They walked an empty stretch of unclaimed railroad, chimneypots up from the street morass like periscopes peering curious, until they saw the piles of debris blocking the tracks. There were torches. Below in the alleyways was fighting, the incursion of the militia as the Collective’s barricadistes withdrew and fell back a few streets, firing from street kiosks, voxiterator booths, from behind iron pillars.
A war train was approaching from beyond the barricade—they could see its lights and the gush of it. It fired as it came, sending shells into the militia in the streets. It came up from the south, from Kelltree’s docks.
“Halt, you fuckers!” came from the barrier. Cutter was ready to beg entrance, but Judah spoke in a huge voice, coming out of stupor.
“Do you know who you’re talking to, chaver? Let me through, now. I’m Judah Low. I’m Judah Low.”
Ori’s landlady let them in. “I don’t know if he’ll be coming back,” Cutter said, and she looked away and thinned her green lips, nodded. “I’ll clean up later,” she said. “He’s a good boy. I like him. Your friends are here.”
Curdin and Madeleina were in Ori’s room. Madeleina wore tears. She sat by the bed and did not make a sound. Curdin lay soaking blood into the mattress. He sweated.
“Are we saved?” he said when Judah and Cutter came in. He did not wait. “Got pretty harsh out there.” They sat with him. Judah put his head in his hands. “We had some hostages, some priests, some members of Parliament, Fat Sunners, the old Mayor’s party. And the crowd was . . . It got ugly.” He shook his head.
“He’s dead, or dying,” Curdin said. He tapped his rear legs. “This one. The man inside me. That was the worst of it.” He backheeled his own ruined hindleg.
“Sometimes it seemed to want to go somewhere. There’s a knot in my belly. I wonder whether this was a dead man, or whether they left him alive in there. Whether his brain’s in there, in the dark. He’d be mad, wouldn’t he? I was either half-corpse, or half-madman. I might have been a prison.”
He coughed—there was blood. No one spoke a long time.
“I wish, you know I really wish you’d been here in the early days.” He looked at the ceiling. “We didn’t know what we were doing. People on the streets were moving much faster than the Caucus. Even some militia were coming over to us. We had to run to catch up.
“We put on lectures and hundreds came. The cactacae voted to show people inside the Glasshouse. I won’t tell you everything was all right because it weren’t. But we was trying.”
Silence again. Madeleina kept her eyes on his face.
“Chaos. Concessionists wanted to meet the Mayor, Suitors wanted peace whatever cost. The Victorians screaming that we had to crush Tesh: they thought the city’d gone pusillanimous. A core of Caucus. And provocateurs.” He smiled. “We had plans. We made mistakes. When we took over the banks, the Caucus didn’t argue hard enough, or we argued wrong, because we ended up borrowing little bits with by your leave. Never mind it should have been ours to start with.”
He was quiet so long Cutter thought he had died.
“Once, it was something else,” he said. “I wish you’d seen it. Where’s Rahul gone? I wanted to tell him.
“Well he or his’ll see something, I suppose. They’re still coming, ain’t they? Gods know what they’ll face.” He shook as if chuckling, emitting no sound. “The militia must know Iron Council’s coming. It’s good that they’re coming. I’m sorry it’s later than we’d have liked. We were thinking of them, when we did what we did. I hope we made them proud.”
By noon he was in a coma. Madeleina watched him.
She said: “It was him tried to stop the mob, when they took revenge against the hostages. He tried to step in.”
“Listen to me,” Judah said to Cutter. They were in the hallway. All Judah’s uncertainty was gone. He was hard as one of his own iron golems. “The Collective is dead. No, listen, be quiet. It’s dead and if Iron Council comes here it’ll be dead too. They’ve no chance. The militia’ll amass on the borders, where the trains come in. They’ll just wait. By the time the Council gets here—be, what, four weeks at least?—the Collective’ll be gone. And the militia’ll pour everything into killing Iron Council.
