Iron Council (26 page)

It is just the same motion, and it is utterly new. The urgency
is drunken. The pace faster by orders of magnitude. The ties are thrown down much farther apart, only just enough to hold the train. These rails will not last. They are not meant to. The roadbed they are building is only a sketch, a ghost in the land. The
train creeps like a child.

As the rails come clear, ground clean by the weight of the train, the men and women take them up again. They are pulled by mules past the storage and workshop cars where hundreds more are stacked, past the railroad and the train itself, to the front, into the glare of the engine’s lamp eyes. And there they are unloaded. And the track-layers lay them down again.

Miles of track, reused, reused, it is the train’s future and its present, and it emerges a fraction more scarred as history and is hauled up again and becomes another future. The train carries its track with it, picking it up and laying it down: a sliver, a moment of railroad. No longer a line split through time, but contingent and fleeting, recurring beneath the train, leaving only its footprint.

They move at speeds that eclipse anything they have achieved. A mile a day has been their benchmark, and this is many times that. Now the huge Remade woman who was freakish and kept from the tracks before is welcomed with her one-blow hammering. The tracks lay down, come up, lay down, come up. They protrude hundreds of yards before and behind the train.

—The gendarmes are coming.

Judah goes back with the demolishers.

—I want to do this with a golem, he says. He touches the flimsy bridge, sends his power out conducted by the metal, makes it ab-live. No one is listening to him. —I want to make this rail a golem. I want to make the rails conductors for it.

He can hear the crack of unsettling metal as the tracks try to stretch and become a giant man. He shudders. He has not the strength for this. His companions climb the shaking bridge, cross into the darkness of the hole. It is not golem they prepare but it is an intervention.

Judah rejoins the train shunting on the flat, toward Cobsea. It is turning. Some popular committee, some delegated or loudly insistent group squatting on the weather-hood, directing the track-
layers. They turn from the invisible line to where that fickle town waits. With taps from the mallets, with their expertise, the perpetual train veers. Judah helps the crews take up the final rails and return them to the front. The tracks are turning.

The perpetual train deviates, west-northwest. Into wilderness where there is nothing, a new unmapped place. The train is going feral. Judah cannot breathe.

(Much later he hears the crack and billow of explosions. He imagines the poorly built bridge folding and become spillikins.
He imagines the gendarme’s train jackknifing to kiss its own tail, voiding men and ordnance, uncoiling to the chasm floor. He thinks of Oil Bill’s plan, and of the detritus that will scud across the dried-up river. The train and the skeleton of the bridge will settle, become wood-and-metal fossils.)

The perpetual train has gone wild. The iron council is renegade.

Spring is starting to sing summer, and the perpetual train is buzzed by insects Judah has never seen before, like folded paper lanterns, like tiny hooded monks. Their ichor is bloodred.

Judah hauls rails. He hauls them up, unbuckling the past. Behind him the army of camp followers are suddenly full of mission. They carry hoes and break up the earth where the tracks have been.

It is ineffective camouflage. They cannot pass without indelible marks. It will take years of earth shucking and rock rabbits and rock foxes crisscrossing ruts with their own paths, years of rain and winds before the scab left by the perpetual train is gone.

There is so much to do. It is not easy to run away.

Miles every day. Sharp turns of the reused and reused rails,
and the snatch of railroad skirts impediments—pools, rock snarls. Crews of graders throw rubble into sinkholes. Behind the train is a track of dust. The train is in a sparse wood that has waited for the railroad to fill it, and the iron council meets.

—We got to get more planned. We need scouts, hunters, we need water. We have to track a route.

—Where we going then?

—Brothers, brothers . . .

—I ain’t your brother, a woman shouts.

—All right bloody hell
sisters
then, and everyone is laughing.
—Sisters, sisters . . .

—They won’t stop, you know. It is Uzman. People quiet. —It ain’t a joke. It ain’t safe. Brothers . . . sisters . . . We crossed Weather Wrightby. He won’t forget. They’ll hunt us down.

Steam rises from his pipes.
You never wanted us here,
Judah thinks.
This isn’t what you wanted. You wanted us to hold. Your pretty runagate dreams were of making a line to the guilds, as if they’d run come save us. Now you’re still trying. Though you’d not have chose it thus.

