Iron Council

by China Miéville

  In a tavern Judah buys the service of gun-layer Oil Bill, whose right hand had been a tool for the servicing of motors and is reconfigured by a gunsmith in brass with splayed barrel for a peppering of shot. He refuses to let Judah run, earns his protection money by letting the androgyne gambler catch them. There is a showdown in the freezing winter dust. As the townspeople of the punk village get out of range the gambler releases a brace of daggerpigeons that gust bladily at Oil Bill, but with a rate of fire Judah has never seen before (clockwork and coil mechanisms refilling his cannon-hand) the fReemade shreds them and fires through their feathers to send the Maru’ahmer sprawling wet and dead.

  Judah runs with Oil Bill. He has neglected his golems, his stiltspear memories and the railroad itself. He sees in the brigand a hunger for the rails that reminds him of his own. The fReemade’s passion is less complex, and Judah wonders if it is a purer thing. Deep in himself, below the calm that has settled on him, he knows he must come to understand the rails.

  They pay in some taverns, extort in others. Oil Bill sings songs of wandering renegades. Judah performs for him, makes golems—it is his only trick—out of the food they eat and has them dance across the table. He tries to breathe in time, to mimic the stiltspear.

  Each dwelling makes its own rules and enforces them if it can. New Crobuzon does not claim the plains. It does not yet want them; it does not despatch militia here: it cedes the rights to policing and its spoils to the TRT, to Weather Wrightby and his monopoly railroad. The TRT gendarmes are the law here, but they are mercilessly liberal: their gunners guard only some mines and bartertowns.

  Bill’s reputation means it is some time before anyone opposes him and Judah sees him kill again. When he does it is an act against someone foul, a snarling drunkard who threatens everyone he sees with his moving hexed tattoos, but still it is disproportionate. Judah stares at the corpse, stripped by the town’s gutterchildren.

  The thing he has felt born within him, a creature of his congealed concern, flicks its tail. He does not like his companion.

  Still he stays with Oil Bill, becomes a gunsman himself, in his duster, swaps his mule for a stolen horse. Because Oil Bill cannot leave the railroad alone. They tramp the winter hills. Bill brings them back to the rails endlessly.

  —Look now, that there with them old trailers like that, them’s the work train’s supplies, goin’ all the way into the swamp. And them others we seen is for the sightseers from New Crobuzon come to see wild country, and that other’n with the guntowers ‘hind its engine . . . that’s the wages train. He smiles.

  Judah is curious. There have been tries to rob the railroad before. Vivid and daring raids from horse riders and carriages and from fReemade shaped for speed with bevies of stolen legs, who keep up with the speeding engines and harass their firemen, boarding the train and disappearing again with snatched money.

  Oil Bill’s plan might work. It is base, utterly without finesse, and it might work because Oil Bill is neither cowed nor awed by the iron road. Others have tried to shear off sections of a bridge to halt a train for ambush: Bill wants to blow the bridge while the train is on it. He wants to commit an act of war. Judah is so astonished by the plan’s imbecility that it is almost admiration.

  —The trellis at Silvergut Gap, Oil Bill says, drawing in the dirt. —Fuckin’ bridge is hundreds of yards long. We wait below, light fuses and scarper when the fuckin’ train hits the bridge. That shoddy piece of shite can’t take that. It’s coming down.

  And then the plan is that the iron train will unfold in air and shatter on the frozen flint a hundred feet below, and though yes there will be huge wastage as fire takes boxes of money, and carriages are sealed shut by crushed metal, and the blood of dead trainmen and passengers stains the notes, some ingots are bound to fall free. Some guineas are sure to gust out in the wind of the cut, and Oil Bill will simply pick spoils from the ground and the air.

  Oil Bill’s genius is the limits of his ambition. A greater thief would insist on taking every stiver from the coffers, could not support this idly conceived carnage. Oil Bill though does not care if the bulk is left to ruin in the broken train, so long as he can reach some money, and in its blithe and vast violence his plan might work.

