“Oh my gods,” Cutter heard himself say. There was cheering, spontaneous, absolute with delight. “Oh my gods and Jabber and godsdamned fuck, we’re out, we’re out.”
They took a route on the very edge, the littoral ridge that divided the fringes of the Torque from the healthy land. They hammered the metal home on the smokestone flat and came back into natural land.
The perpetual train went through the smokelands. The winds had gusted great roils, rock cumulonimbus on the anvil-tops of which they laid tracks quickly, nervous that they might revert. “Somewhere down there’s where we came in,” Judah said. The split path they had made had long been effaced in scudding stone.
Judah, Cutter and Thick Shanks walked in the lee of the solid cloud, by the edge of the cacotopos.
“Some of us are afraid,” Thick Shanks said. “Things have run away from us. Feels like we ain’t got a choice of what we’re doing.” His voice was thin in the warm wind.
“Sometimes there are no choices,” Judah said. “Sometimes it’s history decides. Just have to hope history don’t get it wrong. Look, look, isn’t that it?”
They found what they were looking for: a vertical uncoil of rock drooled with ivy and on which shrubs were stubbled. There was something different about the ground, a remnant of gouging, long-ago explosive-ploughing. A path visible under two decades’ growth.
“This is where we came through,” Judah said, “the first time.”
He stood by the cloudlike wall and tugged at a rockplant, and Cutter saw it was not a rockplant but a bone come from the stone. A sere wristbone, time-bleached leather still ragging it.
Judah said: “Was too slow.”
A man encased. Caught by a tide of smokestone. Cutter looked with wide eyes. Around the wristbone was a circle of air, a thin burrow, where the arm-meat had been, and had rotted. And inside, it must hollow in a body’s contours, emptied by grubs and bacteria. A flaw, an ossuary the shape of a man. Silted with bones and bonemeal.
“Councillor or militia. Can’t remember now, can you, Shanks? There’s others. Dotted through. Bodies in the rock.” They clambered to the top of the range. The Iron Council moved, its hammers ringing, the wyrmen like windblown leaves above it through the gushing of its smoke. Cutter watched the train progress. He saw the strangeness of its contours, its brick and stone towers, the rope bridges that linked its carriages, its carriage-mounted gardens and the smoke of its chimneys, echoes of the smokestacks at its head and tail.
A way east, long-rusted barrels of militia ordnance protruded from the stone.
In the land beyond, the land that extended to New Crobuzon itself, it was a prairie autumn. The Councillors looked carefully at the water and the woods and hills and at their charts. They could not believe where they were.
The maps they inherited from when Iron Council was the TRT train became useful again. The perpetual train was still embedded in the loosest ink, the crosshatched beige that indicated uncertainty, but eastward the drawings grew more clear; stippling of brush, the watercolour wash of fen, contours of hills in precise line. This was not land on which tracks had been laid, but it was in the city’s ken. The Council could track its route through the ink.
They checked and rechecked. It was a burgeoning revelation. They were heady and astounded. “Around the long lake here. We’ve Cobsea to our south. We should avoid them, get northside of the lake as fast we can. We’ll bring Council justice to New Crobuzon.”
Even knowing the militia followed them could not cow them. “They’ve come after us. They followed us into the stain,” Judah told Cutter. “They’ve triggered a golem trap I put in the cacotopos.” No militia had ever gone so deep. This must be a dedicated squad, who realised the Council was heading back for New Crobuzon.
“We’ll go close to the hills.” Days ahead, a backbone of mountains rose and extended half a thousand miles to New Crobuzon. “We’ll skirt them; we’ll take the train through the foothills. To New Crobuzon.”
There were still months to go, but they went fast. Scouts went to see where bridges or fording were needed, where swampers had to fill wetland, where tunnellers and geothaumaturges would carve out passages. History felt quicker.
Drogon the whispersmith was alight with excitement, sounding in Cutter’s ears, telling him he could not believe that they had come through, that they had achieved this, that they were so close to being home. “Got to clock what we done,” he said. “Got to mark it. No one’s ever done this, and plenty’ve tried. There’s still a way to go, and it’s still land no one knows well, but we’ll do it.”
Judah sat on the traintop and watched this suddenly unalien landscape. “It ain’t safe,” he told Cutter. “Can’t say it’s safe at all.” He spent much time alone, listened to his voxiterator.
“Judah, Cutter,” Elsie said, “we should go back to the city.”
She was silent in these days, with Pomeroy’s death. She had found a calm that let her live in her loneliness. “We don’t know what’s happening there; we don’t know what state they’re in. We need to get them word that we’re coming. We could sway things. We could change it.”
It was a long way still, and there were many things that stood to stop them.
“She’s right.” Drogon spoke to each of them. “We need to know.”
“It ain’t no matter, I don’t think,” Judah said. “We’ll go, nearer the time. We’ll go and get a welcome ready, prepare for them.”
“But we don’t know what it’ll be there…”
“No. But it won’t make a difference.”
“What are you talking about, Judah?”
“It won’t make a difference.”
“Well if he ain’t going, no matter. I’ll go alone,” Drogon said. “I’m going back to the city, believe it.”
“They’ll find us, you know,” Elsie said. “Even if we veer north, Cobsea’ll likely hear of us.”
“As if the Council can’t deal with fucking Cobsea men,” Cutter said, but she interrupted.
“And if Cobsea finds us, it won’t be long before New Crobuzon does. And then we’ll have to face them again. Them as follows us, and those that’ll face us too.”
One of the carriages of the perpetual train was changing. They thought they had got through the fringe of Torque without being marked too hard, that all they had to show was the sanatorium full of the uncanny ill or dying. But some of the cacotopic miasma was slow to show effect.
There were three people in the boxcar when its Torque sarcoma began. The train was juddering through a high land of alpestrine plants and stoneforms jawing the air. One morning while snow as fine as dust eddied and the hammerers had to warm their fingers with each strike, the door of the carriage would not open. The Councillors within could only shout through cracks in the wood.
They took an axe to it but it rebounded without scuffing paint or wood, and the Councillors knew that this was the cacotopic stain’s last fingers. But by then the voices of those within had dulled with lassitude, a surrendering up.
Through the night they became more and more languid. By the next day the car was changing its shape, was bulbous and distending, the wood straining, and the people within made contented cetacean sounds. The walls grew translucent and shapes could be seen, eddying as if in water. The planks and nails and wood-fibre opalesced then went transparent as the boxcar sagged, fat over the wheels, and the councillors inside grew more placid, moved oozily within air become thick. The debris from the store-cupboards lost their shapes and spun as impurities.
The carriage became a vast membranous cell, three nuclei still vaguely shaped like men and women afloat in cytoplasm. They watched and waved stubby arm-flagella at their comrades. Some Councillors wanted to decouple the grotesquerie, let it roll away and thrive or denature according to its new biology, but others said they’re our sisters in there and would not let them. The long train continued with the corpulent amoebic thing rippling with the movement of passage, its innard inhabitants smiling.