Iron Council (43 page)

Ori returned home, and people were waiting for him: Madeleina di Farja; Curdin, whom he had not seen for months, Remade and broken; and a group of men and women he did not know.

“We need to talk to you,” Madeleina said. “We need your help. We have to find your friend Jacobs. We have to stop him.”

At that Ori cried, with the relief that someone else had come to this knowledge without him, that something would be done, that he did not have to do it alone. He was so tired. Seeing them, ranged and rugged by him, carrying their weapons with purpose, without the panic of those days, he felt something in him strain for them.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

In the south, a salvage squad took a dangerous mission through the streets that separated Aspic from Sobek Croix Gardens. The park was a free-fire zone, inhabited by prison escapees and renegades from factions, not controlled by the Collective or by Parliament. The Collectivists needed fuel: they took axes and saws to the trees. But hauling through the streets under militia fire and returning weighed down by logs cost them. Men fell, shot on the corners of the park, lay on the cobbles, pinned and put down in the shade of walls.

Decisions were still made, but the overarching strategy that had made the Collective operate like a power, an alternative city-state, was breaking down. Some squads were commanded with strategic intelligence, but each action now was more or less its own end, part of nothing larger.

The Flyside Militia Tower had long been stripped of weapons, its thaumaturgic compounds deployed, its secret maps taken. Skyrails, thick and thrumming wires, extended south and north from its top, each stretched taut to its terminus. In the south the last militia tower in the city, in the suburbs of Barrackham; to the north the rail angled up, hundreds of feet above the tangle of slate and iron roofs, over the ghetto of the Glasshouse and the intricately twisted River Tar, up to the centre of New Crobuzon. It went to the Spike, stabbed into the sky by Perdido Street Station.

In these savage last days, the Collectivists of the Flyside tower filled two pods with explosives, chymical and blackpowder. A little before noon, they released one in each direction, throttles jammed. The little vehicles of brass tubing and glass and wood accelerated very fast, screamed over the city.

Wyrmen scattered in surprise as the wires bowed under the pods’ weight. They rose, shouted obscenities.

Perdido Street Station was the centre of the city, even more than Parliament, the atramentous keep now empty of functionaries (it was an irony of the time that the “Parliamentarian” government had suspended Parliament). The Mayor was making decisions from the Spike.

As the north-travelling pod careered over Riverskin the militia fired grenades. They landed short, with cruel billows, on Sheck or the riverside streets near Petty Coil. But the guards could not miss for long. The pod made the metal skyrail scream, and one two missiles sailed out, burst its windows and detonated.

The pod blew, its payload conflagrating in an apocalypse instant, and it plummetted in a smoke-described arc. It shattered across the shopkeepers’ houses and terraces of Sheck, crumbling into melting metal and fire.

To the south, though, the explosive-crammed pod rushed over spivvy streets, directly above a barricade at the borders of Aspic and Barrackham. Militia and Collectivist looked up from either side of the wedge of rubble and brick.

The pod overshot open scrubland, sinking as the skyrail angled down, as the estate towers rose toward it. It rushed into the Barrackham Tower.

A one-two-three of explosions as dirty fire blared from the top of the militia spire. Its concrete bulged and split; it was eaten from inside by an unfolding plume; it went up, blew out and began to fall, and the stories below it subsided. In burning slabs like pyroclastic flow the top of the tower slewed off, militia pods falling out and tumbling.

The skyrail went murderously slack, whiplashed down across two miles of city. It coiled through slates, gouging a threadline fault and killing as it came. It dangled from the Flyside Tower and curved toward Aspic, where its hot weight tore buildings.

A spectacular kind of triumph, but one the Collectivists knew would not change the tide.

Most of the workshops by Rust Bridge were quiet, their staff and owners keeping out of sight or protecting the Collective’s borders. But there were still some small factories doing what work they could, for what payment they could get, and it was to one of these that Cutter went on the day the militia tower fell.

The fires of the ancient street of glassworkers were cold, but with a scraped-together purse and political exhortations, he persuaded the seditionist workforce of the Ramuno Hotworks to restart their furnaces, bring out the potash, ferns, the limestone to scour and clear. Cutter gave them the housing with Judah’s circular mirror that he had broken. At last they said they would build him a crystal-glass speculum. He went to Ori’s rooms, to wait for him and Judah.

