– I was in there, Judah says to himself, looking into the fen. He says to himself, -I should go home, but, but… It is difficult for him to say why he does not. He is drawn to the grandeur of this intervention.
He goes back to the deserted stiltspear encampment. It is being eaten by itself, giving in to mud. A part of him wants to go deep and find the stiltspear in the middle of their shrinking wetland. But he is human, and the stiltspear kill humans now. He effects some inadequate communion. He feels hollowed out.
Judah watches the graders’ progress. He is like a seagull, a carrion-eater in the train’s slow slow wake. It and its tracks might progress only a few score yards each day in this merciless swamp. Autumn is speeding up.
The tent-town and its shanties at the boundary of the fens are a hub of commerce and crude industry. They are full of country runaways, workers not working, prospectors, the pistolled horse- wanderers who are growing in numbers across the plains opened by the iron road. Cactacae, vodyanoi, llorgiss, khepri, and races more arcane: crustaceans walking on two legs and cowled like monks, figures with too many eyes. Mercenary glory-hunters; canaille of scores of cultures.
– How can I just go back, Judah says to one as they throw bone dice, -with that thing, that train, there? How can I?
He is a tramp wandering the steam-and-piston town of the rails. There are thousands of men and women, many without work. A pitiable reserve army trudges behind the perpetual train. They beg when the gendarmes are not watching.
Judah makes golems from the trodden-down mud of the track-end. He cannot leave the tracks.
The villages they pass become rich and murderously violent-decadent, liquor-swilling, whore-filled and lawless-for the few days or weeks of the railroad, and then die. The towns live mayfly lives.
Sex is as much part of the iron-road industry as spiking, grading, herding and paperwork. A tent city of prostitute refugees from New Crobuzon’s red-light districts follows the rails and the men that set them down. The men call it Fucktown.
The train comes and changes everything. For centuries there have been communities by the scrags of forests. Wars between subsistence farmers and hunters, hermits and trappers; trade and treaties between the natives and settlers from dissident sects hiding from New Crobuzon. The city’s runaway Remade have taken to these steppes and become fReemade. Now this native economy is cut open, and New Crobuzon hears its rumours.
There are small exoduses of prospectors from the metropolis trekking from the line to where they say rockmilk or jewels or the puissant charged bones of monstrosities can be mined. Criminals have new places to run, and bounty hunters new ways to follow them. All of these newcomers, explorers and the city’s dregs and the curious from across the continent, track into the new landscape. Like tributaries, like the thread-roots of ivy, their routes spread out from and to the railroad. Judah’s is one of them.
Roaming miles of track, Judah knows he is in some low-
level shock. Each night he dreams of stiltspear. He hears their staccato utterance, the chronopausal breath. In his dream they return to him bloodied and stripped of their hands.
Judah walks days, crosses a trestle bridge aswarm with workers and Remade brachiating from extending simian arms. At the end of a siding, a loop of track into a chert-rimmed dustbowl, is the town Such. It is renamed with pioneer verve: they call it Haggletown, Cardtown, the Old-Eye-In-The-Hole, and Hucksterville.
In the casinos track-laying men throw their money down alongside dandies with silver flintlocks and black silk hats: gamblers, cardsmen, aleatori. From New Crobuzon, Myrshock and Cobsea at the end of the proposed routes, and some from farther. The cactus-man from Shankell; a nameless vodyanoi said to come from Neovadan; Corosh, a shaman from the Wormseye Scrub who supplements his traditional turtle-shelled coat with slacks and spats.
Judah watches them greet each other and play.
– BarkNeck, Corosh says in unflawed Ragamoll. -Not seen you since Myrshock. Judah sees him unclip a Wormseye weapon from his belt, a gris-gris mace studded with whispersome cowries.
There are scores of styles of dice and cards. Dice with six, eight, twelve sides, lopsided dice with differing likelihoods of settling on various faces. Cards with seven suits, suits of wheels flames locks and black stars, decks of picture cards without suits at all.
There are women among the chancers: Frey with her tough and beautiful smile; the Rosa in the prettiest blood-coloured dresses, cooling herself with what is supposed to be a razored metal fan. In his second week in Such, Judah sees a Remade-no, with that bearing he is fReemade, an outlaw-acrawl on a lower body like a den of fighting snakes, pass the gendarmes, who pretend they do not see him. -Jaknest, the name is spoken quietly, -Jaknest the Free Stakesman. Jaknest leaves a trail into a back room, where there must be some high-roller game where anyone’s money is good, law be fucked.
Judah does not want to play. Instead he tries to steal. He makes a golem of sticks, has the little made man scurry beneath the table with the night’s biggest pot. It clambers up a chair’s crossbars to sit below Place How, a gambling man in black and silver who is amassing chips and promissory notes. The casino is full and loud, and no one sees the figurine save Judah.
It moves to his commands, trying to unpick Place How’s bag. There is a rushing, a red sulphur gash in the air, and the golem is smouldering carbon. A clot of smoke and dim flame crawls fast as a rat back up How’s coat, to circle his neck and disappear. Everyone rises but How pats the air to calm them.
Judah blinks. Of course a man of How’s wealth and profession goes protected. He does not rely on the casinos’ vodun to sniff out illicit augury. He has his own ward dæmon. When he has won all he wants How stands at the bar and buys drinks and tells stories of his games and the places he has been, and how the new railroad has brought him back to New Crobuzon. He is unwinding the road, Judah thinks. He’s counting it backward, telling its miles like he counts cards.
– Sir I’d like to come with you. And Place How laughs not unkind at this sullen bruised young man half his age. He does not take so much convincing: the thought of a butler appeals to his pretensions. He dresses Judah for the part, and teaches him to ride the mule he buys him. -Now you in hock to me a while, How says.
They go between trail-towns through sage and heather, sometimes overlooking the railroad and its crews. The landscape changes by the tracks: the animals are wary, the trees thin.
Judah does not golem except when he is alone. Between towns Place is loquacious and charming to him: when they reach a place where he can play he puts on a master’s face and has Judah wait behind him, bring him bonbons and kerchiefs. Judah is part of How’s uniform, as much as his velveteen jacket.
The same players recur, and Judah learns their styles. BarkNeck the cactus-man is surly and disliked, tolerated because he is not the cardsman he thinks. The Rosa is a delight to watch, to hear. And there is Jaqar Kazaan, and O’Kinghersdt, and the vodyanoi Shechester, and others, all with their preferred plays. How has his dæmon, and the others have their own protections: hexes, familiars, tamed air elementals gusting through their hair. Judah sees cheats and bad losers shot and harpooned.
Place How loses more money than Judah has ever owned, one night, and makes it up again, with more, two days later. Judah sees him play for shacks, for weapons, for embalmed oddities, for knowledge, and above all for money. Judah bleeds off a few coins when he can. He is sure that is expected.