Iron Council

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

A dirigible flew fast. It was pushed by wind and its engine over stone fragments. The dead towns it overflew, the remnants of railroad boom, were like discolourations on heliotypes. Cutter watched from the little cockpit.

The Collective had got them out. First two decoy balloons had set out, piloted by dummies, and while the militia pounded them, the escape dirigible flew. The pilot went so low towerblocks rose around them. The ship had cut between the smokestacks of the slum factories, evaded hunter warflots.

They travelled in fear of air-pirates, but beyond the idiot aggressions of githwings and a few outlander wyrmen nothing attacked them in the wilds outside the city. Cutter thought of Judah all the time. In him moved a complex of anger, and a kind of need he could not exorcise.

“Be careful, Cutter,” Judah said before he went, and held him. He would not say what he was doing, why he was staying. “You have to be quick. They’re through. The militia, through the cacotopos, and they’re hunting the Council down. Come back,” he said. “When they turn away, or scatter, come back, and I’ll be waiting. And if they refuse to turn away, come ahead of them, come to the city, and I’ll be here, I’ll wait.”

You never will, Cutter thought. Not in the way you know I want.

The pilot was Remade, his arm a python that he strapped to him. He hardly spoke. Over three days, all Cutter learnt was that he had once worked for a crime-boss, that he was pledged to the Collective.

“We have to go fast,” Cutter said. “Something’s coming out of the cacotopic zone.” He knew it must sound like some Torque-beast was hunting, and he did not correct the impression. “We have to find the Council.”

He checked the mirrors he carried. The glassworks had built a beautiful replacement. He had shown them to Madeleina di Farja, explaining what they were for.

“How many times have you done it?” she said, and he laughed.

“None times. But Judah Low told me how.”

Cutter stared down into the acres of air specked with birds and windblown scobs. They flew over raincloud like a smoke floor. At the limits of their vision, miles south, they saw people. A long spread-out column through the landscape, the vanguard of the rogue train, who went ahead even of the graders and the bridge-builders.

“Fly past, not too close,” Cutter said. “Let them know we don’t mean no harm.” His heart went fast. It took them an hour to trace the scattered miles of Council back, to the graders sweeping aside debris, patting down and hammering down the ground, and then to the track-layers moving with precision that made them seem automata, and then to the perpetual train.

“There.”

Cutter watched it. Its flatbeds, its carriages and its built-up towers, its bridges swaying, the mottled colours of its addenda, the skull and head adornments, smoke from all of its chimneys, those of the engines and those that specked its length. And all around it the hundreds of Councillors moving along it and on it, in the gap through which it travelled. A bolt of hexed gunpowder combusted below them.

“Dammit, they think we’re attacking. Swing round, give them a berth, let’s lower some flags.”

The train edged forward along the unrolling tracks, the line behind it dismantled as it went. In its wake was debris, a cut of altered ground.

“Gods they’re moving fast. They’ll be at the city within weeks,” Cutter said. Weeks. Too slow. Too late. Besides, he thought, what can it do? What can it do?

Cutter thought of the perpetual train deserted, growing old, made at last of age and weather as rain and wind turned its iron into red dust and the slates and thatch of its remade roofs slipped untended and mouldered, became mulch. In the shade of the flatcars weeds would pierce the hard floor of the train and its spokes and axles would be knotted with stems, honeysuckle, an empire of buddleia. Spiders and wilderness animals would run its nooks, and the boiler would grow cold. The last stores of coal would settle like the striae of ore they had once been. The smokestacks would clog with windblown loess. The train would be made of landscape. The rocks in which it sat would be stained with train.

The passage that the Iron Council had left would be a strange furrow of geography. And at last the descendants of the Councillors who had run as they had to, as he would persuade them they must, from the incoming militia and New Crobuzon’s revenge, the children of their many-times children would find the remnants. They would walk it and excavate the strange barrow, find their history.

Miles behind the very last of the Council’s stragglers, at the end of a wilder, wooded zone, was a line of fire, a crawl-motion that through the telescope Cutter saw was dark figures. Men were coming. Perhaps two days away.

“Oh Jabber they’re there,” Cutter said. “It’s them. It’s the militia.”

When they descended, the leaders were waiting for them. Ann-Hari and Thick Shanks embraced Cutter. They turned to the pilot, and Cutter saw that the Collectivist had tears in his eyes.

The urgency of Cutter’s mission filled him. The Councillors surrounded him, demanding to know what was happening in New Crobuzon. Ann-Hari was trying to control the situation, trying to bring Cutter to her, but he wanted very much not to be in her hands alone, did not want her controlling the message he brought. She was too powerful for him, her agenda too strong.

“Listen to me,” he shouted until he was heard. “The militia are coming. They’ve come through the cacotopic stain. They’re a day or two away. And you can’t go to the city. You have to run.”

When at last they understood him a gusty roar of no took them over, and Cutter climbed out of their arms and stamped on the train roof in frustration. He felt a wave of the bitterness, sadness and near-contempt with which Judah’s politicking and that of the Caucus had always filled him. He wanted to save these people from their own desperate want.

“You fools, ” he shouted. He knew he should restrain himself but he could not. “Godsdammit, listen to me. There is a militia squad on your tail which has come through the cacotopic godsdamned stain, do you understand? They’ve crossed the world and back again just to kill you. And there are thousands more of them in New Crobuzon. You have to turn.” He shouted over their anger. “I’m your friend, I ain’t your enemy. Didn’t I cross the fucking desert? I’m trying to fucking save you. You cannot fight them, and you godsdamned well can’t fight their paymasters.”

A clutch of Council wyrmen flew to see. The Councillors debated. But it was a one-sided argument, to Cutter’s rage.

“We beat the militia before, years ago.”

“No you didn’t,” he said. “I know the damn story. You blocked them just enough that you could run away-that ain’t the same thing. This is the flatlands. You ain’t got nowhere to run. You face them now, they’ll kill you.”

“We’re stronger now, and we’ve got our own hexes.”

“I don’t know what the militia are carrying, but godsdammit, you think your fucking moss magic is going to stop a New Crobuzon murder squad? Go. Get out. Regroup. Hide. You cannot do this.”

“What about Judah’s mirrors?”

“I don’t know,” Cutter said. “I don’t even know if I can make them work.”

“Better try,” said Ann-Hari. “Better get ready. We haven’t come this far to run. If we can’t shake them off, we take them down.”

Cutter had lost.

“The Collective sends its solidarity, its love,” the pilot shouted. His voice was shaking. “We need you. We need you to join us, as fast as you can. Your fight’s ours. Come be part of our fight,” he said, and though Cutter was shouting, “Their fight is over,” he was not heard.

Ann-Hari came to him. He was almost weeping in frustration.

“We were meant to do this,” she said.

“There’s no plan to history,” he shouted. “You’ll die.”

“No. Some of us will, but we can’t turn away now. You knew we wouldn’t.” It was true. He had always known. The wyrmen returned as the light came down.

“Enough to fill a carriage,” one shouted. There were only a few score militia, it seemed, and at that the Councillors shouted derision. They had many times that number.

“Yes but gods it ain’t just about that,” Cutter shouted. “You think they won’t have something on their side?”

“So you better be ready,” Ann-Hari said. “You better practise with Judah’s mirrors.”

The Iron Councillors gathered everyone who could fight. The laggers, spread out behind them, were called to catch up, for safety. They sped up their track-laying, to reach a point where a few igneous pillars jutted out of the earth, where there were some dry hills, so they would have a little shelter. With the expertise they had accrued over years, they readied to fight.

“He got gone,” one wyrman said. He was talking about one of the others on the reconnoitre. “He got gone out the air. Something come pull him out the air, see?”

