He had waited for their alarm to subside.
“You couldn’t stay hid forever. You knew it. I don’t know how they know. Godspit, it’s been more’n twenty years, it could be anything. A wanderer tells another tells another tells another: it could have been one of your own, finding their way back to New Crobuzon, caught and interrogated. It could be a spy.” He spoke over the noise that spurred. “Far-seeing on a new scale. I don’t know. Point is they know where you are. They found you. I don’t even know how long they’ve known. But they’d never get a troop across the cacotopic stain, or through the Galaggi Veldt and forests and whatever—we had Qurabin.” But we didn’t at first, Judah, Cutter thought. What were you planning to do? “But with the war, that’s changed. Because the Firewater Straits are open.
“They’re coming all the way round, by sea. They’re trying to get past Tesh, up past Maru’ahm, and they’ll land on the edge of the grasslands. They’ll come at you not from the east but the west. They could never do that till now.
“Sisters, Councillors, comrades. You’re about to be attacked. And there’ll be no quarter. They’re coming to destroy you. They can’t allow you to continue. You got away. And sisters . . . now more than ever they need to finish it.”
It was hard for Judah to make the Councillors understand about the chaos in New Crobuzon. The older ones remembered their own strikes and the great shucking off in which they culminated, but New Crobuzon itself was an old old memory and thousands of miles away. Judah tried to make the troubles live to them. “There is something happening,” he said.
“They have to bring you back in pieces. So they can say to the citizens, See what we done. See what we do to them as tries to rise. See what’s been done to your Council.
“They’re coming to destroy you. It’s time to move, to relay the tracks. You have to go. You could go north—I don’t know. Take it up to the tundra. An ice-train with the bear-riders. Up to the Cold Claws. I don’t know. Hide again. But you have to go. Because they’ve found you, they’re coming for you, and they won’t stop till you’re gone.”
“Yeah, they could hide,” Drogon said in Cutter’s ear, sudden and insistent. “Or there’s another possibility. They could come back. Tell them they have to come back. Tell them.”
He did not whisper it as an instruction, but he spoke so urgently, with such sudden fervour, that Cutter obeyed him.
For days the Council was stunned enough that it could not plan. It had no sentimentality about its sedentary town. They had always insisted that the train was where they lived, that other buildings were only annexes, cabs without wheels. But the resources they had accrued over years, hard-won, would be missed.
“We should stay. We can take whatever comes,” the younger Councillors declared, and their parents, the Remade, strove to tell their children what New Crobuzon was.
“This ain’t a band of striders,” they said. “This ain’t horse-thieves. This is a different thing. Listen to Low.”
“Yeah, but we’ve techniques now, that, no disrespect to Mr. Low, he don’t know about. Moss-magic, cirriomancy—does he know about them?” Thaumaturgy learnt from arcane natives. Their parents shook their heads.
“This is New Crobuzon. Forget that. It ain’t like that.”
Judah unwrapped the braced mirror that Cutter had brought him. “There’s only one,” he said. “The other’s broken and without it this isn’t a weapon. But even if we had another, it wouldn’t be enough. You have to go.”
They had sent the cleverest of the wyrmen to watch the coast hundreds of miles off. A week passed. “Found nothing,” the first said when it came back, and Judah had grown angry. “They’re coming,” he said.
He refused to advise anything specific. Drogon, though, had become maniacal in his desire for the Council to return. He told the Councillors again and again that it was their duty to return. It was a strange fervour.
Cutter went to dances. The raucousness of them calmed him, the drunk young men and women kicking to peasant waltzes. He swapped partners and drank and ate their drugged fruit. He went with a tough young man he could grab and handfuck and even kiss so long as it was some kind of boys’ play, not sex but wrestling or somesuch. Afterward, wiping his hand, he found the man talkative about what Iron Council should do.
