“And you? What are you going to do? While I’m off persuading the damn Council.”

“I said. I’ve an idea-something for safety’s sake. A last plan. Because by Jabber and by gods and by everything, Cutter, I will not let this happen. Stop them. But if you don’t, I’ll be here, with my plan. Do right by me, Cutter. ”

Bastard, Cutter thought, tearing up, trying to speak. Bastard to say that to me. You know what you are to me. Bastard. He felt his chest hollow, felt as if he were falling inside, as if his very fucking innards were straining for Judah.

“Love you, Judah,” he said. He looked away. “Love you. Do what I can.” I love you so much Judah. I’d die for you. He wept without sob or sound, furious at it, trying to wipe it away.

Judah kissed him. Judah straightened, kind, implacable, held Cutter gently by the chin and tilted his head up. Cutter saw the damp on the wallpaper, saw the doorframe, looked at Judah’s stubble all grey, the man’s thin face. Judah kissed him and Cutter heard a sound from his own throat, and was enraged at himself and then also at Judah. You bastard, he thought or tried to think at the kiss, but he could not make himself. He would do what Judah asked. I love you Judah.

Part Nine. SOUND AND LIGHT

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

A dirigible flew fast. It was pushed by wind and its engine over stone fragments. The dead towns it overflew, the remnants of railroad boom, were like discolourations on heliotypes. Cutter watched from the little cockpit.

The Collective had got them out. First two decoy balloons had set out, piloted by dummies, and while the militia pounded them, the escape dirigible flew. The pilot went so low towerblocks rose around them. The ship had cut between the smokestacks of the slum factories, evaded hunter warflots.

They travelled in fear of air-pirates, but beyond the idiot aggressions of githwings and a few outlander wyrmen nothing attacked them in the wilds outside the city. Cutter thought of Judah all the time. In him moved a complex of anger, and a kind of need he could not exorcise.

“Be careful, Cutter,” Judah said before he went, and held him. He would not say what he was doing, why he was staying. “You have to be quick. They’re through. The militia, through the cacotopos, and they’re hunting the Council down. Come back,” he said. “When they turn away, or scatter, come back, and I’ll be waiting. And if they refuse to turn away, come ahead of them, come to the city, and I’ll be here, I’ll wait.”

You never will, Cutter thought. Not in the way you know I want.

The pilot was Remade, his arm a python that he strapped to him. He hardly spoke. Over three days, all Cutter learnt was that he had once worked for a crime-boss, that he was pledged to the Collective.

“We have to go fast,” Cutter said. “Something’s coming out of the cacotopic zone.” He knew it must sound like some Torque-beast was hunting, and he did not correct the impression. “We have to find the Council.”

He checked the mirrors he carried. The glassworks had built a beautiful replacement. He had shown them to Madeleina di Farja, explaining what they were for.

“How many times have you done it?” she said, and he laughed.

“None times. But Judah Low told me how.”

Cutter stared down into the acres of air specked with birds and windblown scobs. They flew over raincloud like a smoke floor. At the limits of their vision, miles south, they saw people. A long spread-out column through the landscape, the vanguard of the rogue train, who went ahead even of the graders and the bridge-builders.

“Fly past, not too close,” Cutter said. “Let them know we don’t mean no harm.” His heart went fast. It took them an hour to trace the scattered miles of Council back, to the graders sweeping aside debris, patting down and hammering down the ground, and then to the track-layers moving with precision that made them seem automata, and then to the perpetual train.

“There.”

Cutter watched it. Its flatbeds, its carriages and its built-up towers, its bridges swaying, the mottled colours of its addenda, the skull and head adornments, smoke from all of its chimneys, those of the engines and those that specked its length. And all around it the hundreds of Councillors moving along it and on it, in the gap through which it travelled. A bolt of hexed gunpowder combusted below them.

“Dammit, they think we’re attacking. Swing round, give them a berth, let’s lower some flags.”

The train edged forward along the unrolling tracks, the line behind it dismantled as it went. In its wake was debris, a cut of altered ground.

“Gods they’re moving fast. They’ll be at the city within weeks,” Cutter said. Weeks. Too slow. Too late. Besides, he thought, what can it do? What can it do?

Cutter thought of the perpetual train deserted, growing old, made at last of age and weather as rain and wind turned its iron into red dust and the slates and thatch of its remade roofs slipped untended and mouldered, became mulch. In the shade of the flatcars weeds would pierce the hard floor of the train and its spokes and axles would be knotted with stems, honeysuckle, an empire of buddleia. Spiders and wilderness animals would run its nooks, and the boiler would grow cold. The last stores of coal would settle like the striae of ore they had once been. The smokestacks would clog with windblown loess. The train would be made of landscape. The rocks in which it sat would be stained with train.

The passage that the Iron Council had left would be a strange furrow of geography. And at last the descendants of the Councillors who had run as they had to, as he would persuade them they must, from the incoming militia and New Crobuzon’s revenge, the children of their many-times children would find the remnants. They would walk it and excavate the strange barrow, find their history.

Miles behind the very last of the Council’s stragglers, at the end of a wilder, wooded zone, was a line of fire, a crawl-motion that through the telescope Cutter saw was dark figures. Men were coming. Perhaps two days away.

“Oh Jabber they’re there,” Cutter said. “It’s them. It’s the militia.”

When they descended, the leaders were waiting for them. Ann-Hari and Thick Shanks embraced Cutter. They turned to the pilot, and Cutter saw that the Collectivist had tears in his eyes.

The urgency of Cutter’s mission filled him. The Councillors surrounded him, demanding to know what was happening in New Crobuzon. Ann-Hari was trying to control the situation, trying to bring Cutter to her, but he wanted very much not to be in her hands alone, did not want her controlling the message he brought. She was too powerful for him, her agenda too strong.

“Listen to me,” he shouted until he was heard. “The militia are coming. They’ve come through the cacotopic stain. They’re a day or two away. And you can’t go to the city. You have to run.”

When at last they understood him a gusty roar of no took them over, and Cutter climbed out of their arms and stamped on the train roof in frustration. He felt a wave of the bitterness, sadness and near-contempt with which Judah’s politicking and that of the Caucus had always filled him. He wanted to save these people from their own desperate want.

“You fools, ” he shouted. He knew he should restrain himself but he could not. “Godsdammit, listen to me. There is a militia squad on your tail which has come through the cacotopic godsdamned stain, do you understand? They’ve crossed the world and back again just to kill you. And there are thousands more of them in New Crobuzon. You have to turn.” He shouted over their anger. “I’m your friend, I ain’t your enemy. Didn’t I cross the fucking desert? I’m trying to fucking save you. You cannot fight them, and you godsdamned well can’t fight their paymasters.”