Iron Council - China Mieville [163]
They checked and rechecked. It was a burgeoning revelation. They were heady and astounded. “Around the long lake here. We’ve Cobsea to our south. We should avoid them, get northside of the lake as fast we can. We’ll bring Council justice to New Crobuzon.”
Even knowing the militia followed them could not cow them. “They’ve come after us. They followed us into the stain,” Judah told Cutter. “They’ve triggered a golem trap I put in the cacotopos.” No militia had ever gone so deep. This must be a dedicated squad, who realised the Council was heading back for New Crobuzon.
“We’ll go close to the hills.” Days ahead, a backbone of mountains rose and extended half a thousand miles to New Crobuzon. “We’ll skirt them; we’ll take the train through the foothills. To New Crobuzon.”
There were still months to go, but they went fast. Scouts went to see where bridges or fording were needed, where swampers had to fill wetland, where tunnellers and geothaumaturges would carve out passages. History felt quicker.
Drogon the whispersmith was alight with excitement, sounding in Cutter’s ears, telling him he could not believe that they had come through, that they had achieved this, that they were so close to being home. “Got to clock what we done,” he said. “Got to mark it. No one’s ever done this, and plenty’ve tried. There’s still a way to go, and it’s still land no one knows well, but we’ll do it.”
Judah sat on the traintop and watched this suddenly unalien landscape. “It ain’t safe,” he told Cutter. “Can’t say it’s safe at all.” He spent much time alone, listened to his voxiterator.
“Judah, Cutter,” Elsie said, “we should go back to the city.”
She was silent in these days, with Pomeroy’s death. She had found a calm that let her live in her loneliness. “We don’t know what’s happening there; we don’t know what state they’re in. We need to get them word that we’re coming. We could sway things. We could change it.”
It was a long way still, and there were many things that stood to stop them.
“She’s right.” Drogon spoke to each of them. “We need to know.”
“It ain’t no matter, I don’t think,” Judah said. “We’ll go, nearer the time. We’ll go and get a welcome ready, prepare for them.”
“But we don’t know what it’ll be there . . .”
“No. But it won’t make a difference.”
“What are you talking about, Judah?”
“It won’t make a difference.”
“Well if he ain’t going, no matter. I’ll go alone,” Drogon said. “I’m going back to the city, believe it.”
“They’ll find us, you know,” Elsie said. “Even if we veer north, Cobsea’ll likely hear of us.”
“As if the Council can’t deal with fucking Cobsea men,” Cutter said, but she interrupted.
“And if Cobsea finds us, it won’t be long before New Crobuzon does. And then we’ll have to face them again. Them as follows us, and those that’ll face us too.”
One of the carriages of the perpetual train was changing. They thought they had got through the fringe of Torque without being marked too hard, that all they had to show was the sanatorium full of the uncanny ill or dying. But some of the cacotopic miasma was slow to show effect.
There were three people in the boxcar when its Torque sarcoma began. The train was juddering through a high land of alpestrine plants and stoneforms jawing the air. One morning while snow as fine as dust eddied and the hammerers had to warm their fingers with each strike, the door of the carriage would not open. The Councillors within could only shout through cracks in the wood.
They took an axe to it but it rebounded without scuffing paint or wood, and the Councillors knew that this was the cacotopic stain’s last fingers. But by then the voices of those within had dulled with lassitude, a surrendering up.
Through the night they became more and more languid. By the next day the car was changing its shape, was bulbous and distending, the wood straining, and the people within made contented cetacean sounds. The walls grew translucent