“Everyone knows we’ll leave,” he said. “What, we going to ignore Judah Low? And some say go up and some say down, and no one’s sure which way we’ll head, but me and more and more others, we’ve another plan. We been thinking. We say don’t go north or south, we say go east. Back along the tracks we left. We say it’s time to go home. Back to New Crobuzon.”
It was not Drogon’s doing, Cutter realised. It was a native desire.
“I think something is coming,” Qurabin said, a disembodied voice.
Drogon said, “They know it’s coming. And more and more of them want to head for New Crobuzon.”
“No,” Judah said. Cutter saw many things in him: a pride, a fear and anger, exasperation, confusion. “No, they’re insane. They’ll die. If they can’t face one New Crobuzon battalion, how’ll they face the city? It don’t make any sense to run from the militia to the militia. They can’t come back.”
“That ain’t what they’re banking on. You fired them up, didn’t you? With all your talk about what’s happening. They think they might tip the balance, Judah. And I think they might be right. They want to return to crowds, throwing petals at the rails. They want to come home to a new city.”
“No,” said Judah, but Cutter saw excitement in Pomeroy, in Elsie. He felt something of it through his own sardonics and reserve.
There was a clamour to go back. “It’s a matter of speed,” one old Remade woman said. “When we come here we laid down spare iron, so as if we needed to get away, they were waiting. Well, we’ve people coming for us now, and we’ve a lot of miles between us and safety, and we need speed. Them tracks is waiting. A mile here, two there. Be idiocy not to use them.” She pretended pragmatism.
Judah argued, but he was proud, Cutter saw, of his Council’s desire to return, to be something in this New Crobuzon moment. He wanted to dissuade them out of fear, but he wanted not to—Cutter saw this—for a sense of history.
“You don’t know,” he said, and he spoke gently. “You don’t know what it’ll be, what’ll be happening there. We need you to survive. It’s more important than anything. I’ve been your damn bard, and I need you to survive.”
“This ain’t—forgive me, Mr. Low, with all respect—this ain’t about what you need but what we need. We can’t take the bastards on their way, so if we’re to run, let’s make our running something. Let’s get word to New Crobuzon. Tell them we’re coming home.” That was a young man born five years after the Council, raised in the grasses.
Ann-Hari stood. She began to declaim.
I am not New Crobuzon born, she told them, and expounded her life in brute oratory. “I never knew I could have a country: Iron Council is my country, and what do I care about New Crobuzon? But Iron Council is an ungrateful child, and I ever loved ungrateful children. New Crobuzon deserves no gratitude—I been there and I know—and we are the child that freed ourselves. No other did. And all the other children are ungrateful now, and we can help them.”
To Cutter it was as if Judah’s party had liberated the Iron Council, had uncoupled it from some restraint, that it was taken by a tendency long immanent. Whatever reasons they gave, the Councillors arguing to go back seemed to voice something embedded, that they had wanted a long time. They were avid at the insurgency Judah described.
When he tried to think it in words, Cutter could not make it clear. They had come—he had come—so far, at such cost, to warn the Council that it should flee: how could it possibly face the city?
But though he could not express it, Cutter felt the logic of return. He felt it swell as Ann-Hari spoke, and he was not the only one.
The Councillors cheered her and shouted her name, and shouted “New Crobuzon.”
Elsie and Pomeroy exulted. They had never expected this. Qurabin made a sound of pleasure, no more supportive of New Crobuzon than of the Tesh who had betrayed the monastery, and impressed by the Councillors and their welcome. Qurabin was glad to be part of whatever exertion this would be. Drogon was delighted. Judah was silent, proud and frightened.
Cutter saw Judah’s fear. You need it to be a legend, don’t you? he thought. This troubles you, this it-coming-back. You love it for wanting to, but you need it safe, the thing you made. Something we can dream of. Judah would do anything for the Iron Council, anything at all. Cutter saw that. Judah’s love for it was complete.
They took the town down, broke their mud-and-wattle, their meeting houses, turned them to dust. They gathered what crops they could. There were plenty of those among the Councillors who were outraged.