If Cutter had met Ori before, which was possible given the tight world of the pre-Collective seditionists, he did not remember it. Madeleina di Farja had described Ori, and Cutter had envisaged an angry, frantic, pugnacious boy eager to fight, excoriating his comrades for supposed quiescence. Ori had been something very else.

He was broken. In some way Cutter did not quite understand, but for which he felt empathy. Ori had shut down, and Cutter and Judah and Madeleina had to start him up again.

“It’s getting close,” Qurabin said. “It’s getting near, we have to hurry.”

The monk spoke more and more urgently: the mind behind the words seemed to degrade a little every day. There had been so many enquiries of that hidden Tesh Moment, more and more of Qurabin must have become hidden.

In her or his faintly decomposing way, Qurabin was anxious. The monk was troubled by each spiral they passed, felt the incoming of whatever the thing was, the purveyor of the coming hecatomb: the massacre spirit, the massenmordist, the unswarm, Qurabin called it. It was coming soon, he said, he felt it. The urgency infected Cutter, and the fear.

A ring of small haints beset the city. On the way to Ori’s home Cutter passed a commotion a street away, and Qurabin suddenly dragged him toward it, gripping him with hidden hands and keening. When they got there they saw the last moments of an emission like a dog, tumbling in complex patterns, disappearing and seeming to gather the world’s colour and light to it as it went. The small crowd of Collectivists around it were screaming and pointing, but none of them had died.

Qurabin moaned. “That’s it that’s it,” Qurabin said as the world blinked and the thing was gone. “It’s the endgame.”

Cutter did not know if he believed that Ori had killed Mayor Stem-Fulcher. It was still incredible to him. To think of that poised, white-haired woman he had known from heliotypes, from posters, from brief glimpses at public events, who had taken so much of his hatred for so long, now gone, was hard. He did not know what to do with it. He sat in Ori’s rooms, and waited.

Judah was with Ori, with Ori as Toro. He was clinging to him, pushed through the world’s skin to his old workshop in Brock Marsh.

“What you got to go for anyway?” Cutter had said. “I’m going to get a mirror—we’ll have that for the Council—so what is it you want? They’ll have closed your workshop.”

“Yes,” Judah said, “they will have. And yes, the mirror’s what’s needed, but there are things I want. Things I might need. I have a plan.”

The others were at the armouries. The Iron Council Remade were preparing to defend the Collective on the barricades. What must it be for them, this strange fight? Cutter thought.

He thought of the journey through the badlands and pampas, through the tumbledown rockscape, through hundreds of miles at a tremendous rate, directed by Drogon the horse-tramp who had explored these hinterlands before, until they had come to the city rising west of the estuary plain. They had come through ghost towns. Little empties, mean architecture desiccated by years of being left alone, inhabited only by squalls of dust.

“Yes,” Judah had whispered. This was his past, these outposts, the remnants of fences, the little bough-marked graves. Less than three decades before these had been the boomtowns.

The revolt of the Iron Council, the renegacy of the perpetual train, had been the last part of the crisis of corruption, incompetence and overproduction that had destroyed Wrightby’s Transcontinental Railroad Trust. The thrown-up towns and hamlets of the plains, and the herds of beef and crossbred meat-beasts, the gunfighters and mercenaries, the trappers, the populace of that mongrel of money and wild, had evaporated, in months. They left their houses like snakeskin casts behind. The waddies were gone, the horse-gangsters, the whores.

The Iron Council would be accelerating. It would eat the distance, even as each moment of track-laying seemed arduous and slow. Cutter had realised the Council must be in the open land. And the militia who tracked it, who had traced over the whole world to find it, must still be following, all the way back toward their home, gaining daily. The most absurdly roundabout trip, across the continent and back again, by a terrible route.

As the light began to glower and go out, the sense of the room buckled and ripped at two points, and from nothing, horns emerged. Toro shoved through adrip with the energies that were reality’s blood, carrying Judah, wrapped together like lovers.

Judah stumbled free and the colours dripped upward from him to sputter out of existence before they hit the ceiling. He was carrying a full sack.

“Got what you needed, then?” Cutter said. Judah looked at him and the last of the worldblood evanesced.

“Everything to finish this,” he said. “We’ll be ready.”

The fact that there were Iron Councillors in the Collective had leaked. Even through the terror and the unhappiness of those bleak days, it was huge news.

