Iron Council - China Mieville [70]
They go between trail-towns through sage and heather, sometimes overlooking the railroad and its crews. The landscape changes by the tracks: the animals are wary, the trees thin.
Judah does not golem except when he is alone. Between towns Place is loquacious and charming to him: when they reach a place where he can play he puts on a master’s face and has Judah wait behind him, bring him bonbons and kerchiefs. Judah is part of How’s uniform, as much as his velveteen jacket.
The same players recur, and Judah learns their styles. BarkNeck the cactus-man is surly and disliked, tolerated because he is not the cardsman he thinks. The Rosa is a delight to watch, to hear. And there is Jaqar Kazaan, and O’Kinghersdt, and the vodyanoi Shechester, and others, all with their preferred plays. How has his dæmon, and the others have their own protections: hexes, familiars, tamed air elementals gusting through their hair. Judah sees cheats and bad losers shot and harpooned.
Place How loses more money than Judah has ever owned, one night, and makes it up again, with more, two days later. Judah sees him play for shacks, for weapons, for embalmed oddities, for knowledge, and above all for money. Judah bleeds off a few coins when he can. He is sure that is expected.
In the wilds, Judah’s duties include the sexual. He does not mind: he feels no less or more than when he is with a woman. There is a nugget of compassion in him, and he feels it growing. He feels something inchoate, some beneficence.
A day’s ride from the railroad, they hear that Maru’ahm gamblers are coming. Everyone is excited.
—I ever was a gambling man, Place How says that night. —Ain’t a style or a way of play I ain’t come up against: I play the naturals, the numerologicians, and the graduates of academies made them gnostics of stake-raising. Won more’n I lost or I’d not be here. But Maru’ahm, oh. I been once years gone and I tell you if I’m good and say my prayers that’s where I go when I die.
Maru’ahm, the casino parliament.
—Sure it’s mostly for them as like roulette and half-a-hole snapjack and dice, but it’s not just the ally-ate-ors, they do for cardsmen too. Ten year gone, now, 1770. I was playing like La Dama Fortuna was wet for me. Staked my horse, my weapons, my life, and kept winning. And then there were stakes as they only have in Maru’ahm: I’m winning law after law, playing grandbridge and black sevens, till an all-night session of quincehand and I stake a big property law against one of the Queen’s cardsharp senators and I lose, but I seen him pull hidden cards from his sleeves to win the whole pot of legislation and I call him out, and I ain’t such a fighter but dammit I was sore, and there was a duel—ten paces and turn—hundreds of townsfolk watching and most of them cheering me, my law would be better for them. To this day I think it was one of them killed him, not me. I never was much with a gun. He smiles.
No one plays like the Maru’ahmers, and they bring their house rules with them. Gamblers congregate. In a little town where basin rivers meet, the iron road a day’s ride, the pilgrims converge. The townspeople are astonished at the rakes in their streets, well-dressed men and women carrying ornamented wicked weapons, filling taverns, bringing foreign wines, selling them to the landlords and buying them back, prostituting the local young.
Winter is in. There is snow. Judah hears that the track builders have stopped, are hunkered down, punished by the weather. He feels something eating at him. The road is a sentence written on the ground and he must parse it, and he is failing.
Something extraordinary comes out of the ice-flat sky. The Maru’ahm gamblers arrive in an outlandish biokiteship, a spindly, feathered, beetle-nacred thing. It lands and blinks its headlamp eyes, disgorges the gamblers. They wear jade- and opal-coated jumpsuits; they carry cards; their leader is a princess. In accented Ragamoll and with