The perpetual train, even with its new rolling stock in the strange materia of the wide lands, its rough wood and mineral cars, could not contain all the Councillors. There were hundreds who would be, again, camp followers, nomads in the train’s trail. A few would not come. Some went for the hills, or insisted they would stay as farmers in the settled land, surrounded by remnants of the torn-up iron road.
“You’ll die,” Judah told them, “when they come.” And they responded with bluff and bravado. It would come to nothing, Cutter thought, when the New Crobuzon Militia appeared, its most powerful and well-armed squads, to where they thought they would find their quarry and instead met fifty aging farmers. He watched them, knowing they were dead. May they kill you quick.
Cutter did not know if Ann-Hari and Judah were lovers, but they loved one another in a deep and simple way. He was jealous, yes, but no more than of the other people Judah loved. Cutter was used to this thing so unrequited.
Judah was with Ann-Hari the night before the Iron Council left its grassland sanctuary. Cutter was alone, holding himself and remembering the night he had tussled with the muscular young man.
The next day they gathered: there was Cutter in the outskirt land where wild grass was crushed by the train and by the farmers. And there brawny Pomeroy swinging his weapon playfully, like a scythe, and Elsie her arm around her man’s waist, and Drogon in his brimmed hat leading the mount he had persuaded the horse-
husbanders of the Iron Council to give him, his lips moving and Cutter not sure to whom he spoke, and there the grass fluttered as Qurabin moved along secret ways revealed by his or her strange godling, and out ahead arm-in-arm walked Ann-Hari and Judah Low, investigated by the insects of the morning.
Behind them the Iron Council came. They would fall into line soon, would help lay tracks, help break the stone and wind through the sarsen blocks of the lowlands, but for now they walked ahead. The ellipse of iron was unwinding, the Councillors were track-
layers again. And scouts and water dowsers, hunters and graders, but above all layers of track, who uncoiled the edge of their town and put it down again in a straight line, back along land that bore still the faint trace of their arrival.
Way to their west came predatory militia, soldiers wanting only to destroy them. The Iron Council shuddered, and went on, went east, headed for New Crobuzon, home.
That was how it had been. And then to this edge, this most literal badland.
“Here. This is it, here. The edge of it. The edge of the cacotopic stain.”
part six
THE CAUCUS RACE
CHAPTER TWENTY
The Monstrous Without—and Within. New Crobuzon’s Twin Enemies: The Watcher and the Treacherous. Night of Shame.
The newspapers declaimed. They brought out extra-large fonts for their condemnations of the EyeSky Riots. There were heliotypes of the dead barricaded in shops and smothered by smoke, crushed in falls from windows, shot.
In The Grocer’s Sweetheart on the Chainday after, Ori expected the Runagate Rampant meeting to be overflowing, but no one was there. He came back the next night and the next, looking for a face he remembered. At last on Dustday he saw the knit-worker, gathering money, whispering in the landlord’s ear.
“Jack,” said Ori. She turned, untrusting, and her face only opened a very little when she saw it was him.
“Jack,” she said.
“It’ll have to be fast,” she said. “I have to go. Wine, then, go on.
“Spiralling down, eh?” she said, pointing at the coil-marks on his clothes. “I see them all over now. They’ve gone from walls to clothes. Cactus punks are wearing them, Nuevists, radicals. What do they mean?”
“A link,” he said carefully. “To Half-a-Prayer. I know the man who started them.”
“I heard of him, I think . . .”
“He’s a friend of mine. I know him well.” There was silence. They drank. “Missed the meeting.”
“There ain’t no meetings now. You mad, Ori . . . Jack?” She was horrified. “I’m sorry, Jack,” she said, “really sorry. Curdin told me your name. And where you live. He shouldn’t have done, but he was keen I be able to get Double-R to you, if need be. I told no one.”
He contained his shock, shook his head.
“The meetings?” he said, and she forgot her contrition quickly.
