Iron Council

by China Miéville

  In a commandeered carriage they went fast through Echomire, under the colossal Ribs of Bonetown, across Danechi’s Bridge and through Brock Marsh, and the sky was dark-studded with dirigibles, many more than usual, black and lit against the black. There were militia on the streets, shielded, their faces hidden behind mirrors, specialist squads with hexed truncheons and blunderbusses for crowd control. Enoch whipped the pterabirds. Through the fringes of The Crow, where crowds were running to and from broken-open shopfronts and hauling away calico, jars of food, apothecaries’ remedies.

  Over the roofs scant streets away was the Spike, the bleak splinter from where the militia ruled, tugged seven ways by skyrails. And beside it, its colossal paradox roofscape soaring, disappearing, soaring again into view, was Perdido Street Station.

  They tore under the arches of the Sud and Sink Lines, listening to militia whistles. Stupid blind idiots, Ori thought, of the mass, the rioters out that night. Fighting the khepri, for Jabber’s sake. This is why you need us to wake you up. He checked his guns.

  The first and worst flare of violence had ended when they arrived, but the ghetto was unquiet. They went through streets lit by rubbish fires. The century-old houses of Creekside had been made by and for humans, with poor materials and no care, and they sagged in toward each other like the sick. They were held by the wax and exuded byssus of the home-grubs, colossal maggoting larvae that the khepri used to reshape their dwellings. Ori and his comrades walked under houses half-seen through solid sputum that glowed fat-yellow in torchlight.

  In a nameless square there was a last offensive. There were no militia, of course. Protecting the khepri was not their agenda.

  Twenty or thirty men were attacking a khepri church. They had stamped to broken pieces the figure of Awesome Broodma that had stood by the entrance. It had been a poor, pathetic work, an oversized marble woman stolen or bought cheap from some human ruin, its head sawn off, supplanted with a carefully constructed headscarab in wire, thick with solder, bolted to the neck to mimic she-khepri shape. This chimera of poverty and faith lay scattered.

  The men were battering at the door. Staring down from the first-floor windows were the congregation. Emotion was invisible in their insect eyes.

  “Quillers,” Ori said. Most of the men wore the New Quill Party’s fighting outfits: dark business suits with trousers rolled, bowler hats that Ori knew were lined with steel. They carried razors and chains. Some had pistols. “Quillers.”

  Baron moved in. His first shot pushed a hole through the hat of one New Quill attacker, flaring the armoured lining into a crocus of felt, blood and metal. The men stopped, stared at him. Gods, will we get out of this? Ori thought as he ran where he had been directed, to where masonry gave him some inadequate cover. He dropped a New Quill man and hunkered behind the stone as it pattered viciously with shots.

  For a dreadful half minute the Toroans were pinned. Ori could see Baron’s implacable face, could see where Ruby and Ulliam crouched, Ulliam’s face in an anguish as he fired according to Ruby’s whispered commands. Some of their enemies had scattered, but the hardcore Quillers were focused, those with pistols covering those without as they crept closer.

  And then as Ori prepared to shoot on an approaching corpulent and muscular New Quill man bulging from his inadequate suit, he heard an ugly tearing, and the air between him and the suddenly stupefied New Quillers was interrupted. As if a film of skin was stretched, the fabric of things bowed at two close points, distorting light and sound, and then the warp was a split and from out of the gash reality spat Toro.

  The world resealed. Toro shouted. Crouched and pushed through the intervening feet with one shove of those horns and there was a stammering and Toro was close up to the fat Quill man whose billy club was shattering on the strange-refracting darkness that spilt from Toro’s horns. And then the horns were through the fat man, who gasped and gouted and dropped, sliding like meat off a hook.

  Toro shouted and moved again that uncanny goring way, following the horns that bled the toughened dark, and was then by another man and gouged him, and the horns seemed in the night’s dim to soak up blood. Ori was astounded. A bullet from a New Quill gun pushed through the half-seen integument the horns shed and drew red, and Toro lowed, staggered back, righted and horned at the air and sent the gunman sprawling, feet away.

  But though Toro took three men fast, the New Quillers still way outnumbered them, and were stoked with rage at these racetraitors. They danced in avoidance. Some lumbered, and some were consummate pugilists and gunmen. We ain’t going to get them khepri out, Ori thought.

