Iron Council

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

“I hate that we run from them.”

“You heard, though. You heard how it was. We have to play safe. They’re armed to take us out.”

“But if we have to run from them, why by gods are we heading back to the city? It’ll be way worse.”

“It doesn’t work like that, though, does it? That’s not the idea. We send out word. By coming back, we change things. By the time we get back, it won’t be them waiting for us. It’ll be a different city.”

Cutter and the man lounged against a wall after another dance, in a cab reconfigured. It was a punitive journey, and night after night the Iron Councillors kicked against the darkness to improvised rhythms.

There had been deaths, of course, to footholds lost, to viruses and bacteria of the hinterland, and to the depredations of the inland predators, animals that unfolded in claws, teeth, cirri, and killed. Drogon went hunting with the Council’s forces, came back with the heads of strange predators, with new wounds and stories. That one phases, so we trapped it when it went icy and I took it through the heart. That one sees with its teeth.

Cutter saw some of the new thaumaturgy the Iron Council had learned. It would not have saved them from the militia. The Council tried to make things hard for their pursuers, blowing up bridges behind them, filling trenches with rubble. Judah laid golem traps behind the Iron Council, set to be triggered only by a company of men. He laid as many as he could-each one ate at his energy. Cutter imagined the earth buckling and unbuckling become a rock figure, a figure made of fallen trees, the water of the stream, wherever Judah had laid the trap. Its one instruction indelible and simple in place of a brain: fight. The substance of the inlands themselves gone not feral but organized, interceding and pounding down the militia with its blows.

If the militia reached that far, which Cutter thought they would. Some of them would die, but most would likely not. When they made landfall, found the Council’s trail, even the power of Judah’s great golems could not stop them coming. The militia would close on the stragglers of the Iron Council, those left behind by the train. Iron Council relied on the cacotopic zone. That was what would hide them.

“Didn’t think I’d see this again,” Judah said. They were on a crag peering over the tracks, the long dotted-out spread of men and women, riding pack mules or walking hard and fast, surrounding and joining the graders.

What if the Council changes its policy on the way? Cutter thought. What if we get halfway across and enough people disagree and want to go back?

There. The sun moved behind them. Its vividness seemed to green slowly as it sank, as if it were verdigrising. In the ill-seeming light they looked north and east into the cacotopic stain. They had come hundreds of miles, in weeks, and here they were, at the edge.

Cutter went white to see it. “Qurabin,” he said, “tell us a secret. What is it? What’s happening there?” Something sounded in the air like scuttling.

The monk’s voice came: “Some secrets I don’t want to know.”

There, a Torque landscape. Mussed by that ineffable bad energy, the explosion of shaping, a terrible fecundity. Vistas. We ain’t seeing what this really is, Cutter thought. This is just one idea. One way of it being.

Even there in the outskirts of the cacotopos land was liminal, half-worldly geography, half some bad-dream set. It was merciless, stone horns and trees that looked like stone horns, forests of head-high mushrooms and ferns that dwarfed runt pines and, a way off, the flat of some delta where the sky seemed to push in between too-tall extrusions. Cutter could see nothing moving. That unplace extended to the horizon. It was many miles to pass through.

Cutter did not know if he was seeing hills or insects flying close to his eye: that could not be, he knew, but the impossibility of focus confounded him. Was that a forest so far off? That went for many miles? Or was it not a forest but a tar pit? Or now perhaps not a tar pit but a sea of bones or a grid, a wall of tessellated carbon or scabmatter the size of a city.

He could not make it out. He saw a mountain and the mountain was a new shape, and the snow on its top was a colour snow should not be and was not snow but something alive and tenebrotropic. The distant stuff extended cilia that must be the size of trees, toward oncoming darkness. Lights in the sky, stars, then birds, moons, two or three moons that were the bellies of acre-wide lightning bugs and then were gone.

“I can’t do the sense of it.” Qurabin’s voice was terrible. “There are some things the Moment of the Hidden and the Lost doesn’t know, or’s scared to say.”

The Torquescape was insinuatory, and fervent, and full of presences, animalized rock that hunted as granite must of course hunt and spliced impossibilities. They had all heard the stories: the cockroach tree, the chimerae of goat and ghost, reptilian insects, treeish things, trees themselves become holes in time. There was more than Cutter could bear. His eyes and mind kept trying, kept straining to contain, encompass. “How could they do this? Travel through this?”

“Not through,” Judah said. “They didn’t. Keep remembering that. They went just round the outside. Close enough to scare.”

“Close enough to die,” Cutter said, and Judah inclined his head.

“What things live here?” Cutter said.

“Impossible to list,” Judah said. “Each is its own thing. There are some I suppose-there are shunn, there are inchmen in the outskirts…”

“Where we’ll be.”

“Where we’ll be.”

They would be three weeks, perhaps, in the edges of the cacotopic zone. Three weeks pushing as close as they dared into the viral landscape. There must have been those who had passed through it before, in the half-millennium since it appeared in a spurt of pathological parturition. Cutter knew the stories of Cally the winged man; he had heard rumours of adventures in the stain.

“There must be another way,” he said. But no, they said there was not.

