Once there was a panic, someone as they walked past screaming and running from a patch of moving colour, crying “A haint! A haint!” But it was fresh graffiti, ink sliding down, that had shocked the woman. She laughed, embarrassed. A klaxon sounded and an aerostat had hauled piscine over the Collective and drizzled bombs with coughs of collapsing mortar; those on the streets started and looked wary but more resigned than afraid.
There were countless styles on the streets. A last flowering of impoverished dandyism.
What is this place? thought Cutter. I cannot believe I’m here. I cannot believe I’m back. We’re back.
He saw Judah. Judah was destroyed. His face was absolute with misery. Is this what we won? Cutter saw him wonder.
In the later days of their journey, close to the city, Iron Council’s emissaries had met scores of refugees, poor and not-poor, from downtown and uptown. Out in the open land, they were only the lost. “Too much terror,” one had told them, not knowing who they were, assuming them explorers. “It ain’t the same,” the Crobuzoners said.
“It was something in the first days,” a woman said. She held a baby. “I’d have stayed. It weren’t easy, but it was something. Emptying the prisons and the punishment factories, hearing Tarmuth had gone, getting messages from its Collective, till it fell. The food run out and next thing we’re eating rat. Time to go.”
A terrified shopkeeper from Sheck claimed the Collective had gathered all the rich from the south of Aspic when they had taken it, stolen their houses, shot the men, raped the women and shot them too, and were raising the children as slaves.
“I’m gone,” he said. “What if they win? What if they kill Mayor Triesti like they did Stem-Fulcher? I’m gone for Cobsea. They appreciate an industrious man.”
Through streets Cutter had once known now made strange by mortars, with neglected bunting in the colours of factions, with signs proclaiming idiot theories or new churches, new things, new ways of being, split and peeling. The raucousness and vigour were gone from the streets but still sensible in echo, in the buildings themselves: palimpsests of history, epochs, wars, other revolts embedded in their stones.
There were sixteen Caucusers in the delegate council. Five could be found. They stared. They hugged the newcomers. They wept.
“I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it.”
They each gripped Judah for what he had done, finding Iron Council, and Cutter and Elsie for finding Judah and bringing him back. They greeted Drogon. Judah told them Qurabin was with them, described the monk as a renegade from Tesh, and they looked in unease and waved at the air.
And then the Remade. The Iron Councillors.
One by one, the Caucusers of New Crobuzon’s Collective gripped the hands or tail-like limb of the Councillors, awed, abject, let out murmurs of solidarity. “Decades,” one whispered, holding Rahul, who reciprocated with unexpected gentleness in his lower, reptile arms. “You came back. Chaver, where you been? Gods. We been waiting. ”
There were too many things to ask. What has it been? Where have you been? How do you live? Do you miss us? These questions and others filled the room in ghost unspoken form. When at last someone spoke, it was to say, “Why have you come back?”
Cutter knew some of the delegates. An old cactus-woman called Swelled Eyelid, a Proscribed, he remembered; a man Terrimer, whose affiliation he did not know; and Curdin.
Curdin, a leader of the Runagates Rampant, had been Remade.
There were fashions in Remaking. Cutter had seen this shape before. Pantomime horses, people called them. Curdin had been made quadruped. Behind his own, another pair of legs shuffled uncertainly, bent at their waist, their human torso horizontal and submerging into the flesh above Curdin’s arse as if he were opaque water. Another man had been embedded in him.
“They broke me out,” he said to Cutter quietly. “When it started. When the Collective took over. They emptied the punishment factories. Too late for me.”
“Curdin,” Judah said. “Curdin, what is this? What’s happening? Is this the Collective?”
“It was,” Curdin said. “It was. ”
“Why’s the Council coming back?”
“We’re being targeted,” Judah said. “New Crobuzon fought its way through the Firewater Straits for us. They found out where we are. They’ve wanted us for years. Curdin, they’re chasing us through the cacotopic stain. The Council’s a way off yet, but it’s coming. We came to tell you, and to see-”
“You sure you’re still being followed? Through the stain? How did you come through the damn stain?”
“We’ve not shaken them off. They may be depleted, but they’re still coming. Even if Parliament doesn’t believe that the Council’s returning, their assassins are after us.”
“But why are you here?”
“Because of you, of course. Gods damn, Curdin. I knew something was happening when I left. I knew, and when the Council heard about it, they knew it was time to come home. To be part of this.”
But you wanted to stay away, Judah. Cutter looked at him, with a strange sense.
“We’re coming back. We’re going to join the Collective.”
Though there was joy in the faces of the Caucusers, Cutter swore he saw something ambivalent in all of them.
“There ain’t a Collective.”
“You shut your damn mouth, ” said others instantly, rounding on Curdin, and, “The fuck you say.” Even the other Runagaters looked shocked, but Curdin raised himself up on four tiptoes and shouted.
“We know it. We’ve weeks, at the most. We’ve nothing left. They’ve cut us off, they’re killing Smog Bend, Howl Barrow’s probably gone. We’re less than a fifth of the committee-half the others don’t know what they want, or want to make peace, for gods’ sake, with the Mayor, as if Parliament wants that now. We’re over. We’re just living out days. And now you want to drag the godsdamned Iron Council into this? You want to bring it down?”
“Chaver.” It was a young woman who spoke, a Runagater. Her voice shook. “You won’t like what I’m going to say.”
“No this ain’t because of what’s done to me…”
“Yes, it is. You been Remade, chaver, and it’s a sick thing, and it’s made you despair, and I ain’t saying I’d do it any differently, and I ain’t saying we’ll win for sure, but I am damn well saying that you don’t decide now that we’re done. You better godsdamned fight with us, Curdin.”
“Wait.” Judah’s mouth moved with a panic of collapsing plans. “Listen listen. Whatever the, whatever it is, whatever’s happening, you have to know that ain’t the reason we’re here. We have a job to do. Listen.
“Listen.
“New Crobuzon will fall.
“We heard-listen, please-we heard about the manifestations, your haints. They haven’t stopped, have they?”
“No but they grow smaller…”
“Yeah. For the same reason there aren’t droplets just around a splash. Because something’s getting close. Tesh ain’t suing for peace. Whether they’re talking to you, or Parliament, or both or whatever… they ain’t making peace, they’re preparing for the end. The haints ain’t the weapon. Something else is. It’s in the spirals.”
When at last they understood, they thought him mad. But not in fact for long.
“You think this is a whim?” Cutter raged at them. “You got any idea what we went through to get here? Any idea at all? What we’re trying to do here? The spirals are calling down fucking fire on you. On Parliament, Collective, all.”