Ann-Hari was screaming. The Council-followers were coming in more numbers out of the rock, telling each other what had happened, sending word back: Iron Council has… what?
No noise came from it. It was a huge silence shaped like women and men on a train. The Iron Council was made of quiet. Ann-Hari screamed and tried to grab it, to pull herself up onto it, and time slithered from her at the borders of the golem and sped her hand or deflected it or momentarily had the Council not there so she could not touch it, she could not touch it. She was in time. It was not, and it was beyond her. She could see it, and all the instant of her comrades, but she could not reach it. Others left behind in time were gathering around her. She was screaming.
At the head of the train, reaching with his brawny thorned arm, was Thick Shanks. He was staring at the massed militia in the distance. He was smiling, his mouth open. Beside him a laughing man whose string of spittle was stretched to the point of snapping. The train was occluded with suspended unmoving dust. Its headlights relucent, their shed light absolute and unwavering. Ann-Hari raged and tried and failed to rejoin Thick Shanks and the Iron Council.
Cutter looked on the impossibility. He jumped when Judah put his hands on him.
“Come,” said the somaturge. His voice was not Judah’s. A torn-up ruined thing that came up with blood and sputum, though he still smiled. “Come. I saved them. Come.”
“How long? Will it last?” Cutter heard his quaver.
“Don’t know. Perhaps till things are ready.”
“They died.” Cutter pointed at the train’s rear. Judah turned his head away.
“It’s what it is. I did all I could. Gods, I saved them. You saw.” He rose. He held his stomach. He let out a gasp. He swayed and left a spatter pattern around him. The daylight seemed to strengthen him. He reached, and Cutter gave him his hand, and they began to descend, Judah lolling as if he were stitched from old cloth, down into the rocks, hidden from the tracks. In the very far off, noise said that the militia were coming. That they saw something was not as it should be, and were coming.
Cutter and Judah climbed down, away.
Part Ten. THE MONUMENT
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Scuffing and stumbling over little fox-trails, holding Judah while he dry-retched and pulling Judah’s hair back from his aging face, Cutter wanted the moments not to end. In a shallow brook he washed Judah’s blood away. Judah Low did not pay him any notice, but breathed and spread out his fingers. While this time lasted Cutter could dissemble, could make himself believe that he thought it would end well.
By a sideling creep they went very slowly toward New Crobuzon. Cutter took them a long way from the route of the militia, whom they could see and hear approaching the frozen train. Cutter thought of the hundreds of Councillors who must be running, looking for hides in the rocks, heading swampward. The city refugees among them. The warren of stone forms must be full of the frightened.
“Judah,” he said. He breathed the name. He did not know what emotion it was he spoke with. He thought of those killed by what Judah had done. “Judah.”
They were hardly subtle or secretive; they left what must, Cutter thought, be blatant trails of footfalls and blood and broken branches. He hunkered under Judah, took the tall man’s weight. Other Councillors must have climbed out of the cut and down into the outside land, but by some quirk of geography or timing Cutter and Judah seemed alone, hauling over gorse and through dry wintered brush. They were alone in the landscape. Spirits. When they came to open level land they would look and miles off see the advance of the militia. Once a vantage gave Cutter a look at the perpetual train. He saw it, slightly out of the world, as if reality bowed under its weight, as if it were at the bottom of a pit. He saw it quite unmoving.
With the slow move of the shadows, Cutter saw the winter day grow older. He knew that things must be changing, time creeping around the timeless. I am here, under Judah’s arm. I am taking him back to New Crobuzon. The knowing in him that it would not last was a thorn.
I’ll not ask you anything. I’ll not ask you why you did what you did. Ain’t got time. But even unbidden Judah began to speak.
“There was nothing that could be done, not really. Nothing to keep them from harm. History had gone on. It was the wrong time.” He was very calm. He spoke not to Cutter but to the world. Like one delirious. He was still utterly weak, but he spoke strongly. “History’d gone and that was… I never knew! I never knew I could do it. It was so hard, all the planning, trying to work it out, such learning, and it was… so-” He shook his hands at his head. “-so draining…”
“All right, Judah, all right.” Cutter patted him and did not take his hand away. Held Judah. He filled suddenly, closed his eyes, blinked it down. What a pair we are, he thought, and actually laughed, and Judah laughed too.
New Crobuzon’s that way. Cutter directed their walk.
“Where shall we go, Judah?”
“Take me home,” Judah said, and Cutter filled again.
“Yes,” he said carefully. “Let me take you home.”
Their little dissimulation, that they might make it. A long way around, up toward the rises behind the trainyard, where they might find a way north of the TRT sidings and eastward to New Crobuzon’s slum suburbs. To Chimer, say, or on up through the foothills to the River Tar and the barge nomads and low merchants with whom they might take a ride and be pulled in past Raven’s Gate, past Creekside and the remnants of the khepri ghetto, under the rails, to Smog Bend, into the innards of New Crobuzon. Cutter walked them north, as if that might be their plan.
What was that, Judah? What was that you did? Cutter remembered Judah’s talk of the noncorporeal golems, the stiltspear and their arcane golemetry. I didn’t know you could do that, Judah.
They saw people. “You’re going the wrong way, mate,” one caravanner said. Cutter and Judah pushed past them. The cart wheels scuffed and turned the earth and receded. Cutter looked up at birds. More. A little more. A little longer. He did not have any sense of to whom or to what he was pleading. Judah leant on him, and Cutter held him up.
“Look at you,” he said. “Look at you.” He wiped dirt off Judah’s face, onto his own clothes. “Look at you.”
A second tiny wave of runaways approached. This time all variegated. Humans with handcarts, a vodyanoi panting out of water. A fat she-cactus carrying a prodigious club. She hefted it at Cutter and Judah but set it down again when she saw them more closely. There were two khepri, their skinny women’s bodies swaddled in shawls so they moved with tiny steps, conversing with their headscarabs, the iridescent beetles on their thin necks moving headlegs and mandibles in sign, emitting gusts of chymical meaning. Behind them, a kind of punctuation mark to this random Collective, was a construct.
Cutter stared at it. Even Judah looked, through the fug of his exhaustion. It waddled toward and past them on the ruts.
Limbs, a trunk and head in rough human configuration, its body an iron tube, its head featured in pewter and glass. One arm was its own original, the other some later repair in a scrubbed, lighter steel. From a vent like a cluster of cigars it jetted breaths of smoke. It raised its cylinder legs and placed them down with inhuman precision. Wedged over what would be its shoulder it carried a bundle dangling on the end of a staff.
One of the city’s rare legal constructs, the servant or plaything of someone rich? An underground machine, an illegal, hidden for years? What are you? Did it follow its owner into exile, was its meticulous stomping progress simple obedience to a mathematised rule in its analytical engine? Cutter watched it with the superstition of someone grown up after the Construct War.