Inside Judah the thing shifts, and he knows that though it is not the time yet, he will leave.
They pass the outskirts of the smokestone hills. An abrupt change of landscape into something dreamish and unsettling, where wisp-shapes rise in basalt-hard congelation, clotted clouds on which the tough fauna of the smokestone run. There are plumes, fountainheads where geysers of smoke have poured and set near-instantly. The roadbed goes between them, through a solfatara of vented gases.
The iron council graders have blasted passage. The elegance of set smokestone is interrupted with the base simplicity of jag-edged holes.
Mostly the stonemass is caught as billows, but there are pillars that corkscrew faintly and become wisps at their peak, where leaks of smokestone have gusted in very still air. The train passes under arcs where currents have blown smokestone up from the ground and down again.
The roadbed is extended, the tracks laid through, taken up again. The uncanny landscape is beautiful and discomfiting. The ground could crack and gush at them, a mist that would set in their lungs and statue them in agony. There is no smoking, no cooking; the train moves only in sudden lurches, clearing its exhaust as fast as it can: there can be no smoke distractions. Judah waits ready to release an air golem. The stone around them might evanesce again, as smokestone sometimes does, after an hour or a thousand years of being rock.
Out of the horizon the army comes on Remade horses, camels, steaming jitneys that grind on many wheels. They come in formation into the smokestone. The wyrmen of the iron council track them, flying higher than smokestone might set.
The graders blast the capricious geography. They watch anxious and inexpert for any sign that they have split a smokestone seam.
Other crews lay huge charges in holes they carefully dig, directed by the crawling geoempath. She licks the dirt with animal sounds, in some crude ecstatic trance. Hers is not a strong or focused talent, and trying for such powerful prehension of the earth debases her to it.
Iron Councillors build barricades in a yardang between set faces of cloud. A mile off are the smoke and downlaid and uptaken rails of the perpetual train. Uzman and Ann-Hari are on board, while Judah and Thick Shanks and hundreds of others are ambushers.
They can see the army now. Judah is drained after his preparations. He is already so tired that his dreams are slipping into his thoughts. He must return to iron council as soon as he can. It needs his protection. He has built a golem trap on the cowcatcher, has told them how to trip it should the silicate mist appear, but a golem of air will not last without his shepherding.
– There must be other attacks, he says, as they have all said. This cannot be the only front New Crobuzon will open. But there is no time to think of that now as the attackers come close enough, and before their first guns sound to destroy the ramparts, the iron council attacks.
The wyrmen hammer the air with their thick wings, wheel through shots and drop their clay grenades. Bullets snatch them out of the air.
Bomblets drop, made of whatever the council has: gunpowder, the shrapnel of torn-up tools, vials of crude acids, unpleasant thaumaturgic compounds, oil. Naphtha, caustics, hot smoke unfold and the militia break a little, but they re-form fast, break again at a second sortie of wyrmen. The sun is bright but seems suddenly very cold to Judah.
– It ain’t far, he is muttering. He hears himself. -Ain’t got to do this long.
He leans out, field glasses to his eyes. Wyrmen defecate their contempt on the enemy as they let their missiles go. One bursts: Avvatry, a truculent bull Judah knows enough to greet, taken apart with fusillade so he reaches the ground more rags than animal.
The Councillors fire arbalests made in iron council’s foundries. They light fuses and send rockfall down on the invaders. Judah knows this is his fight to win or to lose.
Judah stands. He stands on the rampart. Wires trail from him, to batteries, to a transformer. He trembles with bravery.
The men and women with him in his hide-all with some vestige, some trace, of hex, all joined together-cut their hands and wrap wire tight around the wounds. It is a crude engine that links them, to require so vulgar and literal a bleeding, something battered together from found materials. -Give it me, Judah shouts, and Shaun shoves the leads home, and the gutter-motor moans, and those amassed all stagger as it siphons out their strength and funnels it into the clips that puncture Judah’s chest.
A sound comes from him that is impossible to describe. His skin tightens and moves as if someone is pressing their fingers to him. From the dust, men stand. They are in the army’s path. Judah sweats. It spews from him. He moves his hands. The men, the golems, walk in ponderous stride.
There are a score or more. Bigger than humans. Premade and waiting. They walk toward the New Crobuzon Militia. Judah shakes. The weaker of his comrades are passed out. Judah is sweating blood.
The black golems stalk on. One is kicked apart by militia horses. Its torso twitches and tries to claw itself on farther, and Judah quivers as if hit with stones. He hauls on the air, pulls something immaterial into place. The dirt men-things walk into the melee, and the mounts shy around them. Bounty hunters and uniformed militia veer as the golems reach for them. Some golems stand cruciform. Some wrap their arms around struggling quarries. Where he can see to direct them, Judah has them push with their abnatural strength through bodyguards to embrace officers. Crowds of the fighters surround each one, hacking the mineral bodies, levelling their pistols.
– Shoot dammit! Judah gasps. And though his enemies cannot hear him they obey. A bullet grinds into one of the figures. The golem is made of flint and gunpowder.
There is a tremendous bay of ignition and the golem disappears in a pillar of explosion. It is a man-thing then a wind of dirt-coloured fire, the stones that were embedded in it suddenly outrushing and laying down the bounty hunters in a circle; and its heat touches one of its fellows and it too goes up, and when the smoke they have become is gone Judah sees soot-stains where they were, and around them ripples of dead men, black and bloody, becoming more solid, becoming more like bodies farther out, and those at the circumference of each crater still move, still shriek.
– Shoot, Judah says again. Gunshots, flaming arrows from ballistae. The hot missiles come in and transform the made figures into vortices of combustion.
One by one they stumble into the attackers, hug them, bury them in blackpowder and then in fire. The gunpowder golems, shambling bombs, sear holes in the army. Judah stands and hears a rhythmic roar that is his heart. His comrades shout in his honour. Blood drips from his face. The last of the golems runs into the invaders, scattering soldiers with every ungainly step. It is gone in the flame from some marksman’s arrow, and dusty fire is unrolling.
There are still hundreds of bounty-men and militia but they are reeling, their commanders screaming, their mounts’ hooves slipping on the mulch of their dead. And the wyrmen come back, and the Councillors make more rockfalls, and the arbalestiers send their huge bolts.
– Low! the men shout. -Yes! And Judah Low roars back at them.
Iron council raiders descend, the hugest Remade, cactacae braves with picks and heavy hatchets. Judah is tugged back and kissed. His comrades are sallow, trembling and cold from the energy he borrowed, but they are stronger than he. Judah closes his eyes.
He passes out, manhandled to safety. He dreams of gunpowder golems, and the sun, and then he is suddenly awake.
– What, what? he says, lurches up. -What, what?
Thick Shanks and Shaun point east, up, into the air. -There are more of them. They’ve attacked the train.
Judah and Shaun ride on a horse reconfigured for speed. Judah is numb. The loud and random bounty-men-and-militia army was an unsubtle distraction.