There were none of the chances Cutter had wanted, no opportunity to tell the stories of the Collective, to ask for the stories of the Council. It was rushed and ugly. He felt desperately angry as the Councillors prepared to die. He felt as well a sense of his own failure, that he was letting down Judah. You knew I couldn’t do it, you bastard. That’s why you’re still there. Getting ready some plan or other for when I fail. Still, even though Judah had expected it, Cutter hated that he had not succeeded.

No one slept that night. Councillors came to the train throughout the darkness hours.

With the first light Cutter and Thick Shanks withdrew into position, each on a stele twenty feet high, yards apart, both facing the sun, holding one of Judah’s mirrors. Before he went, Cutter found Ann-Hari, to try to tell her that she was having her sisters, the Councillors, commit suicide. She smiled until he had finished.

“Our hexers have what Judah gave them,” she said. “We have our own thaumaturgy. And we have what Judah taught us. There are those’ll be calling golems from the traps he gave us.”

“Each time you trigger one, he’ll feel it, you know. No matter how far he is.”

“Yes. And we’ll trigger all of them. One at a time. As the militia come. If we have to.”

“You’ll have to.”

Cutter and Thick Shanks braced themselves each on their rock shaft. It was a little after dawn. The moon was still visible, pale and high. As the sun rose its light struck their mirrors, and Cutter angled his down, directing his beam at the cross-mark he had made on the ground. Thick Shanks did the same, as Cutter had shown him, and the spots of intensified sunlight roamed like nervous animals over scrub and dust, to blend on the X.

Hundreds of Councillors prepared to fight, spread out in waves to trenches and earthworks, propped rifles. Cutter turned west, to where the militia would come.

It was not long. At first he saw only dust. Cutter looked through his telescope. They were still tiny, and they did seem to be very few.

A flock of wyrmen set out to harass them, carrying acid and drop-knives. Behind them the dirigible followed with the snake-armed pilot and two volunteers as strafe-gunners. The militia came closer, over minutes and then hours, and the wyrmen crossed the grey nothing-land, and the dirigible flew low. The engines of Judah’s golem traps were ready; the hexers sang incantations.

A frantic Councillor came out of the stony lands. He stumbled to them, could not speak for moments, silenced by exhaustion and fear.

“I got trapped,” he said at last. “They took my missus. There was eight of us. They made something come out of the earth, they made something come out of us. ” He screamed. People looked at each other. I fucking told you, Cutter thought. He felt despair. I bastard told you that this weren’t simple like it looked.

Two miles off, the wyrmen came close to the militia on their horses. The riders carried no equipment anyone could see. Moved in formation. There was a strange instant, and the wyrmen were pulled one by one out of the air.

For a long few seconds there was no sound. Then-“What…?” “Did…?” “I think that, did you…?” Not yet fear. Still incomprehension. Cutter did not know what had happened, but he knew that fear would come soon.

A last wyrman lurched in the air, wrestling, swaddled in a caul of dirty nothing. Cutter saw it by a smear of the particles it carried, a thrombus of feral air. Cutter knew what was happening.

“Where did they go?” someone shouted.

The wyrmen fought air that overwhelmed them, pulled them apart in marauding currents.

The dirigible was close to the militia, and a line of bullet-dust stretched out across the ground toward them. And then the bullets broke off, and with a sudden violent dancing the vessel tipped mightily up, pitching in the air as if a ship on an unstable sea. For seconds it paused, then began to fall, not as if with gravity but as if fighting, as if the turning motors and air-propellors were struggling. The airship was hauled out of the sky by some brutal hand, broke apart.

Shapes began to organise around the militia as they approached, out of the air or the earth or the fire of the torches they carried. Close enough now to see. All the officers were moving their hands in invocation. Cutter could see the ruins of their uniforms, the split and splintered helmets, scratches and Torque-stains where leather had become something else. The horses were dappled with blood and slather. Their passage through the cacotopic zone had marked them.

There were scores, despite what depredations must have culled them. Made mad by what they had suffered, ready to revenge against these renegades whose flight had dragged them into the cacotopos. No wonder they were so light-armed, no wonder so few. They did not need equipment or ordnance when they called up their weapons out of the surrounds and the matter of the world.

Cutter saw their arcane whips. He saw them shaping the air. He knew it was luftgeists that had brought down the wyrmen and the dirigible, air elementals of tremendous power. This was a corps of invocators, whose weapons were the presences they raised. Beast-handlers, of a preternatural kind. A cadre of elementarii.

Cutter was shouting at his chaverim. He saw some understood. Some were startled into fear.

There were no elementalists in the Iron Council. One man had a tiny captive yag that lived in a jar, a fire-spirit no larger than a match-flame. Those few vodyanoi with undines were bound to them by agreement; they could not control them. But there were some who understood what they were facing.

The elementarii were ranging out, each subgroup preparing its calling. It had to be, Cutter thought. People who could fight without hauling weapons. It had to be either elementalists or karcists, and dæmons are too unsure. Gods damn, a cadre of elementalists. That New Crobuzon would risk losing these men showed how profound was the government’s desire to end the Council.

“Come on, let’s do it,” he shouted to Thick Shanks, and wound the metaclockwork engine as well as he could. He focused the reflected light, levelled the beam, could not stop staring over his shoulder at the attack coming.

Which will it be? Cutter thought. Fulmen? Shudners? Undines? Lightning or stone or freshwater elementals, but of course it might be others: metal, sun, wood or fire. Or one whose elemental status was uncertain or disputed: elements made by history, born out of nothing and become real. Would it be a concrete elemental, a glass elemental? What would it be?

He could see already the coils of dust moving against any wind, extending air limbs. The luftgeists. The militia began to bring into being other things.

Sun? Darkness?

They threw all their torches to the ground, and the fire enlarged as if each individual flame loomed much larger than it should, so the ground was impossibly alight, and from the prodigious fire, with a tremendous cry of pleasure, came things like dogs or great apes made of the flames. A pack of yags, fire elementals that bounded in a motion between loping and burning. Cutter saw unridden horses corralled and chanted over and giving out equine screams. One by one they shuddered and let out dying wet noises and unfolded from inside: out of their shuddering carcasses came leaping creatures of their sinew and muscle and their organs all reconfigured into bloody skinless predators: proasmae, the flesh elementals.

Air, fire, flesh ran and turned in animal excitement. A line of militia drew whips occult-tempered, and cracked them, sending the elementals rearing in fear, delight and challenge. The whips snapped like heavy leather and elyctricity, like shadows. When they cracked the noise made dark light.

The elementarii cajoled their charges forward. Air and fire and flesh came. Councillors screamed. They fired and their shells burst among the elementals. Without strategy, pushed by panic, they triggered Judah’s golem traps.

With automaton motion golems unfolded out of the earth and the metal and wood debris of the railroad. There were not so many as there were elementals, and each of them drew on Judah’s powers. Wherever he was, he must have felt a burst of sudden draining. And soon he’ll feel more, Cutter thought, and tried to focus the mirror.

A bomb exploded in the path of the yags, and they disappeared amid its copse of high flames, and their cries were uncanny cries of pleasure. When the bomb settled, there were the fire elementals still running, bigger, through the smoke. A line of earth golems faced them.

Cutter felt the murmur of clockwork in the mirror, gears uncoiling in discombobulant dimensions. He felt the mirror moving as if it were a baby.

“Unlock your engine,” he shouted, and when Thick Shanks did Cutter felt another tugging. He held his mirror hard and saw Thick Shanks doing the same. The recombinant light their reflections made was waxing.

It was curling, growing around itself. It was something in itself, something real, with dimensions, something that moved. Cutter saw the fishlike swimming presence, a thing roaming out of nothing and made of the hard light, shining like a sun. He felt his strength haemorrhage from him. “We’ve got it,” he shouted. “Take it to them.”

Thick Shanks and he kept their mirrors angled at each other and moved them in time, and the presence of glutinous light followed, dragged over the ground as they turned to face the elementarii. Something terrible was happening. The militia whipmen had come forward, cajoling the elementals at the ends of their lashes, and though the outer lines of the Councillors were laying down fire with everything they had, the proasmae were coming.

