Her influence is spreading. Ann-Hari is more and less than a leader, Judah thinks: she is a person, a nexus of desires, of want for change.
The last yards of rock are being ground through in the dark wet mountain. Judah looks down at the bridge. The new work is something laughable, a quick flimsy lattice of metal and wood thrown up beyond the stumps of proper construction. It is ersatz; it is only just bridge.
Judah is one of a conclave-it surprises him-struggling for strategy. They meet in the hills: Shaun, Uzman, Ann-Hari, Thick Shanks, Judah. But parallel to them, something raucous and collective is emerging.
Every night in the gaslamps the workers gather. First it was convivial-liquor, dice and liaisons-but as the gendarmes come closer, and as Uzman debates strategy in the overlooking ground, the parties change. The men of the train name each other brother.
Ann-Hari comes to the meeting and invades a man’s rambled contribution. A wedge of women push into the men. There are those who try to shout Ann-Hari down.
– You ain’t a worker on this road, a man says. -You ain’t nothing but a mountain whore. This ain’t your damn congress, it’s ours.
Ann-Hari speaks something base. She talks in ragged rhetoric of thrown-together exhortations-a speech that stops Judah. It seems as if it is the train that speaks. The fire holds still.
– not to speak. she says. -If I am not to speak who has the right?-What but on us? What but on the backs of me and mine have we built these rails? We are become history. There’s no backward now. No way back. You know what we have to do. Where we should go.
When she is done no one can speak for seconds, until someone mutters respect.
– Brothers, let’s vote.
Uzman tells them that whichever way they see it, whatever they claim to themselves, Ann-Hari is telling them to run. That’s not the answer. Are they afraid?
– Ain’t running, Ann-Hari says. -We’re done here. We’re something new.
– It’s running, he says. -Utopian.
– It’s something new. We’re something new, she says, and Uzman shakes his head.
– This is running, he says.
They unbolt the guntower and guide the train into the tunnel. They take up the tracks behind them. There is still blasting and scraping from inside the hill, and construction on the strange new bridge. The work is frantic.
In the heat of the morning the sound of other hammers and steam comes. The gendarmes’ train. They see smoke over the heat-dead trees.
The workers gather in the tunnel, among the cleavage of chiselled edges, minutely variant planes. The light makes shadows where vectors of stones meet.
Uzman, the grassroots general, gives orders they choose to obey. A hundreds-strong army of Remade and the freeanole now committed: those few clerks, scientists and bureaucrats who have not run; weak geoempaths; a few others-the camp followers, the mad and unemployable, and the prostitutes whose exhaustion started this. They come out into the night, ready. The train hides in the hole in the hill.
It is cool before dawn. The gendarmes come over ridges and around the bend. They come on foot, in plated carts pulled by Remade horses, in single-person aerostats, balloons above them and propellers on their back. They career through the air, and bear down on the track-layers’ hides.
They drop grenades. It is astounding. The train people are shrieking. They cannot believe that this is how it starts. They are deafened and bloodied. This is how it begins. A cascade of clay splinters and sooty fire.
Those with guns fire. One, two gendarmes snap and bleed out of the sky, haul their strange aircraft out of range, or loll in death in their harnesses, flying or coming down at random. But they keep coming. They roast the air with firethrowers.
– Crush them, Uzman urges, and his troops roll down logs and boulders as the gendarmes regroup and fire arbalests. Thaumaturges on either side make the air oscillate, make patches of grey swim up from nothing to stain the real, send arrows of energy spitting like water in fat that hit and do strange things. It is a chaos of fighting. A constant coughing of shot and screams, and gendarmes fall, but the strikers do in many greater numbers.
There are moments. A troupe of cactacae step forward and only wince as bullets break their skins. They terrorise the gendarmes, who run before the huge flora, but though the officers have no rivebows they have caustics that scorch the cactus skin.
– We’re rabble, Uzman says, and looks in despair. Ann-Hari says nothing. She looks beyond the gendarmes, beyond the tower of smoke where their train is coming.
Judah has made a golem. He sends it out toward the gendarmes. It is a thing made of the railway itself. It is made of handcars, the odds of rails and ties. Its hands are gears. It wears a grill for teeth. Its eyes are something of glass.
The golem walks out of the tunnel. It is impervious. It treads with the care of a man.
As it goes, the fighting seems to quiet. The ugly and incompetent warfare pauses. The golem passes the dead. Only the railway thing seems to move.
And then it stops walking, and Judah shudders in shock because he has not told it to. A new cart comes, carrying an older man and protectors. The man halloos them kindly. Weather Wrightby.
One man beside Weather wears charms. A thaumaturge. He stares at the golem and moves his hands.
Is it you who stopped it? Judah cannot tell.
Weather Wrightby stands amid the fighting. Of course he must be cosseted in hexes to turn bullets, but it is a powerful thing to see. He talks to the hills. The golem stands yards from him, as if facing him in a gunfight, and Weather Wrightby talks to it, too, as if he is talking to the railroad.
– Men, men, he shouts. He pats the air. Slowly his gendarmes lower guns. -What are you doing? he says. -We know what’s happening here. We don’t need all this. Who ordered firing on these men? Who ordered this?
– We must fix this, he says. -This mess. It’s money, they tell me. And it’s the harshness of the overseers. He lifts a sack from the cart. -Money, he says. -We have payment for those free and whole still here. It’s time you all were paid. It’s been too long, and I’m sorry for that. I can’t control the flows of cash, but I’ve done all I can to bring you what’s yours.
Judah says nothing. He makes the golem move its head, a little piece of theatre.
– And you Remade. Weather Wrightby smiles a sad smile. -I don’t know, he says. -I don’t know. You are indentured men. I don’t make laws. You have debts to the factories that made you. Your lives are not your own. Your money… you have no money. But understand. Understand that I don’t think ill of you or blame you for this. I understand that you are reasonable men. We will fix this.
– I cannot pay you: the law will not allow me. But I can put money aside. The TRT cares for its workforce. I will not have my good Remade men suffer the needless harshness of ignorant foremen. I blame myself for this predicament. I was not listening hard enough, and I apologise to you for that.
– We will put structures in hand. We will have an ombudsman to listen, who can punish overseers not worthy of the badge. We will fix this, understand?
– I will put aside money that you would earn if you were free, whole men, and there will be a place for you when this railroad is done. A retreat. In the city if they’ll have it but in these wild lands, near your road, if New Crobuzon is so damned deaf as not to hear what is needed. I will not have you worked to death. There’ll be a cabin for you, and baths, and good food, and you can see out your days there. Think I’m a liar? Think I lie to you?
– No more of this, now. The road’s stalled. Would you halt it? Men, men… You aren’t blasphemers I don’t believe, but this is an unholy thing you do though your reasons are understandable. I don’t blame you, but you’re holding back something the world deserves. Come now. An end to this.