It was into this atmosphere, this war, that Judah, Cutter and their party entered the city.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

“Gods. Gods. How in the name of Jabber did you get here?”

Entering and leaving the New Crobuzon Collective was hard. The barricades were guarded by the tense and terrified. The sewers were patrolled. With the Parliamentarian aeronauts savaging any dirigibles not their own, with hexes protecting each side, coming in and out had become epic and dangerous.

There were lurid folk tales: the heroic guardsman who slipped out without fanfare to execute militia; the Parliamentarian unit that took a wrong turn in a backstreet maze to emerge in the middle of Collectivist territory. Now there was a story of the crusade coming, to take all the poor starvelings in the Collective away.

Of course hundreds had entered and left the Collective, through ill-guarded barriers, through thaumaturgy. The Mayor’s city was full of those who took the Collective’s side: in Chimer, in the industrial fringe of Lichford, areas under martial law but from which guilders, seditionists and the curious sometimes made their way into Dog Fenn or Creekside, begging entry. And the Collective itself contained many who passively or actively wished it ill, and crept out uptown or stayed as spies.

So arrivals were feted, but suspiciously. Judah and the others came from the east of the city, through the ruinous landscape by Grand Calibre Bridge. With Qurabin’s help they found hidden byways, more and more of the monk eroding with each journey. Past the barricadistes. Along brick gulches to the post office in Dog Fenn where the delegate council met. They addressed the representatives of the Caucus.

Cutter felt emptied out. So many months since he had been in New Crobuzon and now it was so new, so tremendously not as it had been. It made him think of everything, it made him think of Drey and Ihona and Fejh and Pomeroy, of the bones under the railroad tracks.

What city is this? he had thought as they entered.

The towers of Grand Calibre Bridge, ajut and centuries broken in the water of the Gross Tar, now crowned with guns puffing lazily to send shells uptown. Badside, always squalid, reshaped and broken now by more than poverty.

Everywhere. Over the girders of Barley Bridge, the streets concatenate with the everyday, the monstrous and the beautiful. They were not quite empty. There were bandaged soldiers who watched the party from broken buildings. Members of a quickly running, now ratlike populace bent under sacks of food, under furniture and nonsense they took from one place to another. They were cowed.

The trail-dust on Cutter and his comrades meant they took curious looks-everyone was dirty but their dirt was different-but no one seemed to find it strange that they travelled together: two Remade, with four whole humans (no one could see Qurabin) pulling their exhausted mounts.

The Remade were mounts themselves. The lizard-bodied man, Rahul, was one: Ann-Hari’s agent when the Iron Council was born, whose voice Cutter had heard telling of Uzman’s death. He was in late mid-age, but still ran on those backbent legs faster than any horse. Judah had ridden him across the wildlands to the city. The other was a woman, Maribet, whose arcane Remaking had put her head on the neck of a carthorse studded with avian claws. Elsie was her rider.

Many of the young freeborn Councillors had been desperate to see New Crobuzon, but Ann-Hari had insisted that the Council itself needed every hand. They would see the city soon enough. Iron Council had sent only these emissaries.

The two Remade stared like farmboys from the Mendican Foothills. As if the geography awed them utterly. They were walking in a broken dream of their own pasts.

There were children in the streets. Wild, they made playgrounds out of destroyed architecture. Bombs had taken large parts of the city away, recast others in a bleak fantastic of pointless still-standing walls, rubble wastes, girders and thick wires uncoiled arm-thick from the ground: gardens of ruin. And amid them new kinds of beauty.

Hexes had made sculptures of brick, stained breakdown, strange colours. In one place they had made an ivied wall only half there, a glasslike brick refraction. The cats and dogs of New Crobuzon ran over this reshaping. They were tense, prey animals now: the Collectivists were hungry.

A strange parade. A children’s play performed on a street-

corner to an audience of parents and friends desperate and ostentatious with pride and enjoyment, as bomb sounds continued. Spirals on the walls. Complex, arcing and re-arcing. Qurabin, unseen, made a hiss, a yes sound.

Once there was a panic, someone as they walked past screaming and running from a patch of moving colour, crying “A haint! A haint!” But it was fresh graffiti, ink sliding down, that had shocked the woman. She laughed, embarrassed. A klaxon sounded and an aerostat had hauled piscine over the Collective and drizzled bombs with coughs of collapsing mortar; those on the streets started and looked wary but more resigned than afraid.

There were countless styles on the streets. A last flowering of impoverished dandyism.

What is this place? thought Cutter. I cannot believe I’m here. I cannot believe I’m back. We’re back.

He saw Judah. Judah was destroyed. His face was absolute with misery. Is this what we won? Cutter saw him wonder.

In the later days of their journey, close to the city, Iron Council’s emissaries had met scores of refugees, poor and not-poor, from downtown and uptown. Out in the open land, they were only the lost. “Too much terror,” one had told them, not knowing who they were, assuming them explorers. “It ain’t the same,” the Crobuzoners said.

“It was something in the first days,” a woman said. She held a baby. “I’d have stayed. It weren’t easy, but it was something. Emptying the prisons and the punishment factories, hearing Tarmuth had gone, getting messages from its Collective, till it fell. The food run out and next thing we’re eating rat. Time to go.”

A terrified shopkeeper from Sheck claimed the Collective had gathered all the rich from the south of Aspic when they had taken it, stolen their houses, shot the men, raped the women and shot them too, and were raising the children as slaves.

“I’m gone,” he said. “What if they win? What if they kill Mayor Triesti like they did Stem-Fulcher? I’m gone for Cobsea. They appreciate an industrious man.”

Through streets Cutter had once known now made strange by mortars, with neglected bunting in the colours of factions, with signs proclaiming idiot theories or new churches, new things, new ways of being, split and peeling. The raucousness and vigour were gone from the streets but still sensible in echo, in the buildings themselves: palimpsests of history, epochs, wars, other revolts embedded in their stones.

There were sixteen Caucusers in the delegate council. Five could be found. They stared. They hugged the newcomers. They wept.

“I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it.”

They each gripped Judah for what he had done, finding Iron Council, and Cutter and Elsie for finding Judah and bringing him back. They greeted Drogon. Judah told them Qurabin was with them, described the monk as a renegade from Tesh, and they looked in unease and waved at the air.

And then the Remade. The Iron Councillors.

One by one, the Caucusers of New Crobuzon’s Collective gripped the hands or tail-like limb of the Councillors, awed, abject, let out murmurs of solidarity. “Decades,” one whispered, holding Rahul, who reciprocated with unexpected gentleness in his lower, reptile arms. “You came back. Chaver, where you been? Gods. We been waiting. ”