“It’s the only way to be safe from the militia,” Drogon whispered. “The only way to be sure they won’t follow us. They’ll be stranded outside. It’s basic orders: never go into the zone. And anyway-” His intonation changed, the breath of his words faster. “-this is how they found their way. The Council, I mean. A passage through the continent. You know how long people tried for that? A passage? Through the smokestone, the cordillera, the quaglands, the barrows? We can’t risk changing it. This might be the only way.”

A few miles in, Judah disappeared for hours in the train’s wake, returned exhausted. Cutter screamed at him not to go off alone, and Judah gave one of his saint’s smiles.

Camouflaged with brush were segments of the tracks. The scouts and graders joined them, section to section, and the train went through the outlands of the stain. Cutter clung to the perpetual train and let the wind refresh him. There were a few demons of motion left, all domesticated now, the children or grandchildren of the first wild pulse-eating dweomers who had chewed the wheels. The ethereal little fauna were cowed. Cutter watched them.

He watched the rocks and the trees, heard below the grind of the gears and flywheels the bleatings of unseen animals. There were fights as people tried to take their turn sleeping in the cabs. The camp of graders was a tight little tent-town, in circles for safety. Still, nothing could prevent some of the effects of the cacotopic stain reaching out.

Water was rationed, but still every day crews led by the council’s few vodyanoi dowsers would set out to find potable streams-they went south, always, away from the Torque and the danger. And still every few days one or other would return ragged and stammering, carrying the remnants of someone lost, or bundling someone who had changed. Torque touched at night with its fingers of alterity.

“She was fine till we headed home,” the hunters might shout, holding a Remade woman who shook so ceaselessly hard and fast that the blur of her limbs and head half-solidified and she was a faintly screaming mass of quasi-solid flesh. “Shadowphage,” they might say, indicating the terrified boy from whom light shone too brightly, the inside of his open mouth as clear and illuminated as the crown of his head. People came back who had become gnawed by the radula of impossibly fast vermiform predators. The Iron Council passed over footprints: the stiletto holes of an echinoid rex, the strange tracks of an inchman, pounded earth in clumps four or five yards apart.

Of the Torque- or animal-wounded they saved those they could, in the cattle-truck become a sanatorium. Others they buried. In their tradition, they laid them ahead of the tracks. Once, digging a grave, they disturbed the bones of one of their ancestors, one of the Council dead on the outward journey, and with tremendous respect they begged her pardon and laid the newly died down with her forever.

“This can’t be right,” Cutter raged. “How many will this take? How many have to die?”

“Cutter, Cutter,” Ann-Hari said. “Hush you. It’s a terrible thing. But if we stayed, faced militia, we all die. And Cutter… so many more were killed the first time. So many more. We’re getting better at this. The perpetual train sends out safety. It’s charmed.” Every day the heads of new predators were hung from the train. It became a grotesque museum of the hunt.

When Cutter saw Drogon, the whispersmith was in a state of constant amazement. He relished the hunt even in these badlands, and everywhere they went he watched so closely, tracking their passage through splits and rockways, watching the movement of the cacotopic zone. He was committing it to memory, trying to understand it. That was one way. Cutter preferred another: wanted this time to be done, wanted only to have it end.

He went with crews scavenging for wood and ground-coal, peat, anything for the boilers. He went with his companions, searching for water.

The diviner emerged from the water-tank car given over to the vodyanoi. His name was Shuechen. He was sour and taciturn as stereotype said vodyanoi always were. Cutter liked that. His own brusqueness, cynicism and temper predisposed him to atrabilious vodyanoi.

As they rode, Shuechen swinging in his water-filled saddlesac, the dowser told them about the debates, the factions among the Councillors, the argument over the Council’s new direction. Ex-Runagaters, cynics, the young, the fearful old. There was uncertainty growing as to whether this was the best strategy, he said.

Shuech would put his big palms flat and sniff the earth, slapping it and listening to its echoes. He led them three hours from the train. Clean water came out of the rocks and gathered in a basin surrounded by roots so minimally touched by Torque that Cutter could imagine he was back in Rudewood. When he did, loss broke him a long moment.

They filled their water-sacks but then it was night, fast as a rag thrown over the sun, and quickly they made camp. They did not light a fire. “Not near the zone,” Shuech said.

Gripped together against a punitive rocky cold, the two Remade made Cutter’s party tell them about New Crobuzon. “Rudgutter’s dead? Can’t say it’s a shock. That bastard was Mayor forever. And now it’s Stem-Fulcher? Gods help us.”

They were stunned by the changes. “The militia patrol openly? In uniform? What in hell happened?” Pomeroy gave a brief history of the Construct War, the attack on the dumps, the rumours of what was within. It did not sound real, even to Cutter, who remembered it.

For a long time they straight refused to believe what Cutter told them of the handlingers.

“We was chased by one,” he said. “I’m telling you. During one of the riot crises a few years back Stem-Fulcher announced that they’ve, whatever, made contact, and that they were all misunderstood.” The handlingers, figures of terror for centuries, the feral hands come from corpses (some said), who were devils escaped from hell (some said), who took over the minds of their hosts and made their bodies into something much more than they had been. If the condemned are to die anyway, Stem-Fulcher had said, and the city is in need of help the handlingers can give, it is foolish sentimentality not to draw an obvious conclusion. And of course they would be tightly controlled.

