Cutter did not know if he was seeing hills or insects flying close to his eye: that could not be, he knew, but the impossibility of focus confounded him. Was that a forest so far off? That went for many miles? Or was it not a forest but a tar pit? Or now perhaps not a tar pit but a sea of bones or a grid, a wall of tessellated carbon or scabmatter the size of a city.
He could not make it out. He saw a mountain and the mountain was a new shape, and the snow on its top was a colour snow should not be and was not snow but something alive and tenebrotropic. The distant stuff extended cilia that must be the size of trees, toward oncoming darkness. Lights in the sky, stars, then birds, moons, two or three moons that were the bellies of acre-wide lightning bugs and then were gone.
“I can’t do the sense of it.” Qurabin’s voice was terrible. “There are some things the Moment of the Hidden and the Lost doesn’t know, or’s scared to say.”
The Torquescape was insinuatory, and fervent, and full of presences, animalized rock that hunted as granite must of course hunt and spliced impossibilities. They had all heard the stories: the cockroach tree, the chimerae of goat and ghost, reptilian insects, treeish things, trees themselves become holes in time. There was more than Cutter could bear. His eyes and mind kept trying, kept straining to contain, encompass. “How could they do this? Travel through this?”
“Not through,” Judah said. “They didn’t. Keep remembering that. They went just round the outside. Close enough to scare.”
“Close enough to die,” Cutter said, and Judah inclined his head.
“What things live here?” Cutter said.
“Impossible to list,” Judah said. “Each is its own thing. There are some I suppose-there are shunn, there are inchmen in the outskirts…”
“Where we’ll be.”
“Where we’ll be.”
They would be three weeks, perhaps, in the edges of the cacotopic zone. Three weeks pushing as close as they dared into the viral landscape. There must have been those who had passed through it before, in the half-millennium since it appeared in a spurt of pathological parturition. Cutter knew the stories of Cally the winged man; he had heard rumours of adventures in the stain.
“There must be another way,” he said. But no, they said there was not.
“It’s the only way to be safe from the militia,” Drogon whispered. “The only way to be sure they won’t follow us. They’ll be stranded outside. It’s basic orders: never go into the zone. And anyway-” His intonation changed, the breath of his words faster. “-this is how they found their way. The Council, I mean. A passage through the continent. You know how long people tried for that? A passage? Through the smokestone, the cordillera, the quaglands, the barrows? We can’t risk changing it. This might be the only way.”
A few miles in, Judah disappeared for hours in the train’s wake, returned exhausted. Cutter screamed at him not to go off alone, and Judah gave one of his saint’s smiles.
Camouflaged with brush were segments of the tracks. The scouts and graders joined them, section to section, and the train went through the outlands of the stain. Cutter clung to the perpetual train and let the wind refresh him. There were a few demons of motion left, all domesticated now, the children or grandchildren of the first wild pulse-eating dweomers who had chewed the wheels. The ethereal little fauna were cowed. Cutter watched them.
He watched the rocks and the trees, heard below the grind of the gears and flywheels the bleatings of unseen animals. There were fights as people tried to take their turn sleeping in the cabs. The camp of graders was a tight little tent-town, in circles for safety. Still, nothing could prevent some of the effects of the cacotopic stain reaching out.
Water was rationed, but still every day crews led by the council’s few vodyanoi dowsers would set out to find potable streams-they went south, always, away from the Torque and the danger. And still every few days one or other would return ragged and stammering, carrying the remnants of someone lost, or bundling someone who had changed. Torque touched at night with its fingers of alterity.
“She was fine till we headed home,” the hunters might shout, holding a Remade woman who shook so ceaselessly hard and fast that the blur of her limbs and head half-solidified and she was a faintly screaming mass of quasi-solid flesh. “Shadowphage,” they might say, indicating the terrified boy from whom light shone too brightly, the inside of his open mouth as clear and illuminated as the crown of his head. People came back who had become gnawed by the radula of impossibly fast vermiform predators. The Iron Council passed over footprints: the stiletto holes of an echinoid rex, the strange tracks of an inchman, pounded earth in clumps four or five yards apart.
Of the Torque- or animal-wounded they saved those they could, in the cattle-truck become a sanatorium. Others they buried. In their tradition, they laid them ahead of the tracks. Once, digging a grave, they disturbed the bones of one of their ancestors, one of the Council dead on the outward journey, and with tremendous respect they begged her pardon and laid the newly died down with her forever.
“This can’t be right,” Cutter raged. “How many will this take? How many have to die?”
“Cutter, Cutter,” Ann-Hari said. “Hush you. It’s a terrible thing. But if we stayed, faced militia, we all die. And Cutter… so many more were killed the first time. So many more. We’re getting better at this. The perpetual train sends out safety. It’s charmed.” Every day the heads of new predators were hung from the train. It became a grotesque museum of the hunt.
When Cutter saw Drogon, the whispersmith was in a state of constant amazement. He relished the hunt even in these badlands, and everywhere they went he watched so closely, tracking their passage through splits and rockways, watching the movement of the cacotopic zone. He was committing it to memory, trying to understand it. That was one way. Cutter preferred another: wanted this time to be done, wanted only to have it end.
He went with crews scavenging for wood and ground-coal, peat, anything for the boilers. He went with his companions, searching for water.
The diviner emerged from the water-tank car given over to the vodyanoi. His name was Shuechen. He was sour and taciturn as stereotype said vodyanoi always were. Cutter liked that. His own brusqueness, cynicism and temper predisposed him to atrabilious vodyanoi.
As they rode, Shuechen swinging in his water-filled saddlesac, the dowser told them about the debates, the factions among the Councillors, the argument over the Council’s new direction. Ex-Runagaters, cynics, the young, the fearful old. There was uncertainty growing as to whether this was the best strategy, he said.
Shuech would put his big palms flat and sniff the earth, slapping it and listening to its echoes. He led them three hours from the train. Clean water came out of the rocks and gathered in a basin surrounded by roots so minimally touched by Torque that Cutter could imagine he was back in Rudewood. When he did, loss broke him a long moment.
They filled their water-sacks but then it was night, fast as a rag thrown over the sun, and quickly they made camp. They did not light a fire. “Not near the zone,” Shuech said.
Gripped together against a punitive rocky cold, the two Remade made Cutter’s party tell them about New Crobuzon. “Rudgutter’s dead? Can’t say it’s a shock. That bastard was Mayor forever. And now it’s Stem-Fulcher? Gods help us.”
They were stunned by the changes. “The militia patrol openly? In uniform? What in hell happened?” Pomeroy gave a brief history of the Construct War, the attack on the dumps, the rumours of what was within. It did not sound real, even to Cutter, who remembered it.