Iron Council - China Mieville [41]
“We sent them a message,” Cutter said. “From Myrshock. They know we’re after you.”
From his satchel Judah brought out papers and three wax cylinders.
“From the Council,” he said. “The oldest letter’s near seventeen years old. The first cylinder’s older'n that. Almost twenty years. The last ones arrived three years ago, and they were only two years old when they came. I know the Council’s there.”
The messages had travelled by unknown routes. Fellid Forest to the sea, by boats to the Firewater Straits, Shankell and Myrshock, to Iron Bay and New Crobuzon. Or through byways in the hills, or through woods by paths hundreds of miles into the swamps below Cobsea. To Cobsea itself in the great plains. Or by air, or thaumaturgy, somehow making their ways at last to Judah Low.
And could you write back, Judah? Cutter thought. You know they’re waiting. Do they know you’re coming? And how many of their messages were lost? He saw austere gullies strewn with fragments of wax. Gusts sending scraps of encoded paper like blossom across the grassland.
He was awed to see the paper, the grooved cylinders, sound fixed in time. Artefacts from a Caucus rumour, from the stories of travellers and dissidents.
What would he know? When first he had heard of Iron Council he was a boy, and it was a folktale like Jack Half-a-Prayer, and Toro, and the Contumancy. When he grew old enough to know that his Parliament might have lied to him—that there might have been no accident in the quagmires to the south—the Iron Council some said had been born there could never be found. Even those who said they had seen it could only point west.
Why did you never show me those, Judah? he thought. Through all their discussions, through all their growing closer. Judah had taken Cutter’s cynicism and tried to do something to it, tried to tell Cutter that it had clogged him. There were other ways of doubting everything that need not sullen him, Judah had said, and sometimes Cutter had tried.
A dozen years they had known each other, and Cutter had learnt many things from Judah, and taught him a few. It was Judah had brought Cutter to the fringes of the Caucus. Cutter thought of the debates in his shop and in his small rooms, in bed. And in all those political ruminations—Judah a most unworldly insurrectionist, Cutter never more than a suspicious fellow-traveller— Cutter had never seen these stocks from the Iron Council itself.
He did not feel betrayed, only bewildered. That was familiar.
“I know where the Council is,” Judah said. “I can find it. It’s wonderful that you came. Let’s go on.”
Judah spoke to the whispersmith. No one but Judah could hear Drogon’s replies, of course. At last Judah nodded, and they understood that Drogon was coming with them. Pomeroy glowered, despite all the susurrator had done.
Judah the somaturge did not seek leadership, did nothing but say he would continue and that they could come, but they became his followers, as they always did. It had been the same in New Crobuzon. He never ordered them, often seemed too preoccupied to notice they were with him, but when they were they attended him carefully.
They prepared. There must be weeks of travel. Miles of land, and more land, and rocks and more trees, and perhaps water, and perhaps chasms, and then perhaps the Iron Council. They slept early, and Cutter woke to the sound of Pomeroy and Elsie’s lovemaking. They could not help their little exhalations, nor the scuffing of their bodies. The noise aroused him. He listened to his friends’ sex with lust and an upswelling of affection. He reached for Judah, who turned to him sleepily and responded to his tonguing kiss, but gently turned away again.
Below his blanket Cutter masturbated silently onto the ground, watching Judah’s back.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
A week they went north and northwest into greening. It was exhausting. The plains