Iron Council - China Mieville [85]
The intransigent Remade are ranged alongside the train. The gendarmes take up positions. The guntower on the perpetual train turns.
Oh my gods, Judah thinks.
—Anyone willing to return to work now, raise your hand, a captain says. The Remade are confused. He does not wait more than five seconds before turning his back. He signals someone and the tower fires.
A shell arcs into the mid of the Remade. Later, Judah will realise its load must have been reduced, not to send burning shrapnel into the train itself. Now all he hears and sees is the fire and explosion, the circle of bloody clearance in the Remade.
A strong accomplished man drives a spike down in three strikes. Many men take four swings: cactacae and the most augmented steam-strong Remade two. There are three prodigious and respected cactus-men who can push a spike home in one blow. There is one Remade woman who can do this, too, but in her the ability is judged grotesque.
Judah is a free spiker. No one on the TRT line is higher. He makes each spike a golem, tasked to hide in the earth, so that with each blow it strives to embed itself.
He hears the metal slaps of his maul as the breaths of a stiltspear. Ah ah ah. Ah ah ah. It sends him back to his voxiterator, listening and teasing apart the elements of the sounds, the overlapping beats. Judah sees Thick Shanks talking to someone without looking at them, standing with his back to the Remade stockade, a refigured man behind the chains lounging as if by chance but Judah knows he is listening.
It is in the company of Thick Shanks that Judah finds Ann-Hari again.
Judah courts the friendship of the militant cactus-man. They talk of the railroad and the uncanny dust-rock landscape and the dry cold of this late winter, and of the rumours that creep down the tracks to them like boxcars. Myrshock’s crews striking again, Cobsea’s government falling again with its meaningless regularity.
They smoke and share drugs around the Fucktown fires, and some of the women join them. It is in the shaking fireside shadows that Judah sees Ann-Hari. She is dressed in the functional provocation of a whore; she sees him as he sees her, but where he stands and cries out and runs to her, she only smiles.
She lets Judah accompany her. Ann-Hari the prostitute has become a nurse, an organiser, a grassroots madame. She has become a counsellor, her strangeness—knowing and credulous in some pastoral combination—meaning the younger and newer girls speak to her for help. Ann-Hari speaks to Shaun and to Thick Shanks. Ann-Hari organises and intervenes.
Judah watches her at the chain stockade. She comes at night to a place where the guards are not watching, and does as Thick Shanks has done, her back to the fence, a Remade man behind her, pretending to be there by chance.
Another man is there, a boy, less than twenty years old. He is propelled to Ann-Hari by the panic that sometimes overtakes Remade. Judah comes forward. In these shocks of psychotic self-
revulsion they can hurt themselves or others, and the boy could reach Ann-Hari through the chain. But he hears what they are saying to each other, and he slows.
—I’ll die I’ll die, I can’t go on, I’m cold, look at me, the boy says. He scrabbles at the outsize insect arms that radiate from his neck like a ruff, that clutch and scratch at him. —I’ll run away.
—Where will you run? Ann-Hari says.
—I’ll follow the rails home.
Ann-Hari’s contact is watching. He has an integument of pipes and pistons emerging from his flesh, a steam-powered skeleton inside and outside.
—You’ll follow the rails.
—I’ll go home. I’ll join the fReemade.
—Go home to New Crobuzon? A Remade. You want to go there? Or you go fReemade? Scrabble like a bandit. They miles from here, they don’t come so close. You be killed