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. T
here 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.