Iron Council - China Mieville [164]
The carriage became a vast membranous cell, three nuclei still vaguely shaped like men and women afloat in cytoplasm. They watched and waved stubby arm-flagella at their comrades. Some Councillors wanted to decouple the grotesquerie, let it roll away and thrive or denature according to its new biology, but others said they’re our sisters in there and would not let them. The long train continued with the corpulent amoebic thing rippling with the movement of passage, its innard inhabitants smiling.
“What in Jabber’s name is it?” Cutter asked Qurabin.
“Not in Jabber’s name anything. I don’t know. There are things I don’t want to trade myself for. And even if I did, there are secrets that have no meaning, questions without answers. It is what it is.”
A fortnight after they had left the cacotopic zone, they met their first eastlanders for twenty years. A little group of nomads emerging from the hills. A fReemade gang, twenty or thirty strong. They were a wild mix, including a rare vodyanoi-Remade among the men and women reshaped for industry or display.
They came with wary courtesy to the train. “We met your scouts,” their leader said. She was amended with organic whips. She stared and stared, and it took Cutter a long time to realise that what he saw in her eyes was awe. “They said you was coming.”
The Remade of the Council looked at her and her brigands. “It’s all change,” the fReemade said that night at a meagre feast. “Something’s going on in the city. It’s under some siege. Tesh, I think. And something else, going on inside.” But they were too far, had been too many years from the town that made them, to know details. New Crobuzon was almost the legend to them that it was to the Iron Councillors.
They did not go with the Council: they wished them their friendship and went on to their rootless robbing life in the hills, but the next fReemade the Council came to did join. They came to show respect, to worship (Cutter could see it) the self-made Remade town, and stayed as citizens, Councillors themselves. When the Iron Council came to the northern shores of the lake that would shield them from Cobsea, they were met by the first fReemade to have sought them out deliberately.
Word must be passing along the strange byways of the continent, the paths between communities and itinerants. Cutter imagined it an infection. Threads of rumour, a fibroma knotting Rohagi together. Iron Council is coming! Iron Council is back!
The Council was fracturing. Their momentum was such that they could not have turned away. The closer they came to the metropolis, the more anxious, hesitant the older Councillors were. “We know what it’s like,” they’d say. “We know what it is there.” And the more certain, messianic, their children became. Those who had never seen the city were eager to visit on it something: what was it, a retribution? An anger? Justice, it might have been.
They would lead the track-laying, young men who might not have the enhanced strength of their parents but who swung their hammers with energy and hunger. The Remade put down tracks with them, but the older Councillors were the followers now.
Ann-Hari was different. She gloried. She was insistent, demanding they go faster. She would stand on outcrops, clamber with crude grace up overhanging hillocks and gnarls and gesture the perpetual train on as if she controlled it, conductor of a steam symphony.
It was so fast, suddenly: they carved on, scouts warning of this small gorge, that stream. Work-crews built hybrid forms of New Crobuzon traditions and oddities from the west—trellis bridges anchored with thick greenery, supports not of stone but of solid colour, that could only be crossed when light shone on them.
“There’s war!” a fReemade told them. “Tesh