Uzman is a good man.

—It ain’t just the gendarmes. TRT’ll put a price on our head. We stole their train. We stole their
railroad.
Think they’ll let that go?

—Every bounty hunter in Rohagi’s coming for us. And godspit, you think the
city
’ll let this go? It is quiet but for the snap of insects against the lantern. —It’s New Crobuzon’s railway too, and we took it. You think they’ll let Remade walk away, find a place in the wilds? The
militia
are coming for us now, too. The militia.

—They’ll come in airships. They’ll come over land. Think they’ll let us go to ground, some fucking fReemade arcadia? They’ll bring the train back wearing our heads. We can’t just find a little valley ten, thirty, a hundred miles from here. If we do this . . . we have to
go.

—We have to be
gone.
Bring me a damn map. Do you realise what we’ve done here? What we are now?

A scattered mess of Remade. A town of Remade and their xenian and freeanole friends. These thieves and murderers, rapists, vagrants, embezzlers, liars. —You look carved, Uzman says with a wonder they can suddenly hear. —Bits of wood, man-sized, whittled by gods. They blink up at him in the shadow of the train they have stolen.

Only three days’ deviation from their plotted route, the iron council is beyond the details of maps. These are strange lands. These are the Middling Sweeps. The Rohagi wilds.

The more intelligent wyrmen are sent out over empty geographies that make them nervous, little urban things that they are. They are charged with finding the hunters still away, the water-
carriers in their carts, looking for springs. Those reconnoitring, who will return to find nothing but carnage where the tunnel once was. They will look over the moulding and sunburnt corpses of the gendarme train, and will say, —What happened here? The wyrmen are sent to gather the iron council’s own.

Systems grow. They find springs, and the water car is kept full, caulked where it bleeds. The guntower is welded and hammered into a seared approximation of its old shape. Remade are trained, hurriedly, by the scientists who have stayed, are shown how to draw charts.

—Where will we go?

At night the renegades play banjos and pipes, the train’s warning bell is struck, its boiler made a drum. Women and men lie together again. Some Chainday nights Judah goes to the wordless trackside man-meets for release, but Ann-Hari and he fuck one night and stroke each other with the most sincere, the most close affection.

The slowly stranging place delights Judah. On the sixth day of the iron council, as the mile-long track-stretch swallows its own tail and moves, as the train enters a dreamish landscape of bruised succulents and the summer comes down on them, a posse of gendarmes and bounty hunters arrives.

They underestimate the council by a gross degree. They are no more than thirty men and xenians, in cracked leather and spikes, their very clothes made weapons. They come out of the vein-coloured undergrowth under the standard of the TRT, creatures like scurrying mushrooms running from them.

The band fire, scream through their loudhailers. —Comply! Lawbreakers, surrender!

Do they think the iron council will be cowed? Judah watches in awe at their stupidity. Twelve of them are shot fast, and the others ride away.

—Get them, get them, get them, shouts Ann-Hari, and the fastest Remade take off with their weapons. —They know where we are!

They can only kill six more. The others escape. —We’re marked, Uzman says. It is less than a hundred miles since they have escaped. —They’ll come for us.

They leave traps. Barrels of blackpowder, complex batteries and fuses. They send the train between stone overhangs, and the geothaumaturges and what hedge-mancers there are cut diaglyphs into the mineral walls and lay down primed circuits so that the weight of a cart will make the rock deliquesce and pour down in cold magma to set again with the outriders of the gendarmes or militia drowned. That is the plan.

Judah sets golem traps. Batteries, somaturgic turbines of his
design, so the fallen wood or the bone-heap or the earth or split discarded ties will stand and fight for iron council.

At night he walks the renegade railroad with Uzman and Ann-Hari, who are chary but need each other. Strategist and visionary. The perpetual train does not stop at night. The train is full of skills. Remade fix what flintlocks can be fixed, and make new weapons. In the furnaces they melt down older rails for cutters and armour. They are making their wheeled town a war-machine.

—It won’t be long, Uzman says. —Time’ll come we probably have to abandon the train, have to run.

