– Where will we go?
At night the renegades play banjos and pipes, the train’s warning bell is struck, its boiler made a drum. Women and men lie together again. Some Chainday nights Judah goes to the wordless trackside man-meets for release, but Ann-Hari and he fuck one night and stroke each other with the most sincere, the most close affection.
The slowly stranging place delights Judah. On the sixth day of the iron council, as the mile-long track-stretch swallows its own tail and moves, as the train enters a dreamish landscape of bruised succulents and the summer comes down on them, a posse of gendarmes and bounty hunters arrives.
They underestimate the council by a gross degree. They are no more than thirty men and xenians, in cracked leather and spikes, their very clothes made weapons. They come out of the vein-coloured undergrowth under the standard of the TRT, creatures like scurrying mushrooms running from them.
The band fire, scream through their loudhailers. -Comply! Lawbreakers, surrender!
Do they think the iron council will be cowed? Judah watches in awe at their stupidity. Twelve of them are shot fast, and the others ride away.
– Get them, get them, get them, shouts Ann-Hari, and the fastest Remade take off with their weapons. -They know where we are!
They can only kill six more. The others escape. -We’re marked, Uzman says. It is less than a hundred miles since they have escaped. -They’ll come for us.
They leave traps. Barrels of blackpowder, complex batteries and fuses. They send the train between stone overhangs, and the geothaumaturges and what hedge-mancers there are cut diaglyphs into the mineral walls and lay down primed circuits so that the weight of a cart will make the rock deliquesce and pour down in cold magma to set again with the outriders of the gendarmes or militia drowned. That is the plan.
Judah sets golem traps. Batteries, somaturgic turbines of his design, so the fallen wood or the bone-heap or the earth or split discarded ties will stand and fight for iron council.
At night he walks the renegade railroad with Uzman and Ann-Hari, who are chary but need each other. Strategist and visionary. The perpetual train does not stop at night. The train is full of skills. Remade fix what flintlocks can be fixed, and make new weapons. In the furnaces they melt down older rails for cutters and armour. They are making their wheeled town a war-machine.
– It won’t be long, Uzman says. -Time’ll come we probably have to abandon the train, have to run.
– We can’t, Ann-Hari says. -Without it we have nothing.
A group of councillors in the clerk’s car lean over vague maps-sketchy composites of myths. The darkwood desks and inlaid walls are carved and graffitied from the first days, when the drunken rebels rendered savage art.
– Here. Uzman presses the map. -What’s this?
– Swamp.
Uzman moves his finger.
– Unknown.
– Salt flats.
– Scree.
– Unknown.
– Tar pits.
– Unknown.
– Smokestone. Smokestone gulleys.
Uzman chews his knuckle. He looks out of the window. Councillors haul the rails from one end of their stolen track-mile to the other.
– Do we have any meteoromancers?
– There’s a girl Toma. Someone shakes their head. -Can whistle up a gust dries her clothes but, you know, parlour hex really…
– We need someone can raise a gale-
– No. One of the researchers speaks. He is a young man who has grown his beard and wears the sweaty clothes of the workforce. He is shaking his head. -I know what you’re wanting. You’re thinking, through the smokestone? No. You saw what happened when Malke was caught in it? He nearly died. You saw what it was like.
– There must be ways to know when it’s coming…
The young man shrugs. -Pressure, he says. -Cracking. A few things. From geysers. He shrugs again. -We looked it up when it trapped us. It’s too many things.
– But there are ways of telling…
– Yes, but Uzman, you’re not thinking. These maps are best-guesses. We’re in the Middling Sweeps. And there’s one thing we do know that’s there. The man runs his finger up the map. The car sways. -See? What this is?
It is a crosshatched patch of land, inked in red. Two hundred miles from them, less than a month at this absurd pace. It abuts the smokestone, or where the old cartographers thought the smokestone might be.
– You know what that is?
Of course Uzman does. They all do. It is the cacotopic stain.
– You ain’t taking us to the stain, Uzman.
– I can’t take you anywhere. The council goes where it decides it will. But I’m telling you the only thing we can do. You decide if it’s what you want or not. And if not I’ll stay and fight, and we die.
– It’s the stain.
– No, no it ain’t the stain. It’s the edges. It’s the outskirts.
Uzman has a look on him. He stands and seems to glimmer. He sweats from the heat of his own pipes, eats coal. His lips are black.
– It ain’t the stain. We have to go through the smokestone flats-
– If they’re there.
– If they’re there. We have to go through the smokestone flats, and beyond that’s the outskirts of the cacotopos. Even if they got through the stone, no one’ll follow us there.
– And you know why, Uzman, right? For good damn reason.
– We got no choice. No, that ain’t so. We run. Leave the train to rot. Run be fReemade. Or we can keep it. All our sweat. The road. But if we keep it, we have to go do this. We have to make it out, far away, or we die. We have to go west. And west of here? He prods the waxed chart. -The cacotopic zone. Just the edges.
He sounds as if he is pleading.
– People’ve dipped in there before. We’ll be all right. We have to.
He pleads.
– Just the edges.
It opened a half millennium before, a rift through which spilt great masses of the feral cancerous force, Torque. A badland beyond understanding. Where men might become rat-things made of glass and rats devilish potentates or unnatural sounds and jaguars and trees might become moments that could not have happened, might become impossible angles. Where monsters go and are born. Where the land, and the air, and time are sick.
– It’s no matter, anyway, someone says. -We ain’t got no meteoromancers, and we ain’t got anyone can call up air elementals, and we ain’t going through smokestone without someone can push wind.
Judah leans on the table; his fringe dances before his eyes. He looks down at the ink landscape.
– Well, he says. -Well now.
Somaturgy, golemetry, is an intervention. Making servants from unlive matter is about persuasion, insinuation. A strategy of life-giving.
– Well now.
I can make a golem out of air, thinks Judah. A clutch of air in the air. Have it run with us. Air running through air. It will exhaust him. But he knows he can get them passage through the smoke.
Judah knows that they will go.
He walks with Uzman, and a golem walks with them. Shambling vegetable pulp. They are a strange troika: the Remade sending steam from the pipes that burrow him; Judah tall and bony, his beard like a furring of dirt; the golem putting down its shapeless feet. The train slips forward in tiny motions.
The moonlight is the colour of lipid fluid, as if the night has an unclosing wound. Behind them Judah sees the train and the train and the train farting smoke, clanging, like some lumpen orchestra of drums and bells. A half mile ahead are Remade laying track, and ahead of them the teams performing a cursory groundbreaking. Behind the railroad is disassembled, and there are hundreds of followers like pilgrims.
Judah sees everything as a city. New Crobuzon has taught him that. He watches the train skirt a curling crust of land and sees the curve and edge of river walls, the warehouse walls by the Tar. He sees a half-fallen tree and remembers a drunken New Crobuzon man leaning at the same angle.