Iron Council (52 page)

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

It was by the Tar that Cutter regained the city. A night entry. Slowly and under new laws, the New Crobuzon authorities were reopening riverine trade. The barge-rangers were waiting to establish new runs. Cutter came back into New Crobuzon disguised in a coal-smeared overall, piloting a fat low-slung boat.

Around him the houses spread out from the wind of the river, tens then hundreds, and he heard their sounds and remembered them, the settling of architecture, and knew he was coming home. The bargeman he had bribed to crew him was eager for Cutter to leave. With the repeating cough of the engine they came past the tarry houses of Raven’s Gate, the khepri warren of Creekside, the houses disguised by mucal addenda, and under the old brick bridges of New Crobuzon, while the boat left a rainbow discharge on the water.

Airships went. They stalked on searchlight legs. A fat glare pinioned the boat then blinked off, twice.

He walked through the warehouses of Smog Bend, the bleached brick, the stained concrete. Past creosote, past bitumen and mouldered posters, past the dumps of building matter, powdered glass and stone, into streets once held by the Collective. Cutter walked past the lots where there had been meetings of residents voting noisily on everything. Now they were as they had been, little wildernesses of concrete-splitting bramble and cow-parsley, wildnesses for the insects. There were spirals on the walls. Rain was washing them away.

Days later and Cutter knew the new rules, knew how to avoid the militia who patrolled the streets and locked down Creekside and Murkside and above all Dog Fenn. They said there were still pockets of Collectivist treachery, and they were ruthless in their hunt.

Cutter said nothing when he saw the squads emerge from broken buildings with men and women screaming their innocence or occasionally rebellion. He kept his eyes down. Numb as he was, he negotiated the checkpoints, offering his forgeries without fear, because he did not care if he was challenged, and when he was not he would walk on without triumph.

Uptown had its beauty. BilSantum Plaza, Perdido Street Station. It was as if there had been no war. The spirals were smears. Perdido Street Station loomed like a god over the city. Cutter looked up at its roofscape, at where he had been.

In the last days of the Collective there had been a desperate copy of the skyrail attack. A train heavy with explosives had set out from Saltpetre Station, accelerating toward Perdido Street Station with a dream of immolating the vast edifice. It would never have happened. The Collectivist who drove it on his suicide mission, brave with drink and the assuredness of death, had rammed the blockade at Sly Station and powered on toward Spit Bazaar, but the militia had detonated the train as it approached, tearing a hole in the stitching of arches that went the length of New Crobuzon. The Sud Line was severed and was being slowly rebuilt.

The posters on the kiosks, the newspapers, the wax proclamations that were free in the voxiterator booths told of the government’s triumphs: Tesh’s tribute payments, their war apologies, the rebirth of community. Hard, hopeful times, they said. There was word of new projects, expeditions across the continent. The promise of a new economy, of expansion. Cutter wandered. Creekside was a ruin. The khepri bodies left after the Quiller Massacre had been cleared, but there were stains still on some walls. In places the phlegm integuments exuded by home-grubs had been cracked and burnt, revealing the brick underneath.

Cutter wandered and watched the reconstruction. Throughout the centre of New Crobuzon were the holes torn by armaments, the thickets of concrete, mortar and broken marble, new raggedy passages linking alleys, paved with rubble. In Barrackham the militia tower’s tip was swathed in scaffolding like cuckoo-spit. The drooping severed skyrail was gone. It would be restrung when the Barrackham Tower stood again.

In Mog Hill, near enough the Collective’s old ground but just outside the militarised zone so not subject to martial law or curfew, Cutter found lodging. He gave his new name. Paid with the proceeds from his day-work, in areas he had not frequented in his life before.

New Crobuzon was wrecked. Its statues broken, districts stained and blistered by fire, whole streets become facades, the buildings eviscerated. Houses, churches, factories, foundries as hollow and brittle as old skulls. Wrecks floated in the rivers.

