The things blocked them. They were caught by a shelf above a canyon, which went to scree too loose to run. Cutter backed against rock and fired. Someone cried. Judah was murmuring.
The rearmost inchman chattered slab teeth. Its head burst. Matter spattered its fellows. Pomeroy refilled his smoking grenade shot.
In the wake of one Iron Council thaumaturge Cutter saw simple plantlife growing in footprint shapes, the spoor of moss-magic. The mossist growled and a mass of blots mottled an inchman’s skin, a bryophyte coating clogging its mouth and the holes of its eyes. It reared, retching, clawing the plant pelt and drawing its own thick blood.
The Iron Councillors fired chakris, fat flat-blade disks or scythe-bladed arrows. The inchmen bled in gouts, but did not stop coming. Judah stepped up with a near-holy fury in his face. He touched the ground. His crooked hand spasmed.
For a second nothing and then the inchmen were padding on moving earth that began to unfold in the shape of a vast man, a somatic intervention in the rock and regolith-and then something stammered in the aether and broke. Judah staggered and sat hard on the loose stones, and the ground settled. The human shape that had begun to disaggregate from it became random again.
Cutter cried Judah’s name. Judah was holding his head. An inchman was one step away from him.
But Pomeroy was there, his blade in his hand. With a psychotic doomed bravery while Elsie screamed he hacked into the human-form abdomen of the inchman.
He was a very strong man. The inchman even stopped a moment at the impact, and Pomeroy let go the sword and stepped back, standing in front of Judah, who gathered himself, looked up as the inchman snatched Pomeroy’s head. Its enormous palm pressed over the man’s face, swung him by his head with the absent savagery of a baby.
Cutter heard the shearing of Pomeroy’s neck, and Elsie’s scream. The inchman flailed Pomeroy’s body. Judah was crouched again, drawing up the golem from the earth. This time it came all the way. It stamped, shedding its earth-self, swung at the nearest inchman. The enormous strike sent the thing off the rock, into the air. Its inchworm arse flexed; it dropped and hit the ground with explosive wetness.
Elsie was weeping. The other inchmen were closing, and Judah crooked his fingers and the golem interceded. It stamped with a walk that was Judah’s walk, Cutter would swear, performed by earth. It stood before the Councillors and tore into another of the geometrid things.
After a moment of indecision while the exhausted Councillors fired, the inchmen retreated from the towering golem. Two descended head-first down the sheer uneven rock. The third was trapped in a last ugly blood-mud wrestle, and the collapsing golem rolled with its opponent to the edge and over.
Judah kneeled by Pomeroy, and the Iron Councillors ran to help their comrades. Cutter, shaking, stared over the edge. He saw the inchmen descending the vertical surface. On the rock floor were the bodies of the two who had fallen, and the red earth of the golem.
Cutter went to Pomeroy and gripped his dead friend. He gripped Elsie, who was wailing, who sobbed on him. Judah was stricken. Cutter tried to grab him too, pulled him close. They hung on together. The three of them held as Elsie cried, and Cutter felt Pomeroy go cold.
“What happened?” he whispered in Judah’s ear. “What happened? You… are you all right? You stumbled… and Pom-”
“Died for me.” Judah’s voice was perfectly flat. “Yes.”
“What happened?”
“Something… A remote. I weren’t expecting it. A golem trap was triggered. I’m saving chymicals and batteries-it took its energy mostly from me, and I didn’t have the focus. It shook me, made me fall.” He closed his eyes, lowered his head. He kissed Pomeroy’s face.
“It’s a golem trap I put in our path,” he said. “The militia triggered it. They’ve made landfall. They’re coming.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
On the coast hundreds of miles away (Judah said) an ictineo, one of New Crobuzon’s experimental ichthyscaphoi, must have come to land. A behemoth fish come out of the ocean crawling on fins that became leg-stubs that stamped forward until the stumpy limbs shattered under their own weight and the enormous Remade fish-thing lay down and shuddered. This was what must have come.
A mongrel of whale-shark distended by biothaumaturgy to be cathedral-sized, varicellate shelled, metal pipework thicker than a man in ganglia protuberant like prolapsed veins, boat-sized fins swinging on oiled hinges, a dorsal row of chimneys smoking whitely. The fish-ship’s mouth (Judah said) must have opened with a grind of industry, anchored by chains, drawbridge-style, as the flange of lower jaw descended and the men of the New Crobuzon militia emerged, bringing their weapons, and coming for the Council.
“It weren’t so easy for us when first we came through. We found ourselves wandering, trying to get away from the stain, and then the path would coil and we’d be going straight into the Torque’s innards, sky like guts or like teeth. We lost so many to it then,” the man said.
He was, from long ago, a Dog Fenn Remade. His hands were gone, the left a mess of bird’s feet congealed in talon-mass, the right a snake’s thick tail. He was a scald, an Iron Council balladeer, and the apparent halting of his delivery was a game: he told in a complex, arresting syncopation mimicking novicehood. His story was a kind of lay for those dead by the inchmen.
“We lost so many. They went to glass and then was just gone, on a hill that was a bone and then a pile of bones and then a hill again. We learnt ways of passing through this in-between.” There was no scientist in the world of Bas-Lag who knew more about Torque, about the cacotopos, than the Iron Council.
“Now we come back, the land’s shucked and the Torque’s done what it’s done. Some of the rails we hid is gone, some’s corkscrewed, some are holes the shape of rails, some are lizards made of stone. But there are enough to get us out again. To come out on the other side, with only the plains between us and New Crobuzon. Hundreds of miles, weeks maybe months, but not the years it would once have taken.”
Many miles west, the New Crobuzon Militia tracked them.
Inchmen came again. This time they attacked the train itself, and were repelled but at cost. They drag-crawled and with their wavering spanworm walk stomped toward the train and even touched it and gnawed at it, marked it with stone-hard teeth and caustic spit. Councillors died pushing them away. There were other creatures: shadows shaped like dogs, simians with hyaena voices pelted with grass and leaves.
The ground defied the Council. It changed in sped-up corrasion, in the buckling of tectonics at some psychotic rate as if time was untethered from its rules. The ground crawled. There were patches of sudden and extreme cold where frost-heave buckled rails, and then temperate places where the rockwalls came closer and creeping hills stalked them.
They laid tracks on ground just smooth enough for their passage, on ties just strong enough, just close enough together. It was a just-railroad, existing in the moment for the train to pass, then gone again. Hauled by the Remade and by young Councillors who had never seen their parents’ former home. Over a spread-out swamp, a quag that ate the tracks.
Cutter would look up, time to time, from his hammering or earth-laying, and see the glowering of the cacotopic stain in the near-distance: the snarl of sky and scene, a baby’s face, an explosion of leaves, an animal in the uncertainty in the air and the hills. We don’t even see it no more, he thought, amazed, and shook his head. The sky was clear, but a serein drizzled onto them. You can get used to the most monstrous absurdity, he thought.