Even so the announcement had spurred new riots out of disgust, the abortive Handlinger Revolt. The crowd who would have taken boats across the Gross Tar to assault Parliament were defeated by those they were protesting, men and women suddenly rising from their masses and spitting fire, dextrier handlingers wearing the meat of the condemned.

Cutter talked late. He was very afraid of changing. “What if Torque gets out here?” he kept saying, and the Remade reassured him differently, one saying that if your number was up it was up, the other that they were far enough that they should be all right.

That night they were attacked.

Cutter woke to ripping and opened his eyes into grey moonlight and a face staring at his own. He thought it had come with him from his dreams. He heard shooting. He hauled himself away from the expression bearing down on him, a quizzical and monstrous look.

When adrenaline hit him he was already moving, was already out and running, thinking, Where are the others, what’s happening, what will I do? Emerging into the camp he saw more clearly what had come and what was happening and he stumbled and fought hard not to fall.

His party were around him, running, firing, and there was someone’s scream that made Cutter cry out himself. He saw the stirrings of the tent like a rag-beast as the thing that tore it flapped fragments like wings. He saw a looping, spastic move and there was the impact of something hurled to the ground, and then another. The percussions were around him everywhere.

“Inchmen!” he heard Elsie shout. “Inchmen!”

The creature threw the rippings of his tent apart and the wind spiraled them into the air and emerging from their centre as if by cheap stage effect was what had come for him with brute and hungry enquiry, what had smelt him through the cerecloth. In the swirl of rag-ends came his predator. Spangrub. Kohramit. Homo raptor geometridae. An inchman.

Cutter stared. The face of the figure leered at him and came forward very suddenly, snapping up and down in a motion Cutter did not for some moments understand.

Taller than he but all torso, its trunk seeming to extend from the ground, its head twice the size of his, long arms scrawn and bone, hands splayed or knuckle-dragging, clutching as it moved. Near-human, its mouth opened by teeth black and long, spike-sharp. He could not see its eyes. Two sinkholes, a mass of wrinkled skin and shadows: if it saw it did so out of darkness. It turned and sniffed, throwing back its bald head and opening and closing as best it could that toothed mouth. And then it shifted and Cutter saw its hindquarters.

Colossal and grossly tubate, a caterpillar body studded with tufts, ventricles opening and closing sphincters, dun and specked with warning colours. The man torso congealed into the front of that yards-long body, hip bones into larval flesh. The inchman moved.

It had a clutch of little pulsing legs at its front below its pale torso, and two, three stubby pairs of prolegs at its very rear. It pulled its rear up in a great arch, vised its prolegs into the hard earth, took the weight of its forebody, and with a flail lifted it, straightening the tube of bodiness, the humanish torso high at the end of outstretched grub physiognomy that batted uncertainly at the air, then onto the spongy caterpillar forelegs.

It sniffed again. It arched again, gripped and opened itself out, put its forebody down closer. Inchworm motion. A groping walk, a spanning toward him.

Cutter fired and ran. The inchman accelerated. The Iron Councillors tried to fight. There were several inchmen at the camp’s corners. There was the bray of a mule, and shouting.

In the moon’s glare Cutter saw another of the loopworm men champing, blood black in the half-light all over its front and mouth, a huge hand pressing down on the shuddering animal beneath it. It made an open-mouthed parody of chewing.

One inchman emitted an elyctric roar. The others joined in, spilling grots from their mouths.

The mules and runt camels were screaming. Shuech fired and the fist of buckshot sheared off skull and brain mass, but the inchman hit did not drop, too stupid or stubborn to die. It lurched in with its grotesque larval swaying, and with a leather-skinned hand grabbed a man and punctured him. The man screamed but stopped very fast as the inchman took him apart.

Shuech threw flaming cacodyl, and the caustic spread over one of the caterpillar figures, which batted without urgency at the fire. It sounded again, that throat noise, and as it reared on its hind prolegs it became a torch, illuminating them all.

The things blocked them. They were caught by a shelf above a canyon, which went to scree too loose to run. Cutter backed against rock and fired. Someone cried. Judah was murmuring.

The rearmost inchman chattered slab teeth. Its head burst. Matter spattered its fellows. Pomeroy refilled his smoking grenade shot.

In the wake of one Iron Council thaumaturge Cutter saw simple plantlife growing in footprint shapes, the spoor of moss-magic. The mossist growled and a mass of blots mottled an inchman’s skin, a bryophyte coating clogging its mouth and the holes of its eyes. It reared, retching, clawing the plant pelt and drawing its own thick blood.

The Iron Councillors fired chakris, fat flat-blade disks or scythe-bladed arrows. The inchmen bled in gouts, but did not stop coming. Judah stepped up with a near-holy fury in his face. He touched the ground. His crooked hand spasmed.

For a second nothing and then the inchmen were padding on moving earth that began to unfold in the shape of a vast man, a somatic intervention in the rock and regolith-and then something stammered in the aether and broke. Judah staggered and sat hard on the loose stones, and the ground settled. The human shape that had begun to disaggregate from it became random again.

Cutter cried Judah’s name. Judah was holding his head. An inchman was one step away from him.

But Pomeroy was there, his blade in his hand. With a psychotic doomed bravery while Elsie screamed he hacked into the human-form abdomen of the inchman.

