Iron Council - China Mieville [71]
The locals attempt country dances, a banausic and inappropriate entertainment. There are the rat-tats of dice, of shatarang discs. A syncopation like the clatter of wheels on rails. The softer shuffle of cards.
Place How faces one steadfast rebis, an androgyne cardsharp from Maru’ahm who wins unhurriedly at baccarat, at tooth bezique, at poker. How clicks his fingers for Judah to bring hot sherbert, but the swagger is merely vulgar. The he-she smiles.
They play a game Judah does not know with a deck of heptagonal cards. They turn them, discard some, concatenate others in an overlapping pattern on the tabletop. Other players come and go, raise bets by some opaque system, lose, while the pot grows, and only How and the hermaphrodite remain.
Each bet now causes How some physical pain. A crowd has gathered. With the turn of a card the Maru’ahm gambler wins the life of How’s ward dæmon, and the little presence manifests as a flaming marmoset that screams and clutches How’s lapels and makes them smoulder, but bursts and is gone in a fart of soot. How is afraid. He rallies and wins a handful of clockwork gems, but in the next round the he-she turns a triple-trick and Place How can only moan. He looks insubstantial. He is growing hard to make out as he loses.
How bets aggressively. He shouts his stake, —For my horse, a year of my thought, for my man yonder. He waves at Judah, who blinks and shakes his head—I ain’t no godsdamned stake—but it is too late, that is just what he is, and How has played and lost and Judah is forfeit. So Judah runs.
He heads back for the railroad on his harried mule, crossing trappers’ and hunters’ trails. He has money he has stolen.
Judah passes through emptied shells of towns that were tracks’-end carnivals months before. He follows freshets swollen with snowmelt. In the coils of hills he watches the railroad, the cavalier onrush of the trains, their flared stacks bellowing blackly, full of chancers for the halfway towns.
Within three days Judah discovers that the rebis who won him is on his trail. Rumours cross the distance. So south, close to the swamp again where the workforce crawl frozen on, Judah finds a gulch-town of gunmen. The plains are suddenly full of them, scapegrace bushrangers. The permanent dacoits of the region have been joined by newcomers made bandit by the iron road. It exerts.
In a tavern Judah buys the service of gun-layer Oil Bill, whose right hand had been a tool for the servicing of motors and is reconfigured by a gunsmith in brass with splayed barrel for a peppering of shot. He refuses to let Judah run, earns his protection money by letting the androgyne gambler catch them. There is a showdown in the freezing winter dust. As the townspeople of the punk village get out of range the gambler releases a brace of daggerpigeons that gust bladily at Oil Bill, but with a rate of fire Judah has never seen before (clockwork and coil mechanisms refilling his cannon-hand) the fReemade shreds them and fires through their feathers to send the Maru’ahmer sprawling wet and dead.
Judah runs with Oil Bill. He has neglected his golems, his stiltspear memories and the railroad itself. He sees in the brigand a hunger for the rails that reminds him of his own. The fReemade’s passion is less complex, and Judah wonders if it is a purer thing. Deep in himself, below the calm that has settled on him, he knows he must come to understand the rails.
They pay in some taverns, extort in others. Oil Bill sings songs of wandering renegades. Judah performs for him, makes golems—it is his only trick—out of the food they eat and has them dance across the table. He tries to breathe in time, to mimic the stiltspear.
Each dwelling makes its own rules and enforces them if it can. New Crobuzon does not claim the plains. It does not yet want them; it does not despatch militia here: it cedes the rights to policing and its spoils to the TRT, to Weather Wrightby and his monopoly railroad. The TRT gendarmes are the law here, but they are mercilessly