A rump escaped. Their information came through: We can’t explode the fucking bridge.
Sheer Bridge, then. But though this time the vodyanoi swimmers were careful of ambush, it was the same thing-their explosives were gone. Found gods-knew-when and removed. The plans of the Collective to cauterise the ingress of militia had been stymied.
“It’ll be the same on Mandrake Bridge, and Barrow. They’ve got ways in. ”
And now here they were coming. With the suppressing fire of the Collective’s guns, the thanatic foci of their hexes, their boobytraps, it took the militia hours to advance through what they made a monstrous landscape, of jags that had been walls and windows without glass or purpose. But they were advancing. Cockscomb Bridge belonged to Parliament again.
As the Collectivists fell back, more barricades went up. The rubble from bombed buildings was hauled as foundation and anything went above it, slag from factories, sleepers, furniture, the stumps of trees from Sobek Croix. The Collectivists had to sacrifice a few streets west of Sedilia Square to focus on main streets. They sent word to the defenders of the south bank itself to prepare for invasion if the militia veered east over the bridge.
They did not. They crossed the river; and in the square they halted, commandeered buildings (one only just vacated by Collectivists, whose effects the militia began systematically to defile, throwing pissed-on heliotypes out of the windows).
In Griss Twist, the insurrectionists took decades-old rubbish from the dumps to block Sheer Bridge. Badside was being shelled, its desolate population and the token Collectivist units left to guard it conserving their ammunition. No one wanted Badside itself; but as a conduit to Echomire and Kelltree, and as the riverbank facing Dog Fenn, the Collective’s heart, it had to be defended.
In the city’s northwest, where the Dog Fenn Collectivists could not go, their sister chapters were in trouble. Something was being prepared in Tar and Canker Wedge, surely an attack on Smog Bend. Break it, with its machinofacture and its organised workers, and that chapter of the Collective was gone.
Howl Barrow was easy. “We can flatten a bunch of inverts, perverts and painters quicker than scratching our arses,” one captured militia commander had said, and his disdainful claim had become notorious. The Howl Barrow chapter would not last long, with its Nuevist squads, its battalions of militant ballet dancers, its infamous Pretty Brigade, a group of Collectivist grenadiers and musketeers all of them dollyboy man-whores in dresses and exaggerated make-up, shouting orders to each other in invert slang. At first they had been greeted with disgust; then with forbearance, as they fought without restraint; then with exasperated affection. No one wanted them to be overrun, but it was inevitable.
The militia took Cockscomb Bridge, broke the Glasshouse Gunners, and were camped on the south bank of the River Tar. They were poised to push east into the heartlands of the Dog Fenn chapter, the stronghold of the New Crobuzon Collective. There was a sense that no Collectivist would voice, that this was the start of the end.
It was into this atmosphere, this war, that Judah, Cutter and their party entered the city.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
“Gods. Gods. How in the name of Jabber did you get here?”
Entering and leaving the New Crobuzon Collective was hard. The barricades were guarded by the tense and terrified. The sewers were patrolled. With the Parliamentarian aeronauts savaging any dirigibles not their own, with hexes protecting each side, coming in and out had become epic and dangerous.
There were lurid folk tales: the heroic guardsman who slipped out without fanfare to execute militia; the Parliamentarian unit that took a wrong turn in a backstreet maze to emerge in the middle of Collectivist territory. Now there was a story of the crusade coming, to take all the poor starvelings in the Collective away.
Of course hundreds had entered and left the Collective, through ill-guarded barriers, through thaumaturgy. The Mayor’s city was full of those who took the Collective’s side: in Chimer, in the industrial fringe of Lichford, areas under martial law but from which guilders, seditionists and the curious sometimes made their way into Dog Fenn or Creekside, begging entry. And the Collective itself contained many who passively or actively wished it ill, and crept out uptown or stayed as spies.
So arrivals were feted, but suspiciously. Judah and the others came from the east of the city, through the ruinous landscape by Grand Calibre Bridge. With Qurabin’s help they found hidden byways, more and more of the monk eroding with each journey. Past the barricadistes. Along brick gulches to the post office in Dog Fenn where the delegate council met. They addressed the representatives of the Caucus.
Cutter felt emptied out. So many months since he had been in New Crobuzon and now it was so new, so tremendously not as it had been. It made him think of everything, it made him think of Drey and Ihona and Fejh and Pomeroy, of the bones under the railroad tracks.
What city is this? he had thought as they entered.
The towers of Grand Calibre Bridge, ajut and centuries broken in the water of the Gross Tar, now crowned with guns puffing lazily to send shells uptown. Badside, always squalid, reshaped and broken now by more than poverty.
Everywhere. Over the girders of Barley Bridge, the streets concatenate with the everyday, the monstrous and the beautiful. They were not quite empty. There were bandaged soldiers who watched the party from broken buildings. Members of a quickly running, now ratlike populace bent under sacks of food, under furniture and nonsense they took from one place to another. They were cowed.
The trail-dust on Cutter and his comrades meant they took curious looks-everyone was dirty but their dirt was different-but no one seemed to find it strange that they travelled together: two Remade, with four whole humans (no one could see Qurabin) pulling their exhausted mounts.
The Remade were mounts themselves. The lizard-bodied man, Rahul, was one: Ann-Hari’s agent when the Iron Council was born, whose voice Cutter had heard telling of Uzman’s death. He was in late mid-age, but still ran on those backbent legs faster than any horse. Judah had ridden him across the wildlands to the city. The other was a woman, Maribet, whose arcane Remaking had put her head on the neck of a carthorse studded with avian claws. Elsie was her rider.
Many of the young freeborn Councillors had been desperate to see New Crobuzon, but Ann-Hari had insisted that the Council itself needed every hand. They would see the city soon enough. Iron Council had sent only these emissaries.
The two Remade stared like farmboys from the Mendican Foothills. As if the geography awed them utterly. They were walking in a broken dream of their own pasts.
There were children in the streets. Wild, they made playgrounds out of destroyed architecture. Bombs had taken large parts of the city away, recast others in a bleak fantastic of pointless still-standing walls, rubble wastes, girders and thick wires uncoiled arm-thick from the ground: gardens of ruin. And amid them new kinds of beauty.
Hexes had made sculptures of brick, stained breakdown, strange colours. In one place they had made an ivied wall only half there, a glasslike brick refraction. The cats and dogs of New Crobuzon ran over this reshaping. They were tense, prey animals now: the Collectivists were hungry.
A strange parade. A children’s play performed on a street-
corner to an audience of parents and friends desperate and ostentatious with pride and enjoyment, as bomb sounds continued. Spirals on the walls. Complex, arcing and re-arcing. Qurabin, unseen, made a hiss, a yes sound.