He was a very strong man. The inchman even stopped a moment at the impact, and Pomeroy let go the sword and stepped back, standing in front of Judah, who gathered himself, looked up as the inchman snatched Pomeroy’s head. Its enormous palm pressed over the man’s face, swung him by his head with the absent savagery of a baby.

Cutter heard the shearing of Pomeroy’s neck, and Elsie’s scream. The inchman flailed Pomeroy’s body. Judah was crouched again, drawing up the golem from the earth. This time it came all the way. It stamped, shedding its earth-self, swung at the nearest inchman. The enormous strike sent the thing off the rock, into the air. Its inchworm arse flexed; it dropped and hit the ground with explosive wetness.

Elsie was weeping. The other inchmen were closing, and Judah crooked his fingers and the golem interceded. It stamped with a walk that was Judah’s walk, Cutter would swear, performed by earth. It stood before the Councillors and tore into another of the geometrid things.

After a moment of indecision while the exhausted Councillors fired, the inchmen retreated from the towering golem. Two descended head-first down the sheer uneven rock. The third was trapped in a last ugly blood-mud wrestle, and the collapsing golem rolled with its opponent to the edge and over.

Judah kneeled by Pomeroy, and the Iron Councillors ran to help their comrades. Cutter, shaking, stared over the edge. He saw the inchmen descending the vertical surface. On the rock floor were the bodies of the two who had fallen, and the red earth of the golem.

Cutter went to Pomeroy and gripped his dead friend. He gripped Elsie, who was wailing, who sobbed on him. Judah was stricken. Cutter tried to grab him too, pulled him close. They hung on together. The three of them held as Elsie cried, and Cutter felt Pomeroy go cold.

“What happened?” he whispered in Judah’s ear. “What happened? You… are you all right? You stumbled… and Pom-”

“Died for me.” Judah’s voice was perfectly flat. “Yes.”

“What happened?”

“Something… A remote. I weren’t expecting it. A golem trap was triggered. I’m saving chymicals and batteries-it took its energy mostly from me, and I didn’t have the focus. It shook me, made me fall.” He closed his eyes, lowered his head. He kissed Pomeroy’s face.

“It’s a golem trap I put in our path,” he said. “The militia triggered it. They’ve made landfall. They’re coming.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

On the coast hundreds of miles away (Judah said) an ictineo, one of New Crobuzon’s experimental ichthyscaphoi, must have come to land. A behemoth fish come out of the ocean crawling on fins that became leg-stubs that stamped forward until the stumpy limbs shattered under their own weight and the enormous Remade fish-thing lay down and shuddered. This was what must have come.

A mongrel of whale-shark distended by biothaumaturgy to be cathedral-sized, varicellate shelled, metal pipework thicker than a man in ganglia protuberant like prolapsed veins, boat-sized fins swinging on oiled hinges, a dorsal row of chimneys smoking whitely. The fish-ship’s mouth (Judah said) must have opened with a grind of industry, anchored by chains, drawbridge-style, as the flange of lower jaw descended and the men of the New Crobuzon militia emerged, bringing their weapons, and coming for the Council.

“It weren’t so easy for us when first we came through. We found ourselves wandering, trying to get away from the stain, and then the path would coil and we’d be going straight into the Torque’s innards, sky like guts or like teeth. We lost so many to it then,” the man said.

He was, from long ago, a Dog Fenn Remade. His hands were gone, the left a mess of bird’s feet congealed in talon-mass, the right a snake’s thick tail. He was a scald, an Iron Council balladeer, and the apparent halting of his delivery was a game: he told in a complex, arresting syncopation mimicking novicehood. His story was a kind of lay for those dead by the inchmen.

“We lost so many. They went to glass and then was just gone, on a hill that was a bone and then a pile of bones and then a hill again. We learnt ways of passing through this in-between.” There was no scientist in the world of Bas-Lag who knew more about Torque, about the cacotopos, than the Iron Council.

“Now we come back, the land’s shucked and the Torque’s done what it’s done. Some of the rails we hid is gone, some’s corkscrewed, some are holes the shape of rails, some are lizards made of stone. But there are enough to get us out again. To come out on the other side, with only the plains between us and New Crobuzon. Hundreds of miles, weeks maybe months, but not the years it would once have taken.”

Many miles west, the New Crobuzon Militia tracked them.

Inchmen came again. This time they attacked the train itself, and were repelled but at cost. They drag-crawled and with their wavering spanworm walk stomped toward the train and even touched it and gnawed at it, marked it with stone-hard teeth and caustic spit. Councillors died pushing them away. There were other creatures: shadows shaped like dogs, simians with hyaena voices pelted with grass and leaves.

The ground defied the Council. It changed in sped-up corrasion, in the buckling of tectonics at some psychotic rate as if time was untethered from its rules. The ground crawled. There were patches of sudden and extreme cold where frost-heave buckled rails, and then temperate places where the rockwalls came closer and creeping hills stalked them.

They laid tracks on ground just smooth enough for their passage, on ties just strong enough, just close enough together. It was a just-railroad, existing in the moment for the train to pass, then gone again. Hauled by the Remade and by young Councillors who had never seen their parents’ former home. Over a spread-out swamp, a quag that ate the tracks.