“Why would we have meetings?” she said. “When it’s going on?” Ori shook his head, and she gave a sound almost a sob. “Jack, Jack . . . Jabber’s sake. What are you doing? Weren’t you there?”
“Godsdammit, of course I was. I was in Creekside. I was . . .” He lowered his voice. “Who are the Militant Sundry, any damn way? I was trying to stand up for the godsdamned khepri your bloody brainless commonalty were busy trying to butcher.”
“The Sundry? Well, if you was xenian and all you’d had in your corner were the comprador bastards in the Divers Tendency, wouldn’t you turn somewhere else? And don’t you dare. Don’t you dare scorn people. You know the Quillers take up the human dust. Even your friend Petron knows that—and don’t bloody look at me like that, Jack, everyone knows his name, he was in the Flexibles. And I ain’t sure of all the bloody lunacies the Nuevists do, faddling about dressed as animals, silly bloody games, but I’d trust him. I don’t know as I’d trust you, Jack, and that’s a sad thing, because it ain’t that I think you don’t want what I want. I know you do. But I don’t trust your judgement. I think you’re a fool, Jack.”
Ori was not even outraged. He was used to the arrogance of the Runagates. He looked at her with cool annoyance, and, yes, a residue of respect, a due she had inherited from Curdin.
“While you’re playing prophets, Jack,” he said, “keep your eyes open. When I move . . . you’ll know. We have plans.”
“They say Iron Council’s coming back.”
Her face had taken on such joy.
“It’s coming back.”
All the things Ori could think to say were obvious. He did not want to insult her, so he tried to think of something else to say, but could not.
“It’s a fairy tale,” he said.
“It ain’t.”
“A fable. There’s no Iron Council.”
“They want you to think that. If there’s no Iron Council, then we ain’t never took power. But if there is, and there is, we did it before, we can do it again.”
“Good Jabber, listen to yourself . . .”
“You telling me you never seen the helios? What do you think that was? You think they built the bloody train by marching alongside each other, women, whores, at the front? Children riding the damn cab hood?”
“Something happened, of course it did, but they were put down. It was a strike is all. They’re long dead—”
She was laughing. “You don’t know, you don’t know. They wanted them dead, and they want them dead again, but they’re coming back. Someone from the Caucus set out for them. We got a message. Why’d they be going, if not to tell them to return?
“Haven’t you seen the graffiti?” she said. “All over. Along with all them coils and spirals you’re wearing. IC You. Iron Council, You. It’s coming back, and
even just knowing that’s a godsdamned inspiration.”
“People want them, they’ll find them, they’ll believe in them, Jack . . .”
“What you don’t know,” she said, and didn’t even look angry anymore, “is that we’re moving. If you could hear the Caucus.” She sipped her drink. She looked at him, some kind of challenge. She’s sitting on the damn Caucus. The cabal of insurrectionists, the truce of the factions and the unaligned.
“There are those in Parliament trying to cosy up, you know. They can’t admit it, but there are factories where we decide if people go to work or not. They want to negotiate. Parliament ain’t the only decider in New Crobuzon anymore. There’s two powers now.”
The knit-worker stretched her hand across the table.
“Madeleina,” she said deliberately. “Di Farja.”
He shook her hand, moved by her trust. “Ori,” he said, as if she didn’t know.
“I tell you something, Ori. We’re in a race. The Caucus is in a race to get things ready. It’ll be weeks or months yet. And we won’t just go round and round—we’re making it a race to something. We ain’t stupid, you know. We’re racing to build what we have to, chains of—” She looked around. “—chains of command, communication. Last night was the start. There’s a way to go, but it’s started. The war’s going sour, they say. The maimed’ll fill the streets. If Tesh could send over that—” She closed her eyes and held her breath, retrospectively aghast. “—that thing, that sky-born witness, what else might they do? Time . . . we ain’t got much time.
“And the Iron Council’s coming back,” she said. “When people hear that, it’ll go off.”
Maybe we’re all together, Ori thought with a plaintiveness that troubled him. Maybe the Caucus race is our race too . . .