Missiles tore into the creatures of slabbed-together muscle, burrowing into them so they refolded and spat out the nuggets of lead and the honed flint or iron blades. The proasmae, the flesh elementals, called up out of the stuff of the horses, reached the earthwork barrier.

They rolled up it, they were amoeboid, they were urchinlike, studded with bones they made limbs, they made themselves suddenly humanoid or like some unskinned and baying wildebeests, and they scrambled the height of the rise and paused at its top, then hurled down onto the screaming men, and Cutter saw what they did.

They dived into the men’s flesh. They dived and poured themselves through the Councillors’ skin, emptying into flesh-stuff, swimming in the innards while their victims, their new houses, looked suddenly stunned and grossly bloated, scrabbling for a brief second at their chests or necks or wherever the proasm had entered before exploding or infolding in a wet burp of blood and the flutter and flap of skin, and the proasm would run on again, its substance increased, built up with stolen flesh. They raced through the line, tugging the mens’ insides out of them and leaving gory skin rags, growing bigger and more bone-flecked as they came.

“Jabber preserve us,” Cutter said.

He pulled at the speculum, and felt resistance. He and Thick Shanks pulled their mirrors at different speeds and the thing between them began to pull apart, to split resentfully, strings of light-matter stretching out between its parts like mucus. Cutter shouted, “Back, back your end, pull it back together!” They struggled to reaggregate the light golem.

The strikes of the militia’s gnoscourges reached much longer than it seemed they should. Yards up the luftgeists screeched and were galvanised into aggression as the elementarii corrected them. They swept down, invisible. They forced the Councillors who shot and slashed pointlessly to breathe them, shoved into their lungs and burst them.

A salvo of attacks, bombs, a rush of weak thaumaturgy, and the militia regrouped. One was hit; one only was killed. The yags faced the first of the golems, a huge figure of stone and the stumps of iron rails. Yags wrestled it, hugged it, and their fire corpi re-formed and enveloped the golem and began to bend its hard black metal with the intensity of their heat. It spilled into a pool, trying still to fight as its matter collapsed. It ran in rivulets, streams of molten golem.

The Councillors fought, but the elementals were racing through them with effortless carnage, scampering like dogs, like children. It was a terrible dangerous strategy to call the elementals, these animals, substances made predatory and playful flesh: they could not be domesticated. But the elementarii needed only to control them for this one quick attack. The yags and luftgeists were heading on, leaving footprints of fire and trails of ruined air, toward the perpetual train. The golems tried to face them-interventions, the manifestations of sentient control against the animalisation of raw forces. The elementals were winning.

But though the air elementals might blow apart the substance of earth golems in a spew of particles, they had to work harder against air golems. It was a strange, near-invisible fight. Almost the very last line of Judah’s defences. Sudden gusts of unnatural wind came up and met the luftgeists, and there was a vague storm where they fought. The made and the wild, the intervention and the barely controlled, squabbled and tore each other apart.

Chunks of something dropped out of the sky and mussed the ground with impact. They were invisible, clots of air itself, Cutter realised, thrown down from the fight above, the torn-off meat of an air elemental discarded by an implacable air golem, the hands of a golem bitten through by a frantic luftgeist. The dead air-flesh lay and evanesced.

The yags were spitting flames. The proasmae were prowling, were sucking the last matter from corpses, grazing on the bodies of the dead. Cutter was very afraid.

From the sunken bed of a stream, way off on the militia’s flanks, emerged horse-riding men. With them, in a powerful loping run, came Rahul the Remade man: and on his back, a bolas spinning in his hands, his hat pulled low, was Drogon, the ranchero, the whispersmith.

Gods, thought Cutter, here come the uhlans, to save us. He felt delirious.

The riflemen on their horses, some on Remade horses, having come up unseen through the gorges of the waterways, having run all the way from New Crobuzon or gods knew where, emerged and began with great expertise to fire. There were many seconds when the militia were too surprised or could not pin down their new enemies.

Though they were not many, the horesemen took up positions like hunters and fired on the militia from protected places. Their weapons shot puissant bullets that roared like splits in the aether, that muttered as they flew. The gunmen took two, three, four, a handful of the elementarii fast, dropping them, and the Councillors who could see it cheered.

Then, oh, fast, some of the militia spun their whips, and the gnoscourges flailed much too long like serpentine presences momentarily alive and playing with space, flicked the rumps of the yags that squealed in voices like burning and came back at a terrible rate, headed for the newcomers. The Iron Council’s gunmen and bombardiers and thaumaturges attacked as they could, but the yags were coming fast.

“Control it. There, there, ” Cutter yelled, nodding toward the wedge of militia, and with Thick Shanks he tugged the mirrors against the resistant light golem. Be, Cutter thought. Fucking be.

He pulled against the drag of the half-born golem and watched the yags bear on the newcomers. Who are they? he thought. Drogon’s friends? As they grew close, Drogon reared up on Rahul and put his hand to the side of his mouth, and must have whispered something. One of the elementarii flailed suddenly with his whip, sending the tip lashing across the gathering yags, and the scream they sent up was not playful but enraged.

Drogon whispered again and another militiaman did the same, scourged the oncoming elementals, and the yags reared and tumbled into each other, gobbed wads of burning sputum at their masters. Drogon whispered, whispered, sent commands to one and another elementarius, had them perform provocations, confusing the animals. The militia had to defend themselves with expert whip-play from the elementals’ revenge.

The light golem was born. It existed. Suddenly. Cutter’s mirror shook as the thing moved. It stood, out of the foetus of light it had been. It was a man, or a woman, a broad figure made of illumination that was impossible to look at yet did not shed light but seemed to suck in what light was there and gave a violent hard glow that impossibly did not spread beyond its own borders. It stood and stepped forward, and the mirrors were tugged with it. Cutter and Thick Shanks were half-following half-dictating its movements.

“There,” Cutter shouted, and they twisted their mirrors so the golem strode forward with a construct’s motion, past the outlying ranks of the Councillors who cried out, was this some seraph come to save them? They looked at each other with eyes momentarily occluded by its brightness, looked to its footsteps, which glowed with residue. The light golem strode into the yags. The golem stretched a little like some dough-thing, gripped the yags and began to shine.

Cutter felt weak. The golem wrestled them, and their fire did nothing against its solid light, and it grew brighter and brighter as it fought, became a humanoid star, shedding cold luminance that effaced the heat of the yags and grew much much too bright to see. And then the yags that had fought it were gone, washed out in its glow, and it was stronger. It moved with an unsound, a stillness.

Yags panicked. There were some that ran away in their animal motion across the landscape, and some who rallied and flew again at the light golem to be erased by its phosphorescence. There were elementarii whipping hard at the frightened fire elementals, but that enraged them and some in passing snapped petulant and pyrotic at their handlers and burnt them to death.

The militia were rallying. Little luftgeists like arrows hunted down the new gunmen, piercing them and drinking their blood. Drogon whispered his instructions, and the militia could not disobey him, and he made their whips flail destructively. They knew by then that he was their main enemy. They sent the proasmae toward him.

Cutter and Thick Shanks sent the golem for the militia, toward a group gathered around some kind of cannon. They were butchering animals. What are they doing?

They were siphoning something from the air, as their proasmae at last reached the newcomer gunmen and began to swim through them. The light golem came on. What were the militia calling?

A drizzle of luminance seemed to be pouring from the sky, very concentrate, a fine shaft just visible. It fell to the mechanism they surrounded. The light came out of the moon. The day-moon, just visible, very faint in sunlight. Out of its half-lustre came the moonlight into the machine, and at the end of the barrel a hole seemed to be opening.

In its deeps, something made of glow was moving. Cutter stared.