Cutter would look up, time to time, from his hammering or earth-laying, and see the glowering of the cacotopic stain in the near-distance: the snarl of sky and scene, a baby’s face, an explosion of leaves, an animal in the uncertainty in the air and the hills. We don’t even see it no more, he thought, amazed, and shook his head. The sky was clear, but a serein drizzled onto them. You can get used to the most monstrous absurdity, he thought.

With the knowledge that the militia followed them was a calm. “They’ll stop at the stain,” Judah said, but Cutter realized he was no longer sure. Cutter took heliotypes from the stationary train, of the unstable landscape and creatures that were not insects nor lizards, birds nor metal cogs but something Torque-random that seemed inspired by all these things.

Judah was quiet. He was in himself. He came to Cutter one night and let the younger man fuck him, which Cutter did with the urgency and love he could not ever control. Judah smiled at him and kissed him and stroked his cheek, gods, not as a lover but like some kind of priest.

Judah spent most of his hours in the laboratory car wedged full of witchy detritus. He wound his voxiterator. Listened over and again to the recordings of the stiltspear songs. Cutter saw his notebooks. They were filled: musical scores slashed through with colours, queries, interruptions. Judah muttered rhythms under his breath.

Once Cutter saw him, standing in half-light at day’s end, at the front of the perpetual train. He heard Judah mutter a song-rhythm and pat his own face with one hand, clicking a syncopation with the other. There were motes around Judah’s head, unmoving, a scattered hand of specks, flies and mountain midges that did not eddy with the wind: an unnatural and profound inertia. When the train shucked and rolled a few feet on, Judah left the gust of immobile insects behind.

Wyrmen Councillors flew. They looked for the end of the zone. Some of course did not return, vanished in a fold of air or suddenly forgetful of how to fly, or ossified, or become wyrmen cubs or tangles of rope. But most came back, and after many days in the outlands half-bred from the monstrous and quotidian, they told the Iron Councillors that they were near the end.

They built their last rails along a path their geoseers said was ambulatory, would wander and confuse pursuers. With the engine newly coated with predator heads, newly charnel, and the carriages scratched and marked by their passage, the Iron Council jackknifed up a slope. Cutter found it impossible to imagine land untouched by Torque.

They crested the rise, hammers laying down last tracks, behind them the crews hauling away the iron of their passage. Cutter stared at a windblown landscape of smokestone. It was a vivid and strange place, but without that pathology, that dreadful cancer fertility of the cacotopic stain.

“Oh my gods,” Cutter heard himself say. There was cheering, spontaneous, absolute with delight. “Oh my gods and Jabber and godsdamned fuck, we’re out, we’re out.”

They took a route on the very edge, the littoral ridge that divided the fringes of the Torque from the healthy land. They hammered the metal home on the smokestone flat and came back into natural land.

The perpetual train went through the smokelands. The winds had gusted great roils, rock cumulonimbus on the anvil-tops of which they laid tracks quickly, nervous that they might revert. “Somewhere down there’s where we came in,” Judah said. The split path they had made had long been effaced in scudding stone.

Judah, Cutter and Thick Shanks walked in the lee of the solid cloud, by the edge of the cacotopos.

“Some of us are afraid,” Thick Shanks said. “Things have run away from us. Feels like we ain’t got a choice of what we’re doing.” His voice was thin in the warm wind.

“Sometimes there are no choices,” Judah said. “Sometimes it’s history decides. Just have to hope history don’t get it wrong. Look, look, isn’t that it?”

They found what they were looking for: a vertical uncoil of rock drooled with ivy and on which shrubs were stubbled. There was something different about the ground, a remnant of gouging, long-ago explosive-ploughing. A path visible under two decades’ growth.

“This is where we came through,” Judah said, “the first time.”

He stood by the cloudlike wall and tugged at a rockplant, and Cutter saw it was not a rockplant but a bone come from the stone. A sere wristbone, time-bleached leather still ragging it.

Judah said: “Was too slow.”

A man encased. Caught by a tide of smokestone. Cutter looked with wide eyes. Around the wristbone was a circle of air, a thin burrow, where the arm-meat had been, and had rotted. And inside, it must hollow in a body’s contours, emptied by grubs and bacteria. A flaw, an ossuary the shape of a man. Silted with bones and bonemeal.

“Councillor or militia. Can’t remember now, can you, Shanks? There’s others. Dotted through. Bodies in the rock.” They clambered to the top of the range. The Iron Council moved, its hammers ringing, the wyrmen like windblown leaves above it through the gushing of its smoke. Cutter watched the train progress. He saw the strangeness of its contours, its brick and stone towers, the rope bridges that linked its carriages, its carriage-mounted gardens and the smoke of its chimneys, echoes of the smokestacks at its head and tail.

A way east, long-rusted barrels of militia ordnance protruded from the stone.

In the land beyond, the land that extended to New Crobuzon itself, it was a prairie autumn. The Councillors looked carefully at the water and the woods and hills and at their charts. They could not believe where they were.

The maps they inherited from when Iron Council was the TRT train became useful again. The perpetual train was still embedded in the loosest ink, the crosshatched beige that indicated uncertainty, but eastward the drawings grew more clear; stippling of brush, the watercolour wash of fen, contours of hills in precise line. This was not land on which tracks had been laid, but it was in the city’s ken. The Council could track its route through the ink.

