Iron Council - China Mieville [156]
If the militia reached that far, which Cutter thought they would. Some of them would die, but most would likely not. When they made landfall, found the Council’s trail, even the power of Judah’s great golems could not stop them coming. The militia would close on the stragglers of the Iron Council, those left behind by the train. Iron Council relied on the cacotopic zone. That was what would hide them.
“Didn’t think I’d see this again,” Judah said. They were on a crag peering over the tracks, the long dotted-out spread of men and women, riding pack mules or walking hard and fast, surrounding and joining the graders.
What if the Council changes its policy on the way? Cutter thought. What if we get halfway across and enough people disagree and want to go back?
There. The sun moved behind them. Its vividness seemed to green slowly as it sank, as if it were verdigrising. In the ill-seeming light they looked north and east into the cacotopic stain. They had come hundreds of miles, in weeks, and here they were, at the edge.
Cutter went white to see it. “Qurabin,” he said, “tell us a secret. What is it? What’s happening there?” Something sounded in the air like scuttling.
The monk’s voice came: “Some secrets I don’t want to know.”
There, a Torque landscape. Mussed by that ineffable bad energy, the explosion of shaping, a terrible fecundity. Vistas. We ain’t seeing what this really is, Cutter thought. This is just one idea. One way of it being.
Even there in the outskirts of the cacotopos land was liminal, half-worldly geography, half some bad-dream set. It was merciless, stone horns and trees that looked like stone horns, forests of head-high mushrooms and ferns that dwarfed runt pines and, a way off, the flat of some delta where the sky seemed to push in between too-tall extrusions. Cutter could see nothing moving. That unplace extended to the horizon. It was many miles to pass through.
Cutter did not know if he was seeing hills or insects flying close to his eye: that could not be, he knew, but the impossibility of focus confounded him. Was that a forest so far off? That went for many miles? Or was it not a forest but a tar pit? Or now perhaps not a tar pit but a sea of bones or a grid, a wall of tessellated carbon or scabmatter the size of a city.
He could not make it out. He saw a mountain and the mountain was a new shape, and the snow on its top was a colour snow should not be and was not snow but something alive and tenebrotropic. The distant stuff extended cilia that must be the size of trees, toward oncoming darkness. Lights in the sky, stars, then birds, moons, two or three moons that were the bellies of acre-wide lightning bugs and then were gone.
“I can’t do the sense of it.” Qurabin’s voice was terrible. “There are some things the Moment of the Hidden and the Lost doesn’t know, or’s scared to say.”
The Torquescape was insinuatory, and fervent, and full of presences, animalized rock that hunted as granite must of course hunt and spliced impossibilities. They had all heard the stories: the cockroach tree, the chimerae of goat and ghost, reptilian insects, treeish things, trees themselves become holes in time. There was more than Cutter could bear. His eyes and mind kept trying, kept straining to contain, encompass. “How could they do this? Travel through this?”
“Not through,” Judah said. “They didn’t. Keep remembering that. They went just round the outside. Close enough to scare.”
“Close enough to die,” Cutter said, and Judah inclined his head.
“What things live here?” Cutter said.
“Impossible to list,” Judah said. “Each is its own thing. There are some I suppose—there are shunn, there are inchmen in the outskirts . . .”
“Where we’ll be.”
“Where we’ll be.”
They would be three weeks, perhaps, in the edges of the cacotopic zone. Three weeks pushing as close as they dared into the viral landscape. There must have been those who had passed through it before, in the half-millennium