Judah is curious. There have been tries to rob the railroad before. Vivid and daring raids from horse riders and carriages and from fReemade shaped for speed with bevies of stolen legs, who keep up with the speeding engines and harass their firemen, boarding the train and disappearing again with snatched money.
Oil Bill’s plan might work. It is base, utterly without finesse, and it might work because Oil Bill is neither cowed nor awed by the iron road. Others have tried to shear off sections of a bridge to halt a train for ambush: Bill wants to blow the bridge while the train is on it. He wants to commit an act of war. Judah is so astonished by the plan’s imbecility that it is almost admiration.
– The trellis at Silvergut Gap, Oil Bill says, drawing in the dirt. -Fuckin’ bridge is hundreds of yards long. We wait below, light fuses and scarper when the fuckin’ train hits the bridge. That shoddy piece of shite can’t take that. It’s coming down.
And then the plan is that the iron train will unfold in air and shatter on the frozen flint a hundred feet below, and though yes there will be huge wastage as fire takes boxes of money, and carriages are sealed shut by crushed metal, and the blood of dead trainmen and passengers stains the notes, some ingots are bound to fall free. Some guineas are sure to gust out in the wind of the cut, and Oil Bill will simply pick spoils from the ground and the air.
Oil Bill’s genius is the limits of his ambition. A greater thief would insist on taking every stiver from the coffers, could not support this idly conceived carnage. Oil Bill though does not care if the bulk is left to ruin in the broken train, so long as he can reach some money, and in its blithe and vast violence his plan might work.
The grub in Judah, not conscience but some nebulous virtue, moves. He feels disassociate from it, but it gnaws him. He will not follow Bill’s plan, but he cannot outfight Oil Bill so he must pretend insouciance, even as they steal powder and ride back along the Silvergut Pass by winter cactuses and weathered black rock, to where the cat’s cradle of wood arcs overhead, to pack the explosive-Bill with lack of care that makes Judah blench-to struts in the cold-hard earth. It is only after that, while they wait for a train and Bill sleeps, that Judah can move against him.
He leaves his horse and climbs the steep rocks, cresting with fingers so insensate with cold he is afraid he will lose them. He runs for near a day until he comes to a railside hut, a siding and a mail-drop, and a TRT signalman.
– The gendarmes, Judah says, waving his empty hands. -I need to get them a message.
Judah returns within a day and a night, on a new animal a mile behind the TRT rangers. When he reaches the roots of the trestle two gendarmes are dead, Bill’s blackpowder scattered.
Bill is gone. The gendarmes station a guard. Judah watches them with contempt. They are motley; they do not have the presence of the New Crobuzon Militia. These are recruits hardly distinguished from drifters and chancers, given guns and sashes in the colours of the TRT. They have little idea of how to pursue Oil Bill, and less inclination. They put a price on him.
Judah is in danger while Oil Bill is free. He joins the bloodprice hunter.
First Judah thinks the bounty man is human, but he accepts his commission with a guttural alien chuckle, flexes his neck and closes his eyes in ways that mark him as abnatural. He rides something that is not a horse but a vague equine semblance, the impression of a horse, a horse burr under the skin of the real. He shoots with a matchlock pistol that spits and mutters and is sometimes a rifle and sometimes a crossbow. He will not tell Judah his name.
They run together on their horse and their horse-bruise through the plainlands in the ripples of the rails, lands not colonised but infected, as life once infected rockpools. Four days of tracking with ideograms of hexed dust and the bounty-man finds Oil Bill, confronts him in a quarry. The white stone is marked, crosshatched with chisel lines, which make a grid behind the bandit’s head.
– You, he shouts at Judah with the rage of the stupid betrayed, and the bondsman kills him and his weapons eat the corpse.
Perhaps I will be this, Judah thinks, and rides with the hunter. They go town to town on the trail of those the gendarmerie will not take. They stop at TRT trackside stations and sift through the wanted notices. The bounty hunter does not ask Judah to stay nor make him leave. He speaks in a sibilant whisper so quiet that Judah cannot tell if he speaks Ragamoll well or hardly at all.
He injures or kills his quarries with the spines from his weapons or with his living nets or with sudden throat-sounds, and drags the bodies back to the way stations for bounty, and asks nothing of Judah, nor provides him anything. The count of sheep-stealers and rapists and murderers goes up, money comes in. Those the unman kills are scum, but the presence in Judah is not at ease.
Three days’ ride across pale stone ways. Clots of rock like ag-gregates of grey air that burst into nothing under horseshoes. A stripmined hole, the bodies of sappers and gendarmes, and the entrances to tunnels where the marrow of some epochs-dead god-beast has become ore and in which a little tribe of trow live.
The Arrowhead Concerns will take what they can of the bone-load. The troglodytes have beaten off miners and made a stand, and the gendarmes want them gone. This is the commission.
Judah watches while his companion unpacks chymicals. He tries to feel equanimity. Nothing moves, not bird nor dust nor cloud. It is as if time is waiting. Judah turns and feels it start again sluggishly as the bounty hunter prepares a huge pot with distillates and oils and hoods it, over a fire, trails a leather tube to the entrance of the cave, anchors it in place with rubber and skin sealing off the air inside. It is the end of night. The fire and the brass cauldron cover them in moving tan light. The bounty-man mixes poisons.
In the mountain’s belly the trow must be waiting. They must be watching, Judah thinks. They must know that something is coming. He thinks, he cannot do otherwise, of the stiltspear and their hopeless unkenning resistance. He is cold, but inside him the worm of uncertainty, the oddity that is not a conscience but an awareness of wrong, a goodness, is uncoiling. He sighs. -Lie down, he tells it. -Lie down. But the oddity will not lie down.
It moves in him and secretes disgust and anger he is sure are not his, but that stain him, and whether they are his or not he feels them. They well up in him. He thinks of the stiltspear cubs, and the trow in the little mountain.
The chymicals are mixing and boiling, and the bounty hunter adds compounds till the red muddish mixture burps gas and a caustic oily smoke begins suddenly to pour from it and is funnelled into the mine. The hunter waits. Poison howls into the tunnels, the liquid boiling at enormous speed.
Judah’s rage takes him. He hesitates more seconds and will always be aware of the cubic yards of murderous gas he lets free in that time, then walks to the cauldron, staying upwind, and puts his left hand below the hood, above the rim, into the smoke. The bounty hunter is horrified and uncomprehending.
The gas is acid and hot and Judah screams as his skin splits, but he does not withdraw his hand, and he makes his scream into a chant, and he forces all the energies he has learnt and all the techniques he has stolen up from his innards and focuses them with the glass-pure nugget of hate and revenge he finds in him and channels and lets go with a cathexis purer and stronger than he has ever felt before, and thaumaturgic energies pour from him and make a golem.
A smoke golem, a gas golem, a golem of particles and poisoned air.