Iron Council
Iron Council
(Bas-Lag 03)
By
China Miéville
"It is a time of wars and revolutions, conflict and intrigue. new Crobuzon is being ripped apart from without and within."
Prologue
Part One: Trappings
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Part Two: Returns
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Part Three: Wine Land
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Anamnesis: The Perpetual Train
Part Four: The Hainting
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Part Five: Retread
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Part Six: The Causus Race
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Part Seven: Stain
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Part Eight: The Remarking
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Part Nine: Sound and Light
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Part Ten: The Monument
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
RUNAGATE RAMPANT. LUNUARY 1806.
“Erect portable moving monuments on the platforms of trains.”
-VELIMIR KHLEBNIKOV, Proposals
Prologue
In years gone, women and men are cutting a line across the dirtland and dragging history with them. They are still, with fight-shouts setting their mouths. They are in rough and trenches of rock, in forests, in scrub, brick shadows. They are always coming.
And in years long gone someone stands on a knuckle of granite, a clenched-up mountain fist. Trees cover the peak as if a spume of forest has settled. He is above a green world while feathered and tough-skinned fauna speck the air below him and pay no mind.
Up past pillars of batholith is the path he has made, and abutting it tarpaulin bivouacs. There are men and fire, little neutered cousin to the conflagrations that fertilize woodlands.
The man apart is in wind that frosts this old moment in place forever while breath cold-congeals on his beard. He consults mercury sluggish in its glass, a barometer and inch-marked cord. He locates himself and the men with him above the belly of the world and in a mountain autumn.
They have ascended. Columns of men have faltered against gravity, tight-knotted dangling in the lee of silicate walls and corners. Servants of their equipment, they have carried the brass, wood and glass oddments like dumb nabobs across the world.
The man apart breathes in the moment long gone, listens to the coughs of mountain animals, the beat of jostling trees. Where ravines are he has plumbed lines to bring them to order and know them, has marked them and annotated his drawings, and learning the parameters of the peneplain or open-sided corries, the tributary canyons, creeks, rivers and fern-scruffed pampas, he has made them beautiful. Where pines or ash are tethered and he notes the radius of a curve, the land humbles him.
Cold takes six of his men and leaves them white and hard in make-do graves. Githwings rinse the party with blood, and bears and tenebrae leave them depleted and men broken and crying unfound in darkness and mules fall and excavations fail and there are drownings and indigens who trustlessly murder but those are all other moments. In this long-gone time there is only a man above the trees. West, mountains block his way, but in this moment they are miles yet.