It took long moments to make sense of it-while he tried to march the light golem over the damage of still-exploding bombs, the wreckage left by the Councillors, who were advancing now that the yags had gone, now the proasmae were distracted by the newcomers, now the militia had lost control of their luftgeists that caused damage and death but only randomly as they gushed over the heavily protected train-but Cutter saw something in the opening. Its parameters changed, defied taxonomy. He tried to make sense of it.

Its shape altered with the seconds. A fish’s skeleton, the ribs passing ripples along the length of a body like a rope of vertebrae or like some rubberised cord. And then there was something of the bear to it, and something of the rat, and it had horns, and a great weight, and it shone as if its guts and skin, its bones were phosphorus. As if it were all cold and bright rock. A firefly, a death mask, a wooden skull.

A fegkarion. A moon elemental.

Cutter had heard of them, of course, but could not believe that this onrushing skeletal insectile animal thing he saw only half a second in three and that was a suggestion or a fold of space was the moonthing about which there were so many stories. Oh gods, oh Jabber.

“Shanks… get the golem to that thing, now.”

But the golem did not walk so fast. It went through the militia at a steady pace, laid out its hands as it came. It took time to touch each man it passed, to smother their heads with its hands and pour light into them, so each burst with light, beams exploding their helmets, shining hard and for yards from their ears, their anuses, their pricks, through their clothes, making them stars, before the golem let them fall.

The fegkarion was crawling out of the nothing. “Come on, ” Cutter said.

The elementalists were withdrawing, gathering around the moon-callers to protect them. They slashed at the golem now and drew its substance with each whip-strike, sent gouts of light spraying. Each lash snapped back Cutter’s and Thick Shanks’ heads. They bled. They kept the thing moving.

The proasmae were neglected. The last of them roared through two more gunners then took its bone-and-innard body into the wilds, following its siblings, rolling away from Drogon and Rahul. Drogon kept whispering, but by some thaumaturgy the militia no longer obeyed him. They lashed at him; they lashed at the golem.

“Come on, come on.”

Now the golem’s light-stuff legs stamped through bodies of the men attacking it, and they burst with the shining. The moon elemental was close, was corkscrewing its chill and grey-glowing self through the hole that was opened, and it was vast, Cutter saw, it was monstrous, and he reached and the golem reached to block the lunic cannon, wedging itself into the hole, shoving through the stuff of the elemental itself and into the engine of the machine, and golem and elemental fought, and blistering light-cold, hot, grey and magnesium-white-came welling out of nothing like sweat.

The Councillors saw the proasmae were gone, sent in their heaviest squads, their cactacae and big Remade. “Take some alive!” someone was shouting, and the cactus hacked conscious and light-comaed militia, and there was a burst, a shattering, and the moon-engine combusted in harpoons of golem-light and moonlight.

The militia were broken. Stopped by Drogon and his men, and by the light golem. The ground was scattered with dead elementarii and countless more dead from the Iron Council, with the burst residue of flesh elementals and their victims, with gobs of glow that trickled luminous into the earth. Those few militia still able rode into the wilds of Rohagi, following the slick tracks of the proasmae, which had become a wild herd: wet red blubber things prowling the dustland.

Those militia left were immobilised by bullets, by chakris or golem-light. Lying, spitting and raging at the Councillors as they came.

“Fuck you fuck you,” one man said through the ruins of his reflective helmet. There was fear in his voice but mostly there was rage. “Fuck you, you send us through the fucking stain, you cowards, you think that’ll stop us? We lost half our force but we’re the fucking best, we can chase you wherever you go, and now we know the way through, we found our way, and maybe you got lucky with this bullshit, this bastard lightshow and fucking susurrator. We know the way.” They shot him.

They shot all the militia left alive. They buried their own dead where they could, except for one, a Remade woman famous for mediating during The Idiocy, long before. They voted her a burial on the train’s carried graveyard, in the flatcar cemetery of its greatest dead. They left the militia to rot, and some defiled the bodies.

When the sun rose again on the yag-scorched train, Cutter found Ann-Hari and the Council’s leaders. They were exhausted. Drogon, Rahul and Thick Shanks were with them. Cutter stumbled with his own tiredness. He gripped Drogon and the Remade who had carried him.

“Last time we escaped the militia,” Thick Shanks said. “This time we beat them. We took them down. ” Something of his delight even entered Cutter himself, though he knew all the contingencies that had led to this victory.

“Yeah. You did.”

“We did. You… the light… all of us did it.”

“Yeah, we did, all right. We did.”

“We got out, is all,” said Rahul. Drogon whispered agreement. “We got lost. Came out of that tunnel, well, that alleyway, whatever, into the main part of the town. It took us a while to find where we were. But there was so much going on that night. We never saw nor heard a thing from you. Not from none of you. We didn’t know if you’d fixed that Teshman or not. We’d no idea. You did, didn’t you?

“It took us time to get back to the Collective, but honestly there were so many damn holes we could walk in. When we found out you’d gone-no, I don’t blame you at all, sister, you couldn’t have known we was coming-we had to get back.

“So we smuggled us out, and then old Drogon here goes off for two days and comes back with his brothers.”

“There ain’t so many of us horse-wanderers,” Drogon told Cutter. “You can get word out. I know where to find them. And they owe me.”

“Where are they now?”

“Most are gone. Some ride tomorrow. These men are nomads , Cutter. Give them your thanks, any coin you can share, that’s all they want.”

“We knew the militia was coming,” Rahul said. “We rode hard.”

“You came out of nowhere.”

“We came out of the trails. Drogon knows them. We came fast. I ain’t never known horses like these men’s. Where’s the monk? Talking of secret trails. Qurabin. Oh no… Gods. And Ori? Did he… Ori? Gods, gods. And…”

“Elsie.”

“Oh gods. No. Oh gods.”

“I didn’t think you could do it,” Cutter said to the Councillors. “I admit that. I was wrong. I’m happy. But it ain’t enough. I told you why Judah ain’t here… he’s working on something. In the Collective. But it’s too fucking late. It’s too late. He’s trying to do what he can.

“Listen to me.

“The Collective’s fallen. Shut your mouth, no, listen… The Collective was a… a dream, but it’s over. It failed. If it ain’t dead by now it’ll be dead in days. You understand? Days.

“By the time the Council comes close to the city… the Collective’ll be dead. New Crobuzon’ll be under martial rule. And what then? Killed Stem-Fulcher, it didn’t make a spit of difference: the system won’t be beat-don’t look at me like that, I don’t like it any more’n you. And when you come rolling up saying Hello, we’re the inspiration, on cue, you know what’ll happen. You know what’ll be waiting.

“Every militiaman and -woman in New Crobuzon. Every fucking war engine, every karcist, every thaumaturge, every construct, every spy and turncoat. They’ll kill you in view of the city, and then the hope that you are-you still are-dies when you die.

“Listen. I’ll give you Judah’s message again.

“You have to turn. The Iron Council has to turn. Or leave the train. You come on to New Crobuzon, it’s suicide. You’ll die. They’ll destroy you. And that can’t be. That ain’t acceptable. Iron Council has to turn.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

“They’ll destroy you,” he said. “Do you want to die?” he said. “You owe yourself to the world, we need you.”

Of course they would not be persuaded. They continued, pushed through the buckled land leaving the scabs of fight behind them. Cutter showed horror that they would not do as he said, but he had expected nothing else. He made his case and the Iron Councillors answered him in various ways.

Some gave the kind of idiot triumphalism that enraged him. “We beat New Crobuzon before, we’ll do it again!” they might say. Cutter would stare uncomprehending because he saw that they knew what they said was untrue, that it would not be that way. They knew.

Others were more thought-through. They gave him pause.

“What would we be?” Thick Shanks said. The cactus-man etched a cicatrix into the skin of his inner arm, cutting a snake shape with an animal’s tooth. “What would you have us be, bandits? We lived free in a republic we made. You want me to give that up, be a bloody wilderness hobo? I’d rather die fighting, Cutter.”