  The grub in Judah, not conscience but some nebulous virtue, moves. He feels disassociate from it, but it gnaws him. He will not follow Bill’s plan, but he cannot outfight Oil Bill so he must pretend insouciance, even as they steal powder and ride back along the Silvergut Pass by winter cactuses and weathered black rock, to where the cat’s cradle of wood arcs overhead, to pack the explosive—Bill with lack of care that makes Judah blench—to struts in the cold-hard earth. It is only after that, while they wait for a train and Bill sleeps, that Judah can move against him.

  He leaves his horse and climbs the steep rocks, cresting with fingers so insensate with cold he is afraid he will lose them. He runs for near a day until he comes to a railside hut, a siding and a mail-drop, and a TRT signalman.

  —The gendarmes, Judah says, waving his empty hands. —I need to get them a message.

  Judah returns within a day and a night, on a new animal a mile behind the TRT rangers. When he reaches the roots of the trestle two gendarmes are dead, Bill’s blackpowder scattered.

  Bill is gone. The gendarmes station a guard. Judah watches them with contempt. They are motley; they do not have the presence of the New Crobuzon Militia. These are recruits hardly distinguished from drifters and chancers, given guns and sashes in the colours of the TRT. They have little idea of how to pursue Oil Bill, and less inclination. They put a price on him.

  Judah is in danger while Oil Bill is free. He joins the bloodprice hunter.

  First Judah thinks the bounty man is human, but he accepts his commission with a guttural alien chuckle, flexes his neck and closes his eyes in ways that mark him as abnatural. He rides something that is not a horse but a vague equine semblance, the impression of a horse, a horse burr under the skin of the real. He shoots with a matchlock pistol that spits and mutters and is sometimes a rifle and sometimes a crossbow. He will not tell Judah his name.

  They run together on their horse and their horse-bruise through the plainlands in the ripples of the rails, lands not colonised but infected, as life once infected rockpools. Four days of tracking with ideograms of hexed dust and the bounty-man finds Oil Bill, confronts him in a quarry. The white stone is marked, crosshatched with chisel lines, which make a grid behind the bandit’s head.

  —You, he shouts at Judah with the rage of the stupid betrayed, and the bondsman kills him and his weapons eat the corpse.

  Perhaps I will be this, Judah thinks, and rides with the hunter. They go town to town on the trail of those the gendarmerie will not take. They stop at TRT trackside stations and sift through the wanted notices. The bounty hunter does not ask Judah to stay nor make him leave. He speaks in a sibilant whisper so quiet that Judah cannot tell if he speaks Ragamoll well or hardly at all.

  He injures or kills his quarries with the spines from his weapons or with his living nets or with sudden throat-sounds, and drags the bodies back to the way stations for bounty, and asks nothing of Judah, nor provides him anything. The count of sheep-stealers and rapists and murderers goes up, money comes in. Those the unman kills are scum, but the presence in Judah is not at ease.

  Three days’ ride across pale stone ways. Clots of rock like ag-gregates of grey air that burst into nothing under horseshoes. A stripmined hole, the bodies of sappers and gendarmes, and the entrances to tunnels where the marrow of some epochs-dead god-beast has become ore and in which a little tribe of trow live.

  The Arrowhead Concerns will take what they can of the bone-load. The troglodytes have beaten off miners and made a stand, and the gendarmes want them gone. This is the commission.

  Judah watches while his companion unpacks chymicals. He tries to feel equanimity. Nothing moves, not bird nor dust nor cloud. It is as if time is waiting. Judah turns and feels it start again sluggishly a
s the bounty hunter prepares a huge pot with distillates and oils and hoods it, over a fire, trails a leather tube to the entrance of the cave, anchors it in place with rubber and skin sealing off the air inside. It is the end of night. The fire and the brass cauldron cover them in moving tan light. The bounty-man mixes poisons.

  In the mountain’s belly the trow must be waiting. They must be watching, Judah thinks. They must know that something is coming. He thinks, he cannot do otherwise, of the stiltspear and their hopeless unkenning resistance. He is cold, but inside him the worm of uncertainty, the oddity that is not a conscience but an awareness of wrong, a goodness, is uncoiling. He sighs. —Lie down, he tells it. —Lie down. But the oddity will not lie down.