“Cutter. I won’t let them. I won’t. Listen to me. You have to tell them. You have to get back and tell them. They have to go. Send the train up north, find a way into the mountains. I don’t know. Maybe they have to desert the train, be fReemade. Whatever. But they can’t come into the city.
“Be quiet.” Cutter had been about to speak but he closed his mouth hard. He had never seen Judah like this: all the beatific calm was gone, and something stone-hard remained. “Be quiet and listen. You have to go now. Get out of the city however you damn well can, and find them. If Rahul or Drogon or anyone finds their way back I’ll send them after you. But Cutter, you have to stop the train from coming.”
“What about you?”
Judah’s face set. He seemed wistful.
“You might fail, Cutter. And if you do, I might, just, be able to do something.”
“You know how to use the mirrors, don’t you? You remember? Because those militia . . . they’ve come all the way through the cacotopic zone. They’ll reach the Council. And I ain’t sure, but I bet I know what they are, what they’d have to be to be hardcore enough to take us, but travel quick and light like they’ve done. If I’m right you’ll have to do what you can, Cutter. You’ll have to show the Council. Do right by me, Cutter.”
“And you? What are you going to do? While I’m off persuading the damn Council.”
“I said. I’ve an idea—something for safety’s sake. A last plan. Because by Jabber and by gods and by everything, Cutter, I will not let this happen. Stop them. But if you don’t, I’ll be here, with my plan. Do right by me, Cutter.”
Bastard, Cutter thought, tearing up, trying to speak. Bastard to say that to me. You know what you are to me. Bastard. He felt his chest hollow, felt as if he were falling inside, as if his very fucking innards were straining for Judah.
“Love you, Judah,” he said. He looked away. “Love you. Do what I can.” I love you so much Judah. I’d die for you. He wept without sob or sound, furious at it, trying to wipe it away.
Judah kissed him. Judah straightened, kind, implacable, held Cutter gently by the chin and tilted his head up. Cutter saw the damp on the wallpaper, saw the doorframe, looked at Judah’s stubble all grey, the man’s thin face. Judah kissed him and Cutter heard a sound from his own throat, and was enraged at himself and then also at Judah. You bastard, he thought or tried to think at the kiss, but he could not make himself. He would do what Judah asked. I love you Judah.
part nine
SOUND AND LIGHT
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
A dirigible flew fast. It was pushed by wind and its engine over stone fragments. The dead towns it overflew, the remnants of railroad boom, were like discolourations on heliotypes. Cutter watched from the little cockpit.
The Collective had got them out. First two decoy balloons had set out, piloted by dummies, and while the militia pounded them, the escape dirigible flew. The pilot went so low towerblocks rose around them. The ship had cut between the smokestacks of the slum factories, evaded hunter warflots.
They travelled in fear of air-pirates, but beyond the idiot aggressions of githwings and a few outlander wyrmen nothing attacked them in the wilds outside the city. Cutter thought of Judah all the time. In him moved a complex of anger, and a kind of need he could not exorcise.
“Be careful, Cutter,” Judah said before he went, and held him. He would not say what he was doing, why he was staying. “You have to be quick. They’re through. The militia, through the cacotopos, and they’re hunting the Council down. Come back,” he said. “When they turn away, or scatter, come back, and I’ll be waiting. And if they refuse to turn away, come ahead of them, come to the city, and I’ll be here, I’ll wait.”
You never will, Cutter thought. Not in the way you kno
w I want.
The pilot was Remade, his arm a python that he strapped to him. He hardly spoke. Over three days, all Cutter learnt was that he had once worked for a crime-boss, that he was pledged to the Collective.
“We have to go fast,” Cutter said. “Something’s coming out of the cacotopic zone.” He knew it must sound like some Torque-beast was hunting, and he did not correct the impression. “We have to find the Council.”
He checked the mirrors he carried. The glassworks had built a beautiful replacement. He had shown them to Madeleina di Farja, explaining what they were for.
“How many times have you done it?” she said, and he laughed.
“None times. But Judah Low told me how.”
