Iron Council - China Mieville [98]
—This is running, he says.
They unbolt the guntower and guide the train into the tunnel. They take up the tracks behind them. There is still blasting and scraping from inside the hill, and construction on the strange new bridge. The work is frantic.
In the heat of the morning the sound of other hammers and steam comes. The gendarmes’ train. They see smoke over the heat-dead trees.
The workers gather in the tunnel, among the cleavage of chiselled edges, minutely variant planes. The light makes shadows where vectors of stones meet.
Uzman, the grassroots general, gives orders they choose to obey. A hundreds-strong army of Remade and the freeanole now committed: those few clerks, scientists and bureaucrats who have not run; weak geoempaths; a few others—the camp followers, the mad and unemployable, and the prostitutes whose exhaustion started this. They come out into the night, ready. The train hides in the hole in the hill.
It is cool before dawn. The gendarmes come over ridges and around the bend. They come on foot, in plated carts pulled by Remade horses, in single-person aerostats, balloons above them and propellers on their back. They career through the air, and bear down on the track-layers’ hides.
They drop grenades. It is astounding. The train people are shrieking. They cannot believe that this is how it starts. They are deafened and bloodied. This is how it begins. A cascade of clay splinters and sooty fire.
Those with guns fire. One, two gendarmes snap and bleed out of the sky, haul their strange aircraft out of range, or loll in death in their harnesses, flying or coming down at random. But they keep coming. They roast the air with firethrowers.
—Crush them, Uzman urges, and his troops roll down logs and boulders as the gendarmes regroup and fire arbalests. Thaumaturges on either side make the air oscillate, make patches of grey swim up from nothing to stain the real, send arrows of energy spitting like water in fat that hit and do strange things. It is a chaos of fighting. A constant coughing of shot and screams, and gendarmes fall, but the strikers do in many greater numbers.
There are moments. A troupe of cactacae step forward and only wince as bullets break their skins. They terrorise the gendarmes, who run before the huge flora, but though the officers have no rivebows they have caustics that scorch the cactus skin.
—We’re rabble, Uzman says, and looks in despair. Ann-Hari says nothing. She looks beyond the gendarmes, beyond the tower of smoke where their train is coming.
Judah has made a golem. He sends it out toward the gendarmes. It is a thing made of the railway itself. It is made of handcars, the odds of rails and ties. Its hands are gears. It wears a grill for teeth. Its eyes are something of glass.
The golem walks out of the tunnel. It is impervious. It treads with the care of a man.
As it goes, the fighting seems to quiet. The ugly and incompetent warfare pauses. The golem passes the dead. Only the railway thing seems to move.
And then it stops walking, and Judah shudders in shock because he has not told it to. A new cart comes, carrying an older man and protectors. The man halloos them kindly. Weather Wrightby.
One man beside Weather wears charms. A thaumaturge. He stares at the golem and moves his hands.
Is it you who stopped it? Judah cannot tell.
Weather Wrightby stands amid the fighting. Of course he must be cosseted in hexes to turn bullets, but it is a powerful thing to see. He talks to the hills. The golem stands yards from him, as if facing him in a gunfight, and Weather Wrightby talks to it, too, as if he is talking to the railroad.
—Men, men, he shouts. He pats the air. Slowly his gendarmes lower guns. —What are you doing? he says. —We know what’s happening here. We don’t need all this. Who ordered firing on these men? Who ordered this?
—We must fix this, he says. —This mess. It’s money, they tell me. And it’s the harshness of the overseers. He lifts a sack from the cart. —Money, he says. —We have payment for those free and whole still here. It’s time you all were