  It moves in him and secretes disgust and anger he is sure are not his, but that stain him, and whether they are his or not he feels them. They well up in him. He thinks of the stiltspear cubs, and the trow in the little mountain.

  The chymicals are mixing and boiling, and the bounty hunter adds compounds till the red muddish mixture burps gas and a caustic oily smoke begins suddenly to pour from it and is funnelled into the mine. The hunter waits. Poison howls into the tunnels, the liquid boiling at enormous speed.

  Judah’s rage takes him. He hesitates more seconds and will always be aware of the cubic yards of murderous gas he lets free in that time, then walks to the cauldron, staying upwind, and puts his left hand below the hood, above the rim, into the smoke. The bounty hunter is horrified and uncomprehending.

  The gas is acid and hot and Judah screams as his skin splits, but he does not withdraw his hand, and he makes his scream into a chant, and he forces all the energies he has learnt and all the techniques he has stolen up from his innards and focuses them with the glass-pure nugget of hate and revenge he finds in him and channels and lets go with a cathexis purer and stronger than he has ever felt before, and thaumaturgic energies pour from him and make a golem.

  A smoke golem, a gas golem, a golem of particles and poisoned air.

  Judah falls back holding his ravaged hand. The smoke still spews from the pot but it does not vent into the tunnels, it collects and rolls in a bolus of pollution over the lip, and retreats back out of the hood and the pipe. The smoke crawls from the pot with evanescent limbs like monkeys’ or lions’ that retract again and emerge, and the cloud stands as a two- three- four- one- none-footed hulk of moiling and it steps or rolls or flies against the wind at the bounty hunter, following Judah’s agonised direction.

  He has never created anything this size before. It is unwieldy and unstable, and the wind tugs grots of it away so it shrinks as it advances but not fast enough to be gone by the time it reaches the hunter, who is firing at it and uselessly through it, sending thin coils of it out with the paths of bullets like brief spines, not seeing Judah beyond, not seeing how he moves his hands and puppeteers the golem. The thing twitches a gas tail. It hugs the bounty hunter in a mindless surround so he cannot but breathe the golem’s substance, and his inhuman skin and the delicate membranes within him pustulate and break apart and he drowns on his liquescent lungs.

  When the unman is dead, Judah has the diminishing golem leap high, and he releases it to the wind and it spasms and is gone. He bandages his hand and robs the bounty hunter’s corpse. It smells just very faintly of the gas.

  Judah does not know how much of the trow town the smoke has envenomed. He knows this is only one day. He knows the Arrowhead Concerns will have the TRT send another bounty hunter to this boneyard and will find the detritus of this failed poisoning, this dead. Judah knows the trow will be eradicated and their homes lost to history, but he will not be party to it, and he has tried to stand in its way.

  The trow will die. If he could leave something behind for them. If he could give these rocks a guardian shape and make it wait, to wake when it is needed. The bounty hunter’s unhorse runs from him and into rock, leaving an animal-shaped bruise of lichen.

  I’m done here, thinks Judah. His hand trembles; he trembles. I’ve done in a man or something that looks like a man. He is exhausted with the effort of his somaturgy, of sustaining the thing’s shape, of killing. He shakes with fear and awe at what he has done, that he could do such a thing, that he could make a golem not from clay but from heavy air. I’m done out here in these wilding lands. They’re wilding because we’re here. He cannot believe what he has been able to do.

  Judah scatters the pots and the guttering fire. He turns back for the iron road.

  In something like a fugue he is taken by the wake of the trains. He meets the roadbed in some utterly lonely place. His horse is tired. It shivers in snow-dust. Judah goes to the hills, to a village overlooking the track labourers.

  Though the men are provided for, though even so far from tracks’-end there is a tribe of prostitutes in their tent brothels, men from the grading teams and the rock-crushers come up sometimes to the tiny village of goatherds where Judah sits and watches. The local girls go with the New Crobuzon men, though their families impotently disapprove and fight and get beaten down. The villagers tend their wounded and weather these intrusions. —What can we do? they say. They are blighted by forbearance, by restraint.

