Iron Council - China Mieville [212]
The perpetual train. The Iron Council itself. The renegade, returned, or returning and now waiting. Absolutely still. Absolutely unmoving in the body of the time golem. The train, its moment indurate.
It could not always clearly be seen. The crude rips in the temporal from which the golem was made gave it edges like facets, an opalescence of injured time. From some angles the train was hard to see, or hard to think of, or difficult to remember, instant to instant. But it was unmoving.
For yards over its chimneys the exhaust was fast as smokestone, motionless until the set billows reached the limits of the split in time, the golem’s body, and above that random barrier gusted away in drifts, the last of the effluvia escaping into history. The Councillors were still poised, their weapons were still ready, the train was bursting into the plains beyond the city, and was without motion.
The last carriage, one of the two engines that pushed instead of pulling, had missed the protection of that cosseting unmoment, had stayed dynamic, and had been derailed and crushed against the sudden crisis of untimed matter. It had burst, scattering hot coal and debris and dying engineers. The last fringe of the car ahead of it was concertinaed and torn, and where it met the unending time golem, the edge of the wound was scored like a line.
Ann-Hari was screaming. The Council-followers were coming in more numbers out of the rock, telling each other what had happened, sending word back: Iron Council has . . . what?
No noise came from it. It was a huge silence shaped like women and men on a train. The Iron Council was made of quiet. Ann-Hari screamed and tried to grab it, to pull herself up onto it, and time slithered from her at the borders of the golem and sped her hand or deflected it or momentarily had the Council not there so she could not touch it, she could not touch it. She was in time. It was not, and it was beyond her. She could see it, and all the instant of her comrades, but she could not reach it. Others left behind in time were gathering around her. She was screaming.
At the head of the train, reaching with his brawny thorned arm, was Thick Shanks. He was staring at the massed militia in the distance. He was smiling, his mouth open. Beside him a laughing man whose string of spittle was stretched to the point of snapping. The train was occluded with suspended unmoving dust. Its headlights relucent, their shed light absolute and unwavering. Ann-Hari raged and tried and failed to rejoin Thick Shanks and the Iron Council.
Cutter looked on the impossibility. He jumped when Judah put his hands on him.
“Come,” said the somaturge. His voice was not Judah’s. A torn-up ruined thing that came up with blood and sputum, though he still smiled. “Come. I saved them. Come.”
“How long? Will it last?” Cutter heard his quaver.
“Don’t know. Perhaps till things are ready.”
“They died.” Cutter pointed at the train’s rear. Judah turned his head away.
“It’s what it is. I did all I could. Gods, I saved them. You saw.” He rose. He held his stomach. He let out a gasp. He swayed and left a spatter pattern around him. The daylight seemed to strengthen him. He reached, and Cutter gave him his hand, and they began to descend, Judah lolling as if he were stitched from old cloth, down into the rocks, hidden from the tracks. In the very far off, noise said that the militia were coming. That they saw something was not as it should be, and were coming.
Cutter and Judah climbed down, away.
part ten
THE MONUMENT
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Scuffing and stumbling over little fox-trails, holding Judah while he dry-retched and pulling Judah’s hair back from his aging face, Cutter wanted the moments not to end. In a shallow brook he washed Judah’s blood away. Judah Low did not pay him any notice, but breathed and spread