Iron Council - China Mieville [72]
Bill’s reputation means it is some time before anyone opposes him and Judah sees him kill again. When he does it is an act against someone foul, a snarling drunkard who threatens everyone he sees with his moving hexed tattoos, but still it is disproportionate. Judah stares at the corpse, stripped by the town’s gutterchildren.
The thing he has felt born within him, a creature of his congealed concern, flicks its tail. He does not like his companion.
Still he stays with Oil Bill, becomes a gunsman himself, in his duster, swaps his mule for a stolen horse. Because Oil Bill cannot leave the railroad alone. They tramp the winter hills. Bill brings them back to the rails endlessly.
—Look now, that there with them old trailers like that, them’s the work train’s supplies, goin’ all the way into the swamp. And them others we seen is for the sightseers from New Crobuzon come to see wild country, and that other’n with the guntowers ‘hind its engine . . . that’s the wages train. He smiles.
Judah is curious. There have been tries to rob the railroad before. Vivid and daring raids from horse riders and carriages and from fReemade shaped for speed with bevies of stolen legs, who keep up with the speeding engines and harass their firemen, boarding the train and disappearing again with snatched money.
Oil Bill’s plan might work. It is base, utterly without finesse, and it might work because Oil Bill is neither cowed nor awed by the iron road. Others have tried to shear off sections of a bridge to halt a train for ambush: Bill wants to blow the bridge while the train is on it. He wants to commit an act of war. Judah is so astonished by the plan’s imbecility that it is almost admiration.
—The trellis at Silvergut Gap, Oil Bill says, drawing in the dirt. —Fuckin’ bridge is hundreds of yards long. We wait below, light fuses and scarper when the fuckin’ train hits the bridge. That shoddy piece of shite can’t take that. It’s coming down.
And then the plan is that the iron train will unfold in air and shatter on the frozen flint a hundred feet below, and though yes there will be huge wastage as fire takes boxes of money, and carriages are sealed shut by crushed metal, and the blood of dead trainmen and passengers stains the notes, some ingots are bound to fall free. Some guineas are sure to gust out in the wind of the cut, and Oil Bill will simply pick spoils from the ground and the air.
Oil Bill’s genius is the limits of his ambition. A greater thief would insist on taking every stiver from the coffers, could not support this idly conceived carnage. Oil Bill though does not care if the bulk is left to ruin in the broken train, so long as he can reach some money, and in its blithe and vast violence his plan might work.
The grub in Judah, not conscience but some nebulous virtue, moves. He feels disassociate from it, but it gnaws him. He will not follow Bill’s plan, but he cannot outfight Oil Bill so he must pretend insouciance, even as they steal powder and ride back along the Silvergut Pass by winter cactuses and weathered black rock, to where the cat’s cradle of wood arcs overhead, to pack the explosive—Bill with lack of care that makes Judah blench—to struts in the cold-hard earth. It is only after that, while they wait for a train and Bill sleeps, that Judah can move against him.
He leaves his horse and climbs the steep rocks, cresting with fingers so insensate with cold he is afraid he will lose them. He runs for near a day until he comes to a railside hut, a siding and a mail-drop, and a TRT signalman.
—The gendarmes, Judah says, waving his empty hands. —I need to get them a message.
Judah returns within a day and a night, on a new animal a mile behind the TRT rangers. When he reaches the roots of the trestle two gendarmes are dead, Bill’s blackpowder scattered.
Bill is gone. The gendarmes station a guard. Judah watches them with contempt. They are motley; they do not have the presence of the New Crobuzon Militia. These are recruits hardly distinguished from drifters