Its headlamps were eyes now, predictably, bristling with thick wire lashes, its cowcatcher a jawful of protruding teeth. The huge tusks of wilderness animals were strapped and bolted to them. The front nub of its chimney wore a huge welded nose, the smokestack ajut from it in nonsense anatomy. Sharpened girders gave it horns. And behind that enormous unwieldy face the engine was crowded with trophies and totems. The skulls and chitin headcases of a menagerie glared dead ferocity from its flanks: toothy and agape, flat, eyeless, horned, lamprey-mouthed with cilia-teeth, bone-ridged, shockingly human, intricate. Where they had them the trophies’ skins were tanned, drabbed by preservation, bones and teeth mazed with cracks and discoloured by smoke. The befaced engine wore dead like a raucous hunter god.
They cut their way on the echo of another path. Sometimes it was gone from view, or geography had twisted in the decades. They might spend hours splitting rocks by the side of hill-shadowed lakes to reach a fissure and, hacking through bramble and the outskirts of bosk, part crabgrass and uncover the ghost of a roadbed, the root-claimed ridge on which years ago they had come the other way. They found caches of rails, savaged by years, and sleepers, some still laid, covered in greased tarpaulin that had stained the earth. They placed their tracks to meet the ends waiting for them.
We left these, the oldsters who had been there at the laying said. I remember now. To make it easier. You never know, we said, when we might have to come back. The left-behind rails sped them. Gifts from their young selves, wrapped in oilcloth in rock-toothed country.
Judah Low taught Cutter to lay tracks.
They had come quietly, the draggled party, into the grasses, when first they had come. They had reached their destination stunned by their arrival. Pomeroy and Elsie quite silent. Drogon the whispersmith pulling his brimmed hat down. Qurabin invisible and felt, tired and diminished by the exertions of scouting, secret-finding. Cutter standing by Judah when he could. When he could, holding Judah’s hand.
Under uncoiling clouds in a grassland were miles of garden. Dense crops abutting each other, bounded by an iron ellipsis of tracks. Beyond the rails other fields were scattered, dissipating and merging with wild flora.
The guides led them there, the grass unsealing and sealing again. They watched all the figures working at their husbandry. A farmland, out here where there was nothing. Most of the party was mute. Judah smiled without ceasing, and muttered Long live. Men and women came along the paths, by sod huts that fringed the railroad, all the topography of normality, an everyday farmstead village, passed through by a train.
Judah watched the locals, and when they came close enough he would laugh and shout Long live, and they would nod in response.
“Hello, hello, hello,” Judah said as a very young child neared, its father half-watching from where he sharpened a scythe. Judah squatted. “Hello, hello, little comrade, little sister, little chaver,” he said. He made a benediction with his hand. “What’s it like, hey?”
And then he stepped back and simply sounded in happiness. The noise he made had been without syllables or shape, was nude delight, as he heard metal wincing and saw clouds of soot spoor, and as the train, the Iron Council, came through the grass. As the towering and shaking iron wood rope and found-sculpture wheeled town rolled out of the grasses and came at them.
They dropped what they carried. “Iron Council.” “Iron Council.” Each of them said it as the tusked train came.
It came, repeating its few-miles, as it had for so long, neither sedentary nor nomadic, describing its home. It was stopping.
“I’m Judah Low,” he shouted. He went toward it as if it were drawing in to a station. “I’m Judah Low.” Someone had stepped from the engine cab, and Cutter had heard a shout, a greeting whose words he could not pick apart but that had made Judah run and scream and scream a name. “Ann-Hari!”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
There had been marshland. Camouflaged fens where what seemed earth and crabgrass became suddenly only a layer of plant on thick water. The Iron Councillors laid down rock fragments, pontoons, sunk pillars quickly cut from woods. They saw copses of stumps weathered by more than two decades and interspersed with neonate trees, where they had taken timber on their way out. The Iron Council moved slowly on rails just above or just below the water. The train became a sedate creature of the shallows. Below it, around it, came noises of bolotnyi and bog-things.
Pomeroy laid tracks. Elsie went with the foragers. Qurabin came at night to the travellers and told them things she or he had found in the hills and swamps. Secret things. In the monk’s slow surrender to the cost of revelations, Cutter sensed a sadness, a coward’s eagerness to die. Qurabin had lost everything and was dissolving into the world with pointless worship.
Drogon the whispersmith was a guard. One of the gunmen who watched the Council in its gushing steaming progress. Cutter was with Judah-he would not let him go. They put down tracks together.
Judah was a fairy tale. The children would come to watch him, and not only them but men and women who had not been born when the Iron Council crossed the world. He was kind. He would make golems for them, which delighted them. They had all heard of his golems. They sang to him once, around a fire, as vaguely animal trees tried to shy from the sound.
They sang Judah a story of Judah. They sang in chanty counterpoint about when he fixed the soldiers with a mud monster and saved the Iron Council, and then how he went into the desert and made an army, and then how he went to the under-hill court of the king of the trow and made a woman out of the princess’ bedsheet and how the sheet and trow had swapped places and how Judah Low had eloped with the troglodyte princess and gone across the sea.
At night Cutter pressed himself to Judah and the older man would sometimes respond, with his beneficent restraint. Cutter would push into Judah or open to him. On the nights they were not together, Judah was with Ann-Hari.
“I got your message,” Judah had said, the first night, when they arrived. “Your cylinder. Rahul’s voice. About Uzman. Long live.”
“Long live.”
Uzman died suddenly, she told him, a swift shutdown, of his organic or pipework tubes they never knew.
“You still have the voxiterator?”
“How many messages you got from us?”
“Four.”
“We sent nine. Give them to someone going to the coast to trade, to give to a ship, that says it’s going south, that might go through the straits, that might get past Tesh, that might get to Myrshock, and then to New Crobuzon. I wonder which ones you got.”
“I have them with me. You can tell me what I missed.”
They smiled at each other, a middle-aged man and a woman who looked much older, sunburnt and effort-lined, but whose energy was as great as his. Cutter was awed by her.
At the long first evening of introductions they met Thick Shanks. He was dethorned, and Judah hugged the brawny, greying cactus-man hard. There were others the golemist recognised and greeted with joy, but it was Shanks and Ann-Hari who filled him.
Others he knew lived quiet as farmers, had become nomads, trappers, hunters bushed with beards. There were newcomers at the head of the Council, with Ann-Hari.
Where she walked she was greeted. Thin and hard, lined, uglied perhaps by time but an astounding ugliness, vivid and passionate. As the train travelled it came to the factories, farmsteads, silos and halls that in the years had spread beyond the train. Ann-Hari would fetch down to walk wherever they stopped.