—We can’t, Ann-Hari says. —Without it we have nothing.

A group of councillors in the clerk’s car lean over vague maps—sketchy composites of myths. The darkwood desks and inlaid walls are carved and graffitied from the first days, when the drunken rebels rendered savage art.

—Here. Uzman presses the map. —What’s this?

—Swamp.

Uzman moves his finger.

—Unknown.

—Salt flats.

—Scree.

—Unknown.

—Tar pits.

—Unknown.

—Smokestone. Smokestone gulleys.

Uzman chews his knuckle. He looks out of the window. Councillors haul the rails from one end of their stolen track-mile to the other.

—Do we have any meteoromancers?

—There’s a girl Toma. Someone shakes their head. —Can whistle up a gust dries her clothes but, you know, parlour hex really . . .

—We need someone can raise a gale—

—No. One of the researchers speaks. He is a young man who has grown his beard and wears the sweaty clothes of the workforce. He is shaking his head. —I know what you’re wanting. You’re thinking, through the smokestone? No. You saw what happened when Malke was caught in it? He nearly died. You saw what it was like.

—There must be ways to know when it’s coming . . .

The young man shrugs. —Pressure, he says. —Cracking. A few things. From geysers. He shrugs again. —We looked it up when it trapped us. It’s too many things.

—But there are ways of telling . . .

—Yes, but Uzman, you’re not thinking. These maps are best-guesses. We’re in the Middling Sweeps. And there’s one thing we
do
know that’s there. The man runs his finger up the map. The car sways. —See? What this is?

It is a crosshatched patch of land, inked in red. Two hundred miles from them, less than a month at this absurd pace. It abuts the smokestone, or where the old cartographers thought the smokestone might be.

—You know what that is?

Of course Uzman does. They all do. It is the cacotopic stain.

—You ain’t taking us to the stain, Uzman.

—I can’t take you anywhere. The council goes where it decides it will. But I’m telling you the only thing we can do. You decide if it’s what you want or not. And if not I’ll stay and fight, and we die.

—It’s the
stain.

—No, no it ain’t the stain. It’s the edges. It’s the outskirts.

Uzman has a look on him. He stands and seems to glimmer. He sweats from the heat of his own pipes, eats coal. His lips are black.

—It ain’t the stain. We have to go through the smokestone flats—

—If they’re there.

—If they’re there. We have to go through the smokestone flats, and beyond that’s the
outskirts
of the cacotopos. Even if they got through the stone, no one’ll follow us there.

—And you know why, Uzman, right? For good damn reason.

—We got no choice. No, that ain’t so. We run. Leave the train to rot. Run be fReemade. Or we can keep it. All our sweat. The road. But if we keep it, we have to go do this. We have to make it out, far away, or we die. We have to go west. And west of here? He prods the waxed chart. —The cacotopic zone. Just the edges.

He sounds as if he is pleading.

—People’ve dipped in there before. We’ll be all right. We have to.

He pleads.

—Just the edges.

It opened a half millennium before, a rift through which spilt great masses of the feral cancerous force, Torque. A badland beyond understanding. Where men might become rat-things made of glass and rats devilish potentates or unnatural sounds and jaguars and trees might become moments that could not have happened, might become impossible angles. Where monsters go and are born. Where the land, and the air, and time are sick.

—It’s no matter, anyway, someone says. —We ain’t got no meteoromancers, and we ain’t got anyone can call up air elementals, and we ain’t going through smokestone without someone can push wind.

Judah leans on the table; his fringe dances before his eyes. He looks down at the ink landscape.

—Well, he says. —Well now.

Somaturgy, golemetry, is an intervention. Making servants from unlive matter is about persuasion, insinuation. A strategy of life-giving.

—Well now.

I can make a golem out of air,
thinks Judah.
A clutch of air in the air. Have it run with us. Air running through air.
It will exhaust him. But he knows he can get them passage through the smoke.

Judah knows that they will go.

He walks with Uzman, and a golem walks with them. Shambling vegetable pulp. They are a strange troika: the Remade sending steam from the pipes that burrow him; Judah tall and bony, his beard like a furring of dirt; the golem putting down its shapeless feet. The train slips forward in tiny motions.