That’s it? He tried to talk but could not. The expression he dragged across his face said it. You think what, you think what ?

What do you think I am? Think I’m so cut off from them as I’ve fought and travelled and fucked with that I’d go, leave them for you ? For your money crusade? All your religiose dung comes to this? This was a recruitment speech ? You want me on your team? Because I know the way? Because I’ve done this? You want me on your team? What do you think I am?

He was melted with disgust, standing in his whisper-hexed stillness, his hands by his side.

“What do you say?” Wrightby said.

Deep in Cutter’s ear came Drogon’s voice: “Speak.”

“Fuck you,” said Cutter instantly. Wrightby nodded, waited.

“Get away from my fucking train. You bastards, you turncoat bastard, Drogon, you’ll never get away from us-” He breathed in to scream and Drogon silenced him again.

“We’ll not get past you?” Wrightby said. He looked quizzical. “I’m not sure. Really, I think we will. We’ll go now. I will be in the yard. When the train comes in. I’ll be there, waiting. Come if you want to, if you change your opinions.”

Drogon whispered again. Cutter was agonied by cramp. The whispersmith indicated a way through the hills, led Weather Wrightby away. He looked back and whispered to Cutter again.

“Just so you know,” he said. “I can’t see as it’ll make a spit of difference. But just in case. Because it has to finish now. Your mirrors are broken. Just to be sure.”

Weather Wrightby looked Cutter in the eyes. “You know where to find me.”

And they were gone, and Cutter was straining. Why didn’t you kill me, you fuckers?

His arm came up. It did not matter. He was no threat. What they had told him did not matter. The militia are waiting -he had said that for weeks. Everyone knew he thought that. However suddenly certain he was, it was what he had always said. Why would this change the Iron Council’s messianic plans?

There was another reason Drogon and Wrightby had left him alive. They still thought he might turn. They thought he might get out, leave the Council as it steamed toward its carnage and its end, and join them. And he hated them for that but also thought, What am I? What am I that they think that of me?

He cried some. He did not know if it was the effort of breaking the hex, or something else. He saw himself as Drogon must have seen him: his sneers and loneliness making him seem a traitor in waiting.

The mirrors had been taken out of their careful wrapping in the armoury car. The glass was veined, the tain made dust. Cutter wanted to tell someone what had happened, but he was afraid of the bitterness in him, the miserable certainty of an expectation fulfilled-he was afraid that for all the real loss of it he would seem to crow. He hated it in him. He knew Drogon had sensed it. It was why they had approached him.

He took the broken mirrors to Ann-Hari, and told her.

The old rails shone back moonlight. At the edge of their vision, in the east, was a darker dark: Rudewood, closing. The lights of the train and its cooking fires shed tiny auras.

“Well?” Ann-Hari said.

“Well?”

“Yes.”

“What will you do?”

“What would you do?”

“I’d turn away, for Jabber’s sake. I’d turn and go south on the rails, not north.”

“Into the swamp?”

“For a start. If that’s what it takes to get away. To live, good gods, Ann-Hari. To live. They’re waiting. Tomorrow, maybe the next day, they’re there. ”

“Are they? So?”

Cutter shouted. Right into the night. “ ‘So?’ Are you insane? Haven’t you listened to me? And what do you mean ‘Are they?’?” Abruptly he stopped. They watched each other. “You don’t believe me.”

“I don’t know.”

“You think I’m lying.”

“Now now,” she said. “Come. You’re a good friend to the Council, Cutter, we know-”

“Oh my good gods, you think I’m lying. So what does that mean? You think, my gods, you think I broke the godsdamned mirrors?”

“Cutter, now.”

“You do. ”

“ Cutter. You didn’t break the mirrors. I know that.”

“So what, you think I’m lying about Drogon?”

“You never wanted us to come back, Cutter. You never wanted us here. And now you tell me the militia are waiting. How do you know Drogon or this man weren’t lying? They know what you think; they know what to tell you. Maybe they want us to fear and fail.”

Cutter stopped up short. Could Weather Wrightby be trying to frighten them away?

Perhaps the Collective had won. The refugees in the stony lands beyond the city were all wrong, and the Collective was establishing new democracy, had ended the suffrage lottery, had disarmed the militia and armed the populace. And there were statues to those fallen. Parliament was being rebuilt. And there were no militia pods, the clouds had no unmarked dirigibles in them, the air was full only of wyrmen, of balloons and bunting. Perhaps Weather Wrightby wanted them not to join that new New Crobuzon.

No. Cutter knew. He knew the truth. That was not how it was. He shook his head.

“You have to tell the Councillors,” he said.

“What do you want me to tell?” Ann-Hari said. “You want me to tell them how someone we never knew or trusted brought another man we don’t know here to tell us that the thing we always knew might be true is true, but gave no proof? You want that?”

Cutter felt a rise of something, some tremulous despair. “Oh my gods,” he said. “You don’t care.”

She met his stare.

Even if, she was saying, even if you are right-even if that was Drogon, and that was Weather Wrightby, even if there are ten thousand militia ranged ready-this is where we are, this is what we are. This is where we have to be. Was this her madness?

“We are the Iron Council,” she said. “We do not turn ever again.”

Cutter thought of running into the night and shouting the truth at these dissidents he had come to care for-his comrades, his chaverim, his sisters-and having them turn, begging them to turn, telling them what was waiting, what he knew, what Ann-Hari knew. He said nothing. He did not shout. He was not sure it was not a failure in him-he was not sure it was not a weakness-but he could not announce the truth. Because he knew that it would make no difference, that none of them would turn away.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

The train went slow on the old rails, the crews running ahead constantly to shore up a collapsing bank of stone, to sweep away detritus for a clear run. They welded split metal, rehammered spikes in bursts of rust. But it was not the ruin on the rails that kept them slow so much as disbelief, the theatre of where they were, what they were doing. At ten, fifteen miles an hour the perpetual train, Iron Council, went north, surrounded by cut, fangs of traprock, for New Crobuzon.

Every window was spiked with guns. The flatcars, the little grassed cemetery, the towers, the tent-towns on the rooftops were full of armed Councillors. They squatted, they sang war songs. “Tell us about New Crobuzon,” the young ones said, those born to whores while the Council was still a work-train, or to free women in Bas-Lag’s inner country, or to Iron Councillors.

Behind the train came the Councillors who could not fight. The children, the pregnant, those whose Remakings made them ill-suited. The old. They stretched a long way on the tracks, singing their own songs.

Wyrmen went overhead, went and came back screeching what they saw. Over the hours the roadbed rose, until the train was on a ridge ordering the granite-stubbled ground into this side and this side. Trees rose as they passed stumps of forest, and the things that lived in them shrieked in the canopies. Many miles west the miasma of trees became Rudewood.