  There was the noise of fast footsteps and Ori despaired, thinking another corps of street-fighters was about to attack them. But the New Quillers were turning, and began to run when the newcomers arrived.

  Cactus-women and -men; khepri with the two sputtering flails of the stingbox; raucous, frog-leaping vodyanoi. A llorgiss with three knives. Perhaps a dozen of mixed xenian races in startling solidarity. A broad cactacae woman shouted orders—“Scabeyes, Anna,” pointing at the running Quillers, “Chezh, Silur,” pointing at the church door—and the motley xenian army moved in.

  Ori was stunned. The New Quillers fired but ran.

  “Who the fuck are you?” one of the Toroans shouted.

  “Get up, shut up,” Toro said. “Drop weapons, present yourselves.”

  A vodyanoi and the llorgiss shouted to the khepri in the church, and held open the doors as the terrified captives ran out and home. Some embraced their rescuers. An unclotting drizzle of khepri males—mindless two-foot scarabs seeking the warmth and darkness—scuttled back from the door. Ori shivered. It was only now he could feel the cold. He heard the fires that gave Creekside a shifting skin of dark light. In their up-and-down illumination he saw children come out of the church with their mothers. Young she-khepri with their headscarabs flexing, their headlegs rippling in childish communication. Two khepri women carried neonates, their bodies like human newborns, their little babies’ necks shading into headgrubs that coiled fatly.

  He dropped his gun hand, and a khepri, one of these militant newcomers, was running at him, the spiked flails of her stingbox leaving spirals of sparks in the air. “Wait!” Ori said.

  “Aylsa.” The cactus-woman stopped her with her name. “He’s got a gun, Thumbs Ready,” said a vodyanoi, and the cactus-woman said: “I know he’s got a gun. There’s exceptions, though.”

  “Exceptions?”

  “They’re under protection.” Thumbs Ready pointed at Toro.

  In the fight-anarchy, it was the first moment that many of the xenians had seen the armoured figure. They gasped in their different racial ways, stepped forward with camaraderie. “Bull,” they said, and made respectful greetings. “Bull.”

  Toro and Thumbs Ready conferred too quiet for Ori to hear. Ori watched Baron’s face. It was immobile, taking in each xenian fighter by turn. Ori knew he was working out in what order he could take them, if he had to.

  “Out, out, out,” Toro said suddenly. “You done so well, tonight. You saved people tonight.” There were no khepri left in the tumbledown church. “Now you got to go. I’ll see you back there. Go quickly.” Ori realised he was breathing hard, that he was bloodied from wounds, exhausted and shaking. “Go, get back, we’ll debrief. Tonight, Creekside’s protected by the Militant Sundry. Humans with weapons are legitimate targets.”

  In the Badside hide. Dawn was pushing at the walls. They lay and fixed each other with unguent and bandages.

  “Baron don’t care, you know,” Ori said. He spoke quietly to Old Shoulder while they made nepenthe-spiced tea. “I saw him. He didn’t care if them khepri women died. He didn’t care if them Quillers got them. He don’t care about anything. He scares me.”

  “Scares me too, boy.”

  “Why’s Toro keep him? Why’s he here?”

  Old Shoulder looked at him over the pot, spooned resin in and honeyed it.

  “He’s here, boy . . . because he hates the ch
air-of-the-board more than we do. He’ll do whatever he has to, to bring you-know-who down. It was you brought him, Jabber’s sake. You was right to. We can keep an eye on him.”

  Ori said nothing.

  “I know what I’m doing,” Old Shoulder said. “We can keep him watched.”

  Ori said nothing.

  Fires in Howl Barrow, in Echomire, in Murkside. Riots in Creekside and Dog Fenn. Race-hate in the ghetto, ineffectual powder grenades thrown from a Sud Line train at the Glasshouse, cracking two more of its frames. The Caucus put out posters deploring the attacks.

  “What happened at the tower in Jabber’s Mound?”

  “Three sallies: first time they got the militia running, made it into the base. Then got beat back. Same as always.”

  Some weird thaumaturgy in Aspic Hole; self-defence committees of the terrified respectable in Barrackham, in Chnum, in Nigh Sump where they were attacked by what everyone said was a mob of Remade.

