Iron Council - China Mieville [191]
“We have to go fast,” Cutter said. “Something’s coming out of the cacotopic zone.” He knew it must sound like some Torque-beast was hunting, and he did not correct the impression. “We have to find the Council.”
He checked the mirrors he carried. The glassworks had built a beautiful replacement. He had shown them to Madeleina di Farja, explaining what they were for.
“How many times have you done it?” she said, and he laughed.
“None times. But Judah Low told me how.”
Cutter stared down into the acres of air specked with birds and windblown scobs. They flew over raincloud like a smoke floor. At the limits of their vision, miles south, they saw people. A long spread-out column through the landscape, the vanguard of the rogue train, who went ahead even of the graders and the bridge-builders.
“Fly past, not too close,” Cutter said. “Let them know we don’t mean no harm.” His heart went fast. It took them an hour to trace the scattered miles of Council back, to the graders sweeping aside debris, patting down and hammering down the ground, and then to the track-layers moving with precision that made them seem automata, and then to the perpetual train.
“There.”
Cutter watched it. Its flatbeds, its carriages and its built-up towers, its bridges swaying, the mottled colours of its addenda, the skull and head adornments, smoke from all of its chimneys, those of the engines and those that specked its length. And all around it the hundreds of Councillors moving along it and on it, in the gap through which it travelled. A bolt of hexed gunpowder combusted below them.
“Dammit, they think we’re attacking. Swing round, give them a berth, let’s lower some flags.”
The train edged forward along the unrolling tracks, the line behind it dismantled as it went. In its wake was debris, a cut of altered ground.
“Gods they’re moving fast. They’ll be at the city within weeks,” Cutter said. Weeks. Too slow. Too late. Besides, he thought, what can it do? What can it do?
Cutter thought of the perpetual train deserted, growing old, made at last of age and weather as rain and wind turned its iron into red dust and the slates and thatch of its remade roofs slipped untended and mouldered, became mulch. In the shade of the flatcars weeds would pierce the hard floor of the train and its spokes and axles would be knotted with stems, honeysuckle, an empire of buddleia. Spiders and wilderness animals would run its nooks, and the boiler would grow cold. The last stores of coal would settle like the striae of ore they had once been. The smokestacks would clog with windblown loess. The train would be made of landscape. The rocks in which it sat would be stained with train.
The passage that the Iron Council had left would be a strange furrow of geography. And at last the descendants of the Councillors who had run as they had to, as he would persuade them they must, from the incoming militia and New Crobuzon’s revenge, the children of their many-times children would find the remnants. They would walk it and excavate the strange barrow, find their history.
Miles behind the very last of the Council’s stragglers, at the end of a wilder, wooded zone, was a line of fire, a crawl-motion that through the telescope Cutter saw was dark figures. Men were coming. Perhaps two days away.
“Oh Jabber they’re there,” Cutter said. “It’s them. It’s the militia.”
When they descended, the leaders were waiting for them. Ann-Hari and Thick Shanks embraced Cutter. They turned to the pilot, and Cutter saw that the Collectivist had tears in his eyes.
The urgency of Cutter’s mission filled him. The Councillors surrounded him, demanding to know what was happening in New Crobuzon. Ann-Hari was trying to control the situation, trying to bring Cutter to her, but he wanted very much not to be in her hands alone, did not want her controlling the message he brought. She was too powerful for him, her agenda too strong.
“Listen to me,” he shouted until he was heard. “The militia are coming. They’ve come through the cacotopic stain. They’re a day