They checked and rechecked. It was a burgeoning revelation. They were heady and astounded. “Around the long lake here. We’ve Cobsea to our south. We should avoid them, get northside of the lake as fast we can. We’ll bring Council justice to New Crobuzon.”

Even knowing the militia followed them could not cow them. “They’ve come after us. They followed us into the stain,” Judah told Cutter. “They’ve triggered a golem trap I put in the cacotopos.” No militia had ever gone so deep. This must be a dedicated squad, who realised the Council was heading back for New Crobuzon.

“We’ll go close to the hills.” Days ahead, a backbone of mountains rose and extended half a thousand miles to New Crobuzon. “We’ll skirt them; we’ll take the train through the foothills. To New Crobuzon.”

There were still months to go, but they went fast. Scouts went to see where bridges or fording were needed, where swampers had to fill wetland, where tunnellers and geothaumaturges would carve out passages. History felt quicker.

Drogon the whispersmith was alight with excitement, sounding in Cutter’s ears, telling him he could not believe that they had come through, that they had achieved this, that they were so close to being home. “Got to clock what we done,” he said. “Got to mark it. No one’s ever done this, and plenty’ve tried. There’s still a way to go, and it’s still land no one knows well, but we’ll do it.”

Judah sat on the traintop and watched this suddenly unalien landscape. “It ain’t safe,” he told Cutter. “Can’t say it’s safe at all.” He spent much time alone, listened to his voxiterator.

“Judah, Cutter,” Elsie said, “we should go back to the city.”

She was silent in these days, with Pomeroy’s death. She had found a calm that let her live in her loneliness. “We don’t know what’s happening there; we don’t know what state they’re in. We need to get them word that we’re coming. We could sway things. We could change it.”

It was a long way still, and there were many things that stood to stop them.

“She’s right.” Drogon spoke to each of them. “We need to know.”

“It ain’t no matter, I don’t think,” Judah said. “We’ll go, nearer the time. We’ll go and get a welcome ready, prepare for them.”

“But we don’t know what it’ll be there…”

“No. But it won’t make a difference.”

“What are you talking about, Judah?”

“It won’t make a difference.”

“Well if he ain’t going, no matter. I’ll go alone,” Drogon said. “I’m going back to the city, believe it.”

“They’ll find us, you know,” Elsie said. “Even if we veer north, Cobsea’ll likely hear of us.”

“As if the Council can’t deal with fucking Cobsea men,” Cutter said, but she interrupted.

“And if Cobsea finds us, it won’t be long before New Crobuzon does. And then we’ll have to face them again. Them as follows us, and those that’ll face us too.”

One of the carriages of the perpetual train was changing. They thought they had got through the fringe of Torque without being marked too hard, that all they had to show was the sanatorium full of the uncanny ill or dying. But some of the cacotopic miasma was slow to show effect.

There were three people in the boxcar when its Torque sarcoma began. The train was juddering through a high land of alpestrine plants and stoneforms jawing the air. One morning while snow as fine as dust eddied and the hammerers had to warm their fingers with each strike, the door of the carriage would not open. The Councillors within could only shout through cracks in the wood.

They took an axe to it but it rebounded without scuffing paint or wood, and the Councillors knew that this was the cacotopic stain’s last fingers. But by then the voices of those within had dulled with lassitude, a surrendering up.

Through the night they became more and more languid. By the next day the car was changing its shape, was bulbous and distending, the wood straining, and the people within made contented cetacean sounds. The walls grew translucent and shapes could be seen, eddying as if in water. The planks and nails and wood-fibre opalesced then went transparent as the boxcar sagged, fat over the wheels, and the councillors inside grew more placid, moved oozily within air become thick. The debris from the store-cupboards lost their shapes and spun as impurities.

The carriage became a vast membranous cell, three nuclei still vaguely shaped like men and women afloat in cytoplasm. They watched and waved stubby arm-flagella at their comrades. Some Councillors wanted to decouple the grotesquerie, let it roll away and thrive or denature according to its new biology, but others said they’re our sisters in there and would not let them. The long train continued with the corpulent amoebic thing rippling with the movement of passage, its innard inhabitants smiling.

“What in Jabber’s name is it?” Cutter asked Qurabin.

“Not in Jabber’s name anything. I don’t know. There are things I don’t want to trade myself for. And even if I did, there are secrets that have no meaning, questions without answers. It is what it is.”

A fortnight after they had left the cacotopic zone, they met their first eastlanders for twenty years. A little group of nomads emerging from the hills. A fReemade gang, twenty or thirty strong. They were a wild mix, including a rare vodyanoi-Remade among the men and women reshaped for industry or display.

They came with wary courtesy to the train. “We met your scouts,” their leader said. She was amended with organic whips. She stared and stared, and it took Cutter a long time to realise that what he saw in her eyes was awe. “They said you was coming.”

The Remade of the Council looked at her and her brigands. “It’s all change,” the fReemade said that night at a meagre feast. “Something’s going on in the city. It’s under some siege. Tesh, I think. And something else, going on inside.” But they were too far, had been too many years from the town that made them, to know details. New Crobuzon was almost the legend to them that it was to the Iron Councillors.

