Iron Council - China Mieville [157]
“There must be another way,” he said. But no, they said there was not.
“It’s the only way to be safe from the militia,” Drogon whispered. “The only way to be sure they won’t follow us. They’ll be stranded outside. It’s basic orders: never go into the zone. And anyway—” His intonation changed, the breath of his words faster. “—this is how they found their way. The Council, I mean. A passage through the continent. You know how long people tried for that? A passage? Through the smokestone, the cordillera, the quaglands, the barrows? We can’t risk changing it. This might be the only way.”
A few miles in, Judah disappeared for hours in the train’s wake, returned exhausted. Cutter screamed at him not to go off alone, and Judah gave one of his saint’s smiles.
Camouflaged with brush were segments of the tracks. The scouts and graders joined them, section to section, and the train went through the outlands of the stain. Cutter clung to the perpetual train and let the wind refresh him. There were a few demons of motion left, all domesticated now, the children or grandchildren of the first wild pulse-eating dweomers who had chewed the wheels. The ethereal little fauna were cowed. Cutter watched them.
He watched the rocks and the trees, heard below the grind of the gears and flywheels the bleatings of unseen animals. There were fights as people tried to take their turn sleeping in the cabs. The camp of graders was a tight little tent-town, in circles for safety. Still, nothing could prevent some of the effects of the cacotopic stain reaching out.
Water was rationed, but still every day crews led by the council’s few vodyanoi dowsers would set out to find potable streams—they went south, always, away from the Torque and the danger. And still every few days one or other would return ragged and stammering, carrying the remnants of someone lost, or bundling someone who had changed. Torque touched at night with its fingers of alterity.
“She was fine till we headed home,” the hunters might shout, holding a Remade woman who shook so ceaselessly hard and fast that the blur of her limbs and head half-solidified and she was a faintly screaming mass of quasi-solid flesh. “Shadowphage,” they might say, indicating the terrified boy from whom light shone too brightly, the inside of his open mouth as clear and illuminated as the crown of his head. People came back who had become gnawed by the radula of impossibly fast vermiform predators. The Iron Council passed over footprints: the stiletto holes of an echinoid rex, the strange tracks of an inchman, pounded earth in clumps four or five yards apart.
Of the Torque- or animal-wounded they saved those they could, in the cattle-truck become a sanatorium. Others they buried. In their tradition, they laid them ahead of the tracks. Once, digging a grave, they disturbed the bones of one of their ancestors, one of the Council dead on the outward journey, and with tremendous respect they begged her pardon and laid the newly died down with her forever.
“This can’t be right,” Cutter raged. “How many will this take? How many have to die?”
“Cutter, Cutter,” Ann-Hari said. “Hush you. It’s a terrible thing. But if we stayed, faced militia, we all die. And Cutter . . . so many more were killed the first time. So many more. We’re getting better at this. The perpetual train sends out safety. It’s charmed.” Every day the heads of new predators were hung from the train. It became a grotesque museum of the hunt.
When Cutter saw Drogon, the whispersmith was in a state of constant amazement. He relished the hunt even in these badlands, and everywhere they went he watched so closely, tracking their passage through splits and rockways, watching the movement of the cacotopic zone. He was committing it to memory, trying to understand it. That was one way. Cutter preferred another: wanted this time to be done, wanted only to have it end.
He went with crews scavenging