Iron Council - China Mieville [216]
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
It was by the Tar that Cutter regained the city. A night entry. Slowly and under new laws, the New Crobuzon authorities were reopening riverine trade. The barge-rangers were waiting to establish new runs. Cutter came back into New Crobuzon disguised in a coal-smeared overall, piloting a fat low-slung boat.
Around him the houses spread out from the wind of the river, tens then hundreds, and he heard their sounds and remembered them, the settling of architecture, and knew he was coming home. The bargeman he had bribed to crew him was eager for Cutter to leave. With the repeating cough of the engine they came past the tarry houses of Raven’s Gate, the khepri warren of Creekside, the houses disguised by mucal addenda, and under the old brick bridges of New Crobuzon, while the boat left a rainbow discharge on the water.
Airships went. They stalked on searchlight legs. A fat glare pinioned the boat then blinked off, twice.
He walked through the warehouses of Smog Bend, the bleached brick, the stained concrete. Past creosote, past bitumen and mouldered posters, past the dumps of building matter, powdered glass and stone, into streets once held by the Collective. Cutter walked past the lots where there had been meetings of residents voting noisily on everything. Now they were as they had been, little wildernesses of concrete-splitting bramble and cow-parsley, wildnesses for the insects. There were spirals on the walls. Rain was washing them away.
Days later and Cutter knew the new rules, knew how to avoid the militia who patrolled the streets and locked down Creekside and Murkside and above all Dog Fenn. They said there were still pockets of Collectivist treachery, and they were ruthless in their hunt.
Cutter said nothing when he saw the squads emerge from broken buildings with men and women screaming their innocence or occasionally rebellion. He kept his eyes down. Numb as he was, he negotiated the checkpoints, offering his forgeries without fear, because he did not care if he was challenged, and when he was not he would walk on without triumph.
Uptown had its beauty. BilSantum Plaza, Perdido Street Station. It was as if there had been no war. The spirals were smears. Perdido Street Station loomed like a god over the city. Cutter looked up at its roofscape, at where he had been.
In the last days of the Collective there had been a desperate copy of the skyrail attack. A train heavy with explosives had set out from Saltpetre Station, accelerating toward Perdido Street Station with a dream of immolating the vast edifice. It would never have happened. The Collectivist who drove it on his suicide mission, brave with drink and the assuredness of death, had rammed the blockade at Sly Station and powered on toward Spit Bazaar, but the militia had detonated the train as it approached, tearing a hole in the stitching of arches that went the length of New Crobuzon. The Sud Line was severed and was being slowly rebuilt.
The posters on the kiosks, the newspapers, the wax proclamations that were free in the voxiterator booths told of the government’s triumphs: Tesh’s tribute payments, their war apologies, the rebirth of community. Hard, hopeful times, they said. There was word of new projects, expeditions across the continent. The promise of a new economy, of expansion. Cutter wandered. Creekside was a ruin. The khepri bodies left after the Quiller Massacre had been cleared, but there were stains still on some walls. In places the phlegm integuments exuded by home-grubs had been cracked and burnt, revealing the brick underneath.
Cutter wandered and watched the reconstruction. Throughout the centre of New Crobuzon were the holes torn by armaments, the thickets of concrete, mortar and broken marble, new raggedy passages linking alleys, paved with rubble. In Barrackham the militia tower’s tip was swathed in scaffolding like cuckoo-spit. The drooping severed skyrail was gone. It would be restrung when the Barrackham Tower stood again.
In Mog Hill, near enough the Collective