The posters on the kiosks, the newspapers, the wax proclamations that were free in the voxiterator booths told of the government’s triumphs: Tesh’s tribute payments, their war apologies, the rebirth of community. Hard, hopeful times, they said. There was word of new projects, expeditions across the continent. The promise of a new economy, of expansion. Cutter wandered. Creekside was a ruin. The khepri bodies left after the Quiller Massacre had been cleared, but there were stains still on some walls. In places the phlegm integuments exuded by home-grubs had been cracked and burnt, revealing the brick underneath.
Cutter wandered and watched the reconstruction. Throughout the centre of New Crobuzon were the holes torn by armaments, the thickets of concrete, mortar and broken marble, new raggedy passages linking alleys, paved with rubble. In Barrackham the militia tower’s tip was swathed in scaffolding like cuckoo-spit. The drooping severed skyrail was gone. It would be restrung when the Barrackham Tower stood again.
In Mog Hill, near enough the Collective’s old ground but just outside the militarised zone so not subject to martial law or curfew, Cutter found lodging. He gave his new name. Paid with the proceeds from his day-work, in areas he had not frequented in his life before.
New Crobuzon was wrecked. Its statues broken, districts stained and blistered by fire, whole streets become facades, the buildings eviscerated. Houses, churches, factories, foundries as hollow and brittle as old skulls. Wrecks floated in the rivers.
He knew how to become part of the whispering networks again, even broken as they were. Even now when no one spoke to anyone with trust, when citizens strove not to see each other’s eyes as they passed, he knew how. Even now when a quickly clenched fist risked being interpreted as handslang and the militia might be called or there might be a quick vigilante killing to save the area from renegade insurgents and the death squads they would bring. Cutter was careful and patient. Two weeks after his return he found Madeleina.
“It’s better now,” she said. “But in the first weeks, gods.
“Bodies by walls, every one of them ‘resisting,’ they said, while they were taken away. Resisting by tripping, or asking a moment’s rest, or spitting, resisting by not coming fast enough when they were told.
“Up by the Arrowhead Pits, in the foothills,” she said, “Camp Sutory. It’s where they keep the Collectivists. Thousands. No one knows how many. There’s an annex: go in, you don’t come out, so they say. When they’re done asking questions.
“Some of us escaped.”
She listed those she had known, and what had happened to them. Cutter recognised some of the names. He could not tell if Madeleina trusted him, or was past care.
“We need to tell what happened,” she said. “It’s what we have to do. But if we tell the truth, those that weren’t here will think we’re lying. Exaggerating. So… do we make it less bad than it was, to be believed? Does that make sense?” She was very tired. He made her tell him all the story, everything about the fall of the Collective.
When he found out how long ago it had been it would have been easy for him to say to himself, There was no one to fight for the Council, but he did not. He did not because they could not know what might have happened, because it had not been allowed to. They could not know what Judah’s intervention had done.
There were ten thousand rumours in New Crobuzon about the Iron Council.
Cutter went often to the slow-sculpture garden in Ludmead, to sit alone amid the art dedicated to the godling of patience. The gardens were ruined. The sculpted lawns and thickets were interrupted by huge sedimentary stones, each of them veined with layers and cracks, each carefully prepared: shafts drilled precisely, caustic agents dripped in, for a slight and so-slow dissolution of rock in exact planes, so that over years of weathering, slabs would fall in layers, coming off with the rain, and at very last taking their long-planned shapes. Slow-sculptors never disclosed what they had prepared, and their art revealed itself only long after their deaths.
He had always hated the sedateness of these gardens, but now that they were ruined he found them a comfort. Some Collectivist or sympathiser punks had climbed the wall weeks ago, before Dog Fenn had fallen, and taken chisels to several of the larger stones. With cheerful imprecision and disrespect they had made crude and quick and vulgar figures, lively and ugly, ground filthy and dissident slogans into their skins. They had ruined the meticulous boring and acid-work of the artists, preempting the erosion-sculptures with pornographic clowns. Cutter sat and leaned against a new stone figure stroking an oversized cock, carved out of what might have been intended as a swan or a boat or a flower or anything at all.
He did not remember much of that time in the hills. The grip of Rahul. Holding him while-did he flail? Did he cry? He suspected that yes he had cried and flailed. He had been held till exhaustion dropped him.
He remembered Ann-Hari walking, disappearing, not looking at him. He remembered her mounting Rahul and having him return to the rocks. “Back,” she had said. “The Council,” and what that meant he had not known. He had not even heard her at the time. Only later when he was done mourning.
Was she at large? Had she looked for and found death? He had seen them disappear, Ann-Hari and Remade Rahul, toward the stones where the Iron Council waited. It was the last time he saw them.
When he had been able to, Cutter had strained to move Judah. He had wanted to bury him. He had tried not to look Judah in his broken face. Finally he pulled him off the animal-track. Without looking, by touch, Cutter had closed Judah’s eyes. He had held Judah’s colding hand and had not been able to bring himself to touch the leather lips with his own though he so wanted to, so had kissed his own fingers instead and brought them a long time to Judah’s breathless mouth. As if, if he waited long enough, Judah would have to move.
He had made a cairn over him. He could only think it in small moments.
The Council did not move. Cutter had not yet been to see it, though he knew he would, but everyone in New Crobuzon knew its state. Judah’s death had not released it from its synchronic jail. The newspapers had outlandish theories for what had happened. Torque-residue was the most common suggestion, after its plunge through the cacotopic zone. Cutter was sure there were those in the government who knew the truth.
He would go to see it, when he could. He thought of Ann-Hari, walking the stone, riding Rahul.
Cutter tells Madeleina about Judah Low, and she listens with wordless sympathy for which he is broken with gratitude. One night she takes him with her to an abattoir in Ketch Heath. They go carefully, roundabout routes. There is a cat-howl as they come close. The animals are coming back, now they are not meat. Once there in the dark slaughterhouse, Cutter steps with di Farja over gutters of cloying blood, and in the hollow churchlike echoes, the ring of the now-empty meathooks against each other, in the smoulder from the fireboxes of the grinders, she shows him the hidden doors and the little printing press beyond.
They work together that night, turning the handles, making sure the ink does not clot. They turn out many hundreds of copies in the dark.
RUNAGATE RAMPANT.
LUNUARY 1806.
“Order reigns in New Crobuzon!” You stupid lackeys. Your order is built on sand. Tomorrow the Iron Council will move on again, and to your horror it will proclaim with its whistle blaring: We say: We were, we are, we will be.