The revolt of the Iron Council, the renegacy of the perpetual train, had been the last part of the crisis of corruption, incompetence and overproduction that had destroyed Wrightby’s Transcontinental Railroad Trust. The thrown-up towns and hamlets of the plains, and the herds of beef and crossbred meat-beasts, the gunfighters and mercenaries, the trappers, the populace of that mongrel of money and wild, had evaporated, in months. They left their houses like snakeskin casts behind. The waddies were gone, the horse-gangsters, the whores.
The Iron Council would be accelerating. It would eat the distance, even as each moment of track-laying seemed arduous and slow. Cutter had realised the Council must be in the open land. And the militia who tracked it, who had traced over the whole world to find it, must still be following, all the way back toward their home, gaining daily. The most absurdly roundabout trip, across the continent and back again, by a terrible route.
As the light began to glower and go out, the sense of the room buckled and ripped at two points, and from nothing, horns emerged. Toro shoved through adrip with the energies that were reality’s blood, carrying Judah, wrapped together like lovers.
Judah stumbled free and the colours dripped upward from him to sputter out of existence before they hit the ceiling. He was carrying a full sack.
“Got what you needed, then?” Cutter said. Judah looked at him and the last of the worldblood evanesced.
“Everything to finish this,” he said. “We’ll be ready.”
The fact that there were Iron Councillors in the Collective had leaked. Even through the terror and the unhappiness of those bleak days, it was huge news.
Excited mobs ran through the byways by the Dog Fenn post office, looking for their guests. When at last they found Maribet and Rahul, the barricade they had joined became a kind of fighting shrine.
There were queues of Collectivists waiting while militia bullets went overhead. They trooped past the Councillors and asked questions-an unspoken politeness limited each person to three. “When will the Council come?” “Have you come to save us?” “Will you take me away with you?” Solidarity and fear and millennial absurdity, in turn. The line became a street meeting, with old arguments between factions rehearsed again while bombs fell.
At the end of the street, on the other side of the barricades, lookouts saw through their periscopes the approach of war constructs. Soldier-machines in brass and iron, glass-eyed, weapons welded to them, came walking. More constructs in one place than had been seen for years.
They stamped and their caterpillar treads ground on the rubble and glass-strewn street toward the barrier. At their head a great earthmover, fronted by a cuneal plough that would push the matter of the barricade apart.
The Collectivists tried grenades, bombs, sent frantic word for a thaumaturge who might be able to halt this ugly monster thing, but it would not be fast enough. They knew they must withdraw. This barricade, this street, was lost.
Snipers and witch-snipers appeared on rooftops over the no-man’s-land, to lay down fire and hex on the constructs and the militia. At first they cut into the government forces, but a swivelling motorgun brought a score of them down in meat-wet and panicked the rest.
As the constructs sped, the Collectivists scrambled and their order broke down as they made for the backstreets. Rahul and Maribet did not know where to go. They headed toward secondary lines that did not take them out of the militia fire. Afterward, Cutter heard what happened: the two Remade had loped with their animal legs and skittered one way and another across the street, called by terrified Collectivists trying to help them. Maribet had turned her hooves on a bomb hole, and as she struggled to stand again and Rahul put out his human and lizard hands to help her, there was a grinding and the wedge-fronted construct began to push the barricade apart, and a militia-loyal cactus-man came over the rim of the tons of city-stuff, fired his rivebow into Maribet’s neck.
Rahul told them about it when he made it to Ori’s house. It was the first Iron Council death in New Crobuzon.
Posters had appeared throughout Collective territory, half-
begging half-demanding that the populace stay. EVERY LOST MAN OR WOMAN OR CHILD IS A WEAKENING OF THE CoLLECTIVE. TOGETHER WE CAN WIN. Of course they could not stem the refugees, who went out under the cordons, to the undercity or the collapsing suburbs beyond Grand Calibre Bridge.
Most ran to the Grain Spiral, the Mendican Foothills, the most adventurous into Rudewood to become forest bandits. But some, at risk, organised into guerrilla work-crews and made their way through the chaos of the city’s outer reaches, past neglected militia crews, by low boroughs become feral without food, too mean for Parliament to give them any notice. West of the city the escapees passed through the long-deserted hangars and goods yards where once the hub of the TRT had been. Rusting engines and flatcars were left deserted.
Offices were still inhabited and lit, where the remnant of Weather Wrightby’s company clung to existence, maintaining a last crew, a few tens of clerks and engineers. It survived off financial speculation, off railroad salvage, off the security work and bounty hunting of the TRT’s paramilitary guard-army, tiny and loyal to Wrightby’s corporatist vision, disdaining the race-thuggery of the Quillers. The men were stationed across the sprawling TRT property, and they and their dogs sometimes chased the escapees away.
The refugees took tools, made their way out of the once-
terminus to the cut from where the Cobsea-Myrshock Railroad had set out.
“It moves, under, it is, they are, the Teshi, are,” said Qurabin. The monk’s voice scuttered around. They were all there-Drogon and Elsie, Qurabin, Cutter, Judah and Toro. Rahul kept watch. They had mourned Maribet. Qurabin was anxious.
“Something happens very soon,” the monk said.
In his strange and strangely broken voice Ori told them the history of his relations with the mysterious tramp: the money, the heliotype of Jack Half-a-Prayer. The help he had given Toro. “I don’t know where the plans come from,” Ori said. “Jacobs? No, no it was Toro’s plan, I know that, because it wasn’t the plan I thought it was. But it did the job. But Jacobs said, when I saw him… I don’t think it mattered much to him at all. He’s had other things on his mind. This was just… a distraction.”
They had promised they would wait for Curdin and for Madeleina, hoping for help. That morning, Judah had begged them to persuade the delegates to aid them, but what could they do? The militia were eating their territory house by broken-down house: there were rumours of punitive revenges against Collectivists in recaptured streets. “We have no one to give, Judah,” Curdin had said.
They returned late.
“Came as soon as we could. It was hard,” Curdin said. “Hello Jack,” he said to Ori.
“We lost Howl Barrow today,” said Madeleina.
She was hard; they both were hard. She was trying not to fall to her despair.
“It was something,” Curdin said. “They lasted two days longer than they should have done. The militia came down over Barrow Bridge, and there was all the barricadistes, and out of nowhere come the Pretty Brigade. And they was magnificent. ” He shouted this suddenly and blinked. In the quiet after the word they heard bombs, at the battlefronts.
“A liability? They were lions. They came in formation, firing, in their dresses.” He laughed with a moment’s genuine pleasure. “They kept up the attack, they lobbed their grenades. Run forward skirts flapping, all lipstick and blackpowder, sending militia to hell. Hadn’t eaten anything but stale bread and rat meat for days, and they fought like gladiators in Shankell. It took the motorguns to cut them down. And they went shouting and kissing each other.” He blinked again many times.