“We have a responsibility,” Ann-Hari said. Cutter never felt eased in her presence. The fervour in her unnerved him-it made him tired and uncertain of himself, as though she might win him over against his own will. He knew he was jealous-no one had had such an effect on Judah Low as Ann-Hari.

“We’re a dream,” she said. “The dream of the commons. Everything came to this, everything came here. We got to here. This is what we are. History’s pushing us.”

What does that mean ? he thought. What are you saying ?

“It’s time for us to push through. Whatever happens. We have to come back now, you see?” That was all she would say.

The whispersmith’s friends, his fellow cavalry, disappeared on their horses Remade and whole, becoming dustclouds as they headed east, south. Drogon stayed. Cutter was not sure why.

“What do you want this lot to do? You been in the city… you know we’ll be killed if we go.”

“They’ll be killed maybe.” Drogon shrugged. “They know what’s happening. Who’m I to stop them? They can’t stop now. You set yourself on a rail and it comes to be what you do. They have to keep going.”

This ain’t about argument, Cutter thought. He was horrified by what seemed to him quiescence. If they tried to argue it, they’d lose… but even though they know that, they still go on… because in going against the facts, they change them. It was a methodology of decision utterly unlike his own, unlike how he could ever think. Was it rational? He could not tell.

The Iron Council progressed through a landscape made of mist. The scarps and hillocks, the layers of trees seemed momentary thickenings of water in the air, seemed to curdle out of the vapour as the perpetual train came, and dissipate again in its aftermath.

They moved through scenery that was abruptly familiar, that jogged old memories. This was New Crobuzon country. Siskins went between dripping haw-bushes. This was a New Crobuzon winter. They were a few weeks away.

“We had a man once, years and years ago,” Ann-Hari said to Cutter. “When the Weaver came to us, before we was Council, and told us secrets. The man went mad, so he could only talk about the spider. He was like a prophet. But then he was boring, and then not even boring, just nothing. We didn’t even hear him, you see? We heard nothing when he spoke.

“You’re like that. ‘Turn back, turn back.’ “ She smiled. “We don’t hear you no more, man.”

I’ve a mission, Cutter thought. I’ve failed. Knowing that his lover had expected it did nothing to stop his sadness.

He became a ghost. He was respected-one of the world-crossers, who had come to save Iron Council. His dissidence now, his insistence that the Council would die, was treated with polite uninterest. I’m a ghost.

Cutter could have left. He could have taken a horse from the township’s stables and ridden. He would have found the foothills, the deserted tracks, Rudewood, he would have come to New Crobuzon. He could not. I’m here now was all he could think. He would run only when he had to.

He had seen the maps. The Council would go on east leaving spike-holes and the debris of track-pressed shale, recycling the iron road, and would at last hit the remains of the railway scores of miles south of New Crobuzon. And there they would couple to what remained of the old tracks, and steam on, and within hours would approach the city.

Cutter would run when he had to. But not now.

“We are a hope,” Ann-Hari said.

Perhaps she’s right. The train will come, the last of the Collective will rise, and the government will fall.

In these damp wilds they were not the only people. There were homesteads, little wood houses built on hills, one every few days. A few acres of sloped and stony ground raked beyond the dark underhangs of hills. Orchards, root vegetables, paddocks of dirt-coloured sheep. The hill farmers and families of loners would come out as the Council took its hours to pass them. They stared, skin milky with inbreeding, in the deepest incomprehension at the great presence. Sometimes they would bring goods to barter.

There must be some tradetowns but the Council did not pass any. The news of them-of the rogue train appearing from the west, escorted by an army of fReemade and their children, all of them proud-crossed the wet country by rumour’s byways.

Word’ll reach New Crobuzon. Maybe they’ll come for us soon.

“Did you hear?” one toothless farmer woman asked them. She offered them applewood-cured ham, for what money they had (arcane westland doubloons) and a memento of the train (they gave her a greased cog that she took as reverential as if it were a holy book). “I heard of you. Did you hear?” She gave them proud passage through her paltry lands, insisting they carve their road through the middle of her field. “You’ll be ploughing for me,” she said. “Did you hear? They say that there’s trouble in New Crobuzon.”

Could mean the Collective’s done. Could mean it’s winning. Could mean anything.

There was more word of that trouble the farther east they went. “The war’s over,” a man told them. His shieling had become a station, his porch a platform. His nearest neighbours had travelled miles from their lowland holdings to be with him when the Iron Council came through. His fields were a sidings yard full of men and women. The farmers and the wilds people watched with stern pleasure.

“The war’s done. They told me. They warred with Tesh, ain’t it? Well it’s over, and we won.” We? You never set foot in New Crobuzon, man. You never been a hundred miles from it. “They did something and they beat them and now the Tesh want peace. Do I know what? The what? What’s a Collective?”

New Crobuzon had done something. The story came back again. A secret mission, some said, an assassination. Something had been halted and life had changed, the Teshi had been restrained, forced into negotiation or surrender. Something stopped Tesh’s plans? Cutter thought wryly. Fancy. And that triumph, it seemed, had bolstered Parliament and the mayor, had bled support from the Collective. That he could not be wry about. That he could not think about.

“The strikers? They’re finished. The government sorted them out.”

Through the rained-on downs came a spread of runaways from the city. They came and lived in the small towns by which the Iron Council was passing; they repopulated the deserted cow-towns they found, the residues of the old railway rush. The Council might come out of the low hills in an industrious multitude and lay down tracks along the preflattened paths, along the reclaimed main roads. New inhabitants would emerge from what had been the saloon, a church, a bawdyhouse, and stare as over hours (their progress faster daily) the crews put down the sleepers and rails on old horsetracks and passed where stagecoaches and drifters had been.

“Did you hear?” They heard the same stories scores of times. There must have been escapees from the Parliamentarian quarters too, but no one said so: everyone was a Collectivist, on the run from the militia. Sure you’re not some two-bit spiv? Cutter thought cynically. Sure you’re really an organiser like you claim?

“Did you hear?” That the war’s over, that we beat the Tesh, and that when we beat the Tesh the Mayor took control again, and everything was sorted, and the Collective went under?

Yes, we heard. Though it was disputed.

They were entertained in these revenant towns, with sex and New Crobuzon cooking. “What have you come for? Did you not hear? Did you hear? There ain’t no Collective no more. Only dregs, some terrorists in Dog Fenn, a few streets here or there.” “That ain’t what I heard, I heard it was there and still fighting.” “You’re coming to help, to fight for the Collective? I wouldn’t go back. It’s a damn war there.” “I’d go back. Can I come? Can I come with you?”

Some of those who had left to be wanderers in the waste-some of the young-joined the perpetual train, to return to New Crobuzon, only weeks after their escape. “Tell us about the Iron Council!” they insisted, and their new compatriots told all their stories.

There were rumours of new kithless, unique powers. “Did you hear,” Cutter heard, “about the golem-man Low?”

“What?” he said, crossing to where the refugee spoke.

“Golem-man Low, he’s got an army of made men. He’s making them of clay in his cellar, ready to take over the city. He’s been seen, outside New Crobuzon, in the rail yards, on the sidings, by the tracks. He’s got plans.”

They came closer, and the escaped they met were more and more recent out of the city. “It’s done,” one said. “There ain’t no Collective anymore. Wish to gods there was.”

That night Cutter looked for Drogon and realised that the whispersmith had gone. He walked the length of the train, sent messages and queries, but there was nothing.

It was possible the susurrator was off riding, hunting, on a mission of his own, but Cutter was very suddenly certain that Drogon had gone. That they were close enough to New Crobuzon, that the horseman had had enough, and had ridden, his adventures with the Iron Council over.

Is that all? Such a slow deflation, such a lacklustre end. Was that all you wanted, Drogon? Not tempted to say good-bye?

