– We have to go, Uzman shouts from above. He is stricken but controlled.
An enormous boiling of rock is where the train came through. The rails disappear into it, embedded forever or until it desolidifies again. Judah has his golem disaggregate, and the air currents around them change.
There is motion, and Judah’s face curls to see in the mid of the new rock geography a forearm protruding, jutted like some horizontal cliff plant, still clutching or trying to clutch as the nerves of the corpse within the smokestone die.
Though they shatter aspects of the train with their bombs the aeronauts are uncertain. The ballooners swivel to see the sudden blockage, rock all full of their colleagues. They are shot down by boldened Councillors. One falls as Judah watches, gas venting from his split globe.
In sudden formation the aeronauts hornet away over the new low hills. Uzman shouts instructions and Councillors run to strip the fallen ballooner of his equipment, to salvage the cloth of his dirigible. -We have to be scavengers, says Uzman. -We have to learn that, from now on. He looks up at the sky.
– There’ll be more, he says, before Judah can even feel relief.
But it comes, the relief, on the day and night of setting out into the uncovered wilderness. Relief and a desperate sadness and a mourning of the many lost.
– They didn’t all get trapped, says Uzman. Judah winces at his tone, the eagerness to find respite. -Some of them was still on the other side.
Where the militia were. It is no comfort. Judah imagines what it must have been for them, militia and council, to watch that thundercloud become rock and eat their friends.
Now as new inhabitants of that place the Councillors attend to their environs. In the torchlight they shudder as the geography shifts. They see other lights that move quite wrong in the distance, and hear shouts they do not recognise, or that they recognise as their own, echoes held captive for hours and released distorted.
The escapees gather. The tracks shift a little. North a shade, a whisper. Uzman is taking them into the cacotopic zone. They are at its very edges, but closer than anyone should ever come.
They have closed a hill door behind them, and with sunrise they see the new landscape for the first time. Miles of scrub in ordinary colours rich after the grey rock. The ground pitching, yawing, becoming wilder. Tremendous numbers of trees, and stone teeth to guard them, and vines fruited with flowers in gewgaw colours. And little lakes and other earthscapes, and in the direction the train and its tracks are heading, a tremendous alteration in the land. Judah can feel it. They all can. Through the wheels.
The shadows do not all lie in the same plane. -We’re only snipping in, Uzman says. -Only putting our toes in. The shadows are wrong, and Judah feels winds blowing in contradictory directions. When the ground is not watched it skews.
They have left so many of their dead behind them, unburied. Shaun is somewhere, lying like a sleeper.
One last day Judah hauls rails. He digs them up from by the new rock, under the mummying hand, and leads the mule carts to the front of the train to lay them down again. Two nubs of iron remain poking from the stone fog.
They are watched by animals, by plants with eyes. The second night Judah speaks to his friends around a fire that by some arcana burns white. Uzman, Ann-Hari, Thick Shanks and those others new elected, mandated by engineers, dowsers, brakemen, waterboys, the ex-whores and the followers.
– You’ve done it, Judah says. Uzman and Ann-Hari are unblinking at his praise. -Got us out. And now you’re in this strange place.
– It isn’t finished yet.
– No, it ain’t. But you’ll be all right. You will. You will. There must be a place beyond this. A place far enough. They won’t follow you. You’ll cross, right across the world. Where there’s fruit and meat. Where the train can stop. You can hunt, fish, rear cattle-I don’t know. You can read, and when you’ve read the books in the library car you should write others. You got to get there.
– But what’s here? What’ll come for us here?
– I don’t know. It’ll be hard, but you’ll get through. Judah does not know why he is speaking like a prophet. It is not him who speaks; it is his thing inside, his innard good. -They won’t follow you in. I’ll lay money.
They laughed at that. Money was ornament now. There were those who still hoarded it, but it was notepaper for the children. It was jewellery.
– And Uzman was right, even though he was wrong, Judah says. -We should have got word to New Crobuzon. Think on it. No one might know.
There is silence. -You might tell no one, just disappear, and all they’d say is that once, when they was building the railroad, the train just went. The Remade went fReemade and took the train with them. You want more than that. The Remade in the city, waiting, they deserve more.
– There’s those as know what happened…
– Yes but will they do it right? You’ll be rumour-that can’t be altered-but what kind of rumour? Do you want to be a rumour that won’t die? That matters? Do you want them to shout the council’s name when they strike?
Ann-Hari smiles.
Judah says, -I’ll go back. I’ll be your bard.
Some of them say at first that it is cowardice, that he is afraid to come with them across the little purlieu of the cacotopos, but none of them really believe him cowardly. They are sorry that he is leaving them.
– We need your golems, a woman says.
– How can you go? Don’t you care for the council, Judah?
Judah rounds at that.
– You ask me that? he says. -You ask me that? He shames them.
– I’ll be your bard. I’ll tell them. Stay still. The powderflash goes and each of the gathered blinks.
In so alien a place, with the foreboding of the Torque, with the unnatural sky and the alterity of the cacotopic zone, even with the smokestone behind them there are some leaving the council.
– Some’ll make it, Judah says. -Go fReemade-they won’t go back to New Crobuzon, not Remade like that.
– You will, you’ll get through, sisters. He looks at them without even uncertainty. -Take it, he says. His voxiterator. They are quizzical. -Here. This is how you make it keep what you say. They watch him load the wax and take what spare cylinders he has. -One every year, he says slowly. -Send me one back. Wherever you are. By boat, horse, foot, whatever. We’ll see if they get through. I want to hear your voices. He looks at Ann-Hari. -I want to hear your voices.
One by one he holds them. He grips each of his comrades very hard, even those whose names he does not know. -Long live iron council, he says to each of them in turn. -Long live, long live.
With sudden mischievous love Judah tongues Uzman, and the Remade jerks and is about to pull away and then does not. Judah does not kiss him for long. -Be gentle to the Chainday-night boys, he says in the Remade’s ear, and Uzman smiles.
And Judah holds Ann-Hari and she kisses him as she did when first they were lovers, and he pulls her close by the hips and she holds his face for seconds. -Long live, he whispers into her mouth. -Long live.
He has forgotten how much faster it is to travel alone. It is not a day before he is returned to the smokestone. The hand of the trapped man, egressing the rock, has been gnawed down to red bone.
Judah walks across the tops of the swells as if over the sea. He sees detritus from the fight and a scattering of corpses. At noon he feels shadows, and over him is a school of airships, moving toward the perpetual train. Judah shields his eyes and leans against his staff.
He supposes that perhaps he should be afraid for his comrades, but he is not. He reads the changing formations of the dirigibles. He smiles, alone on the ground, as they pass like slow barracuda. They seem to hesitate. He sits, his back to a granitic coil, and watches.