Excited mobs ran through the byways by the Dog Fenn post office, looking for their guests. When at last they found Maribet and Rahul, the barricade they had joined became a kind of fighting shrine.

There were queues of Collectivists waiting while militia bullets went overhead. They trooped past the Councillors and asked
questions—an unspoken politeness limited each person to three. “When will the Council come?” “Have you come to save us?” “Will you take me away with you?” Solidarity and fear and millennial absurdity, in turn. The line became a street meeting, with old arguments between factions rehearsed again while bombs fell.

At the end of the street, on the other side of the barricades, lookouts saw through their periscopes the approach of war constructs. Soldier-machines in brass and iron, glass-eyed, weapons welded to them, came walking. More constructs in one place than had been seen for years.

They stamped and their caterpillar treads ground on the rubble and glass-strewn street toward the barrier. At their head a great earthmover, fronted by a cuneal plough that would push the matter of the barricade apart.

The Collectivists tried grenades, bombs, sent frantic word for a thaumaturge who might be able to halt this ugly monster thing, but it would not be fast enough. They knew they must withdraw. This barricade, this street, was lost.

Snipers and witch-snipers appeared on rooftops over the no-man’s-land, to lay down fire and hex on the constructs and the militia. At first they cut into the government forces, but a swivelling motorgun brought a score of them down in meat-wet and panicked the rest.

As the constructs sped, the Collectivists scrambled and their order broke down as they made for the backstreets. Rahul and Maribet did not know where to go. They headed toward secondary lines that did not take them out of the militia fire. Afterward, Cutter heard what happened: the two Remade had loped with their animal legs and skittered one way and another across the street, called by terrified Collectivists trying to help them. Maribet had turned her hooves on a bomb hole, and as she struggled to stand again and Rahul put out his human and lizard hands to help her, there was a grinding and the wedge-fronted construct began to push the barricade apart, and a militia-loyal cactus-man came over the rim of the tons of city-stuff, fired his rivebow into Maribet’s neck.

Rahul told them about it when he made it to Ori’s house. It was the first Iron Council death in New Crobuzon.

Posters had appeared throughout Collective territory, half-
begging half-demanding that the populace stay. E
VERY LOST MAN OR WOMAN OR CHILD IS A WEAKENING OF THE
Co
LLECTIVE
. T
OGETHER WE CAN WIN
. Of course they could not stem the refugees, who went out under the cordons, to the undercity or the collapsing suburbs beyond Grand Calibre Bridge.

Most ran to the Grain Spiral, the Mendican Foothills, the most adventurous into Rudewood to become forest bandits. But some,
at risk, organised into guerrilla work-crews and made their way through the chaos of the city’s outer reaches, past neglected militia crews, by low boroughs become feral without food, too mean for Parliament to give them any notice. West of the city the escapees passed through the long-deserted hangars and goods yards where once the hub of the TRT had been. Rusting engines and flatcars were left deserted.

Offices were still inhabited and lit, where the remnant of Weather Wrightby’s company clung to existence, maintaining a last crew, a few tens of clerks and engineers. It survived off financial speculation, off railroad salvage, off the security work and bounty hunting of the TRT’s paramilitary guard-army, tiny and loyal to Wrightby’s corporatist vision, disdaining the race-thuggery of the Quillers. The men were stationed across the sprawling TRT property, and they and their dogs sometimes chased the escapees away.

The refugees took tools, made their way out of the once-
terminus to the cut from where the Cobsea-Myrshock Railroad had set out.

“It moves, under, it is, they are, the Teshi, are,” said Qurabin. The monk’s voice scuttered around. They were all there—Drogon and Elsie, Qurabin, Cutter, Judah and Toro. Rahul kept watch. They had mourned Maribet. Qurabin was anxious.

“Something happens very soon,” the monk said.

In his strange and strangely broken voice Ori told them the history of his relations with the mysterious tramp: the money, the heliotype of Jack Half-a-Prayer. The help he had given Toro. “I don’t know where the plans come from,” Ori said. “Jacobs? No, no it was Toro’s plan, I know that, because it wasn’t the plan I thought it
was. But it
did the job.
But Jacobs said, when I saw him . . . I don’t think it mattered much to him at all. He’s had other things on his mind. This was just . . . a distraction.”