Cutter stared down into the acres of air specked with birds and windblown scobs. They flew over raincloud like a smoke floor. At the limits of their vision, miles south, they saw people. A long spread-out column through the landscape, the vanguard of the rogue train, who went ahead even of the graders and the bridge-builders.
“Fly past, not too close,” Cutter said. “Let them know we don’t mean no harm.” His heart went fast. It took them an hour to trace the scattered miles of Council back, to the graders sweeping aside debris, patting down and hammering down the ground, and then to the track-layers moving with precision that made them seem automata, and then to the perpetual train.
“There.”
Cutter watched it. Its flatbeds, its carriages and its built-up towers, its bridges swaying, the mottled colours of its addenda, the skull and head adornments, smoke from all of its chimneys, those of the engines and those that specked its length. And all around it the hundreds of Councillors moving along it and on it, in the gap through which it travelled. A bolt of hexed gunpowder combusted below them.
“Dammit, they think we’re attacking. Swing round, give them a berth, let’s lower some flags.”
The train edged forward along the unrolling tracks, the line behind it dismantled as it went. In its wake was debris, a cut of altered ground.
“Gods they’re moving fast. They’ll be at the city within weeks,” Cutter said. Weeks. Too slow. Too late. Besides, he thought, what can it do? What can it do?
Cutter thought of the perpetual train deserted, growing old, made at last of age and weather as rain and wind turned its iron into red dust and the slates and thatch of its remade roofs slipped untended and mouldered, became mulch. In the shade of the flatcars weeds would pierce the hard floor of the train and its spokes and axles would be knotted with stems, honeysuckle, an empire of buddleia. Spiders and wilderness animals would run its nooks, and the boiler would grow cold. The last stores of coal would settle like the striae of ore they had once been. The smokestacks would clog with windblown loess. The train would be made of landscape. The rocks in which it sat would be stained with train.
The passage that the Iron Council had left would be a strange furrow of geography. And at last the descendants of the Councillors who had run as they had to, as he would persuade them they must, from the incoming militia and New Crobuzon’s revenge, the children of their many-times children would find the remnants. They would walk it and excavate the strange barrow, find their history.
Miles behind the very last of the Council’s stragglers, at the end of a wilder, wooded zone, was a line of fire, a crawl-motion that through the telescope Cutter saw was dark figures. Men were coming. Perhaps two days away.
“Oh Jabber they’re there,” Cutter said. “It’s them. It’s the militia.”
When they descended, the leaders were waiting for them. Ann-Hari and Thick Shanks embraced Cutter. They turned to the pilot, and Cutter saw that the Collectivist had tears in his eyes.
The urgency of Cutter’s mission filled him. The Councillors surrounded him, demanding to know what was happening in New Crobuzon. Ann-Hari was trying to control the situation, trying to bring Cutter to her, but he wanted very much not to be in her hands alone, did not want her controlling the message he brought. She was too powerful for him, her agenda too strong.
“Listen to me,” he shouted until he was heard. “The militia are coming. They’ve come through the cacotopic stain. They’re a day or two away. And you can’t go to the city. You have to run.”
When at last they understood him a gusty roar of no took them over, and Cutter climbed out of their arms and stamped on the train roof in frustration. He felt a wave of the bitterness, sadness and near-contempt with which Judah’s politicking and that of the Caucus had always filled him. He wanted to save these people from their own desperate want.
“You fools,” he shouted. He knew he should restrain himself but he could not. “Godsdammit, listen to me. There is a militia squad on your tail which has come through the cacotopic godsdamned stain, do you understand? They’ve crossed the world and back again just to kill you. And there are thousands more of them in New Crobuzon. You have to turn.” He shouted over their anger. “I’m your friend, I ain’t your enemy. Didn’t I cross the fucking desert? I’m trying to fucking save you. You cannot fight them, and you godsdamned well can’t fight their paymasters.”
A clutch of Council wyrmen flew to see. The Councillors debated. But it was a one-sided argument, to Cutter’s rage.
“We beat the militia before, years ago.”
“No you didn’t,” he said. “I know the damn story. You blocked them just enough that you could run away—that ain’t the same thing. This is the flatlands. You ain’t got nowhere to run. You face them now, they’ll kill you.”
