Judah can see the smoke of the train. One midsize warflot edges nervously into the air of the cacotopic zone. From here, the landscape seems utterly quotidian, but Judah can feel something baneful welling below the world’s skin.
The airship lets its bombs fall as it approaches the perpetual train. Judah sees little explosion-flowers over the hills. Even now he is not afraid.
In the distance the sky convulses. A bolus of something moves, a coilsome organic thing-not a cloud but an aspect of the sky itself become palpable and squidish across the land not quite seen. Sound is strange. Judah does not breathe. There is a stutter. The dirigible falters and comes clear again and then it is different-it is a splinter different, it is lower in the sky-and it turns, it removes itself with a speed that Judah would swear was panicked.
The train continues, into the stain, into the cacotopic zone that has beaten New Crobuzon back.
Judah walks for months. His life becomes a fugue of walking. Over creeks, quagmire, over rockland, through forests of vitreous trees, through forests that he thinks are fossil trees then sees are great skeletons. He walks a bonescape, an ossein ecology with its own undergrowth and scavengers.
He passes lakes that bubble with the fighting of vodyanoi tribes. He sees chimneys extruded from mountainsides where there are troglodyte villages. Judah is the guest of neglected priest-tribes. He is robbed by fReemade. He joins a fReemade band.
His body becomes a traveller’s body again. The startling muscles of his arms and chest subside and he is once again a thin mannequin tempered by travel. Garuda come to feed him, dropping from the sky with wordless charity. He checks his just-adequate maps, his compass. He does not retrace his steps the long route he has gone but goes directly east.
Judah passes through a storm, in a basalt place hundreds of miles from New Crobuzon, by blitzbaums, miles-high lightning trees. Bolts held still by cryptic forces, forking into boughs, a magnesium-bright forest.
The low rust skyline of a time-eaten iron town. And a swamp of thaumaturgically jinxed mud that degenerates his boots into worms. And a barrow and a buried church, and fields of wild berries, and beautiful hills. Five times he fights animals and three times he fights sentients. Judah runs or kills.
He is a quieter man. He moves with effortless expertise. It has been many weeks since he made a grass golem to walk with him, for him to talk to until the wind picks it apart. Judah passes cattle that were once domestic and are now feral. The ruins of fences, deserted pastures, miles by miles.
And then at last Judah comes down from the sudden hills and stands quiet like an idiot. At last he comes forward and now he stumbles. Judah goes to his knees. It is cold. What seasons have passed? Judah crawls forward and touches the rails.
It seems impossible that he can touch this metal, these iron sashes that wind around the weather and geography, that for all the blood and salt he spilled on them, the bones of all the men and women they press upon, are nothing, are a nothing, are made nothing by time and dust.
They are scavenged. Imperfect. Sections are gone. The tracks look out from the dirt and hide again. It has been a time since any train came this way.
Judah looks north along the cut. He remembers the carving of the roadbed. He is a long way north of the swamp.
When he goes back Judah will learn why the rails are still. How the money at last choked up in its sluices and died when the malfeasances grew so great that to ignore them would have shamed the state too far. That the money faltered when degraded news of the revolt, of the iron council, reached the railway’s backers. And how after panicked attempts to salvage the TRT through raised wages and a merciless expansion of Remaking the capital flight was so great that Transcontinental Railroad Trust was punctured, and the tracks became bones.
Soon, when he reaches the city again, Judah will learn that. For now he only smiles. He picks up his fallen pack, and as he stoops he strokes a rail as if it were a cat. He strokes it with affection, even with a melancholy.
He steps up and walks on over the dead rails. Around him the angles of the banks enclose him. He cannot see the wider land. This road tunnels his vision and leads him back to New Crobuzon. It has been waiting for him.
– New Crobuzon, he says, he whispers. It is the first time he has spoken for days. -New Crobuzon, I’ll always come back to you.
Not a lover’s promise, not a challenge, not resignation or pugnacity. Something of all of them.
He walks on. Helios of the iron council are in his pack. The truth, escape, a new life, a rolling democracy, Remade arcadia. -I’ll make you legend, he says and the birds listen, -and it will be true.
Judah walks on the iron road, back, to the city, back to the towers of New Crobuzon.
Part Four. THE HAINTING
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The crowd were chasing a maimed man. One of the soldiers or sailors from the Tesh War. They seemed to be on every street: they had welled up as if from under stones.
No papers would say that the war had gone bad but the upswell of the wounded and ruined bespoke disasters. Ori imagined the New Crobuzon ironclads upending and sliding under water made hot by war, imagined slicks of men on the waves, gorged on by seawyrms, by sharks. There were terrible rumours. Everyone knew something of the Battle of Bad Earth and the Fight in the Sun.
The first wave of wounded were treated with fear and respect. They were militia and so not trusted, but they had fought and been ruined for the city, and there was true rage for them, and a fashion for New Crobuzon-loyal songs. What few Teshi there were in the city were murdered or went underground. Anyone with a foreign accent risked a beating.
Increasingly, criminals were conscripted instead of being Remade and jailed. Many of the cripples begging and screaming about the Tesh soulcannon and the efrit winds had been press-ganged and recruited solely for the war. They were not career militia. They were discomfiting, shambling reminders.
The veterans were welcomed and then not welcomed, unwelcomed, spurned. The militia, their erstwhile comrades, cleared them from the parks and squares uptown. Ori had seen them take a man from the petally Churchyard Square, his skin erupted and splitting from beneath with dental wedges, as he screamed about a toothbomb.
New Crobuzoners gave alms to charities that tended the thaumaturgically afflicted. There were still speeches and marches in support of the war: freedom parades they called them with their trumpeters and military floats. But the strangely wounded returnees found they were jinxes.
And those whose hurts were simple and somatic, unhexed? Scarred, stumped rather than too-limbed, blinded, with signs TESH WAR VETEREN, BROKEN FOR N. CROBUZON. Many were doubtless the everyday maimed giving their old injuries a spurious soldier’s glamour, and the resentment and anxiety of Crobuzoners about their city’s war had an outlet.
Only one voice had to raise a jeer- you was born that way, you lying fucker -and a mob might gather, and run the orthodox wounded down. It was for New Crobuzon that they did it, of course, they said- you bastard comparing yourself to our boys fighting and dying. The Murkside crowd approached the burly armless man they accused of lying, said had never been on a ship. He shouted his rank while they threw stones. Ori walked.
Other victims knew better than to raise complaint. The Remade, slave-militia built for war, survivors of their tour. Their integrated arms were decommissioned before their release on the streets of New Crobuzon. If they tried to claim that these Remakings themselves-forgetting even the wound-cut flesh, lost eyes and ill-splinted bones-were war injuries, they would be jeered at the very best. Ori walked.