Iron Council - China Mieville [69]
There are small exoduses of prospectors from the metropolis trekking from the line to where they say rockmilk or jewels or the puissant charged bones of monstrosities can be mined. Criminals have new places to run, and bounty hunters new ways to follow them. All of these newcomers, explorers and the city’s dregs and the curious from across the continent, track into the new landscape. Like tributaries, like the thread-roots of ivy, their routes spread out from and to the railroad. Judah’s is one of them.
Roaming miles of track, Judah knows he is in some low-
level shock. Each night he dreams of stiltspear. He hears their staccato utterance, the chronopausal breath. In his dream they return to him bloodied and stripped of their hands.
Judah walks days, crosses a trestle bridge aswarm with workers and Remade brachiating from extending simian arms. At the end of a siding, a loop of track into a chert-rimmed dustbowl, is the town Such. It is renamed with pioneer verve: they call it Haggletown, Cardtown, the Old-Eye-In-The-Hole, and Hucksterville.
In the casinos track-laying men throw their money down alongside dandies with silver flintlocks and black silk hats: gamblers, cardsmen, aleatori. From New Crobuzon, Myrshock and Cobsea at the end of the proposed routes, and some from farther. The cactus-man from Shankell; a nameless vodyanoi said to come from Neovadan; Corosh, a shaman from the Wormseye Scrub who supplements his traditional turtle-shelled coat with slacks and spats.
Judah watches them greet each other and play.
—BarkNeck, Corosh says in unflawed Ragamoll. —Not seen you since Myrshock. Judah sees him unclip a Wormseye weapon from his belt, a gris-gris mace studded with whispersome cowries.
There are scores of styles of dice and cards. Dice with six, eight, twelve sides, lopsided dice with differing likelihoods of settling on various faces. Cards with seven suits, suits of wheels flames locks and black stars, decks of picture cards without suits at all.
There are women among the chancers: Frey with her tough and beautiful smile; the Rosa in the prettiest blood-coloured dresses, cooling herself with what is supposed to be a razored metal fan. In his second week in Such, Judah sees a Remade—no, with that bearing he is fReemade, an outlaw—acrawl on a lower body like a den of fighting snakes, pass the gendarmes, who pretend they do not see him. —Jaknest, the name is spoken quietly, —Jaknest the Free Stakesman. Jaknest leaves a trail into a back room, where there must be some high-roller game where anyone’s money is good, law be fucked.
Judah does not want to play. Instead he tries to steal. He makes a golem of sticks, has the little made man scurry beneath the table with the night’s biggest pot. It clambers up a chair’s crossbars to sit below Place How, a gambling man in black and silver who is amassing chips and promissory notes. The casino is full and loud, and no one sees the figurine save Judah.
It moves to his commands, trying to unpick Place How’s bag. There is a rushing, a red sulphur gash in the air, and the golem is smouldering carbon. A clot of smoke and dim flame crawls fast as a rat back up How’s coat, to circle his neck and disappear. Everyone rises but How pats the air to calm them.
Judah blinks. Of course a man of How’s wealth and profession goes protected. He does not rely on the casinos’ vodun to sniff out illicit augury. He has his own ward dæmon. When he has won all he wants How stands at the bar and buys drinks and tells stories of his games and the places he has been, and how the new railroad has brought him back to New Crobuzon. He is unwinding the road, Judah thinks. He’s counting it backward, telling its miles like he counts cards.
—Sir I’d like to come with you. And Place How laughs not unkind at this sullen bruised young man half his age. He does not take so much convincing: the thought of a butler appeals