“We’re stronger now, and we’ve got our own hexes.”
“I don’t know what the militia are carrying, but godsdammit, you think your fucking moss magic is going to stop a New Crobuzon murder squad? Go. Get out. Regroup. Hide. You cannot do this.”
“What about Judah’s mirrors?”
“I don’t know,” Cutter said. “I don’t even know if I can make them work.”
“Better try,” said Ann-Hari. “Better get ready. We haven’t come this far to run. If we can’t shake them off, we take them down.”
Cutter had lost.
“The Collective sends its solidarity, its love,” the pilot shouted. His voice was shaking. “We need you. We need you to join us, as fast as you can. Your fight’s ours. Come be part of our fight,” he said, and though Cutter was shouting, “Their fight is over,” he was not heard.
Ann-Hari came to him. He was almost weeping in frustration.
“We were meant to do this,” she said.
“There’s no plan to history,” he shouted. “You’ll die.”
“No. Some of us will, but we can’t turn away now. You knew we wouldn’t.” It was true. He had always known. The wyrmen returned as the light came down.
“Enough to fill a carriage,” one shouted. There were only a few score militia, it seemed, and at that the Councillors shouted derision. They had many times that number.
“Yes but gods it ain’t just about that,” Cutter shouted. “You think they won’t have something on their side?”
“So you better be ready,” Ann-Hari said. “You better practise with Judah’s mirrors.”
The Iron Councillors gathered everyone who could fight. The laggers, spread out behind them, were called to catch up, for safety. They sped up their track-laying, to reach a point where a few igneous pillars jutted out of the earth, where there were some dry hills, so they would have a little shelter. With the expertise they had accrued over years, they readied to fight.
“He got gone,” one wyrman said. He was talking about one of the others on the reconnoitre. “He got gone out the air. Something come pull him out the air, see?”
There were none of the chances Cutter had wanted, no opportunity to tell the stories of the Collective, to ask for the stories of the Council. It was rushed and ugly. He felt desperately angry as the Councillors prepared to die. He felt as well a sense of his own failure, that he was letting down Judah. You knew I couldn’t do it, you bastard. That’s why you’re still there. Getting ready
some plan or other for when I fail. Still, even though Judah had expected it, Cutter hated that he had not succeeded.
No one slept that night. Councillors came to the train throughout the darkness hours.
With the first light Cutter and Thick Shanks withdrew into position, each on a stele twenty feet high, yards apart, both facing the sun, holding one of Judah’s mirrors. Before he went, Cutter found Ann-Hari, to try to tell her that she was having her sisters, the Councillors, commit suicide. She smiled until he had finished.
“Our hexers have what Judah gave them,” she said. “We have our own thaumaturgy. And we have what Judah taught us. There are those’ll be calling golems from the traps he gave us.”
“Each time you trigger one, he’ll feel it, you know. No matter how far he is.”
“Yes. And we’ll trigger all of them. One at a time. As the militia come. If we have to.”
“You’ll have to.”
Cutter and Thick Shanks braced themselves each on their rock shaft. It was a little after dawn. The moon was still visible, pale and high. As the sun rose its light struck their mirrors, and Cutter angled his down, directing his beam at the cross-mark he had made on the ground. Thick Shanks did the same, as Cutter had shown him, and the spots of intensified sunlight roamed like nervous animals over scrub and dust, to blend on the X.
Hundreds of Councillors prepared to fight, spread out in waves to trenches and earthworks, propped rifles. Cutter turned west, to where the militia would come.
It was not long. At first he saw only dust. Cutter looked through his telescope. They were still tiny, and they did seem to be very few.
A flock of wyrmen set out to harass them, carrying acid and drop-knives. Behind them the dirigible followed with the snake-armed pilot and two volunteers as strafe-gunners. The militia came closer, over minutes and then hours, and the wyrmen crossed the grey nothing-land, and the dirigible flew low. The engines of Judah’s golem traps were ready; the hexers sang incantations.