He told them of more than two years sending out scouts across unknown unmapped land to be lost and many to die, squabbling over routes, learning techniques. The Council laying down tracks, blundering into wars. They had taken their train without intent between the ranks of feuding forest things that pattered them with darts and stones: animal-men accused them of invasion. The renegade train met representatives of half-heard-of countries: Vadaunk the mercenary kingdom; Gharcheltist, the aquapolis. The Iron Councillors learnt new languages, trade and politesse with brute and urgent efficiency. “Land went open after the cacotopos.”
Poor bewildered little New Crobuzoners. They felt, Cutter sensed, a kind of pity for their younger selves traipsing dogged across places they could not comprehend. They felt their pasts gauche. At the time they must merely have blinked and kept walking, kept hammering, apologising where they realised they trespassed. There had been sacrifices-severe, dreadful prices to pay when they passed unknowing into this or that little despotism, crossed some potentate or quasigodling thing. “We took the Council once into that forest and there was that magma-horse took all our coal. Remember? Remember when we lost them boys to that ghast thing that left glass footprints?”
A landscape that punished outsiders. They were picked off by animals, by cold and heat. They starved, were sent to shivering deaths by illness, died of thirst when their watercarts got lost. They made themselves learn, constructing their absconder railway.
And they had warred themselves, when they had to, against tribes who would not take offerings for the right to pass into their lands. There was a time, which the Councillors described briefly in shame-The Idiocy, they called it-when the train itself had been ripped by civil war, over strategy, over how to continue. The generals of the caboose and those of the foremost engine had lobbed grenades at each other over the long yards of train between, a week of guerrilla actions on the roofs of the cars, butchery in corridors.
“It was a bad winter. We was hungry. We was stupid.” No one could look up during that story.
But at last the grassland. They had mapped and made peace with the neighbours they found. “We got more maps than the New Crobuzon Library.” The train kept moving. At very last, way west, their scouts found the sea.
“The train’s our strength. We have to keep it strong.” They could never have the train stand still. It would have been a betrayal. They knew-they always knew-that when they found the place where they could rest, where the land would support them, even then they would never let the train fall still. They worshipped it, in a profane way. They reshaped it, made it monstrous, kept its engines primed, able to power on anything that would burn. They had built a life.
Years. Throwing up structures as they needed them. Their town had grown. And nomads and lost adventurers of all races came to join the renegopolis. The Iron Council.
The town and its government were one. Its delegates, its committee were voted on by catchments based on work and age and random factors. There were vicious arguments, methods of persuasion not always admirable, a hinterland of democracy, patronage and charisma. There were those who advocated moving; those who said the wheels should stop. There had been factions within factions in the early years, over methods of industry and agriculture. They had continued to build life, delegating, being delegates, arguing, voting, disagreeing and making things work.
“Before, I was an oiler,” the storyteller had said. “I oiled the wheels.”
“And you know why I’m here,” Judah had said. “Now it’s time for you to reach a new decision. It’s time for you to leave. To move again.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Civilisations had been in the tablelands through which they passed, in this strange puna. The Iron Council, tracking back in head-on collision with its own history, passed through ruins.
Something that had perhaps once been a temple, a town of temples. In the shadow of a cratered ziggurat they laid their tracks, and the vent of their engines rose over the vines. They drove home spikes and split corroded marble gods in the rootmass. The Iron Council made the dead home shiver with hammer-blows. It sooted the bas-reliefs of battles in heaven. The Iron Council cut through the ivy-clotted city, towers gone to moulder.
“I know a man from a long time gone,” Judah had said to the committee. “We used to be partners. He was a government man for a time, works for some big concern now, but still has his ears open. He and me have history, and sometimes he needs golems for his work. And when he comes to me for that, we talk.”
Judah had told Cutter of these strange conversations, Pennyhaugh half-crowing at Judah, become his enemy, but them still drinking together. Not debates but performances. “I only see him because he gives me information, and I can give it to the Caucus,” Judah said. “And I don’t know… I don’t think he’s stupid enough just to sound off. It’s some kind of gift. ”
The committee listened. There were the middle-aged, and Remades who remembered New Crobuzon, women who had once been the camp’s whores: but more than half the delegates were young, had been children or unborn when the Council was made. They watched Judah speak.
“There are always rumours. I asked him, like I know how to do, so he thinks he’s offering it to me. He told me what was happening. You know there’s war against Tesh.” They did not know the details, but so big a war as this made Bas-Lag shudder, and stories reached the Iron Council by bush-adventurers.
“There’s slaughter in the Firewater Straits: they call it the Sanguine Straits now. They broke the Witchocracy’s thalassomach hex, and the navy’s pushing ships through, all the way around the coast. Thousands of miles. But another expedition set off, weeks back. Below the warships. Ictineos. Maybe grindylow-led, I don’t know. But they’re coming. It’d take a long time, but they must be nearly here. Might have made landfall.
“They never forgot you in the city, you know. They never forgot Iron Council. Long live. People whisper the words. Your name’s on walls. Parliament never forgave you, never forgot what you done. And now they know where you are.”
He had waited for their alarm to subside.
“You couldn’t stay hid forever. You knew it. I don’t know how they know. Godspit, it’s been more’n twenty years, it could be anything. A wanderer tells another tells another tells another: it could have been one of your own, finding their way back to New Crobuzon, caught and interrogated. It could be a spy.” He spoke over the noise that spurred. “Far-seeing on a new scale. I don’t know. Point is they know where you are. They found you. I don’t even know how long they’ve known. But they’d never get a troop across the cacotopic stain, or through the Galaggi Veldt and forests and whatever- we had Qurabin.” But we didn’t at first, Judah, Cutter thought. What were you planning to do? “But with the war, that’s changed. Because the Firewater Straits are open.
“They’re coming all the way round, by sea. They’re trying to get past Tesh, up past Maru’ahm, and they’ll land on the edge of the grasslands. They’ll come at you not from the east but the west. They could never do that till now.
“Sisters, Councillors, comrades. You’re about to be attacked. And there’ll be no quarter. They’re coming to destroy you. They can’t allow you to continue. You got away. And sisters… now more than ever they need to finish it.”
It was hard for Judah to make the Councillors understand about the chaos in New Crobuzon. The older ones remembered their own strikes and the great shucking off in which they culminated, but New Crobuzon itself was an old old memory and thousands of miles away. Judah tried to make the troubles live to them. “There is something happening,” he said.