He knew how to become part of the whispering networks again, even broken as they were. Even now when no one spoke to anyone with trust, when citizens strove not to see each other’s eyes as they passed, he knew how. Even now when a quickly clenched fist risked being interpreted as handslang and the militia might be called or there might be a quick vigilante killing to save the area from renegade insurgents and the death squads they would bring. Cutter was careful and patient. Two weeks after his return he found Madeleina.

“It’s better now,” she said. “But in the first weeks, gods.

“Bodies by walls, every one of them ‘resisting,’ they said, while they were taken away. Resisting by tripping, or asking a moment’s rest, or spitting, resisting by not coming fast enough when they were told.

“Up by the Arrowhead Pits, in the foothills,” she said, “Camp Sutory. It’s where they keep the Collectivists. Thousands. No one knows how many. There’s an annex: go in, you don’t come out, so they say. When they’re done asking questions.

“Some of us escaped.”

She listed those she had known, and what had happened to them. Cutter recognised some of the names. He could not tell if Madeleina trusted him, or was past care.

“We need to tell what happened,” she said. “It’s what we have to do. But if we tell the truth, those that weren’t here will think we’re lying. Exaggerating. So . . . do we make it less bad than it was, to be believed? Does that make sense?” She was very tired. He made her tell him all the story, everything about the fall of the Collective.

When he found out how long ago it had been it would have been easy for him to say to himself,
There was no one to fight for the Council,
but he did not. He did not because they could not know what might have happened, because it had not been allowed to. They could not know what Judah’s intervention had done.

There were ten thousand rumours in New Crobuzon about the Iron Council.

Cutter went often to the slow-sculpture garden in Ludmead, to sit alone amid the art dedicated to the godling of patience. The gardens were ruined. The sculpted lawns and thickets were interrupted by huge sedimentary stones, each of them veined with layers and cracks, each carefully prepared: shafts drilled precisely, caustic agents dripped in, for a slight and so-slow dissolution of rock in exact planes, so that over years of weathering, slabs would fall in layers, coming off with the rain, and at very last taking their long-planned shapes. Slow-sculptors never disclosed what they had prepared, and their art revealed itself only long after their deaths.

He had always hated the sedateness of these gardens, but now that they were ruined he found them a comfort. Some Collectivist or sympathiser punks had climbed the wall weeks ago, before Dog Fenn had fallen, and taken chisels to several of the larger stones. With cheerful imprecision and disrespect they had made crude and quick and vulgar figures, lively and ugly, ground filthy and dissident slogans into their skins. They had ruined the meticulous boring and acid-work of the artists, preempting the erosion-sculptures with pornographic clowns. Cutter sat and leaned against a new stone figure stroking an oversized cock, carved out of what might have been intended as a swan or a boat or a flower or anything at all.

He did not remember much of that time in the hills. The grip of Rahul. Holding him while—did he flail? Did he cry? He suspected that yes he had cried and flailed. He had been held till exhaustion dropped him.

He remembered Ann-Hari walking, disappearing, not looking at him. He remembered her mounting Rahul and having him return to the rocks. “Back,” she had said. “The Council,” and what that meant he had not known. He had not even heard her at the time. Only later when he was done mourning.

Was she at large? Had she looked for and found death? He had seen them disappear, Ann-Hari and Remade Rahul, toward the stones where the Iron Council waited. It was the last time he saw them.

When he had been able to, Cutter had strained to move Judah. He had wanted to bury him. He had tried not to look Judah in his broken face. Finally he pulled him off the animal-track. Without looking, by touch, Cutter had closed Judah’s eyes. He had held Judah’s colding hand and had not been able to bring himself to touch the leather lips with his own though he so wanted to, so had kissed his own fingers instead and brought them a long time to Judah’s breathless mouth. As if, if he waited long enough, Judah would have to move.

He had made a cairn over him. He could only think it in small moments.

The Council did not move. Cutter had not yet been to see it, though he knew he would, but everyone in New Crobuzon knew its state. Judah’s death had not released it from its synchronic jail. The newspapers had outlandish theories for what had happened. Torque-residue was the most common suggestion, after its plunge through the cacotopic zone. Cutter was sure there were those in the government who knew the truth.

