though no one is listening. He stands on the rocks and makes his traintrack golem run.

He makes it run like a steam man, with the metal chewing sound of its gear-thighs. It stamps through an increasing bullet-rain leaving huge footprints, and it runs and leaps, throws itself, falls in a punitive wood-and-metal mass, breaking the bones of the gendarmes. Judah cannot see Weather Wrightby, but he knows, as he watches the golem make its swimming motion and crush as it disaggregates, that Wrightby is alive.

—Fall back fall back, Shanks or Shaun or someone, some thrown-up general is calling, but fall back where? There is nowhere to go. The gendarmes scatter under the punishment of blackpowder, but their weapons are so much the stronger, they cannot be held off. It is a desperate, desultory standoff, the gendarmes moving in desert-fight formations, the Remade across the hills from rock to rock hiding place, half-ordered, half-routed.

But there is ruckus from around the curve. Something.

—What, what the, what is . . . ? Judah says. The TRT men are pulling back toward their train, and now there is the sound of other fighting.

From the way they have come, from the history in the roadbed, come noises Judah has never heard before. Something is approaching in a staccato onrush, a drumming on the flattened stone. A cavalry of striders. The borinatch. Moving at a speed that awes, their legs taller than the tallest men, unhinging, stiff unguligrade motion of spasms and lurching, turning by pinpoint acrobatics, twisting on their hooves.

They lurch with inhuman grace closer, their faces masks between baboons and wood-carvings, and insectlike and haunting. They come among the gendarmes, dwarfing them and spinning and sending their bone-stiff legs among the axles, tottering but not falling as vehicles veer and crash. The borinatch grasp down, and their arms and hands manipulate in space and vectors other than those Judah can see.

They grope through dimensions, their limbs become unseen, reaching across gaps of space much too wide and grabbing gendarmes or punching them through their skin. The striders attack with weapons extant in whatever other plane it is they touch, that are visible for instants only as purple flowers or silver liquid faces, and where they strike the gendarmes are cut and crushed and diminished in complex ways and scream without sound and stumble over angles of earth that should never trouble them.

There are scores of the striders, a fighting band. Riding among them is the Remade scout on the lizard’s body, sent from the train and ordered to reach New Crobuzon.

The gendarmes are pulling back, killed and wounded in grotesque ways by the striders’ spectral maces. Judah cannot see Weather Wrightby. The Remade scout moves with the highstep of the plains lizard. The striders jostle him and mutter with their stringy mouths, and he laughs and slaps them and shouts, —Ann-Hari, I done it. They come with me. They done like you said they would. I found them.

When did she have time? Judah cannot imagine. When did she have time, when did she know, when did she go to those who might be chosen as scouts, when did she know she had another agenda, when did she suspect the gendarmes would attack, and send for reinforcements? How did she know where to send him?

The lizard-mount scout has not been on the mission he was given; he has been on a different task, on Ann-Hari’s instructions. He has saved the train.

—See, see? Ann-Hari is delighted. —I knew them strider hate the rails, the TRT.

—I told them like you said, the lizard-man says. —I told them what TRT was doing, begged help.

—You went against the council, Uzman says to her. She holds his look and waits until the silence is discomfiting, and then in her accented Ragamoll she says, —We go.

—You went against the
council.

—Saved us.

People are gathering.

—This ain’t your queendom.

Ann-Hari blinks. She looks wonderingly at him,
How stupid are you?
her face says, but she waits a moment and speaks again slowly. —We, go,
now.

—You went against the council.

Judah speaks. His own voice shocks him. Everyone looks at him. The legs of a golem in earth shift behind him and drum their unfinished heels in mild tantrum. —Uzman, he says. —You’re right, but listen.

—Without the council, what are we? Uzman says.

Judah nods. —Without it what are we? I know, I know. She shouldn’t have gone against it. But Uzman, you seen what they done. They ain’t going to hold back. They’ve come to end us, Uzman. What we going to do?

—We needed others, Uzman says. —We needed the city guilds. We could have had them . . .

—It’s too late now, Judah says. —We won’t know, will we? We won’t find out. We have to go. We can’t beat them now.

—You want us to go fReemade? Uzman says. He is loud. —I’m a fucking insurrectionist, Judah. You want me to run like a bandit? He is raging. Shooting still sounds. —You want us to take off into the damn hills like we’re afraid? That what you want? Fuck you, and you, Ann-Hari . . . Everything we have—

—We have nothing, says Judah.

—We have everything, says Ann-Hari.

They look at each other.

—We don’t give up what we have, says Ann-Hari. Judah’s golem’s legs shudder. —We give up nothing. All our blood and muscle. All the dead. Every hammer blow, the stone, every mouthful we eat. Every bullet from every gun. Each whipping. The sea of sweat that come from us. Every piece of coal in the Remade boilers and the boiler of the engine, each drop of come between my legs and my sisters’ legs, all of it, all of it is in that train.

She points into the darkness of the tunnel where the work
continues. —All of it. We unrolled history. We made history. We
cast history in iron and the train shat it out behind it. Now we’ve ploughed that up. We’ll go on, and we’ll take our history with us. Remake. It’s all our wealth, it’s everything, it’s all we have. We’ll
take it.

The strikers of the iron council join her. Even Uzman can do nothing else.

Waving many-planed hands, the striders go. —Thank you thank you, Judah shouts.

In the mountain’s stomach, the train punches through the last veil of stone. The tunnel that has been so hadal dark is gusted full of light.

The train rolls on to the skeletal bridge that has been so quickly made to meet it. The train shudders and lists. The bridge moves. The train reels, drunkard. Judah does not breathe.

It moves firmer, continues across that so-spindly accretion of girders. The train passes high over the dreadful valley, breathing smoke above it, over the yards of swaying make-do bridge to the original structure, and the movement stops.

The train crosses. It is on the earth, on the other side of the mountain.

The rebels step over the awful trellis, children crying as their mothers hold them. With each wind the people are still, but they all of them come across, and no one falls.

They are the cactus-men, the freeanole humans, one two scarab-head khepri, camp followers and drifters, a flock of the wyrmen low in the sky staring with the enthusiasm of dogs, stranger races, renegade llorgiss and a mute hotchi, and hundreds and hundreds of the Remade, in every shape of flesh. They are firemen, engineers and brakemen, those who were clerks, the few overseers who changed sides early enough, the hunters, bridge-builders, the scouts and scientists who will not leave their laboratory, the prostitutes, tunnellers, plebeian magicians, verity-gaugers and low-grade hexers, the workless nomads who scavenge the tracks, now become something, and hundreds, hundreds of the track-layers.

Their wealth and history is embedded in the train. They are a town moving. It is their moment in iron and grease. They control it. Iron council. The motion of the council begins.

It is the same motion that has brought them so far. It is exactly the same. The carts full of rails and ties unload and the crews drop them in position and they are spaced and the rails are taken out and hauled and dropped and hammered with careful rhythm, one two three, down. Ahead race the grading crews; but this long flat land has only a few extrusions that are cleared easily, and they do not sweep away all the bric-a-brac of stones and nature that they would have done before.