“Listen to me,” he shouted until he was heard. “The militia are coming. They’ve come through the cacotopic stain. They’re a day or two away. And you can’t go to the city. You have to run.”
When at last they understood him a gusty roar of no took them over, and Cutter climbed out of their arms and stamped on the train roof in frustration. He felt a wave of the bitterness, sadness and near-contempt with which Judah’s politicking and that of the Caucus had always filled him. He wanted to save these people from their own desperate want.
“You fools, ” he shouted. He knew he should restrain himself but he could not. “Godsdammit, listen to me. There is a militia squad on your tail which has come through the cacotopic godsdamned stain, do you understand? They’ve crossed the world and back again just to kill you. And there are thousands more of them in New Crobuzon. You have to turn.” He shouted over their anger. “I’m your friend, I ain’t your enemy. Didn’t I cross the fucking desert? I’m trying to fucking save you. You cannot fight them, and you godsdamned well can’t fight their paymasters.”
A clutch of Council wyrmen flew to see. The Councillors debated. But it was a one-sided argument, to Cutter’s rage.
“We beat the militia before, years ago.”
“No you didn’t,” he said. “I know the damn story. You blocked them just enough that you could run away-that ain’t the same thing. This is the flatlands. You ain’t got nowhere to run. You face them now, they’ll kill you.”
“We’re stronger now, and we’ve got our own hexes.”
“I don’t know what the militia are carrying, but godsdammit, you think your fucking moss magic is going to stop a New Crobuzon murder squad? Go. Get out. Regroup. Hide. You cannot do this.”
“What about Judah’s mirrors?”
“I don’t know,” Cutter said. “I don’t even know if I can make them work.”
“Better try,” said Ann-Hari. “Better get ready. We haven’t come this far to run. If we can’t shake them off, we take them down.”
Cutter had lost.
“The Collective sends its solidarity, its love,” the pilot shouted. His voice was shaking. “We need you. We need you to join us, as fast as you can. Your fight’s ours. Come be part of our fight,” he said, and though Cutter was shouting, “Their fight is over,” he was not heard.
Ann-Hari came to him. He was almost weeping in frustration.
“We were meant to do this,” she said.
“There’s no plan to history,” he shouted. “You’ll die.”
“No. Some of us will, but we can’t turn away now. You knew we wouldn’t.” It was true. He had always known. The wyrmen returned as the light came down.
“Enough to fill a carriage,” one shouted. There were only a few score militia, it seemed, and at that the Councillors shouted derision. They had many times that number.
“Yes but gods it ain’t just about that,” Cutter shouted. “You think they won’t have something on their side?”
“So you better be ready,” Ann-Hari said. “You better practise with Judah’s mirrors.”
The Iron Councillors gathered everyone who could fight. The laggers, spread out behind them, were called to catch up, for safety. They sped up their track-laying, to reach a point where a few igneous pillars jutted out of the earth, where there were some dry hills, so they would have a little shelter. With the expertise they had accrued over years, they readied to fight.
“He got gone,” one wyrman said. He was talking about one of the others on the reconnoitre. “He got gone out the air. Something come pull him out the air, see?”
There were none of the chances Cutter had wanted, no opportunity to tell the stories of the Collective, to ask for the stories of the Council. It was rushed and ugly. He felt desperately angry as the Councillors prepared to die. He felt as well a sense of his own failure, that he was letting down Judah. You knew I couldn’t do it, you bastard. That’s why you’re still there. Getting ready some plan or other for when I fail. Still, even though Judah had expected it, Cutter hated that he had not succeeded.
No one slept that night. Councillors came to the train throughout the darkness hours.
With the first light Cutter and Thick Shanks withdrew into position, each on a stele twenty feet high, yards apart, both facing the sun, holding one of Judah’s mirrors. Before he went, Cutter found Ann-Hari, to try to tell her that she was having her sisters, the Councillors, commit suicide. She smiled until he had finished.
“Our hexers have what Judah gave them,” she said. “We have our own thaumaturgy. And we have what Judah taught us. There are those’ll be calling golems from the traps he gave us.”
“Each time you trigger one, he’ll feel it, you know. No matter how far he is.”
“Yes. And we’ll trigger all of them. One at a time. As the militia come. If we have to.”
“You’ll have to.”
Cutter and Thick Shanks braced themselves each on their rock shaft. It was a little after dawn. The moon was still visible, pale and high. As the sun rose its light struck their mirrors, and Cutter angled his down, directing his beam at the cross-mark he had made on the ground. Thick Shanks did the same, as Cutter had shown him, and the spots of intensified sunlight roamed like nervous animals over scrub and dust, to blend on the X.
Hundreds of Councillors prepared to fight, spread out in waves to trenches and earthworks, propped rifles. Cutter turned west, to where the militia would come.
It was not long. At first he saw only dust. Cutter looked through his telescope. They were still tiny, and they did seem to be very few.
A flock of wyrmen set out to harass them, carrying acid and drop-knives. Behind them the dirigible followed with the snake-armed pilot and two volunteers as strafe-gunners. The militia came closer, over minutes and then hours, and the wyrmen crossed the grey nothing-land, and the dirigible flew low. The engines of Judah’s golem traps were ready; the hexers sang incantations.
A frantic Councillor came out of the stony lands. He stumbled to them, could not speak for moments, silenced by exhaustion and fear.
“I got trapped,” he said at last. “They took my missus. There was eight of us. They made something come out of the earth, they made something come out of us. ” He screamed. People looked at each other. I fucking told you, Cutter thought. He felt despair. I bastard told you that this weren’t simple like it looked.
Two miles off, the wyrmen came close to the militia on their horses. The riders carried no equipment anyone could see. Moved in formation. There was a strange instant, and the wyrmen were pulled one by one out of the air.
For a long few seconds there was no sound. Then-“What…?” “Did…?” “I think that, did you…?” Not yet fear. Still incomprehension. Cutter did not know what had happened, but he knew that fear would come soon.
A last wyrman lurched in the air, wrestling, swaddled in a caul of dirty nothing. Cutter saw it by a smear of the particles it carried, a thrombus of feral air. Cutter knew what was happening.
“Where did they go?” someone shouted.
The wyrmen fought air that overwhelmed them, pulled them apart in marauding currents.
The dirigible was close to the militia, and a line of bullet-dust stretched out across the ground toward them. And then the bullets broke off, and with a sudden violent dancing the vessel tipped mightily up, pitching in the air as if a ship on an unstable sea. For seconds it paused, then began to fall, not as if with gravity but as if fighting, as if the turning motors and air-propellors were struggling. The airship was hauled out of the sky by some brutal hand, broke apart.