He would go to see it, when he could. He thought of Ann-Hari, walking the stone, riding Rahul.

Cutter tells Madeleina about Judah Low, and she listens with wordless sympathy for which he is broken with gratitude. One night she takes him with her to an abattoir in Ketch Heath. They go carefully, roundabout routes. There is a cat-howl as they come close. The animals are coming back, now they are not meat. Once there in the dark slaughterhouse, Cutter steps with di Farja over gutters of cloying blood, and in the hollow churchlike echoes, the ring of the now-empty meathooks against each other, in the smoulder from the fireboxes of the grinders, she shows him the hidden doors and the little printing press beyond.

They work together that night, turning the handles, making sure the ink does not clot. They turn out many hundreds of copies in the dark.

RUNAGATE RAMPANT.
LUNUARY 1806.

“Order reigns in New Crobuzon!” You stupid lackeys. Your order is built on sand. Tomorrow the Iron Council will move on again, and to your horror it will proclaim with its whistle blaring:
We say: We were, we are, we will be.

Now through pathways in the strewn wires and razored wires that litter this open zone this flat land outside the city split by a seam of rail we come in numbers. Under the moon in grey or without it gathered in the dog drab of unlit night we will come.

There. There we will come to Iron Council. There we will come to the perpetual train, truly perpetual now perhaps poised always poised forever just about its wheels just about to finish turning. It waits. By its iron axles are devils of motion, waiting an eternal second.

Past guards patrolling a border. Where there are runnels beneath the wires we slip through, where there are none we cut or climb very careful, cushioned with rag. Through the selvage of history toward that moment become a place, that history instant a splinter in now, under now’s skin.

We are incessant despite the penalties. Old women, young, men, human cactus khepri hotchi vodyanoi and Remade, even Remade. Here in the environs of the train those Remade who make the dangerous pilgrimage are given something, are for these yards around this moment equals. And scores of children. Rude little roughnecks, orphans living animal in New Crobuzon’s streets self-organised in troupes to come to this strange playground. Through runoff and flyblown trains made of rust, the aggregate of industry in the TRT sidings, reaccreting power as its new projects begin, through beetle-tracked wasteland, through miles of greyed nothing and stones like the ghosts of stones the alley children come to the Iron Council.

There is a circuit. There are routes to be followed.

Climb the scree slopes to look down on the flash-frozen smoking from the chimneys. Stand on the very tongue of tracks between the iron to look into the face of the train. Slow circle widdershins the whole Council, a some-minutes’ walk. No one can touch it. Everyone tries. Time slips around it. They are coming. Everyone can see it. The Iron Council is not stopped it is
onrushing
it is
immanent
and we see it only in this one moment. Circle it.

The engine smokestack towered and flared, a belch of black, keeping its shape, swept back fast by the wind embedded in that moment. We come in close scant hairs from the protuberance of animal-head horns and the blades of the warriors who wait, stand close up, stare at the Councillors preparing with shouts set on them.

That one is Thick Shanks. That big, age-discoloured cactus-man, him at the engine’s window. He helped make Iron Council all the time ago. Here he is to bring it home.

There is a route from Councillor to Councillor, given names. Here is Spitter whose excited shout has left saliva spray in a parabolic fringe around his mouth; here is Leapfrog who has jumped from one carriage top toward another and hangs over the gap midway in her arc; here is the Gunner from whose rifle has emerged a bullet, ajut six inches from the barrel. The tradition is to stop, wave your hand between unmoving missile and gun.

Some of us knew these Councillors once. There is a woman who comes many times to speak to the same man, her father, come back to her, unmoving in history. She is not the only one who visits family.

The ivy-tower skirted with rust dust and smoke the cattletrucks made bunks and bedlam, panelled laboratory cars messhalls arsenals and church, here open-topped flatcars full of earth, gardens and a graveyard with its cenotaph, a cab whittled from driftwood and the bulbous triple-nucleated plasmic sac left where Torque warped those inside, the final engine with its snarl of metal teeth where the moment ended. These paused Council cars wait to salvage us.