Cutter prepared to leave. It could not be long. He felt a hollowness, a preemptive loss. He wondered how and where the militia would confront them and destroy the Council. The Remade and their families and comrades, the Councillors, all knew what was coming. Their track-laying songs became martial. They oiled their guns; the forges at trackside and in the carriages turned out weapons. The Iron Councillors carried made and stolen guns. The glass and brass foci of ordnance-shamanism. Racks of spears and west-coast weapons.

“We’ll gather people with us, we’ll be an army, we’ll sweep in. We’ll turn things around.” Cutter winced to hear the dreams. “We’re bringing history.”

There was a drip of people across the land, on their way anywhere, without plans but away from the carnage of New Crobuzon.

Still empty land, only a few half-kept orchards, a few groves of temperate fruit-trees. There was a moment of transition. They were in the wilds, in unsafe lands, and then with a suddenness and a strange anticlimax they were in domesticated country. They knew they were close.

The graders and scouts returned. “Yonder. Just beyond.” Over stone-flecked undulations. “The old rails. Down to Junctiontown, in the swamps. And up to New Crobuzon.”

Two days away. Every moment they continued, Cutter expected a deployment of New Crobuzon troops to emerge from the tunnels and flint hides of that damp region, but they did not come. How long would he stay? He had tried to dissuade them. Would he handle the mirror one more time?

“Low the golemer’s been seen, he’s in the hills, he’s watching over us. He’s by the old rails.”

Oh yes? Has he? Cutter was sour. He was very lonely. Where are you, Judah? He did not know what to do.

In small numbers, some Councillors-the older, mostly, the first generation, who remembered the punishment factories-left. Not many, but enough to be felt. They would go into the hills to scout for wood or food and would not come back. Their comrades, their sisters, shook their heads with scorn and care. Not everyone was unafraid, or willing or able to ignore their fear.

I’ll decide the plan when I see the old rails, Cutter told himself, but then he walked with the track-layers as they bent the iron road through gaps between sediment and basalt stanchions and through the V the graders had cut in soft displaced earth and there, there, there wetly ashine, black but glowing, were the rails. More than twenty years old. Curving away, drawn together by perspective, slipped through geography. The metal path. The crossties were bucked by neglect but held the rails down.

The Councillors gave a cheer that was reedy in the cold wet air but that continued a long time. The track-layers waved their tools. The Remade gesticulated their unshaped limbs. The road to New Crobuzon. That old road. Left to moulder when the collapse of money and the stockpiles in warehouses had made an end to the TRT boom. They had been left to the shifting ground-Cutter could see where the banks of the cut had bowed and buried the metal. They were running grounds for wild things.

In some places the iron had been stolen by salvagers. The Council would have to lay down some from its own stock. The Iron Council had come this way before, unborn, when it was just a train. The wet of the stones, the dark and glistening way. Cutter stared. And what was it? What was happening in his city? Where the Collective was fighting? How should he run?

Judah, you bastard, where are you?

The hammermen laid down the rails, and with careful measured sideswipes of their mallets, they put in curves. They made bends, gently, so that their tracks came out of the west and skewed gradually through the banks of the train-gash up and onto the roadbed of the old rails.

This is all a postlude, Cutter thought. This is all happening after the story.

The Collective was falling or fallen and all there was was this unfolding of violence. We’ll swing it, change it, Cutter thought with sad scorn, in the voice of a Councillor.

The greatest moment in the history of New Crobuzon. Laid low by war and by the end of war, which was gods help me my doing, our doing. But what could we do? Could we let the city fall? The Collective would have fallen anyway, he told himself, but he was not sure of that. He drew icons in the earth, making trains in outline, men and women running away or toward something. Maybe the Collective’s just hiding. Everyone in the city waiting. Maybe I should stay on the train. He knew he would not.

There were guards around the sprawling train-town now for fear of militia and of the bandits. Mostly the brigands that came, fReemade and whole, came to join the Council. They arrived daily, wondering if they had to audition, show their worth. The Councillors welcomed them, though some fretted about spies. There was too much chaos in those last days to worry. Cutter saw newcomers everywhere, with their tentative enthusiasm. Once with a start he thought he saw a man attached backward on a horse’s neck.

Walking back through the cold at night, through a startled gust of rock pigeons, Cutter heard a voice. Deep in his ear.

“Come up here. I’ve something to tell you. Quiet. Please. Quietly.”

“Drogon?” Nothing but the idiot fluting of the birds. “Drogon?” Only small stones skittering.

It was not a command but a request. The susurrator could have made him come, but had only asked.

Drogon was waiting in the dark hills overlooking the train.

“I thought you’d gone,” Cutter said. “Where’d you go?”

Drogon stood with an old white-haired man. He held a gun, though it was not aimed.

“This one?” the old man said, and Drogon nodded.

“Who’s this?” said Cutter. The old man held his arms behind his back. He wore an old-fashioned waistcoat. He was eighty or more, stood tall, looked at Cutter sternly, kindly.

“Who is this Drogon? Who the fuck are you?”

“Now, lad…”

“Quiet,” said Drogon peremptorily in Cutter’s ear. The old man was speaking.

“I’m here to tell you what’s happening. This is holy work and I would not have you not know. I’ll tell you the truth, son: I had and have no interest in you.” He spoke with a singing cadence. “I was here to see the train. I’ve been wanting to see the train a long time, and I come by darkness. But your friend”-he indicated Drogon-“insisted we speak. Said you might want to hear this.”

He inclined his head. Cutter looked at the gun in Drogon’s hand.

“So here is what it is. I am Wrightby.”

“Yes, I see you know me, you know who I am. I confess gratification, yes. I do.” Cutter breathed hard. Godsfuckingdamn. Could it possibly be true? He eyed Drogon’s gun.

“Stand still.” A whispered command. Cutter stood tall so fast his spine cracked. His limbs were rigid. “Hold,” Drogon said.

Jabber… Cutter had forgotten what it was to be so ordered. He shook, tried to curl his fingers.

“I am Weather Wrightby and I am here to tell you thank you. For this thing you’ve done. Do you know? Do you know what it is you’ve done? You crossed the world. You crossed the world, something that’s needed doing as long as I’ve lived, and that you did.

“More than once I tried, you know. With my men. We did what we could. Cut through the mountains, through creeping hills. Smokestone. All the landscapes. You know them. We tried, we died, we turned back. Eaten, killed. Taken by cold. Again and again, I tried. And then I was too old to try.

“All this”-he swept his arm up-“all this metal trail from New Crobuzon to the swamps, the split, to Cobsea, to Myrshock, it was something. But it wasn’t what I worked for. Not really. Not my dream. You know that.

“No: that other thought, of iron stretched from sea to sea, that was mine. The continent cut open. From New Crobuzon west. That was mine. That’s history. That’s what I been fighting for, wanting. You know it, don’t you, all of you? You know that.

“I won’t pretend you didn’t rile me. You did, of course you did, you riled me when you took my train. But then I saw what you were doing… Holy work. Much more than you’d been charged with. And while it weren’t the easiest for me to see, I’d not stand in the way of that.” Weather Wrightby shone; his eyes were passionate and wet. “I had to come see you. I had to tell you this. What you’ve done, what you did. I salute you.”

Cutter shook like an animal in a trap, debased by the susurrator’s techniques. He strived, moving and hearing again “Be still” deep in his ear. It seemed to resonate in the bone itself. Gods, fucking, damn. The air was utterly still. There was the snap of metal from below. It was cold.

“And then you were gone, off in the west and who knew where? It was over, but I knew I’d hear of you again and then, yes.” Weather Wrightby smiled. “Even fallen and failed, I’ve my networks, I’ve my plans. I’ve my friends in Parliament who want me to succeed. I hear things. So when they found you-when one of their scouts or merchanteers went up through that sea, and heard of the train-town and sent word and sent scouts and found you-when that happened, I heard it. And when they sent their men to bring your heads, under cover of the war, I heard that too.

