Iron Council - China Mieville [93]
—You, he says to Judah. —With me.
They round the curve through dead trees and there is the perpetual train. It breathes its smoke and it spits steam as they come closer in mangy army. Its cowcatcher is splayed like ruined teeth. Its chimney flares, seems a funnel sucking up the energy of the sun. And all over figures jump from it and to it, from the bunks on its roof, from the trucks where the free men sleep, from all of it, staring as those who approach, gendarmes and strikers, shout. The two sides try to win them over as they run.
—they, they—
—get down, it’s the bastard Remade—
—they shot us down, they beat us—
—disperse you bastards or I’ll godsdamned shoot—
—stop them, Jabber, fuck stop them fuck’s sake—
The gendarmes fringe the train in raggedy formation, guns out, and the surge of the curious and the angry strikers—tunnellers, prostitutes, Remade—skitters to a stop. The gendarme retreat to their teetering guntower.
Now there is a long moment between a standoff and a confusion. Ann-Hari and the piped man approach. He looks emotionless. Ann-Hari does not. Behind them is a pitching army of Remade. They do not march, they shake their legs, some still ringed by the fringes of shackles opened with stones and stolen keys. They do not march, they almost fall with every step, and the sun makes them vivid in mongrel colours. The sun cuts sharp edges around the weapons they have made.
They raise slivers of the fence that has contained them. They swing the chains that tethered their feet. They grip shivs, pot shards embedded in wood. There are scores, and then hundreds of them.
—Jabber who let them out, what you done? someone shouts hysterically.
The thing in Judah swells up to see them. It bloats him; it moves like a baby in his belly. Judah shouts for them, a welcome, an alarum.
Men on all fours become bison-men, carrying men wrapped about with limbs, and women walking on elongated arms made of animals’ parts, and men stamping on piston legs like jackhammers come alive, and women all over whiskers, or with finger-thick tendrils feeling through their skin, and tusks stolen from boars and carved from marble, and mouths become interlocked gears, and switching tails of cats and dogs frilling waists like skirts and sweating in inks from Remade glands and astream with a rainbow mess, and this aggregate of criminals, this motley comes closer in freedom.
The gendarmes have withdrawn. They are in their armoured cab, in the guntower. Some have grabbed mules and horses from the tracks’-end corral and gone.
—No no no.
Many among the tunnellers and the track-layers are aghast at the freeing of the Remade. No one is sure who did it, how. Some stolen keys, a moment that went through the kraal of tethered criminals (though still there are a few who will not emerge, who cling to their irons).
—This ain’t what we’re here for. This ain’t what this was. A tunneller is shouting at Shaun Sullervan, disdaining to speak to Ann-Hari or the host of Remade stretching their limbs. —I didn’t want that boy to be beat, it ain’t nothing he’d done, but this is stupid. What are you going to fucking do? Eh? We have . . .
He looks at the blinking Remade, who stare at him. He twists a little.
—No offence, mates. He is speaking to the Remade now. —Look, it ain’t my fucking business. You seen we won’t let them beat you down no more. But, but, you can’t, you got to go back, this is . . . He indicates the guntower.
It is late. There is a siege and a strange siege calm.
—People have fucking died, the man says. —They’ve died.
The boy with the insect additions is dead. Other Remade were dropped by bullets. A cactus-man was split by a moment of flying wood. Gendarmes have been piled up, broken on mallets, on spikes, on the ersatz weapons of the railroad. There are dazed mourners by trench graves.
Hunters return. Prostitutes sit on rocks in that deserted