They did not go with the Council: they wished them their friendship and went on to their rootless robbing life in the hills, but the next fReemade the Council came to did join. They came to show respect, to worship (Cutter could see it) the self-made Remade town, and stayed as citizens, Councillors themselves. When the Iron Council came to the northern shores of the lake that would shield them from Cobsea, they were met by the first fReemade to have sought them out deliberately.

Word must be passing along the strange byways of the continent, the paths between communities and itinerants. Cutter imagined it an infection. Threads of rumour, a fibroma knotting Rohagi together. Iron Council is coming! Iron Council is back!

The Council was fracturing. Their momentum was such that they could not have turned away. The closer they came to the metropolis, the more anxious, hesitant the older Councillors were. “We know what it’s like,” they’d say. “We know what it is there.” And the more certain, messianic, their children became. Those who had never seen the city were eager to visit on it something: what was it, a retribution? An anger? Justice, it might have been.

They would lead the track-laying, young men who might not have the enhanced strength of their parents but who swung their hammers with energy and hunger. The Remade put down tracks with them, but the older Councillors were the followers now.

Ann-Hari was different. She gloried. She was insistent, demanding they go faster. She would stand on outcrops, clamber with crude grace up overhanging hillocks and gnarls and gesture the perpetual train on as if she controlled it, conductor of a steam symphony.

It was so fast, suddenly: they carved on, scouts warning of this small gorge, that stream. Work-crews built hybrid forms of New Crobuzon traditions and oddities from the west-trellis bridges anchored with thick greenery, supports not of stone but of solid colour, that could only be crossed when light shone on them.

“There’s war!” a fReemade told them. “Tesh says it’s stopped its attacks, and then it hasn’t. They say there’s two envoys from New Crobuzon, asking different terms. New Crobuzon don’t speak with one voice no more.”

If the fReemade out here know we’re coming, Cutter thought, there’s no way them in New Crobuzon don’t. Word gets out. When will we face them?

Every few days Judah would spasm as the militia following them triggered his traps. With each, a few more of the soldiers might be taken, but a few days later another of the traps would go and prove they were coming. Judah tracked their progress in his own moments of weakness.

“They’re there,” he said finally. “I recognise that one. They’re definitely in the cacotopos. I can’t believe they followed us there. They must be desperate to get us.” What would a golem be, made of Torqued materia? With ablife channelled through that bleak matrix?

The stretched-out crew of graders and track-layers went north and east, and though they took their rails and crossties with them they left a land permanently tainted by their passage: a litter of metal parts, scars of railroad. The sky became colder, and through the darkness of the air massif became visible, leagues north. Dark drizzle came.

Here, perhaps three hundred miles west of the stub of the New Crobuzon railway, they were met by refugees. Not fReemade but recent citizens, come in a huddled rainwet congress out of the mist to run the last mile toward the growling engine, abasing before it like pilgrims. It was they who told Ann-Hari and Judah and the Iron Councillors what had happened in New Crobuzon, what was still happening, the story of the Collective.

“Oh my good gods,” said Elsie. “We did it. It’s happened. It’s happened. Oh my gods.” She was rapt. Judah’s face was open.

“It rose in Dog Fenn,” a refugee said. “Came up out of nowhere.”

“That ain’t the case,” another said. “We knew you was coming-the Council. We had to get ready for you, some said.”

They were terribly cowed before the Iron Council. These runaways were speaking to the figures they had seen so many times, for years, in the famous heliotype. They had to be cajoled into talking.

“So there’s no wages: people are hungry. There’s the war, and ex-militia telling what it’s really like, and there are Tesh attacks. We feel like we ain’t safe at all and the city ain’t keeping us… And we hear that someone’s gone to find the Iron Council.” Judah’s face moved to hear it.

“There are Tesh attacks?” Cutter said. The man nodded.

“Yes. Manifestations. And you know, the government’s saying it’s going to sort out the Tesh, going to end the war, but it’s chaos, and no one knows if they’re doing what they say. There’s another demonstration to Parliament to demand protection, and there’s them in the crowd yelling for more than that, giving out their leaflets. Caucus people, I think. But out come the men-o’-war, and the shunn, and the militia come down on us.

“And someone starts saying there’s a handlinger at the front. And people started fighting.

“I wasn’t there-I heard about it, is all. There was dead all over the streets. And when people got the militia on the run… All over the city come up barricades. Time for us to do what we needed, on our own. We didn’t need the militia. Keep them out.

“It was after that we heard the Mayor was dead.”

Delegates from all the districts had gathered in a collective, called and recalled in excitement and panic as the downtowners realised there was no suffrage lottery, that each of them had direct power. After some days the anti-Parliament had curtailed that rude democracy; but only, they swore, because they were in a double war. Most in the Collective were eager to negotiate with Tesh, not caring who controlled what in the seas south.

“Why are you here?” the Councillors asked.

The New Crobuzoners looked down and up again and said that the fierceness of the fighting had driven them away, that there were many exiles. They had been walking for weeks, trying to find the Iron Council.

They were not Caucusers nor collectivists, Cutter thought, only people who had found they were part of a dissident town-within-a-town and under fire, who had run with their possessions in their barrows. They had sought the Council not with a theory or politics, but with the awe of religious petitioners. Cutter disdained them. But Judah was all joy.