“What could I do? What could I do but come to you? You know the route. You know the way through the continent. Do you know? What that is? That’s holy knowledge. I’d not let them bury that. You went as fast as you can, there’s places I’d deviate, go souther near the Torque, but however it’s finessed its your way. I needed to know.

“So I got word to your best defender in the city, one there when your Council was born. You think it isn’t known?” He shook his head with gentle amusement. “Who’s an idea where the Council might have gone? Of course we know. Known for a long time who their man is in the city. I’ve paid one of his friends, a long time, to keep a link to him. I got him word so he’d come find you. We knew he could. And we could come and help. To find the Council, to help it back. My whispersmith.”

Drogon was an employee. He was security, an agent, for the TRT. Cutter’s blood went from his stomach.

“He’s somewhere near, you know, they say. Your defender, Low. He’s been seen. He’s like a lost thing now the Collective’s near gone. He’s been seen around the lines. Waiting for your end. We’ve what we needed.

“We came to help, and learn the way. We learnt it all. Drogon, my man. A good man. We’d not have them interrupt you. We had to stop them. So close, so nearly home. I couldn’t let them interrupt you so near the city. We had to see you back again.”

That’s why Drogon came back. This mad bastard here, Wrightby’s fucking mission. And those other cavalry, TRT all? Good gods. He needed us to come through. He had to know we’d made it all the way. Had to see our route. He fought the city. He killed the damn militia so he could see us get back.

“And now, you’re here. Shhh, still now.”

“Still,” said Drogon, and Cutter’s slow struggling ended.

“Now you’re here. You’ll be on the rails tomorrow. And back to the city. You see, you’ve done what was needed. I’ve the route across the continent. By the cacotopic stain. The way you made out of your bodies and your need. We thank you for it.”

Drogon, without sneer or show, inclined his head.

“You can be sure we’ll use it. I’ll build the iron way. This continent will be made again, Remade, it’ll be made beautiful.” Cutter stared at the visionary of money and iron. He stared and could not speak, could not move, could not tell Weather Wrightby he was mad. Now Wrightby could cross the continent, after so long trying and failing. He would plough a train-thin strip and siphon money to the west and suck it back again. He would change the world and New Crobuzon.

Can he? It’s a long way. A damn long way.

But he knows the way now.

“Here’s how it will be. They’re waiting for you. The Collective’s dead. You know that, yes? And the militia knows you’re coming. They’re waiting. They know where you’ll arrive. To the sidings, the terminus we built. There’ll be plenty of them.”

There would be battalions. There would be whole brigades. Lined in rows, with their guns, with a patience of mass murder. They were waiting for their quarry to come, enter the fire and iron, the hotspit thaumaturgic carnage, at their own pace. No light golem, no moss-magic, no braveheart resistance of the fReemade and their kin, no cactus savagery, no shaman channelling, would defeat that massing.

“You’ll die. I’m here to tell you that.” He said it not like a warning, but as part of a conversation. He’ll not intercede again. This fucker helped for some religious craziness, some mercantile madness. Even against the government. But now we’re back he’s done with that. We’re home, we’ve done what’s needed, he has the way. He can do what he’s always wanted. It’s in Drogon’s head, the bastard, in the tracks we left.

“I want you to know you are magnificent. Such a brave thing, so strong. Like nothing I’d imagined. Well done, well done. You can end now.

“I tell you why I tell you this.

“It wouldn’t be seemly for you not to know. You should know what you’ve become. When you turn those last curves, and see the trainyard, and the militia.”

Cutter shook. Drogon watched him.

“Or you could go.”

Cutter’s heart beat faster as if it were only with the saying of it that Wrightby made it possible. As if he were giving him permission to escape. “You could go. Drogon wanted you to have that choice. That’s why I’m here.”

Drogon? Did you? Cutter had the strength, just, to move his eyes and look at his erstwhile companion. The ranch-hand hatted killer did not look up. Such attenuated camaraderie. What was this? Some last chance, granted to Cutter. I always had a chance, he thought, though he felt as if Drogon had given him a present.

“You’ve ridden history across the Rohagi steppes. You’ve made the TRT a truth though its name was always a lie before. It did-it crossed a continent. You can go now.

“Or. Or you could help us. You could help us cross back again. Once more. Leave the tracks behind us this time.” Wrightby looked at him and Drogon did not. “Drogon’s told me your facility, how you’ve learnt to travel, to grade, to scout. And you were always your own man. We know that. You could help us.”

Gods, Jabber, Jabber and shit, godspit, godshit, you ain’t saying that. You ain’t. The true of it. A revelation. So. Even through Drogon’s disabling hex, Cutter sneered.

That’s it? He tried to talk but could not. The expression he dragged across his face said it. You think what, you think what ?

What do you think I am? Think I’m so cut off from them as I’ve fought and travelled and fucked with that I’d go, leave them for you ? For your money crusade? All your religiose dung comes to this? This was a recruitment speech ? You want me on your team? Because I know the way? Because I’ve done this? You want me on your team? What do you think I am?

He was melted with disgust, standing in his whisper-hexed stillness, his hands by his side.

“What do you say?” Wrightby said.

Deep in Cutter’s ear came Drogon’s voice: “Speak.”

“Fuck you,” said Cutter instantly. Wrightby nodded, waited.

“Get away from my fucking train. You bastards, you turncoat bastard, Drogon, you’ll never get away from us-” He breathed in to scream and Drogon silenced him again.

“We’ll not get past you?” Wrightby said. He looked quizzical. “I’m not sure. Really, I think we will. We’ll go now. I will be in the yard. When the train comes in. I’ll be there, waiting. Come if you want to, if you change your opinions.”

Drogon whispered again. Cutter was agonied by cramp. The whispersmith indicated a way through the hills, led Weather Wrightby away. He looked back and whispered to Cutter again.

“Just so you know,” he said. “I can’t see as it’ll make a spit of difference. But just in case. Because it has to finish now. Your mirrors are broken. Just to be sure.”

Weather Wrightby looked Cutter in the eyes. “You know where to find me.”

And they were gone, and Cutter was straining. Why didn’t you kill me, you fuckers?

His arm came up. It did not matter. He was no threat. What they had told him did not matter. The militia are waiting -he had said that for weeks. Everyone knew he thought that. However suddenly certain he was, it was what he had always said. Why would this change the Iron Council’s messianic plans?

There was another reason Drogon and Wrightby had left him alive. They still thought he might turn. They thought he might get out, leave the Council as it steamed toward its carnage and its end, and join them. And he hated them for that but also thought, What am I? What am I that they think that of me?

He cried some. He did not know if it was the effort of breaking the hex, or something else. He saw himself as Drogon must have seen him: his sneers and loneliness making him seem a traitor in waiting.

The mirrors had been taken out of their careful wrapping in the armoury car. The glass was veined, the tain made dust. Cutter wanted to tell someone what had happened, but he was afraid of the bitterness in him, the miserable certainty of an expectation fulfilled-he was afraid that for all the real loss of it he would seem to crow. He hated it in him. He knew Drogon had sensed it. It was why they had approached him.

He took the broken mirrors to Ann-Hari, and told her.

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…”

“I know. I knew they wouldn’t. It doesn’t matter.”

“What happened? In the city?”

“Oh Cutter. Done, it’s done.” Judah was placid, cowish. He looked between Cutter and Ann-Hari’s heads at the curve of the track, in the direction from which the perpetual train would come. Looked back at them, back at the tracks. His attention switched ceaselessly.

“What’ll we do?” Cutter said.

“There’s nothing to be done, now,” Judah said. “It’s not the same now. The city… it’s changed again.”

“Why are you here, Judah?” Ann-Hari said. “What are you here for, Judah Low?” She was complicitous. They were smiling at each other, just. A little play in their voices. Even with the carnage to come, even having seen the militia, there was something still playful in her. She reached and touched him again and again, and he her. The thing between them was like an animal coiling from him to her and back. He looked over her shoulder and back at her.

