“What’ll we do?” Cutter said.
“There’s nothing to be done, now,” Judah said. “It’s not the same now. The city… it’s changed again.”
“Why are you here, Judah?” Ann-Hari said. “What are you here for, Judah Low?” She was complicitous. They were smiling at each other, just. A little play in their voices. Even with the carnage to come, even having seen the militia, there was something still playful in her. She reached and touched him again and again, and he her. The thing between them was like an animal coiling from him to her and back. He looked over her shoulder and back at her.
“Judah!” Cutter shouted, and Judah turned to him.
“Yes, yes, Cutter,” he said. “Of course.” He was calming. “Why did you come here?”
“What have you done, Judah?” Cutter said. But there was a noise, and Judah gave a happy gasp just like a little boy and jumped on his toes, again like a boy. There were tears in his eyes. A smile and crying.
A wraith of smoke emerged a half mile off. The perpetual train. It wriggled up, the discharge, like a soot grub from a burrow, faster, slewing a tight turn through blasted barriers and coming closer. A wind came up before the train and pushed at their faces, Cutter and Ann-Hari turning to watch the lamps that rounded and shone weakly through the daylight, washed out the stone and the tracks, and the Iron Council came into the last of the cut.
No. Cutter did not know if he spoke aloud. He did not believe there were revolutionists hidden behind the militia. He watched and shouted aloud or in his head, as the Iron Council came through cleft stone and rolled at speed toward death. No.
The flared guard made into teeth, the engine a fetish head, carved with stories, hung with animal spoils, crowded with the toughest warriors, the biggest Remade, the cactacae with scramasaxes ready, roaring, feted by New Crobuzon refugees who ran alongside, who cheered desperately and threw confetti. The second engine, all its follow-ons, the whole tracktop town become militant, become its weapons, the Iron Council become a fighting city. Its wheels beat the iron, smoke gouting from its chimneys, everyone poised to fight, with no plan but the imbecile bravery of forward.
Uh uh, uh uh. Cutter heard it, the wheels, the clatter of tracks. He ran to the edge of the gap and shouted though he could not be heard. He saw that Judah was crying but still smiling, and Ann-Hari was smiling only. The train, faster than it had ever gone, went past Rahul, who waved his human and his lizard hands.
Cutter stumbled, and behind him he heard Judah muttering, heard Judah repeat the two-part rhythm, the repeating beat of the train. He was singing along with the train, and there was something expectant in him. Cutter leaned over, looked down on the train and the Councillors preparing for war, their last war, for their city again. He saw ahead of them a strange pattern of obstructions between the ties, nothing heavy enough to derail or damage the engine, but a precise set of interruptions, looking from above like the points of a pictogram, over a few yards of track.
“Uh uh uh uh, ” Judah said, and below in time sounded uh uh, and the front of the Iron Council passed over a mechanism Cutter had seen, that he had thought a signal relict or something half-finished; and as the wheels touched it and it clattered, it beat into motion, and Judah gasped and dropped to his knees. His skin stretched; the very meat of him seemed bled away. Cutter saw the force of his cathexis, the yank of energy.
He heard the syncopation of the train and of something else now, a complex interfering, percussion in antiphase. Iron Council tripped the switch that Judah had laid for it and the circuit he had left went live, siphoning force from him, and only Cutter could see. Cutter watched Judah blink and gasp.
The little blockade between the tracks, which Judah’s first shout had stopped Cutter or Ann-Hari seeing, wedged in the shingle, propped on crossties-a blockage of pins, of metal rods, of blocks-was pushed over by the Iron Council. Each piece landed hard, onto the contacts Judah had laid, and their strange precise order, their materials, made each of them fall with its own sound. They combined into a careful and exact music of breaking, snaps and tolling iron that added to the flawless beat of the train; and for seconds, for a snatch of time, there was pulse-magic, a palimpsest tempo, and in that moment of complexity, each accented block of noise intervening in time, cutting time into shape so that as the huge hunter’s head of the Iron Council emerged from the rock folds and synclines into open land the moments themselves were hacked by the noise, axed into shape, an intervention through the mechanism that sucked energy from Judah Low, the great self-taught somaturge of New Crobuzon, and crude, vigorous, ineluctable, the precision of that parcelled-up time reshaped time, was an argument in time,
reshaped the time itself, and made it
a golem
time golem
which stood into its ablife, a golem of sound and time, stood and did what it was instructed to do, its instruction become it, its instruction its existence, its command just be, and so it was. This animate figure carved out of time itself, the rough hew-marks of its making the unshaped seconds and crushed moments at its edges, the split instances where its timelimbs joined its timebody. It was. The shape of a figure in dimensions insensible even to its maker, unseen by any there; its contours, seen another way, enveloping the train.
The time golem stood and was, ignored the linearity around it, only was. It was a violence, a terrible intrusion in the succession of moments, a clot in diachrony, and with the dumb arrogance of its existence it paid the outrage of ontology no mind.
His face bloodied, making some beached fish-flapping motion as he crawled and smeared his gore on the earth, as he shambled like a drunk man to stand, broken by the effort of thaumaturgy, Judah Low looked into the cut and smiled. Cutter watched him.
There was an ugly noise. The tearing and crush of a weighty impact. Ann-Hari was screaming. She ran down the scree with a wake of dust. She fell and rolled and gathered herself, tearing her clothes. Rahul stood in his own shock, looked up at the Iron Council, scant feet from him. The Councillors and runaway citizens were standing, were waiting, quite uncertain. Everyone was looking at the train.
The perpetual train. The Iron Council itself. The renegade, returned, or returning and now waiting. Absolutely still. Absolutely unmoving in the body of the time golem. The train, its moment indurate.
It could not always clearly be seen. The crude rips in the temporal from which the golem was made gave it edges like facets, an opalescence of injured time. From some angles the train was hard to see, or hard to think of, or difficult to remember, instant to instant. But it was unmoving.
For yards over its chimneys the exhaust was fast as smokestone, motionless until the set billows reached the limits of the split in time, the golem’s body, and above that random barrier gusted away in drifts, the last of the effluvia escaping into history. The Councillors were still poised, their weapons were still ready, the train was bursting into the plains beyond the city, and was without motion.
The last carriage, one of the two engines that pushed instead of pulling, had missed the protection of that cosseting unmoment, had stayed dynamic, and had been derailed and crushed against the sudden crisis of untimed matter. It had burst, scattering hot coal and debris and dying engineers. The last fringe of the car ahead of it was concertinaed and torn, and where it met the unending time golem, the edge of the wound was scored like a line.