“It’s happened, it’s happening,” Judah said. His voice was thick. “The rising, the second Contumancy, we’ve done it. Because of what we did. The Iron Council… it was an inspiration… When they heard we were coming…”

Ann-Hari was staring at him. He seemed to wear a halation in the last of the light. He spoke as if he were reading a poem. “We made this thing years ago and it laid its tracks through history, left its marks. And then we did this to New Crobuzon.”

He looked astounding, a very beautiful thing. He looked transformed. But Cutter knew he was wrong. We didn’t do this, Judah. They did. In New Crobuzon. With or without the Council.

“Now,” Judah said. “We ride into the city, we join them. We aren’t so far from the last of the rails. Jabber, gods, we’ll ride into a changed city, we’ll be part of change. We’re bringing a cargo. We’re bringing history. ”

Yes, and no, Judah. Yes we are. But they’ve got their own history already.

Cutter had come not for the Iron Council, but for Judah. It was a guilt he could never forget. I’m not here for history, he thought. Low mountain pikes looked down on him. In a cold river, the Iron Council vodyanoi were swimming, while the train idled in its strath. I’m here for you.

“And there’ll be no militia now,” Judah said. “They know we’re coming, but with the city in revolt they won’t spare anything to face us down. When we come, there’ll be a new government. We’ll be a… a coda to the insurgency. A commonwealth of New Crobuzon.”

“It’s been hard,” said one of the refugees, uncertainly. “The Collective’s under fire. Parliament’s come back hard…”

“Oh oh oh.” No one saw who spoke. The sounds ebbed up suddenly. “Oh, now.

“What’s this?”

The voice was Qurabin’s. Cutter looked for the fold in air, saw a flit of gusting.

“What’s this?” The pilgrim-refugees were open-eyed in fear of this bodiless voice. “You said there were attacks, Tesh attacks. Manifestations? What kind? And what is this? This, this, this here?”

A buffeting, the stained leather of a newcomer’s bag belling with Qurabin’s tug. The woman moaned at what she thought some ghost, and Cutter snapped at her as Qurabin repeated, “What is that mark?” She looked in idiot fear at the complex gyral design on her bag.

“That? That’s a sign of freedom. Freedom spiral, that is. It’s all over the city.”

“Oh oh oh.”

“What is it, what is it, Qurabin?”

“What are the Tesh attacks?” The monk’s voice was calmer but still very fast. Cutter and Elsie stiffened; Ann-Hari’s concern grew; Judah slowly folded as he saw something was happening.

“No, no, this… I remember this. I need to, I have to, I’ll ask…” The monk’s voice wavered. There was an infolding sense, colours. Qurabin was asking something of the Moment of Secrets. There was silence. The refugees looked fearful.

“How is Tesh attacking?” Qurabin’s voice came back strong. “You said manifestations? Is it colour-sucked things, presences? Emptinesses in the shape of things in the world-animals, plants, hands, everything? And people gone, sickened by them and dead? They come out of nothing, unglow, is it? And they’re still coming. Yes?”

“What is it? Qurabin for Jabber’s sake…”

“Jabber?” There was a hysteria to the monk’s voice. Qurabin was moving, the locus of his sound bobbing among them. “Jabber can’t help, no, no. More to come, there’s more to come. And he has you thinking those are signs for freedom. The spiral. Oh.”

Cutter started-the voice was right up close to him. He felt a gust of breath.

“I’m Tesh, remember. I know. The things that are coming in your city, the haints-they aren’t attacks, they’re ripples. Of an event that hasn’t yet come. They’re spots in time and place. Something’s coming, dropped into time like water, and these have splashed back. And where they land, these little droplets come like maggoty things to suck at the world. Something’s coming soon, and these, these, these spirals, these curlicues are bringing it.

“Someone is loose in New Crobuzon. This is ambassadormagik. The little manifs are nothing. Tesh want more than that. They’re going to end your city. These spirals-they’re the marks of a hecatombist.”

Qurabin had to explain several times.

“Who left that mark is a purveyor of many thaumaturgies. Of which this is the last. This is the finishing of the law. This will take your city and, and will wipe your city clean. Understand that.”

“These are freedom spirals,” said a refugee, and Cutter all but cuffed him to be quiet.

“They say Tesh is talking? They say there are negotiations? No no no. If there are, they are ploy. This is the final thing they will do. Their last attack. Months of preparation, huge energy. This will end everything. No more wars for New Crobuzon. Not ever again.”

“What is it, what will it be?”

But Qurabin did not answer that.

“There will be no more wars and no more peace,” Qurabin said. “And more ripples will come, spattered, on the other side of the event. The last drops. Manifestations in the nothing left after your city’s gone. They’ll wipe it out.”

It was very cold, and the wind that ran down from the chines snatched smoke from their food-fires. Before and behind them, Councillors bunked in their ironside town. There were the noises of mountain animals. There was talking, and the settling metal of the sleeping train.

“What can we do?” Judah was in horror.

“If you want… if you want to fix it, you have to find him. The one who’s doing this, who’s calling things. We have to find him. We have to stop him.

“You-we-have to get back to New Crobuzon. We have to go now.”