“Judah!” Cutter shouted, and Judah turned to him.

“Yes, yes, Cutter,” he said. “Of course.” He was calming. “Why did you come here?”

“What have you done, Judah?” Cutter said. But there was a noise, and Judah gave a happy gasp just like a little boy and jumped on his toes, again like a boy. There were tears in his eyes. A smile and crying.

A wraith of smoke emerged a half mile off. The perpetual train. It wriggled up, the discharge, like a soot grub from a burrow, faster, slewing a tight turn through blasted barriers and coming closer. A wind came up before the train and pushed at their faces, Cutter and Ann-Hari turning to watch the lamps that rounded and shone weakly through the daylight, washed out the stone and the tracks, and the Iron Council came into the last of the cut.

No. Cutter did not know if he spoke aloud. He did not believe there were revolutionists hidden behind the militia. He watched and shouted aloud or in his head, as the Iron Council came through cleft stone and rolled at speed toward death. No.

The flared guard made into teeth, the engine a fetish head, carved with stories, hung with animal spoils, crowded with the toughest warriors, the biggest Remade, the cactacae with scramasaxes ready, roaring, feted by New Crobuzon refugees who ran alongside, who cheered desperately and threw confetti. The second engine, all its follow-ons, the whole tracktop town become militant, become its weapons, the Iron Council become a fighting city. Its wheels beat the iron, smoke gouting from its chimneys, everyone poised to fight, with no plan but the imbecile bravery of forward.

Uh uh, uh uh. Cutter heard it, the wheels, the clatter of tracks. He ran to the edge of the gap and shouted though he could not be heard. He saw that Judah was crying but still smiling, and Ann-Hari was smiling only. The train, faster than it had ever gone, went past Rahul, who waved his human and his lizard hands.

Cutter stumbled, and behind him he heard Judah muttering, heard Judah repeat the two-part rhythm, the repeating beat of the train. He was singing along with the train, and there was something expectant in him. Cutter leaned over, looked down on the train and the Councillors preparing for war, their last war, for their city again. He saw ahead of them a strange pattern of obstructions between the ties, nothing heavy enough to derail or damage the engine, but a precise set of interruptions, looking from above like the points of a pictogram, over a few yards of track.

“Uh uh uh uh, ” Judah said, and below in time sounded uh uh, and the front of the Iron Council passed over a mechanism Cutter had seen, that he had thought a signal relict or something half-finished; and as the wheels touched it and it clattered, it beat into motion, and Judah gasped and dropped to his knees. His skin stretched; the very meat of him seemed bled away. Cutter saw the force of his cathexis, the yank of energy.

He heard the syncopation of the train and of something else now, a complex interfering, percussion in antiphase. Iron Council tripped the switch that Judah had laid for it and the circuit he had left went live, siphoning force from him, and only Cutter could see. Cutter watched Judah blink and gasp.

The little blockade between the tracks, which Judah’s first shout had stopped Cutter or Ann-Hari seeing, wedged in the shingle, propped on crossties-a blockage of pins, of metal rods, of blocks-was pushed over by the Iron Council. Each piece landed hard, onto the contacts Judah had laid, and their strange precise order, their materials, made each of them fall with its own sound. They combined into a careful and exact music of breaking, snaps and tolling iron that added to the flawless beat of the train; and for seconds, for a snatch of time, there was pulse-magic, a palimpsest tempo, and in that moment of complexity, each accented block of noise intervening in time, cutting time into shape so that as the huge hunter’s head of the Iron Council emerged from the rock folds and synclines into open land the moments themselves were hacked by the noise, axed into shape, an intervention through the mechanism that sucked energy from Judah Low, the great self-taught somaturge of New Crobuzon, and crude, vigorous, ineluctable, the precision of that parcelled-up time reshaped time, was an argument in time,

reshaped the time itself, and made it

a golem

time golem

which stood into its ablife, a golem of sound and time, stood and did what it was instructed to do, its instruction become it, its instruction its existence, its command just be, and so it was. This animate figure carved out of time itself, the rough hew-marks of its making the unshaped seconds and crushed moments at its edges, the split instances where its timelimbs joined its timebody. It was. The shape of a figure in dimensions insensible even to its maker, unseen by any there; its contours, seen another way, enveloping the train.

The time golem stood and was, ignored the linearity around it, only was. It was a violence, a terrible intrusion in the succession of moments, a clot in diachrony, and with the dumb arrogance of its existence it paid the outrage of ontology no mind.

His face bloodied, making some beached fish-flapping motion as he crawled and smeared his gore on the earth, as he shambled like a drunk man to stand, broken by the effort of thaumaturgy, Judah Low looked into the cut and smiled. Cutter watched him.

There was an ugly noise. The tearing and crush of a weighty impact. Ann-Hari was screaming. She ran down the scree with a wake of dust. She fell and rolled and gathered herself, tearing her clothes. Rahul stood in his own shock, looked up at the Iron Council, scant feet from him. The Councillors and runaway citizens were standing, were waiting, quite uncertain. Everyone was looking at the train.

The perpetual train. The Iron Council itself. The renegade, returned, or returning and now waiting. Absolutely still. Absolutely unmoving in the body of the time golem. The train, its moment indurate.

It could not always clearly be seen. The crude rips in the temporal from which the golem was made gave it edges like facets, an opalescence of injured time. From some angles the train was hard to see, or hard to think of, or difficult to remember, instant to instant. But it was unmoving.

For yards over its chimneys the exhaust was fast as smokestone, motionless until the set billows reached the limits of the split in time, the golem’s body, and above that random barrier gusted away in drifts, the last of the effluvia escaping into history. The Councillors were still poised, their weapons were still ready, the train was bursting into the plains beyond the city, and was without motion.

The last carriage, one of the two engines that pushed instead of pulling, had missed the protection of that cosseting unmoment, had stayed dynamic, and had been derailed and crushed against the sudden crisis of untimed matter. It had burst, scattering hot coal and debris and dying engineers. The last fringe of the car ahead of it was concertinaed and torn, and where it met the unending time golem, the edge of the wound was scored like a line.

Ann-Hari was screaming. The Council-followers were coming in more numbers out of the rock, telling each other what had happened, sending word back: Iron Council has… what?

No noise came from it. It was a huge silence shaped like women and men on a train. The Iron Council was made of quiet. Ann-Hari screamed and tried to grab it, to pull herself up onto it, and time slithered from her at the borders of the golem and sped her hand or deflected it or momentarily had the Council not there so she could not touch it, she could not touch it. She was in time. It was not, and it was beyond her. She could see it, and all the instant of her comrades, but she could not reach it. Others left behind in time were gathering around her. She was screaming.

At the head of the train, reaching with his brawny thorned arm, was Thick Shanks. He was staring at the massed militia in the distance. He was smiling, his mouth open. Beside him a laughing man whose string of spittle was stretched to the point of snapping. The train was occluded with suspended unmoving dust. Its headlights relucent, their shed light absolute and unwavering. Ann-Hari raged and tried and failed to rejoin Thick Shanks and the Iron Council.

Cutter looked on the impossibility. He jumped when Judah put his hands on him.

“Come,” said the somaturge. His voice was not Judah’s. A torn-up ruined thing that came up with blood and sputum, though he still smiled. “Come. I saved them. Come.”

“How long? Will it last?” Cutter heard his quaver.

“Don’t know. Perhaps till things are ready.”

“They died.” Cutter pointed at the train’s rear. Judah turned his head away.

“It’s what it is. I did all I could. Gods, I saved them. You saw.” He rose. He held his stomach. He let out a gasp. He swayed and left a spatter pattern around him. The daylight seemed to strengthen him. He reached, and Cutter gave him his hand, and they began to descend, Judah lolling as if he were stitched from old cloth, down into the rocks, hidden from the tracks. In the very far off, noise said that the militia were coming. That they saw something was not as it should be, and were coming.

Cutter and Judah climbed down, away.