  “What a damn night. Gods.” Things were breaking.

  “And all because of that thing, that sun-thing.”

  “Nah, not really.”

  A critical mass of fear was what it had been, what it had released—a terror and a rage that found outlet. Protect us, people had shouted, tearing at the mechanisms that claimed to look after them. “It was just a catalyst,” Ori said.

  “What in the name of Jabber and his godsdamn saints was that thing?”

  “I know.” Whenever Baron spoke his comrades were quiet. “I know, or at least I know what I think it is, and I think so because it’s what the militia and the Mayor think too.

  “What they call a witnessing. Remote viewer. Tesh camera. Come to see what we’re about. The state of us.”

  They were aghast.

  “I told you. We ain’t winning the war. It ain’t as powerful as that—it didn’t touch us, did it? The war ain’t over yet. But yes, they’re spying on us. And as well as all them normal spies they must have, they ain’t afraid to show us, now, they’re watching. They got strange gris-gris, the Tesh. Their science ain’t ours. They’ve eyeballed us. There’ll be more.”

  At the other end of the world, around the corners of coastlines, where physics, thaumaturgy, geography were different, where rock was gas, where settlements were built on the bones of exploration, where traders and pioneers had died at the savage justice of the western Rohagi, where there were cities and states and monarchies without cognates in Crobuzoner philosophy, a war was being fought. The militia exerting New Crobuzon’s claims, fighting for territories and commodity chains, for theories, they said. Fighting for something unclear. And in response to bullets, the powderbombs, the thaumaturgy, burncurs and elementalists of New Crobuzon, Tesh, City of the Crawling Liquid, had sent this witnessing, to learn them.

  “How?” Ori said. “New Crobuzon . . . It’s the strongest . . . ain’t it?”

  “You going to swallow that?” Enoch jeered. He sounded tired. “New Crobuzon, greatest city-state in the world, and that? Horseshit . . .”

  “No it ain’t,” said Baron, and they were quiet again. “He’s right. New Crobuzon is the strongest state in Bas-Lag. But sometimes it ain’t the strongest wins. And especially when the stronger thinks, because it’s stronger, that it ain’t got to try to fight.

  “We’re getting outfought. And the government knows it. And they don’t like it, and they’re going to try to turn it into a victory, but here’s the thing: they know they have to end this. They’re going to sue for peace.”

  The sun kept rising, and its light through the warehouse windows reached at sharper and sharper angles and took them one at a time, tangled in their hair and shone from Old Shoulder’s skin. Ori felt warm for the first time in hours.

  “They’re going to surrender?”

  Of course they would not. Not explicitly—not in the speeches they would give, not in their history books or in the loyal newspapers. It would be a historic compromise, a nuanced strategy of magnificent precision. But even many of those loyal to the Mayor’s Fat Sun Party and the partners in the Urban Unity Government would balk. They would know—everyone would know—what had been done. That New Crobuzon, however the Mayor put it, had been defeated.

  “They’re trying to now,” Baron said, “but they don’t even know how to speak to the Teshi. We ain’t had contact with our mission there for years. And gods know there must be Teshi afuckingplenty in New Crobuzon now, but they ain’t got no clue who, where they are. The embassy’s always been empty. Teshi don’t do things that way. They’re trying thaumaturgy, message-boats, dirigibles . . . they’ll do whatever they bloody have to. They’ll try pigeon before long. They want a meeting. No one’s going to know what’s damn-well being done till they turn round and tell us ‘Good news, the Mayor’s brought peace.’ And in the meantime the poor bastards in the boats and on the ground’ll keep fighting and dying.”

  Under alien skies. Ori felt vertigo.

  “How do you know?” said Old Shoulder. He was standing, his legs locked, his arms folded. “How do you know what they think, Baron?”

  Baron smiled. Ori looked down and hoped he would not see that smile again.

  “ ’Cause of who I’m talking to, Shoulder. You know how I know. After all them bloody pints I sunk in Brock Marsh, I know because I been talking to my new best friend, Bertold Sulion.”

  part five

  RETREAD

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  “Here. This is it, here. The edge of it. The edge of the cacotopic stain.”