  A new calm has embedded in Judah since the line was cut into his swamps. He looks at the world through glass.

  He becomes some kind of storyteller of the city to his goatherd hosts. They let him live in the wickiup encampments. They are grateful that he is not as brutish as the men of the perpetual train. They ask him questions in their barbarous Ragamoll.

  —Is true the road make milk sour?

  —Is true it kill young in the womb?

  —Is true it make fish in river bad?

  —What’s name of the road?

  —I was at its end, Judah says. What is the name of the road? The question startles him.

  He has found a young woman from the hillside peasants who lies with him. Her name is Ann-Hari. She is several years younger than he, farouche and pretty. He thinks of her as a girl though her enthusiasms and her stare sometimes seem to him more adult and calculating than ingenue.

  Judah wants her with him. Ann-Hari is lost to her family and her village. There are several like her, some boys but mostly young women, utterly charged by the arrival of these tough roustabouts and the breathing pistons of the trains. Their families lament while they let their flocks run, or sell them for meat to railroaders for scrimshawed trinkets from the tool-rooms. The goatkeep young men join the grading teams and fill the rivers. The young women find other outlets.

  Ann-Hari is not Judah’s; he cannot keep her. He first finds her when she is flushed by the road, and she takes him and discards her virginity with eagerness he knows has little to do with him. For the few days that she is only his he tries to make it as much as he can; he tries to give the arc of a life’s love. It is not an affectation but a role; he gives himself over. She is looking over his shoulder while she straddles him, for something else—not even something better, but else, more. She makes friends. She comes to him in the village smelling of other men’s sex.

  Her clipped Downs Ragamoll is changing. She uses city slang, steals it from the hammermen. Judah can see the calm and ruthless intelligence under her giddiness, her voracious acquisition. He shows her the golems he can make, that still grow in strength and size. She is entertained but no more than by a thousand other things.

  There is bad blood among the camp followers. The whores who have dutifully followed these men, splitting from the perpetual train to work with these mountain diggers, are affronted by their new rural rivals, these farmgirls who expect no pay. Some of the workers themselves are threatened by these newly voracious young women who do not sell or even give sex but take it. They know no rules. They have yet to learn taboos: some even try to go with the camp’s prisoners, the shackled Remade. The Remade are terrified by this, and go to their overseers.

  One cold night Ann-Hari comes to Judah terrified, blackened, bloodied and welted. There has been a fight. A gang of prostitutes
has gone from tent to tent. They have pulled apart any lovers they find, overwhelming the outraged men by numbers, holding them, checking the face and voice of each woman. Those that are locals taking no pay, they have hauled outside and decorated with engine oil and feathers. The gendarmes have sympathies with the working girls, and they let them carry on.

  Ann-Hari was rutting a man at the edges of camp when the raucous whores’ justice caught her. She fought back. She punched with all her peasant strength. She knocked three of them down, jabbed out with a little gimlet that punctured an older woman’s stomach. Ann-Hari ran from her whitening victim.

  Judah has never seen her so meek. He knows that this is only a small thing. No one has died, and likely will not—the blade is tiny. Now the locals know the rules, and no one will remember Ann-Hari who fought back. But the fear this sudden violence has left in her does not fade, and a part of Judah is glad, because now she is afraid to stay he can persuade her to come with him. He wants out of the wilderness; he wants to buckle the iron road closed behind him, go home; and he wants another’s eyes through which to see.

  They go two days’ walk to a dying station, to the trains. They have third-class seats. Judah watches Ann-Hari watching the receding grass and buttes, the river they flank, the gashes, the darkness of tunnels. Hours in silence but for the complex rhythm of wheels, to the city he has not seen for many months, and that she has never seen.

  He is back, and blinking like a countryman at New Crobuzon. Ann-Hari and he squat in a tent on a rooftop in Badside. They overlook the carcass of Grand Calibre Bridge, its pivoting section jammed, rusted immobile as it has long been, become only a breakwater.

  All Ann-Hari’s fear went away with the miles, and there is nothing that will stop her learning New Crobuzon. Each day she comes back to him and tells him with excitement about the city.