“Just come with me then if you want,” he had said to Ann-Hari. “Prove me wrong. You can always come back. But if I’m right, I’m telling you… I’m telling you Judah has something planned.” And though Ann-Hari had been exasperated there was in his urgency and the uncertain valence of his concern-was he excited, anxious, angry?-something that struck her and had her ride with him.
He had failed Judah, and he had to see him, unsure as he was what he sought to do-to persuade Judah to turn the Council if he could, to explain himself, to have him accept Cutter’s regret that he had failed. When the horse-guards blocked him he demanded they summon Ann-Hari. “You have to let me go,” he said. “Give me a fucking horse. Judah’s ahead! I have to see him!”
She affected impatience but he saw her start. She said she would come. “Whatever. Escort me if you don’t trust me, I don’t care, but there’s only a few hours left, and I have to fucking see him.”
What’s he doing?
Then. In the lands nearest New Crobuzon. Where rivers crossed under the raised road, and the stones that gave cover were gnawed by acid rain. Foothills stretched out their legs and rucked up the land in untidy grass, where the piceous thick of Rudewood like a black and black-green rash tided toward the train’s path and even in places stretched sparse little hands of forest to the edges of the track. Cutter, Rahul and Ann-Hari passed through trees and tree-shadow.
The perpetual train was quickly invisible behind them, the rails, newly renewed, meandering. Cutter rode as if he were alone, beside the metal raised like proud flesh, like slub in the land’s weft. There were some refugees still lining the iron who waved him on, but most had run to be with the train itself. He ignored the halloos- Where’s the Council? Come to save us? They’re ahead, boy, be careful. He kept his stare to the tracks, the trackside. The train was no more than an hour behind him.
He felt as if New Crobuzon sucked him in, as if its gravity-the denseness of brick, cement, wood, iron, the vista of roofs, stippling of smoke and chymical lights-as if its gravity took him. The stoned land rose like floodtide toward the line, and Cutter’s horse descended past a place where the roadbed and the country were level. Rahul was beside him. By a meadow of boulders Cutter saw a barge passing. They were near the farmlands. He watched the trackside. The occasional mechanism where a signal might have stood, some meter to read the speed or passage of trains. Here a clutch of stones and metal debris in the train’s path or by its side.
A flock of wyrmen tore back from New Crobuzon, scattered below the fast clouds and screeched at them. “They waiting! Thousands and thousands and thousands! Rows of ’em! No!”
Cutter and Rahul were racing on the eastern side of the tracks, eating the distance, so fast Cutter became hypnotised with it, until after a last turn of rocks the tracks converged at the end of suddenly bleak flatrock land, a stony pool and low marsh where there were wading birds as grey as the environs. At the end of the perfect perspective was a township of sidings, where the rails fanned. The smoke of workshops, the winter-dulled corrugate iron of train sheds, the sprawled terminus at the edge of New Crobuzon. Cutter sounded and heard Rahul sound too, become a single mass in the distance, one organism of pikes and cannon, clouded light reflected from thousands of masks, were the militia.
“Oh my gods.” Judah, where are you?
The troops waited.
“Where’s Judah?” Ann-Hari said. She was staring at the waiting men, miles off, and Cutter saw, good gods, he saw a challenge in her, a fight-light in her eye. A smile.
“We must have missed him. Come on, I swear he’s here…”
“You know nothing, don’t you, you don’t know nothing…”
“Godsdammit, Ann-Hari, we can find him.” Why are we looking? What will he do?
The train would come from the sheltering stone gulley out into that plateau with the New Crobuzon Militia waiting. Cutter saw the train. Come and come through, and the faces of all the Councillors pale when they saw what waited for them, but set with the knowledge that there was nothing else to be done. By the time they slowed the engine the militia would be on them. Nothing was possible except a last bravery, a tough pugnacious death. The knowledge would come over them, and the sweating and terrored faces of all the hundreds of Councillors on the train would toughen again, and the train would speed up. It would accelerate toward the enemy.
Come on, we taken the militia twice before, we can do it again, would come the shouts, lies that everyone would gratefully pretend to believe. Some would whisper to their gods or dead ancestors or lovers, kiss charms that would not protect them. They would shout, Iron Council! and For the Collective! and Remaking!
The Iron Council, the perpetual train, would howl, smoke streaming, the whistles of its cabin shrill, the sounds of its guns a tempest of bullets. The train would come into the zone of the New Crobuzon guns, and in bucking fire and the stretch and split of metal, in the agony shouts of burning dissidents, of fReemade, as hot death took them, Iron Council would end.
Gods, gods.
The Councillors rode back toward the train a few hundred yards. Cutter forced a slower pace. He watched the metal. Last chance. A mile, no more, into the cosseting of the stone surrounds. Again wyrmen overhead, but these ones speaking with different accents, these were city wyrmen come to greet the newcomers. “Come, come,” they shouted. “We’re waiting. Behind militia. For you.” They wheeled and went back toward some trackside machinery. Cutter rode.
“Ann-Hari.” A call from the edge of the gulch, twenty feet above. Cutter looked up and it was Judah.
Cutter let out a sound. He stopped his horse as Rahul stopped and he and Ann-Hari looked up. Judah Low was standing. He moved in agitation, craving their attention.
“Ann, Ann-Hari,” Judah shouted. “Cutter.” He beckoned hugely.
“Judah,” Cutter said.
“Come up, come up. What are you doing here? What are you doing? Gods, come up.”
Rahul’s great lizard weight could not take the incline, which slithered under him. He could only wait by the tracks as Cutter and Ann-Hari gripped handhold stubs of roots, ascended, stood, Cutter keeping his head down as long as he could so it was only at the very last that he raised his shale-grey face and looked at Judah Low.
Judah was looking at Ann-Hari with an opaque expression. He embraced her a long time, as Cutter watched. Cutter licked his lips. Cutter waited. Judah turned to him and with something at least half a smile gripped him too, and Cutter let Judah for a tiny moment take his weight. Cutter closed his eyes and rested his head, then made himself stand back again. They could see the tracks’ exit from the raised land.
They watched, the three of them, watched each other. Here he was, the tall thin grey-haired man Judah Low. What are you? Cutter thought. Around Judah were signs that he had been waiting. A water bottle. The obscure debris of his golem craft. A telescope.
In this place there was no one around them. The last cut before the city. Wyrmen went overhead again and circled, and shouted hysterical warnings as they went.
“What you been doing?” Cutter said. “What are you doing? They wouldn’t stop, Judah, they wouldn’t turn. I tried…”
“I know. I knew they wouldn’t. It doesn’t matter.”
“What happened? In the city?”
“Oh Cutter. Done, it’s done.” Judah was placid, cowish. He looked between Cutter and Ann-Hari’s heads at the curve of the track, in the direction from which the perpetual train would come. Looked back at them, back at the tracks. His attention switched ceaselessly.