  Long before that the arc-flight of buzzards was disrupted. They scattered. The coy unfolding walk of a jaguar faltered and the cat erupted, was gone. Dust and black smoke sent animals away. Hundreds of years changed at the arrival of that crude loudness.

  Through an opening-up of earth, like a bacillus, some little organic thread sullying blood, infecting landscape, came the Iron Council. A steaming and sniffing metal animal god. As once they did years before, figures before it laid down rails, and others cleared its tracks, and others recycled them, took the left-behind path and hauled it in the path of the sounding engine.

  Wherever it went it was intruder. It was never part of the land. It was an incursion of history in stubby hillside woodland and the thicker tree-pelt of real forest, valleys between mountains, canyon-plains horned randomly with monadnocks. It intruded in uncanny places, dissident landscape, creeping hills, squalls of smokestone and fulgurite statues, frozen storms of lightning.

  An apparition. A town of men and women hacked at the ground, rendered it just flat enough to lay tracks. They were invaders.

  Like their ancestors the first Councillors, some of whom were their own younger selves, they were muscled, weathered, expert. Remade, whole, cactus, alien other, a consummate industry, the rail-carriers with their tongs, the dropping of sleepers, hammer-blows tight enough to dance to.

  They wore skins; they wore smocks and trousers made from sacks resewn. They wore jewels made of railway metal, and sang mongrel songs, bastards of decades-old construction chanties, and new lays telling their own story.

  West we came to find a place to

  Rest to go without a trace and

  Live our lives Remade and free to

  Give ourselves our liberty

  In the centre of the swarm, hundreds of figures attending to its complex fussy needs, protected by guards, lookouts at the hills and treetops and in the air, came the cause of it all, the train. Marked by time. It was altered. The train had gone feral.

  The abattoirs, the bunks, the guntower, the library, the mess hall, the work-cabs, all the old carriages were there, but changed. They were crenellated, baroque and topped with dovecots. Rope bridges joined new towers on different carriages and sagged and went tight at the slight curving of the Iron Council’s path. Siege engines were bolted to the roofs. New windows were cut into the carriages’ sides. Some were thickened with ivy and waxy vines, spilling from them as if they were old churches, winding the length of the guntower. Two of the flatb
eds were filled with kitchen gardens full of herbs. Two others were also earth-filled, but only grass grew on them, between gravestones. A little pack of half-tame motion demons bit playfully at the Council’s wheels.

  There were new carriages, one built all of water-smoothed driftwood, caulked with resin, tottering on spare, newly smelted or reclaimed wheels. Cars for alien Councillors, mobile pools for water-dwellers. The train was long, pushed and pulled by its engines. Two in the back, two at the front, their smokestacks all amended with metal flanges, painted and stained in crushed-earth colours to mimic flames. And at the very front of the train the largest, behind its flaring guard-skirt, was so amended and reshaped with crude art that it looked to have distended over the years, almost buckled with gigantism.

  Its headlamps were eyes now, predictably, bristling with thick wire lashes, its cowcatcher a jawful of protruding teeth. The huge tusks of wilderness animals were strapped and bolted to them. The front nub of its chimney wore a huge welded nose, the smokestack ajut from it in nonsense anatomy. Sharpened girders gave it horns. And behind that enormous unwieldy face the engine was crowded with trophies and totems. The skulls and chitin headcases of a menagerie glared dead ferocity from its flanks: toothy and agape, flat, eyeless, horned, lamprey-mouthed with cilia-teeth, bone-ridged, shockingly human, intricate. Where they had them the trophies’ skins were tanned, drabbed by preservation, bones and teeth mazed with cracks and discoloured by smoke. The befaced engine wore dead like a raucous hunter god.

  They cut their way on the echo of another path. Sometimes it was gone from view, or geography had twisted in the decades. They might spend hours splitting rocks by the side of hill-shadowed lakes to reach a fissure and, hacking through bramble and the outskirts of bosk, part crabgrass and uncover the ghost of a roadbed, the root-claimed ridge on which years ago they had come the other way. They found caches of rails, savaged by years, and sleepers, some still laid, covered in greased tarpaulin that had stained the earth. They placed their tracks to meet the ends waiting for them.